He was first dressed for dinner. She had decided, after rather a lot of conversation about it, that the belief that our better people do not dress for dinner on the first night out was a superstition. He sauntered up to the smoking-room for his first cocktail aboard, feeling very glossy and handsome and much-traveled. Then he was feeling very lonely, for the smoking-room was filled with amiable-looking people who apparently all knew one another. And he knew nobody aboard save Fran.
“That’s the one trouble. I’m going to miss Tub and Doc Hazzard and the rest horribly,” he brooded. “I wish they were along! Then it would be about perfect.”
He was occupying an alcove with a semicircular leather settee, before a massy table. The room was crowded, and a square-rigged Englishman, blown into the room with a damp whiff of sea air, stopped at Sam’s table asking abruptly, “Mind if I sit here?”
The Englishman ordered his cocktail with competence:
“Now be very careful about this, steward. I want half Booth gin and half French vermouth, and just four drops of orange bitters, and no Italian vermouth, remember, no Italian vermouth.” As the Englishman gulped his drink, Sam enjoyed hating him. The man was perfectly expressionless, like a square-headed wooden idol, colored like an idol of cedar wood. “Supercilious as the devil. Never would be friendly, not till he’d known you ten years. Well, he needn’t worry! I’m not going to speak to him! Curious how an Englishman like that can make you feel that you’re small and skinny and your tie’s badly tied without even looking at you! Well, he—”
The Englishman spoke, curtly:
“Decent weather, for a February crossing.”
“Is it? I don’t really know. Never crossed before.”
“Really?”
“You’ve crossed often?”
“Oh, perhaps twenty times. I was with the British War Mission during the late argument. They were always chasing me across. Lockert’s my name. I’m growing cocoa down in British Guiana now. Hot there! Going to stay in London?”
“I think so, for a while. I’m on an indefinite vacation.”
Sam had the American yearning to become acquainted, to tell all about his achievements, not as boasting but to establish himself as a worthy fellow.
“I’ve been manufacturing motor cars—the Revelation—thought it was about time to quit and find out what the world was like. Dodsworth is my name.”
“Pleased to meet you.” (Like most Europeans, Lockert believed that all Americans of all classes always said “Pleased to meet you,” and expected so to be greeted in turn.) “Revelation? Jolly good car. Had one in Kent. My cousin—live with him when I’m home—bouncing old retired general—he’s dotty over motors. Roars around on a shocking old motor bike—mustache and dignity flying in the morning breeze—atrocious bills for all the geese and curates he runs over. He’s insanely pro-American—am myself, except for your appalling ice water. Have another cocktail?”
In twenty minutes, Sam and Major Clyde Lockert had agreed that the “labor turnover” was too high, that driving by night into the brilliance of headlights was undesirable, that Bobby Jones was a player of golf, and that they themselves were men of the world and cheery companions.
“I’ll meet lots of people. And I like this ship. This is the greatest day of my life—next to my marriage, of course,” Sam gloated, as the second dinner gong flooded the ship with waves of hysterical sound and he marched out to rouse Fran from her mysterious activities.
There was awaiting him in his cabin a wireless from Tub Pearson:
bon voyage stop london sure see my nephew jack starling american embassy living georgian house stop dont raise on bobtailed straights wish with you tub.
He wondered about introducing Major Lockert to Fran.
He was never able to guess how she would receive the people whom he found in the alley and proudly dragged in to her. Business men whom he regarded as upstanding and vigorous, she often pronounced dull; European visitors whom he found elegant, she was likely to call “not quite the real thing”; and men whom he had doubtfully presented to her as worthy but rather mutton-headed, she had been known to consider fine and very sensitive. And for all her theoretical desire to make their house a refuge for him and for whomever he liked to invite, she had never learned to keep her opinions of people to herself. When she was bored by callers, she would beg “Do you mind if I run up to bed now—such a headache,” with a bright friendliness which fooled no one save herself, and which left their guests chilled and awkward.
Would she find Lockert heavy?
While they sat in the music room over after-dinner coffee, with a dance beginning in the cleared space, Lockert came ambling up to them.
“Mr. Lockert—my wife,” Sam mumbled.
Lockert’s stolidity did not change as he bowed, as he sat down in answer to a faint invitation, but Sam noted that his pale blue eyes came quickly alive and searched Fran with approval. … Fran’s lovely pallor, in a robe de style such as only her slenderness could bear.
Sam settled back with his cigar and let them talk. To him, always, the best talk was no brilliance of his own, but conversation that amused Fran and drew her out of her silken sulkiness.
“You’ve been long in America, Mr. Lockert?”
“Not this time. I’ve been living in British Guiana—plantation—no soda for your whisky, and always the chance of finding a snake curled up in your chair on the verandah—nice big snakes, all striped, very handsome and friendly—don’t seem to get used to ’em.”
Lockert spoke to her not with such impersonal friendliness as he had for Sam, not with the bored dutifulness which most men in Zenith showed toward any woman
