“Very true,” I assented, “but a really capable man wouldn’t work for him. He’d consider him too futile and try to take his treasure away from him and then the poor creature would be just where he was before, compelled to invent something else. Any man who would work for him wouldn’t actually be worth having. It would be a case of the blind leading the blind.”
There was much more of this—a long discussion. We agreed that any man who does anything must have so much more than the mere idea—must have vision, the ability to control and to organize men, a magnetism for those who are successful—in short, that mysterious something which we call personality. This man did not have it. He was a poor scrub, blown hither and yon by all the winds of circumstance, dreaming of some far-off supremacy which he never could enjoy or understand, once he had it.
CHAPTER XIV
THE CITY OF SWAMP ROOT
Binghamton—"Bimington," as Franklin confusedly called it in trying to ask the way of someone—now dawned swiftly upon us. I wouldn’t devote a line to those amazingly commercial towns and cities of America which are so numerous if the very commercial life of the average American weren’t so interesting to me. If anyone should ask me “What’s in Binghamton?” I should confess to a sense of confusion, as if he were expecting me to refer to something artistic or connected in any way with the world of high thought. But then, what’s in Leeds or Sheffield or Nottingham, or in Stettin or Hamburg or Bremen? Nothing save people, and people are always interesting, when you get enough of them.
When we arrived in Binghamton there was a parade, and a gala holiday atmosphere seemed everywhere prevailing. Flags were out, banners were strung across the roadway; in every street were rumbling, large flag-bedecked autotrucks and vehicles of various descriptions loaded with girls and boys in white (principally girls) and frequently labeled “Boost Johnson City.”
“What in the world is Johnson City, do you suppose?” I asked of Franklin. “Are they going to change the name of Binghamton to Johnson City?”
Speed was interested in the crowds. “Gee, this is a swell town for girls,” he commented; but after we had alighted and walked about among them for a time, they did not seem so attractive to me. But the place had a real if somewhat staccato air of gayety.
“Where is Johnson City?” I asked of a drug clerk of whom we were buying a sundae.
“Oh, it’s a town out here—a suburb that used to be called Leicestershire. They’re renaming it after a man out there—R. G. Johnson.”
“Why?”