One of the women—and save for her damp eyes a most spinsterish and unaphrodisiac lady she appeared—cried, “Some trip is right! And I’ve got a date to meet the second officer in Paris. He’s going to lay off one trip. And maybe I’ll just keep him laid off. Maybe I’ll decide to buy me a nice little boy friend. Some baby! Oh, those Or‑i‑ental eyes! Say, Pete, for the love o’ Gawd, ain’t you going to buy our little friend here”—she pointed at Sam with a thin, chaste, overmanicured, and rather wobbly forefinger—“a lil drink?”
But Sam declined. His vision of the beauties of the gutter had vanished with haste and a ludicrous squawking. He was grimly again the Sam Dodsworth who was proud of keeping in shape. He accepted, with irritating signs of pleasure, a lemonade (it was the first he had tasted in months) and sat wondering about these fellow-countrymen.
He could not place them. In age they seemed to run from thirty to forty. They were not so vulgar nor so vicious as at first they seemed. Once in a while they were betrayed by alcohol into revealing that they did have vocabularies and had perhaps read a book. He suspected that two out of the three men were university graduates; that all six of these loud-mouthed libertines were, at home, worthy deacons and pallbearers. He had known in Zenith of “young married couples,” theoretically responsible young doctors and lawyers and salesmen, who turned dances at country clubs into a combination of brothel and frontier bar. But he had not gone to such dances. These people were none of his! Then, shocked, he realized that perhaps they were. Were these oafs anything but younger and gayer and slightly more amorous Tub Pearsons?
They were not altogether to blame. They were the products of Prohibition, mass production, and an education dominated by the beliefs that one goes to college to become acquainted with people who will later be useful in business, and that the greatness of a university is in ratio to the number of its students and the number of its athletic victories.
Or so Sam brooded.
He had heard much of the “sexually cold American woman.” Heaven knows, he raged, he had felt it in Fran! Yet with these riotous women, it was the lack of chill which he resented. The amiable lady who was going to “buy her” a second officer had, during Sam’s stay at the table, kissed one of the men, held the hand of another, and was now turning her withered excitement on himself: “Say, you’re some husk! Gee, I bet you hurt the lil ole golf ball’s feelings when you slam it one!”
He smiled bleakly.
He thought of seeing Mrs. Cortright next evening. He had recalled her only as a pleasant, unexciting, worthy person, but now he saw her as a Grecian vase, he saw her as a bowl of alabaster within which a fire could be lighted.
“A finish to her—like a European,” he reflected. “Yet she’s American, thank God! I couldn’t fall for a real European. Has to be somebody that could look at an old gray New England barn with the frost on it, in October, and get a kick out of it, without my having to explain.”
His long, ambling thoughts were interrupted by his original host’s inquiring:
“You been here in Venice some time?”
“Yes. Several times.”
“Well, maybe you can explain—Hope I’m not stepping all over anybody’s feet, but me—Well, this is the first time I’ve ever been abroad, and I’d always thought Venice would be kinda like a musical comedy. But of all the darn slow places—Why, there isn’t a first-class cabaret in town! Nothing but a lot of rundown tenements with a lot of carvin’s on ’em and a bunch of Chicago Drainage Ditches in between!”
“Well, I like it!”
“But what do you like about it?”
“Oh, lots of things. Especially the architecture.”
But what his mind saw, as he blurted out something about being tired and took his leave, was no vision of arching bridges, of secret alleys and the quivering reflection of airy towers; it was the memory of Edith Cortright serene in her Venetian palace.
“She couldn’t possibly go out and grab things, like Fran,” he reflected, as he clumped toward the Bauer-Grünwald. “She’s definitely a ‘great lady.’ Yet I’ll bet that at heart she’s lonely. She wouldn’t mind cooking for her man any more than Nande would. Oh, damn it, Sam, why are you so simple? Why do you insist on thinking everybody else is lonely, merely because you are?”
It was a small and placid dinner at Edith Cortright’s, on Thursday evening. The only guests besides Sam were an English couple who were vaguely and politely something important—very politely but very vaguely. If Sam did not find them cheery, he was amused by the pleasant carelessness of Mrs. Cortright’s household.
The Fran who liked to quote poems about Gipsies and Villon and the Brave Days When We Were Twenty-one was, in private life, a sergeant major. Theoretically, she was the mother confessor and breezy confidante of all her servants and of the plumber, the postman, and the bootlegger. Practically she was always furious at their incompetence. She was chummy with them only when they assured her of her beauty and power; when the seamstress gurgled that Fran had the most exquisite figure in Zenith, or when the corner druggist asked her if his new hat was really correct English style.
Or so Sam brooded.
Edith Cortright seemed to have no discipline, no notion as to her servants’ duties. They argued with her. They contradicted her. The butler said that she had ordered broccoli; and the maid came in with clacking slippers. They were always chattering. They seemed to be sharing some secret joke with her; and when she smiled at Sam, in her tired way, after a voluble colloquy with the butler, he wished he could
