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_ But Edith screamed, clapping her hands over her ears to shut out the
sound of his voice, and ran up-stairs, sobbing loudly, followed by
her mother. However, Mrs. Sheridan descended a few minutes later and
joined her husband in the library. Bibbs, still sitting in his gold
chair, saw her pass, roused himself from reverie, and strolled in
after her.
"She locked her door," said Mrs. Sheridan, shaking her head woefully.
"She wouldn't even answer me. They wasn't a sound from her room."
"Well," said her husband, "she can settle her mind to it. She
never speaks to that fellow again, and if he tries to telephone her
to-morrow--Here! You tell the help if he calls up to ring off and
say it's my orders. No, you needn't. I'll tell 'em myself."
"Better not," said Bibbs, gently.
His father glared at him.
"It's no good," said Bibbs. "Mother, when you were in love with
father--"
"My goodness!" she cried. "You ain't a-goin' to compare your father
to that--"
"Edith feels about him just what you did about father," said Bibbs.
"And if YOUR father had told you--"
"I won't LISTEN to such silly talk!" she declared, angrily.
"So you're handin' out your advice, are you, Bibbs?" said Sheridan.
"What is it?"
"Let her see him all she wants."
"You're a--" Sheridan gave it up. "I don't know what to call you!"
"Let her see him all she wants," Bibbs repeated, thoughtfully.
"You're up against something too strong for you. If Edith were
a weakling you'd have a chance this way, but she isn't. She's got
a lot of your determination, father, and with what's going on inside
of her she'll beat you. You can't keep her from seeing him, as long
as she feels about him the way she does now. You can't make her think
less of him, either. Nobody can. Your only chance is that she'll
do it for herself, and if you give her time and go easy she probably
will. Marriage would do it for her quickest, but that's just what
you don't want, and as you DON'T want it, you'd better--"
"I can't stand any more!" Sheridan burst out. "If it's come to BIBBS
advisin' me how to run this house I better resign. Mamma, where's
that nigger George? Maybe HE'S got some plan how I better manage my
family. Bibbs, for God's sake go and lay down! 'Let her see him all
she wants'! Oh, Lord! here's wisdom; here's--"
"Bibbs," said Mrs. Sheridan, "if you haven't got anything to do, you
might step over and take Sibyl's wraps home--she left 'em in the hall.
I don't think you seem to quiet your poor father very much just now."
"All right." And Bibbs bore Sibyl's wraps across the street and
delivered them to Roscoe, who met him at the door. Bibbs said only,
"Forgot these," and, "Good night, Roscoe," cordially and cheerfully,
and returned to the New House. His mother and father were still
talking in the library, but with discretion he passed rapidly on
and upward to his own room, and there he proceeded to write in his
note-book.
There seems to be another curious thing about Love [Bibbs wrote].
Love is blind while it lives and only opens its eyes and becomes
very wide awake when it dies. Let it alone until then.
You cannot reason with love or with any other passion. The wise
will not wish for love--nor for ambition. These are passions
and bring others in their train--hatreds and jealousies--all
blind. Friendship and a quiet heart for the wise.
What a turbulence is love! It is dangerous for a blind thing to
be turbulent; there are precipices in life. One would not cross
a mountain-pass with a thick cloth over his eyes. Lovers do.
Friendship walks gently and with open eyes.
To walk to church with a friend! To sit beside her there! To rise
when she rises, and to touch with one's thumb and fingers the other
half of the hymn-book that she holds! What lover, with his fierce
ways, could know this transcendent happiness?
Friendship brings everything that heaven could bring. There is no
labor that cannot become a living rapture if you know that a friend
is thinking of you as you labor. So you sing at your work. For
the work is part of the thoughts of your friend; so you love it!
Love is demanding and claiming and insistent. Friendship is all
kindness--it makes the world glorious with kindness. What color
you see when you walk with a friend! You see that the gray sky
is brilliant and shimmering; you see that the smoke has warm
browns and is marvelously sculptured--the air becomes iridescent.
You see the gold in brown hair. Light floods everything.
When you walk to church with a friend you know that life can give
you nothing richer. You pray that there will be no change in
anything for ever.
What an adorable thing it is to discover a little foible in your
friend, a bit of vanity that gives you one thing more about her to
adore! On a cold morning she will perhaps walk to church with you
without her furs, and she will blush and return an evasive answer
when you ask her why she does not wear them. You will say no
more, because you understand. She looks beautiful in her furs;
you love their darkness against her cheek; but you comprehend that
they conceal the loveliness of her throat and the fine line of her
chin, and that she also has comprehended this, and, wishing to
look still more bewitching, discards her furs at the risk of
taking cold. So you hold your peace, and try to look as if you
had not thought it out.
