“And I thought I knew this town! Ten years I put in here! But honestly, it’s sixteen times as bad as it was three years ago, seems to me. Ought to be lovely three years from now! And foreign—say, when you see a real old-fashioned American face on the street, you wonder how he got here. I think I’ll go back to London and see some Americans!”
Ross, Sam felt, was exaggerating. But when Ross had gone and he had roused himself from his lassitude for a walk—for a hot crawl—he felt lost and small and alien in the immense conflict of the steaming streets.
And he had no place to go. He realized that this capital, barbaric with gold and marble, provided every human necessity save a place, a café or a plaza or a not-too-ladylike teashop, in which he could sit and be human. Well! He could go to the Metropolitan Art Gallery, the Aquarium, the dusty benches of Central Park, or sit gently in a nice varnished pew in a Protestant Church.
People running with suitcases nicked his legs, small active Jews caromed into him, flappers with faces powdered almost purple looked derisively at his wandering and bucolic mildness, a surf of sweaty undistinguishable people swept over him, shopwindows of incredible aloof expensiveness stared at him, and at every street-crossing he was held up by the wave of traffic, as he crept over to Fifth Avenue, down to Forty-second, past leering cheap-jack shops and restaurants, over to Sixth and back again to the Grand Central Station.
He stood contemplatively (he who a year ago would never have stood thus, but would have rushed with the most earnest of them) on the balcony overlooking the shining acres of floor of the Grand Central Station, like a roofed-over Place de la Concorde. Why, he wondered, was it that the immensity of Notre Dame or St. Paul’s did not dwarf and make ridiculous the figures of the worshippers as this vastness did the figures of travelers galloping to train-gates? Was it because the little people, dark and insignificant in the cathedrals, were yet dignified, self-possessed, seeking the ways of God, whereas here they were busy with the ludicrous activity of insects?
He fancied that this was veritably the temple of a new divinity, the God of Speed.
Of its adherents it demanded as much superstitious credulity as any of the outworn deities—demanded a belief that Going Somewhere, Going Quickly, Going Often, were in themselves holy and greatly to be striven for. A demanding God, this Speed, less good-natured than the elder Gods with their faults, their amours, their vanity so easily pleased by garlands and flattery; an abstract, faultless, and insatiable God, who once he had been offered a hundred miles an hour, straightway demanded a hundred and fifty.
And with his motor cars Sam had contributed to the birth of this new religion, and in the pleasant leisure of Europe he had longed for its monastic asperities! He blasphemed against it now, longing for the shabbiest bar on the raggedest side street of Paris.
He shook his great shaggy head as he looked down on traveling-salesmen importantly parading before bag-laden redcaps, on fagged brokers with clanking bags of golf sticks, on fretful women, contemptuous overdressed women, and sleek young men in white knickerbockers. They seemed to him driven to madness by the mad God of Speed that themselves had created—and Sam Dodsworth had created.
Sam and Ross Ireland foolishly tried to take a taxicab to the theater. When they were already half an hour late, they got out and walked the last six blocks. They saw a number of delightful and naked young women, as naked as they would have been at Folies-Bergère.
“From the breaths around us, I guess there’s a few New Yorkers who haven’t heard about Prohibition,” sighed Ross, as they paced the street in the entr’acte. “Well, fortunately, the preachers haven’t enough influence with God yet to keep the girls from being naked. They’ll have to fix that up as soon as Prohibition really goes over—arrange to have the girls born with flannel nighties on. … Honestly, Sam, I don’t get these here United States. We let librarians censor all the books, and yet we have musical comedies like this—just as raw as Paris. We go around hollering that we’re the only bona fide friends of democracy and self-determination, and yet with Haiti and Nicaragua we’re doing everything we accused Germany of doing in Belgium, and—you mark my word—within a year we’ll be starting a Big Navy campaign for the purpose of bullying the world as Great Britain never thought of doing. We boast of scientific investigation, and yet we’re the only supposedly civilized country where thousands of supposedly sane citizens will listen to an illiterate clodhopping preacher or politician setting himself up as an authority on biology and attacking evolution.”
It was after the wearisome glare of the musical comedy, at a speakeasy which was precisely like an old-fashioned bar except that the whisky was bad, that Ross Ireland raged on:
“Yes, and to have a little more of our American paradox, we have more sentimental sobbing over poor de‑uh mother in the movies, and more lynching of negroes, than would be possible anywhere else in the world! More space, and more crowded tenements; more hard-boiled pioneers, and more sickly discontented wives; more Nancies among young men; more highbrow lectures, and more laughing-hyena comic strips and more slang—Well, take me. I’m supposed to be a newspaperman. I’ve seen a lot—and read a whale of a lot more than I ever admit. I have ideas, and I even have a vocabulary. But I’m so American that if I ever admit I’m interested in ideas, if I ever phrase a sentence grammatically, if I don’t try to sound like a longshoreman, I’m afraid that some damned little garage-proprietor will think I’m trying to be pedantic! Oh, I’ve learned a lot about myself and my beloved America today!”
“Just
