“I don’t know very much about them,” said Sam. “Have you been in America?”
“Oh, a liddle—before the war. I was a professor in Harvard for a year, and in Leland Stanford a year, and I traveled maybe a year, but of course that is nothing to get any real knowledge of your great country.”
Then, at Kurt’s suggestion, Professor Braut gave a minute history of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota.
Through it he turned constantly to Sam for confirmation, and Sam—who knew very little about North Dakota and precisely nothing about the Nonpartisan League—nodded blandly. At the end, Sam addressed himself strongly:
“He knows more about your own country than you do! Sambo, you know nothing. Ignorant! I wish I hadn’t given up thirty years to motorcars. And I haven’t really learned much here in Europe. A tiny bit about architecture and a little less about wine and cooking and a few names of hotels. And that’s all!”
While Kurt chattered of the adventures of Archduke Michael as a chauffeur to a Hungarian Jew, Sam had a vision of learning and of learned men, of men who knew things with precision, without emotional prejudice, and who knew things which really affected the broad stream of human life; who considered the purposes of a thousand statesmen, the function of a thousand bacteria, the significance of a thousand Egyptian inscriptions, or perhaps the pathology of a thousand involved and diseased minds, as closely as he himself had considered the capacities of a hundred salesmen and engineers and clerks in the Revelation Company. He saw groups of such learned men, in Berlin, in Rome, in Basle, in both Cambridges, in Paris, in Chicago. They would not be chatterers. Oh, he pondered, probably some of them would be glib and merry enough over a glass of beer, but when it came to their own subjects, they would speak slowly, for to any given question there would be so many answers among which to select. They would not vastly please Fran; they would not all of them be dancers of elegance, and perhaps they would fail to choose quite the right waistcoats. They would look insignificant and fuzzy, like Professor Braut, or dry and spindling. And he would be proud to have their recognition—beyond all recognitions of wealth or title.
How was it that he had not known more of them? In Yale, teachers had been obstacles which a football-player had to get past in order to carry out his duty of “doing something for old Yale.” New York was to him exclusively a city of bankers, motor dealers, waiters, and theater employees. On this European venture which was to have opened new lives to him, he had seen only more waiters, English spinsters marooned in hotels, and guides with gold teeth.
Scholars. Men who knew. Suddenly he felt that he might have been such a man. What had kept him from it? Oh, he had been cursed by being popular in college, and by having a pretty wife who had to be surrounded with colored lights—
No, he rebuked himself. He couldn’t get away with excuses like that! In the first place, he was a dirty dog to be ungrateful for having been popular and for having had such a glorious girl as his Fran—look at her now, laughing about the sanctity of the sausage in the German social scheme—look at her, reducing the Count of Obersdorf, kin of princesses and maybe kings, to bouncing admiration! No, he’d been lucky.
Besides! A fellow did not become things—anyway not after five or six or seven years of age. He simply was things! If he had had the capacity to be a savant, nothing would have prevented.
Or—
Suddenly he felt better about it. Was it possible that in some involved, unelucidated way, he himself was a savant in fields not admitted by the academicians as scholarship? He told himself that in the American motor-world he was certainly not known merely as a peddler and as a financial acrobat, but as the authority on automobile-designing, as the first man to advocate four-wheel brakes. Hm. Did that constitute him a scholar, or—
Or possibly an artist? He had created something! He had no pictures in the academies, no books to be bound in levant, no arias nor flimsy furniture named after him, but every one of the twenty million motors on the roads of America had been influenced by his vision, a quarter of a century ago, of long, clean streamlines!
Yes! And it didn’t hurt a man to be a little proud of some honest thing he had done! It gave him courage to go on. Especially with a wife like Fran, who was always criticizing—
Good God, had he really become confirmed, since the case of Arnold Israel, in this habit of seeing Fran not as his loyal companion but as a dreaded and admired enemy, to placate whom was his object in life? Was this the truth about his wanderings, all his future?
He hastily got out of that torturing wonder by sending his mind back to scholarship, while he looked intelligent and placidly ate Backhuhn and seemed to listen to Theodor von Escher on his own superiority to Kreisler.
Could he ever attain scholarship now? Was it too infantile a fancy to think of becoming the first great historian of motors, historian of something which was, after all, more important in social evolution than twenty Battles of Waterloo? Or could he learn something of architecture? For he really was a little tired of motors. They meant, just now, sitting at a desk in the Revelation offices. Could he really make better Sans Souci Gardens?
Anyway, he wasn’t going on just being a Cook’s tourist, rather less important to Fran than concierges and room-waiters. He’d do something—
Or was this inner glow, so exciting and so rare—was it merely a reflection of drinking champagne and being
