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.
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.