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DODSWORTH

Sinclair Lewis

CHAPTER 1

The aristocracy of Zenith were dancing at the Kennepoose Canoe Club. They two-stepped on the wide porch, with its pillars of pine trunks, its bobbing Japanese lanterns; and never were there dance-frocks with wider sleeves, nor hair more sensuously piled on little smiling heads, never an August evening more moon-washed and spacious and proper for respectable romance.

Three guests had come in these new-fangled automobiles, for it was now 1903, the climax of civilization. A fourth was approaching, driven by Samuel Dodsworth.

The scene was a sentimental chromo — crisping lake, lovers in canoes singing "Nelly Was a Lady," all very lugubrious and happy — and Sam Dodsworth enjoyed it. He was a large and formidable young man, with a healthy brown mustache and a chaos of brown hair on a massive head. He was, at twenty-eight, assistant superintendent of that most noisy and unsentimental institution, the Zenith Locomotive Works, and in Yale (class of 1896) he had played better than average football, but he thought well of the most sentimental sorts of moonlight.

Tonight he was particularly uplifted because he was driving his

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first car. And it was none of your old-fashioned "gasoline buggies,"
with the engine under the seat. The engine bulked in front, under
a proud hood over two feet long, and the steering column was not straight
but rakishly tilted. The car was sporting and rather dangerous, and
the lights were powerful affairs fed by acetylene gas. Sam sped on, with
a feeling of power, of dominating the universe, at fifteen dizzy miles
an hour.

At the Canoe Club, he was greeted by Tub Pearson, admirable in
white kid gloves. Tub — Thomas J. Pearson — round and short and
jolly, class-jester and class-dandy at Yale, had been Sam Dodsworth's
roommate and chief admirer throughout college, but now he had begun to
take on an irritable dignity as teller and future president of his
father's bank in Zenith.

"It runs!" Tub marveled, as Sam stepped in triumph from the car.
"I've got a horse all ready to tow you back!" Tub had to be witty,
whatever happened.

"Certainly it runs! I'll bet I was up to nineteen miles an hour!"

"Yeh! I'll bet that some day automobiles 'll run forty!" Tub
jeered. "Sure! Why, they'll just drive the poor old horse right off
the highway!"

"They will! And I'm thinking of tying up with this new Revelation
Company to manufacture 'em."

"Not seriously, you poor chump?"

"Yes."

"Oh my Lord!" Tub wailed affectionately. "Don't be crazy, Sambo!
My dad says automobiles are nothing but a fad. Cost too much to run.
In five years, he says, they'll disappear."

Sam's answer was not very logical:

"Who's the young angel on the porch?"

If she was an angel, the girl at whom Sam was pointing, she was

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an angel of ice; slim, shining, ash-blonde, her self-possessed voice
very cool as she parried the complimentary teasing of half a dozen
admirers; a crystal candle-stick of a girl among black-and-white lumps
of males.

"You remember her — Frances Voelker — Fran Voelker — old Her-
man's kid. She's been abroad for a year, and she was East, in fin-
ishing-school, before that. Just a brat — isn't over nineteen or
twenty, I guess. Golly, they say she speaks German and French and
Italian and Woof-woof and all known languages."

Herman Voelker had brewed his way into millions and respectability.
His house was almost the largest in Zenith — certainly it had the
greatest amount of turrets, colored glass windows, and lace curtains —
and he was leader among the German-Americans who were supplanting the
New Englanders as controllers of finance and merchandizing. He en-
tertained German professors when they came lecturing and looking, and
it was asserted that one of the genuine hand-painted pictures which he
had recently brought back from Nurnberg was worth nearly ten thousand
dollars. A worthy citizen, Herman, and his tart beer was admirable,
but that this beef-colored burgher should have fathered anything so
poised and luminous as Fran was a miracle.

The sight of her made Sam Dodsworth feel clumsy as a St. Bernard
looking at a white kitten. While he prophesied triumphs for the motor
car, while he danced with other girls, he observed her airy dancing and
her laughter. Normally, he was not particularly afraid of young women,
but Fran Voelker seemed too fragile for his thick hands. Not till ten
did he speak to her, when a partner left her, a flushed corybant, in a
chair near Sam's.

"Do you remember me — Dodsworth? Years since I've seen you."

"Remember! Heavens! I wondered if you were going to notice me.

I used to steal the newspaper from Dad to get the news of your football

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heroisms. And when I was a nice young devil of eight, you once
chased me out of your orchard for stealing apples."

"Did I? Wouldn't dare to now! Mavenex' dance?"

"Well — Let me see. Oh. The next is with Levering Mott,
and he's already ruined three of my two slippers. Yes."

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If he did not dance with any particular neatness, a girl knew
where she was, with Sam Dodsworth. He had enough strength and decision
to let a young woman understand who was doing the piloting. With Fran
Voelker, he was inspired; he waltzed as though he was proud of his shin-
ing burden. He held her lightly enough and, after the chaste custom of
the era, his hands were gloved. But his finger-tips felt a current
from her body. He knew that she was the most exquisite child in the
world; he knew that he was going to marry her and keep her forever in
a shrine; he knew that after years of puzzled wonder about the purpose
of life, he had found it.

"She's like a lily — no, she's too lively. She's like a humming
bird — no, too kind of dignified. She's — oh, she's a flame!"

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They sat talking by the lake at midnight. Out on the dappled
water, seen through a cloud of willow leaves, the youngsters in canoes
were now singing "My Old Kentucky Home." Zenith was still in the hal-
eyon William Dean Howells days; not yet had it become the duty of
young people to be hard and brisk, and knowing about radios, jazz, and
gin.

Fran was a white shadow, in a lace shawl over her thin yellow dancing
frook, as she drooped down on a newspaper which he had solemnly spread
for her on the long grass. He trembled a little, and sounded very
pompous, rather boyish:

"I suppose you went everywhere in Europe."

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"More or less. France and Spain and Austria and Switzerland and — Oh, I've seen the Matterhorn by moonlight, and Santa Maria della Salute at dawn. And I've been almost frozen to death in a mistral at Avignon!"

"I suppose you'll be bored in Zenith."

She laughed, in a small competent way. "I know so much about Europe — I'm no Cook's tripper! — that I know I don't know anything! All I can do in French is to order breakfast. Six months from now, all I'll remember of Germany is the names of nineteen towns, and how the Potsdamer Platz looks when you're waiting for a droschke. But you've done things. What are you doing now, by the way?"

"Assistant supe at the Locomotive Works. But I'm going to take a big gamble and — Ever ride in an automobile?"

"Oh yes, several times, in Paris and New York, and I saw her Benz exhibiting a new auto in Berlin — oh, just dandy!"

"Well, I believe that in twenty years, say by 1923 or '4, they'll be as common as buggies are now! I'm going in on a new company here — Revelation Automobile Company. I'll get less salary, but a swell gamble. Wonderful future. I've been working on my mechanical drawing lately, and I've got the idea that autos ought to get away from imitating carriages. Make a — it sounds highbrow, but I mean what you might call a new kind of beauty for autos. Kind of long straight lines. The Revelation boss thinks I'm crazy. What do you think?"

"Oh, splendid!"

"And I've bought me an automobile of my own."

"Oh, really?"

"Let me drive you home tonight!"

"No, sorry; Mama is coming for me."

"You've got to let me take you for a ride. Soon!"

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"Perhaps next Sunday.... We must go back to the clubhouse, don't you think?"

He sprang up, meekly. As he lifted her to her feet, as he felt her slim hands, he murmured, "Certainly like to see Europe some day. When I graduated, I thought I'd be a civil engineer and see the Brazil jungle and China and all over. Regular Richard Harding Davis stuff! But I might run into you over there, and you might show me some of it."

"I'd love to! I do want to go back!"

Ah, if she desired Europe, he would master it fore, and give it to her on a platter of polished gold!

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There was the telephone call to her when he should have been installing machinery at the Revelation Automobile Company. There was the drive with her in his new car, very careful, though once he ventured on seventeen miles an hour. There was the dinner at the Voelkers', in the room with carved beams like a Hofbräuhaus, and Sam's fear that if Fran was kept on food like this, roast goose and stuffed cabbage and soup with Leberknödel, she would lose her race-horse slimness.

And there was even a moment when, recalling his vow made in Massachusetts Tech after graduating from Yale, that he would cut loose from America and see the great world, he warned himself that between Fran and tying himself to the urgent new motor industry, he would be caught for life. The vision of himself as a Richard Harding Davis hero returned wistfully.... Riding a mountain trail, two thousand sheer feet above a steaming valley; sun-helmet and whipcord breeches; tropical rain on a tin-roofed shack; and a shot in the darkness as he sat over a square-face of gin with a ragged tramp of Noble Ancestry. But his mind fled back to the excitement

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of Fran's image: her spun-glass hair, her tingling hands, her lips that were forever pursing in fantastic pouts, her chatter that fell suddenly into inexplicable silence, her cool sureness that made him feel foggy and lumbering.

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In a slaty November drizzle, they were tramping the cliffs along the Chaloosa River. Fran's cheeks were alight and she was humming, but when they stopped to look at the wash of torn branches in the flooded river, Sam felt that he must be protective. She was too slight and precious for such hardship as an autumnal rain. He drew the edge of his mackintosh over her woolly English topcoat.

"You must be soaked! I'm a brute to let you stay out!"

She smiled at him, very close. "I like it!"

It seemed to him that she had snuggled closer. He kissed her — for the first time, and very badly indeed.

"Oh, please don't!" she begged, a little shocked, her lively self-possession gone.

"Fran, you've got to marry me!"

She slipped from the shelter of his raincoat and, arms akimbo, said impishly, "Oh, really? Is that a new law?"

"It is!"

"The great Yale athlete speaks! The automobile magnate!"

Very gravely: "No, just a soared lump of meat that's telling you he worships you!"

Still she stared at him, among the autumn-bedraggled weeds on the river bank; she stared impudently, but quite suddenly she broke, covered her eyes with her hands, and while he clumsily dabbled at her cheeks with a huge handkerchief, she sobbed:

"Oh Sam, my dear, but I'm so grasping! I want the whole world, not just Zenith! I don't want to be a good wife and mother and play

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cribbage prettily. I want splendor! Great horizons! Can we look
for them together?"

"We will!" said Sam.

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It was not till late in 1908, when he had been married for five
years to Fran Voelker and they had two babies, Emily and Brent, that
Samuel Dodsworth came on his real struggle at the Revelation Auto-
mobile Company.

His superiors in the company had equally prized him for his
steadiness and industry, and fretted at him for being a dreamer. He
was as crazy as a poet, they said. Not only did he venture to blas-
against not only did he
pheme, the great Renault-Darraque dogmas of car-designing, keep
on raving about long "stream-lines", but he insisted that the largest
profits would lie in selling automobiles as cheaply as possible to
as many customers as possible. He was only assistant manager of
production in 1908, but he owned a little stock, and his father-in-
law, portly old Herman Voelker, owned more. It was hard to dis-
charge Sam, even when he growled at the president of the company,
"If you keep the Rev looking like the one-horse-shay, we'll go
bankrupt."

They tried to buy him out, and Sam, who had been absorbed in
blue prints and steel castings, had to learn something about the
tricks of financing: about bonds, transfer of stock, call loans,
discounts to dealers. With Voelker's money behind him, he secured
twenty-three per cent. of the stock, he was made vice president and
manager of production, he brought out the first four-door model,
and he saw the Revelation become the sensation of America for a
season and one of its best-selling cars for a score of years.

And never, these twenty years, did he come nearer to the Braz-
ilian jungle than Wall Street; never nearer to the tinkling

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Printer:

Use Arabic num-
erals, not Rom.
for chapter head-
ings.

CHAPTER 2

Samuel Dodsworth discovered that there was snowstorm, nearly a blizzard, whirling about the house. He closed the windows with a bang and plumped back into bed till the room should be warm. He did not move so swiftly as he once had, and above the frogged silk pajamas which Fran insisted on buying for him, his hair was gray. He was healthy enough, and serene, but he was tired, and he seemed far older than his fifty years.

Fran was asleep in the farther of the twin beds, vast walnut structures with yellow silk draping. Sam looked about the bedroom. He had sometimes caught himself wondering if it wasn't too elaborate, but usually its floridness pleased him, not only as a sign of success but because it suited the luxurious Fran. Now he noted contentedly the chaise longue, with a green and silver robe across it, the desk, with monogrammed stationery very severe and near-English and snobbish, Fran's bedside table, with jeweled traveling-clock, cigarettes, and the new novels, the bathroom with its purple tiles.

Fran stirred, sighed and, while he chuckled at her resemblance to a child trying to slip back into dreams, she furiously burrowed her eyes into the little lacy pillow, which was crumpled with her determined sleeping.

"No use," he said. His rather heavy voice caressed her. "You know you're awake! Rise and shine! Face the problems of humanity and the grape fruit!"

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She sat up, looking at him with the astonishment she had never quite lost at being married, breaking a yawn with a smile, tousling her that was still ash-blond, without gray. bobbed ash-blond hair. If Sam seemed older than his age, she was far younger. She was forty-one now, in 1925, but, rosy with sleeping, she seemed thirty-one.

"I'm going to have breakfast in bed you're smoking before breakfast again I haven't had breakfast in bed since yesterday," she yawned amiably, while he swung his thick legs over the edge of his lilac satin comforter and lighted a cigarette.

"Yes. Stay in bed. Like to, myself. Devil of a snowstorm," he said, paddling 'round to stroke her hair, to nuzzle his ruddy cheek against her soft fairness. "By the way, did I ever happen to remember to tell you that I adore you?"

"Why — let me see — no, I don't believe so."

"Golly, I'm getting absent-minded! I'll have my secretary remind me to do it tomorrow." Seriously: "Realize that we finally wind up the old Revelation Company today? Sort of sorry."

"No! I'm not a bit sorry! I'm delighted. You'll be free for the first time in all these years. Let's run off some place. Oh, don't let yourself get tied up with anything new! So silly. We have enough money, and you go on stewing — 'must change the design of the carburetor float — simply must sell more cars in the territory between Medicine Hat and Woolawoola.' So silly! What does it matter? What does it matter! Do ring for the maid, darling."

"Well, no, maybe it doesn't matter, but fellow likes to do his job. It's kind of a battle; fun to beat the other fellow and put over a thundering big sale. But I am rather tired. Wouldn't mind skipping off to Florida or some place."

"Let's!"

He had dutifully brought her heavy silver mirror, brush and comb,

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her powder, her too-gorgeous lounging robe of Chinese brocade. When
she had made herself a bit older by making herself youthful, she sat
up in bed to read the Zenith Advocate-Times. If she looked fluffy
and agreeably useless, there was nothing fluffy in her brief, rather
sharp comments on the news. She sounded like a woman of many af-
fairs, many committees.

"Humph! That idiot-boy alderman, Klingenger, is going to oppose
our playground bill. I'll wring his neck!..... The D.A.R. are going
to do another pageant. I will not be Martha Washington! You might
be George. You have his detestable majesty's majesties."

"Me?" as he came from his bath. "I'm a clown. Wait till you see me in Florida!"

"Yes. Pitching horseshoes, I wouldn't put it past you, my beloved!..... Huh! It says here the Candlelight Club expect to have Hugh Walpole lecture, next season. I'll see our program committee pinches him off 'em."

He was slowly dressing. He always wore large grave suits, brown
or gray or plain blue, expensively tailored and not very interesting,
with decorous and uninteresting ties of dull silk, and no jewelry save
a watch-chain. But though you were not likely to see what he wore,
you noted him as a man of importance, as an executive, tall, deep-
chested, his kind eyes never truculent, but his mouth serious, with
crescents of wrinkles beside it. His gray-threaded brown mustache,
trimmed every week by the best barber at the best hotel, was as
eccentric and showy as a doormat.

He made his toilet like a man who never wasted motions — and
who, incidentally, had a perfectly organized household to depend upon.
His hand went surely to the tall pile of shirts (Fran ordered them
from Jermyn Street) in the huge Flemish armoire, and to the glacial
nest of collars, always inspected by the parlor maid and discarded for the

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slightest fraying. He tied his tie, not swiftly but with the un-
wasteful and extremely unadventurous precision of a man who has in-
troduced as much "scientific efficiency" into his every act of daily
domesticity as into his factory.

He kissed her and, while she nibbled at sweetbreads and drank
her coffee in bird-like sips and furiously rattled the newspaper in
bed, he marched down-stairs to the oak-beamed dining-room. Over a
second copy of the *Advocate* and a Chicago paper, he ponderously and
thoroughly attended to orange juice, porridge and thick cream, ba-
eon, corn cakes and syrup, and coffee MMMMM in a cup twice as large
as the cup which Fran was jiggling in her thin hand as she galloped
through the paper up-stairs.

To the maid he said little, and that amiably, as one certain
that he would be well served. He was not extraordinarily irritable
even when he was informed that Emily, his engaging daughter, had been
up late at a dance and would not be down for breakfast. He liked
Emily's morning gossip, but he never dreamed of demanding her
presence — of demanding anything from her. He smiled over the let-
ter of his son, Brent, now a junior in Yale.

Samuel Dodsworth was, perfectly, the American Captain of Indus-
try, believing in the Republican Party, high tariff and, so long as
they did not annoy him personally, in prohibition and the Episcopal
Church. He was the president of the Revelation Motor Company; an
enormous multimillionaire, he was a millionaire, though decidedly not a
multimillionaire; his large house was on Ridge Crest, the most
fashionable street in Zenith; he had some taste in etchings; he did
not split many infinitives; and he sometimes enjoyed Beethoven. He
would certainly (so the observer assumed) produce excellent motor
cars; he would make impressive but dispassionate speeches to the
democratic

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salesmen; but he would never love passionately, lose tragically, nor
sit in contented idleness upon tropic shores.

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To define what Sam Dodsworth was, at fifty, it is easiest to
state what he was not. He was none of the thinks which most Euro-
peans and many Americans expect in a leader of American industry. He
was not a Babbitt, not a Rotarian, not an Elk, not a deacon. He
rarely shouted, never slapped people on the back, and he had atten-
ded only six baseball games since 1900. He knew, and thoroughly, the
Babbitts and baseball fans, but only in business.

While he was bored by free verse and cubism, he thought rather
well of Dreiser, Cabell, and so much of Proust as he had rather lab-
oriously mastered. He played golf reasonably well, and did not often
talk of his scores. He liked fishing-camps in Canada, but never made
himself believe that he preferred hemlock boughs to a mattress. He
was common sense apotheosized, he had the energy and reliability
of a dynamo, he liked whisky and poker and pate de foie gras, and all
the while he dreamed of motors like thunderbolts, as poets less
modern than himself might dream of stars and roses and nymphs by a
pool.

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A crisis in life had been forced on him, for his Revelation
Company was being absorbed by the Unit Automotive Company — the
imperial U.A.C., with its seven makes of motors, its body-building
works, its billion dollars of capital. Alex Kynance, president of
the U.A.C., was in Zenith, and today the final transfer of
holdings was to be made.

Sam had wanted to fight the U.A.C., to keep independent this
creation to which he had devoted twenty-two years, but his fellow
directors were afraid. The U.A.C. could put on the market a car as

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good as the Revelation at a lower price, and drive them from the market. If necessary, the U.A.C. could sell below cost for a year or two. But they wanted the Revelation label and would pay for it. And the U.A.C. cossacks were good fellows. They did not treat Sam like a captive, but as a fellow warrior, to be welcomed to their larger army, so at the last Sam hid from himself the belief that the U.A.C., with their mass production, would cheapen and ruin the Revelation and turn his thunderbolt into a standardized cigar-lighter, and he had agreed to their generous purchase price.

He was not happy about it, when he let himself think abstractly. But he was extremely well trained, from his first days in Zenith High School, in not letting himself do anything so destructive as abstract thinking.

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Sam clumped up-stairs and found Fran, very brisk, fairly cheerful, still in her brocade dressing-gown but crouching over her desk, dashing off notes: suggestions to partisans in her various clubs, orders to the secretaries of the leagues which she supported — leagues for the study of democracy, leagues for the blind, societies for the collection of statistics about the effect of alcohol on plantation-hands in Mississippi. She was interested in every aspect of these leagues except perhaps the purposes for which they had been founded, and no Indiana politician was craftier at soaping enemies, advising friends, and building up a political machine to accomplish nothing in particular.

lumbered

She shone at Sam as he mambambo in, but she said abruptly, "Sit down, please. I want to talk to you."

"Oh Lord, what have I done now?" He sat meekly in a chintz-covered overstuffed chair.

"Sam! I've been thinking lately. I didn't want to speak to

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you about it till you had the U.A.C. business all finished. But I'm
afraid you'll get yourself tied up with some new job, and I want to
go to Europe!"

"Well ——"

"Wait! This may be our only chance, the only time you'll be
free till we're so old we won't enjoy wandering. Let's take the
chance! There'll be time for you to create a dozen new kinds of cars
when we come back. You'll do it all the better if you have a real
rest. A real one! I don't want to go just for a few months, but
for a solid year."

"Good Heavens!"

"Yes, they are good! Think! Here's Emily going to be married
next month. Then she won't need us. Brent has enough friends in
college. He won't need us. I can chuck all these beastly clubs and
everything. They don't mean anything; they're just make-believe, to
keep me busy. I'm a very active female, Sam, and I want to do some-
thing besides sitting around Zenith. Think what we could do! Spring
on the Italian Lakes! Motoring through the Tyrol! London in the
Season! And I've never seen Europe since I was a girl, and you've
never seen it at all. Let yourself have a good time for once! Trust
me, can't you, dear?"

"Well, it would be kind of nice to get away from the grind. I'd
like to look over the Rolls Royce and Mercedes plants. And see Paris
and the Alps. But a year — That's a long time. I think we'd
get pretty tired of Europe, living around in hotels. But — I
really haven't made any plans. The U.A.C. business was so sudden.
I would like to see Italy. Those hill-towns must be very curious.
And so old. We'll talk about it tonight. *Auf wiedersehen*, old lady."

He tramped out, apparently as dependable as an old Newfoundland
and as little given to worrying about anything more complex than the
hiding-places of bones. But he was fretting as he sat, MAAAA erect,

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in his limousine, while Smith drove him into town.

These moments of driving were the only time he was alone. He was as beset by people — his wife, his daughter, his son, his servants, his office-staff, his friends at lunch and on the golf course — as in his most frenziedly popular days at college, when it had been his "duty to old Yale" to be athletic and agreeable, and never to be alone, certainly never to sit and think. People came to him, swarmed about him, wanted his advice and his money and the spiritual support which they found in his ponderous caution. Yet he liked to be alone, he liked to meditate, and he made up for it on these morning rides.

"She's right," he worried. "I'd better not let her know how right she is, or she'll yank me off to London before I can pack my flask. I wonder — Oh yes, of course, she does care for me, a lot. But sometimes I wish she weren't quite so good a manager. She just tries to amuse me by playing at being a kitten. She isn't one, not by a long shot. She's a greyhound. Sometimes when I'm tired, I wish she wanted to just cuddle up and be lazy with me. She's quicksilver. And quicksilver is hard, when you try to compress it, even if it does flicker."

"Oh, that's unfair. She's been the best wife — I haven't given enough time to courting her, what with all this cursed business. And I'm tired of business. Like to sit around with myself and chat and get acquainted with myself. And I'm tired of these streets!"

The limousine was laboring through a gusty snowstorm, skidding a bit on icy asphalt, creaking and lumbering as it climbed over drifts. The windows of the car were frost-emblazoned. Sam impatiently cleared a peep-hole with the heel of his glove.

They were creeping along Conklin Avenue, where the dreary rows

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of old red brick mansions, decayed into boarding houses, the cheap grocery shops and dirty laundries and gloomy little "undertaking parlors" and lunch-rooms with the blatant sign "Eats," not very en-trancing at any time, were turned by the rags of blown snow into the bleakness of a lumber-camp, while the breadth of the street made it only the more shelterless and unintimate. It was a street of signboards advertising tires and cigarettes, of wooden one-story shacks between old-fashioned yellow brick tenement-houses gloomy in the sunless snow; a region of poverty without picturesqueness and of labor without hope.

"Oh Lord, I'd like to get away from it! Be nice to see the Mediterranean and a little sunshine," Sam muttered. "Let's go!"

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The General Offices of the Revelation Motor Company were in an immense glass and marble building on Constitution Avenue, North, above Court House Square, opposite the flashing new skyscraper of the Plymouth National Bank. The entrance to the floor given to executive offices was like the lobby of a pretentious hotel -- waiting-room in brocade and tapestry and Grand Rapids renaissance; then something like an acre of little tables with typists and typists and typists, very busy, and clerks and clerks and clerks, with rattling papers; and a row of private offices resembling furniture showrooms, distinguished by enormous desks in imitation of refectory tables, covered with enormous sheets of plate glass, and fanatically kept free of papers and all jolly disorder.

The arrival of President Dodsworth was like that of a General Commanding. "Good morning!" rumbled the uniformed doorman, a retired sergeant. "Good morning!" chirped the girl at the inquiry desk, a charming girl whose gentleman-friend was said to be uncommonly high up in the fur business. "Good morning!" indicated the

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typists and clerks, their heads bowing like leaves agitated by a
flitting breeze as he strode by them. "<u>Good morning!</u>" caroled
private stenographer as he entered his own office. "GOOD MORNING!"
shouted his secretary, an offensively high-pressure young slave-
driver. And even the red-headed Jewish office boy, as he took
Sam's coat and hung it up so that it would not dry, condescended
"Mornin', boss."

Yet today all this obsequiousness, normally not unpleasant to
the Great Man, annoyed him; all this activity, this proof that ever
so many people were sending out ever so many letters about things
presumably of importance, seemed to him an irritating fussiness.
What did it matter whether he had another hundred thousand dollars
to leave to Brent? What did it matter whether John B. Johnson of
Jonesburg did or did not take the local Revelation agency? Why were
all these hundreds of young people willing to be turned into ma-
chines for the purposes of rattling papers and bowing to the pres-
ident?

The Great Man approached his desk, put on his eye-glasses, and graciously received a stock-report, as one accomplishing empires. But what the Great Man was thinking was:

"They make me tired — poor devils! Come on, Fran! Let's go!
Let's drift way round to China!"

