“Gee, this is some place!” exulted the Hon. Thomas J. Pearson (president of the Centaur State Bank, trustee of the Fernworth School for Girls, vice president of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce, vestryman of St. Asaph’s P.E. Church), and straightway he was dancing with a redheaded girl like a little brass and ivory statue.
“Well—” philosophized Matey. “Eh? Heavens no, I don’t want to dance in this stock exchange! Well, I might just as well pretend I don’t mind Tub’s chasing after all these little goldfish, because he’ll do it anyway, and I might as well get the credit for being broad-minded. Which I ain’t! You old darling, Sambo, I was sorry Tub felt he had to uphold the banner of American Humor by making a goat of himself with that snooty waiter at that place—wh’d’ they call it?—there tonight.”
“Oh, good Lord, Matey, he’s just like a—”
“You’re going to say, ‘He’s just like a kid let out of school, and he’s got to kick up his heels,’ which if I remember the rhetoric that that old Miss Getz drummed into my mutton head in finishing-school, is both a cliché and a mixed metaphor. Oh, I adore the fat little devil! He’s awfully sweet when you can get him tied down at the domestic hearth, with no audience. But once that animal smells applause—Honestly, I think that the sense of humor of the people that talk about having a ‘sense of humor’ is a worse vice than drinking. Oh, well, it might have been worse. He might have turned out religious, or a vegetarian, or taken to dope. The little monkey! And he’s drinking too much, tonight. I just hope he won’t take enough so he’ll wake up with a perfectly fierce head tomorrow, and feel so conscience-stricken that I’ll have to give him the devil just to relieve him. Oh, I can do it—and probably will!—but I want to enjoy myself, too, while I’m here, and I’m going to take home a great, big, expensive boule cabinet, if I have to forge a check for it!”
She consented, later, to dance with Sam, though it was more like charging a mob than dancing. She was nimble, for all her plumpness; and as she did not, like Fran, point out his every clumsy step, his every failure to follow the music, he danced rather well with her, and enjoyed it, and recovered some of the high spirits with which he had met them at the train—spirits too high and romantic to last forever.
Tub dug out, somewhere, probably in the bar, a quite respectable fellow-banker from Indiana, and two Irish girls, whose art was commercialized but pretty, and everybody danced—everybody drank a good deal—everybody laughed.
Tub himself had so good a time that he showed the highest sign of pleasure known to an American: he wanted to “go on some place else.”
They did—to another Caverne or Taverne or Palais or Câve or Rendezvous, with the same high standard of everything except wine and music and company and then, too brightly lit to waste any more time in dancing or flirtation or anything save sitting and really attending to drinking and humor, Tub insisted that they go back to the New York Bar, where, he assured Matey, they would “meet reg’lar fell’s.”
They did. In a corner table of the bar, under the sketches of Parisian celebrities, they were picked up by an American navy officer who had magnificent lies about the China coast, and somehow there was added to their party a freelance journalist and a lone English corn-merchant, who talked a good deal, and very spiritedly, about the admitted fact that Englishmen never talk much and then shyly.
Tub, in one day, was a warmer habitué of the New York Bar than was Sam Dodsworth after a year. It was not merely that Sam was dogged by a sense of dignity, by a feeling that a Prominent Manufacturer ought not to be seen about barrooms, but also that he had a certain judicious timidity which suggested that there was no reason why the keen, hard-minded journalists who frequented the bar and exchanged gossip of kings and treaties should be interested in him. But Tub was a Professional Good Fellow—when he was away from the oak-panel and gold velvet vestry of St. Asaph’s, the trustees’ room at the Fernworth School, or the marble and walnut office at the Centaur State Bank, where he put on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles which somehow prevented his eyes from twinkling or looking slyly humorous.
He hadn’t forgotten one of the men he had met at the bar that afternoon. He called two of the journalists by their first names, and he was in general so full of prankishness that the lone naval officer broke into tears of relief and told them all about his most recent fight with his wife.
But there was one flaw in the joviality. Tub had drunk Burgundy at dinner, Napoleon brandy afterward, champagne all evening, and now he decided (in spite of the earnest counsel of Sam, Matey, the naval officer, the Englishman, the journalist, the waiter, and a few by-sitters) to show his loyalty to America and the Good Old Days by drinking real American rye whisky—and it was a very copious loyalty that he showed.
In the middle of the commander’s story about his wife, Tub began to look listless, with fine lines of sweat-drops on his upper lip—and it was only two in the morning and he had been drinking steadily for only twelve hours, which is not even par for a representative of Prohibition America on his first day in Paris.
Matey cried to Sam,
