II
As we lingered at the table (water with ice having arrived and the Stars and Stripes flying triumphantly over the pitcher), I was brought up to date as to the recent history of the Smiths. As an old neighbor from home they welcomed me to their confidence. The wife and daughter had been abroad a year with Munich as their chief base. Smith’s advent had been unexpected and disturbing. Rest and change having been prescribed, he had jumped upon a steamer and the day before our encounter had joined his wife and daughter in Berlin. They were waiting now for a conference with a German neurologist to whom Smith had been consigned—in desperation, I fancied—by his American doctor. Mrs. Smith’s distress was as evident as his own irritation; Miss Fanny alone seemed wholly tranquil. She ignored the apparent gravity of the situation and assured me that her father had at last decided upon a long vacation. She declared that if her father persisted in his intention of sailing for New York three weeks later, she and her mother would accompany him.
While we talked a cablegram was brought to Smith; he read it and frowned. Mrs. Smith met my eyes and shook her head; Fanny frugally subtracted two thirds of the silver Smith was leaving on the tray as a tip and slipped it into her purse. It was a handsome trinket, the purse; Fanny’s appointments all testified to Smith’s prosperity and generosity. I remembered these friends so well in old times, when they lived next door to me in the Mid-Western town which Smith, ten years before, had outgrown and abandoned. His income had in my observation jumped from two to twenty thousand, and no one knew now to what fabulous height it had climbed. He was one of the men to reckon with in the larger affairs of “Big Business.” And here was the wife who had shared his early struggles, and the child born of those contented years, and here was Smith, with whom in the old days I had smoked my after-breakfast cigar on the rear platform of a street car in our town, that we then thought the “best town on earth,”—here were my old neighbors in a plight that might well tax the renowned neurologist’s best powers.
What had happened to Smith? I asked myself; and the question was also in his wife’s wondering eyes. And as we dallied, Smith fingered his newspaper fretfully while I answered his wife’s questions about our common acquaintances at “home” as she still called our provincial capital.
It was not my own perspicacity but Fanny’s which subsequently made possible an absolute diagnosis of Smith’s case, somewhat before the cautious German specialist had announced it. From data supplied by Fanny I arrived at the conclusion that Smith is the “tired business man,” and only one of a great number of American Smiths afflicted with the same malady,—bruised, nerve-worn victims of our malignant gods of success. The phrase, as I shall employ it here, connotes not merely the type of iron-gray stock broker with whom we have been made familiar by our American drama of business and politics, but his brother (also prematurely gray and a trifle puffy under the eyes) found sedulously burning incense before Mammon in every town of one hundred thousand souls in America. I am not sure, on reflection, that he is not visible in thriving towns of twenty-five thousand,—or wherever “collateral” and “discount” are established in the local idiom and the cocktail is a medium of commercial and social exchange. The phenomena presented by my particular Smith are similar to those observed in those lesser Smiths who are the restless and dissatisfied biggest frogs in smaller puddles. Even the farmers are tired of contemplating their glowing harvests and bursting barns and are moving to town to rest.