There was nothing else.
The train took another diabolic three minutes to start. They walked up and down—a tall, well-tailored pair, obviously complacent and not much interested, not very emotional.
He took her arm, as he had so many times at so many railroad stations, but dropped it with hot guiltiness.
“No, please,” she said, tucking her arm into his. “It is going to be a little hard to realize, isn’t it, old thing! Oh, Sam darling, you and I can’t get along together. And I do love Kurt. I stand by that! But we have been partners, good partners, in this funny business of life. … We’ve had so many happy times, just you and I together!” Her voice lost its confidence. “Shall I ever see you again? And—oh, my blessings, my dear—”
“Eeeeeein-steigen—bitte einsteigen!” cried the mourning voice of the guard.
“That means ‘all aboard’?” croaked Sam.
“Yes. Quick!”
The train was starting as he climbed up to the vestibule. Fran stood alone. He saw her with a strange, impersonal pity. She seemed so slim and young and defenseless, so alone in the gray city. He realized that she was crying.
His heavy mature voice became young and shaky as he cried, “Dear, did I remember to tell you today that I adore you?”
The guard slammed the vestibule door, and as through an open window he craned to look back at her, he saw Kurt von Obersdorf running down the platform, he saw Fran droop into Kurt’s arms, and he walked slowly into the roaring loneliness of his compartment.
XXX
Kaleidoscope. Scarlet triangles and azure squares, crystalline zigzags and sullen black lines. Meaningless beauty and distortions that were the essence of pain. Such were the travels of Samuel Dodsworth, those summer months.
He longed to go home to Zenith, to have the solace of Tub and Matey, of Emily and Brent, of streets and corners and offices that respected him and did not sneer at him as an ignorant tourist. But to face the derision that would be his if he came back without Fran, to hear in every corner the delighted whispering which was the vicarious vengeance of men who wanted to be free of their own wives and took out their timorous hatred in snickering and twilight gossiping about the marital troubles of others—that he could not endure. And to face a gloating, damp, pawing pity, to face the morons who would suppose that he was so little that he would be gratified by their libeling Fran, his Fran, and by cumbersomely congratulating him on losing her, who was his very soul—that was not to be borne.
If he had had a job at home, he would probably have plunged back into it, and in a fury of papers and secretaries and telephone-calls have concealed himself from the scandal. But he hadn’t. Just now the Sans Souci Gardens plan seemed to him as preposterous as his lifelong belief that he was man enough to hold his wife.
Yet twice, in Paris, he reserved passage to America, and twice he frugally went to the Cunard office and got back his passage money.
He crept over to London to hear the one language he knew, and fled from it because he did know the language, because someone might recognize him and pity him. He went on a German tour to the North Cape and the Baltic, got off at Riga, and fled from it because he did not know the language.
He returned to England, rented a motor, and toured along the old Roman road through Kent, stopping in villages of half-timbered houses and cottages covered with red tile shingles; into Sussex villages secret in still wooded valleys beneath the shining downs. He might have been seen, a very large man alone in a rather small car; a lone figure sitting on the sky-cut rim of a hill, hour on hour, clasping his knees, apparently brooding; a man alone in a public bar, listening to everything that was said—surprised and pleasant when someone spoke to him.
He felt the peace and security of the English valleys and farmsteads—and it made him the more restless because he was so definitely an outsider. He returned to Paris, and night after night he sat in American bars, and was put down as one of the beachcombers who have been something once but who have gone bankrupt—financially or nervously or alcoholically—and of whom one must pityingly beware.
He understood. So it came to pass that he spent most of his time alone, in his room in the Grand Universel. (It gave him a curious mean pleasure, now, to have a cheap single bedroom instead of a suite.) He drank a good deal. Sometimes he had a cognac instead of breakfast. But between blurred drowsinesses, he saw with clarity that he was utterly a man alone, that his work, his children, his friends, his habitual routine of life, and at last his wife, all the props and crutches with which he had been enabled to hobble through life as a Good Fellow, were gone, and that he had nothing upon which to depend except such solaces as he might find in his own brain. No one really needed him, and he was a man who had never been able to depend on anyone to whom he could not give.
In childish, absurd ways he managed to kill time, day on day, in a fog which now and then mercifully concealed from him the needs of Samuel Dodsworth. Till noon he loafed
