“Wherejuh wanna go?” he growled.
It shocked Sam to find how jarred he was by this demonstration of democracy. Like most Americans in Paris, he had been insisting that all French taxi-drivers were bandits, but now they seemed to him like playful and cuddling children.
It was achingly hot in the side streets leading from the piers, and appallingly dirty. In front of warehouses and mean brick houses turned into tenements were flying newspapers, piles of bottles and rags and manure. Gritty clouds of ashes blew from open garbage cans, and tangled with the heat was New York’s summertime stench of rotten bananas, unwashed laundry, ancient bedding, and wet pavements. In front of the taxicab, making Sam’s heart stop with fear, darted ragged small boys (quite cheerful, and illogically healthy); and on the flimsy iron balconies of fire-escapes sat mothers with hair dragging across their eyes, nursing babies who in between sups wailed against the unjust heat. It was, Sam felt, a city nervous as a thwarted woman. (Sam still believed in male strength and female weakness.) It seemed so masculine in its stalwart buildings, but there was nothing masculine in its heat-shocked, clamor-maddened nerves. The traffic policemen raged at Sam’s taxi-driver, the taxi-driver cursed all the truck-drivers, and, above the roaring of their engines, the truck-drivers cursed everybody on the street.
Ninth Avenue was insane with the banging of the Elevated; Eighth Avenue was a frontier camp of little shops; Seventh Avenue was a bedlam of traffic between loft buildings with enormous signs—“Löwenstein & Putski, Garments for Little Gents,” and “The Gay Life Brassière, Rothweiser and Gitz”; Sixth Avenue combined the roar of Ninth with the nastiness of Eighth and the charging traffic of Seventh; and when in relief Sam saw the stateliness of Fifth Avenue, there was an inhuman mass of shiny cars from curb to curb.
The Sam Dodsworth who considered himself tireless was exhausted when he crawled into the cool refuge of his hotel. He sat by the window in his room, looking at the sullen stretch of the lofty office-building opposite, and longed for a drink.
“Conservatively, I’d give twenty-five dollars right now for the bottle of Scotch that the customs man took away from me. … Oh, Lord! … I don’t like New York so well, in weather like this. I’ll be glad to get out into the country. That’s the real America. … I hope it will be! … I can see where I’m not going to complain about having too much leisure, the way I did in Paris! And I want that drink!”
It did not improve his opinion of Prohibition—it made the whole business seem the more imbecile and annoying and hypocritical—that after a telephone call, within half an hour he had a case of whisky in his room, and that he was taking a drink far earlier in the day than he would ever have done in Paris.
He had many people to see in New York before he went to New Haven for his class reunion. But he telephoned to no one—with the exception of the bootlegger. He had only the energy to sit by the window, getting what breeze there was, trying to ignore the ceaseless menace of the city roar, feeling more homeless than in Europe, trying to compose a lively cable to Fran and to get Brent, in New Haven, on the telephone.
He had not cabled Brent his date of sailing. “Boy’s probably tied up with a lot of exams and things; when I land in New York I’ll find out by phone when it’s convenient for him to come down to New York.” Brent was not to be found now by telephone. Sam sent him a telegram, and that was quite all that he felt like doing. He rested till one, till half-past. He had a small lunch, in his room, and the joy of having proper American sugar corn almost revived him, but afterward he sat by the window again till three, brooding. Lassitude bound him like a vast cobweb.
What was he doing here in New York? What was he doing anywhere? What reason had he for living? He was not necessary to Fran in Paris. And the motorcar industry seemed to be spinning on quite cheerily without him.
He faced his discovery—the incident had happened at his entrance to the hotel, but he had not admitted it to his consciousness till now. Alighting from his taxicab he had seen the new model Revelation car, as produced by the Unit Automotive Company, at three hundred dollars less than Sam’s former price. He had wanted to hate it, to declare that it was tinny and wretched, but he had had to admit that it was a marvel of trimness, with the body swung lower, the windshield more raking. He felt antiquated. The U.A.C. had created this new model in six months; with his own organization he could not have produced it in less than a year. And he would have held it till the autumn motor shows and brought it out pompously, as though he were a priest grudgingly letting the laity behold his mysteries. Were the U.A.C. making light of seasons and announcement-dates—just tossing off new models as though they were cans of corn?
It came to him that he had not known when the new Revelation would be out. For the first months of his absence he had heard often from Alec Kynance, received all the gossip, with many invitations to return. He had heard but little the past three months. Was he out of it—perhaps forever?
He had come back to America feeling that the world of motors longed for him; he felt, this hot confused afternoon, that no one cared. … It was true that, to keep his time free, he had told no one he was arriving, but confound it, they might have found out somehow—
Come to
