The Turmoil Part 2

Bibbs contented himself with a non-committal gesture. "Business is crawling up the old streets," he said, his long, tremulous hand indicating a vasty structure in course of erection. "The boarding-houses come first and then the--"

"That isn't for shops," she informed him. "That's a new investment of papa's--the 'Sheridan Apartments.'"

"Well, well," he murmured. "I supposed 'Sheridan' was almost well enough known here already."

"Oh, we're well enough known ABOUT!" she said, impatiently. "I guess there isn't a man, woman, child, or n.i.g.g.e.r baby in town that doesn't know who we are. But we aren't in with the right people."

"No!" he exclaimed. "Who's all that?"

"Who's all what?"

"The 'right people.'"

"You know what I mean: the best people, the old families--the people that have the real social position in this town and that know they've got it."

Bibbs indulged in his silent chuckle again; he seemed greatly amused. "I thought that the people who actually had the real what-you-may-call-it didn't know it," he said. "I've always understood that it was very unsatisfactory, because if you thought about it you didn't have it, and if you had it you didn't know it."

"That's just bosh," she retorted. "They know it in this town, all right!

I found out a lot of things, long before we began to think of building out in this direction. The right people in this town aren't always the society-column ones, and they mix around with outsiders, and they don't all belong to any one club--they're taken in all sorts into all their clubs--but they're a clan, just the same; and they have the clan feeling and they're just as much We, Us and Company as any crowd you read about anywhere in the world. Most of 'em were here long before papa came, and the grandfathers of the girls of my age knew each other, and--"

"I see," Bibbs interrupted, gravely. "Their ancestors fled together from many a stricken field, and Crusaders' blood flows in their veins. I always understood the first house was built by an old party of the name of Vertrees who couldn't get along with Dan'l Boone, and hurried away to these parts because Dan'l wanted him to give back a gun he'd lent him."

Edith gave a little e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of alarm. "You mustn't repeat that story, Bibbs, even if it's true. The Vertreeses are THE best family, and of course the very oldest here; they were an old family even before Mary Vertrees's great-great-grandfather came west and founded this settlement. He came from Lynn, Ma.s.sachusetts, and they have relatives there YET--some of the best people in Lynn!"

"No!" exclaimed Bibbs, incredulously.

"And there are other old families like the Vertreeses," she went on, not heeding him; "the Lamhorns and the Kittersbys and the J. Palmerston Smiths--"

"Strange names to me," he interrupted. "Poor things! None of them have my acquaintance."

"No, that's just it!" she cried. "And papa had never even heard the name of Vertrees! Mrs. Vertrees went with some anti-smoke committee to see him, and he told her that smoke was what made her husband bring home his wages from the pay-roll on Sat.u.r.day night! HE told us about it, and I thought I just couldn't live through the night, I was so ashamed! Mr.

Vertrees has always lived on his income, and papa didn't know him, of course. They're the stiffist, most elegant people in the whole town. And to crown it all, papa went and bought the next lot to the old Vertrees country mansion--it's in the very heart of the best new residence district now, and that's where the New House is, right next door to them--and I must say it makes their place look rather shabby! I met Mary Vertrees when I joined the Mission Service Helpers, but she never did any more than just barely bow to me, and since papa's break I doubt if she'll do that! They haven't called."

"And you think if I spread this gossip about Vertrees the First stealing Dan'l Boone's gun, the chances that they WILL call--"

"Papa knows what a break he made with Mrs. Vertrees. I made him understand that," said Edith, demurely, "and he's promised to try and meet Mr. Vertrees and be nice to him. It's just this way: if we don't know THEM, it's practically no use in our having build the New House; and if we DO know them and they're decent to us, we're right with the right people. They can do the whole thing for us. Bobby Lamhorn told Sibyl he was going to bring his mother to call on her and on mamma, but it was weeks ago, and I notice he hasn't done it; and if Mrs. Vertrees decides not to know us, I'm darn sure Mrs Lamhorn'll never come. That's ONE thing Sibyl didn't manage! She SAID Bobby offered to bring his mother--"

"You say he is a friend of Roscoe's?" Bibbs asked.

"Oh, he's a friend of the whole family," she returned, with a petulance which she made an effort to disguise. "Roscoe and he got acquainted somewhere, and they take him to the theater about every other night.

Sibyl has him to lunch, too, and keeps--" She broke off with an angry little jerk of the head. "We can see the New House from the second corner ahead. Roscoe has built straight across the street from us, you know. Honestly, Sibyl makes me think of a snake, sometimes--the way she pulls the wool over people's eyes! She honeys up to papa and gets anything in the world she wants out of him, and then makes fun of him behind his back--yes, and to his face, but HE can't see it! She got him to give her a twelve-thousand-dollar porch for their house after it was--"

"Good heavens!" said Bibbs, staring ahead as they reached the corner and the car swung to the right, following a bend in the street. "Is that the New House?"

"Yes. What do you think of it?"

