That was Sam’s only achievement during his stay in Zenith. But weeks went by before he admitted, rather angrily, that business did not need him … just as Brent did not need him, Emily did not need him.
But certainly, he comforted himself, Fran needed him, and such friends as Tub Pearson.
XIX
Thomas J. Pearson and Samuel Dodsworth had always been too well acquainted to know each other. They had been together since boyhood. Each was a habit to the other. It had been a habit for Tub to go once a week to Sam’s for poker; a habit for Sam to telephone him for lunch every Tuesday or Wednesday. They analyzed each other, they considered each other as individuals, no more than a man considers the virtues of his own several toes, unless they hurt. Even Sam’s absence from Tub at technical school, after college, had given them no understanding of each other. They were under the spell of the collegiate belief that one’s classmates are the most princely fellows ever known in history.
But in Sam’s six months abroad, Tub had grown into new habits. It was to the house of Dr. Henry Hazzard that Tub looked now for his weekly drug of poker. Sam saw that Hazzard was at least as necessary to Tub as himself, now, and sometimes he found himself allied against the two of them when the talk fell on labor or European alliances and they expressed the fat opinions which Sam himself had once accepted but about which he now felt shaky. He was slightly jealous, slightly critical. He noted that Tub wasn’t quite so perfect as he had remembered. When Tub shrieked, during a game of poker, “ ‘What ho’ said the cat to the catamaran” or “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the ante” Sam was not diverted. And he felt that Tub was as critical of him. If he hinted that the paving on Conklin Avenue was bad, or that the coffee at the country club left something to be desired, Tub scolded, “Oh, God, we expatriates certainly are a hard bunch to please!”
When Sam dined with them, he found himself turning oftener to Tub’s bouncing goodwife, Matey, than to Tub.
Yet between times they played their nineteen holes happily, serene as a pair of old dogs out rabbit-hunting. If sometimes Sam found himself wishing for Ross Ireland’s melodramatic talk about revolutions and lost temples, if sometimes Tub seemed rather provincial, Sam was thoroughly scandalized, and rebuked himself, “Tub’s the best fellow in the world!”
It is doubtful whether he was the more disturbed by finding that he could get along without Tub or by finding that Tub could get along without him.
Believing from Sam’s first enthusiastic foreign letters that he would not return from Europe this year, Tub had planned with Dr. Hazzard a month’s motoring-golfing expedition. They were excited about it. They were going to play over the best courses in Winnemac, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio. They spoke of the charms of stumbling over new varieties of bunkers, wild grass, and rosebushes. They raved over long shots across sand dunes, and disastrous ponds in which to lose dozens of golf balls.
They had planned to go by themselves, but now they invited Sam. He hesitated. He felt unwanted.
Of course they hadn’t known he would be returning—
Of course they had urged him to come—
Only why couldn’t they have waited to see whether he would return?
He compromised by going with them for two weeks out of the month.
It was a good jaunt. They laughed, and felt free of womenfolk and nagging secretaries, retold all the dirty stories they knew, drank discreetly, drove fast, and admired the golf courses on the North Shore, above Chicago. Sam enjoyed it. But he noted that when he left they seemed cheerful enough about going on by themselves.
Brent—Emily—business—now Tub and Hazzard—they didn’t need him.
All thinking about matters less immediate than food, sex, business, and the security of one’s children is a disease, and Sam was catching it. It made everything more difficult.
He thought about alcohol.
He noted that most of the men of the country club set, including himself, drank too much. And they talked too much about drinking too much. Prohibition had turned drinking from an agreeable, not very important accompaniment to gossip into a craze. They were jumpy about it, and as fascinated as a schoolboy peering at obscene posters.
And he began to meditate about his acquaintances, almost frankly.
He realized, almost frankly, that he was not satisfied now by Dr. Hazzard’s best limericks, Tub’s inside explanations about the finances of Zenith corporations, even Judge Turpin’s whispers about the ashes upon the domestic hearths of their acquaintances.
Hang it, that had been good talk in Paris, even when he had not altogether understood it—Atkins’ rumination on painters, the gilded chatter of Renée de Pénable’s gang of pirates, and still more the stories of Ross Ireland. He had heard of Anastasia, who was declared to be the daughter of the Czar, of the Zinovieff letter which had wrecked the Labor Party of Britain, of the suicide of Archduke Rudolph, of the Empress Charlotte wandering melancholy mad through the haunted rooms of Castle Miramar, of systems to win at Monte Carlo, of Floyd Gibbons’ plan to make a motor road from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande, of Turkish women born in harems who now bobbed their hair and studied biology, of the Chinese “Christian general”—oh, a hundred stories touching great empires and hidden lands. And he had seen the King and Queen of England drive up Constitution Hill in an open motor, had seen Carpentier, the prizefighter, dancing—a pale, solemn, unathletic-looking young man, seen Briand at the opera and Arnold Bennett at the theater.
It had been good talk and good seeing.
But even if he were articulate enough to bring home this booty to Tub and Dr. Hazzard and Judge
