Windy McPherson's Son Part 37

"You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man's spending month after month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this," he observed.

Jackson laughed and lighted a cigarette.

"How little you know me," he said. "I would live my life in the open but that I am a mighty good actor and have just finished another long New York run. What are you going to do now that you are thin and brown? Will you go back to Morrison and Prince and money making?"

Sam shook his head and looked at the quiet elegance of the man before him. How satisfied and happy he looked.

"I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely," he said.

"They are a rotten crew," Jackson a.s.sured him, "and I am taking a night train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over."

On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old man who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.

"I am going to sail from Seattle," he said, "and go everywhere and hunt everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind of thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there until I die."

"I will go with you," said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at Detroit and continued westward with his new acquaintance.

For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous, big-hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early investment in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to his l.u.s.ty, primitive pa.s.sion for shooting and killing. They went on lion hunts, elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of Africa Sam took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the beach smoking black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over and that Sam was a fool to go.

After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life of a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He went on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the sh.o.r.es of northern lakes, canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat about clubs and fas.h.i.+onable hotels listening to the talk of the men and women of that world.

Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on the Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw her. For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure as she walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had come to mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come face to face with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train to the city feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed after the years.

In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily and almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from his hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting with Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant, got into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode about town laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to pa.s.sers-by in the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place at the edge of town, where the party spent hours around a long table, drinking, and singing songs.

One of the girls sat on Sam's lap and put an arm about his neck.

"Give me some money, rich man," she said.

Sam looked at her closely.

"Who are you?" he asked.

She began explaining that she was a clerk in a downtown store and that she had a lover who drove a laundry wagon.

"I go on these bats to get money to buy good clothes," she said frankly, "but if Tim saw me here he would kill me."

Putting a bill into her hand Sam went downstairs and getting into a taxicab drove back to his hotel.

After that night he went frequently on carouses of this kind. He was in a kind of prolonged stupor of inaction, talked of trips abroad which he did not take, bought a huge farm in Virginia which he never visited, planned a return to business which he did not execute, and month after month continued to waste his days. He would get out of bed at noon and begin drinking steadily. As the afternoon pa.s.sed he grew merry and talkative, calling men by their first names, slapping chance acquaintances on the back, playing pool or billiards with skilful young men intent upon gain. In the early summer he got in with a party of young men from New York and with them spent months in sheer idle waste of time. Together they drove high-powered automobiles on long trips, drank, quarrelled, and went on board a yacht to carouse, alone or with women. At times Sam would leave his companions and spend days riding through the country on fast trains, sitting for hours in silence looking out of the window at the pa.s.sing country and wondering at his endurance of the life he led. For some months he carried with him a young man whom he called a secretary and paid a large salary for his ability to tell stories and sing clever songs, only to discharge him suddenly for telling a foul tale that reminded Sam of another tale told by the stoop-shouldered old man in the office of Ed's hotel in the Illinois town.

From being silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings, Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right way of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He lost his native energy, grew fat and coa.r.s.e of body, was pleased for hours by little things, read no books, lay for hours in bed drunk and talking nonsense to himself, ran about the streets swearing vilely, grew habitually coa.r.s.e in thought and speech, sought constantly a lower and more vulgar set of companions, was brutal and ugly with attendants about hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, but ran like a coward to sanitariums and health resorts at the wagging of a doctor's head.

BOOK IV

CHAPTER I

One afternoon in early September Sam got on a westward-bound train intending to visit his sister on the farm near Caxton. For years he had heard nothing from Kate, but she had, he knew, two daughters, and he thought he would do something for them.

"I will put them on the Virginia farm and make a will leaving them my money," he thought. "Perhaps I shall be able to make them happy by setting them up in life and giving them beautiful clothes to wear."

At St. Louis he got off the train, thinking vaguely that he would see an attorney and make arrangements about the will, and for several days stayed about the Planters Hotel with a set of drinking companions he had picked up. One afternoon he began going from place to place drinking and gathering companions. An ugly light was in his eyes and he looked at men and women pa.s.sing in the streets, feeling that he was in the midst of enemies, and that for him the peace, contentment, and good cheer that shone out of the eyes of others was beyond getting.

In the late afternoon, followed by a troop of roistering companions, he came out upon a street flanked with small, brick warehouses facing the river, where steamboats lay tied to floating docks.

"I want a boat to take me and my crowd for a cruise up and down the river," he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. "Take us up and down the river until we are tired of it. I will pay what it costs."

It was one of the days when drink would not take hold of him, and he went among his companions, buying drinks and thinking himself a fool to continue furnis.h.i.+ng entertainment for the vile crew that sat about him on the deck of the boat. He began shouting and ordering them about.

"Sing louder," he commanded, tramping up and down and scowling at his companions.

A young man of the party who had a reputation as a dancer refused to perform when commanded. Springing forward Sam dragged him out on the deck before the shouting crowd.

"Now dance!" he growled, "or I will throw you into the river."

The young man danced furiously, and Sam marched up and down and looked at him and at the leering faces of the men and women lounging along the deck or shouting at the dancer. The liquor in him beginning to take effect, a queerly distorted version of his old pa.s.sion for reproduction came to him and he raised his hand for silence.

"I want to see a woman who is a mother," he shouted. "I want to see a woman who has borne children."

A small woman with black hair and burning black eyes sprang from the group gathered about the dancer.

"I have borne children--three of them," she said, laughing up into his face. "I can bear more of them."

Sam looked at her stupidly and taking her by the arm led her to a chair on the deck. The crowd laughed.

"Belle is after his roll," whispered a short, fat man to his companion, a tall woman with blue eyes.

As the steamer, with its load of men and women drinking and singing songs, went up the river past bluffs covered with trees, the woman beside Sam pointed to a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.

"My children are there. They are getting supper now," she said.

She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang a song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam's companion kept time with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain stood looking up the river.

"Turn back," he said, "I am tired of this crew."

On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside Sam.

"We will go to my house," she said quietly, "just you and me. I will show you the kids."

Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell Sam her story.

She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.