“Hell, so do I! Things I can remember, people I’ve talked to, knocking around this country, High Sierras to the Cape Cod cranberry-bogs. Old Pop Conover, that used to be a Pony Express Rider, going lickety-split, risking his life among the Indians—I remember him at eighty, the whitest old man you ever saw; lived in a little shack in my town in Iowa, baching it—had an old chair made out of a flour-barrel. Say, he’d tell us kids stories by the hour; he’d put up a tramp for the night; and he’d’ve received a king just the same way. Never occurred to him that he was any better than the tramp or any worse than a king. He was a real American. And I’ve seen the bunch at football games—nice clean youngsters. But we’re turning the whole thing into a six-day bicycle race. And with motorcycles instead of the legs that we used to have once!”
With Ross Ireland talking always—assailing the American bustle except at such times as Sam complained of it, whereupon Ross would defend it furiously—they ambled to a Broadway cabaret.
It was called “The Georgia Cabin,” it specialized in Chicken Maryland and yams and beaten biscuit, and the orchestra played “Dixie” every half hour, to great cheering. Aside from Ross and Sam, everybody in the place was either a Jew or a Greek. It was so full of quaintness and expensiveness. The walls were in monstrous overblown imitation of a log cabin; and round the tiny fenced dancing-floor, so jammed that the dancers looked like rush-hour subway passengers moving in sudden amorous insanity, was the Broadway idea of a rail-fence.
The cover charge was two dollars apiece. They had two lemonades, at seventy-five cents each, with a quarter tip to the Hellenic waiter—at which he grumbled—and a quarter to the trim and cold-eyed hat-girl—at which she snapped, “Another pair of cheapskates!”
They said little as they marched toward their hotel. Over Sam, thick, palpable, like a shroud, was the lassitude he had felt in Paris. He was in a dream; nothing was real in all this harsh reality of trolley bells, furious elevated trains, swooping taxicabs, the jabbering crowds. The heat was churning up into a thunderstorm. Lightning revealed the cornices of the inhumanly lofty buildings. The whole air was menacing, yet he felt the menace indifferently, and heavily he said good night to Ross Ireland.
The storm exploded as he stood at the window of his hotel room. Every lightning flash threw into maniacal high relief the vast yellow wall of the building opposite, and its innumerable glaring windows; and in the darknesses between flashes he could imagine the building crashing over on him. It was terrifying as a volcanic eruption, even to Sam Dodsworth, who was not greatly given to fear. Yet terror could not break up the crust of dull loneliness which encased him.
He turned from the window with a lifeless step and went drearily to bed, to lie half awake. He muttered only, “This hustle of American life—regular battle—is it going to be too much for me, now I’m out of the habit?”
And, “Oh, God, Fran, I am so lonely for you!”
XVII
But it was a pleasanter and more kindly America that he found the next evening, when he sat with Elon Richards, chairman of the board of the Goodwood National Bank, on the terrace at Willow Marsh, Richards’ place on Long Island.
In the morning, Sam’s son, Brent, telephoned from New Haven that he would finish his examinations in two days and be down for a real bender with his father. In the afternoon Sam labored mightily with Alec Kynance in the New York office of the U.A.C. He was again offered a vice-presidency of the U.A.C. and again he refused.
He was vague about his refusal.
“Alec, it’s hard to explain it—just feel that I’ve given most of my life to making motor cars, and now I’d like to sit around and visit with myself and get acquainted. Yes, I was lonely in Paris. I admit it. But it’s a job I’ve started, and I’m not going to give it up yet.”
Kynance was sharp.
“I don’t know’s I can ever make this offer again.”
Sam scarcely heard him. He—of old-time the steadily attentive—was woolgathering: “I’ll never be good for anything but business, but why not have a little fun and try something new—big orange-grove in Florida, or real estate?”
When Sam telephoned to Richards of the Goodwood National, Richards insisted on his coming out to Long Island for the night.
Sam was relaxed and cheered by the drive, in the Hispano-Suiza which Richards’ daughter, Sheila, had invited her father to buy the moment she had read the novels of Michael Arlen. They slipped through the vicious traffic of the Grand Central district, turned up First Avenue with its air of a factory village, crossed the superb arch of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, from which they looked down to towers looming over docks for steamers from Rio de Janeiro and Barbados and Africa.
They shot through a huddle of factories and workers’ cottages, and fled along a road which followed the shoreline, with a salt breeze whispering through the open windows of the great car; they came into pleasant suburbs, and turned off on a country lane among real farms. Sam’s slightly battered Americanism rose exultantly as he saw cornfields, pumpkin vines, white farmhouses with piles of poplar stove-wood.
And the talk was good.
Sam had never been such a fool as to assert that virile citizens talked only of bonds and prizefighting, and that anyone who pretended to an interest in Matisse or the Ca’ d’Oro was an effeminate pretender. Only, he had pled with Fran, he himself had as much right to be interested in bonds and bored by Matisse as a painter had to be interested in Matisse and bored by bonds. Of course bonds had been important enough to Alec Kynance, that afternoon. Yet Alec’s talk
