Windy McPherson's Son

One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out of his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia, looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his bill at the hotel, and took a train for New York.  He had definitely abandoned the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about the country and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in villages, and had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his income.

He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood.  The spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain spring mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in his experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran through the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when the call of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind, filling him with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in his brain, yet at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was, after all, a man of the towns and the crowds.  Caxton and South Water Street and LaSalle Street had all left their marks on him, and so, throwing his canvas jacket into a corner of the room in the West Virginia hotel, he returned to the haunts of his kind.

In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and into the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named Jackson.

Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him.  He remembered a visit he had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again the quiet elegance of the surroundings.

“Hello, Moneymaker,” said Jackson, heartily.  “Heard you had gone to a nunnery.”

Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson’s eyes open with astonishment.

“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 assured 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 lusty, primitive passion 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 shores of northern lakes, canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat about clubs and fashionable 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 passers-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 passed 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 passing 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 coarse 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 coarse 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.