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Alec Kynance, president of the Unit Automotive Company, with
his regiment of officers, lawyers, secretaries, were not coming for
half an hour. Sam said impulsively to his stenographer, "Miss
Rachman, skip down to the travel bureau at the Thornleigh, won't
you please, and bring me all the steamship folders and European
travel information and so on that they have there. And 'round-the-
world."

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While he waited for her he turned over the papers in the wire basket which his secretary had reverently laid on the glass-topped vastness of his desk. These matters had seemed significant a few days ago, like orders given in battle, but now that the Revelation Company was no longer his —

He sighed, he turned over the papers indifferently: The secret report on the dissipations of the manager of the Northwestern Division. The plans of the advertising agency for notices about the union of the U.A.O. and the Revelation, which was to be announced with glad, gaudy public rejoicing. What did they matter, now that he was turned from a bandit captain to a clerk?

For the first time he admitted that if he went to the U.A.O., even as first vice president, he would be nothing more than an office boy. He could make no daring decisions by himself. They had taken from him the pride in pioneering which was one of his props in life — and who They were, he didn't quite know. They were something more than just Alec Kynance and a few other officers of the U.A.O. & They were part of a booming industrial flood which was sweeping over him. They would give him a larger house, a yacht, but They would not give him work that was really his own. He had helped to build a machine which was running away from him. He had no longer the dignity of a craftsman. He made nothing; he meant nothing; he was no longer Samuel Dodsworth, but merely part of a crowd vigorously pushing one another toward nowhere.

He wandered to the window. In that blast of snow, the shaft of the Plymouth National Bank Building was aspiring as a cathedral; twenty gray stories, with unbroken vertical lines swooping up beyond his vision into the snowy fog. It had nobility, but it seemed cruel, alone and contemptuous of friendly human efforts as a forgotten tower on the Siberian steppes. How indifferently it

-21-

would watch him starve and freeze!

With relief he looked at the travel brochures when his stenciller brought them in — a lively girl, shaking the snow from her little cloche hat, beaming at him, assuring him that he really did exist and was something of importance still. Then he was lost in the mazing pictures.... Titantic walls of the Grand Canyon, scarlet pillars and pyramids of orange. A tawny road in Algiers, the sun baking, nodding camels and drivers with dusky malign faces under their turbans. St. Moritz, shadowed by the mountains, and a pretty girl on a toboggan. A terrace at Cannes, where through fig-trees and palms and tumbling roses you looked on the sea with a lone fellacca. A valley of colored patchwork fields seen from a harsh tor of Dartmoor. Japanese children rollicking among cherry trees beside a tiny temple. Dark wood of carven mediaeval houses looming over the Römerberg at Frankfort. The Grand Canal, with the fantastic columns of the piazetta and the soft pink and cream of the ducal palace. The old sea-fronted walls of Ragusa. The streets of Paris — kiosks, impudent advertisements, a whisk of skirts, a whirligig of traffic, and little tables at which to loaf all day long.

"Wouldn't be so bad!" thought Sam. "I'd like to wander around a few months. Only I'm not going to let Fran coax me into being one of these wishy-washy expatriates, homeless, afraid of life, living on the Riviera as though they were in a sanatorium for neurotics. I'm going to go on doing something with life, and my place is here. We'll go abroad, only I'll make her fight for it, or she'll feel she's running the whole show. Then I'll come back here, and I'll take Alec Kynance's show right away from him!"

"Mr. Kynance is here!" announced his secretary.

-22-

CHAPTER 3

Mr. Alexander Kynance, president of the Unit Automotive Company, was a small bustling man with a large head, an abrupt voice, a live-ly mind, a magnificent lack of scruples, and a love for oratory and Corona Coronas. He had been a section-hand, a railway superinten-dent, he had the best cellar of Burgundies in Detroit, and he made up for his runtiness by barking at people.

"Everything all ready? Everything all ready?" he barked at Sam Dodsworth, as the dozen representatives of the two companies set-tled down and rested their elbows on the gigantic mirror-surfaced table in the gold and oak directors'-room.

"I think so," Sam drawled.

"Just a few things left," said Kynance. "We've about decided to run the Revelation in between the Chromecar and the Highroad in class — drop it three hundred below your price — two-door sedan at eleven-fifty."

Sam wanted to protest. Hadn't he kept the price down to the very lowest at which his kind of a car could be built? But suddenly — what difference did it make? The Revelation wasn't his master, his religion! He was going to have a life of his own, with Fran, a lovely loyal Fran, whom he'd imprisoned here in Zenith!

Let's go!

He was scarcely listening to Kynance's observations on retaining the slogan "You'll revel in a Revelation." Sam had always detested

-23-

this battlecry. It was the invention of a particularly bright and bounding young copy-writer who took regular exercise at the Y.M.C.A., but the salesmen loved it. As Kynance snapped, "Good slogan — good slogan — full of pep," Sam mused:

"They're all of them human megaphones....And I'm tired."

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When he had rather sadly signed the transfer of control to the U.A.C. and his lifework was over, with no chance for retreat, Sam shook hands a great deal with a number of people, and was left alone with Alec Kynance.

"Now to real business, old man," Kynance blatted. "You'll be tickled to death at getting hooked up with a concern that can control the world-market one of these days — regular empire, b's God! — instead of crawling along having to depend on a bunch of so-so assistants. We want you to come with us, of course. I haven't been hinting around. Hinting ain't my way. When Alec Kynance has something to say, by God he shoots! I want to offer you the second vice-presidency of the U.A.C., in general charge of production of all our eight makes of cars, including the Rev. You've been getting sixty thousand salary, besides your stock?"

"Yes."

"We can offer you eighty-five, and your share in the managers' pool, with a good chance for a hundred thou in a few years, and you'll probably succeed me when the bootlegged hootch gets me. And you'll have first-class production men under you. You can take it easy and just think up mean ideas to shove over. Other night you were drooling about how you'd like to make real Ritzy motor caravans with electric stoves and radios and everything built in. Try it! We've got the capital. And this idea you had about a motorized touring school for boys in summer. Try it! Why, God, we might run all these summer

-34-

camps out of business and make a real killing — get five hundred thousand customers — kid that hadn't gone on one of our tours, no class to him at all! Try it! And the U.A.O. getting into aeroplane manufacture. Go ahead. Draw up your plans. Yes sir, that's the kind of support we give a high-class man. When do you want to go to work? I suppose you'll have to move to Detroit, but you can get back here pretty often. Want to start right in, and see things zip?"

Sam's fantastic schemes for supercaravans, for an ambulatory summer school in which boys should see the whole country, from Maine pines to San Joaquin wheat-fields, which he had found stimulating and not very practical, were soiled by the lobster-faced little man's insistence on cashing in. No!

"First, I think I'll take a vacation," Sam said doubtfully. "Haven't had a real one for years. Maybe I'll run over to Europe. May stay three months or so."

"Europe? Rats! Dead's a doornail! Place for women and long-haired artists. Dead! Only American loans that keep 'em from burying the corpse! All this art! More art in a good shiny spark-plug than in all the fat Venus de Mylos they ever turned out. Naw! Go take a run through California, maybe grab a drink of good liquor in Mexico, and then come with us. Look here, Dodsworth. My way of being diplomatic is to come out flat. You necking around with some other concern? We can't wait. We got to turn out the cars! I can't keep this open, and I've offered you our pos-o-lutely highest salary. That's the way we do business. Yes or no?"

"I'm not flirting with any other company. I've had several offers and turned them down. Your offer is fair."

"Fine! Let's sign the contract right now. Got her here! Put down your John Hancock, and begin to draw the ole salary from this minute, with a month's vacation on pay! How's that?"

-25-

With the noisiness of a little man making an impression, Ky-
nance slapped the contract on the glowing directors'-table, flour-
ished an enormous red and black fountain pen, and patronizingly
poked Sam in the shoulder.

Irritably Sam rumbled, "I can't tie myself up without thinking it over. I'll give you my answer as soon as I can. Probably in a week or so. But I may want to take a four-months rest in Europe.

Never mind about the pay meanwhile. Rather feel free."

"My God, man, what do you think is the purpose of life? Loaf-
ing? Getting by with doing as little as you can? I tell you, what
I always say is: there's no rest like a little extra work! You
ain't tired — you're just fed up with this backwoods town. Come up
to Detroit and see how we make things hum! Come sit in with us and
hear us tell Congress where it gets off. Work! That's the caper!
I tell you," with a grotesque, evangelical sonorousness, "I tell you,
Dodsworth, to me, work is a religion. 'Turn not thy hand from the
plow.' Do big things! Think of it; by making autos we're enabling
half the civilized world to run into town from their pig-sties and
see the movies, and the other half to get out of town and give Na-
ture the once-over. Twenty million cars in America! And in twenty
more years we'll have the bloomin' Tibetans and Abyssinians riding
on cement roads in U.A.C. cars! Talk about Napoleon! Talk about
Shakespeare! Why, we're pulling off the greatest miracle since the
Lord created the world!

"Europe? How in hell would you put _in_ four months? Think you could stand more 'n ten art galleries? I _know_! I've seen Europe! Their Notre Dame is all right for about half an hour, but I'd rather see an American assembly-plant, thousand men working like a watch, than all their old, bum-lighted, tumble-down churches ——"

It was half an hour before Sam got rid of Kynance without antag-
onizing him, and without signing a contract.

-36-

"I'd like," Sam reflected, "to sit under a linden tree for six straight months and not hear one word about Efficiency or Doing Big Things or anything more important than the temperature of the beer — if there is anything more important."

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He had fallen into rather a rigid routine. Most days, between office and home, he walked to the Union Club in winter, drove to the golf course in summer. But tonight he was restless. He could not endure the fustiness of the old boys at the club. His chauffeur would be waiting there, but on his way to the club Sam stopped, with a vague notion of tasting foreignness, at a cheap German restaurant. It was dark, quiet, free of the bouncing grandeur of Kynances. At a greasy oil-cloth covered table he sat sipping coffee and nibbling at sugar-crusted coffee-cake.

"Why should I wear myself out making more money for myself — no, for Kynance! He will like hell take my caravans away from me!"

He dreamed of a very masterwork of caravans: a tiny kitchen with electric stove, electric refrigerator; a tiny toilet with shower-bath; a living-room which should become a bedroom by night — a living-room with a radio, a real writing desk; and on one side of the caravan, or at the back, a folding verandah. He could see his caravanners dining on the verandah in a forest fifty miles from any house.

"Kind of a shame to have 'em ruin any more wilderness. Oh, that's just sentimentality," he assured himself. "Let's see. We ought to make that up —" He was figuring on a menu. "We ought to produce those in quantities for seventeen hundred dollars, and our selling-point will be the saving in hotel bills. Like to camp in one myself! I will not let Kynance have my ideas! He'd turn the caravans out, flimsy and uncomfortable, for eleven hundred, and all he'd think about would be how many we could slam on the market. Ky-

-27-

nance! Lord, to take his orders, to stand his backslapping, at
fifty! No!"

The German restaurant-keeper said, as one content with all
seasons and events, "Pretty bad snow tonight."

"Yes."

And to himself:

"There's a fellow who isn't worrying about Doing Big Things. And work isn't his religion. His religion is roast goose, which has some sense to it. Yes, let's go, Fran! Then come back and play with the caravan.....Or say, for an elaborate rig, why not two caravans, one with kitchen and toilet and stores, other with living-bedroom, and pitch 'em back to back, with a kind of train vestibule door, and have a real palace for four people?..... I would like to see Monte Carlo. Must be like a comic opera."

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His desire for Monte Carlo, for palms and sunshine and the es-
timable fish of the Prince of Monaco, was enhanced by jogging through
the snowstorm in his car, by being held up in drifts, and <u>undergoing</u>
clutching the <u>involving</u> seat during a rather breathless slide up-
hill to Ridge Crest. But when he entered the warmth of the big
house, when he sat in the library alone (Fran was not yet back from
the Children's Welfare Bridge), with a whisky-soda and a volume of
Masereel woodcuts, when he considered his deep chair and the hearth-
log and the roses, Sam felt <u>all</u> the security of his own cave and
the assurance to be found in familiar work, in his office-staff,
in his clubs, his habits and, most of all, his friends and Fran
and the children.

He regarded the library contentedly: the many books, some of
them read — volumes of history, philosophy, travels, detective
stories; the oak-framed fireplace with a Mary Cassatt portrait of
children above it; the blue davenport; the Biedermeyer rug from

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Fran's kin in Germany; the particularly elaborate tantalus.

"Pretty nice. Hotels — awful! Oh yes, I'll probably go over to the U.A.O. But maybe take six weeks or a couple of months in Europe, then move to Detroit. But not sell this house! Been mighty happy here. Like to come back here and spend our old days. When I really make my pile, I'll do something to help turn Zenith into another Detroit. Get a million people here. Only, plan the city right. Make it the most beautiful city in the world. Not just sit around on my chair in Europe and look at famous cities, but make one!"

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Once a month, Sam's closest friends, Tub Pearson, his humorous classmate who was now the gray and oracular president of the Centaur State Bank, Dr. Henry Hazzard, the heart specialist, Judge Turpin, and Wheeler, the packing-house magnate, came in for dinner and an evening of poker, with Fran as hostess at dinner but conveniently disappearing after it.

She whisked in from her charity bridge as he was going up to dress. In her sleek coat of gray squirrel she was like a snow-sprinkled cat pouncing on flying leaves. She tossed her coat and hat to the waiting maid, and kissed Sam abruptly. She was virginal as the winter wind, this girl who was the mother of Emily about to be married.

"Terrible bore, the bridge. I won seventeen dollars. I'm a good little bridge-player, I am. We must hustle, it's almost dinner time oh what a bore Lucile McKelvey is with her perpetual gabble about Italy I bet I'll learn more Italian in three weeks than she has in three trips come on my beloved we are late!"

"We are going then?"

"Going where?"

"To Europe."

-29-

"Oh, I don't know. Think how nice it would be for you to
"pitch a wicked horseshoe," as dear Tub would say, in Florida."

"Oh, quit it!"

As they tramped up-stairs he tucked his arm about her, but she
released herself, she smiled at him too brightly — smile glitter-
ing and flat as white enamel paint — urbane smile that these twen-
ty years had made him ashamed of his longing for her, and said,
"We must hurry, lamb." And too brightly she added, "Don't drink
too
much tonight. It's all right with people like Tub Pearson, but
Judge Turpin is so conservative — I know he doesn't like it."

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She had a high art of deflating him, of enfeebling him, with
one quick, innocent-sounding phrase. By the most careless comment
on his bulky new overcoat she could make him feel like a lout in
it; by crisply suggesting that he "try for once to talk about some-
thing besides motors and stocks," while they rode to a formidable
dinner to an elocutionary senator, she could make him feel so un-
intelligent that he would be silent all evening. The easy self-
confidence which weeks of industrial triumphs had built up in him
she could flatten in five seconds. She was, in fact, a genius at
planting in him as assurance of his inferiority. Thus she did
tonight, in her nicest and friendliest way, and instantly the lum-
bering Ajax began to look doubtfully toward the poker he had al-
ways enjoyed, to fear the opinion of Judge Turpin — an eye-glassed
sparrow of a man who had nothing seemed to admire Sam, and who
showed his reverence for the law by taking illicit drink for drink
with him.

Sam felt unworthy and apologetic till he had dressed and been
cheered by a glimpse of his daughter, Emily.

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Emily, as a child, had been his companion; he had always under-

-30-

stood her, seemed nearer to her than to Fran. She had been a Tom boy, sturdy of shoulder, jolly as an old family dog out on a walk.

He used to come to the nursery door, lamenting:

"Milord, the Duke of Buckin'um lies wownded at the gate!"

Emily and Brent would wail joyously, "Not seriowsly, I hope," and he answer, "Mortually, I fear."

They had paid him the compliment of being willing to play with him, Emily more than the earnest young Brent.

But Emily had been drawn, these last five years, into the tempestuous life of young Zenith; dances, movie parties, swimming in summer, astonishingly unrestricted companionship with any number of boys; a life which bewildered Sam. Now, at twenty, she was to be married to Harry McKee, assistant general manager of the Vandering Bolt and Nut Company (considered in Zenith a most genteel establishment); ex-tennis-champion, captain during the Great War, a man of thirty-four who wore his clothes and his slang dashingly. The parties had redoubled, and Sam realized wistfully that Emily and he had no more of their old, easy, chuckling talks.

As he marched down to supervise the cocktails for dinner, Emily flew in, blown on the storm, crying at him, "Oh Samivel, you old beautiful! You look like a grand duke in your dinner jacket! You sweet thing! Damn it, I've got to be at Mary Edge's in twenty minutes!"

She galloped up-stairs, and he stood looking after her, and sighed.

"I'd better begin to dig in against the lonely sixties," he brooded.

He shivered as he went out to tell the butler-for-the-evening how to prepare the cocktails, after which, he knew, the butler would prepare them to suit himself, and probably drink most of them.

Insert over

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Sam remembered that this same matter of a butler for parties only
had been the subject of rather a lot of pourparlers between Fran and
himself. She wanted a proper butler in the house, always. And certainly
they could afford one. But every human being has certain extravagances
which he dare not assume, lest he offend the affectionate WICKED WIFE and
jeering friends of his youth -- the man who has ventured on spats dares
not take to a monocle -- the statesman who has ventured on humor dares
not be so presumptuous as to venture on honesty also. Somehow, Sam be-
lieved that he could not face Tub Pearson if he had anything so effete
as a regular butler in the house, and Fran had not won.....not yet.

-51-

line blank

Tub Pearson — the Hon. Thos. J. Pearson, former state-senator, honorary LL.D. of Winnemac University, president of the Centaur State Bank, director in twelve companies, trustee of the Loring Grammar School and of the Zenith Art Institute, chairman of the Mayor's City Planning Commission — Tub Pearson was still as much the jester as he had been at Yale. He and his lively wife Matilde, known as "Matey," had three children, but neither viceregal honors nor domesticity had overlaid Tub's view of himself as a natural comedian.

All through the poker-game, at the large table in Sam's library, where they sat with rolled-up sleeves and loosened collars, gratified sighs, gurgling their whisky-sodas, Tub jabbed at Judge Turpin for sentencing bootleggers while he himself enjoyed his whisky as thoroughly as any one in Zenith. When they rested — that is to say, filled their glasses — at eleven, and Sam suggested, "May not have any more poker with you lads for a while?" and I may trot over to Europe for six months or so," then Tub had an opportunity suitable to his powers.

"Six months! That's elegant, Sambo. You'll come back with an English accent: 'Hy sye, hold chappie, cawn't I 'ave the honor of raising the bloomin' pot a couple o' berries, dear old dream?'"

"Ever hear an Englishman talk like that?"

"No, but you will! Six months! Oh, don't be a damn' fool! Go for two months, and then you'll be able to appreciate getting back to a country where you can get ice and a bath-tub."

"I know it's a heresy," Sam drawled, "but I wonder if there aren't a few bath-tubs in Europe? Think I'll go over and see. My deal."

He did not show it; he played steadily, a rectangular-faced, large man, a cigar gripped in his mouth, cards dwarfed in his wide

-32-

hand, but he was raging within:

"I've been doing what people expected me to, all my life, Football in college, when I'd as soon have stuck in the physics laboratory. Make money and play golf and be a good Republican ever since. Human cash-register! I'm finished! I'm going!"

But they heard from him only "Whoop you two more. Cards?"

-33-

CHAPTER 4

It was late when Sam yawned up to bed. Their poker had lasted till after one. The spacious chamber was half lighted from the bathroom. The dusky light caught the yellow silk curtains by her bed, the crystal on her wide dressing-table. She had left the windows closed, and the air was not unpleasantly stuffy with cold cream, powder, and steaminess lingering from a hot bath scented with bath salts.

He was eager for her breathing presence. His determination to escape with her had made Fran seem nearer and more desirable than in months, but as he felt guilty about awakening her, he did not admit that he was doing anything so unkind — he merely dropped his shoes loudly.

She looked startled when she awoke. How many times she had looked startled, a little incredulous, when she stirred to discover him beside her! She turned on her bedside light, she looked at him vaguely, as though she wasn't quite sure who he was, but, after all, one had to be polite. She was incredibly young and unmarked with wrinkles, a girl in a lace nightgown edged at the neck with white fur.

He plumped down on the bed beside her, kissed her shoulder. She suffered it, unresponding, and said, too cheerily, "Please no! Not now. Listen dear, I want to talk. Ohhhh, gee, I'm sleepy! I tried to stay awake till you came up, but I dozed off. So I shamed!

-34-

But pull up the big chair and listen."

"Don't you want me to kiss you?"

"Why do you always ask that? In that hurt way? You're so silly! You know you've had several drinks. Oh, I don't mind — though Tub and you, for men that are responsible citizens and don't really drink at all, always do manage to tuck away a lot too much! I don't mind. But don't you think it's a little icky, this sudden passion for embracing when you're — well, exhilarated?"

"Good Heavens, my dear man, haven't I been your wife for twenty-two years? Oh, please, dear, don't be quarrelsome! Have I done something to hurt you? I'm so, so terribly sorry! I am, truly, dear. Kiss me!"

In was the coolest, most brief of kisses that she gave him and, though the chore done, most briskly she rattled, "Now pull up the big chair and listen, dear. Or would you rather wait till tomorrow?" She added, with the imitation of baby-talk which ordinarily tickled him, "Is most awful important!"

He dragged the wing-chair to the edge of her bed and decorously sat down, wagging a varnished pump, but he said testily, "Good Lord, you don't need to coax. Let's have it."

"Oh, don't be such an old grump! Now I ask you: is that fair? Because I don't like the reek of whisky? Would you like it on my breath?"

"No. But I didn't take much. But — Never mind. Listen, Fran. I know what you want. And I've decided. Kynance tried to tie me up with a contract to go to work right away, but I refused. So we'll go to Europe, and maybe for four-five months!"

"Oh, That." With all his experience of her zig-zag incalculability, her shreds of knowledge that seemed to have no source, her

-35-

ambitions and desires that seemed not worth the pains, her veiled
resentment of hurts which he had not meant to inflict, her amiabili-
ity when he had expected her to be angry, he was surprised now at
her indifference. "It's more fundamental than going to Europe.
See here, Sam. Even if I didn't want to, oh, kiss you — Sorry
I don't seem to be more passionate. I wish I were, for your sake.
But apparently I'm not. But even so, we have been happy, haven't
we! We have built something pretty fine!"

"Yes, we have. What's worrying —"

"Even if we haven't been wild operatic lovers, I do think we
mean something awfully deep and irreplaceable to each other. Don't
we?"

His touchy ardor gave way to affection. He reached his long arm
out and patted her slight, nervous fingers. "Yes. We differ on a
lot of things, but I guess we've got something solid for each other
that we can't find in anybody else."

"Something really permanent, Sam? Dependable? So we're like
two awfully good friends backing each other in a terrible street
fight?"

"Absolutely. But what's —"

"Listen. We've done the first part of our jobs. We've made
enough money. We've brought up the children. You have something
to show for your work — this really marvelous car that you've
created. And yet we're still young, comparatively. Oh, let's not
settle down into contentment with the dregs of life! Let's have a
new life, all over, and not worry any more about duties (and I've
had my own, young man — if you think it's easy to run a house like
this, and entertain everybody!). Let's — oh, it's hard to express
it, but I mean: let's not tie ourselves down to saying we'll come
back from Europe (but it was sweet of you, dear, to consent without

-36-

making me beg), but I mean: let's not insist that we **have** to be
back from Europe in four months — yes, or four years! On the other
hand, if we don't like it, let's not feel we have to stay; let's
take the first boat back. But let's — Oh please now, get this!
Let's start out of this stupid old town without one single solitary
plan in our heads beyond landing in Europe, and coming back when we
really want to, and going where we please when we please. Maybe we'll
be back after two months on the Riviera, and then again, forty years
from now, we may be living in a bamboo shack in Java and thumbing our
moses at anybody who doesn't like it! Why, I'd almost like to sell
this house, so we won't have anything to bind us."

"You're not serious? Good Lord, we couldn't do that! Why,
it's our home! Wouldn't know what to do if we didn't have a safe
harbor like this to come back to! Why, we've built ourselves into
this old place, from the Radiola to the new garage doors. I guess
I know every dahlia in the garden by its middle name! I love the
place the way I do Emily and you and the boy. Only place where we
can slam the door and tell everybody to go to hell and be ourselves!"

"But perhaps we'll get us some new selves, without losing the
old ones. You'd — oh, you could be so magnificent, so tall and
impressive and fine, if you'd let yourself be, if you didn't feel
you had to be just an accessory to a beastly old medium-priced car,
if you'd get over this silly fear that people might think you
were affected and snobbish if you demanded the proper respect from
them! There **are** great people in the world — dukes and ambassadors
and generals and scientists and — And I don't believe that
essentially they're one bit bigger than we are. It's just that
they've been trained to talk of world-affairs, instead of the price
of vanadium and what Mrs. Hibbletebibble is going to serve at her
Hallowe'en party. I'm going to be one of 'em! I'm not afraid of

-37-

'em! If you'd only get over this naive passion for 'simplicity'
and all those nice peasant virtues and let yourself be the big man
that you really are! Not meekly say to His Excellency that though
you look like a grand-duke, you're really only little Sammy Dods-
worth of Zenith! He won't know it unless you insist on telling him!
.....And perhaps an ambassadorship for you, after you've been abroad
long enough to learn the tricks..... Only to do all that, to grab
the world, we must _not_ be bound by the feeling that we're tied to
this slow-pokey Zenith till death do us part from the fun of ad-
venturing!'

