He slumped in his chair, he rubbed his chin, and sighed:
“Well, I guess about as much as I’d get out of reading the steamship and hotel ads in a New York Sunday paper! I know a little less than when I started. Then, I knew that all Englishmen were icicles, all Frenchmen chattered, and all Italians sat around in the sun singing. Now I don’t even know that much. I suspect that most Englishmen are friendly, most Frenchmen are silent, and most Italians work like the devil—pardon me!”
“Exactly!”
“I’ve learned to doubt everything. I’ve learned that even a fairly successful executive—and I was that, no matter, how much of a loafer I seem now—”
“Oh, I know!”
“I’ve learned that even a fairly good garage boss like myself isn’t much good at deciding between Poiret and Lanvin, or between Early English and Decorated. No American business man ought to go abroad, ever, except to a Rotary convention, or on a conducted tour where he’s well insulated from furriners. Upsets him. Spoils his pleasure in his own greatness and knowledge! … What have I learned? Let’s see: The names of maybe fifty hotels, of which I’ll remember five, in a few years. The schedules of half a dozen de luxe trains. The names of a few brands of Burgundy. How to tell a Norman doorway from Gothic. How to order from a French menu—providing there’s nothing unusual on the bill. And I can say ‘How much’ and ‘Too much’ in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. And I think that’s about all I’ve learned here. I guess they caught me too late!”
XXXII
With his second drink, at Florian’s, after dinner, he recaptured a rare exhilarating glow at the thought of travel, alone and fast. He could go as he would: North, South—the very names had magic: North and snowdrifts among silent pines; South and bamboo huts in the jungle; East and a cranky steamer jogging up a purple strait; West and a bench by a log cabin in the Rockies, with a lake two thousand feet below, and himself, strong and deep-breathing as he had been at thirty, smelling the new-cut chips, the frosty air. Yes! He would see them all! He wouldn’t go back to an office!
He had twenty, perhaps thirty years more. He would have a second life; having been Samuel Dodsworth he would go on and miraculously be someone else, more ruthless, less bound, less sentimental. He could be a poet, a governor, an explorer. He’d learned his faults of commercial-mindedness, of timidity before women. Correct ’em! He’d seen the gaps in his knowledge. Fill ’em!
Twenty years more!
Start right now. Tomorrow he would take up Italian. Tomorrow he would write to Ross Ireland about that jaunt to the Orient. Yes!
After the comfort of tea with Edith Cortright, he had been lonelier than ever. For five minutes he had planned to flee to Fran. But fried scampi and a drink solaced him; a second drink set his imagination dancing. Then he wanted another drink—and didn’t want it.
No! He shook himself. He hated this flabby, easy escape through alcohol into a belief in his own power and freedom. He wasn’t (proudly) one of the weaklings who took refuge from problems in the beautiful peace of the gutter, where the slime covered one’s ears from the nasal voices of the censors who were always demanding of a tired man a little more than he could do.
But was that true? Was anything he had thought true—even this easy disgust at easy escape? Was it possible that he was unable to fall permanently into drunkenness, to disintegrate, to scorn all decent scorn and be content with a Nande Azeredo in a stinking garret, not because he was too strong but because he was too weak—too weakly afraid of what Fran, Tub, Matey, strangers like Mrs. Cortright, would say? Was it possible that it took more courage to be a hobo, deliberate, out and out, than to go on living like a respectable manufacturer while he ached like a Verlaine? Was dry rot really braver than a moist and dripping rage of defiance?
He gave it up.
He was so tired of dragging out his little soul and worrying over it! If he could only be laughing, unthinking, with Tub Pearson. Or if Mrs. Cortright had been willing to dine with him—
Mrs. Cortright. Now there was a woman! As proper as Fran and as worldly, yet as indifferent to titles and luxury as Nande.
“Mighty sweet woman!”
He thought again about that third drink, then vehemently didn’t want it, vehemently retired into the respectability from which for a moment he had thought he might escape. For at the next table was an American party, full of merriment and keeping their brother from falling by setting an edifyingly bad example.
There were three men, three women. Apparently some of them were married to some of the others, but they seemed confused as to who was married to whom.
They noted Sam, and one of the men staggered over to shout, “American, ain’t you? Well, say, why the lone fiesta? Come over and join a live bunch!”
Rather pleased, Sam went over and joined.
“Just arrived?” he asked, as was proper.
“You bet. Landed at Naples, yesterday,” said his host. “Came over on a Wop ship—elegant boat too—and say, boy, that was some trip, too, I’ll tell the cockeyed world! Say, I’ve heard about wet voyages, but this trip—say, I bet I never went to bed before three G.M. once, the whole way over! And the girls—say, they were just as good as the men. Dorine here, she drank two bols champagne in two hours, and the whole bunch were so crazy about the Italian officers—say, the officers had to brush ’em off the bridge every time they wanted to do any fancy navigating! And that gave us boys a chance to get in
