“Say, it was exactly like going back to the dear old Home Town in Ioway, after my first three years in New York! That time I wanted to tell the hometown boys all the news about the Brooklyn Ridge and immorality, and they wanted to talk about Henry Hick’s new flivver!
“Well, I guess it’s all about alike, really—Buddhism in Burma and Henry’s flivver. It’s all neighborhood gossip, with different kinds of neighbors. Only—
“But it isn’t the same! I’ve seen—oh, God, Sam, I’ve seen the jungle at dawn, and these fellows have stayed here, stuck at little desks, and never drifted five steps away from their regular route from home, to the office, to the speakeasy, to the office, to the movie, to home. I was on a ship afire in the Persian Gulf—
“I know it’s just vanity, Sam, but there are things outside America—Whether they’re ever going to have sense enough to make a Pan-Europa there—whether Britain is going to recognize Russia, and who’s going to get Russian oil—what will become of Poland—what Fascism really means in Italy; things that ought to be almost as interesting as the next baseball game. But these lads that’ve stuck here in New York, they’re so self-satisfied (like I was once!) that they don’t care a hang for anything beyond the current price of gin! They don’t know there is a Europe, beyond the Paris bars. Why even in my shop—I carry on in Europe as though I were the great, three-star, two-tailed special foreign correspondent but here (it’s a fact!) the fellow that does the weekly cartoon about Farmer Hiram Winterbottom gets three times my salary—say, if he came into the office, old Quackenbos would give him the whole day!
“Well, now that I’ve told you what a nice, lace-collared, abused darling I am, let’s—
“But this town, that I’ve been looking forward to—(Man, do you realize we could sail back on the Aqui in a week? Think of that nice cool corner in the smoking-room!) I’ve found that the one and only up-to-date, new, novel, ingenious way of getting anywhere in this burg, if you want to get there, is to walk! It takes a taxi, in this traffic, ten minutes to make ten blocks. And the subway—How many years since you’ve been in the subway? Well, don’t! I thought I was a pretty big guy, and fairly husky, but say, the subway guard at the Grand Central just stuck his knee in the middle of my back and rammed me into a car that was already plumb-full like I was a three-year-old child! And I stood up as far as Brooklyn Bridge, with my nose in the neck of a garbage-wholesaler! Say, I feel like an anarchist! I want to blow up the whole town!
“Then, after lunch, I wanted to buy a few real first-edition suits of American athletic underwear, so I went to Mosheim’s department store. Seen their new building? Looks like a twenty-story ice-palace. Windows full of diamonds and satins and ivory and antique Spanish furniture, and lingerie that would make a movie-actress blush. ‘City of luxury—Europe beat a mile!’ says I. ‘Extra! Pleasure Capital of the World Discovered by H. Ross Ireland!’ And then I tried to get into the store. Honestly, Sam, I’ll be quite a husky fellow when I get my strength. I used to play center and wrestle heavyweight in the University of Iowa. But, by golly, I couldn’t hardly wedge my way in through the doors. There was one stream of maniacs rushing out and another rushing in, as though it was a fire, and every aisle was jammed, and then when you got to the proper counter—
“Well, I’ve got good and plenty sore at the way the hired help treat you abroad. I’ve had a Turkish rug-vendor go crazy when I didn’t want to pay more’n twice the price of a rug; I’ve had a hard-boiled Greek mate bawl hell out of me because he tripped over me on deck; I’ve had a gondolier say what he thought of my tip. But anyway, those fellows treated you as though you were almost their equals. It’s like Chesterton says—if a fellow kicks his butler downstairs, it doesn’t show any lack of democracy; it’s only when he feels too superior to his butler to touch him that he’s really snooty. And that’s how the nice bright young gent at the underwear-counter treated me. He had about six people to wait on, and unless I spoke quick and took what he gave me, he wasn’t going to waste time on me, and he kept looking at me with a ‘You big hick, don’t try to fool me, that ain’t no real New York suit you got on—back to Yankton.’
“Then I tried to get out of the store. One fellow elbowing you in the stomach and another jabbing you in the back, and the elevator man hollering ‘Step lively, please,’ till you wanted to sock him in the nose. Honestly, I felt like a refugee driven by the Cossacks—no, I didn’t feel that human; I felt like I was one of a bunch of steers driven down the runway to the slaughterhouse. God, what a town! Luxury! Gold! Everything but self-respect and decency and privacy!
“And what an oration! That’s the longest speech I’ve made since I caught my No. 1 Boy in Burma wearing my best pants!”
“Well,” Sam soothed, “it’ll be better when you get out into the country.”
“But I don’t like the country! Being a hick by origin, I like cities. I had enough cornfields and manure-piles before I ran away, at fourteen. And from what I heard at lunch, all the other towns in America are becoming about as bad as New York—traffic jams and big movie theaters and radios yapping everywhere and everybody has to have electric dishwashers and vacuum cleaners and each family has to have not one car, by golly, but two or three—and all on the installment plan! But I
