He had thought of himself, when he had been the president of the Revelation Company, as a young man at fifty. To him, then, old age did not begin till seventy, perhaps seventy-five, and he would have another quarter-century of energy. But the completeness with which Emily, at twenty-one, had matured, become competent to run her own life, made Sam feel that he belonged to an unwanted generation; that, amazingly, he was old.
It was the afternoon of Elizabeth Jane’s party which made Sam so conscious that he was a stranger, unable to mix with this brisk, luxurious Young Married Set, that he politely fled from Emily’s house and holed-in at the Tonawanda Country Club.
Elizabeth Jane was Harry McKee’s eleven-year-old niece. Like a surprising number of other successful youngish men of Zenith, hard-surfaced, glossy, ferociously driving in business, and outside of business absorbed only in sports and cocktail-lit dancing, McKee was fanatically interested in children. He was on the Zenith school-board and the Board of Visitors of St. Mark’s Town and Country School. Emily and Harry McKee made Sam blush by the cheery openness with which they informed him that they intended to have only three children, but to have those with celerity and to have them perfect. (They apparently possessed more control of Providence than was understood by such an innocent as Sam.) While they awaited the arrival of the three, they were devoted to Elizabeth Jane, a sedate, bob-haired, bookish child, who reminded Sam of a boy minstrel in a Maxfield Parrish picture. (He had always admired Parrish’s dream castles, despite Fran’s scoffing.)
Sam liked Elizabeth Jane. “Real old-fashioned child,” he said. “So innocent and demure.”
And the next day Elizabeth Jane remarked placidly, when she had invited herself to tea with Sam and Emily, “Aunty, would it be awfully rude of me if I said my teacher is a damn fool? Would it? She’s started telling us about sex, and she’s so scared and silly about it, and of course all of us kids know all about it already.”
“My God!” said Samuel Dodsworth to himself.
McKee and Emily celebrated Elizabeth Jane’s twelfth birthday with an afternoon party for forty children. Sam knew that there were to be many dodges of a rich nature; he was aware that a red and white striped pavilion was being erected on the McKee lawn, and orders in for such simple delights as Pêche Melba, Biscuit Tortoni, and Bombe Surprise, along with Viennese pastry, loganberry juice, imported ginger ale and lobster salad, and that the caterer was sending half a dozen waiters in dress suits. But he was still antiquated enough to picture the children playing Ring Around a Rosy, and Puss in the Corner, and Hide ’n’ Go Seek.
He was lunching with Tub Pearson on the day of the party, and after lunch he excitedly went to the five and ten cent store and filled his pockets with dozens of pleasant little foolishnesses—false noses, chocolate cigars, tissue-paper hats—and proceeded to McKee’s, planning to set all the children at the party laughing with his gifts.
He was late. When he arrived the children were decorously sitting in four rows of chairs on the lawn, watching a professional troupe from the Zenith Stock Company perform an act from Midsummer Night’s Dream. And there was a professional magician afterward—though the young lordlings were bored by such kitchy banalities as rabbits out of silk hats—and a lady teacher from the Montessori School, who with a trained voice-for-children and trained gestures told ever such nice Folk Tales from Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Iceland, and Yucatan. Then, unherded but politely in order, the children filed past a counter at which Harry McKee, disguised as an Arab for no perceptible reason, gave each of them a present.
They each said, “Thank you very much,” tolerantly, and unwrapped their presents, showing their trained social-mindedness by depositing the wrappers in a barrel therefor provided. Sam goggled at the presents. There were French perfume and packets of a thousand stamps, riding crops and portable phonographs, engraved stationery and a pair of lovebirds.
He hastily pulled out the flaps of his coat pockets lest someone see the ludicrous little gifts he had bought.
And later, “I’ve got to get out of this. Too rich for my blood.”
It took a week of tactful hinting about needing eight hours of daily golf, but in the end he escaped to one of the chintzy bedrooms at the Tonawanda Country Club and there, in an atmosphere of golf, gin-bottles in the locker room, small dinners followed by poker, and a reading-room full of magazines which on glossy paper portrayed country houses and polo teams, he made out a lotus-eating existence, with cold cauliflower and stringy lamb-chops and bootlegged whisky for lotuses.
He persuaded himself, for minutes at a time, that business affairs demanded his staying in Zenith, and he bleakly knew, for hours at a time, that they didn’t.
His capital was invested in carefully diversified ventures—in U.A.C. stock, railroad and industrial and government bonds. However often he conferred with his bankers and brokers, he couldn’t find anything very absorbing to do in the way of changing investments.
But he also owned, as a more speculative interest, a share of a resort hotel near Zenith, and on his way to America he had persuaded himself that, with his newly educated knowledge of food and decoration and service, he would be able to improve this hotel.
It was quite a bad hotel, and very profitable.
He had a meal there, two days after arriving in Zenith, and it was terrible.
He told the manager that it was terrible.
The manager looked bored and resigned.
When Sam had persuaded him to stay, the manager explained that with the cost of materials and the salaries of cooks, he couldn’t do a better meal at the price. It was all very well, the manager pointed out, to talk about the food in Paris. Only, this wasn’t Paris. And furthermore, did Sam happen to
