“Why not?”
“Oh, could we? It would make me remember—Oh, of course not! Perfectly silly, with us traveling—”
But he rose to her fancy; he demanded of the old peddler, “How much liras? Eh?” and interrogatively held up five fingers.
After much conversation which neither Sam nor the peddler understood, and at which Fran giggled helplessly, Sam bought the object for seven lire, and that night Fran surrounded it with a pearl necklace and burned a candle in front of it. Then she had forgotten it—but not quite thrown it away. It had made its way into one of those neglected drawers of a wardrobe trunk, one of those old attics of traveling, which contain bathing-suits, walking shoes, solid histories intended to make journeying educational, and all the other useful staples which one surely will use, and never will.
Fran dove into this attic drawer busily; she drew out the shell-box, and stood holding it. Her eyes were deep, pitiful, regretful, and all their defense was gone. He looked back at her, helpless. And neither of them found anything to say, and suddenly she had snatched out of the attic drawer a never-used thermos bottle and their moment was gone.
A minute later when, after desperate groping for speech, he felt that it would be an ingratiating thing to say, “If I happen to go to Spain, would you like me to get you any lace or embroidery or anything?” she answered suavely, “Oh, thanks, thanks no. I fancy I may run down to the Balkans before long, and I believe there’s some very decent embroidery there. I say, will you please notice that I’m putting these dress collars not with your day collars but with your evening shirts? Heavens, we must hurry!”
When a man straggles on the short death-walk from his cell through the little green door, into the room where stands the supreme throne, does he, along with his incredulous apprehension, along with trying to believe that this so-living and eternal-seeming center and purpose of the universe, himself—this solid body with its hard biceps, its curiously throbbing heart that ever since his mother’s first worry has in its agonies been so absorbing, this red-brown skin that has glowed after the salt sea at Coney Island and has turned a sullen brick after wild drinking—the astonishment that this image of God and Eternity will in five minutes be still and stiff and muck—is he at that long slow moment nonetheless conscious of a mosquito bite, of a toothache, of the smugness of the messages from Almighty God which the chaplain gives him, of the dampness of the slimy stone corridor and the echo of their solemn march? Is he more conscious of these little abrasions than of the great mystery?
So busy were Sam and Fran at the station—buying magazines, looking over the new Tauchnitzes, seeing that his extra trunks were registered through to Paris—that they had no time to question whether this might be their last parting. They had dined in the crowded bar of the Adlon, too close to others to have the luxury of mourning; she had said nothing more emotional than “If you should decide to go to America, when you see Emily and the boy tell them that I’ll come back and see them in a few months now … no matter what happens … unless they’d like to come over to Europe. Of course I’d like that. … I put some new tooth-powder in the bottle in your fitted case.”
She was as attentive as a courier at the station; it was she who with her quick inaccurate German persuaded the conductor to change Sam to a one-berth compartment, who prevented his giving the hotel porter, who met them with their hand luggage and registered the trunks through, more than four marks as tip.
By general, it had been he, these months, who had borne the duties of tickets, luggage, reservations, while she sat back in cool elegance and was not shy about criticizing him for his errors. But tonight she led the expedition, she thought of everything, and he felt helpless as a maiden aunt. He had a new respect for her. … Perhaps, with Kurt, she wouldn’t be a child any longer, but grasp reality. That made him the more disconsolate, the more hopeless of some future miraculous reconciliation. He saw her a woman reborn. It seemed to him that she was grasping the intricacies of daily life in Europe as deftly as she managed everything from the cook’s salary to the women’s club program in America. He could not imagine her, just now, going back to Zenith. Kurt von Obersdorf and the Princess Drachenthal and Europe had utterly defeated and put in their place Sam Dodsworth and Tub and Matey Pearson and Ross Ireland and the Midwest.
Thus his thoughts blundered and writhed while he ambled after her through the station—to the newsstand, to the cigar-stand, to the train-gate—feeling himself no closer to her polished and metallic briskness than he was to the bundle-lugging third-class passengers who plodded through the echoing immensity of the train-shed; and
