When he tried to counter with florid compliments, she bustled out to the kitchen.
The sound of the coming taxicab released him from the eternity of sitting dead in a tomb. While the servants straggled out with his luggage, he held her hand, patting it.
“It is all ready, Signore,” said the maid. She received the highly expected tip, and with a “Com’ beck soon!” which sounded sincere, she vanished.
In the twilight outside the tree-shadowed door, he awkwardly shook hands with Edith, but while he was trying to say something agreeable, she cried:
“It’s too late now. But I thought that some day—I thought it would be easy for me to talk, and I would tell you all sorts of things about how I feel and think. That it’s been pleasant to be with you. That you’re bigger than you know, not smaller, like celebrities. That you’ve made me willing to stop being afraid of the world, and to attack it again. I’ve felt—” She seized his rough sleeve. “That curious feeling, always a surprise every time I was with you, of ‘Why, it’s you!’ That feeling that you were different from any other living person—not necessarily one bit finer but—oh, different! I shouldn’t say any of this, but before it’s quite too late—too late!—I want to try to be reckless. But I can’t say any of the things I thought. Bless you, my dear! And God keep you through the wickedness of this Happy Ending!”
He kissed her, a terrible clinging kiss, and lumbered over to the roadway and his taxicab. He looked back. She seemed to start toward him, then closed the door quickly. Through a window he heard her voice, weary and spiritless: “Only one for breakfast, Teresa.”
He was alone with a yawning taxi-driver, as a breeze came up from the bay in the Southern darkness.
XXXVI
Fran was lovely, very young, in a gray-squirrel mantle.
“I got it for almost nothing, at the summer sales in Berlin,” she said. “Why is it most women never can seem to economize? I’ll bet your wonderful flame, Mrs. Cost—Cortright? funny, I never can seem to remember her name—she’s frightfully clever, I’m sure, but I’ll bet she’d have paid twice as much for it.”
The late September was cold even for mid-Atlantic. Fran smoothed the fur, draped it closer in her steamer-chair. She seemed to him like a leopard with its taut limbs hidden by a robe.
Now, after tea hour on the S.S. Deutschland, a raging sunset smeared the waves with a frightening crimson. They smelled a storm. The ship ducked before the attacking waves. But Fran was full of liveliness and well-being. As she talked, she nodded every instant to people they had met aboard, the men who were always in a knot about her at the dances, the matrons who talked of “that charming Mrs. Dodsworth—she told me she was much younger than her husband—he’s a little slow, don’t you think—but she’s so fond of him—looks after him like a daughter.”
Fran cuddled down in her richness of fur.
“Oh, it’s nice to be going somewhere!” she said. “I bet we’ll both be crazy to start off somewhere, maybe back to Paris, when we’ve been home a few months. (What an atrocious hat that woman has on and my dear, will you regard her shoes! Why they allow people like that in the first cabin?) And you can’t know how tired I got of sticking around Berlin forever ’n’ ever! Oh, you were so right about Kurt, Sam dear. I don’t know how you guessed it! You’d be the first to admit you aren’t usually so awfully good at judging character, except in the case of businessmen, but you were right with—Oh, he was so bossy! He was furious if I so much as suggested I’d like to run down to Baden-Baden by myself. And where he got the idea that he was so important—Oh, his family may be as old as the Coliseum—the Coliseo—but when I saw his mother, my dear, the most awful old country frump—”
“Don’t!” said Sam. “Don’t know why, but I kind of hate to hear you riding Kurt and his mother that way. They were probably hurt, too.”
Most graciously, quite forgivingly, “Yes, you’re right. Sorry, M’sieu! I’ll be a good girl. And of course everything is all right now. After all, it’s such a wonderful Happy Ending to our wild little escapades! We’ve both learned lots, don’t you think? and now I won’t be so flighty and you won’t be so irritable, I’m sure you won’t.”
There was dancing in the verandah café. Young Tom Allen, the polo player—young Tom, all black and ivory and grin—came to ask her to dance. She smiled up at him, airily patted Sam’s arm, and scampered away, while Tom seemed to be holding her hand under shelter of her squirrel robe.
The sunset was angry now, the color of port wine.
Sam staggered around and around the slanting deck, alone, and alone he stood aft, looking back in the direction of Europe. But there was only foggy gray.
He awoke, bewildered, at two in the morning. The storm had come; the steamer was pitching abominably. In his half sleep he heard Edith whimpering in her sleep in the twin bed beside him. Smiling, glad to comfort her who had been all comfort to him here in sun-bright Naples, he stretched out his arm, sleepily stroked her thin wrist.
He startled, he sat up and gasped, at