This theory is satisfactory except that it does not account for
the absence of the muff. Ah, well, there must always be a mystery
somewhere! Mystery is a part of enchantment.
Manual labor is best. Your heart can sing and your mind can dream
while your hands are working. You could not have a singing heart
and a dreaming mind all day if you had to scheme out dollars,
or if you had to add columns of figures. Those things take your
attention. You cannot be thinking of your friend while you write
letters beginning "Yours of the 17th inst. rec'd and contents
duly noted." But to work with your hands all day, thinking and
singing, and then, after nightfall, to hear the ineffable kindness
of your friend's greeting--always there--for you! Who would wake
from such a dream as this?
Dawn and the sea--music in moonlit gardens--nightingales
serenading through almond-groves in bloom--what could bring such
things into the city's turmoil? Yet they are here, and roses
blossom in the soot. That is what it means not to be alone!
That is what a friend gives you!
Having thus demonstrated that he was about twenty-five and had formed
a somewhat indefinite definition of friendship, but one entirely his
own (and perhaps Mary's) Bibbs went to bed, and was the only Sheridan
to sleep soundly through the night and to wake at dawn with a light
heart.
His cheerfulness was vaguely diminished by the troublous state of
affairs of his family. He had recognized his condition when he wrote,
"Who would wake from such a dream as this?" Bibbs was a sympathetic
person, easily touched, but he was indeed living in a dream, and all
things outside of it were veiled and remote--for that is the way of
youth in a dream. And Bibbs, who had never before been of any age,
either old or young, had come to his youth at last.
He went whistling from the house before even his father had come
down-stairs. There was a fog outdoors, saturated with a fine powder
of soot, and though Bibbs noticed absently the dim shape of an
automobile at the curb before Roscoe's house, he did not recognize it
as Dr. Gurney's, but went cheerily on his way through the dingy mist.
And when he was once more installed beside his faithful zinc-eater
he whistled and sang to it, as other workmen did to their own machines
sometimes, when things went well. His comrades in the shop glanced
at him amusedly now and then. They liked him, and he ate his lunch at
noon with a group of Socialists who approved of his ideas and talked
of electing him to their association.
The short days of the year had come, and it was dark before the
whistles blew. When the signal came, Bibbs went to the office, where
he divested himself of his overalls--his single divergence from the
routine of his fellow-workmen--and after that he used soap and water
copiously. This was his transformation scene: he passed into the
office a rather frail young working-man noticeably begrimed, and
passed out of it to the pavement a cheerfully pre-occupied sample
of gentry, fastidious to the point of elegance.
The sidewalk was crowded with the bearers of dinner-pails, men and
boys and women and girls from the work-rooms that closed at five.
Many hurried and some loitered; they went both east and west, jostling
one another, and Bibbs, turning his face homeward, was forced to go
slowly.
Coming toward him, as slowly, through the crowd, a tall girl caught
sight of his long, thin figure and stood still until he had almost
passed her, for in the thick crowd and the thicker gloom he did not
recognize her, though his shoulder actually touched hers. He would
have gone by, but she laughed delightedly; and he stopped short,
startled. Two boys, one chasing the other, swept between them, and
Bibbs stood still, peering about him in deep perplexity. She leaned
toward him.
"I knew YOU!" she said.
"Good heavens!' cried Bibbs. "I thought it was your voice coming out
of a star!"
"There's only smoke overhead," said Mary, and laughed again. "There
aren't any stars."
"Oh yes, there were--when you laughed!"
She took his arm, and they went on. "I've come to walk home with you,
Bibbs. I wanted to."
"But were you here in the--"
"In the dark? Yes! Waiting? Yes!"
Bibbs was radiant; he felt suffocated with happiness. He began to
scold her.
"But it's not safe, and I'm not worth it. You shouldn't have--you
ought to know better. What did--"
"I only waited about twelve seconds," she laughed. "I'd just got
here."
"But to come all this way and to this part of town in the dark, you--"
"I was in this part of town already," she said. "At least, I was only
seven or eight blocks away, and it was dark when I came out, and I'd
have had to go home alone--and I preferred going home with you."
"It's pretty beautiful for me," said Bibbs, with a deep breath.
