“It sounds dreadful. And yet so exciting! I think I should be glad of a nice striped snake, for a change! I’m terribly fed up with the sound, safe American cities where you never find anything in your chair more thrilling than the morning paper. I think I’ll go look for snakes!”
“Are you going East?”
“Don’t know. Isn’t it nice! No plans beyond London.”
“You’ll stay in London a bit?”
“Yes, if there aren’t too many Americans there. Why is it that the travelling American is such a dreadful person? Look at those ghastly people at that second table there—no, just beyond the pillar—father with horn-rimmed spectacles, certain to be talking about either Coolidge or Prohibition—earnest mother in homemade frock out to hunt down Culture and terribly grim about it—daughter with a voice like a file. Why is it?”
“And why is it that you Americans, the nice ones, are so much more snobbish than the English?”
She gasped, and Sam awaited a thunderbolt, which did not come. Lockert was calm and agreeable, and she astonishingly bent to his domination with a puzzled: “Are we, really?”
“Appallingly! I know only two classes of people who hate their own race—or tribe or nation or whatever you care to call it—who travel principally to get away from their own people, who never speak of them except with loathing, who are pleased not to be taken as belonging to them. That is, the Americans and the Jews!”
“Oh, come now, that’s idiotic! I’m as proud of being—No! That’s so. Partly. You’re right. Why is it?”
“I suppose it’s because your boosters go so much to the other extreme, talking about ‘God’s Country’—”
“But that expression is never used any more.”
“It isn’t? Anyway: ‘greatest country on earth’ and ‘we won the war.’ And your ghastly city-boosting tours and Elks’ conventions—people like you hate this bellowing. And then I do think the English have, as you would say, ‘put something over on you’—”
“I’ve never used the phrase!”
“—by sitting back and quietly assuming that we’re the noblest and rightest people on earth. And if any man or any nation has the courage or the magnificent egotism to do that long enough, almost everyone will accept it from him. Oh, the English are essentially more insufferable than the Americans—”
“But not so noisy about it,” mused Fran.
Sam was not at all sure that he liked this discussion.
“Perhaps not,” said Lockert; “though if there’s anything noisier than the small even voice with which an Englishman can murmur, ‘Don’t be so noisy, my dear fellow—!’ Physically, it may carry only a yard, but spiritually it rings clear up through the Heavens! And I’ll be hearing it, now that I’ve become a Colownial. Even my cousin—I was speaking to your husband about him—absolute fanatic about motor transport—I’m to stay with him in Kent. And he’ll be pleasant to me, and gently rebuking—And he’s rather a decent old thing—General Herndon.”
“General Lord Herndon? Of the Italian drive?” said Fran.
“Yes. You see, my revered great-grandfather did so well out of cotton that he was rewarded with a peerage.”
“And you’re so proud of it! That’s why you enjoy your mock humility. You had a quite American thrill in admitting that your cousin is a lordship. It’s bunk—I mean, it’s nonsense, the British assertion that only Americans take titles seriously. You have as much satisfaction out of not calling your cousin ‘Lord’ as—”
“As any charming American woman would out of calling him ‘Lord’!”
She seemed helpless against Lockert’s bland impertinence; she seemed to enjoy being bullied; she admitted, “Yes, perhaps,” and they smiled at each other.
“But seriously,” said Lockert, “you’ll be more English than I am, after you’ve lived there a year. I’ve knocked about so much in South America and Colorado and Ceylon that I’m merely a tramp. Jungle rat.”
“You really think so—that I’ll become English?” She was unguardedly frank, she the ever-guarded.
“Quite. … I say, may I have this dance?”
Lockert, for all his squareness—he was as solid and ungraceful-looking as his favorite mutton-chop—danced easily. Sam drooped in his chair and watched them.
“Nice she has somebody to play with already,” he insisted.
And within three days she had a dozen men to “play with,” to dance and argue with, and race with around the deck. But always it was Lockert who assumed that he was her patron, who looked over her new acquaintances one by one, and was not at all shy about giving his verdict on them. She became helplessly angry at his assumptions, and he apologized so affably and so insincerely that she enjoyed quarreling with him for hours at a time, snuggled in a steamer robe on deck. And when Lockert and she found that they were both devoted to dogs and they became learned about wire-haired terriers, Sam leaned back listening as though she were his clever daughter.
Between times she was gayer with him and more affectionate than she had been for years; and day by day the casualness suitable to a manufacturer like Sam broke down into surprising, uncharted emotions.
VI
On their last day out—they were due in Southampton at noon, tomorrow—there was on the Ultima all the kindly excitement, all the anticipation and laughter, of the day before Christmas. When the Dodsworths came up to the smoking-room for their cocktail before dinner they were welcomed by the dozen people whom Lockert, the mixer of the voyage, had attracted to the round table in the center of the room.
What delightful people! Sam glowed; what a pleasure to travel with them: Lockert, the stolidly loquacious English adventurer; the jolly and vulgar little Jewish millinery buyer from Denver, who was quite the cleverest
