_ Through the open country Bibbs was borne flying between brown fields
and sun-flecked groves of gray trees, to breathe the rushing, clean
air beneath a glorious sky--that sky so despised in the city, and so
maltreated there, that from early October to mid-May it was impossible
for men to remember that blue is the rightful color overhead.
Upon each of Bibbs's cheeks there was a hint of something almost
resembling a pinkishness; not actual color, but undeniably its
phantom. How largely this apparition may have been the work of the
wind upon his face it is difficult to calculate, for beyond a doubt
it was partly the result of a lady's bowing to him upon no more formal
introduction than the circumstance of his having caught her looking
into his window a month before. She had bowed definitely; she had
bowed charmingly. And it seemed to Bibbs that she must have meant
to convey her forgiveness.
There had been something in her recognition of him unfamiliar to
his experience, and he rode the warmer for it. Nor did he lack the
impression that he would long remember her as he had just seen her:
her veil tumultuously blowing back, her face glowing in the wind
--and that look of gay friendliness tossed to him like a fresh rose
in carnival.
By and by, upon a rising ground, the driver halted the car, then
backed and tacked, and sent it forward again with its nose to the
south and the smoke. Far before him Bibbs saw the great smudge upon
the horizon, that nest of cloud in which the city strove and panted
like an engine shrouded in its own steam. But to Bibbs, who had
now to go to the very heart of it, for a commanded interview with
his father, the distant cloud was like an implacable genius issuing
thunderously in smoke from his enchanted bottle, and irresistibly
drawing Bibbs nearer and nearer.
They passed from the farm lands, and came, in the amber light of
November late afternoon, to the farthermost outskirts of the city;
and here the sky shimmered upon the verge of change from blue to
gray; the smoke did not visibly permeate the air, but it was there,
nevertheless--impalpable, thin, no more than the dust of smoke.
And then, as the car drove on, the chimneys and stacks of factories
came swimming up into view like miles of steamers advancing abreast,
every funnel with its vast plume, savage and black, sweeping to the
horizon, dripping wealth and dirt and suffocation over league on
league already rich and vile with grime.
The sky had become only a dingy thickening of the soiled air;
and a roar and clangor of metals beat deafeningly on Bibbs's ears.
And now the car passed two great blocks of long brick buildings,
hideous in all ways possible to make them hideous; doorways showing
dark one moment and lurid the next with the leap of some virulent
interior flame, revealing blackened giants, half naked, in passionate
action, struggling with formless things in the hot illumination.
And big as these shops were, they were growing bigger, spreading over
a third block, where two new structures were mushrooming to completion
in some hasty cement process of a stability not over-reassuring.
Bibbs pulled the rug closer about him, and not even the phantom of
color was left upon his cheeks as he passed this place, for he knew
it too well. Across the face of one of the buildings there was an
enormous sign: "Sheridan Automatic Pump Co., Inc."
Thence they went through streets of wooden houses, all grimed, and
adding their own grime from many a sooty chimney; flimsey wooden
houses of a thousand flimsy whimsies in the fashioning, built on
narrow lots and nudging one another crossly, shutting out the stingy
sunlight from one another; bad neighbors who would destroy one another
root and branch some night when the right wind blew. They were only
waiting for that wind and a cigarette, and then they would all be gone
together--a pinch of incense burned upon the tripod of the god.
Along these streets there were skinny shade-trees, and here and there
a forest elm or walnut had been left; but these were dying. Some
people said it was the scale; some said it was the smoke; and some
were sure that asphalt and "improving" the streets did it; but Bigness
was in too Big a hurry to bother much about trees. He had telegraph-
poles and telephone-poles and electric-light-poles and trolley-poles
by the thousand to take their places. So he let the trees die and
put up his poles. They were hideous, but nobody minded that; and
sometimes the wires fell and killed people--but not often enough to
matter at all.
Thence onward the car bore Bibbs through the older parts of the
town where the few solid old houses not already demolished were in
transition: some, with their fronts torn away, were being made into
segments of apartment-buildings; others had gone uproariously into
trade, brazenly putting forth "show-windows" on their first floors,
seeming to mean it for a joke; one or two with unaltered facades
peeped humorously over the tops of temporary office buildings of one
story erected in the old front yards. Altogether, the town here was
like a boarding-house hash the Sunday after Thanksgiving; the old
ingredients were discernible.
This was the fringe of Bigness's own sanctuary, and now Bibbs
reached the roaring holy of holies itself. The car must stop a
every crossing while the dark-garbed crowds, enveloped in maelstroms
of dust, hurried before it. Magnificent new buildings, already dingy,
loomed hundreds of feet above him; newer ones, more magnificent, were
rising beside them, rising higher; old buildings were coming down;
middle-aged buildings were coming down; the streets were laid open
to their entrails and men worked underground between palisades, and
overhead in metal cobwebs like spiders in the sky. Trolley-cars and
long interurban cars, built to split the wind like torpedo-boats,
clanged and shrieked their way round swarming corners; motor-cars
of every kind and shape known to man babbled frightful warnings and
frantic demands; hospital ambulances clamored wildly for passage;
steam-whistles signaled the swinging of titanic tentacle and claw;
riveters rattled like machine-guns; the ground shook to the thunder
of gigantic trucks; and the conglomerate sound of it all was the sound
of earthquake playing accompaniments for battle and sudden death. On
one of the new steel buildings no work was being done that afternoon.
