“Hell! I suppose you got the tickets to Europe! I suppose you got our passports—”
“No. Your secretary did! I’m afraid you don’t get any vast credit for that, my dear man!”
That was all the family scene for which they had time before they disembarked at the Ritz, but Fran was able to keep up quite a high level of martyrdom and bad temper, for the Ritz was nearly full, also, and they could not have a suite till the next day. Tonight, Fran had to endure a mere double bedroom with a private bath.
“I suppose,” she stormed, “that I’m expected to spend my entire time in London packing and unpacking and moving and unpacking all over again! This awful room! Oh, I do think you might have remembered—”
All the gaiety was gone from Sam’s large face. He held her arm, painfully, and growled, “Now that’ll do! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! I always deny it, even to you, but you can be the nagging wife! Just the kind you hate! We’ve never had a better room than this, and tomorrow we’ll have a suite, and you needn’t unpack anything besides a toothbrush this evening—we needn’t dress for dinner. You make me sick when you get this suffering, abused, tragedy fit. I know it’s because you’re tired and jumpy, but can’t you ever be tired and jumpy without insisting that everyone around you be the same way?”
“Is it necessary for you to shout at me, as a proof of your calmness—your superb masculine calmness—and is it necessary to break my arm? I am not a nagger! I’ve never nagged you! But the fact that you, who are so fond of talking about yourself as the great executive who never forgets a detail—”
“Never say anything of the kind!”
“—could forget to send that wireless, and then you’re too self-satisfied even to be sorry about it—”
“Fran!” His arm circled her; he led her to the window. “Look down there! Piccadilly! London! I’ve always wanted to see it, just as much as you have. Are we going to quarrel now? Do you remember the very first evening I met you, after you’d come back from Europe, and I said we’d come here together? And we have. Togeth—Oh, I guess I sound sentimental, but to be here in England, where all our people came from, with you—”
“I’m sorry. I was naughty. I’m sorry.” Then she laughed. “Only my people didn’t come from here! My revered ancestors galloped around the Bavarian mountains in short green pants, and yodeled, and undoubtedly they fought your ancestors on all possible occasions!”
But her laughter was not very convincing; her restoration to happiness not complete. She said, while she was unpacking her smaller bag, gliding in and out of the bathroom—she said, in rather a lonely, discouraged way:
“Same time, my dear, you aren’t always thoughtful about me. American husbands never are. You’re no worse than the rest, but you’re just as bad. You think of nothing beyond business and golf. It never occurs to you that a woman, poor idiot, is lots more pleased when you remember to send her flowers, or when you phone to her at odd hours, just to say you love her, than she would be by a new motor car. Please don’t think I’m nagging—maybe I was before, but I’m not now, really! I do so want us to be happy together! And now that you don’t have to think about business, don’t you think it might be nice to get acquainted with me? I’m really quite a nice person!”
“Nice? Oh, Lord!”
She was cheerfuller, after their long kiss, and he—he became very busy trying to be a thoughtful husband.
And she agreed that it was jolly that they needn’t dress for dinner, and then she unpacked their evening clothes.
It was toward evening; he must make her first night in London exciting; and, like most American husbands, he assumed that the best way to do it was to invite someone, if possible someone a little younger and livelier than himself, to join them.
Major Lockert?
Oh, damn Major Lockert!
They’d seen too much of him on the ship—and the patronizing way in which he’d ambled into their compartment on the boat train and thrust a Graphic and a Tatler on them—And the way he’d explained that you mustn’t confuse a florin and a half-crown—
Still, Lockert was younger than himself—perhaps half a dozen years—and he could gabble about baccarat and Paris-Plage and other things that Fran seemed to find important—
“Let’s get hold of somebody for dinner, honey,” he said, “and then maybe we’ll take in a show. How about it? Shall I try to get hold of Lockert?”
“Oh no!”
He was pleased; considerably less pleased when she went on, “He’s been so kind to us, and so helpful, and we mustn’t bother him on his first evening home. What about this young Starling, Tub’s nevvy, at the American Embassy?”
“We’ll try him.”
The Embassy was closed, and at his bachelor apartment, Dunger, the porter, explained that Mr. Starling had gone to the Riviera for a fortnight.
“Do you remember any of the people you met here when you came abroad as a kid?” Sam asked.
“No, not really. And I haven’t any relatives here—all in Germany. Hang it, I do think that after all these centuries my family might have provided me with one respectable English earl as kinsman!”
“What about Hurd, the Revelation agent? I think he came to our house once when he was in Zenith.”
“Oh, he—he’s a terrible person—absolute roughneck—how you ever happened to send an American like Hurd over here when you might have had a nice Englishman as London agent and—Why, don’t you remember I asked you not to write him we were coming?
