The Turmoil quotes

At a breeze he must smother in the whirlpools of dust, and if he should decline at any time to inhale the smoke he has the meager alternative of suicide.

The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more riches.

He gets them and pants the fiercer, smelling and swelling prodigiously. He has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained to one tune: “Wealth! I will get Wealth! I will make Wealth! I will sell Wealth for more Wealth!

This obvious thing was wholly a mystery to both parents; the mother was nonplussed, failed to trace and connect; and the father regarded his son as a stubborn and mysterious fool, an impression not effaced as the years went by.

At twenty-two, Bibbs was physically no more than the outer scaffolding of a man, waiting for the building to begin inside

—a long-shanked, long-faced, rickety youth, sallow and hollow and haggard, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a peculiar expression of countenance; indeed, at first sight of Bibbs Sheridan a stranger might well be solicitous, for he seemed upon the point of tears.

“But I certainly do look better,” he returned, in a voice as slow as his gait; a drawl that was a necessity, for when Bibbs tried to speak quickly he stammered.

“Up to about a month ago it took two people to see me. They had to get me in a line between ’em!”

Edith did not turn her eyes directly toward him again, after her first quick glance;

“How do I look?” she insisted.

“You look,” he answered, as his examination ended upon an incrusted watch of platinum and enamel at her wrist, “you look⁠—expensive!”

That was a substitute for what he intended to say, for her constraint and preoccupation, manifested particularly in her keeping her direct glance away from him, did not seem to grant the privilege of impulsive intimacies.

“We’ve been having very bright weather this month—for us.” She blew the flake of soot into the air, seeming relieved.

He looked up at the dingy sky, wherein hung the disconsolate sun like a cold tin pan nailed up in a smokehouse by some lunatic, for a decoration.

“Yes,” said Bibbs. “It’s very gay.” A few moments later, as they passed a corner, “Aren’t we going home?” he asked.

“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.

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.

“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?”

“What?” Sheridan leaned forward, resting his hands upon the desk and staring across it incredulously at his son.

“I don’t understand⁠—exactly⁠—what you want it all bigger for?”

“Great God!” shouted Sheridan, and struck the desk a blow with his clenched fist. “A son of mine asks me that! You go out and ask the poorest day-laborer you can find! Ask him that question—”

“I did once,” Bibbs interrupted; “when I was in the machine-shop. I—”

“He said, ‘Oh, hell!’ ” answered Bibbs, mildly.

“Yes, I reckon he would!” Sheridan swung away from the desk. “I reckon he certainly would! And I got plenty sympathy with him right now, myself!”

His left hand held stretched between thumb and forefinger an elastic section of his helpless customer’s cheek, while his right hand hung poised above it, the razor motionless. And then, roused from trance by the door’s closing, he accepted the fact of Sheridan’s presence.

The barber remembered that there are no circumstances in life⁠—or just after it⁠—under which a man does not need to be shaved.

He stepped forward, profoundly grave. “I be through with this man in the chair one minute, Mist’ Sheridan,” he said, in a hushed tone. “Yessuh.” And of a solemn negro youth who stood by, gazing stupidly, “You goin’ resign?” he demanded in a fierce undertone.

“Dust to dust,” said the minister, under the gaunt trees; and at that Sheridan shook convulsively from head to foot. All of the black group shivered, except Bibbs, when it came to “Dust to dust.”

Bibbs stood passive, for he was the only one of them who had known that thought as a familiar neighbor

; he had been close upon dust himself for a long, long time, and even now he could prophesy no protracted separation between himself and dust.

Bibbs drew a long breath and waited till he could command his voice.

“I’ve never been able to apologize quickly,” he said, with his accustomed slowness, “because if I try to I stammer. My brother Roscoe whipped me once, when we were boys, for stepping on his slate-pencil. It took me so long to tell him it was an accident, he finished before I did.”

Mary Vertrees had never heard anything quite like the drawling, gentle voice or the odd implication that his not noticing the motionless state of their vehicle was an “accident.”

“Listen,” he said, with peculiar earnestness. “I’ll tell you now, because—because I’ve decided I’m one of the family.” And then, as if the earnestness were too heavy for him to carry it further, he continued, in his usual tone,

“I’m drunk with power, Edith.”

“What do you want to tell me?” she demanded, brusquely.

“I haven’t any, Edith,” he said.