"Well," he drawled, "I'm pretty sure the sanitarium's about half a size bigger; I can't be certain till I measure."

And a moment later, as they entered the driveway, he added, seriously: "But it's beautiful!"

CHAPTER IV

It was gray stone, with long roofs of thick green slate. An architect who loved the milder "Gothic motives" had built what he liked: it was to be seen at once that he had been left unhampered, and he had wrought a picture out of his head into a n.o.ble and exultant reality. At the same time a landscape-designer had played so good a second, with ready-made accessories of screen, approach and vista, that already whatever look of newness remained upon the place was to its advantage, as showing at least one thing yet clean under the grimy sky. For, though the smoke was thinner in this direction, and at this long distance from the heart of the town, it was not absent, and under tutelage of wind and weather could be malignant even here, where cows had wandered in the meadows and corn had been growing not ten years gone.

Altogether, the New House was a success. It was one of those architects'

successes which leave the owners veiled in privacy; it revealed nothing of the people who lived in it save that they were rich. There are houses that cannot be detached from their own people without protesting: every inch of mortar seems to mourn the separation, and such a house--no matter what be done to it--is ever murmurous with regret, whispering the old name sadly to itself unceasingly. But the New House was of a kind to change hands without emotion. In our swelling cities, great places of its type are useful as financial gauges of the business tides; rich families, one after another, take t.i.tle and occupy such houses as fortunes rise and fall--they mark the high tide. It was impossible to imagine a child's toy wagon left upon a walk or driveway of the New House, and yet it was--as Bibbs rightly called it--"beautiful."

What the architect thought of the "Golfo di Napoli," which hung in its vast gold revel of rococo frame against the gray wood of the hall, is to be conjectured--perhaps he had not seen it.

"Edith, did you say only eleven feet?" Bibbs panted, staring at it, as the white-jacketed twin of a Pullman porter helped him to get out of his overcoat.

"Eleven without the frame," she explained. "It's splendid, don't you think? It lightens things up so. The hall was kind of gloomy before."

"No gloom now!" said Bibbs.

"This statue in the corner is pretty, too," she remarked. "Mamma and I bought that." And Bibbs turned at her direction to behold, amid a grove of tubbed palms, a "life-size," black-bearded Moor, of a plastic composition painted with unappeasable gloss and brilliancy. Upon his chocolate head he wore a gold turban; in his hand he held a gold-tipped spear; and for the rest, he was red and yellow and black and silver.

"Hallelujah!" was the sole comment of the returned wanderer, and Edith, saying she would "find mamma," left him blinking at the Moor. Presently, after she had disappeared, he turned to the colored man who stood waiting, Bibbs's traveling-bag in his hand. "What do YOU think of it?"

Bibbs asked, solemnly.

"Gran'!" replied the servitor. "She mighty hard to dus'. Dus' git in all 'em wrinkles. Yessuh, she mighty hard to dus'."

"I expect she must be," said Bibbs, his glance returning reflectively to the black bull beard for a moment. "Is there a place anywhere I could lie down?"

"Yessuh. We got one nem spare rooms all fix up fo' you, suh. Right up staihs, suh. Nice room."

He led the way, and Bibbs followed slowly, stopping at intervals to rest, and noting a heavy increase in the staff of service since the exodus from the "old" house. Maids and scrubwomen were at work under the patently nominal direction of another Pullman porter, who was profoundly enjoying his own affectation of being hara.s.sed with care.

"Ev'ything got look spick an' span fo' the big doin's to-night," Bibbs's guide explained, chuckling. "Yessuh, we got big doin's to-night! Big doin's!"

The room to which he conducted his lagging charge was furnished in every particular like a room in a new hotel; and Bibbs found it pleasant--though, indeed, any room with a good bed would have seemed pleasant to him after his journey. He stretched himself flat immediately, and having replied "Not now" to the attendant's offer to unpack the bag, closed his eyes wearily.

White-jacket, racially sympathetic, lowered the window-shades and made an exit on tiptoe, encountering the other white-jacket--the hara.s.sed overseer--in the hall without. Said the emerging one: "He mighty shaky, Mist' Jackson. Drop right down an' shet his eyes. Eyelids all black.

Rich folks gotta go same as anybody else. Anybody ast me if I change 'ith 'at ole boy--No, suh! Le'm keep 'is money; I keep my black skin an'

keep out the ground!"

Mr. Jackson expressed the same preference. "Yessuh, he look tuh me like somebody awready laid out," he concluded. And upon the stairway landing, near by, two old women, on all-fours at their work, were likewise pessimistic.

"Hech!" said one, lamenting in a whisper. "It give me a turn to see him go by--white as wax an' bony as a dead fis.h.!.+ Mrs. Cronin, tell me: d'it make ye kind o' sick to look at um?"

"Sick? No more than the face of a blessed angel already in heaven!"

"Well," said the other, "I'd a b'y o' me own come home t' die once--"

She fell silent at a rustling of skirts in the corridor above them.

It was Mrs. Sheridan hurrying to greet her son.