“Be funny if now I really were starting that ‘adventure in new life’ that we’ve talked so much rot about! Yes, I have known what I wanted—Fran! But probably as a kid wants the moon. (That’s what she’s like too—the moon on a still November night!) And if I can’t have her—well, I hope I have the sense to find something else, and to take it. … But I won’t!”
XXVI
He was going to surprise Tub and Matey at the station. He had gone to the Continental Hotel, at which Tub had reservations. From Berlin, he had merely wired Tub in London, “Be in Paris day or two after you arrive delighted see you
”; from Paris he had telephoned to Mr. A. B. Hurd, of Revelation Motors in London, asking him to snoop about and find out from the Savoy porter what train Tub was taking.
Sam waited in the Gare du Nord, excited but pleasantly superior. He was no American tourist, embarrassed by the voluble Parisians! He knew ’em! He could say to a porter, “Apportez le bagage de Monsieur à un taxicab” just as well as old Berlitz—almost as well as Fran. He swung his stick, strolled along the platform, and nodded to the gathering porters, feeling much as he had on the evening after the last game of the football season. When the lean swift French locomotive flashed in, hurling its smoke up to join the ghosts of smoke-palls that lurked under the vast roof of the train shed, he chuckled aloud.
“Old Tub! And Matey! First time in Paris!”
He looked over the heads of the crowd and saw Tub handing his bags out of the car window to a porter, saw him and the plump Matey hustle out of the car, saw him, with the blank worried nervousness of a man who doesn’t expect to be met and who feels that the labors of travel are too much for him, wave his arms in the effort of explaining in Zenith French—dealcoholized French, French Hag—where he wanted to go.
Swift, looming, Sam thrust through the crowd toward the Pearsons. He saw that Tub himself was carrying a small suitcase—probably with Matey’s famous and atrocious jewelry. He swooped on Tub, grasped his shoulder, and snarled (with one of the exceedingly few impersonations in his unhistrionic life), “Here, you, fella! Not allowed carry y’ own baggage!”
Tub looked up with all the rage of an honest American who has been enfeebled by rough seas, doubted by customs officials, overcharged by waiters, overinformed by guides, misunderstood by French conductors; who has suddenly by thunder had enough and who is going to expose and explode the entire continent of Europe. He looked up, he looked bewildered, and then he said slowly, “Well, you damned old horse-thief! Well, you big stiff!”
They banged each other’s shoulders, Sam kissed the suddenly beaming Matey, and they went down the platform together, Sam with one arm about Tub’s shoulder and one about Matey’s. He said sharply to the porter, “Un taxi, s’il vous plaît”—just as the porter was waving to a taxi on his own—and Tub clamored, “Well, I’m a son of a gun! Say, you’ve certainly learned to parley-vous like a native, Sambo!”
They asked after Fran.
It hurt him that they seemed content to miss her, willing to believe that she “had a touch of flu and had to lie low a couple weeks, so she couldn’t come down to welcome you.” But he resented it only for a moment. There were so many exciting places to show Tub! It was delightful to have the Tub who had always been cleverer and more fashionable than he now regarding him as a sophisticated European and turning to him, admiring his dash and flavor.
And it was pleasant to be Tubbish and foolish and noisy without Fran’s supercilious inspection.
Matey Pearson was a good soul. She was fat and pleasant. As a girl she had been the gayest and maddest of her set in Zenith; the fastest skater, the most ecstatic dancer, the most reckless flirt. Now she had three children—one was Brent’s classmate in Yale—and she cultivated the Episcopal Church, a rare shrewd game of poker, and the choicest dahlias in Zenith. Fran said that she was vulgar. She said that Fran was lovely.
At the hotel she kissed Sam again, and cried, “Say, my heavens but it’s nice to see a human being that’s human again! Now you boys get to thunder out of here and let me unpack, and you go off and get decently drunk, but do try to be sober enough for dinner, which gives you two hours, if we dine at eight, and enough time too, sez I. Get out of here! I love you both. With reservations!”
To be alone with Tub Pearson, on Tub’s first afternoon on the continent of Europe!
They had leapt over the barriers that had been erected between them since college—different vocations, rivalry as to the splendor of their several children, rivalry as to social honors, and this last flagrancy of Sam in living abroad while Tub stayed true at home. They were today the friends who had shared dress-shirts and speculations in Senior year.
From time to time they looked at each other and muttered, “Awful good to be here with you, you old devil!”
Sam did not see that Tub was completely gray, that he was podgy, that round his eyes were the lines of a banker who day after day sharply refuses loans to desperate men. He saw the lively Tub whom he had protected in fights with muckers and whom he had admired for his wit; and while he held to his temporary superiority as the traveled man and tutored gourmet, he anxiously showed Tub all his little treasures.
He took Tub to the New York Bar, and impressed Tub as an habitué by casually asking whether anybody had heard from Ross Ireland. He took Tub to Luigi’s, introduced him to
