“Oh, thanks. Gosh, you’re looking fine, sir.”
He found that though Brent would be in New York for only twelve hours, he had brought dinner clothes.
“Fran’s boy, all right,” he reflected, and somehow he was a bit lonely. He wished that he could give this nervous youngster something more than an allowance—some strength, some stability.
While they dressed, Brent recovered from his filial shyness enough to chatter about the miracles performed by Chick Budlong as a pole-vaulter, about the astounding fact that after being a perfectly good egg for over two years, Ogden Rose had turned literary and heeled the Lit., about the “bum body job” of the new U.A.C. Revelation. He was emerging as the young elegant, slim in dinner clothes, and he belonged to a world which would resent Sam’s intrusion, which desired no strength nor stability … even if, Sam considered, he had any to give.
The “German restaurant” to which Brent led him was altogether imitation: beer mugs made in Pennsylvania; beams stained to look old; colored glass windows which, if they could have been opened, would have been found to look on nothing but a plaster wall; and beer that was most deplorably and waterily imitation.
Against this soiled and tawdry background, against the soiled and insolent and rather pathetic Polish waiters, Brent was real as a knife-blade, and as shining.
Sam had had a notion that now, two men together, his son and he could be intimately frank. He would talk to Brent about drinking, gambling, the value of money as a means and its worthlessness as an end, and most of all, about women. Oh, he wouldn’t snoop and paw—he’d just give his own notions of a life neither Puritanical nor licentious; be awfully frank about the danger of the daughters of the street, while admitting, like a man of the world, the compulsion of “sex”; and if Brent should be moved to give any confidences, he would treat them casually, sympathetically—
That warm rejoicing idea had been chilled the moment he saw Brent’s self-confident figure. Why, the boy might think he was in Bad Taste, and next to the affection of Fran and Emily, he wanted Brent’s affection and respect more than that of anyone in the world. So, in parental fear, while he would have liked to expose his soul, he droned about Lord Herndon, Gioserro the aviator, the palace at Versailles—
But there was one intimate thing of which he could talk:
“Son, have you decided whether you’ll go to Harvard Law School when you finish Yale?”
“I haven’t quite decided, sir.”
“Don’t call me ‘sir’! Look here, Brent; I have a notion—If your mother and I are still abroad when you graduate, how would it be for you to come and join us for a year or so? Maybe between us, we could get her to chase off to Africa and India and China and so on. Just now she’s stuck on Paris. I’ve been finding out there’s a devil of a lot to see in this world. There’s no hurry about your getting down to earning money.”
“But you went to work early, sir.”
“Don’t call me ‘sir’—I’m still under the age for it—I hope! And I think that maybe I got to work too early. Rather wish, now, I’d bummed around the world a little first. And after all these years you’ve been studying, to go right on to your law books—”
“Well, you see, sir, I’m not sure I’ll go out for law.”
“Um. What you thinking of? Medicine? Motors?”
“No, I—You know my roommate, Billy Deacon, his dad is president of Deacon, Iffley and Watts, the bond-house; and Billy wants me to come in with him selling bonds. I think probably I could be making twenty-five thousand a year in ten years, and in the law, if I went into a really top-hole New York firm, I’d only be a clerk then. And some day I’ll be in the hundred and fifty thousand a year class.”
Brent said it with the modest confidence, the eager eyes, of a young poet announcing that he was going to write an epic.
Sam spoke doubtfully:
“May sound like a funny thing from a man that’s always captured every dollar he could lay his hands on, but—Brent, I’ve always wanted to build things; to leave something besides a bank balance. Afraid you wouldn’t be doing that, just selling bonds. Not that I’ve anything against bonds, you understand! Nice handsome engravings. But are you going to need to make money so fast—”
“Life’s a lot more expensive than when you started, Dad. Fellow has to have so many things. When I was a kid, a man with a limousine was a little tin god, but now a fellow that hasn’t got a yacht simply isn’t in it. If a fellow makes his pile, then he can lay off and have a hobby—see Europe and go out for public spirit and all that stuff. I believe I’ve got a swell chance with Bill Deacon and his bunch.”
“Well. Course you’ve got to decide for yourself. But I wish you’d think it over—about really building things.”
“Sure. I certainly will, sir.”
Brent was bright with compliments about Sam’s knowledge of Europe; he remarked that Sam’s football glories were still remembered at Yale.
And Sam sighed to himself that he had lost the boy forever.
XVIII
Sam was packing, to go to New Haven for his thirtieth class reunion, when the mild little knock came at the door. He roared “Come in,” and at first did not look to see who his visitor might be. The silence after the opening of the door made him turn.
Tub Pearson was on the threshold, grinning.
“Well, you fat little runt!” said Sam, which meant, “My dear old friend, I am enchanted to see you!” And Tub gave answer, “You big stiff, so they couldn’t stand you in Yurrup any more, eh? So you had to sneak back here,
