He was frightened by his drop into insignificance.
At half-past three he was startled and cheered by a telephone-call:
“Hello? Dodsworth? This is Ross Ireland. Say, I’m in the same hotel. Doing anything? Mind if I run up for a minute?”
Ireland burst in, red, collar wilted, panting.
“Say, Dodsworth, am I crazy? Do I look crazy?”
“No, you look hot.”
“Hot? Hell! I’ve been hot in Rangoon. But I sat back in a nice carriage, in my pretty little white suit and my sun-helmet, and took it easy. I didn’t feel as though I’d been in two hundred and twenty-seven train collisions, one right after another. Do you know what I’ve found out? I hate this damn town! It’s the dirtiest, noisiest, craziest hole I was ever in! I hate it—me that’s been going up and down the face of the earth for the last three years, shooting my face off and telling everybody what a swell capital New York is.
“What you got to drink? Oh, God, only whisky? Well, let’s have a look at it.
“Well, this morning I didn’t even stop to unpack. I was going to see the dear old home town—the dear old neighbors, by heck, down on Park Row. I got down to the Quackenbos office, and the office boy hadn’t ever heard my name—I’ve only been sending in three columns a week, signed, for three years! But he found a stenographer who thought she’d heard of me, and they actually let me in to see the old man—mind you, to get in to see him was sixteen times harder than it would be to see King George at Buckingham Palace, and when I did get in, there he was with his feet in a desk drawer reading the jokes in the New Yorker. Well, he was all right. He jumped up and told me I was the white-haired boy, and the sight of me’d just about saved him from typhoid, and we talked a whole half hour, and then made a date to finish up our business at lunch, tomorrow! Oh no, he didn’t have one minute till then! Tonight—God, no, he had to help open up a new roof garden.
“Oh, I’ve been the boiled muttonhead! I’ve been going around Europe and Asia telling the heathen that the reason we hustle so in New York is because we get so much done. I never discovered till today that we do all this hustling, all this jamming in subways, all this elbowing into elevators, to keep ourselves occupied and keep from getting anything done! Say, I’ll bet I accomplished more honest-to-God work in Vienna in three hours than I will here in three days! Those Austrian hicks don’t have any bright office boys or filing-systems to prevent them from talking business. So they go home for two hours’ lunch. Poor devils! No chance to ride on the subway! And only cafés to sit around in, instead of night clubs. Awful life!
“Well, when I’d got this whole half hour in with the boss—he took up most of it telling a swell new smutty story he’d just heard—one I used to tell back in Ioway in 1900—I drifted over to the Chronicle to see the bunch I used to work with. … I was city editor there once! … Half of the bunch were aus. Gone into politics, I guess. … The other half were glad to see me, so far as I could figure out, but they’d gone and got married or learned to play bridge or taken to teaching Sunday School or some immoral practise like that, and by golly not one of ’em could I get for dinner and a show tonight. By the way, you don’t happen to be free for tonight, Dodsworth, do you? Grand! Tickled to death!
“Well, I went out to lunch with one of the fellows on the Sunday edition. He suggested some whisky, but I wanted something cool. He said he knew a place where we could get some real genuine Italian Chianti—and say, he called it ‘genuwine Ytalian’ too. As a joke. I believe he taught English in Harvard for a year. But being a hard-boiled newspaperman, of course he had to be a roughneck, to show he wasn’t pedantic. … Like me, I guess. I’ve been pulling that same lowbrow pose myself.
“But anyway: we look up this genuwine Ytalian dump—I guess, from the smell, they used it as a laundry till it got too dirty—and the Wop brought on a bottle of something that was just about as much like Chianti as I’m like a lily of the valley. Honestly, Sam, it tasted like vinegar that’d been used on beets just once too often.
“And then—Oh, I suppose, being just back after my first long hike, I felt I had a Chautauqua message for Young America—I suppose I felt I was a Peary bringing home the Pole under my arm. I tried to tell this chap how much I knew about Burma, and how chummy I was with Lord Beaverbrook, and all the news about the land problem in Upper Silesia, and was he interested? Say, he was about as much interested as I’d be in a chatty account of the advancement of Christian Science in Liberia! But he had a lot of important news for me. Golly! Bill Smith’d had a raise of twenty bucks a week! Pete Brown is going to edit the hockey gossip, instead of Mike Magoon! The Edam Restaurant is going to have a new jazz orchestra! The Fishback Portable Typewriter has gone up five dollars in price! Ellen Whoozis, the cocktail-party queen, who writes the Necking Notes, is going to marry
