Bildungsromans; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
“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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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