"But to sell the house ——"

"Oh, we don't need to do that, of course, silly — not at first.
I just mean it as an example of how free we ought to be. Of course
we wouldn't sell it. Heavens, we may be delighted to slink back
here in six months! But don't let's plan to, that's what I mean.
Oh, Sam, I'm absolutely not going to let my life be over at forty
— well, at forty-one, but no one ever takes me for more than
thirty-five or even thirty-three. And life would be over for me
if I simply went on forever with the idiotic little activities in
this half-baked town! I won't, that's all! You can stay here if
you insist, but I'm going to take the lovely things that — I have
a right to take them, because I understand them! What do I care
whether some club of human, or half-human, tabby-cats in eye-glasses
study dietetics or Lithuanian art next year? What do I care whether
a pretentious bunch of young millionaire manufacturers have an imi-
tation English polo team?..... when I could have the real thing, in
England! And yet if we stay here, we'll settle down to doing the
same things over and over. We've drained everything that Zenith
can give us — yes, and almost everything that New York and Long
Island can give us. And in this beastly country —— In Europe,

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a woman at forty is just getting to the age where important men take
a serious interest in her. But here, she's a grandmother. The Map-
pers think I'm as venerable as the bishop's wife. And they make me
old, with their confounded respectfulness — and their charming re-
joicing when I go home from a dance early — I who can dance better,
yes, and longer, than any of them —"

"Now, now!"

"Well, I can! And so could you, if you didn't let business
sap every single ounce of energy you have! But at the same time —
I only have five or ten more years to continue being young in. It's
the dernier cartouche. And I won't waste it. Can't you understand?
Can't you understand? I mean it, desperately! I'm begging for
life — no I'm not! — I'm demanding it! And that means something
more than a polite little Cook's trip to Europe!"

"But see here now! Do you actually mean to tell me, Fran,
that you think that just moving from Zenith to Paris is going to
change everything in your life and make you a kid again? Don't you
realize that probably most people in Paris are about like most
people here, or anywhere else?"

"They aren't, but even if they were —"

"What do you expect out of Europe? A lot of culture?"

"No! 'Culture'! I loathe the word, I loathe the people who
use it! I certainly do not intend to collect the names of a lot of
painters — and of soups — and come back and air them. Heavens,
it isn't just Europe! We may not stay there at all. It's being
free to wander wherever we like, as long as we like, or to settle
down and become part of some community or some set if we like, and
not feel that we have a duty to come back here. Oh, I could love you
so much more if we weren't a pair of old horses in a treadmill!"

They sailed for Southampton in February, three weeks after

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Emily's wedding.

They had rented the house for a year, and Fran made a very decent bargain of it, including that matter of the extra rent for linen and silver. Sam was absorbed in completing the Revelation Company transfer, and in answering Fran when she complained, "Oh, work's become a disease with you! You go on with it when there's no need. Let the underlings finish up. Dear, it's because I do love you that ----- Do you think you'll ever learn to enjoy leisure, to enjoy just being yourself and not an office? You're not going to make me feel guilty for having dragged you away, are you?"

"By God, I'll enjoy life if it kills me — and it probably will!" he grumbled. "You've got to give me time. I've started this business of being 'free' about thirty-five years too late. I'm a good citizen. I've learned that Life is real and Life is earnest and the presidency of a corporation is its goal. What would I be doing with anything so degenerate as enjoying myself?"

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CHAPTER 5

The S.S. Ultima, thirty-two thousand tons burden, was four
hours out of New York. As the winter twilight glowered on the tangle
of gloomy waves, Samuel Dodsworth was aware of the domination of
the sea, of the insignificance of the great ship and all mankind. He
felt lost in the round of ocean, one universal gray gash for a golden
on the New York ferries. He felt uneasy as he stood at the after
rail and saw how the rearing mass of the sea loomed over the ship
and threatened it when the stern dipped — down, unbelievably down,
as though she were sinking. But he felt resolute again, strong and
very happy, as he swung about the deck. He had been sickish only
for the first hour. The wind filled his chest, exhilarated him.
Only now, the messy details of packing and farewells over, and the
artificially prolonged waving to friends on the dock endured, did
he feel that he was actually delivered from duty, actually going —
going to strange-colored, exciting places, to do unknown and heroic
things.

He hummed (for Kipling meant something to Sam Dodsworth which
no Shelley could, nor Dante) — he hummed "The Gipsy Trail":

Follow the Romany patteran
North where the blue bergs sail,
And the bows are gray with the frozen spray,
And the masts are shod with mail.
Follow the Romany patteran
West to the sinking sun,

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Till the junk-sails lift through the houseless drift,
And the East and the West are one.

Follow the Romany patteran
East where the silence broods

By a purple wave on an opal beach
In the hush of the Mahim woods.

"Free!" he muttered.

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He stopped abruptly by the line of windows enclosing the music-
room, forward on the promenade deck, as he fumbled for the memory of
the first time he had ever sung "The Gipsy Trail."

It must have been when the poem was first set to music. Any-
way, Fran and he had been comparatively poor. The money that old
Herman Voelker had lent them had gone into the business. (A sud-
den, meaningless spatter of snow, out on that cold sea. How serene
the lights in the music room! He began to feel the gallant security
of the ship, his enduring home.) Yes, it was when they
had gone off on a vacation — no chauffeur then, nor suites at the
best hotels, but Sam driving all day in their shabby Revelation,
with sleep in an earth-scented, wind-stirred tent. They had driven
West — West, two thousand miles toward the sunset, till it seemed
they must indeed come on the Pacific and junk-sails lifting against
the misted sun. They had no responsibilities of position. Together
they chanted "The Gipsy Trail," vowing that some day they would wan-
der together —

And they were doing it!

Such exultation filled him, such overwhelming tenderness, that
he wanted to dash down to their cabin and assure himself that he
still had the magic of Fran's companionship. But he remembered with
what irritable efficiency she had been unpacking. He had been mar-
ried for over twenty years. He stayed on deck.

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He explored the steamer. It was to him, the mechanic, the most sure and impressive mechanism he had ever seen; more satisfying than a Rolls, a Delauney-Belleville, which to him had been the equivalents of a Velasquez. He marveled at the authoritative steadiness with which the bow mastered the waves; at the powerful sweep of the lines of the deck and the trim stowing of cordage. He admired the first officer, casually pacing the bridge. He wondered that in this craft which was, after all, but a floating iron egg-shell, there should be the roseate music room, the smoking-room with its Tudor fireplace — solid and terrestrial as a castle — and the swimming-pool, green-lighted water washing beneath Roman pillars. He climbed to the boat deck, and some never realized desire for sea-faring was satisfied as he looked along the sweep of gangways, past the huge lifeboats, the ventilators like giant saxophones, past the lofty funnels serenely dribbling black woolly smoke, to the forward mast. The snow-gusts along the deck, the mysteriousness of this new world but half seen in the frosty lights, only stimulated him. He shivered and turned up his collar, but he was pricked to imaginativeness, standing outside the wireless room, by the crackle of messages springing across bleak air-roads ocean-bounded to bright snug cities on distant plains.

"I'm at sea!"

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He tramped down to tell Fran — he was not quite sure what it was that he wanted to tell her, save that steamers were very fine things indeed, and that ahead of them, in the murk of the horizon, they could see the lanes of England.

She, in their cabin with its twin brass beds, its finicking

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imitations of gray-blue French prints on the paneled walls, was amid a litter of shaken-out frocks, heaps of shoes, dressing gowns, Coty powder, three gift copies of "The American Tragedy," binoculars, steamer letters, steamer telegrams, the candy and the Charles & Company baskets of overgrown fruit and tiny conserves with which they were to help out the steamer's scanty seven meals a day, his dress-shirts (of which he was to, and certainly would not, put on a fresh one every evening), and French novels (of which she was to, and certainly wouldn't, read one in a stately, aloof, genteel manner every day on deck).

"It's terrible!" she lamented. "I'll get things put away just about in time for landing....Oh, here's a wireless from Emily, the darling, from California. Harry and she seem to be standing the honeymoon about as well as most victims."

"Chuck the stuff. Come out on deck. I love this ship. It's so ______ Man certainly has put it over Nature for once! I think I could 've built ships! Come out and see it."

"You do sound happy. I'm glad. But I must unpack. You skip along ______"

It was not often, these years, that he was kittenish, but now he picked her up, while she kicked and laughed, lifted her over a pile of sweaters and tennis shoes and bathing-suits and skates, kissed her, and shouted, "Come on! It's our own honeymoon! Elop-ing! Have I ever remembered to tell you that I adore you? Come up and see some ocean with me. There's an awful lot of ocean around this ship......Oh, damn the unpacking!"

He sounded, I think, a little masterful, but it was always a satisfaction, when he was masterful, to have her consent to be mastered. He was pleased now to have her stop being efficient about this business of enjoying life, and consent to do something for no reason

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except that it was agreeable.

In her shaggy Burberry, color of a dead maple leaf, and her
orange Tam O'Shanter, she suggested autumn days and brown
uplands. She was a girl; certainly no mother of a married daughter.
He was cumbersomely proud of her, of the glances which the men pas-
sengers snatched at her as the swung round the deck.

"Funny how it comes over a fellow suddenly — I mean — this
is almost the first time we've ever really started out like lovers
— no job to call us back. You were dead right, Fran — done enough
work — now we'll live! Together — always! But I'll have so much
to learn, to keep up with you. You, and Europe! Hell, I'm so sen-
timental! D' you mind? Just come out of state prison! Did twenty
years!"

Round and round the deck. The long stretch on the starboard
side, filthy with deck chairs, with rug-wadded passengers turning a
pale green as the sea rose, with wind-ruffled magazines, cups left
from teatime, and children racing with toy carts. The narrow pas-
sage aft, where the wind swooped on them, pushing them back, and the
steamer dipped so that they had to labor up-hill, bending forward,
their limbs of lead. But, as they toiled, a glimpse of ship mys-
teries that were stirring to land-bound imaginations they looked
a hatchway down into — some one said there were half a dozen Brazil-
ian cougars being shipped down there — and along a dizzy aerial
gangway to the after deck and the wheelhouse and a lone light in
the weaving darkness they saw the last glimmer of the streaky wake
stretching back to New York.

Then, blown round the corner, released from climbing upward,
a dash along the cold port side, blessedly free of steamer chairs
and of lardy staring. Swinging at five miles an hour. The door
of the smoking-room, with a whiff of tobacco smoke, a pleasant reek

-45-

of beer, a sound of vocal Americans. The place where the deck wi-
dened into an alcove — thick walls of steel, dotted with lines of
rivets smeared with thick white paint — and the door of the stew-
ardi' pantry from which, in the afternoon, came innumerable sand-
wiches and cakes and cups and pots of tea. The double door to the
main stairway, where, somehow, a stewardess in uniform was always
talking to a steward. The steel-gripped windows of the music room,
with a glimpse of unhappy young-old women, accompanying their mothers
abroad, sitting flapping through magazines. Where the deck was un-
enclosed, the yellow scoured rail and the white stanchions, bright
in the deck light, brighter against the dark coil of sea. Always
before them, the long straight lines of the decking planks, rigid
as bars of music, divided by seams of glistening tar. Deck — ship
— at sea

Then forward, and the people along the rail — bold voyagers
facing the midwinter Atlantic through glass windows — honeymooners
quickly unclasping as the pestiferous deck-
circlers passed — aged and sage gentlemen commenting on the infer-
iority of the steerage passengers who, forward on the deck below,
altogether innocent of being condescendingly observed by the
gentry-by-right-of-passage-money, jigged beside a tarpaulin-covered
hatch to the pumping music of an accordion, and blew blithely on
frosted fingers.

And round all over again, walking faster, turning from casual
pedestrians into competitors in the ocean marathon. Faster. Cutting
corners more sharply. Superior to thrusting wind, to tilting deck.
Gaining on that lone, lean, athletic girl, and passing her.....

"That's the way to walk! Say, Fran, I wonder if sometime we
couldn't get away from hotels and sort of take a walking-trip along
the coast when we get there.

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he had always rather irritably detested.

Toward the seven deadly arts Sam had had the inarticulate reverence which an Irish policeman might have toward a shrine of the Virgin on his beat.... that little light seen at three of a winter's morning. They were to him romance, escape, and he was irritated when they were presented to him as a preacher presents the virtues of sobriety and chastity. He hadn't the training to lose himself in Bach or Goethe; but in Chesterton, in Schubert, in a Corot, he had been able to forget motors and Alec Kynance, and always he had chuckled over the gay anarchy of Mencken. But with rising stubbornness he asserted that if he had to take the arts as something in which he must pass an examination, he would chuck them altogether and be content with poker.

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As Fran had both a sitting and a fitting that afternoon (to Sam they seemed much the same, except that Fran's costumer was more virile and less grasping than her portrait-painter) he had a whole afternoon off.

Secretly, a little guiltily, he reflected, "I've done Notre Dame right, with Fran. Now I think I'll sneak off and see if I really like it! You can't tell! I might! Even though old Atkins says I have to.... Hell! I wish I were back home!"

Solemnly, his Baedeker shamelessly in hand, Sam lumbered out of his taxi before Notre Dame, and quite as shamelessly slipped off across the river to a café facing the cathedral. There, quietly, without Fran's quivers of appreciation, he began to feel at home.

He admitted the cathedral's gray domination. There was strength there; strength and endurance and wisdom. The flying buttresses eddied like wings. The whole cathedral expanded before his eyes; the work of human hands seemed to tower larger than the sky. He felt,

-173-

dimly and disconnectedly, that he too had done things with his hands;
that the motor car was no contemptible creation; that he was nearer
to the forgotten, the anonymous and merry and vulgar artisans who
had created this somber epic of stone, than was any Endicott-Everett
Atkins with his Adam's apple ecclesiastically throbbing as he uttered
pomposities about "the transition in Gothic motifs." How those cheery
artisans would have laughed -- drinking their wine, perhaps, at this
same corner!

He read in the Book of Words. (Did Ruskin and Cellini and Dante
actually travel without Baedekers? How strange it seemed, and new !)

"Notre Dame ..... in early Roman times the site was occupied by
a temple of Jupiter. The present church was begun in 1163."

He laid the book down and drifted into the pleasantest dreaming
he had known for all the fatal weeks since he had been adopted by the
Right People.

A temple of Jupiter. Priests in white robes. Sacrificial bulls
with patient wondering eyes, tossing their thick garlanded heads.
Chariots pounding across the square -- right across the river there!
The past, which had been to the young playing football, to the
man harrassed by building motor cars, only a flamboyant myth, was
suddenly authentic, and he walked with Julius Caesar, who in that mom-
ent ceased to be merely a drawing in a school-book, a ventriliquist's
dummy talking the kind of overgrammatical rot that only school-masters
could understand, and became a living, lively, talkative acquaintance,
having a drink here with Sam, and extraordinarily resembling
Roosevelt off-stage.

Heavy with meditation, happy in being unobserved and not having
to act up to the splendors of Fran, he paid his bill and ambled across
the bridge and into the cathedral.

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It bothered him, as always, that there were no prim and cushioned pews such as he knew in Protestant churches in America; it made the cathedral seem bare and a little unfriendly; but beside a vast pillar, eternal as mountains or the sea, he found a chair, tipped a verger, forgot his irritation with people who buzzed up and wanted to guide him, and lost himself in impenetrable thoughts.

He roused himself to read, patiently, in Baedeker: "Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of Henry II of England, was buried beneath the high altar in 1186. In 1430 Henry VI of England was crowned king of France and in 1560 Mary Stuart (afterward Mary Queen of Scots) was crowned as queen-consort of Francis II. The coronation of Napoleon I and Josephine de Beauharnais by Pope Pius VII (1804).... was celebrated here with great ceremony."

(And in Saurier's studio brassy women were chattering about the races!)

Plantagenet. Rearing lions on scarlet banners edged with bullion. Mary Stuart and her proud little head. Napoleon himself -- here, where Sam Dodsworth was sitting.

"Humph!" he said.

He stared at the Rose Window, but he was seeing what it meant, not what it said. He saw life as something greater and more exciting than food and a little sleep. He felt that he was no longer merely a pedler of motor cars; he felt that he could adventure into this Past about him -- and possibly adventure into the far more elusive Present. He saw, unhappily, that the Atkins and De Penable existence into which Fran had led him was not the realization of the "great life" for which he had yearned, but its very negation -- the bustle, the little snobberies, the cheap little titles, the cheap little patronage of "art."

"I'm going to get out of this town and do something -- Some- thing exciting. And I'll make her go with me! I've been too weak

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did about Mrs. Hauksbees, but it certainly knocks your eye
out! That big temple at Tanjore -- tower eleven stories high, all
carved. And the life there -- everything different -- smells different
(and sometimes not so good!) -- and the people still in masquerade cos-
tumes, and queer curry kind of grub, and Eurasian shops where the Babus
will tell you grand lies -- every one good for a mail-story, and a
philosophy -- say, I met a Buddhist priest that knew more about the
Christian Religion than the Archbishop of Canterbury on even Bill's
day. Oh, you ought to get out there, if you can take the time. And
then beyond India, Burma -- take a river-boat -- regular floating
market-place, with natives in funny turbans squatting all over the
decks -- go up the Irrawaddy to Mandalay and on to Bhamo. Or you can
get steamers at Rangoon for Penang and Sandoway and Akyab and Chitta-
gong and all kinds of fancy places."

(Rangoon: Akyab! Chittagong!)

"And then around to Java and China and Japan, and home by way of
California."

"I'd like to do it," said Sam. "Paris is a lovely city, but -- -- --"

"Oh, Paris! Paris is nothing but a post-graduate course in Broadway."

"Looks good to me," said the ex-Zenith-newspaperman.

"It would! Paris is a town for Americans that can't stand work,"
said Ross Ireland. "I'm keen to see America; tickled to death I'm go-
ing back in June. I've been away three years WWWWWWWWWW, first time
I've ever been away. I'm homesick as the devil. But I like my America
straight. I don't want it in the form of a lot of expatriates sitting
around Paris cafes, and being superior both to French peasants and Amer-
ican-humors. And when I want to travel, I want to travel! -- Say, you
land in Bangkok, with that big gold temple rising over the town, and
the boatmen singing in -- whatever it is that they do sing in -- or
you go to Moskow and see the moujiks in felt boots and sheepskin coats,

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with the church spires absolutely like white and gold lace-work against
the sky — Say, that's travel !"

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Yes. That's the stuff! Sam was going to travel like that. He'd
go — Oh, to Constantinople, back through Italy or Austria, and home
for his thirtieth class reunion. — just time to do it now, if he hustled.
Then Fran and he might start out again next autumn and see Egypt and
Morocco — Yes.

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It is a favorite American Credo that "if the acting is good enough,
you can enjoy a play in a language you don't understand as well as in
English." Fran held to that credo. Sam urgently did not. He hated
to sit through French plays, and when he returned to the hotel from
the New York Bar and Ross Ireland — from the Irrawaddy River and
Chittagong — he found Fran with tickets for "Le Singe qui Parle,"
a slightly bad temper, and the aviator Gioserro.

"You smell of whisky! Atrociously! Now please hurry and dress!
Captain Gioserro and you and I are going to the theater. Now please
hurry, can't you? I'll order the cocktails meanwhile. As you see,
I'm all ready. After the theater, we'll meet Renée de Penable and
some other people and dance."

As he dressed, Sam fretted, "French play! Humph! I won't know
which is the husband and which is the lover for at least the first
two acts!"

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If he slept at the play, he did it ever so modestly and retiringly,
and he was unusually polite to Madame de Penable, while they danced,
which was until Fran was approving on their way home, and quite
as easily as though they were back in Zenith, he asserted while they

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Would you mind handing me the cold-cream that's in the bathroom --
no -- no -- I think it's on the bureau -- oh, thanks --

"Yes, but I thought we could go home for just a couple
months, or maybe three, and then start out again. Say go West this
time, and sail for China and Japan and round to Rangoon and India
and so on."

"Yes, I'd like to do that some time.... Oh dear, how sleepy I
am!...... But not now, of course, now that we know nice things
of people here."

"But that's just what I mean! I don't think so. Oh, they're a lively bunch, and lots of 'em good families and so on, but I don't think they are."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean they're a bunch of wasters. All they do, Penable and
her whole gang, and Atkins's hangers-on aren't much better, all they
do is just dance and chatter and show off their clothes. Their
idea of a good time is just about that of a chorus-girl --"

Fran had been inattentive. She wasn't now. She snatched up a
lace wrap, slapped it about her shoulders over her nightgown, and
faced him, like a snarling white cat:

"Sam! Let's get this straight. I've felt you've been sulking,
that you've been too afraid to --"

"Too polite!"

"---say what you thought. Well, I'm sick and tired of having
to apologize, yes, to *apologize*, for the crime of having introduced
you to some of the nicest and most amusing people in Paris, and for
having backed you up when they were offended by your boorishness!
Am I to understand that you regard Madame de Penable and her whole
gang, as you so elegantly call it, *simply* rotters? May I point

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out to you that if I don't have quite so lively an appreciation of such
nature's noblemen as Mr. A. B. Hurd -----"

"Fran!"

"---yet possibly I may be a little better equipped to understand
really smart, cosmopolitan people than you are! Kindly let me remind
you that Renée de Pénable is the intimate friend of the most exclusive
aristocracy of the _ancien regime_ here -----"

"But is she? And what of it?"

"Will you _kindly_ stop sneering? You that are so fond of accusing
me of sneering! And my dear Samuel, you really don't do it so very
well! Delicate irony isn't your long suit, my dear good man!"

"Damn it, I won't be talked to like a stable boy!"

"Then don't act like one! And if I may be permitted to go on and
answer the charges which _you_ brought up, not I -- the whole subject is
thoroughly distasteful to me -- and oh Sam, so vulgar, so beastly vul-
gar!" For a second she was dramatically mournful and hurt, but in-
stantly she was a charging Gossack again: "But when you attack any
one that's been as sweet to me as Renée, all I can say is ----- Do you
happen to realize that she is the dearest friend of the Duchesse de
Quatrefleurs -- she's promised to take me down to the Duchess's chateau in
Burgundy -----"

"She's never done it!"

"_as it happens_, the Duchess is ill, just at the moment! And your
charming remark illustrates perfectly what I mean by your sneering!....
Or, to take the example of Renée's friend, Mrs. Sittingwall. She's the
widow of a very distinguished English general who was killed in the
war -----"

"He wasn't a general -- he was a colonel -- and now the woman is
engaged to that old rip of a French stock-broker, Andillet."

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"What of it? M. Andillet does dress too loudly, and he drives a car too fast, but he's a most amusing old dear, and he orders the best meal in Paris. And knows cabinet ministers -- bankers -- diplomats -- everybody that's influential."

"Well he looks to me like a crook. And what about the young gigolos that are always hanging around Mrs. Penable?"

"I do think it's too gracious of you to take the word 'gigolo,' which I taught you in the first place -----"

"You did not!"

"----- and use it against me, my dear polylingual Sam! I suppose you are referring to boys like Gioserro and Billy Dawson. Yes, they're not at all like American business men, are they! They actually enjoy being charming to women, they enjoy sharing their leisure with women, they dance beautifully, they talk about something besides the stock market -----"

"Oh, they enjoy leisure, all right! Oh now Fran, I don't mean to be nasty about them, but you know they graft on women -----"

"My dear man, Captain Gioserro (and he could call himself Count Gioserro, if he wanted to!) has a perfectly good family income, as his people have had before him, for generations -----" now!

"Whoa! Hold up! I question his having a very _good_ family income. I notice that whenever he's with us, he always manages to let me pay. Not that I mind, but ----- Why say, I've never seen him spend a cent except tonight, when he gave ten centimes to the fellow that opened the cab door. Now please listen, Fran, and don't go off into a tantrum. Don't you and Mrs. Penable almost always pay the bills -- for feeds, for taxis, for tips, for tickets -- for Gioserro and young Dawson and most of these other slick young men that she has hanging around?"

"What of it? We can afford it. Or are you" She became

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"What of it? We can afford it. (The name, by the way, as I re-marked several hundred times before, is Madame de Penable !) Or are you -----" She became regally outraged and deliberate. "-----" are you perhaps hinting that because you so generously support me, you have the right to dictate on whom and for what I spend every cent? Do you desire me to give you a detailed account of my expenses, like an office boy? Then let me remind you -- oh, this is so distasteful to me, but I must remind you that I have twenty thousand a year of my own, and now that I have a chance to be happy, with amusing people -----"

She was sobbing. He caught her shoulders, and demanded, "Will you stop self-dramatizing yourself, my young lady? You know, and you know good and well, that I'm criticizing these young men for grafting just because I want to point out that they're no good; nothing but a lot of butterflies."

She broke away from his grasp and from her own sobs, and she was tart again: "Then thank God for the butterflies! I'm so tired of the worthy ants!..... Sam, we might just as well have this out..... if we're going on together."

The last five words chilled him, nothing he could say could board. He was incredulous. She seemed a little to mean it, and she went on resolutely:

"Let's get it straight -- just what we are up to; what we want. Now that we are meeting them, do you appreciate people with wit and elegance, or have you already had enough of them? Are you going to insist on returning to -- oh, decent enough people, but people that can't see anything in life more amusing than poker and golf and motor-ing, that are afraid of suave manners, that think to be rough-neck is to be strong? Does the accumulated civilization of two thousand years of Europe mean something to you or -----"

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controversy?

And (each second he was more confused) just what was the controversy really about?

Anyway, she couldn't really have meant anything by her "if we're going on together." But suppose she had? Married couples did break up, quite incredibly, after years. Did he, in order to hold her, have to obey her, to associate forever with peacocks like this Mrs. Sitting-wall and this fellow Andillet -- who was certainly a little more than friendly with the Pénable woman?

No, hanged if he would!

But if that meant losing Fran? Good God! Why, now that he had to absorb him into her efforts/save Fran, Emily, Brent, and three or four friends like Tub Pearson. Nor would he have anything new: he doubted if any other job could ever stimulate him like building up the Revelation Company; he doubted if he would make any new friends; he doubted if travel, pictures, music, hobbies, would ever be anything more than diversions interesting for an hour at a time. And of what he had left to keep life tolerable, Fran was first. She was the reason for everything! It was a second, a renewed Fran reality that he loved in his daughter Emily. His business and his making of money had been all for Fran -- well no, maybe not all -- hell! how hard it was to be honest about one's own self -- maybe not all -- fun putting business across, too, but she'd been the chief reason for it, anyway. As for his friends -- Why, he'd've chucked even Tub, if Fran hadn't liked him!

Fran! That just the other day had been a girl, cool and sparkling and strange, on the Canoe Club porch, that had walked with him into the rain.

