“Hm!” said Sam.
Suddenly he was testy. Oh, of course she had a “right” to be with Kurt as much as she liked. He wasn’t a harem-keeper. And of course it would be puerile to rage, “If she has a right to be loose, then I have the same right.” There was no question of “rights.” It was a question of what he wanted, and whether he was willing to pay for it—whether he wanted new, strange loves, whether he could find them, and whether he was willing to pay in dignity, in the respect that Fran had for him despite her nervous jabbings.
When he had seen the Pearsons off for Amsterdam, with mighty vows to meet them in Zenith within six months, when he had for an hour sat outside the Café des Deux Magots, brooding on the Franocentric universe which had cataclysmically replaced the universe of business and creating motors and playing golf, then sharply, gripping the marble top of the little table with his huge hand, he admitted with no more reservations that he was hungry as a barren woman, hungry for a sweetheart who should have Fran’s fastidiousness, Minna von Escher’s sooty warmth, and Matey Pearson’s shrewd earthiness.
He dined alone in a little Montparnasse restaurant filled with eager young couples: a Swedish painter with an Italian girl student, an American globetrotter with his Polish mistress, pairs of white Russians and Italian anti-fascists. They all twittered like lovebirds and frankly held hands over the vin ordinaire and horse-meat. And here, as it was very cheap, there were actually French people, all in couples except when they belonged to enormous noisy family parties, and the couples stroked each other’s hands, unabashedly nuzzled each other’s cheeks, looked into each other’s eyes, the world well lost.
It was spring—spring and Paris—scent of chestnut blossoms, freshness of newly watered pavements, and Sam Dodsworth was almost as lonely as though he were at the Adlon with Kurt and Fran.
When he thought of Fran’s cool, neat politeness to him, he was angry. When he looked about him at youth in love, he was angrier. This passion, ungrudging and unabashed, Fran had never given him. He had been robbed—Or robbed her? All wrong, either way. Had enough—
Oh, he was lonely, this big friendly man, Sam Dodsworth, and he wanted a man to whom he could talk and boast and lie, he wanted a woman with whom he could be childish and hurt and comforted, and so successful and rich was he that he had neither, and he sought them, helpless, his raw nerves exposed. So searching, he strolled after dinner to the Select, which was rivaling the Café du Dôme as the resort of the international yearners in Paris.
A man alone at a café table in the more intellectual portions of Paris, and not apparently expecting someone, is always a man suspect. At home he may be a prince, a successful pickpocket, or an explorer, but in this city of necessitous and over-friendly strollers, this city where anyone above the rank of assassin or professional martyr can so easily find companions, the supposition is that he is alone because he ought to be alone.
But it is also a rule of this city of spiritual adventurers which lies enclosed within the simple and home-loving French city of Paris, this new Vanity Fair, of slimier secrets, gallanter Amelias and more friendly Captain Dobbinses than Thackeray ever conceived, that if such a solitary look prosperous, if he speak quietly to the waiters, not talk uninvited to the people at the next table, and drink his fine à l’eau slowly, he may be merely a well-heeled tourist, who would be gratified to be guided into the citadel of the arts by a really qualified, gently tourist-despising, altogether authentic initiate of the Parisian Hobohemia—a girl who has once had a book-review printed, or a North Dakota cellist who is convinced that everyone believes him to be an Hungarian gipsy.
So it happened that when Samuel Dodsworth sat melancholy and detached at a table before the Select, four young people at another table commented upon him—psycho-analytically, biologically, economically; cleverly, penetratingly, devastatingly.
“See that big dumbbell there by himself?” remarked Clinton J. Gillespie, the Bangor miniaturist. “I’ll bet he’s an American lawyer. Been in politics. Fond of making speeches. He’s out of office now, and sore about it.”
“Oh, hell!” said the gentleman next. “In the first place he’s obviously an Englishman, and look at his hands! I don’t suppose you have room for mere hands in your rotten little miniatures! He’s rich and of good family, and yet he has the hands of a man who works. Perfectly simple. He’s the owner of a big country estate in England, crazy about farming, and prob’ly he’s a baronet.”
“Grand!” said the third, smaller, sharper-nosed man. “Perfect—except for the fact that he is obviously a soldier and—I’m not quite sure about this, but I think he’s German!”
“You all,” said the fourth, a bobbed-haired girl of twenty with a cherubic face, rosebud mouth, demure chin, magazine-cover nose, and the eyes of a bitter and grasping woman of forty, “make me very sick! You know so much that isn’t so! I don’t know what he is, but he looks good for a bottle of champagne, and I’m going over and grab it.”
“What the devil good, Elsa,” complained Clinton J. Gillespie, “is it for you to come to Paris if you always go talking to Babbitts like that fellow? You never will become a novelist!”
“Won’t that be fierce—when I think over some of the novelists that hang around this joint!” rasped Elsa, and she tripped to Sam’s table, she
