Each of them crunched Sam’s hand and growled (only the Rhodes scholar’s growl was more feline than canine): “Certainly is a mighty great pleasure to meet you. Staying over here long?”
Near the door was a side-table spread with Martini cocktails, Manhattan cocktails, Bronx cocktails, and bottles of Scotch, Canadian Club, American rye and Bourbon. Sam could not escape without four cocktails, and when he wavered to his seat beside A. B. Hurd, he had altogether forgotten that he had ever been lonely, that Fran was with Lockert.
There was a deal of noisy humor at the dinner; a deal of shouting the length of the table; a number of stories beginning “Jever hear the one about the two Jews—” And it must be said that Sam, privileged now to enjoy the suburbs of correct English society, enjoyed it more than any dinner this fortnight. He enjoyed it even when cognac and whisky sodas followed the dessert and some of the guests—free for only one evening a week from the American wives whom living in England had not weakened in their view of women’s right to forbid men’s rights—snatched the excuse to get quite reasonably drunk and to soar into American melody: “The Old Man Came Rolling Home,” and “He Laid Jesse James in His Grave” and “Way Down on the Bingo Farm,” with what they conceived to be a correct Cockney version of “She Was Poor but She Was Honest,” all of them leading triumphantly up to:
My name is Yon Yonson,
I come from Visconsin,
I vork on a lumberyard dere,
Ven I go down de street
All de people I meet
Dey saaaaaaay,
“Vot’s your name?”
And I sa‑aaaaay:
My name is Yon Yonson,
I come from Visconsin—
It seemed a good song, at a certain stage of liquor, and they kept it up for ten minutes.
But between such highlights, Sam Dodsworth got in a seminar of inquiries about the question that to him, also, had become a disease: Is America the Rome of the world, or is it inferior to Britain and Europe? Or confusedly both?
Out of all the thirty, there were not ten whose speech showed that they had lived abroad. If occasionally they said “braces” instead of “suspenders,” or “two bob” instead of “four bits,” you would have supposed that they had been reading English fiction. There were not six who would ever have been taken for Englishmen by Americans, and not three who would have been taken for Englishmen by Englishmen.
Yet there were not more than six, Sam discovered incredulously, who wanted to return to America for the rest of their lives.
He had understood that hybrid cosmopolites with a fancy for titles and baccarat, eccentric artists who were fond of mistresses and chess, idlers who needed someone with whom to loaf, might prefer to live abroad. But that this should be true of the gallant thirty—good salesmen, up-and-coming authorities on cash registers and motor tires—was disturbing to him, and mystifying.
These men believed, and belligerently announced, that America was the “greatest country in the world,” not only in its resources and increasing population and incomparable comforts of daily life, not only in its energy and mechanical ingenuity, but equally in its generosity, its friendliness, its humor, its aspiration for learning. Scarce one of them, Sam judged, but longed to see his own beloved quarter of America—
New York on a winter night, with the theaters blaring and the apartment-houses along Park Avenue vanishing up into the wild sky rosy from a million lights. Vermont on an autumn afternoon, with the maples like torches. Midsummer in Minnesota, where the cornfields talked to themselves, and across miles of rolling wheatland, dimpling to the breeze, you saw the tall red wheat-elevators and the spire of the German Catholic Church. The grave silence of the wilderness: plateaus among the scarred peaks of the Sierra Nevadas, painted buttes in Arizona, Wisconsin lakes caressing in dark waters the golden trunks of Norway pines. The fanlights above serene old Connecticut doorways in Litchfield and Sharon. Proud cold sunsets in the last five minutes of the Big Game at Thanksgiving-time—Illinois vs. Chicago, Yale vs. Harvard—yes, and quite as aching with sentimental and unforgettable and lost sweetness, Schnutz College vs. Maginnis Agricultural School. Cities of a quarter of a million people with fantastic smoky steel works, like maniac cathedrals, which had arisen in twenty years upon unpeopled sand-barrens. The long road and a rather shaggy, very adventurous family in a squeaky flivver, the new Covered Wagon, starting out to see all the world from Seattle to Tallahassee, stopping to earn their bacon and bread and oil by harvesting; singing at night in tourist camps on the edge of wide-lawned towns—
“I certainly do like to get back to Alabama—mighty nice girls there, and you talk about your Georgia terrapin—say, listen, boy,” said Stubbs of the Pittsburgh and Western National Bank, “we