The building had killed a man in the morning--and the steel-workers
always stop for the day when that "happens."
And in the hurrying crowds, swirling and sifting through the
brobdingnagian camp of iron and steel, one saw the camp-followers
and the pagan women--there would be work to-day and dancing to-night.
For the Puritan's dry voice is but the crackling of a leaf underfoot
in the rush and roar of the coming of the new Egypt.
Bibbs was on time. He knew it must be "to the minute" or his father
would consider it an outrage; and the big chronometer in Sheridan's
office marked four precisely when Bibbs walked in. Coincidentally
with his entrance five people who had been at work in the office,
under Sheridan's direction, walked out. They departed upon no visible
or audible suggestion, and with a promptness that seemed ominous to
the new-comer. As the massive door clicked softly behind the elderly
stenographer, the last of the procession, Bibbs had a feeling that
they all understood that he was a failure as a great man's son, a
disappointment, the "queer one" of the family, and that he had been
summoned to judgment--a well-founded impression, for that was exactly
what they understood.
"Sit down," said Sheridan.
It is frequently an advantage for deans, school-masters, and worried
fathers to place delinquents in the sitting-posture. Bibbs sat.
Sheridan, standing, gazed enigmatically upon his son for a period of
silence, then walked slowly to a window and stood looking out of it,
his big hands, loosely hooked together by the thumbs, behind his back.
They were soiled, as were all other hands down-town, except such as
might be still damp from a basin.
"Well, Bibbs," he said at last, not altering his attitude, "do you
know what I'm goin' to do with you?"
Bibbs, leaning back in his chair, fixed his eyes contemplatively upon
the ceiling. "I heard you tell Jim," he began, in his slow way. "You
said you'd send him to the machine-shop with me if he didn't propose
to Miss Vertrees. So I suppose that must be your plan for me. But--"
"But what?" said Sheridan, irritably, as the son paused.
"Isn't there somebody you'd let ME propose to?"
That brought his father sharply round to face him. "You beat the
devil! Bibbs, what IS the matter with you? Why can't you be like
anybody else?"
"Liver, maybe," said Bibbs, gently.
"Boh! Even ole Doc Gurney says there's nothin' wrong with you
organically. No. You're a dreamer, Bibbs; that's what's the matter,
and that's ALL the matter. Oh, no one o' these BIG dreamers that put
through the big deals! No, sir! You're the kind o' dreamer that
just sets out on the back fence and thinks about how much trouble
there must be in the world! That ain't the kind that builds the
bridges, Bibbs; it's the kind that borrows fifteen cents from his
wife's uncle's brother-in-law to get ten cent's worth o' plug tobacco
and a nickel's worth o' quinine!"
He put the finishing touch on this etching with a snort, and turned
again to the window.
"Look out there!" he bade his son. "Look out o' that window! Look at
the life and evergy down there! I should think ANY young man's blood
would tingle to get into it and be part of it. Look at the big things
young men are doin' in this town!" He swung about, coming to the
mahogany desk in the middle of the room. "Look at what I was doin' at
your age! Look at what your own brothers are doin'! Look at Roscoe!
Yes, and look at Jim! I made Jim president o' the Sheridan Realty
Company last New-Year's, with charge of every inch o' ground and every
brick and every shingle and stick o' wood we own; and it's an example
to any young man--or ole man, either--the way he took ahold of it.
Last July we found out we wanted two more big warehouses at the Pump
Works--wanted 'em quick. Contractors said it couldn't be done; said
nine or ten months at the soonest; couldn't see it any other way.
What'd Jim do? Took the contract himself; found a fellow with a new
cement and concrete process; kept men on the job night and day, and
stayed on it night and day himself--and, by George! we begin to USE
them warehouses next week! Four months and a half, and every inch
fireproof! I tell you Jim's one o' these fellers that make miracles
happen! Now, I don't say every young man can be like Jim, because
there's mighty few got his ability, but every young man can go in and
do his share. This town is God's own country, and there's opportunity
for anybody with a pound of energy and an ounce o' gumption. I tell
you these young business men I watch just do my heart good! THEY
don't set around on the back fence--no, sir! They take enough
exercise to keep their health; and they go to a baseball game once
or twice a week in summer, maybe, and they're raisin' nice families,
with sons to take their places sometime and carry on the work--because
the work's got to go ON! They're puttin' their life-blood into it, I
tell you, and that's why we're gettin' bigger every minute, and why
THEY'RE gettin' bigger, and why it's all goin' to keep ON gettin'
bigger!" _