Good Lord, the Canoe Club had burned down twenty years ago!

In the radiant May of Paris, with the horse chestnuts out on the

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Champs Elysées, he sat huddled, feeling cold.

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He went to lunch with Fran, Madame de Penable, and Billy Dawson, a young American who was the airiest and most objectionable of the De Penable's gentleman valets. Sam was gravely polite. For two weeks he went with Fran and the De Penable's court to all sorts of restaurants reeking with cigarette smoke and expensive perfume and smart scandal. Between times, he sneaked off, like a small boy going to the circus, to low places, looking particularly for the roving correspondent, Ross Ireland, and when he found that Ireland was sailing on June fifteenth on the _Aquitania_, which would arrive in time for Sam's thirtieth reunion at Yale, he anxiously engaged a stateroom for "self & wife." He liked Ross Ireland; he found particularly amusing, very like his own cultural pretenses, the fact that since Ireland was totally unable to learn any language save Iowan, he thundered that English was "enough to take anybody anywhere" and that "these fellows that talk about having to know French if you're going to do political stuff in Europe are just trying to show what smart guys they are," he liked the way in which Ireland mingled stories of Burmese temples with stories of Old Doc Jevons back t's home in Ioway.

This lowness Sam kept from his wife, and the fact that he was agonizingly bored by not having enough to do. Yet his devotion did not win her back. There was a courteous coolness about her, always.

When he had definitely to know about returning to America, she answered briskly:

"Yes. I've thought it over. I can understand that you need to go back. But I'm not going. I've practically promised Renée de Penable to take a villa with her near Montreux for the summer. But I want you to go and see Tub and every one and thoroughly enjoy yourself, and then come back and join me in the late summer, and we'll think about the Orient."

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But when she saw him off at the Gare St Lazare she was suddenly
softened.

She cried, she clung, she sobbed, "Oh, I didn't realize how much
I'll miss you! Perhaps I'll come join you in Zenith. Do have the
very best time you can, darling. Go camping with Tub -- and give him
my love -- and tell him and Matey I hope they'll come over here -- and
try to get Em and Brent to come. Oh my dear, forgive your idiotic,
feather-brained wife! But let her have her foolish fling now! I did
make a real home for you, didn't I? I shall again. Take care of
yourself, my dear, and write me every day, and don't be angry with me --
or do be angry, if it'll make you any happier! Bless you!"

And the first day out she sent him a radio: "You are a big brown
bear and worth seventy-nine thousand gigolos even when their hair greased
best butter stop did I remember to tell you that I adore you".

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CHAPTER 16.

With Ambrose Channel ahead of them, Sam Dodsworth and his friend Ross Ireland spent a considerable part of their time in the smoking-room of the _Aquitania_ arguing with other passengers about the glories of America. Sam was appreciative enough, but Ross was eloquent, he was lyric, he was tremendous.

At praise of Paris, Cambodia, Oslo, Glasgow, or any other foreign pride, he snorted, "Look here, son, that's all apple-sauce, and I _know_! I've been hiking for three years. I've interviewed Count Bethlen and I've paddled up the Congo; I've done a swell piece about the Lena Gold Fields and I've driven three thousand miles in England. And believe me, I'm glad to be getting back to a real country, buddy!

"New York? Noisy? Say, why wouldn't it be noisy? It's got something going on! Believe me, they're remodeling all the old parts of Heaven after New York skyscrapers! Say, if we get past the perils of the deep and I have the chance to hang my hat up in Park Row again, you'll never get me farther away than an Elks' Convention at Atlantic City! And don't let anybody tell you that the Elks and the Rotarians and the National Civic Federation are any more grab-it-all than the English merchant, who hates our dollar-chasing so much that he wants to keep us from it by copping all the dollars/ or the elegant high-brow Frenchman who doesn't love the franc any more than he loves God. Why say, even about drinking — I'll admit I like a sidewalk cafe

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better than I do a speak-easy, but once I round up my old bunch at
Denny's and have a chance to stick my legs under the table with a lot
of real home-baked he-Americans instead of these imitation-Frog
Americans that loaf around abroad --- Boy!"

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Sam discovered, dropping into Ross Ireland's stateroom, that Ross
was guilty of secret intellectual practises. Except when, in morning
clothes, he was interviewing Lord Chancellors and Generals Commanding,
Ross felt that he must prove his sturdy independence by saying "Buddy,"
"Where d' you get that stuff," and "Oh bologny." He was never, by
any chance, "doing an analytical study" — at most he was "writing a
little piece." He addressed English stewards as "Cap'n," he asked
the Cockney smoking-room steward for his "check," and almost his only
French expression was "viskey-soda." He announced, widely and loudly,
that any newspaperman who called himself a "journalist" was a Big Stiff,
a Phoney Highbrow, and an Imitation Limey. He said that any foreign
correspondent who read history, went to concerts, or wore spats was
"showing off."

But Sam discovered that Ross Ireland was guilty of reading vast
and gloomy volumes of history; that he admired Conrad more than Conan
Doyle; that he had a sneaking preference of chess to poker; and that
he was irritably proud of having his evening clothes made in London.

That such a man, violently American yet not untraveled in dis-
tant coasts, should so rejoice
at going back made Sam the more convinced about returning to his own.
Of the vast and polished elegancies of the _Aquitania_ he had little
impression, none of the excitement about the steely resolution of
ships which he had known on the _Ultima_, because all his excitement
was focused on the blessed people he was going to see.

Tub Pearson -----

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after the most conversational anticipation with Fran, he had been dis-
appointed by his first sight of Notre Dame. It had seemed low and
hulking — not half so impressive as the lath-and-plaster Notre Dame
in the movie film. He managed to fret rather ardently. He hoped to
be uplifted by New York as a young lover hopes to be enraptured by the
sight of his lady, and hope is often not the sign but the denial of
hope.

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They came through the Narrows, into New York harbor, early in the
June morning. Sam was up at five, delighted by the friendly green of
the lawn at Fort Hamilton, after the shifting sea. It was extraordin-
arily hot for early summer, a bit uncomfortable even on deck, and a
fog hid the horizon. Sam was afraid that he was not to have his re-
discovery of New York. After quarantine, as they trudged from Staten
Island toward North River, he could see only anchored steamers, and a
huge water-beetle of a ferry boat, hove hoarse-voiced and insulting.
Then the fog lifted, and he cried "My God!" High up shone the towers
and spires of an enchanted city floating upon the mist, pyramids and
golden domes glistening in the early sun, vast walls studded with
golden windows, spell-bound and incredible.

Ross Ireland, beside him, muttered "Gee!" and then, "Say, does it
make you proud to be coming home to that?"

It is true that when they swaggered up North River, the debris of
docks and warehouses and factories on the river-bank seemed rather lit-
tered. The thickening heat glared around them, and the river was MMRMMRMM
greasy with swirls of fantastically colored oil films.
But as they
were cumbersomely warped into the dock, as Sam heard the good American
shouts from the dark hedge of people waiting on the pier; "Attaboy!"
and "Where'd you get the monocle?" and "How'd you leave Mary?" and
"Oh, come on -- have a heart! -- sneak me one bottle ashore!" -- he

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muttered over and over, "It's kind of nice to be home!"

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Then there were the customs.

Not that the inspectors were so impolite as is fabled, but it is
irritating to be suspected of smuggling liquor, particularly when, like
Sam, you are smuggling liquor. He had a quart of pre-war Scotch among
the suits in a wardrobe trunk, and the inspector found it, immediately.

"What's this? What did you call this?"

"Why! It looks like a bottle!" said Sam, affably. "I can't imagine
how it got there! Let me present it to you."

And then they fined him five dollars. But what was worse was that
being destitute of liquor caused in Sam a most indignant thirst — Sam
Dodsworth, who had never in his life taken a drink before noon, except
once after a certain football game in New Haven. He had to have —

The taxi-driver — Sam came to him after hours of paying customs—
fees, of getting necessitous porters, in a high state of boredom, to
trundle his luggage along the immensity of cement floor and through to
freedom, of seeing it shot perilously down the most efficient and
disconcerting moving belt, and of having it and himself thrown gasping
into the lions' den of New York traffic — the taxi-driver gave Sam
his first welcome to America.

"Wherejuh wanna go?" he growled.

It shocked Sam to find howjejane jarred he was by this demon-
stration of democracy. Like most Americans in Paris, he had been in-
sisting that all French taxi-drivers were bandits, but now they seemed
to him like playful and cuddling children.

line blank

It was achingly hot in the side streets leading from the piers,
and appallingly dirty. In front of warehouses and mean brick
houses turned into tenements were flying newspapers, piles of bottles

-192-

and rags and manure. Gritty clouds of ashes blew from open garbage cans, and tangled with the heat was New York's summertime stench of rotten bananas, unwashed laundry, ancient bedding, and wet pavements. In front of the taxicab, making Sam's heart stop with fear, darted ragged small boys (quite cheerful, and illogically healthy); and on the flimsy iron balconies of fire-escapes sat bedraggled mothers with whimpering babies, mothers with hair dragging across their eyes, nursing wailed babies who in between sups/ against the unjust heat. It was, Sam felt, a city nervous as a thwarted woman. (Sam still believed in male strength and female weakness.) It seemed so masculine in its stalwart buildings, but there was nothing masculine in its heat = shocked, clamor-maddened nerves. The traffic policemen raged at Sam's taxi-driver, the taxi-driver cursed all the truck-drivers, and, above the roaring of their engines, the truck-drivers cursed everybody on the street.

Ninth Avenue was insane with the banging of the Elevated; Eighth Avenue was a frontier camp of little shops; Seventh Avenue was a bedlam of traffic between loft buildings with enormous signs — "Löwenstein & Putski, Garments for Little Gents," and "The Gay Life Brassière, Rothweiser and Gitz"; Sixth Avenue combined the roar of Ninth with the nastiness of Eighth and the charging traffic of Seventh; and when in relief Sam saw the stateliness of Fifth Avenue, there was an inhuman mass of shiny cars from curb to curb.

The Sam Dodsworth who considered himself tireless was exhausted when he crawled into the cool refuge of his hotel. He sat by the window in his room, looking at the sullen stretch of the lofty office-building opposite, and longed for a drink.

"Conservatively, I'd give twenty-five dollars right now for the bottle of Scotch that the customs man took away from me......Oh Lord!..... I don't like New York so well, in weather like this. I'll

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be glad to get out into the country. That's the real America....I
hope it will be!..... I can see where I'm not going to complain about
having too much leisure, the way I did in Paris, while I live here, and I
want that drink!

It did not improve his opinion of Prohibition — it made the whole
business seem the more imbecile and annoying and hypocritical — that
after a telephone call, within half an hour, he had a case of whisky in
his room, and that he was taking a drink far earlier in the
day than he would ever have done in Paris.

He had many people to see in New York before he went to New Haven
for his class reunion. But he telephoned to no one — with the exception
of the bootlegger. He had only the energy to sit by the window, getting
what breeze there was, trying to ignore the ceaseless menace
of the city roar, feeling more homeless than ever before, trying to compose a lively cable to Fran and to get Brent, in New Haven, on the telephone.

He had not cabled Brent his date of sailing. "Boy's probably tied
up with a lot of exams and things; when I land in New York I'll find
out by phone when it's convenient for him to come down to New York."
Brent was not to be found now by telephone. Sam sent him a telegram,
and that was quite all that he felt like doing. He rested till one,
till half-past. He had a small lunch, in his room, and the joy of having
proper sugar corn almost revived him, but afterward he sat by the
window again till three, brooding. Lassitude bound him like a vast
cobweb.

What was he doing here in New York? What was he doing anywhere?
What reason had he for living? He was not necessary to Fran in Paris.
And the motor-car industry seemed to be spinning on quite cheerily
without him.

He faced his discovery — the incident had happened at his entrance

-195-

"Hello? Dodsworth? This is Ross Ireland. Say, I'm in the same hotel. Doing anything? Mind if I run up for a minute?"

Ireland burst in, red, collar wilted, panting.

"Say, Dodsworth, am I crazy? Do I look crazy?"

"No, you look hot."

"Hot? Hell! I've been hot in Rangoon. But I sat back in a nice carriage, in my pretty little white suit and my sun helmet, and took it easy. I didn't feel as though I'd been in two hundred and twenty-seven train collisions, one right after another. Do you know what I've found out? I hate this damn town! It's the dirtiest, noisiest, craziest hole I was ever in! I hate it — me, that's been going up and down the face of the earth for the last three years, shooting my face off and telling everybody what a swell capital New York is.

"What you got to drink? Oh God, only whisky? Well, let's have a look at it.

"Well, this morning I didn't even stop to unpack. I was going to see the dear old home town — the dear old neighbors, by heck, down on Park Row. I got down to the Quackenbos office, and the office boy hadn't ever heard my name — I've only been sending in three columns a week, signed, for three years! But he found a stenographer who thought she'd heard of me, and they actually let me in to see the old man — mind you, to get in to see him was sixteen times harder than it would be to see King George at Buckingham Palace, and when I did get in, there he was with his feet in a desk drawer reading the jokes in the *New Yorker*. Well, he was all right. He jumped up and told me I was the white-haired boy, and the sight of me'd just about saved him from typhoid, and we talked a whole half hour, and then made a date to finish up our business at lunch, tomorrow! Oh no, he didn't have one minute till then! Tonight — God no, he had to help open up a new roof garden.

"Oh, I've been the boiled mutton-head! I've been going around

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Europe and Asia telling the heathen that the reason we hustle so in New York is because we get so much done. I never discovered till today that we do all this hustling, all this jamming in subways, all this elbowing into elevators, to keep ourselves occupied and keep from getting anything done! Say, I'll bet I accomplished more honest-to-God work in Vienna in three hours than I will here in three days! Those Austrian hicks don't have any bright office boys or filing-systems to prevent them from talking business. So they go home for two hours' lunch. Poor devils! No chance to ride on the subway! And only cafés to sit around in, instead of night clubs. Awful life!

"Well, when I'd got this whole half hour in with the boss — he took up most of it telling a swell new smutty story he'd just heard — one I used to tell back in Ioway in 1900 — I drifted over to the Chronicle to see the bunch I used to work with..., I was a city editor there once!.... Half of the bunch were gone into politics, I guess..... The other half were glad to see me, so far as I could figure out, but they'd gone and got married or learned to play bridge or taken to teaching Sunday School or some immoral practise like that, and by golly not one of 'em could I get for dinner and a show tonight. By the way, you don't happen to be free for tonight, Dodsworth, do you? Grand! Tickled to death!

"Well, I went out to lunch with one of the fellows on the Sunday edition. He suggested some whisky, but I wanted something cool. He said he knew a place where we could get some real genuine Italian Chianti — and say, he called it 'genuwine Ytalian' too. As a joke, I believe he taught English in Harvard for a year. But being a hard-boiled newspaperman, of course he had to be a roughneck, to show he wasn't pedantic..... Like me, I guess. I've been pulling that same lowbrow pose myself.

"But anyway: we look up this genuwine Ytalian dump — I guess,

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from the smell, they used it as a laundry till it got too dirty — and the
Wop brought on a bottle of something that was just about as much like
Chianti as I'm like an Easter lily. Honestly, Sam, it tasted like vine-
gar that'd been used on beets just once too often.

"And then — Oh, I suppose, being just back after my first long
hike, I felt I had a Chautauqua message for Young America — I suppose
I felt I was a Peary bringing home the Pole under my arm. I tried to
tell this chap how much I knew about Burma, and how chummy I was with
Lord Beaverbrook, and all the news about the land problem in Upper
Silesia, and was he interested? Say, he was about as much interested as
I'd be in a chatty account of the advancement of Christian Science in
Liberia! But he had a lot of important news for me. Golly! Bill Smith
'd had a raise of twenty bucks a week! Pete Brown is going to edit
the hockey gossip, instead of Mike Magoon! The Edam Restaurant is going
to have a new jazz orchestra! The Fishback Portable Typewriter has
gone up five dollars in price! Ellen Whoozis, the cocktail-party queen,
who writes the Necking Notes, is going to marry the religious editor!

"Say, it was exactly like going back to the dear old Home Town in
Ioway, after my first three years in New York! I wanted to tell the
home-town boys all the news about the Brooklyn Ridge and immorality,
and they wanted to talk about Henry Hick's new flivver!

"Well, I guess it's all about alike, really — Buddhism in Burma
and Henry's flivver. It's all neighborhood gossip, with different
kinds of neighbors. Only —

"But it isn't the same! I've seen — oh, God, Sam, I've seen the
jungle at dawn, and these fellows have stayed here, stuck at little
desks, and never drifted five steps away from their regular route from
home, to the office, to the speak-easy, to the office, to the movie, to home.
I was on a ship afire in the Persian Gulf —

"I know it's just vanity, Sam, but there are things outside America—

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Whether they're ever going to have sense enough to make a Pan-Europa there -- whether Britain is going to recognize Russia, and who's going to get Russian oil -- what will become of Poland -- what Fascism really means in Italy; things that ought to be almost as interesting as the next baseball game. But these lads that 've stuck here in New York, they're so self-satisfied (like I was once!) that they don't care a hang for anything beyond the current price of gin! They don't know there is a Europe, beyong the Paris bars. Why even in my shop -- I carry on in Europe as though I were the great, three-star, two-tailed special foreign correspondent but here (it's a fact!) the fellow that does the weekly cartoon about Farmer Hiram Winterbottom gets three times my salary -- say, if he came into the office, old Quackenbos would give him the whole day!

"Well, now that I've told you what a nice, lace-collared, abused darling I am, let's --

"But this town, that I've been looking forward to -- (Man, do you realize we could sail back on the *Aqui* in a week? Think of that nice cool corner in the smoking-room!) I've found that the one and only up-to-date, new, novel, ingenious way of getting anywhere in this burg, if you want to *get* there, is to walk! It takes a taxi, in this traffic, ten minutes to make ten blocks. And the subway -- How many years since you've been in the subway? Well, don't! I thought I was a pretty big guy, and fairly husky, but say, the subway guard at the Grand Central just stuck his knee in the middle of my back and rammed me into a car that was already plumb-full, like I was a three-year-old child, and I stood up as far as Brooklyn Bridge, with my nose in the neck of a garbage-wholesaler! Say, I feel like an anarchist! I want to blow up the whole town!

"Then, after lunch, I wanted to buy a few real first-edition suits of American athletic underwear, so I went to Mosheim's

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department store. Seen their new building? Looks like a twenty-story
ice-palace. Windows full of diamonds and satins and ivory and antique
Spanish furniture, and lingerie that would make a movie-actress blush.
'City of luxury -- Europe beat a mile!' says I. 'Extra! Pleasure Capital
of the World Discovered by H. Ross Ireland!' And then I tried to get
into the store. Honestly, Sam, I'll be quite a husky fellow when I get
f. c. my **strength**. I used to play center and wrestle heavy-weight in the Un-
iversity of **Iowa**. But by golly, I couldn't hardly wedge my way in
through the doors. There was one stream of maniacs rushing out and
another rushing in, as though it was a fire, and every aisle was jammed,
and then when you got to the proper counter --

"Well, I've got good and plenty sore at the way the hired help treat
you abroad. I've had a Turkish rug-vendor go crazy when I didn't want
to pay more 'n twice the price of a rug; I've had a hardboiled Greek
mate bawl hell out of me because he tripped over me on deck; I've had a
gondolier say when he thought of my tip. But anyway, those fellows
treated you as though you were almost their equals. It's like Chester-
ton says -- if a fellow kicks his butler down-stairs, it doesn't show
any lack of democracy; it's only when he feels too superior to his but-
ler to touch him that he's really snooty. And that's how the nice
bright young gent at the underwear-counter treated me. He had about
six people to wait on, and unless I spoke quick and took what he gave
me, he wasn't going to waste time on me, and he kept looking at me
with a 'You big hick, don't try to fool me, that ain't no real New
York suit you got on -- back to Yankton.!

"Then I tried to get out of the store. One fellow elbowing you in
the stomach and another jabbing you in the back, and the elevator man
hollering 'Step lively, please,' till you wanted to sock him in the
nose. Honestly, I felt like a refugee driven by the Cossacks -- no,
I didn't feel that human; I felt like I was one of a bunch of steers

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driven down the runway to the slaughter-house. God, what a town!
Luxury! Gold! Everything but self-respect and decency and privacy!

"And what an oration! That's the longest speech I've made since
I caught my No. 1 Boy in Burma wearing my best pants!"

"Well," Sam soothed, "it'll be better when you get out into the
country."

"But I don't like the country! Being a hick by origin, I like
cities. I had enough cornfields and manure-piles before I ran away,
at fourteen. And from what I heard at lunch, all the other towns in
America are becoming about as bad as New York -- traffic jams and big
movie theaters and radios yapping everywhere and everybody has to have
electric dish-washers and vacuum cleaners and not one car, by golly,
but two or three -- and all on the installment plan! But I guess any
of those Burgs would be better than this monkey jungle."

"And I thought I knew this town! Ten years I put in here! But
honestly, it's sixteen times as bad as it was three years ago, seems
to me. Ought to be lovely three years from now! And foreign --
say, when you see a real old-fashioned American face on the street,
you wonder how he got here. I think I'll go back to London and see
some Americans!"

"White Rock?"

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If Ross felt Sam was exaggerating. But when he had roused himself from his lassitude for a walk -- for a hot crawl -- he felt lost and small and alien in the immense conflict of the steaming streets.

And he had no place to go. He realized that this capital, barbaric with gold and marble, provided every human necessity save a place, a café or a plaza or a not-too-lady-like tea-shop, in which he could sit and be human. Well! He could go to the Metropolitan Art

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heavily he said good night to Ross Ireland.

The storm exploded as he stood at the window of his hotel room.
Every lightning flash **threw** into maniacal high relief the vast yellow
wall of the building opposite, and its innumerable glaring windows; and
in the darknesses between flashes he could imagine the building crash-
ing over on him. It was terrifying as a volcanic eruption, even to
Sam Dodsworth, who was not greatly given to fear. Yet terror could
not break up the crust of dull loneliness which encased him.

He turned from the window with a lifeless step and went drearily
to bed, to lie half awake. He muttered only, "This hustle of American
life -- regular battle -- is it going to be too much for me, now I'm
out of the habit?"

And, "Oh God, Fran, I am so lonely for you!"

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insisted on his coming out to Long Island for the night.

Sam was relaxed and cheered by the drive, in the Hispano-Suiza which
Richards' daughter, Sheila, had invited her father to buy the moment she
had read the novels of Michael Arlen. They slipped through the vicious
traffic of the Grand Central district, turned up First Avenue with its
air of a factory village, crossed the superb arch of the Fifty-Ninth
Street Bridge, from which they looked down to towers looming over docks
for steamers from Rio de Janeiro and Barbados and Africa.

They shot through a huddle of factories and workers' cottages,
and fled along a road which followed the shore-line, with a salt breeze
whispering through the open windows of the great car; they came into
pleasant suburbs, and turned off on a country lane among real farms.
Sam's slightly battered Americanism rose exultantly as he saw corn-
fields, pumpkin vines, white farm-houses with piles of poplar stove-wood.

And the talk was good.

Sam had never been such a fool as to assert that virile citizens
talked only of bonds and prize-fighting, and that any one who pretended
to an interest in Matisse or the Ca' d' Oro was an effeminate pretender.
Only, he had pled with Fran, he himself had as much right to be inter-
ested in bonds and bored by Matisse as a painter had to be interested
in Matisse and bored by bonds. Of course bonds had been important enough
to Alec Kynance, that afternoon. Yet Alec's talk had not been good, be-
cause the little man could never keep his role of Napoleon of Commerce
to himself, but insisted on treating every one he met as either a Faith-
ful Guardsman whose ear he could tweak, or as a Faithful Field Marshal
who was gaping to receive (from Alec) a new bâton.

But Elon Richards talked of consolidations and investments and golf
and the more scandalous divorces of bankers with the simplicity and
impersonality of a dairyman discussing cattle-feed. He announced (while

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lives to working for their jobs. And I felt as though there was such a
devil of a lot to learn about the world that we're too busy to learn here."

Richards puffed comfortably; then:

"Did you know I was reared in Europe, Sam?"

"No! Fact?"

"Yes. My father and mother were devoted to Europe. We wandered. I spent fourteen out of the first sixteen years of my life in schools in France and England and Switzerland, and I went back there every summer while I was in Harvard -- except the last vacation, after Junior year. Then my father had a brain-wave, and sent me out to Oregon to work in a lumber camp. I was crazy about it! I was so sick of pensions and cafés and the general European attitude that, for an American, you weren't such a bad egg. In Oregon I got beaten up by the lumberjacks three times in seven days, but at the end of the summer I was ardently invited to stay on as straw boss of the camp. I loved it! And I've gone on loving it ever since. I know that plenty of French financiers are more elegant and leisurely than your flat-footed friend Alec Kynance, but I get more fun out of fighting Alec!

"Sam, it's a battle here, the way it is in Russia and China. And you, Sam, you old grizzly, can never be a contemplative gazelle. You've got to fight. And I think of it! Maybe America will rule the world! Maybe in the end we'll be broken up by Russia. But isn't a world-fight like that better than sitting around avoiding conversational errors and meditating on the proper evening waistcoats? Life!"

Sam meditated, silently and long.

"Elon," said he, "there was a time I knew my own mind. I didn't do whatever my latest stenographer suggested. But I've seen too many things, recently. If Fran were here -- my wife -- I'd probably be pro-Europe. You make me pro-American."

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"Why be pro-anything? Why not dive head-first into whatever battle seems most interesting? You can be sure of this: the result won't mean anything. My girl, Sheila, informs me that a judicious use of eugenics, Karl Marx, and tennis would turn us all into a bunch of beneficent Apollos in five generations. God forbid! I have a sneaking suspicion that none of us poor vertebrates want perfection, really! But I mean: You're one of these kind-hearted, dutiful Americans who feels apologetic and inferior the moment he retires, and who'll spend the rest of his life trying to satisfy everybody he meets: his wife and his mistress ——"

"Not yet!"