"You'll never know what it was to hear your laugh in the darkness--and
then to--to see you standing there! Oh, it was like--it was like--how
can I TELL you what it was like?" They had passed beyond the crowd
now, and a crossing-lamp shone upon them, which revealed the fact that
again she was without her furs. Here was a puzzle. Why did that
adorable little vanity of hers bring her out without them in the DARK?
But of course she had gone out long before dark. For undefinable
reasons this explanation was not quite satisfactory; however, allowing
it to stand, his solicitude for her took another turn. "I think you
ought to have a car," he said, "especially when you want to be out
after dark. You need one in winter, anyhow. Have you ever asked your
father for one?"
"No," said Mary. "I don't think I'd care for one particularly."
"I wish you would." Bibbs's tone was earnest and troubled. "I think
in winter you--"
"No, no," she interrupted, lightly. "I don't need--"
"But my mother tried to insist on sending one over here every
afternoon for me. I wouldn't let her, because I like the walk,
but a girl--"
"A girl likes to walk, too," said Mary. "Let me tell you where I've
been this afternoon and how I happened to be near enough to make you
take me home. I've been to see a little old man who makes pictures
of the smoke. He has a sort of warehouse for a studio, and he lives
there with his mother and his wife and their seven children, and he's
gloriously happy. I'd seen one of his pictures at an exhibition, and
I wanted to see more of them, so he showed them to me. He has almost
everthing he ever painted; I don't suppose he's sold more than four
or five pictures in his life. He gives drawing-lessons to keep
alive."
"How do you mean he paints the smoke?" Bibbs asked.
"Literally. He paints from his studio window and from the street--
anywhere. He just paints what's around him--and it's beautiful."
"The smoke?"
"Wonderful! He sees the sky through it, somehow. He does the ugly
roofs of cheap houses through a haze of smoke, and he does smoky
sunsets and smoky sunrises, and he has other things with the heavy,
solid, slow columns of smoke going far out and growing more ethereal
and mixing with the hazy light in the distance; and he has others
with the broken sky-line of down-town, all misted with the smoke and
puffs and jets of vapor that have colors like an orchard in mid-April.
I'm going to take you there some Sunday afternoon, Bibbs."
"You're showing me the town," he said. "I didn't know what was in it
at all."
"There are workers in beauty here," she told him, gently. "There are
other painters more prosperous than my friend. There are all sorts
of things."
"I didn't know."
"No. Since the town began growing so great that it called itself
'greater,' one could live here all one's life and know only the side
of it that shows."
"The beauty-workers seem buried very deep," said Bibbs. "And I
imagine that your friend who makes the smoke beautiful must be buried
deepest of all. My father loves the smoke, but I can't imagine his
buying one of your friend's pictures. He'd buy the 'Bay of Naples,"
but he wouldn't get one of those. He'd think smoke in a picture was
horrible--unless he could use it for an advertisement."
"Yes," she said, thoughtfully. "And really he's the town. They ARE
buried pretty deep, it seems, sometimes, Bibbs."
"And yet it's all wonderful," he said. "It's wonderful to me."
"You mean the town is wonderful to you?"
"Yes, because everything is, since you called me your friend. The
city is only a rumble on the horizon for me. It can't come any closer
than the horizon so long as you let me see you standing by my old
zinc-eater all day long, helping me. Mary--" He stopped with a gasp.
"That's the first time I've called you 'Mary'!"
"Yes." She laughed, a little tremuously. "Though I wanted you to!"
"I said it without thinking. It must be because you came there to
walk home with me. That must be it."
"Women like to have things said," Mary informed him, her tremulous
laughter continuing. "Were you glad I came for you?"
"No--not 'glad.' I felt as if I were being carried straight up and up
and up--over the clouds. I feel like that still. I think I'm that
way most of the time. I wonder what I was like before I knew you.
The person I was then seems to have been somebody else, not Bibbs
Sheridan at all. It seems long, long ago. I was gloomy and sickly
--somebody else--somebody I don't understand now, a coward afraid
of shadows--afraid of things that didn't exist--afraid of my old
zinc-eater! And now I'm only afraid of what might change anything."
She was silent a moment, and then, "You're happy, Bibbs?" she asked.
"Ah, don't you see?" he cried. "I want it to last for a thousand,
thousand years, just as it is! You've made me so rich, I'm a miser.
I wouldn't have one thing different--nothing, nothing!"
"Dear Bibbs!" she said, and laughed happily. _
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