United States

The United States is a recurring setting where returning from war does not mean leaving conflict behind. Its stations, military offices, family homes, and workplaces place characters between public demands and private needs: Richard Ellsworth Savage encounters registration checks and a new commission, while Ben Compton tries to build an education alongside paid work and family debt.

Return, Registration, and Military Service

Richard Ellsworth Savage’s return to New York City brings him into a summer landscape that feels lonely and empty. At Pennsylvania Station, policemen and plainclothes officers demand registration cards from young men who are not in uniform. A group of men stands hemmed in by police, while Savage and Hiram Halsey Cooper hurry toward their train. Cooper has told Savage to wear his uniform, making military status a practical protection in a public space where civilian young men are being checked and detained.

The United States also offers Savage a route back into service. Cooper, now a major working in the Ordnance purchasing department, uses his military connections to arrange an introduction to a general interested in Savage’s experience on two fronts and his knowledge of languages. Savage says that some of his experience had been bad, but that he had hated to return. The contrast is telling: he has come home, yet military authority quickly draws him toward another commission.

Family Ties and the Pull of Home

After completing paperwork and meeting Cooper for lunch, Savage travels to Atlantic City to see his mother. She is staying in a boarding house and is anxious about spies. Her son Henry Savage has enlisted as an infantry private and is somewhere in France; she resents that a grandson of a general should hold such a low rank, while expecting that he will rise. The family’s military inheritance shapes her hopes even as the war separates her from her son.

Savage asks about his maternal grandfather, whose memory his mother had rarely revisited since Savage’s childhood. She recalls him as a tall man in a blue uniform, with a white goatee and a hat turned up on one side, and remembers the hoarhound drops he carried in a small silver bonbonnière. The object had long since gone, along with the family’s other possessions, when her husband failed financially. The recollection links American military prestige to a more fragile family history of lost status and money.

Later, Savage considers remaining in Europe rather than returning to the United States. He says he may need to go home to do something about his mother if Henry does not return, and that Colonel Edgecombe can arrange his release from service there if he gives up his right to transportation home. His willingness to waive the passage underscores the tension between wanting to leave uniformed life and feeling responsible for family at home.

Work, Study, and Class in New York City

For Ben Compton, the United States is also a place where education has to be assembled from work, borrowed money, and limited time. After leaving Nick Gigli, Ben returns home to find winter employment that will leave room for study. He passes the examinations and matriculates at the College of the City of New York. His father borrows one hundred dollars through the Morris Plan to get him started, and Sam sends twenty-five dollars from Newark for books; Ben adds earnings from evening work at Kahn’s drugstore.

Ben’s study is purposeful and political. He reads Marx’s Capital at the library on Sunday afternoons, joins the Socialist Party, and attends lectures at the Rand School when he can. He thinks of himself as preparing to become a well-sharpened instrument, but his progress is vulnerable to illness and debt. Scarlet fever keeps him in hospital for ten weeks, and afterward reading for an hour gives him a headache. Meanwhile, his father owes another hundred dollars, in addition to the first loan, interest, and investigation fees. In these episodes, American opportunity is real but costly: study and advancement depend on labor, family borrowing, and a body and household already under strain.