"Wait! —— and his friends. Sam, I'm such an idealist that I'd like to start an Association for the Hanging of All Idealists. For Heaven's sake decide whether you, your own self, are happier in America or in Europe, and then stick there! Me, I'm glad to have European bankers coming to me begging for loans instead of going to European cafés and begging waiters for a table in the sun! Sam, this American adventure —— Because it is an adventure that we have here — the greatest in the world — and not a certainty of manners in an unceftainty of the future, like all of Europe. And say, do you know, our adventure is going to be the bigger because we do feel that Europe has a lot we need. We're no longer satisfied with the log cabin and the corn pone. We want everything that Europe has. We'll take it!"

"Um," said Sam.

That night he slept child-like, in a breeze from the Sound. He awoke at five, to sit on the edge of his bed, bulky in his rather touseled silk pajamas, meditating while he looked down on the marshlands/ smoking with morning, and the Sound, like whirls of cobweb over bright steel.

If he were fifty miles farther out on Long Island, perhaps he could see across to the Connecticut shore and New Haven.

He realized that this was grotesquely like a day in spring of his senior year in Yale when from East Rock he had looked across the Sound to Long Island, and in that distant shore beheld romantic harbors.

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He was separated from the boy who had sat on East Rock only by Long Island Sound, and thirty years, and a boy's certainty that he would "do something worth while." Today he could think of things far more interesting to attempt than in those solemn important days when he had been a football star weighed down with the monastic duties of an athlete. It was not, now, ridiculous to consider being a wanderer in Japan, a proponent of Sheila Richards's socialism or its crusading foe, or, twenty years hence, merely an old man with a pipe, content among apple trees on a hill above the Ohio River. But also it was obvious now that he was by people and strengths and weaknesses which he had not recognized in his young hour of vision on East Rock.

He could not return to a completely simple and secure life in America because of Fran's dislike for it, and without the habitual titilation of Fran's gaieties and bad temper, life was inconceivable. He could not become an elegantly lounging cosmopolitan because -- his thought stumbled and growled -- oh, because he was Sam Dodsworth!

He was chained by every friend who had made life agreeable -- bound not to shock or lose them. He was chained by every dollar he had made, every automobile he had manufactured -- they meant a duty to his caste. He was chained by every hour he had worked -- they had left him stiff, spiritually rheumatic.

He still wanted the world.... but there was nothing specific in the world that he wanted so much as, thirty years ago, he had wanted to be a Richard Harding Davis hero.

Then it came to him. He marveled, "No, the trouble is that, aside from keeping in with Fran and the children and a few friends, I don't want anything enough to fight for it much. I've done about all I ever imagined -- got position, made money, met interesting folks. I'd be a lot luckier if I were a hobo that hadn't done any of the things he wanted to. Oh, hang it, I don't much care. Maybe I didn't hitch my wagon

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to a high-enough star! This one don't look very good!

"Rats! When I get out of this crazy New York district and meet real, simple, hearty fellows back in Zenith -- yes, sure, and at my re-union -- I'll get over this grouch.

"But what's it all about, this business of life?

"I'd give my left leg if I could believe what the preachers say. Immortality. Serving Jehovah. But I can't. Got to face it alone -----

"Oh, for God's sake, quit pitying yourself! You're as bad as Fran-----

"Fran! She's never bad. Not really. Did I ever happen to remember to tell you that I adore you, Fran?"

Four hours later, at breakfast, he was an unsentimental Captain of Finance, attentive only to waffles.

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He stood at a gate in the Grand Central Station watching his son lope up the inclined cement runway from the New Haven train. "If there's anything finer than him at Oxford or in France -----" he gloated, and "More Fran's boy than mine, though; got her good looks and quickness."

Brent was like a young race horse, his pale face and high thin forehead almost too bred-down, too refined, But there was health and buoyancy in his humorous eyes, his shout of "Hello, Dad! Swell to see you again. Good crossing?"

"Yes. Fair. Nice to see you, boy. How long can you stay?"

"Have to be back in the morning. Catch the milk-train."

"Too bad. Here, give your bag to a red-cap."

"And pay a quarter? Not a chance -- not with corn whisky costing what it does."

"Um. I wouldn't drink much of that. But I guess you know that. Where'd you like to dine tonight? Ritz, or some hell-raising place?"

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"I'll show you a real joint with real German beer."

"Fine. Uh ..." Sam looked shyly down at the shy boy, and blurted, "Mighty proud of you for making both Bones and Phi Beta Kappa."

"Oh, thanks. Gosh you're looking fine, sir."

He found that though Brent would be in New York for only twelve hours, he had brought dinner clothes, with "Fran's boy, all right," he reflected, and somehow he was a bit lonely. He wished that he could give this nervous youngster something more than an allowance -- some strength, some stability.

While they dressed, Brent recovered from his filial shyness enough to chatter about the miracles performed by Chick Budlong as a pole-vaulter, about the astounding fact that after being a perfectly good egg for over two years, Ogden Rose had turned literary and heeled the Lit. about the "bum body job" of the new U.A.C. Revelation. He was emerging as the young elegant, slim in dinner clothes, and he belonged to a world which would resent Sam's intrusion, which desired no strength nor stability.... even if, Sam considered, he had any to give.

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The "German restaurant" to which Brent led him was altogether imitation: beer mugs made in Pennsylvania; beams stained to look old; colored glass windows which, if they could have been opened, would have been found to look on nothing but a plaster wall; and beer that was most deplorably and waterily imitation.

Against this soiled and tawdry background, against the soiled and insolent and rather pathetic Polish waiters, Brent was real as a knife-blade, and as shining.

Sam had had a notion that now, two men together, his son and he could be intimately frank. He would talk to Brent about drinking, gambling, the value of money as a means and its worthlessness as an end,

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and most of all, about women. Oh, he wouldn't snoop and paw -- he'd just give his own notions of a life neither Puritanical nor licentious; be awfully frank about the danger of the daughters of the street, while admitting, like a man of the world, the compulsion of "sex"; and if Brent happened to be moved to give any confidences, he would treat them casually, sympathetically ---

That warm rejoicing idea had chilled the moment he saw Brent's self-confident figure, and he could never get it back. Why, the boy might think he was in Bad Taste, and next to the affection of Fran and Emily, he wanted Brent's affection and respect more than that of any one in the world. So, in parental fear, while he would have liked to expose his soul, he droned about Lord Herndon, Gioserro the aviator, the palace at Versailles ---

But there was one intimate thing of which he could talk:

"Son, have you decided whether you'll go to Harvard Law School when you finish Yale?"

"I haven't quite decided, sir."

"Don't call me 'sir'! Look here, Brent; I have a notion --- If your Mother and I are still abroad when you graduate, how would it be for you to come and join us for a year or so? Maybe between us, we could get her to chase off to Africa and India and China and so on, just now she's stuck on Paris. I've been finding out there's a devil of a lot I to see. There's no hurry about your getting down to earning money."

"But you, sir."

"Don't call me 'sir' -- I'm still under the age for it -- I hope! And I think that maybe I got to work too early. Rather wish, now, I'd bummed around the world a little first. And after all these years you've been studying, to go right on to your law books ---"

"Well you see, sir, I'm not sure I'll go out for law."

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"Um. What you thinking of? Medicine? Motors?"

"No, I --- You know my roommate, Billy Deacon, his dad is president of Deacon, Iffley and Watts, the bond<sup>1</sup> house; and Billy wants me to come in with him selling bonds. I think probably I could be making twenty-five thousand a year in ten years, and in the law, if I went into a really <sup>2</sup> tophole New York firm, I'd only be a clerk then. And some day <sup>3</sup> be in the hundred and fifty thousand a year class."

He said it with the modest confidence, <sup>4</sup> with the eager eyes<sup>5</sup> of a young poet announcing that he was going to write an epic.

Sam spoke doubtfully:

"May sound like a funny thing from a man that's always captured every dollar he could lay his hands on, but --- Brent, I've always wanted to build <u>things</u>; to leave something <u>behind</u> besides a bank balance. Afraid you wouldn't be doing that, just selling bonds. Not that I've anything against bonds, you understand! Nice handsome engravings, But are you going to need to make money so fast ---"

"<u>Life's</u> a lot more expensive than when you started, Dad. Fellow has to have so many things. When I was a kid, a man with a limousine was a little tin god, but now a fellow that hasn't got a yacht simply isn't in it. If a fellow makes his pile, then he can lay off, and <u>go out for the building</u> have a hobby <u>and</u> see Europe and go out for public spirit and all that stuff. I <u>believe</u> I've got a swell chance with Bill Deacon and his bunch."

"Well. Course you've got to decide for yourself. But I wish you'd think it over -- about really building things."

"Sure. I certainly will, sir."

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Brent was bright with compliments about Sam's knowledge of Europe; he remarked that <u>Sam's</u> football glories were still remembered at Yale. (And Sam sighed to himself that he had lost the boy now forever.)

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CHAPTER 18

Sam was packing, to go to New Haven for his thirtieth class re-
union, when the mild little knock came at the door. He roared "Come
in" and at first did not look to see who his visitor might be. The
silence after the opening of the door made him turn. Tub Pearson was
on the threshold, grinning.

"Well you fat little runt!" said Sam, which meant "My dear old
friend, I am enchanted to see you!" And Tub gave answer, "You big
stiff, so they couldn't stand you in Yurrup any more, eh? So you had
to sneak back here, eh? You big bum!" Which signified, to one know-
ing the American language, "I have been quite distressingly lonely for
you in Zenith, and had you not returned, I should probably have given
up the Reunion and gone to Europe to see you -- I would, really."

"Well you're looking fine, Tub." And they patted each other's
arms, curtly.

"So are you. You look ausgesteckt. I guess Europe must have
agreed with you. Didn't bring me home a little of that swell French
wine, did you?"

"Sure, I've got a whole case of it in my collar box."

"Well, bring it out. Let's not put off the fatal hour."

From behind the bathtub (where, under the new American dispensa-

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tion, all hotel guests hide the current bottle of whisky, to make it
easier for the hotel servants to find it) Sam produced something, chuck-
ling, "Now this may just look like plain Methodist bootlegged corn to
you, Tub, but remember you ain't traveled expensively and got educated,
I have. Say when..... Oh say, Tub, I got a bottle of the real thing --
pre-war Scotch -- taken off me here at the docks."

"Oh my God! What a sacrilege! Well now tell me, what kind of a
time d' you really have?"

"Oh fine, fine! Paris is a fine city. Say, how's *mater* and your kids?"

"Fine!"

"How's Harry Hazzard?"

"He's fine. He's got a grand-daughter. Say, they whoop it up all
night long in Paris, don't they?"

"Yeh, pretty late. Have you seen Emily lately?"

"Just the other day at the country club. Looked fine. Oh say,
Sambo, can you explain one thing to me? Is there any chance the Bol-
sheviks will pay the Czarist debts to France? And what kind of a buy
are French municipals?"

"Well, I didn't find out much about -----Oh, I met some high-class
Frogs -- fellow named Andillet, stock-broker, pretty well heeled I guess.
But it isn't like with us. Hard to get those fellows down to real ser-
ious talk, out of the office. They want to gas about the theater and
dancing and horse-racing all the time. But say, I did learn one mighty
interesting thing: the Citroen people in France and the Opel people in
Germany are putting up low-priced cars that'll give the Ford and the
Chev a mighty hard run for their money, in European territory and -----
Oh! Say! Tub! Can you tell me anything about the rumors that Ford is
going to scrap Model T and come out with an entirely new model? My God,
I've tried and tried and I can't find out anything about it! I've asked

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Alec Kynance, and I've asked Byron Rogers of the Sherman, and I've asked Elon Richards, and if they know anything, they won't let it out and ---
By golly I'd like to find out something about it."

"So would I! So would I! And I can't find out a thing!"

They both sighed, and refilled.

"They finished the new addition to the country club?" asked Sam.

"Yes, and it's a beauty. They play much golf in France?"

"I guess so, on the Riviera. Been by my house recently? Everything look all right?"

"You bet. I stopped and spoke to your caretaker. Seems a good reliable fellow. Say, just what *does* a fellow do, evenings in Paris? What kind of hang-outs do you go to? 'Bout like night-clubs here?"

"Well, a lot better wine -- well no, at that, some of the places that are filled with Americans stick you and stick you good for pretty poor fizz. But on the whole --- Oh, I don't know; you get tired of racketing around. All these pretty women, talking all the time!"

"Didn't pick up a little cutie on the side, did you?"

"Did you say 'cutie' or 'cootie'?"

And they both laughed, and they both sighed, and of Sam's non-existent amorous affairs they said no more.

And they found that they had nothing else to say.

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For years they had shared friends, games, secret business reports. They had been able to talk actively about the man they had seen the day before, the poker they had played two days ago, the bank scandal that was going on at the moment. But in six months, most of the citizens of Zenith whose scandals and golf handicaps had been important had been dimmed for Sam; he could not see them, could think of nothing to ask about them. The two men fell into an uncomfortable playing at catch

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with questions and answers.

Sam said, mildly, "Kind of wish I'd started going abroad earlier,
Tub -- kind of interesting to see how differently they do things. But
it's too late now."

He struggled to make clear what had interested him in England and
France -- the tiny, uncharted differences of dress, of breakfast bacon,
of political parties, of vegetables in market places, -- but Tub was
impatient. What he wanted was a gloating vicarious excursion into blazing
restaurants full of seductive girls, marvelous food, wine unimaginably
good, at fifty cents a bottle, superb drunks without a headache, and endless
dancing without short breath. Sam tried to oblige but -----

"Funny!" He couldn't somehow picture the dancing rendezvous he had
seen only a fortnight ago. He could see the musty cupboard where the
patient chambermaid of their hotel floor had sat waiting, apparently all day,
and all night, knitting, smelling of herring and poverty; but of the Jardin
de ma Soeur he could see nothing but tables, smooth floor, and the too
darkly enraptured eyes of Gioserro the aviator, dancing with Fran.

Sam dropped so low conversationally that he asked about the well-
being of the Rev. Dr. Willis Fortune Tate of Zenith.

Then Ross Ireland banged in.

"Off to Mexico to do a story on oil, gimme a drink," he said, and
all was liveliness again.

Sam was distressed that he should be relieved to have this half-
stranger, but pleased when Tub Pearson took to him. Half an hour later,
when Ross had told his celebrated story of Doc Pilvins the veterinarian
and the plush horse, the three of them went out to dinner, had three cock-
tails, and went lively and content.

Only once in an evening of different night clubs, none of which
were different, did Sam worry again: "Good Lord, are all of us getting

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so we can't be happy, can't talk, till we've had a lot of cocktails?
What's the matter with our lives?

But on the Yale campus next afternoon, with Tub, he was roaring
with delight to see again the comrades of old days; the beloved class-
mates who stayed so unshakably in his mind that he had forgotten noth-
ing about them save their professions, their present dwelling-places,
and their names.

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The 1896 division of the procession to the baseball game at Yale
Field, in their blue coats and white trousers, was led by Tub Pearson,
shaking rattle and singing:

Good morning, Mr. Zip, Zip, Zip,
Got a hair-cut as short as mine?
Good morning, Mr. Zip, Zip, Zip,
I cer'n'ly am feeling fine.
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,
If the army don't get you then the navy must -----

Sam was moved to sadness and prayer by the sight of his class-mates.
It was one of the astonishments of the reunion how old many of them had
become at fifty or fifty-two -- Don Binder, for instance; in college a
serious drinker, baby-faced and milky; now an Episcopalian rector who
looked as though he were sixty-five and as though he carried the sins
of the country on his stooped shoulders. The spectacle made Sam him-
self feel ancient. But as startling were the class-mates who at fifty
looked thirty-five, and who irritated a man like Sam, amiable about
exercise but no fanatic, by shouting that everybody ought to play
eighteen holes of golf a day.

But however sheepish Sam might feel, Tub was radiant, was again
the class clown during the procession. He danced across the road from
side to side, shaking his rattle, piping on a penny whistle, frighten-
ing a child on the sidewalk almost into epilepsy by kneeling down and
trying to be chummy.

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"He's fine. He's funny," Sam assured himself. "He's a great goat. Hell, he's an idiot! Why am I getting to be such a grouch on life? Better go back to the desk."

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But whatever discomfort he had at playing the hobbledehoy, in the class reunion Sam found balm. They knew who he was! No one in Paris (except Fran, at times) knew that. But his classmates realized that he was Sambo Dodsworth, great tackle, Skull and Bones, creative engineer, president of a corporation, "prince of good fellows."

Except for a few professional alumni who at fifty could still tell what was the score in last year's Yale-Brown game, who at fifty had nothing with which to impress the world except the fact that they were Yale Men, the class had drifted far from the cheery loafing and simple-hearted idealism of college days. They were bank presidents and college presidents and surgeons and country school-teachers and diplomats; they were ranchmen and congressmen and ex-convicts and bishops. One was a major general, and one -- in college the most mouse-like of bookworms -- was the funniest comedian on Broadway. They were fathers and grandfathers, and most of them looked as they overworked or overdrank. Not one of them had found life quite the amusing and triumphant adventure he had expected; and they came back wistfully, longing to recapture their credulous golden days. They believed (for a week) that their classmates were peculiarly set apart from the crooked and exasperating race of men as a whole.

And all of this Sam Dodsworth believed -- for a week.

It was pleasant, on a clam bake at Momauguin, to loll in the sand with the general, a college president, and two steel kings, as though they were all of them nineteen again, to be hailed as "Old Sambo," to

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French windows, and a parrot, not too articulate, in a red enamel cage.
The breakfast set was of taffy-like peasant faience from Normandy, and
the electrical toaster and percolator on the table were of nickle which
flashed in the lively Midwestern morning sunshine.

Sam was exultant. He had arrived late last evening, and as his own
house was musty from disuse, he had come to Emily's. He had slept with
a feeling of security, and this morning he was exhilarated at being again
with her, his own Emily, gayest and sturdiest of girls. He had brought
his presents for them down to breakfast -- the Dunhill pipe and the
Charvet dressing-gown for Harry, the gold and tortoise-shell dressing-
table set and the Guerlain perfumes for Emily. They admired the gifts,
they patted him in thanks, they fussed over his having real American
porridge with real cream and, with a blissful assurance of having come
home forever to his own snug isle, after decades amid white-fanged seas,
of having brought to his astounded tribe incredible tales of Troy and
Circe and men with two heads, he began to expatiate on Paris, smiling
at them, reaching out to take Emily's hand, launching into long-winded
details.

"---now what I never understood about Paris," he was rumbling,
"is how much of it is like a series of villages, with narrow
streets and little bits of shops that don't hardly keep the proprietor
busy. You always hear of the big boulevards and the wild dance halls,
but what struck me was the simple little places ---"

"Yes, that was so even in the war, when I was in Paris," said
McKee. "But there must be a lot of difference since then. Say, Dad,
I'm afraid I have to hustle to the office. Hope to sell a few million
bolts to the Axton Car people today. But I want to hear all about Paris.
Be home by six-thirty. Awful' good to have you back, sir. Good bye,
Emily of Emilies!"

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After the kisses and flurry and engine-racings of McKee's departure, Emily beamed her way back and caroled, "Oh, don't eat that cold toast, I'll make you a nice fresh slab. You must try this lovely apricot jam. Now go on and tell me some more about Paris. Oh, it's perfectly ducky to be with you again! Harry is next to the nicest man living but you're the oh you must eat some more. Now tell me about Paris."

"Well," mildly, "I haven't really much to tell. It's hard to express how you feel about a foreign place. Something different in the air. I'm afraid I'm not much on analyzing a thing like that....Emily, uh -- Harry doing pretty well financially?"

"Oh, splendidly. They've raised him another five thousand a year."

"You don't need a little check for yourself?"

"Oh, not a thing. Thanks, old darling. Drat him, Harry carried off the Advocate and I know you want to read it."

Sam did not hear her reference to the Advocate. Flushed, he was reflecting, "Am I trying to pay my daughter to be interested in me? Trying to buy her affection?" He scuttled away from the thought, into a hasty description of Les Halles at dawn, after the De Penable menagerie had had an all-night round of cafés. He had begun to care for his own narration; he was saying, "Well, I'd never tried white wine and onion soup for breakfast but I was willing to try anything once," when the telephone began.

"Excuse me a second, Daddy," said Emily, and for five minutes she held a lively conversation with one Mona about tennis tournament, knitted suits, Dick, speed boats, lobster salad, Mrs. Logan, and a Next Thursday mentioned with such italisized awe that Sam felt ignorant in not knowing how it might differ from any other Thursday. He realized too that he did not know who Mona, Dick, or Mrs. Logan were.

The importance of having eaten onion soup for breakfast had cooled

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by the time Emily whisked back to the table. Before Sam had warmed up and begun the story of Captain Gioserro's hiring a vegetable wagon to drive to the hotel, the sneering telephone called Emily again, and for three minutes she dealt with a tradesman who had apparently been sending bad meat. She dealt with him competently. She seemed to know everything about cuts of steak, the age of ducklings, and the trimming of a crown roast.

She was not his rollicking helpless girl. She was a Competent Young Matron.

"She doesn't need me any more," sighed Sam.

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The Dodsworths had not rented their house but left it empty, save for a caretaker who maintained a creeping ashen existence in a corner of the basement, spelling out old newspapers from garbage cans all day long. The caretaker, when he had admitted Sam, after five minutes of ringing, wanted to show him through the house, but Sam said abruptly, "I'll go by myself."

The hall was dim as a tomb and as airless. His foot-fall on the carpetless floor was so loud that he began to tip-toe. There were presences which threatened him as an intruder in his own house. He stood in the door of the library. That room, once warm and tranquil, was bleakly unwelcoming. It was a dead room in a dead house. The rugs were rolled up, piled in a corner, their exposed undersides drab and pebbly. The book-shelves were covered with sheets, and the deep chairs, swathed in gray covers, as shapeless and distasteful as the wrapper of a slovenly housewife. The fireplace had a stingy cleanness. But in a corner of it clung a scrap of paper with Fran's hectic writing. He stooped slowly to pick it up, and made out the words "call motor at ten and." She seemed to dash into the room and flee

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away, leaving him the lonelier.

He climbed heavily up the stairway, steps clattering flatly, and shouldered into their bedroom. He looked about, silent. He went over to the drawn window blinds. "Blinds getting cracked. Need new ones," he said aloud. He looked about again, and shivered. He went to the great walnut twin bed in which Fran had always slept, and stood staring at it. He patted the head of the bare mattress and quickly marched out of the room -- out of the house.

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Brent was to have returned to Zenith for a fortnight, and Sam had a hundred plans for motoring with him, fishing with him. But Brent telegraphed, "Invited corking yachting party Nova Scotia mind if not return," and Sam, perfectly expressionless, wrote his answer, "By all means go hope have splendid time." As he walked out of the Western Union office he sighed a little, and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking up and down the street, a man with nothing to do.

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He had thought of himself, when he had been the president of the Revelation Company, as a young man at fifty. To him, then, old age did not begin till seventy, perhaps seventy-five; and he would have another quarter-century of energy. But the completeness with which Emily, at twenty-one, had matured, had become competent to run her own life, made Sam feel that he belonged to an unwanted generation; that, amazingly, he was old.

It was the afternoon of Elizabeth Jane's party which made Sam so conscious that he was a stranger, unable to mix with this brisk, luxurious Young Married Set, that he politely fled from Emily's house and holed-in at the Tonawanda Country Club.

Elizabeth Jane was Harry McKee's eleven-year-old niece. Like

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a surprising number of other successful youngish men of Zenith, hard-surfaced, glossy, ferociously driving in business, and outside of business absorbed only in sports and cocktail-lit dancing, McKee was fanatically interested in children. He was on the Zenith school-board and the Board of Visitors of St. Mark's Town and Country School. Emily and Harry McKee made Sam blush by the cheery openness with which they informed him that they intended to have only three children, but to have those with celerity and to have them perfect. (They apparently possessed more control of Providence than was understood by such an innocent as Sam.) while they awaited the arrival of the three, they were devoted to Elizabeth Jane, a sedate, bob-haired, bookish child, who reminded Sam of a boy minstrel in a Maxfield Parrish picture. (He had always admired Parrish's dream castles, despite Fran's scoffing.)

Sam liked Elizabeth Jane. "Real old-fashioned child," he said.
"So innocent and demure."

And the next day Elizabeth Jane remarked placidly, when she had invited herself to tea with Sam and Emily, "Aunty, would it be awfully rude of me if I said my teacher is a damn' fool? Would it? She's started telling us about sex, and she's so scared and silly about it, and of course all of us kids know all about it already."

"My God!" said Samuel Dodsworth to himself.

McKee and Emily celebrated Elizabeth Jane's twelfth birthday with an afternoon party for forty children. Sam knew that there were to be many dodges of a rich nature; he was aware that a red and white striped pavilion was being erected on the McKee lawn, and orders in for such simple delights as Pêche Melba, Biscuit Tortonì, and Bombe Surprise, along with Viennese pastry, loganberry juice, imported ginger ale and lobster salad, and that the caterer was sending half a

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dozen waiters in dress suits. But he was still antiquated enough to picture the children playing Ring Around a Rosy and Puss in the Corner and Hide 'n' Go Seek.

He was lunching with Tub Pearson on the day of the party, and after lunch he excitedly went to the Five and Ten Cent store and filled his pockets with dozens of pleasant little foolishnesses -- false noses, chocolate cigars, tissue-paper hats -- and proceeded to McKee's, planning to set all the children at the party laughing with his gifts.

He was late. When he arrived, the children were decorously sitting in four rows of chairs on the lawn, watching a professional troupe from the Zenith Stock Company perform an act from "Midsummer Night's Dream." And there was a professional magician afterward -- though the young lordlings were bored by such kitchy banalities as rabbits out of silk hats -- and a lady teacher from the Montessori School who, with a trained voice-for-children and trained gestures, told ever such nice Folk Tales from Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Iceland, and Yucatan. Then, unherded but politely in order, the children filed past a counter at which Harry McKee, disguised as an Arab for no perceptible reason, gave each of them a present.

They each said "Thank you very much" tolerantly, and unwrapped their presents, showing their trained social-mindedness by depositing the wrappers in a barrel therefor provided. Sam goggled at the presents. There were French perfume and packets of a thousand stamps, riding crops and portable phonographs, engraved stationery and a pair of love-birds.

