“Damn it!” said Bill to himself in the cab. “I’ll go to America!” The exact words, probably, which Columbus had used, talking the thing over with his wife.
Bill’s knowledge of the great republic across the sea was at this period of his life a little sketchy. He knew that there had been unpleasantness between England and the United States in seventeen-something and again in eighteen-something, but that things had eventually been straightened out by Miss Edna May and her fellow missionaries of The Belle of New York Company, since which time there had been no more trouble. Of American cocktails he had a fair working knowledge, and he appreciated ragtime. But of the great American institutions—ice water, direct primaries, New Jersey mosquitoes, the Woolworth Building, George M. Cohan, chop suey, rubberneck wagons, bunts, Matty, silver-tongued orators, Yellowstone Park, the Pennsylvania Station, corn on the cob, and Eva Tanguay—he was completely ignorant. And his natural ignorance had been complicated by the contradictory reports of the country which he had received from exiles of his acquaintance resident in London. His friend Gates, for instance, said that, except for a few scattered hamlets, America ceased at Forty-second Street, New York. Another exile, on the other hand, thought little of New York, but said that Constantinople, Michigan, was God’s footstool. A third claimed that the country began only on the western side of the Rocky Mountains. It was confusing for Bill.
He was on his way now to see Gates. Gates was a comparatively recent addition to his list of friends, a New York newspaper man who had come to England a few months before to act as his paper’s London correspondent. He was generally to be found at the Pen and Ink Club, an institution affiliated with the New York Players, of which he was a member.
Gates was in. He had just finished lunch.
“What’s the trouble, Bill?” he inquired, when he had deposited his lordship in a corner of the reading room, which he had selected because silence was compulsory there, thus rendering it possible for two men to hear each other speak. “What brings you charging in here looking like the Soul’s Awakening?”
“I’ve had an idea, old man.”
“Shoot!”
“Eh?”
“Proceed. Continue. Put it over.”
“Oh! Well, you remember what you were saying about America?”
“What was I saying about America?”
“The other day, don’t you remember? What a lot of money there was to be made there, and so forth.”
“Well?”
“I’m going there.”
“To America?”
“Yes.”
“To make money?”
“Rather.”
Gates nodded—sadly, it seemed to Bill. He was rather a melancholy young man, with a long face not unlike the face of a pessimistic horse.
“Gosh!” he said.
Bill felt a little damped. By no mental juggling could he construe “Gosh!” into an expression of enthusiastic approbation.
“Don’t you think I could make money there?” he asked.
“At what?”
“Oh, anything.”
“Yes, there’s a demand for that, of course.”
“You said there were a lot of things a fellow could drop into.”
“I was thinking of the open coal chutes.” He looked at Bill curiously. “What’s the idea?” he said. “I could have understood it if you had told me that you were going to New York for pleasure, instructing your man Willoughby to see that the trunks were jolly well packed and wiring to the skipper of your yacht to meet you at Liverpool. But you seem to have sordid motives. You talk about making money. What do you want with more money?”
“Why, I’m devilish hard up.”
“Tenantry a bit slack about coming across with the rent?” said Gates sympathetically.
Bill laughed.
“My dear chap, I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about. How much money do you think I’ve got? Four hundred pounds a year, and no prospect of ever making more unless I sweat for it.”
“What! I always thought you were bloated.”
“What gave you that idea?”
“You have a prosperous look. It’s a funny thing about England. I’ve known you four months, and I know men who know you; but I’ve never heard a word about your finances. In New York we all wear labels, stating our incomes and prospects in clear lettering. Well, if it’s like that it’s different, of course. There certainly is more money to be made in America than here. I don’t quite see what you think you’re going to do when you get there, but that’s up to you.
“There’s no harm in giving the city the once over. Anyway I can give you a letter or two that might help.”
“That’s awfully good of you.”
“You won’t mind my alluding to you as my friend William Smith?”
“William Smith?”
“You can’t travel under your own name if you are really serious about getting a job. Mind you, if my letters lead to anything it will probably be a situation as an earnest bill clerk or an effervescent office boy, for Rockefeller and Carnegie and that lot have swiped all the soft jobs. But if you go over as Lord Dawlish you won’t even get that. Lords are popular socially in America, but are not used to any great extent in the office. If you try to break in under your right name you’ll get the glad hand and be asked down to Tuxedo and Huntington, and play a good deal of golf and dance quite a lot, but you won’t get a job. A gentle smile will greet all your pleadings that you be allowed to horn in and save the firm.”
“I see.”
“We may look on Smith as a necessity.”
“Do you know, I’m not frightfully keen on the name Smith. Wouldn’t something else do?”
“Sure. We aim to please. How would Jones suit you?”
“The trouble is, you know, that if I took a name I wasn’t used to I might forget it.”
“If you’ve the sort of mind that would forget Jones I doubt if ever you’ll be a captain of industry.”
“Why not Chalmers?”
“You think it easier to memorize than Jones?”
“It