“My life has been about as exciting as an incubator chicken’s. But I look out through the glass at things.”

“Well, then,” she said, “if you look out through the glass you must know what effect such stuff would have upon me!” She rose, visibly agitated. “What if it was true?” she demanded, bitterly. “What if it was true a hundred times over?

And when the examination was concluded, that afternoon, the doctor informed Bibbs that the result was much too satisfactory to be pleasing. “Here’s a new situation for a one-act farce,” he said, gloomily, to his next patient when Bibbs had gone.

“Doctor tells a man he’s well, and that’s his death sentence, likely. Dam’ funny world!”

Bibbs decided to walk home, though Gurney had not instructed him upon this point. In fact, Gurney seemed to have no more instructions on any point, so discouraging was the young man’s improvement.

She interrupted him with laughter, and Mary Vertrees’s laugh was one which Bibbs’s father had declared, after the housewarming, “a cripple would crawl five miles to hear.” And at the merry lilting of it Bibbs’s father’s son took heart to forget some of his trepidation.

“I’ll be any kind of idiot,” he said, “if you’ll laugh at me some more. It won’t be difficult for me.”

She did; and Bibbs’s cheeks showed a little actual color, which Mary perceived. It recalled to her, by contrast, her careless and irritated description of him to her mother just after she had seen him for the first time. “Rather tragic and altogether impossible.”

incredible that there was a smoky street just yonder, where housemaids were bringing in evening papers from front steps and where children were taking their last spins on roller-skates before being haled indoors for dinner.

He had a curious sense of communication with his new friend.

He knew it could not be so, and yet he felt as if all the time he spoke to her, saying: “You hear this strain? You hear that strain? You know the dream that these sounds bring to me?”

And wouldn’t it be pleasant, really, if they could all cross the winning-line together?

Who really enjoys beating anybody⁠—if he sees the beaten man’s face?

The only way we can enjoy getting ahead of other people nowadays is by forgetting what the other people feel. And that,” he added, “is nothing of what the music meant to me.

Light seemed to glow from her; he was blinded by that radiance of kindness. But all he could say was, huskily, “To think you’re there—with me—standing beside the old zinc-eater—”

And they laughed and looked at each other, and at last Bibbs found what it meant not to be alone in the world. He had a friend.

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 downstairs.

“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.”

“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.”

And yet when you’ve been reading the paper I’ve heard you objecting to the children being taught anything except what would help them to make money. You said it was wasting the taxes.

You want them taught to make a living, but not to live.

When I was a little boy this wasn’t an ugly town; now it’s hideous. What’s the use of being big just to be hideous? I mean I don’t think all this has meant really going ahead—it’s just been getting bigger and dirtier and noisier.

Yes, sir, it took a pretty fair-sized shock to get him out of his trance, but it certainly did the business.” He patted his wife’s shoulder again, and then, without any prefatory symptoms, broke into a boisterous laugh.

“Honest, mamma, he works like a gorilla!”

And so Bibbs sat in the porch of the temple with the money-changers.

But no one came to scourge him forth, for this was the temple of Bigness, and the changing of money was holy worship and true religion.

The priests wore that “settish” look Bibbs’s mother had seen beginning to develop about his mouth and eyes—a wary look which she could not define, but it comes with service at the temple;

though street musicians were not tolerated, being considered a nuisance and an interference. A man or woman who went singing for pleasure through the streets—like a crazy Neopolitan—would have been stopped, and belike locked up; for

Freedom does not mean that a citizen is allowed to do every outrageous thing that comes into his head.

The streets were dangerous enough, in all conscience, without any singing! and the Motor Federation issued public warnings declaring that the pedestrian’s life was in his own hands, and giving directions how to proceed with the least peril.

So Bibbs, learning their ways and walking with them, harkened to the voice of the people and served Bigness with them.

For the voice of the people is the voice of their god.

Sheridan had made the room next to his own into an office for Bibbs, and the door between the two rooms usually stood open—the father had established that intimacy.

Everywhere the people shouted of the power, the size, the riches, and the growth of their city. Not only that, they said that the people of their city were the greatest, the finest, the strongest, the Biggest people on earth.

They cited no authorities, and felt the need of none, being themselves the people thus celebrated.

And if the thing was questioned, or if it was hinted that there might be one small virtue in which they were not perfect and supreme, they wasted no time examining themselves to see if what the critic said was true, but fell upon him …