He hastily pulled out the flaps of his coat pockets lest some one see the ludicrous little gifts he had bought.

And later, "I've got to get out of this. Too rich for my blood."

It took a week of tactful hinting about needing eight hours of

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daily golf, but in the end he escaped to one of the chintzy bedrooms at
the Tonawanda Country Club and there, in an atmosphere of golf, gin-
bottles in the locker room, small dinners followed by poker, and a read-
ing room full of magazines which on glossy paper portrayed country houses
and pole teams, he made out a lotus-eating existence, with cold cauli-
flower and stringy lamb-chops and bootlegged whisky for lotuses.

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He persuaded himself, for minutes at a time, that business affairs
demanded his staying in Zenith, and he bleakly knew, for hours at a
time, that they didn't go on so long as he was unwilling to desert Fran's
ambitions and return to active motor-manufacturing.

His capital was invested in carefully diversified ventures -- in
U. A. C. stock, railroad and industrial and government bonds. However,
often he conferred with his bankers and brokers, he couldn't find any-
thing very absorbing to do in the way of changing investments.

But he also owned, as a more speculative interest, a share of a
resort hotel near Zenith, and on his way to America he had persuaded
himself that, with his newly educated knowledge of food and decoration
and service, he would be able to improve this hotel.

It was quite a bad hotel, and very profitable.

He had a meal there, two days after arriving in Zenith, and it
was a terrible meal.

He told the manager that it was a terrible meal.

The manager looked bored and resigned.

When Sam had persuaded him to stay, the manager explained that
with the cost of materials and the salaries of cooks, he couldn't do
a better meal at the price. It was all very well, the manager pointed
out, to talk about the food in Paris. Only, this wasn't Paris. And
furthermore, did Sam happen to know what chickens cost per pound at the

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present moment?

That was Sam's only achievement during his stay in Zenith. But
weeks went by before he admitted, rather angrily, that business did
not need him..... just as Brent did not need him, Emily did not need
him.

But certainly, he comforted himself, Fran needed him, and such
friends as Tub Pearson.

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CHAPTER 19

Thomas J. Pearson and Samuel I Dodsworth had always been too well ac-
quainted to know each other. They had been together since boyhood.
Each had been a habit to the other. It had been a habit for Tub to go
once a week to Sam's for poker; it was a habit for Sam to telephone
him for lunch every Tuesday or Wednesday. They analyzed each other,
they considered each other as individuals, no more than a man considers
the virtues of his own several toes, unless they hurt. Even Sam's
absence at technical school, after college, had given them no
understanding of each other. They were justly under the spell of the
collegiate belief that one's classmates are the most princely fellows
ever known in history.

But in Sam's six months abroad, Tub had grown into new habits.
It was to the house of Dr. Henry Hazzard that he looked now for his
weekly drug of poker. Sam saw that Hazzard was at least as necessary
to Tub as himself, now, and sometimes he found himself allied against
the two of them when the talk fell on labor or European alliances and
they expressed the fat opinions which he himself had once accepted
but about which he [felt now] shaky. He was slightly jealous, slightly
critical. He noted that Tub wasn't quite so perfect as he had rem-
embered. When Tub shrieked "What ho," said the cat to the catamaran,
during a game of poker,

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or "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the ante" during a game of Texas holdSam was not diverted. And he felt that Tub was as critical of him. If he hinted that the paving on Conklin Avenue was bad, or that the coffee at the country club left something to be desired, Tub scolded "Oh God, we expatriates certainly are a hard bunch to please!"

When Sam dined he found himself turning oftener to Tub's bouncing goodwife, ~~matet,~~ than to Tub.

Yet between times they played their nineteen holes happily, ser-
ene as a pair of old dogs out rabbit-hunting. If sometimes Sam found
himself wishing for Ross Ireland's melodramatic talk about revolutions
and lost temples, if sometimes Tub seemed rather provincial, he was
thoroughly scandalized, and rebuked himself, "Tub's the best fellow
in the world!"

It is doubtful whether he was the more disturbed by finding that
he could get along without Tub or, ~~that~~ by finding that
Tub could get along without him.

Believing from Sam's first enthusiastic foreign letters that he
would not return from Europe this year, Tub had planned with Dr. Hazzard
a month's motoring-golfing expedition. They were excited about it. They
were going to play over the best courses in Winnemac, Indiana, Illinois,
Michigan, and Ohio. They spoke of the charms of stumbling over new var-
ieties of bunkers, wild grass, and rosebushes, ~~as conventionally as Cossacks~~ might speak of an invitation to tea in the sultan's harem. They raved
over long shots across sand dunes, and disastrous ponds in which to lose
dozens of golf balls.

They had planned to go by themselves, but now they invited Sam.
He hesitated. He felt unwanted.

Of course they hadn't known he would be returning ---

Of course they **had** urged him to come

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Only why couldn't they have waited to see whether he would return ---

He compromised by going with them for two weeks out of the month.

It was a good jaunt. They laughed, and felt free of womenfolk and nagging secretaries, retold all the dirty stories they knew, and drank discreetly, drove fast, and admired the golf courses on the North Shore, above Chicago. Sam enjoyed it. But he noted that when he left they seemed cheerful enough about going on by themselves.

Brent - Emily - business - now Tub and Hazzard. They didn't need him.

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All thinking about matters less immediate than food, sex, business, and the security of one's children is a disease, and Sam was catching it. It made everything more difficult.

He thought about alcohol.

He noted that most of the men of the country club set, including himself, drank too much. And they talked too much about drinking too much. Prohibition had turned drinking from an agreeable, not very important accompaniment to gossip into a craze. They were jumpy about it, and as fascinated as a schoolboy peering at obscene posters.

And he began to meditate about his acquaintances, almost frankly.

He realized, almost frankly, that he was not satisfied now by Dr. Hazzard's best limericks, Tub's inside explanations about the finances of Zenith corporations, even Judge Turpin's whispers about the ashes upon the domestic hearths of their acquaintances.

Hang it, that had been good talk in Paris, even when he had not altogether understood it -- Atkins's rumination on painters, the gilded chatter of Renée Penable's gang of pirates, and still more the stories of Ross Ireland, the other joker. He had heard the real story of Anastasia, who was declared to be the daughter of the Czar, of the Zinovieff letter which had wrecked the Labor Party of Britain, of the suicide of

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Archduke Rudolph, of the Empress Charlotte wandering melancholy mad through the haunted rooms of Castle Miramar, of systems to win at Monte Carlo, of Floyd Gibbon's plan to make a motor road from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande, of Turkish women born in harems, who now bobbed their hair and studied biology, of the Chinese "Christian general" -- oh, a hundred stories touching great empires and hidden lands. And he had seen the King and Queen of England drive up Constitution Hill in an open motor, had seen Carpentier, a prize-fighter, dancing -- a pale, solemn, unathletic-looking young man, seen Briand at the opera and Arnold Bennett with his new bride at the theater.

It had been good talk and good seeing.

But even if he were articulate enough to bring home this booty to Tub and Dr. Hazzard and Judge Turpin, he felt -- after a few stumbling trials he knew that they would not be interested.

He saw that it was not a question of Ross Ireland being interested in kingdoms and of Tub being interested only in coupons and aces. He saw, slowly, that none of his prosperous industrialized friends in Zenith were very much interested in anything whatever. They had cultivated caution until they had lost the power to be interested. They were like old surly farmers. The things over which they were most exclamatory -- money, golf, drinking -- didn't fascinate them as brushstrokes or woodwinds fascinated the peering Endicott Everett Atkins; to the lords of Zenith, they were, really, not pleasures but ways of keeping so busy that they would not admit how bored they were, how empty their ambitions. They had as their politics only a testy fear of the working class. (Why, Sam perceived uneasily, the whole country turned the dramatic game of politics over to a few seedy professional vote-wranglers!) To them women were only bedmates, housekeepers, producers of heirs, and a home could not escape, and audience that had to listen when everybody at the office was tired of

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hearing one's grievances. The arts, to them, consisted only of jazz,
conducive to dancing with young girls, pictures which made a house look
rich, and stories which were narcotics to make them forget the tedium
of existence.

They did things, they rushed, the supervised, they contended -- but
they were not interested.

However difficult Fran might be at times, pondered Sam, however
foolish Madame de Pénable with her false hair and her false gigolos,
however pompous and patronizing Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins, they were
fascinated by everything, from their own amours to soup and aeroplanes.

He would like to be one of them. There was only one thing in the
way. Could he?

Thus meditated Samuel Dodsworth, alone on the porch of the country
club, awaiting the return of Tub Pearson.

What the devil was he doing here? He was as dead as though he
were entombed. He had to "get busy" -- either go back to work, at once,
or join Fran.

Which?

Then, for a week or two, he became very busy peering into the Sans
Souci Gardens development.

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To the north of Zenith, among wooded hills above the Chaloosa River,
there was being laid out one of the astonishing suburbs which have ap-
peared in America since 1910. So far as possible, the builders kept
the beauties of forest and hills and river; the roads were not to be
broad straight gashes butting their way through hills, but winding by-
ways, very inviting.....if one could only kill off the motorists. Here,
masked among trees and gardens, were springing up astonishing houses --
considerably more desirable as residences than the gaunt fortified

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castles of the Rhine, the magnificent and quite untenable museums of French chateaux. They were all imitative, of course -- Italian villas and Spanish patios and Tyrolean inns and Tudor manor houses and Dutch Colonial farmhouses so mingled and crowded one another that the observer was dizzy. They were so imitative and so standardized that it was easy to laugh at them. But they were no more imitative of Munich than Munich was imitative of Italy or than Italy of Greece, and like the rest of the great American Domestic Architecture of this era, they were probably the most comfortable residences in the world....for one who didn't mind it if his Venetian balcony was only ten feet from his neighbor's Swiss chalet eaves, and his neighbor's washing got slightly in the way of tea on his own lawn.

Driving through the San Souci Gardens, Sam was fascinated. He liked the energy with which roads were being dug, houses rising, stone fountains from Florence being set up in squares and circle designated by arty little swinging street signs as "Piazza Santa Lucia" and "Plaza Real".

That there was something slightly ridiculous about mixing up Spain and Devon and Norway and Algiers, and transplanting them to the sandy hills of a Midwestern town, where of late the Indians had trapped rabbits and the rusty-bearded Yankees had trapped the Indians, did vaguely occur to Sam, but it was all a fantastic play to him, very gay and bright after the solemn respectabilities and the disapproving mansard roofs of the older residential avenues in Zenith.

Here, at least, he reflected, was all the color and irregularity he had gone abroad to seek; all the scarlets and yellows and frivolous pinks, all the twisty iron-work and scalloped tiles and striped awnings and Sicilian wine-jars he could swallow, along with (he thanked Heaven) all the mass-produced American electric refrigerators, oil furn-

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aces, vacuum cleaners, garbage incinerators, over-stuffed chairs and built-in garages which, for all of Fran's scoffing and Mr. Atkins's expatriate distress, Sam still approved.

It came to him that now there was but little pioneering in manufacturing motors; that he hadn't much desire to fling out more cars on the packed highways. To create houses, perhaps less Coney-Island-like than those -- and not be scrapped noble houses that would last three hundred years, in a year, as cars were --

"That'd be interesting," said Sam Dodsworth, the builder.

Of course he knew nothing about architecture. But he knew a good deal about engineering, about steel and wood and glass, about organizing companies, about getting along with labor.

"And say! Here's something that Fran would take an interest in! And she's an expert about decorations and all that stuff....Might hold her here!"

In a leisurely way, apparently not much interested, Sam saw to it that he was introduced to the president of the Sans Souci Company and that they played golf together. He was invited to view their Gardens with the president, and afterward he spent a good deal of time walking through them, talking to architects, to carpenters, to gardeners. Otherwise he merely waited. He was very good at waiting.

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Twice a week letters from Fran had drawn him toward her and toward Europe. Her first letter had come on the day of his arrival in Zenith:

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Villa Doree,
Vevey,
Montreux,
La Suisse.

Sam dear, it's too glorious! Down the lake, friendliest little steamers zipping by -- peaks of the Dent de Midi -- too perfectly

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**superb** -- at sunset they're clouds of gold. And I've actually been walking! (Was Fran terribly bad in Paris, always galloping out to night clubs when you'd rather have gone walking? Well you have your revenge -- **awfully** lonely for your big bear growls and general dependability even though I am moved by beauty of this place and rather grateful for a little calm.) Walk up through vineyards to ducky little stone houses.

The villa is **charming** -- not much ground but lawns and roses and terrace for tea, right on the lake. Renée Penable is just as glad as I am to be free for a while of all the noisy young dancing men. We've both sworn to let ourselves be old ladies with caps and knitting for a while, probably take to religion and camomile tea. I'm waiting for your letters, just had your steamer note, **so** glad you enjoyed crossing with Mr. Ireland, you probably had more fun with him than a bad sport like me -- there, I shouldn't have said that, it looks mean, and I really and truly am glad you had a nice bachelorish time. Be sure and write **everything** about Brent and Emily and McKee. Give my regards to Tub and Dr. Hazzard. An astonishing big gull has just lighted on the lawn right in front of the window by which I write. We have the funniest pair of maids -- one looks like a kewpie, and I suspect the purity of her intentions toward the postman, and Cook is built like a Japanese wrestler -- only more clothed, of course. I hope you will have a happy stay in Zenith. I do miss you. Come back soon and in early autumn we'll jaunt off together. I know you're a little fed up with Paris and personally I don't care if we don't get back there till spring, we might view Egypt, Italy etc. for six months. Renée sends you her love and so do I, old grizzly!

Your Fran.

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Her next three letters were short, devoted to scenery and troubles.

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She always had troubles -- always! They weren't very serious troubles, he thought: Renée had been cross, the cook had been cross -- apparently Fran herself had never been cross. The dance at the Hotel des Deux Mondes had been a bore, the rain had been wet, the English family next door had been rude, she had a toothache. Two of the letters were impersonal, almost chilling; in between was an affectionate cry for him, so that he was ~~confused,~~ and gave a good deal of his hours of meditation to wishing that she were a little less complicated.

The fourth letter was livelier:

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Wouldn't you *know* it, Sam! After swearing that she never wanted to see a dancing man again, or anything in the way of a male more disturbing than a Father Confessor, Renée has already gathered about her (which unfortunately more or less means about me too) a brand new horde of Apollos. How she does it I don't know! There'll be a nice young man of sixty staying with his venerable mamma at a hotel here; somebody in Paris asks him to call on us; he comes formally to tea; and the next day he's panting on the doorstep again, bringing a pack of males ranging from sixteen to eighty and from racing models to the latest thing in hearses. Of course she knows simply *everybody* -- we can't go to the Deux Mondes for a cocktail without at least one gent swooping down on her with glad whoops of alcoholic welcome. So now the house is littered with fauns and Bacchuses, if that's the word. There's an English hunting man named Randall who wears blue collars and shirts, and another Englishman picturesquely named Smith, and an Austrian baron who, as far as I can find out, sells clocks, and a man who seems to have leased the French Bourse, and a rich American Jew named Arnold Israel -- he's about forty and very good-looking in a black-haired,

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black-eyed, beefy sort of way but a little too gaudily Oriental for my
simple taste, when he kisses your hand he almost bites it, ugh! Of course
it is nice to be able to dance again, but I really and truly did enjoy
just mouching around and being quiet. Would you mind transferring five
thousand (dollars) to my account at the Guaranty, Paris? Food here is
more expensive than I had expected, and I've had to buy some more summer
things -- I found a shop in Montreux with simply _darling_ hats, and while
it's all very well to walk and to study the dear sweet smelly Common
People by riding on trams, now that Renée has gone and dragged us into
the Life Idiotic again, we've had to hire a limousine and a chauffeur.
I hope you're ever so happy, darling.

Français

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It was with her next letter that he began to fret. It reached him
while he was motoring and golfing with Tub Pearson and Dr. Hazzard:

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Such a lovely blue and golden day! The mountains are like the pil-
lars of heaven. A bunch of us are taking a motor boat across to the
French side of the lake. Arnold -- Arnold Israel, an American here, I
think I spoke of him -- he has discovered a marvelous little inn where we
can lunch -- under the vine and fig tree sort of thing. He's really an
awfully nice person, one of these extraordinary international Jews who
can do everything and knows everything -- rides like an angel, swims
seven miles, tells the funniest living stories, knows more about paint-
ing than old Atkins and more about biology and psychology than sixteen
college professors and I must say he dances like Maurice himself! And
he is an American. It's funny, I know I'm playing into your hands but
I must admit this, much though I admire Europeans, it is nice to rest
one's self after even Renée's best cut-glass etc., by being

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simple and natural with a fellow countryman -- one who will understand when you say, "She must have gotten that hat from the five and ten cent store," or even, "Attaboy." I find that with you away, you dear darling old vulgarian, I have positive joy in hearing somebody say, "Oh, hell." Makes me almost homesick. Oh yes, I guess I am American all right!
Must hurry now, lots of love

F

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For ten days, no letter, then two together:

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You would approve of your bad Fran thoroughly if you knew what a healthful life she is leading. Of course sometimes I do stay up a bit late at dances -- we've met an awfully nice American Jewish family here named, of all things, Lee, friends of Arnold Israel -- they have rented a wonderful old castle back from the lake above Glion, and they do give the most gorgeous parties. But otherwise I'm outdoors most of the time -- riding, swimming, tramping, motoring, tennis -- the Israel man has the most terrific cannon-ball in tennis. And then he'll read Shelley aloud, like a twenty-year-old Vassar girl! What a man! And to think that he's in the jute and hemp importing business! though it's true that he merely inherited the business from his hustling old father, and that he's able to leave it four or five months every year and loaf all through Europe. Good Heavens, this whole letter seems to be about Arnold Israel! That's only because I thought he was the person here who would interest you most. I needn't tell you that he and I are merely the most impersonal kind of friends. Oh, I suppose he would get sentimental if I'd let him but I most certainly will not, and with all his Maharajah splendors, he has the most delicate and sensitive mind. I do appreciate what you say about Brent and Emily's having really grown

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up and hardly needing us. Madly though I adore them and long to see them,
I'm almost afraid to, they'd make me feel so old, whereas now if you
could see me in white blouse, shamelessly crimson skirt, white shoes and
stockings, you would say I'm a flapper, and it's beautifully quiet here
by the lake at night -- getting in <u>quantities</u> of restful sleep.

Your Fran

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Sam dear, this isn't really a letter but just a PS to my note of
yesterday. I feel as though I wrote so much about Mr. Israel that you'll
think I think too much about him. That's the unfortunate thing about
letters -- one just chats along and often gives a wrong impression. If
I have mentioned him several times it's only because most of the other
people, no matter how well they may dance or swim, are really pretty
dull, while he is a nice person to talk to, and of course -- I needn't
tell you, you old loyal darling, I have no other interest in him. Be-
sides, Renée is crazy about him and wants to annex him for keeps,
and as she's really the chef de bureau here, having found the villa etc.
even though she does pay only half the rent, if she wants her old Arnold
she can certainly jolly well have him, for all I care. Hastily, F

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The next letter did not come for nearly a fortnight, and Sam real-
ized, putting on his glasses to peer at the stamp, that it was not from
Vevey but from Stresa, in Italy:

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Sam, the most dreadful thing has happened. Madame de Penable and
I had simply the most dreadful row, she said things I simply could not
forgive, and I have left the villa and come here to Lake Maggiore. It's
a lovely place, but as I don't know whether I shall stay, you'd better

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address me % Guaranty, Paris. And it was all about nothing. I've written you about a Mr. Israel we met at Vevey and how crazy Renée was about him. One evening, I hate to say this about a woman who, after all, no matter how vulgar and unscrupulous she is has given me a good time, but I really must say she'd drunk more than was good for her and after the guests had gone she suddenly turned on me like a fish-wife and she used the most dreadful language and she accused me of carrying on an affair with Mr. Israel and of stealing him from her which was idiotic as well as false because I must say she never did have him so how could I have stolen him from her even supposing I had the slightest desire to! I've never had anybody talk to me the way she did, it was simply dreadful. Of course I didn't condescend to stoop to her level and answer her. I simply said very politely, "My dear Madame de Pénable, I'm afraid you are hysterical and not altogether responsible for what you are saying and I would prefer not to discuss the matter any further certainly not till tomorrow morning." But that didn't stop her and finally I simply went to my room and locked the door and next day I moved to a hotel and then came down here -- it really is lovely here, with the Borromean Isles including the famous Isola Bella lying out in the lake and across the lake, behind the nice village of Pallanza, the mountains rising, quite high and villages etc. strung along the roads up the mountains. I feel awfully lonely here and that beastly toothache I had in London is returning but after all, anything is better than living with a brawling vulgar fool like Mme. de Pénable. I hate to 'fess up and I guess this gives you a lovely chance to crow over me, only I know you're too generous and understanding of your bad little girl to take such an advantage of her, but you certainly were completely right in what you said, or rather hinted, for you were too kind to come out and say anything rude, about the Pénable woman and her dreadful vulgar friends. I'm sorry. I hope I've learned

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something. Only I don't want you to think that Mr. Israel is in any
way to blame, as like the Penable woman and her friends. He was as innoc-
ent as I was, and he was good enough to see me off on the train at Vevey.
He is a man I would like to have you meet, I think you would find in him
all the nice, jolly, companionable, witty things you find in Ross Ireland
and at the same time a subtlety and good taste that I'm sure you will
admit with all his fine qualities Mr. Ireland lacks. Well perhaps we
will run into Arnold when you come back for I believe he is taking a whole
year this time wandering around Europe. Oh do come soon, darling! I
miss you so today! If you were here we'd take the little batello --
aren't you proud of me, I've already learned ten words of Italian in one
day; "Come in" is <u>avanti</u> and the bill is <u>le conto</u> or no, <u>il</u> conto I
think it is -- and we'd go scooting around the lake. If it's convenient
you might send another couple of thousand, Guaranty Paris -- of course
I have to pay my share of the rent at the cursed villa at Vevey even
though I'm not there, I suppose if I didn't, and I certainly would jolly
well like not to, the Penable woman would go around saying that I was
not only a libertine and a man-snatcher but also an embezzler! How I'd
like to have you spank her for me with your big beautiful strong hand!
You'd do it so calmly and so thoroughly! So of course I have to pay my
share of the rent and limousine hire there and as I also have to pay now
for my rooms here or wherever I may be (you better not depend on this
address reaching me but address % Guaranty) it will make things a little
more expensive than I had hoped. Oh dear, I did hope this would be a
nice economical summer, and heaven knows I tried hard enough to make it
so, but I didn't expect the unexpected to unexpect quite so disastrously.
I feel better now after talking to you like this -- I cried almost all
last night -- and I shall now live the life of a nun and devote myself
to the study of the Italian language and people, as befits an old lady

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like me.

Your rumped and repentant Fran.

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That letter had come on the day when the president of the Sans Souci Gardens Company had invited Sam to lunch.

He was very frank, the president. He was a trained architect. He astonished Sam by admitting that he thought Sans Souci rather dreadful. "There's too much mixture of styles, and the houses are too close together," he said. "But most Americans, while they'll pay a devil of a lot for a big impressive house, don't care enough for privacy so that they'll pay for a decent-sized plot of ground. And they want French chateaux in a Henry Ford section! But at least we've been educating them to be willing to come out toward the country instead of huddling together in the city. And I'm planning now, if Sans Souci doesn't ruin me, a much bigger development where we won't mix the styles. Oh, I suppose we'll have to go on cribbing from Europe and Colonial America. When a natural genius comes along and creates something absolutely new in houses, only a few people really like 'em. But I picture a new development -- I hope with a less agonizing name than Sans Souci Gardens, which is the invention of that grand old Frenchman, one of my partners, Mr. Abe Blumenthal -- in which, at least, we can keep the thing from looking like a world's fair. For instance, one section strictly confined to houses more or less in the Tudor style, and another all Dutch Colonial, or something not warring with Dutch Colonial. Or maybe the whole development in one style. Like Forest Hills on Long Island."

But -- the Sans Souci president went on -- he himself was too fanciful and too impatient. And as he needed some one (he hinted that it might be Sam) who would take the hundred or so notions for hotels and luxurious yachting tours and chain restaurants which he con-

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ceived every month, pick out the most practical, and control the financ-
ing, the selling.

He grinned. "Doesn't sound like much of an offer. It's based on
the belief that I do have some new and interesting ideas along with quite a
decent knowledge of architecture and building. But I'd like to
see if it isn't possible for us to get together. While you'd been de-
ciding that you were bored with selling cars and while you've been look-
ing up my record for dependability -----"

"Oh, you guessed that?" grunted Sam.

"Of course!"

"I'll think it over, I most certainly will," said Sam.

He returned to the country club, planning a dozen or so new kinds
of real estate developments of his own, to receive Fran's distressed
letter from Stresa.

It all seemed to fit in. He would bring her back; together they
would look into the building of houses. He cabled her, "Too bad! Penable
glad got rid her why don't you return Zenith? then abroad again in year or
so."

She answered "No want stay few more months suit self about joining."

And the great Samuel Dodsworth still had no more notion of what he
was going to do than when, as a senior in college, he had sat on East
Rock, looking at Long Island Sound, planning to be a bridge-builder in
the Andes.

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He wrote to her of the Sans Souci Gardens, and waited. He read
about domestic architecture, and went to Cleveland and Detroit to inspect
new developments.

