The Turmoil Booth Tarkington (best reads .txt) 📖

would not look beautiful at his funeral. A woman might look beautiful, though, at the funeral of a man whom she had known and liked. And in that case, too, she would probably not want to talk if she drove home from the cemetery with his brother: nor would she want the brother to talk. Silence is usually either stupid or timid. But for a man who stammers if he tries to talk fast, and drawls so slowly, when he doesn’t stammer, that nobody has time to listen to him, silence is advisable. Nevertheless, too much silence is open to suspicion. It may be reticence, or it may be a vacuum. It may be dignity, or it may be false teeth.

Sometimes an imperceptible odor will become perceptible in a small inclosure, such as a closed carriage. The ghost of gasoline rising from a lady’s glove might be sweeter to the man riding beside her than all the scents of Arcady in spring. It depends on the lady⁠—but there are!

Three miles may be three hundred miles, or it may be three feet. When it is three feet you have not time to say a great deal before you reach the end of it. Still, it may be that one should begin to speak.

No one could help wishing to stay in a world that holds some of the people that are in this world. There are some so wonderful you do not understand how the dead could die. How could they let themselves?

A falling building does not care who falls with it. It does not choose who shall be upon its roof and who shall not.

Silence can be golden? Yes. But perhaps if a woman of the world should find herself by accident sitting beside a man for the length of time it must necessarily take two slow old horses to jog three miles, she might expect that man to say something of some sort! Even if she thought him a feeble hypochondriac, even if she had heard from others that he was a disappointment to his own people, even if she had seen for herself that he was a useless and irritating encumbrance everywhere, she might expect him at least to speak⁠—she might expect him to open his mouth and try to make sounds, if he only barked. If he did not even try, but sat every step of the way as dumb as a frozen fish, she might think him a frozen fish. And she might be right. She might be right if she thought him about as pleasant a companion as⁠—as Bildad the Shuhite!

Bibbs closed his notebook, replacing it in his trunk. Then, after a period of melancholy contemplation, he undressed, put on a dressing-gown and slippers, and went softly out into the hall⁠—to his father’s door. Upon the floor was a tray which Bibbs had sent George, earlier in the evening, to place upon a table in Sheridan’s room⁠—but the food was untouched. Bibbs stood listening outside the door for several minutes. There came no sound from within, and he went back to his own room and to bed.

In the morning he woke to a state of being hitherto unknown in his experience. Sometimes in the process of waking there is a little pause⁠—sleep has gone, but coherent thought has not begun. It is a curious half-void, a glimpse of aphasia; and although the person experiencing it may not know for that instant his own name or age or sex, he may be acutely conscious of depression or elation. It is the moment, as we say, before we “remember”; and for the first time in Bibbs’s life it came to him bringing a vague happiness. He woke to a sense of new riches; he had the feeling of a boy waking to a birthday. But when the next moment brought him his memory, he found nothing that could explain his exhilaration. On the contrary, under the circumstances it seemed grotesquely unwarranted. However, it was a brief visitation and was gone before he had finished dressing. It left a little trail, the pleased recollection of it and the puzzle of it, which remained unsolved. And, in fact, waking happily in the morning is not usually the result of a drive home from a funeral. No wonder the sequence evaded Bibbs Sheridan!

His father had gone when he came downstairs. “Went on down to ’s office, jes’ same,” Jackson informed him. “Came sat breakfas’-table, all by m’self; eat nothin’. George bring nice breakfas’, but he di’n’ eat a thing. Yessuh, went on downtown, jes’ same he yoosta do. Yessuh, I reckon putty much ev’y-thing goin’ go on same as it yoosta do.”

It struck Bibbs that Jackson was right. The day passed as other days had passed. Mrs. Sheridan and Edith were in black, and Mrs. Sheridan cried a little, now and then, but no other external difference was to be seen. Edith was quiet, but not noticeably depressed, and at lunch proved herself able to argue with her mother upon the propriety of receiving calls in the earliest stages of “mourning.” Lunch was as usual⁠—for Jim and his father had always lunched downtown⁠—and the afternoon was as usual. Bibbs went for his drive, and his mother went with him, as she sometimes did when the weather was pleasant. Altogether, the usualness of things was rather startling to Bibbs.

During the drive Mrs. Sheridan talked fragmentarily of Jim’s childhood. “But you wouldn’t remember about that,” she said, after narrating an episode. “You were too little. He was always a good boy, just like that. And he’d save whatever papa gave him, and put it in the bank. I reckon it’ll just about kill your father to put somebody in his place as president of the Realty Company, Bibbs. I know he can’t move Roscoe over; he told me last week he’d already put as much on Roscoe as any one man could handle and not go crazy. Oh, it’s a pity⁠—” She stopped to wipe her