A seaside town: a crescent of flat-faced houses, the brass-sheathed door of a select pub and, countrywards, a governess-cart creeping among high hedges to a village green, a chalky hill with Roman earthworks up to which panted the bookish vicar beside a white-mustached ex-proconsul who had ruled jungles and maharajahs and lost temples where peacocks screamed.
Mother England! Home!
He dashed down to Fran. He had to share it with her. For all his training in providing suitable company for her and then not interrupting his betters, he burst through her confidences as Lockert and she stood aloof from the dance. He seized her shoulder and rumbled, “Light ahead! We’re there! Come up on the top deck. Oh, hell, never mind a coat! Just a second, to see it!”
His insistence bore Fran away, and with her alone, unchaperoned by that delightful Major Lockert, he stood huddled by a lifeboat, in his shirtsleeves, his dress coat around her, looking at the cheery wink of the light that welcomed them.
They had full five minutes of romancing and of tenderness before Lockert came along, placidly bumbling that they would catch cold … that they would find Kent an estimable county … that Dodsworth must never make the mistake of ordering his street-boots and his riding-boots from the same maker.
The smell of London is a foggy smell, a sooty smell, a coal-fire smell, yet to certain wanderers it is more exhilarating, more suggestive of greatness and of stirring life, than springtime hillsides or the chill sweetness of autumnal nights; and that unmistakable smell, which men long for in rotting perfumes along the Orinoco, in the greasy reek of South Chicago, in the hot odor of dusty earth among locust-buzzing Alberta wheatfields, that luring breath of the dark giant among cities, reaches halfway to Southampton to greet the traveler. Sam sniffed at it, uneasily, restlessly, while he considered how strange was the British fashion of having railway compartments instead of an undivided car with a nice long aisle along which you could observe ankles, magazines, Rotary buttons, clerical collars, and all the details that made travel interesting.
And the strangeness of having framed pictures of scenery behind the seats; of having hand straps—the embroidered silk covering so rough to the fingertips, the leather inside so smooth and cool—beside the doors. And the greater strangeness of admitting that these seats were more comfortable than the flinty Pullman chairs of America. And of seeing outside, in the watery February sunshine, not snow-curdled fields but springtime greenness; pollarded willows and thatched roofs and half-timbered façades—
Just like in the pictures! England!
Like most people who have never traveled abroad, Sam had not emotionally believed that these “foreign scenes” veritably existed; that human beings really could live in environments so different from the front yards of Zenith suburbs; that Europe was anything save a fetching myth like the Venusberg. But finding it actually visible, he gave himself up to grasping it as enthusiastically as, these many years, he had given himself to grinding out motor cars.
VII
Not the charge and roaring of the huge red busses, not the glimpse of Westminster’s towers beside the Thames, not the sight of the pale tall houses of Carlton House Terrace, so much delighted Sam and proved to him that incredibly he was in London as did a milk cart on its afternoon delivery—that absurd little cart, drawn by a pony, with the one big brassy milk container, instead of a truck filled with precise bottles.
“That certainly is old-fashioned!” he muttered in the taxicab, greatly content.
They planned to stay at the Berkeley, but when Sam stood at the booking-desk, making himself as large and impassive and traveled-looking as possible, and said casually, “I’d like a suite,” the clerk remarked, “Very sorry, sir—full up.”
“But we wirelessed for reservations!” snapped Fran.
“Come to think of it, I forgot all about sending the radio,” said Sam, looking apologetically at the clerk, apologizing for the rudeness of Fran, his child.
She breathed quickly, angrily, but never yet had she quarreled with him in public.
“You might try the Savoy, sir. Or the Ritz—just across Piccadilly,” the clerk suggested.
They drooped back to the taxicab waiting with their luggage, feeling unwelcome, and when they were safely inside the car, she opened up:
“I do think you might have remembered to send that wireless, considering that you had absolutely nothing else to do aboard—except drink! When I did all the packing and—Sam, do you ever realize that it really wouldn’t injure your
