“Oh, thank you! Nice of you to wake me up. Having a kind of nightmare. My, it’s rough!”
In his agitation he tightened his fingers on her wrist.
“Oh, Sam, don’t—Oh, don’t be ardent! Not yet. I must get used—And I’m so sleepy!” Very brightly: “You don’t mind, do you? Nighty-night!”
He lay awake. In the watery light from the transom he saw the sheen of her silver toilet-things on the dresser. He thought of this tremendous steamer, pounding the waves. He thought of the modern miracle of the radio, up above, of the automatic electric steering apparatus. Yet on the bridge were sailors, unautomatic, human, eternal. The ship, too, was eternal, as a vehicle of man’s old voyaging. Its creaking seemed to him like the creaking of an ancient Greek trireme.
But while his thoughts reached out thus for things heroic, he heard her placid breathing and he smelled not the sea gale but perfume that came from little crystal vials among her silver toilet-things that were vaster than the hull of the steamer, stronger than the storm.
He felt that he would never sleep again.
He closed his great fist, tight. Then it relaxed, and he was asleep.
He roused to hear her bubbling, in a stormy dawn:
“Are you awake? Don’t let me disturb you. Horrid morning! Let’s get up some bridge. We’ll get Mr. Ballard and Tom Allen. He’s a dear boy, isn’t he! Though I feel like a mother toward him. Oh, Sam, if you aren’t too sleepy—Oh. While we’re in New York, I think I’ll see if I can’t pick up a really nice Chinese evening wrap. Tom told me about a shop. Of course I have those others, but they’re getting so shabby, and after all, you don’t expect me to look a fright, like Matey Pearson, do you! I’ll make her eyes start out of her head with the Marcel Rochas frock I got in Paris, and think, I only had two days to get it in! Zenith will simply foam at the mouth! Oh, after all, it is kind of nice to be going home—for a while—after all we’ve gone through—and Sam, I wonder if you understand that I understand probably you were just as brave and honest as I was, even with the hideous suffering I had to face in Berlin! And—Oh, I don’t know what reminded me of it, but you must be careful with the Ballards. I’m afraid you bored them last evening, talking about Italian motors. You must remember that they have a villa in Florence, and they’re used to the real Italy, and artists and the nobility and so on. But of course it doesn’t matter. And—Do you mind ringing for coffee? That’s an old dear!”
The scent of her perfumes seemed stronger than by night, in the sleep-thickened air of the stateroom.
He slowly raised himself to ring for the steward. He had said nothing whatever.
She blissfully dropped off to sleep again, and he bathed, dressed, swayed out on deck. The open portion of the promenade deck was protected by canvas against which the water crashed, sending streams between the lashings to trickle along the deck. He labored forward, stood solemnly at a window looking ahead at the bow plunging into the waves, at the foam hurled over the forepeak, at a desolate immigrant in a tattered old raincoat trying to keep a footing on the forward deck.
It was black ahead. To a landsman it was menacing. Yet there was strength in the stormy air and, after a long breath, stretching out his great arms, Sam began to plow around the deck.
His eyes seemed turned inward; his lips moved a little in his meditation.
After half an hour, breakfastless, he suddenly climbed the stairs from A Deck to the Boat Deck and, down a narrow corridor, past the tiny florist-shop, came to the wireless bureau—a narrow desk across a small room, like a telegraph office in a minor hotel.
Emotionlessly, he wrote and handed in a message to Edith Cortright: “Will you be Naples three weeks from now?”
He went down to breakfast. All morning and half the afternoon he played bridge, watching Fran flirt with the ebullient Tom Allen.
The answer to his radio came just before teatime: “No but shall be venice for couple months bless you Edith.
”
For an hour, while Fran made much of tea with half a dozen men, Sam sat alone in the smoking-room, pretending to read whenever any lone and necessitous drinker came in to look for a drinking companion.
At the dressing-hour, he said mildly to Fran, “I wonder if we mightn’t have dinner here in our stateroom tonight? I want to talk about things. We’ve sort of avoided it.”
“Good Heavens, Sambo, what’s come over you? Do you regard it as particularly cheerful to dine in this beastly little hole of a room on a rough night like this? Besides! I promised the Ballards we’d join them in the grill for dinner—such a common, stupid commercial crowd in the salon.”
“But we must talk.”
“My dear man, I think we’ll manage it, with four full days ahead of us on this steamer! I’m really not going off to the Riviera or any place, you know!”
It was not till late in the evening that he had his chance. As they came down to the stateroom at bedtime, Fran very lively after a session in the smoking-room, he said, without prelude:
“Not much use trying to do it tactfully. Wanted to, but—Fran, we can’t make a go of it, and I’m going back and join Edith Cortright.”
“I don’t quite understand. What have I done now? Oh, my God, if you haven’t learned—You haven’t learned anything, not one single thing, out of all our sorrows! Still criticizing me, and such a kind sweet way of springing something beastly cruel on me just when I’ve been happy, as I have tonight!” She faced him, hands clenched. “Will you kindly, Mr. Dodsworth, be a little less mysterious and tell me just what it