Her next letter had been written some days before he had received her
Stresa letter, before she had his cable. It informed him:

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Yes, my dear Samivel, I am still at Stresa, though I may be off to Deauville -- I've always wanted to see one of those places where gloomy earls go to lose money at chemin de fer. But meantime I've been very happy here, after getting over my first hysterics at the Fenable woman's beastliness. I've had such a nice girl here to give me Italian lessons daily and with her or other acquaintances made at the hotel I've explored all the divine villages about here -- Pallanza and Baveno and Gignese, back in the hills and Cannobio, and Arona, etc. etc. I've taken a steamer clear up to Locarno, the Swiss end of the lake, and the tram up to the top of Monte Mottarone -- Sam, it's so steep that when you look down at the lake below you the water seems absolutely to tip up like a tilted platter! So you're not to worry about me, I'm quite all right. I suppose I ought to tell you that Arnold Israel has come down here from Vevey, you remember the nice American Jew I wrote you about, he's staying here at this same hotel. I don't know that I ought to tell you this -- even you, you old woolly-bear darling with your kind, decent, sympathetic mind might possibly misunderstand for, with all your virtues, after all you do have an American way of looking at things, but I'm afraid some gossip might come to you some day and I want you to understand. Needless to say, our relations are as innocent as though we were a boy and girl of eight and I do have such a nice happy clean time with him -- Sam, he drives a car even faster than you do, my heart almost stopped yesterday when he was driving 118 kilometers an hour, but he's such a superb driver that I usually feel quite safe. Now I must hurry and dress. Bless you. I hope you're well and happy. Best love to Emily and Harry.

F

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That afternoon he telephoned to the president of the Sans Souci Com-
pany that he was summoned abroad and could decide nothing for several
months. He telegraphed to New York for a steamer reservation. He dashed
to Emily, to Tub, to Hazzard, and said good-bye. But it was a week be-
fore he could sail, and meantime another letter had come from Fran --
from Deauville:

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Yes, here I am, and I don't like it much. This place is very gay
but a little icky; lots of nice people but also <u>dreadful</u> ones, profiteers
giving cocktail parties, race-track touts infesting the lounge. I wish
I'd gone to the Lido instead. Perhaps I will. See here now, Samivel.
In your letter, written to me at Vevey but received since I left, you
said that you hoped I would, as you expressed it, "lay low" after my winter
in Paris and "get to bed early for a while." I don't suppose you meant
to be unpleasant but you couldn't realize how jumpy and hurt and bewildered
I was after the horrible Penable affair, like a lost child, and how your
scolding would hurt me. Am I to spend the rest of my life growing old
as gracefully <u>and as fast</u> as I can, which is apparently <u>your</u> ideal!
You talk as though I were some hell-raising flapper instead of a woman of
the world who like<u>es</u> civilized amusements. There! I'm sure you didn't
mean to be scolding, but can't you understand, how it might hit me when
I was in a very high-strung condition? Really, Sam, you must be a little
more thoughtful! Do try to use a little imagination, now and then! Now
that's off my chest and shall we just forget it? Only I must say --Sam,
you may think I'm unjust, but really it was essentially your fault that
I ever had the <u>Penable</u> trouble. If you hadn't insisted on running back
to America for your class reunion, which wasn't so awfully necessary,
after all, if you had stuck by me so that I wasn't in the <u>~~anomalous~~</u> and almost humiliating position of being without a husband,

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Just like a lone adventuress, the De Penable woman would never have dared act
as though I were an adventuress and have turned on me the way she did.
I hope you'll understand that I mean this only in the kindest and sweetest
way, and we are, after all, aren't we, one of the few married couples who
understand each other so well that we can be frank, and next time I hope
you'll try to remember. There, that's over, and now for the news.

Yes, says the hussy defiantly, Arnold Israel is here with me, that
is, as I'm sure you'll understand, he is in no sense with me, but he's
here in Deauville. At first I wouldn't come along, but he was so thought-
ful, so sweet, so understanding. He dug up somehow -- I don't know how
he does these things but he has what one might call the spiritual as well
as the financial Midas touch, do you know that I've just discovered that
while I thought he was merely loafing while he was away from his beastly
old jute and hemp business, here in Europe, he's made about $40,000 by
gambling in exchange and buying and selling a, well, a reasonably authen-
tic Rembrandt and he wanted to give me some pearls but of course I wouldn't
let him, but I'm drifting away from the thread of my story. He found out
at Stresa that a most respectable old Philadelphia couple, real Ritten-
house Square sort only fond of gaiety, were here, and he had them invite
me to come here under their wing, which made it all right and prevents
any of the nasty kind of gossip such as a beast like the De Penable woman
loves. After all, I thought, I'm silly about not coming with him. Sam
will never misunderstand, he has imagination, and besides, I realized,
I'm not a young flittergibbet or one of these horrible female Ponce de
Lions like De Penable, but a perfectly respectable matron who has brought
up a son and a daughter now married, and no one would ever think of gos-
siping.

So here I am and while, as I say, I'm not crazy about the place,
Arnold and I and his friends, a Mr. and Mrs. Doone, perfectly darling

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people and such wonderful sports though they're nearly seventy, we have
gay little parties of our own and loaf around on the beach for hours nours
nours at a time. Address me c/o Paris, though I'm certain to be here for
at least three weeks more, as there is a magnificent costume ball coming off
to which Arnold and I are going, most scrupulously as the Sirocco and the
North Wind, me with my nice pale Swede hair being naturally the North Wind.
Lots of love, F○

F6

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Sam cabled, "Sailing SS. Carmania meet you Paris Hotel Universel Sep-
tember two." He added "Love," and crossed it out, and put it in again.

Twelve days later he was looking at the long fortifications at Cher-
bourg, watching the voluble little Frenchmen on the tender.

On deck, by night and day, he had walked out of his system all ir-
ritation at Fran, all hatred of Arnold Israel. When he had finished her
Deauville letter in Zenith, he had suddenly grasped something which he had
never completely formulated in their twenty-three years of marriage -- that she
was not in the least a mature and responsible woman, mother and wife and
administrator, but simply a clever child, with a child's confused self-
dramatizations. The discovery had dismayed him. Then it had made him
the more tender. His other children, Brent and Emily, did not need him;
his child Fran did need him! Something in life still needed him! He
thought of her, awaiting him there in Paris, as he had thought of her
in the uncomplicated days of their courtship.

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CHAPTER 20

Late of a cloudy afternoon, the Paris express slid through the thund-
erous gloom of the train shed, and Sam was jumpy with the excitement of
arrival, looking down at the porters as though they were his friends,
smiling at the advertisements of Cointreau and Fernet Branca, of Rouen and
Avignon, on the station walls. He marched quickly out of the train, peer-
ing for Fran, anxious when he did not see her, and he felt utterly let
down as he clumped after the porter with his bags.

She was at the end of the platform.

He saw her afar; he was startled to know how much lovelier she was
than he had remembered. In a cool blue coat and skirt, with a white blouse,
her hair, pale and light-touched as new straw, suggested at the edge of
her slim legs so silken, her shoulders so confident,
she was the American athletic girl, swift to dance, to play tennis, to
drive like a cyclone. She was so vital, so young! His heart caught with
admiration. But he was conscious that her face was unhappy, and that she
looked at the approaching passengers only mechanically. Didn't she want
him ---

He came up to her shyly, he was confused by the rather polite smile
that masked her face, but holding her by her two shoulders, looming over
her, he murmured, "Did I remember to write you that I adore you?"

"Why no, I don't believe you did. Do you? That's very nice, I'm

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sure."

Her tone was as light and smooth and passionless, her laugh was as distant, as the banter of an actress in a drawing-room comedy.

They were strangers.

At the hotel she said hesitantly, "Uh, Sam -- do you mind -- I thought you'd be tired after the journey. I know I am, after coming from Deauville. So I got two single rooms instead of a double. But they're right next to each other."

"No, maybe better rest," he said.

She came with him into his room, but she hovered near the door, saying with a dreadful politeness, "I hope you will find the room all right. It has quite a nice bathroom."

He hesitated, "I'll unpack later. Let's not hang around here now. Let's skip right out and catch us a good old sidewalk café and watch the world go by again!" Wretchedly he noted that she looked relieved. He had given her but a tap of a kiss. She had demanded no further caress.

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She was courteous, while he gossiped of Zenith, she laughed at the right moments, and she remained a stranger, forced to entertain the friend of a friend and wanting to get the duty over. She did ask questions about Emily and Brent, but when he talked of Tub, of golfing, she did not listen.

He could not endure it, but he said only, tenderly, "What's matter, honey? You seem kind of far off. Not feeling well? Glad to see me?"

"Of course! It's nothing. It's just -- I guess I didn't sleep very well last night. I'm a little nervy. But of course I'm glad to see you, dear old bear!"

And still they had not talked of Madame de Pénable, of Arnold Israel, of Stresa and Deauville. He had kept from it as much as she; he had said

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only, "Too bad you had your trouble with Mrs. Pénable, but I'm glad you had some fun after that. Your letters were great," He sounded provincial as he maundered about Zenith, rather dull and thick, but his senses were furiously awake. He noted how agitated she seemed. He noted that she drank three cocktails. He noted that he, Sam Dodsworth, was slowly massing for a battle, and that he dreaded it.

When they dressed for dinner, she closed the door between their two rooms.

"Let's go to Voisin's, where we can be quiet and talk," said he.

"Oh wouldn't you rather go some place a little more festive?"

"I would not!" Then first was he brusque. "I want to talk."

She shrugged.

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After the soup, he bumbled, "Well, I guess I've given you most of the news. Let's talk about plans. Where would you like to go, this fall? What about a good, long, easy hike through Italy and Spain and maybe over to Greece and Constantinople?"

"Why, I think that would be very nice a little later on. But just now --- After all, I've had a dreadfully rustic summer -- and of course you have, you poor thing! I think we both deserve a little gaiety here in Paris before we leave. After all, when you go traveling around to assort-ed places, you're *frightfully* detached from people." Then, very blandly, as though it wasn't at all necessary to have his agreement, "I think we might stay here three months or so, and we might take a nice apartment up near the Etoile. I'm so sick of hotels."

"Well ---" He stopped, then it came in a slow tidal wave. "I don't blame you for being sick of hotels. So am I! But I certainly don't intend to spend all fall, as I spent all spring, sitting on my rear in

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Paris ----- "

"Need you be vulgar? "

"Yes, I guess I need to. I don't intend to sit around here all fall,
waiting for you to go. When we first started out, I was willing
either to go on living in Zenith or travel, but if I'm going to travel, I
want to travel -- to see things, see different kinds of people and towns.
I'd like to see Venice and Madrid; I'd like to have some German beer. I
don't propose to go on being sacrificed to your ambition as a social climber
----- "

She flared, "That is a lie, and you know it's a lie! Do you think I
have to climb to meet people like Renée Pénable? Climb down, if anything!
But I do find it rather more amusing to play with civilized people than
to sit and soak at the New York Bar -- yes, or go around gaping at ruins
with a Baedeker! It's all very well for you, but I have to do the pack-
ing, I have to interpret for you. I have to plan the trip. Heavens, we'll
go to Venice! But is there any need of our galumphing off like a Cook's
tour when we could have a charming autumn here, with our own servants, and
all the friends that I have here now -- quite independent of the Pénable
person? I'm sorry, Sam, but if you could just occasionally try to catch
somebody else's point of view ----- I should prefer to remain right here
in Paris for ----- "

"Fran! "

"Well? "

He hesitated. While they talked, round them flowed the amenity of
~~good~~ service, and if they were two volcanoes, they kept their rumblings
low, and to any observer they seemed merely a large and impassive man,
probably English, and a woman with a ~~quick-changing~~ face who was a little
angry but very much in control of her anger.

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"Fran! You really would sacrifice me, to stay here?"

"Don't be so melodramatic! I can't see that it's any sacrifice to remain in the loveliest city ——"

"Is Arnold Israel here in Paris?"

"Yes he is! What of it?"

"When did you see him last?"

"This noon." She was enjoying being defiant, he felt.

"He going to stay here in Paris some time?"

"I don't know. How should I know? Yes, I suppose he is."

"He give you any ideas about a flat near the Etoile?"

"See here, my dear Samuel! Have you been reading novels? Just what is the idea of this comic returned-husband-sternly-cross-examining-loose-wife pose ——"

"Fran! How far did you go with this Israel?"

"Have you any idea how insulting you are?"

"Have you any idea how insulting I'm going to be, if you don't stop this injured innocent business?"

"And have you any idea of how angry I'm going to be if you continue to act like a barroom bully — which is what you are, essentially! I've concealed it from myself, for years, but I knew all the time —— The great Sam Dodsworth, the football player, the celebrated bruiser, the renowned bully! Why, you belong in the kitchen, with the corner police-man, not among civilized ——"

"You haven't answered. How far did you go with this Israel? I'm doing you the honor of asking you, not of snooping. And you haven't answered."

"And I most certainly do not intend to answer! It's an insult to be expected —— And it's an insult to Mr. Israel! He is a gentleman! I wish he were here! You wouldn't dare to talk to me as you've been

-257-

talking, if he were here. He's quite as powerful as you are, my dear Samuel -- and he has brains and breeding and manners as well. Aah! 'How far did you go in sin with your hellish lover!' After all the years I've tried to do something for you, you still have the vocabulary of a Laura Jean Libbey novel! Arnold, you will be shocked to learn, is so unregenerate that he prefers André Gide and Paul Morand to Laura Jean Libbey, and of course it's Black Guilt for me to have found a little pleasure in talking to him instead of discussing poker with your lovely friend Mr. Tub Pearson ------"

While she raced on, quietly hysterical, he knew the answer to his question, and he was astonished that he was not more astonished, shocked that he was not more shocked. He did not greatly press her. When she stopped, shaking with muted sobs which he pitied, he said, gently:

"You found him very romantic?"

"Of course! He is!"

"Perhaps I can understand that -- more or less."

"Oh Sam, please do be human and understand! You do it so well, when you forget your Stern Man of Granite role and let yourself be sweet. Of course there was nothing wrong between Arnold and me ------ Isn't it funny how ------ I'm just as bad as I accused you of being! Using old cant phrases like that! 'Nothing wrong between Arnold and me'! I suppose we were sleeping together. After all, though, perhaps I was unjust to you; perhaps you didn't mean anything of the kind, but merely ------ You are kind, Sam, but if you don't mind my saying so, you're just the least little bit clumsy, now and then ------"

She had checked her hysteria, had become amiable and prattling and self-confident again, and all the while he was reflecting, "She's lying. She never used to lie. She changed. This fellow is her lover."

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"---and what I suppose you were really hinting at was that I may
have been handsomely kissed by my ardent Jewish friend, before I left
Deauville. Well, I was! And I liked it! It doesn't matter if I never
see him again -- oh Sam, if you could only understand how humiliating and
infuriating it was of you to suggest that my desire to stay here had any-
thing whatever to do with Arnold! But he was charming. If you could only
have seen him, lolling among the sand dunes as though (I used to tell him)
he were a Maharajah among gold cushions, with white flannels, and his hair
wild and his shirt open at the throat --- It would have looked silly and
pretentious with any other man, but on him it seemed natural. And all the
while, with all his gorgeousness, talking so simply, so confidingly --
really, it was touching. But haven't we talked enough of him? We must
still make our plans ---"

"Let's get him settled first. I've got ---"

"Sam, the thing you never could realize about him, even if you met
him, was how touching he was. Clever and handsome and rich and so on,
and yet such a child! He needed some one like me to talk to. Oh, I was
just an audience for him -- nice old mother confessor. He, descending
enough to say that for a venerable dame of forty-two, I was still an ex-
cellent imitation of a pretty wench, and he'd supposed I was five years
younger than himself, not two years older. And that I was the best
dancer he'd found in Europe. But of course the bouquets were just pre-
liminary to his talking about himself and his unhappy childhood, and you
know what a fool I am about children -- the least hint that anybody has
had an unhappy childhood and I dissolve in tears! Poor Arnold! He
suffered as a boy because he was clever and strong. Nobody could believe
how sensitive he was. And his mother was a grim, relentless old dragon,
who hated weakness of any kind, or what she thought was weakness, and
when she'd find him day-dreaming, she'd accuse him of loafing ---Oh,
it must have been hell, for so fine a spirit! And then in college, the

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usual trouble of the too clever and too handsome Jew -- high-hatted by
the stupidest, drabbest, meanest Yankees and Middlewesterners -- they
looked down on him, just the way a dray-horse might look down on a fine
race-horse. Poor Arnold! Of course I was touched by so proud a person
as he _caring_ to tell me about his real self."

"Fran! You don't by any chance suppose, do you, that this is the
first time your Mr. Israel has used the neglected-childhood approach?
And apparently successfully!"

"Oh, I've had enough of your insulatels! Are you _again_ hinting that
I fell for him?"

"I am! It's rather important to know. Did you?"

"Well then -- yes. I did."

"Oh!"

"And I'm proud of it! I couldn't, once -- under your heavy-handed
tutelage, my dear Samuel! -- have believed it possible to be an 'erring
wife'! What blind hypocrites people are! And when it did happen, it all
seemed so right and natural and sweet -- -- --"

While she raced on he was incredulously admitting that this abom-
inable thing, this newspaper-headline, divorce-court, sensational-novel
degradation, had actually happened to him -- to her -- to Emily and Brent.
He had a fascinated desire to know details. He pictured this Arnold Is-
rael, this black leopard of a man -- no, too big for a black leopard, but
that sort of gracefulness -- returning to her Deauville hotel with her,
shirt open at his too smooth throat -- no, he'd be coming home with her
in evening clothes, probably with a cape thrown back; accompany her to
her room at the hotel in Deauville; whisper "Just let me come in for one
good-night kiss," Then Fran became real. Since he had arrived Sam's
eyes had seen her but cloudily, his ears had heard her only as a stranger.
Now he peered at her, was conscious of her, in _the_ black and

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silver, conscious of the curve from shoulder to breast; and he was raging
at the thought of Israel.

All his long thinking and his wrath slid by in five seconds and he
had not missed a word as she panted:

"You think it's an overwhelming attack on Arnold to suggest that he's
used the same tactics before. Of course he has -- of course he's had other
affairs -- perhaps lots of them! Thank Heaven for that! He's had some
training in the arts of love. He understands women. He doesn't think
they're merely business partners. Let me tell you, my dear Samuel, it
would be better for you, and for me both, if you'd devoted a little of
your valuable time to the despised art of rousing a woman to some degree
of romantic passion -- if you'd given some of the attention you've lavished
on carburetors to me -- and possibly even to other women -- I suppose
you have been what is called 'faithful' to me since our marriage."

"I have!"

"Well, doubtless I ought to be highly gratified --"

"Fran! Do you want to marry this fellow Israel?"

"Heavens no! Anyway, I don't think so."

"And yet you want to see him every day this fall."

"That's different. But not marry him. He's too much like plum
cake -- wonderful at a Christmas feast, but he'd bring indigestion. For
a permanent diet I'd prefer good, honest, dependable bread -- which you
are -- please don't think that's insulting; it's really a great compli-
ment. No! Besides, he doesn't want to! I doubt if he'd care for any
one woman for more than six months. Oh, I believe him when he says he's
almost morbidly faithful to the one woman while it lasts but --"

"Has he got a wife some place?"

"I don't think so. I don't know. Heavens! Does it matter?"

"It may!"

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"Oh, don't try to be melodramatic! It doesn't suit your Strong Calm
Manly type! Anyway, Arnold wouldn't marry me because I'm not a Jew. He's
just as proud of being a Jew as you are of being a Nordic. He ought to be!
He's more or less related to the Mendelssohn's and the Rothschilds and all
kinds of really significant people. A cousin of his in Vienna ------"

"Fran! Have you any idea how serious this business is?"

"Well, rather more than you have, perhaps!"

"I doubt it! Fran, you'll either marry him or cut him out, absolutely and completely."

"My dear Samuel, he might have something to say about that! He's
not one of your meek Revelation secretaries. And I won't be bullied."

"Yes you will! For the first time! God knows you're getting off
easy. Oh, I'm not the kind that would grab a shot gun and start off to
get you and your lover ------"

"Well I should hope not!"

"Don't be so sure! I could turn that way, if you just went on long
enough! No, I'm not that kind, especially. But by God, I'm still less
of the complaisant husband who's going to sit around and watch his wife
entertain her lover, as you've planned to, this fall ------"

"I haven't admitted that I plan to do any ------"

"You've admitted it and more! Now you'll either come away and
travel with me, and chuck this fellow and forget him, or I'll divorce
you -- for adultery!"

"Ridiculous!"

"Worse than that! Horrible! People calling you charlat! You can
imagine how Brent and Emily will feel!"

Very slowly: "Sam, I never till this moment suspected that ------
I knew you were stupid and heavy and slow and fond of vulgar people, but
I never knew you were simply a bullying rotten cad! No one has ever spoken
so to me in all my life!"

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"I know it. I've baby'd you. You regard yourself, young woman, as the modern American, with fancy European improvements. But I'm a lot more modern than you are. I'm a builder. I don't have to depend on any title or clothes or social class or anything else to be distinctive. And you've never seen it! You've just lambasted me because I am slow and clumsy, till you've stolen every bit of self-confidence I have. You've been the traitor to me in my own home. Criticizing! Not nagging, but just enjoying yourself by being so sweet and superior to me and humbling me. That was worse than your affair with this Israel."

"Oh, I haven't done that! Oh, I didn't mean to! I respect you so!"

"Do you respect me when you want me to sit around and be valet to your lover!"

"Oh no, no, no, I --- Oh, I can't think clearly. I'm all confused. I --- Yes, if you want, we'll leave for Spain tomorrow."

They did.

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CHAPTER 21

Since the days of Alexander the Great there has been a fashionable belief that travel is agreeable and highly educative. Actually, it is one of the most arduous yet boring of all pastimes and, except in the case of a few experts who go globe-trotting for special purposes, it merely provides the victim with more topics about which to show ignorance. The great traveler of the novelists is tall and hawk-nosed, speaking nine languages, annoying all right-thinking persons by constantly showing drawing-room manners. He has "been everywhere and done everything." He has shot lions in Siberia and gophers in Minnesota, and played tennis with the King at Stockholm. He can give you a delightful evening discoursing on Tut's tomb and the ethnology of the Maoris.

Actually the great traveler is usually a small mussy person in a faded green fuzzy hat, inconspicuous in a corner of the steamer bar. He speaks only one language, and that gloomily. He knows all the facts about nineteen countries, except the home-lives, wage-scales, exports, religions, politics, agriculture, history and languages of those countries. He is as valuable as Baedeker in regard to hotels and railroads, only not so accurate.

He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent

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half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all. Four hundred pictures all on a wall are four hundred times less interesting than one picture; and no one knows a café till he has gone there often enough to know the names of the waiters. These are the laws of travel.

If it were so inspiring and informing a business as the new mode of round-the-world-tour advertisements eloquently set forth, then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers, Pullman porters, and Mormon missionaries.

It is the awful toil which is the most distressing phase of travel. If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of starting out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.

Actually, most of those afflicted with the habit of traveling merely lie about its pleasures and profits. They do not travel to see anything, but to get away from themselves, which they never do, and away from rowing with their relatives -- only to find new relatives with whom to row. They travel to escape thinking, to have something to do, just as they might play solitaire, work cross-word puzzles, look at the cinema, or busy themselves with any other dreadful activity.

These things the Dodsworths discovered, though, like most of the world, they never admitted them.

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More than cathedrals or castles, more even than waiters, Sam remembered the Americans he met along the way. Writers speak confidently, usually insultingly, of an animal called "the typical American traveling abroad." One might as well speak of "a typical human being." The Amer-

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the

Cadys had lived in the same house for five generations; by Mr. Otto Kretch and Mr. Fred Larabee of Kansas City, two oil men who were on a golfing tour of the world, to take three years; by the brass-bound heel-clicking Colonel Thorne; by Mr. Lawrence Simton, who dressed like a lily and spoke like a lady; by Miss Addy T. Belcher, who was collecting material for a new lecture trip on foreign politics and finance and who, off stage, resembled a chorus girl; and by Miss Rose Love, the musical comedy star, who off stage resembled a short-sighted school teacher.

Typical Americans!

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Sam never lost the adventurousness of seeing on a railway car a sign promising that the train was going ~~from Paris to Milan, Venice, Trieste, Zagreb, Vinkovci, Sofia and Stamboul.~~ Though he became weary of wandering, so that one museum was like another, so that when he awoke in the morning it took a minute to remember in what country he was, yet the names of foreign towns always beckoned him.

To Avignon, they wandered, to San Sebastian and Madrid and Toledo and Seville, and so on. To Arles, Carcassonne, Marseilles, Monte Carlo, Genoa, Florence, and so on, Sienna, Venice, with two months divided between Naples and Rome and a jaunt to Sicily. To Vienna, Budapest, Munich, Nuremberg, and so on. And so, late in April, they came to Berlin.

Sam might not tell of it when he went home, nor years later remember it, but he found that to him, the real characteristic of making a Foreign Tour had nothing to do with towers or native costumes, galleries or mountain scenery. It was the tedium of almost every hotel, almost every evening, when they had completed their chore of sight-seeing. There was "nothing to do in the evening" save occasional movies, the opera, or cafés if they were not too far from the hotel in the foreign and menacing darkness.

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Every evening the same. Back to the hotel, weary, a grateful cup
of tea, slow dressing. They never dared, after trying it once, to go
down to dinner in tweeds, and be stared at by the English tourists of the
pay-in-guineas classes as though they were polluting the dining-room.

A melancholy cocktail in the bar. Dinner, always the same -- white
and gold dining-room, suavely efficient black-haired captain of waiters
pulling out their chairs, a clear soup of parenthetic flavor, a fish not
merely white but blanched, chicken with gloomy little carrots, crème car-
amel, cheese and fruit. The same repressed and whispering fellow-diners:
the decayed American mother in silver with the almost equally decayed
daughter in gold, staring pitifully at the large lone Englishman; the
young intellectual Prussian honeymoon couple, pretending to read and ig-
nore each other, and the fat mature Bavarian couple, wanting to be cheery
but not daring. The aged Britons -- he with a spurt of eyebrows and
positive opinions on artichokes and the rate of exchange; she always
glaring over her glasses at you if you laughed or asked the head-waiter
about trains to Grasse. The vicar of the local English church, moistly
friendly, the one person who came and spoke to you but who, by his manner
of inquiring after your health, made you feel guilty because you weren't
going to his service next Sunday.

Then the real tedium.

Sitting till ten in the lounge, listening to an orchestra mildly
celebrating the centenary of Verdi, reading an old Tauchnitz, peeping
up uneasily as you felt more and more the tightening of personal ties
with
these too well-known, too closely studied strangers.

It was worse when the hotel was half-empty and the desert of wait-
ing chairs in the lounge looked so lonely.

