“Good Lord, are all of us here in America getting so we can’t be happy, can’t talk, till we’ve had a lot of cocktails? What’s the matter with our lives?”
But on the Yale campus next afternoon, with Tub, he was roaring with delight to see again the comrades of old days; the beloved classmates who stayed so unshakably in his mind that he had forgotten nothing about them save their professions, their present dwelling-places, and their names.
The 1896 division of the procession to the baseball game at Yale Field, in their blue coats and white trousers, was led by Tub Pearson, shaking a rattle and singing:
Good morning, Mr. Zip, Zip, Zip,
Got a haircut as short as mine?
Good morning, Mr. Zip, Zip, Zip,
I cer’n’ly am feeling fine.
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,
If the army don’t get you then the navy must—
Sam was moved to sadness and prayer by the sight of his classmates. It was one of the astonishments of the reunion how old many of them had become at fifty or fifty-two—Don Binder, for instance, in college a serious drinker, baby-faced and milky, now an Episcopalian rector who looked as though he were sixty-five and as though he carried the sins of the country on his stooped shoulders. The spectacle made Sam himself feel ancient. But as startling were the classmates who at fifty looked thirty-five, and who irritated a man like Sam, amiable about exercise but no fanatic, by shouting that everybody ought to play eighteen holes of golf a day.
But however sheepish Sam might feel, Tub was radiant, was again the class clown during the procession. He danced across the road from side to side, shaking his rattle, piping on a penny whistle, frightening a child on the sidewalk almost into epilepsy by kneeling down and trying to be chummy.
“He’s fine. He’s funny,” Sam assured himself. “He’s a great goat. Hell, he’s an idiot! Why am I getting to be such a grouch on life? Better go back to the desk.”
But whatever discomfort he had at playing the hobbledehoy, in the class reunion Sam found balm. They knew who he was! No one in Paris (except Fran, at times) knew that. But his classmates realized that he was Sambo Dodsworth, great tackle, Skull and Bones, creative engineer, president of a corporation, “prince of good fellows.”
Except for a few professional alumni who at fifty could still tell what was the score in last year’s Yale-Brown game, who at fifty had nothing with which to impress the world except the fact that they were Yale Men, the class had drifted far from the cheery loafing and simple-hearted idealism of college days. They were bank presidents and college presidents and surgeons and country schoolteachers and diplomats; they were ranchmen and congressmen and ex-convicts and bishops. One was a major general, and one—in college the most mouse-like of bookworms—was the funniest comedian on Broadway. They were fathers and grandfathers, and most of them looked as though they overworked or overdrank. Not one of them had found life quite the amusing and triumphant adventure he had expected; and they came back wistfully, longing to recapture their credulous golden days. They believed (for a week) that their classmates were peculiarly set apart from the crooked and exasperating race of men as a whole.
And all of this Sam Dodsworth believed—for a week.
It was pleasant, on a clam bake at Momauguin, to loll in the sand with the general, a college president, and two steel kings, as though they were all of them nineteen again, to be hailed as “Old Sambo,” to wrestle without thinking of dignity, and for a moment to be so sentimental as to admit that they longed for something greater than their surface successes. It was pleasant, in the rooms to which they were assigned in Harkness, to forget responsibilities as householders and company managers, and to loll puppy-like on window-seats, beside windows fanned by the elms, telling fabulous lies till one, till two of the morning, without thinking of being up early and on the job. It was pleasant at dinner in a private room to sing “Way Down on the Bingo Farm” and to come out with a long, clinging, lugubrious yowl in:
Here’s to good old Yaaaaaaaaaaaale
She’s so hearty and so hale—
Even the men who on the first day he had not been able to remember became clear. Why yes! That was old Mark Derby—always used to be so funny the way he played on a comb and never could remember his necktie.
He was nineteen again; in a world which had seemed barren of companionship he had found two hundred brothers; and he was home, he rejoiced—to stay!
So, with Tub Pearson, he rode westward from New York to Zenith, gratified as the thunderous slots of Manhattan streets gave way to the glowing Hudson, to tranquil orchards and old white houses and resolute hills.
The breakfast-room of Harry McKee, Sam’s new son-in-law, was a cheery apartment with white walls, canary-yellow curtains at the French windows, and a parrot, not too articulate, in a red enamel cage. The breakfast set was of taffy-like peasant faïence from Normandy, and the electrical toaster and percolator on the table were of nickel which flashed in the lively Midwestern morning sunshine.
Sam was exultant. He had arrived late last evening, and as his own house was musty from disuse, he had come to Emily’s. He had slept with a feeling of security, and this morning he was exhilarated at being again with her, his own Emily, gayest and sturdiest of girls. He had brought his presents for them down to breakfast—the Dunhill pipe and the Charvet dressing-gown for Harry, the gold and tortoiseshell dressing-table set and the Guerlain perfumes for Emily. They admired the gifts, they patted him in thanks, they fussed over his having real American porridge with real cream. In a blissful assurance of having come home forever to his own
