But Elon Richards talked of consolidations and investments and golf and the more scandalous divorces of bankers with the simplicity and impersonality of a dairyman discussing cattle-feed. He announced (while the car slipped past the little farms and into a region of great estates) that the K.L. and Z. would be bankrupt within two months, that there really was something to this company that was going to grow 1,000,000 reindeer in Alaska, that Smith Locomotive Common wouldn’t be such a bad buy, and that it was perfectly true that the Antelope Car was going to announce safety windshield glass as a standard accessory.
The great house at Willow Marsh stood on a bluff looking over marshes to Long Island Sound. They dined on a brick terrace, at a little table with quivering candles, round it three wicker chairs with Sam, Richards, and his daughter, Sheila. It was Sheila who six months ago had demanded the Hispano-Suiza, but this summer she was in a socialist stage. Sam was a little annoyed because all through dinner she kept asking why the workers should not take from Sam and her father all their wealth.
Richards, to Sam’s incredulity, encouraged Sheila by teasing her:
“If you can get a really first-class leader, like Lenin, who’s strong enough to take the money away from me in the first place and to construct a practical working state in the second, I shan’t worry—just as soon work for him and his gang as for our stockholders. But if you think, my impudent young daughter, that because a lot of socialist journalists yap that maybe, possibly, some day, the working-class may get educated up to the point of running industry and therefore I ought to join ’em—well, let ’em make me!”
So for an hour.
After twenty-five years of big industry, Sam Dodsworth still believed, in an unformulated and hazy way, that socialism meant the dividing-up of wealth, after which the millionaires would get it all back within ten years. He still half believed that all Bolsheviks were Jews who wore bushy beards, carried bombs, and were hardly to be distinguished from anarchists. He didn’t completely believe it, because in his office he had met suave and beardless Soviet agents who had talked competently about importing Revelation cars. But to take socialism seriously—
It annoyed him.
Why had he ever gone abroad? It had unsettled him. He had been bored in Paris, yet he liked crêpes Susette better than flapjacks; he liked leaning over the bridges of the Seine better than walking on Sixth Avenue; and he couldn’t, just now, be very excited about the new fenders for the Revelation car. How was it that this America, which had been so surely and comfortably in his hand, had slipped away?
And here was the daughter of an Elon Richards, most safely conservative of bankers, contaminated with a lot of European socialism. Was life really as complicated as all that?
It was simpler when Sheila had left them. The June twilight was tender, and across the mauve ribbon of Long Island Sound unseen villages sprang to life in soft twinkling. On the cool terrace, after two choked days in New York, Sam relaxed in a wicker chair, shoulders moving with contentment. Richards’ cigars were excellent, his brandy was authentic, and now that Sheila was away, driving her own car off to a dance, his talk was again reasonable.
But it came again—
“Curious, Richards,” Sam pondered aloud. “Since I landed in New York yesterday, I’ve hated the whole rush and zip of it—till this evening, when I’ve had a chance to sit down in the country and feel human. Course it was probably just the hot weather. Only—Do you know, I had a feeling of leisure in France and in England. I felt there as though people made their jobs work for them; they didn’t give up their lives to working for their jobs. And I felt as though there was such a devil of a lot to learn about the world that we’re too busy to learn here.”
Richards puffed comfortably; then:
“Did you know I was reared in Europe, Sam?”
“No! Fact?”
“Yes. My father and mother were devoted to Europe. We wandered. I spent fourteen out of the first sixteen years of my life in schools in France and England and Switzerland, and I went back there every summer while I was in Harvard—except the last vacation, after Junior year. Then my father had a brainwave, and sent me out to Oregon to work in a lumber camp. I was crazy about it! I was so sick of pensions and cafés and the general European attitude that, for an American, you weren’t such a bad egg. In Oregon I got beaten up by the lumberjacks three times in seven days, but at the end of the summer I was ardently invited to stay on as straw boss of the camp. I loved it! And I’ve gone on loving it ever since. I know that plenty of French financiers are more elegant and leisurely than your flat-footed friend Alec Kynance, but I get more fun out of fighting Alec!
“Sam, it’s a battle here, the way it is in Russia and China. And you, Sam, you old grizzly, can never be a contemplative gazelle. You’ve got to fight. And think of it! Maybe America will rule the world! Maybe in the end we’ll be broken up by Russia. But isn’t a world-fight like that better than sitting around avoiding conversational errors and meditating on the proper evening waistcoats? Life!”
Sam meditated, silently and long.
“Elon,” said he, “there was a time when I knew my own mind. I didn’t do whatever my latest stenographer suggested. But I’ve seen too many things, recently. If