Always the same, except in a few cities with casinos and cabarets
and famous restaurants -- the same in Florence and Granada, in Hyeres

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and Dresden.

Every evening after such a siege of boredom Sam guiltily inquired of himself why they hadn't gone out and looked at what was called the "Native Life" of the city -- at the ways of that inconspicuous 99/100 of the population whom tourists ignored. But oh, they'd tried it. It wasn't a matter of dark-alley dangers; he would rather have liked a fight in a low bar. But foreign languages, the need of ordering a drink or asking a taxi fare in Italian or Spanish, was like crawling through a hedge of prickly thorns. And to go anywhere in dress clothes save to tourist-ridden restaurants, was to be tormented by stares, comments, laughter. The frankness with which these Italians stared at Fran --

No, easier to stay in the hotel.

Once in a fortnight Sam was able to let himself be picked up in the bar by some American or English blade, and then he glowed, and talked beamingly of motors, of Ross Ireland. And now Fran welcomed and was gracious with such rescues..... whatever she said in the bedroom afterward about manners and vulgarity.

But it thrust them together, this aching tedium of marooned events, and they were often tender.

And Fran was getting tired of the isolation of travel. He gloated that before long, now, she would be content to go home with him, to stay, and at last, fed up on the syrupy marshmellows of what she had considered *romance*, to become his wife.

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Twilight in Naples, and from their room at Bertolini's they looked across the bay. The water and the mountains in the water were the color of smoke, and a few little boats, far out, were fleeing home before dark. In the garden below them the fronds of a palm tree waved slowly, and lemon trees exhaled an acrid sweetness. The lights

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at the foot of Vesuvius were flickering steel points. Her hand slipped into his and she whispered, "I hope the boats get safely home!" They stood there till palms and sea had vanished and they could see only the lights of Naples. Some one afar was singing "Sant Lucia." Sam Dods-worth did not know the song was hackneyed. He fell a-dreaming.

"Tee - ta - tah, tee de dee, tee - ta - tah, taaaa - da," he hummed. Italy and Fran! The Bay of Naples! And they would go on -- to sun-bright isles, to the moon-husned desert, pagoda bells, and home! "Tee - ta - tah, tee de dee ---- Santaaaaa Lucia!" He had won her back to be his wife!

"And they still sing that horrible grind-organ garbage! Let's go eat," she said.

He startled and sighed.

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They were again companions, as they had been in their first days of Paris, and sometimes they had whole afternoons that were gay, trusting, filled with the vigor of laughter and long walks. They had again the sweetness of depending on each other. But Sam was conscious that their relationship had become self-conscious.

Much of the time Fran was straining to be friendly. Getting into a rut of it, they quarreled more often over tinier things.

He knew that he had bruised her, humiliated her, by his bullying in Paris, but he could not, in all his hours of agonizing about it, see what else he could have done. He tried to win her with little gifts of flowers, of odd carved boxes, and he fretted over her being chilly at night, hot at noon, tired in galleries, till she wailed, "Oh don't fuss so! I'm all right!"

"If I could only do things naturally and easily, the way that fellow Israel probably does," he sighed to himself.....and fancied that she was sighing.

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He caught himself being critical. For all his "trying to make it up to her," as he put it, he was testily aware of certain childishnesses in her which he had ignored.

In the matter of money she was a brat. She talked, always, of her thoughtfulness about economy; of jewing down a milliner from a thousand francos to seven hundred, of doing without a personal maid. But she took it for granted that they should have the best suit in the best hotel in every town, and she so used the floor maid and the hair-dresser and so had to tip them that a personal maid would have been cheaper.

Sam would have liked to economize a little. He still brooded on the Sans Souci Gardens -- though he never subjected his dream to her brisk ridicule, for he guessed what she would say about the idiocy of Italian palaces in Zenith. If he could ever coax her back, he would try the gamble of building (if she permitted him!), and in it he could use all the capital he had.

But he never spoke to her of money, and she never suggested that an ordinary room would do them as well as the royal suite, and if she made any comment at all it was only on the inferiority of that suite.

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For hours at a time he assured himself of Fran's beauty, gracefulness, wit, and her knowledge of European languages and customs. He convinced himself -- except in Venice, when they were with Mrs. Cortright.

Edith Cortright had been born in Michigan, daughter of a banker who became Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. In Washington she had married Cecil R. A. Cortright of the British Embassy, and gone with him to the Argentine, to Portugal, to Rome, to Roumania, where he was minister, and on many vacations home to England. She was about the age of Fran, fortyish, and she had been a widow now for three years, wandering from England to Italy and back. A note from Jack Starling, Tub Pearson's

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nephew in London, sent her to call on the Dodsworths at the Danieli in
Venice, and she invited them to tea at her flat, a floor of the Ascagni
Palace; echoing rooms, stone floored, with tall windows on the Grand Canal,
with the light from a marble fireplace on chests of smoky walnut and vast
tables worn satiny with age.

Sam was at first not vastly taken with Edith Cortright. She was
abrupt as she talked of diplomats, of villas on the Riviera, of Roman soc-
iety, of painting. She was dressed in soft black, worn a little sloppily,
and she was pale. But he saw how lovely her hands were, and realized that
her quiet voice was soothing. He guessed that her intense eyes missed
nothing.

Fran played up to Mrs. Cortright. She too talked of diplo-
mats, she too had notions about villas and society and painting, and on
their way home she informed Sam that her Italian accent was much better
than Mrs. Cortright's. Suddenly, though resenting his own criticism as
though some one else were daring to make it, he felt that Fran knew con-
siderably less than he -- and she -- had always assumed. Her Italian!
She knew a hundred words! Villas! They'd never seen a Riviera villa
from a more intimate position than the outside wall!

He reflected that Fran had an unsurpassed show-window display but
not much on the shelves inside.

Then he was angry with himself; then he pitied her, and loved her
for her childish shrillness of make-believe, her eagerness to be noticed
and admired.

He wished they were going to see more of Mrs. Cortright. She rested
him, and he felt that she really belonged to this puzzling, reticent thing
called Europe and might make it clear to him.

Sam was surprised, line blank
felt rather guilty, to find that he was becoming

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more a master of the nervous art of travel than Fran. In Paris she had been supreme; taken to language and manners and food hectically, while he stood outside. And she still insisted that he couldn't understand Italian waiters and shopping and lace shawls and cathedrals as she could. But while she was daily becoming more uncertain, he was daily developing more of a sure purpose in travel.

He was going back to make some such a "development" as the Sans Souci Gardens, and a contemplating it he was becoming conscious that there was such a thing as architecture. Details that once he would never have noticed became alive: hand-wrought iron balconies, baroque altars, tiled roofs, window shutters, copper pans in kitchens seen from the street. He began, shyly keeping it from Fran, to sketch doorways. He began, in the evenings of hotel tedium, to read stray notes on architecture -- Baedeker's introductions, articles in copies of *Country Life* found in the hotel -- instead of news-stand detective stories.

It made him increasingly eager to be out each morning to see new things, to collect knowledge; and somehow, increasingly, it was he who planned where they should go, who was willing to confer with concierges and guides, and it was Fran who followed him.

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The contrast between Fran and Mrs. Cortright kept annoying him. He was not very well pleased to see that after twenty-four years of living with Fran he had not in the least come to know her.

Always, particularly when they had first come abroad, he had considered her clearly superior to other American women. Most of these others, he had grunted to himself, were machines. They sobbed about babies and dressmakers and nothing else. They were either hard-voiced and suspicious, or gushing. Their only emotion was a hatred of their men, with whom they joyously kept up a cat and mouse feud, trying to catch them at

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flirtation, at poker-playing. But Fran, he had gloated, had imagination and flair and knowledge. She talked of politics and music; she laughed; she told excited stories; she played absurd pleasant games -- he was the big brown bear and she the white rabbit; he was the oak and she the west wind who ruffled his foliage -- and did it, too, until he begged mercy. She never entered a drawing-room -- she made an entrance, paused at the door, dramatic, demanding, stately in simple black and white, where other women hesitated into a room, fussy and tawdry. And they glowered, those other women, when Fran gathered in the men and was to be heard talking with derisive gaiety about tennis, Egyptian excavations, Bolshevism -- everything in the world.

He had been so proud of her!

And in Paris, at first -- how different her devouring of French life from the flatness of the American women whom he heard in restaurants croaking, in tinny, Mid-western voices, "Mabel says she knows a place in Paris where she can buy Ivory Soap, but I've found one where I can get Palm Olive Soap for seven cents a cake!"

Ah, he had rejoiced, not of these was his Fran -- swift silver huntress, gallant voyager, shrewd critic, jubilant companion!

And now, however he cursed himself for it, he could not down the wonder whether she really was any of these poetic things -- whether she didn't merely play at them. He could never root out suspicion, planted when he had read her letter about Deauville and Arnold Israel, that she was in heart and mind and soul an irresponsible child. And the minute he was pleased with the bright child quality in her, the irresponsibility annoyed him..... Bobbing at cherries is not so pretty a sport at forty-three.

A child.

Now she was ecstatic -- a little too demandingly ecstatic for his

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unwieldiness to follow her -- over a moonlit sea, a tenor solo, or a
masterpiece of artichoke cookery. Half an hour later she was in furious
despair over a hard bed, a lukewarm bath, or a missing nail-file; and Sam
was always to blame, and decidedly was to be told about it. He was so
blame if it rained, or if they could not get a table by the window; it
was not her tardy dressing but his clumsiness in ordering a taxi which
made them late for the theater.

She was a child in her way of preening herself over every attractive
man who looked interestedly at her along the journey -- now that she had
been converted and suddenly believed in <u>salvation</u> by passion.
And equally a child in laughing at, in forgetting, the older and less
glittering men who were kind to them on trains and friendly at hotels.
She forgot so easily!

Sam was certain that she had forgotten Arnold Israel. He identified
certain Paris letters, with a thick, black, bold script, as Israel's.
At first she was jumpy and secretive about them; then, in a month, she
let them lie unopened. And once, apropos of a gesticulating <u>operatic</u>
baritone, she began making fun of Israel's ardors....He would almost have
been gladder, Sam sighed, if she had enough loyalty to remember Arnold
longer.

She was lovely quicksilver, but quicksilver is hard for a thick hand
to hold.

A child!

He noted, too, her pretentiousness when she was with people like
Mrs. Cortright, in her Italian palace. Fran let it be known that she
herself was of importance. She rebuked people who -- never having seen
her before -- failed to know that she was an expert at tennis, French
and good manners. She didn't exactly say it, but she spoke as though
red old Herman Voelker, her respectable sire, had been at least a baron,

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and she was forever laughing at this fellow-traveler as being "common"
and approving that other as being (presumably like herself) of "quite a
good family -- quite decent." She was like a child boasting to a play-
mate of her father's wealth.

But he felt it with a brooding pity that made him the fonder --
made it the harder for him to fight his way free from her capricious
domination of his life.

So, after months given more to exploring themselves than to ex-
ploring Europe, they came in April to Berlin.

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CHAPTER 33

The good Herr Rechtsanwalt Biedner was giving a dinner, at his flat just off the Tiergarten, to his second cousin, Fran Dodsworth, and Fran's husband. Herr Dr. Biedner was very Prussian, with close-cropped head, small eyes, hard jaw, and sausage rolls at the back of his neck, and he was probably the kindest and pleasantest man the Dodsworths had ever met, and the most international-minded.

Now, in the spring of 1927, Berlin looked prosperous again; also Herr Biedner had an excellent law practise, and his home was as thick with comfort as a coffee cake with sugar. In the hallway was an armoire of carved oak, and the horns of a stag; in the living-room, about a mon-umental stove of green porcelain, a perfect auction-room of old easy chairs, and what seemed like hundreds of portraits of the Kaiser, Bis-marck, Von Moltke, Beethoven, and Bach clustered behind the grand piano.

Sam was edified to discover that a porcelain stove really could heat a room, and that the pianist of the family was not Frau Biedner or some ~~unrevealed~~ daughter but Herr Biedner himself, though he seemed to be a perfectly worthy and successful lawyer. He was also gratified by the sight of three wine glasses at each plate, and of slim green bottles of Diedesheimer Auslese, 1921.

But the conversation appalled him.

They were so kind, these half dozen German business men and their wives whom Herr Biedner had assembled to greet his American cousins,

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and they all spoke English. But they talked of things which meant nothing in the world to Sam -- of the Berlin theater, of the opera, of a Kokoschka Austellung, of Streseman's speech at the League of Nations Council, of the agrarian situation in Upper Silesia --

"Golly this is going to be heavy going," sighed Sam. "I wish somebody would tell a funny story."

And with weighty politeness he answered the weightily polite queries of the woman next him: Was this his first trip to Germany? Was he going to stay long in Berlin? Was it really true that since Prohibition it was difficult to get wine in America?

The one light was the man on the other side of Fran from Dr. Biedner. With apparent gratification, Biedner had introduced him as Count Obersdorf, taking Sam aside to explain that Kurt von Obersdorf was the present head of one of the greatest Austrian families. His ancestors had owned castles, towns, thousands of acres, whole counties; they had had power of life and death; kings had bargained for their support. But the family had steadily grown poor the past two hundred years, and been finally ruined by the Great War, in which the Graf Kurt had served as major of Austrian artillery. Though his mother kept up a pretense of state, with two slew-footed peasant servants in a ruined old house in the Salzkammergut, Kurt was working in the Berlin bureau of the Internation Tourist Agency (the famous I.T.A.). He could not afford to marry. He had a reasonable salary; he was head of the I.T.A.'s banking department; but he had to "punch the time-clock," said Herr Dr. Biedner, obviously proud of this Americanism. "He is a fine sport about it. And he uses not much his title. His ancestors probably hanged my ancestors for shooting rabbits, but now he is like one of us here in my household, and he says that nowhere else in Berlin can he get a proper Suppe mit Leberknödel."

Being impressed by the title of count and by a vision of hard-riding

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ancestors in armor, Sam assured himself that he wasn't in the least impress-
ed by title or ancestors, and he studied the family hero attentively.

Kurt von Obersdorf was perhaps forty. He was a tall, loose, lively
man, with thick black hair. He had dignity enough, but he was full of laugh-
ter, and you felt that by choice he would like to be a clown. He made love
to every woman and made friends with every man. Fran blushed when he
kissed her hand, and Sam felt less disconsolate, less swamped by foreign-
ess, when Kurt shook his hand and babbled in an Oxford accent with occas-
ional tumbles into comic-paper diction, "I know so much about your Rev-
elation car. Herr Dr. Biedner tells me you were responsible for it. I am
enchanted to see you here in Berlin. Since six years I have driven a
Revelation the same car, it belongs to a friend, it is very shabby but
the other day I drove it to Wild Park at a hundred and fifty kilometers
an hour. I was arrested!"

Kurt demanded to see the Biedner grand-child (rather a nasty child,
Sam thought, but chittered at it boisterously); then he played the piano;
then he mixed the cocktails which Herr Biedner regarded as suitable to
Americans and which the good burgher guests tasted with polite and beam-
ing anxiety.

"Lively fellow, that count. Shows off too much. Never sits still,"
Sam meditated, with a sound American disapproval of foreign monkey-tricks,
and all the while he liked Kurt better than any one he had met since
Paris.

All through dinner, Jurt concentrated on Fran.

Sam became restive as he overheard Kurt dashingly tell Fran just
what her "type" was, and cheerfully insult her by announcing what he liked
and what he detested about that type.

"Yes," Sam caught, "you regard yourself as very European, Mrs. Dods-worth, but you are altogedder American. You are brilliant. You are an

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automobile's head-light. You learn quick. But you hurry right out and use
all you learn. You never have fun out of not letting anybody know you
know something. You are very beautiful. I suppose, especial, you have the
most beautiful hair I ever have seen. But you would be discontented if
there came anybody who did not -- wie sagt man? -- who did not acknowledge
it. You are a play -- author and heroine and actor, every one together.
A great play. But you could never just cook for some man."

"Why should I?" demanded Fran.

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It came to Sam that he had heard this before.

Major Lockert, telling Fran about herself, delighting her by talking
about her, stirring her to a desire for men who desired her.

Yes. Lockert had started this biological process which had set Fran
alight, changed her into something altogether different from the Fran who
had sailed with him -- Or had it? Perhaps her first romance had un-
covered the real, the essential Fran, whom neither he nor herself had
known in the chill polite years of Zenith.

Damn Lockert!

And that aviator fellow, that Italian, Gioserro, had carried on the
process. Damn Gioserro!

And Arnold Israel had really broken the delicate coating of ice
over her. Damn Arnold Israel!

And now Kurt von Obersdorf, a man who could laugh, was going to lure
her -- Oh, damn Kurt!

Or should he damn Fran instead? Fran to whom life was a fashion show,
and sentimental, with herself as perpetual heroine.

Or damn the Sam Dodsworth who had thought carburetors more fascinat-
ing than the souls and bodies of women?

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Anyway, he wouldn't have another Arnold Israel business starting in Nipitinthebud. Certainly would!

He worked up rage at Kurt von Obersdorf and had it ruined the moment Kurt came to him, with Fran in tow, after dinner.

"Mr. Dodsworth," said Kurt, "I have behaved outrageously to your wife. She thinks I have insulted her because I say that she is only making believe when she thinks herself European -- she is lovely, really, because she is American. But I am so pro-American! I admire all things American so much -- huge buildings and central heating and adding machines and Fords. Can I please take you about Berlin? I would be very happy!"

"Oh, we mustn't trouble you."

"But it would be a pleasure! Your cousins, the Biedners, they were so very kind to me when I first came from Vienna and I have had so little chance to repay. And the Herr Doctor is so busy with legal t'ings -- <u>aber fabelhaft</u>! I have much more time. Let me have the pleasure of doing something for the Herr Doctor!"

But from the way in which Kurt looked at Fran, Sam wondered if he might not have a livelier reason.

"Tomorrow -- Sunday -- are you free? May I take you out to a funny place for lunch?"

"That would be very kind of you," Sam said unenthusiastically.

"Splendid! I call for you at twelve."

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Their suite in the Hotel Adlon looked on the eighteenth-century Pariser Platz, smacking of royal coaches and bewigged footmen, and beyond the Branderburger Tor, at the end of Unter den Linden, they could see the thick woods and little paths of the Tiergarten. This Sunday morning, after the party at Herr Biedner's, was flooded with spring, such exultant and surprised reawakening as only Northern cities know. Sam bullied Fran out of bed at eight-thirty, whistled while he shaved,

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devoured eggs in defiance of Fran's daily objection to American breakfasts in Europe (she always managed to eat them if they were ordered for her), and lured her into the Tiergarten. The statues of portentous armored Hohenzollerns along the Sieges Allee they admired -- neither of them had yet been properly told that the statues were vulgar and absurd-- and they followed paths beside brooks, over little bridges, along a lake, to the Coney Island minarets which leered at them over the wall about the Zoo. Quite lost, they rounded the Zoo, stumbled on the Bräus-
tübl and had a second breakfast of Rostwürstchen and Munich beer thick as molasses. After the more languid airs of Italy, their northern blood was roused by the spring breeze, and they came back to the Adlon chattering, smiling, content, just in time to meet Graf Oberdorf in the Adlon lobby.

He bounced toward them as though he had known them a dozen years.

"It is a good thing that I shall take you away today! It is such a beautiful weather and if you are not dragged off where you can only loaf, then conscientious tourists like you would go see museums and palaces and all kind of dreadful things!"

"I am _not_ a conscientious tourist!" protested Fran.

Kurt shook his head. With his experience at the Internationale Tourist Agency, he could not imagine an American who was not a collector of sights, who did not work at travel as though it were a tournament with the honors to the person who could last out the largest number of museums. He was as convinced that all Americans mark down credits for themselves in their Baedekers as are Americans that all Germans drink beer every evening.

He called a taxi. Sam was rather glad that Kurt had not wasted money on a private car. If he were going to the country by himself, Sam fancied, Kurt would go quite gaily in a motor 'bus -- and be

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friendly with the driver before they got there. Already he had seen
Kurt plunge into lively conversations with the Adlon concierge, the news-
standman, two pages, and the taxi-driver; and most of the way out to the
rustic haven disastrously named Pichelsberg, Kurt told riotously of how
frightened he had been all through the war, of how he had been captured
by a very small Italian with a very large rifle, and of how he had won a
debate about the plays of Pirandello with the Italian major who had him
in for questioning.

The driver stopped by the road to <u>tighten the fan</u> and <u>belt, place a spark plug</u>, and Kurt skipped out to watch him.

"Kind of like an American, this fellow -- this count," said Sam.
"Got a sense of humor, and don't take himself too seriously."

"Oh no, it's a very different thing," Fran insisted. "He's completely European. Americans are humorous to cover up their worry about things. They think that what they do is immediately important and the world is waiting for it. The real European has a sense of a thousand years of ancestors like himself before him; he knows that his love affairs or his politics or his tragedies aren't very different from a hundred that have gone before. And they aren't so violently ambitious for success -- they want to fit into life as they find it rather than to move it about -- and they'd rather retire to a little cottage hidden among trees than to build a big stucco house on a hill for strangers to admire. Count Obersdorf doesn't take himself seriously -- but he takes Obersdorfs in general and Austrians in general and Europe in general awfully seriously. And he <u>is</u> rather a lamb, isn't he! I'll be glad, though, when he feels easier with us and becomes his own real thoughtful self -- he knows that's how he really is when he understands that we're not his 'conscientious tourists,' -- imagine! -- but the <u>right</u> sort that ----"

If "yeah, nice fella," said Sam.

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He was irritated by her self-election to superiority; he was both- ered by her desire to have this new suitor consider her superior. When Kurt had scrambled back into the taxi she looked at him as fondly as though he were a bright boy whom she wanted to amuse.

Sam sighed.

They left the taxicab at a path leading up over a sandy bank into thick scrub pines, and in the lazy warm day they ambled over pine needles to a shining river, the Havel, and along it, past small house-boats and a flotilla of row boats filled with ejaculatory German sweethearts, to an immense waste of outdoor restaurant, the Erster Schildhorn, a block of tables set under trees by the river, attended by hysterically flying waiters. For all the haste of the waiters, they never seemed to accomplish anything by their hastening, and it took a full hour and a half for Fran and Kurt and Sam to lunch. And they liked it. In the spell of spring air, of rustling water, of good heavy stultifying food, they grew relaxed, content to sit and drink beer forever, to forget cities and hotel lobbies and motors and the social items in the _New York Herald_. Marinierte Herring and beer -- noodle soup and beer -- ham knuckle and butter-dripping mashed potatoes and beer -- Apfel Strudel and whipped cream and coffee -- the stolid Sam, the fiery Fran, the mercurial Kurt, they all gorged equally, and sat in the sun by the water, in a pleasant and anti-social coma, so deep a coma that Fran and Kurt did not talk and Sam was only mildly aroused by the fabulous spectacle of a man solemnly riding out on the Havel in a boat propelled like a bicycle -- sausage legs revolving, a procedure as sacriligious to Sam as rowing an automobile.

Without inquiring their desires -- Kurt was always a benevolent despot of a host -- he led them, when their eyes were cleared of the haze of food, on a walk of miles along the river and into Potsdam.

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Here, Kurt explained, lived a small colony of the old Junkers, the court circle of before-the-war, ex-ministers and generals and their proud ladies, dispossessed by the republic. He was taking them to tea at the house of his aunt, the old Princess Drachenthal, whose husband, killed by the misery of the war which he had labored to prevent, had been an ambassador.

"The Crown Prince often comes in for tea. You will like my aunt. She is a dear old thing," said Kurt.

"Speak English?" Sam muttered uneasily.

Kurt looked at him curiously. "She was brought up in England. Her mother was the daughter of the Duke of Wessex,"

It cannot honestly be denied that Sam was guilty of wishing that Tub Pearson and Dr. Henry Hazzard were there, nor that he realized immediately, with a twinge, that it was Fran's gay combativeness and bright hair that had done it. Then he forgot his little complexities in the zest of their tramp. He himself marched on tireless. Fran, in coat and skirt smart as a cavalry uniform, walked with the swift nervousness of a tennis player, while Kurt loped ahead and behind and to the side like an Airedale.

They passed country houses, square blocks of white, set in immense lawns; they passed beer gardens, festive and vocal; and came to the descorous gray flat-fronted houses of Potsdam, sedate as Gramercy Park or a crescent in Bath. It was a clean, homelike, secure kind of country, and Sam found himself liking its orderliness better than the romantic untidiness of Italy. And found himself not only liking but feeling at one with the Germans.

He still had a war psychosis. He had expected to find in Germany despotic and "sabre-clanking" officials and hateful policemen; had worked up an adequate rage in anticipation. He was nearly disappointed when

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he found the customs officials friendly, when he asked questions of a Berlin policeman and was answered with a salute and directions in English, and when their room waiter at the Adlon remembered having seen them at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago! Now he admitted that in all of Europe, however interesting other nationals, however merry the Italians and keen the French, he found only the British and the Germans his own sort of people. With them alone could he understand what they thought, how they lived, and what they wanted of life.

He liked this Sunday stream of Berliners on excursion -- vast families with babies and rye bread and pickles and cold ham; eager young men and girls, hatless, the cropped girls rather masculine as far down as the neck but thoroughly feminine below; and occasional strayed Bavarians faithful to green hats with feathers and deer-horn ornaments, green jackets, green leather shorts, and rucksacks -- the rucksacks not necessarily containing anything but a handkerchief, since to a true Bavarian a rucksack is worn not so much for portage as for elementary modesty; as some races conceal the face and some the chest so the Bavarians conceal the small of the back.

Fran protested against the infrequency of "native costumes"; she pointed out that despite the occasional Bavarians, most of these excursioners could not be told from a crowd in Zenith. But that, after months of constantly eating the plum pudding of novelty, was precisely what Sam liked about them, and he was less homesick this afternoon than for weeks; he developed a liking for the gossiping Count Obersdorf; he felt that the walk was "taking the kinks out of his legs"; he was glad that Fran had a lively companion in Kurt; and he came cheerfully up to the gloomy brown mansion of the Princess Drachenthal.

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She was fragile old lady, like something made of porcelain, and she seemed translucent as porcelain. She called Fran "my dear," and