He had felt too inert and too wounded—wantonly wounded—to take the trouble to remind her that he had just come from England, where there was a hideous war and people walked places whenever they could. No more use turning the screw, driving the barb.
Something had happened to his family in the six years of his absence. They’d lost something—heart, guts, reason, even great chunks of knowledge—and all they had left were glass brick walls, automobiles, cocktails, bad tempers.
He tramped through the pretty part of town, the hill part, squirting the slush vindictively; he entered the shabbier section with less spattering steps, as if the poorer people had more delicate sensibilities, or as if they were fellow sufferers rather than the authors of his fury. The ugliness of the rows of frame houses, painted in the most repugnant shades of yellow and green and brown, stung like a rebuke; nobody taught the poor people anything; they couldn’t learn for themselves; even if they learned, they couldn’t do much about their learning, because they were poor. His father would call these people—the women hanging out clothes in the back yards, the old men stealing kindling from the railroad right-of-way—by the single name of Labor. His father would call what was going on inside Jimmie’s mind Communistic. But Jimmie wasn’t thinking about economics—he wasn’t thinking at all; he was only feeling—and his feelings were raw as his right cheek, and as unpleasant to behold.
At the Corinth Works he was given a pass by the boss’s secretary, Miss Melrose, and shown to the lab that had been made ready for his coming. A big lab, a good lab, a fairly dramatic lab. Too intricate for the layman’s eyes it was like the insides of a great engine, made of glass. He kicked off his overshoes, hung his hat on the spout of a retort, put on a brand new rubber apron, and walked around, reading the labels on hundreds of bottles, cocking his eye, now and again, to note that the old man had so much imagination, and so much money for chemicals. The apparatus was magnificent. The layout could not be improved. Light poured from windows high overhead, all around the room—twenty or more, big and opaque, so no one could watch the alchemy in progress.
The place was air-conditioned.
Jimmie sighed and sat down on a stool. Here was one spot-one niche in the hostile Midwestern city, in the unfamiliar world of America—where he was going to be perfectly at home.
Old Cholmondeley, he thought, would give his right eye for this joint. Percy would give his other arm. Well, this was America. In America—they had everything. He wondered which of the pressing problems he would start on. His wonderment took his thoughts a long way—to the heart of the battle in Europe; he tried to weigh the relative strategic values of succeeding here, or succeeding there—if he should succeed at all.
Finally, grunting, he walked to a rack of test tubes, took one down, poured into it some powdered iron, looked at it for a full five minutes, set it back in the rack, picked up a pencil that had never been used, and commenced to write a prodigality of equations on long sheets of yellow paper.
He was studying these when his door pushed open. Because Miss Melrose had said no one would disturb him unless he rang, Jimmie knew who had opened his door.
“’Lo, Willie,” he said.