“Now Hurd’s a mighty good fellow! He’s cocky, and I don’t suppose he’s read a book since he used to look at the lingerie ads in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue as a kid, but he’s a whirlwind at selling, and he tells mighty good stories, and he would know the best restaurants in London.”
Softened, a bit motherly—or at least a bit sisterly—she comforted him, “You really would like to see him, wouldn’t you? Well then, let’s get him, by all means.”
“No, this is your party. I want somebody that you’d like. Plenty of time to see Hurd; go call on him tomorrow, maybe.”
“No, really, I think it would be lovely to have your Mr. Hurd. He wasn’t so bad. I was exaggerating. Yes, do call him up—please do! I’d feel terrible if I felt that I’d kept you from seeing—And perhaps you do owe it to the business. He may have some cables from the U.A.C.”
“Well, all right. And if I don’t get him, how about trying Colonel Enderley and his wife—I thought they were about the nicest people on the boat, and they may not have a date for tonight. Or that aviator, Ristad?”
“Splendid.”
Hurd’s office was closed.
Hurd’s home address not in the telephone book.
Colonel and Mrs. Enderley not at the Savoy, after all.
Max Ristad not in.
Who else?
How many millions of American husbands had sat on the edges of how many millions of hotel beds, from San Francisco to Stockholm, sighing to the unsympathetic telephone, “Oh, not in?” ruffling through the telephone book, and again sighing, “Oh, not in?”—looking for playmates for their handsome wives, while the wives listened blandly and never once cried, “But I don’t want anyone else! Aren’t we two enough?”
A little melancholy at having to struggle through their Second Honeymoon unassisted, they dined at the hotel and went to the theater. In the taxicab, he had a confused timidity—no fear of violence, no sense of threatened death, but a feeling of incompetence in this strange land, of making a fool of himself, of being despised by Fran and by these self-assured foreigners; a fear of loneliness; a fear that he might never be restored to the certainties of Zenith. He saw his club, the office, the dear imprisonment of home, against the background of London, with its lines of severe façades, its roaring squares, corners clamorous with newspaper vendors, and a whole nest of streets that irritated him because they weren’t reasonable—he didn’t know where they led! And a tremendous restaurant that looked bigger than any clashing Childs’ in New York, which was annoying in a land where he had expected to find everything as tiny and stiff and unambitious as a Japanese toy garden.
And the taxi-driver hadn’t understood his pronunciation—he had had to let the hotel porter give the name of the theater—and what ought he to tip the fellow? He couldn’t ask Fran’s advice. He was making up for his negligence about the radiogram for hotel reservations by being brusque and competent—a man on whom she could rely, whom she would love the more as she saw his superiority in new surroundings. God, he loved her more than ever, now that he had the time for it!
And what was that about not confusing a half-crown (let’s see: that was fifty cents, almost exactly, wasn’t it?) and a florin? Why had Lockert gone and mixed him all up by cautioning him so much about them? Curse Lockert—nice chap—awfully kind, but treating him as though he were a baby who would be disgraced in decent English society unless he had a genteel guide to tell him what he might wear and what he might say in mixed society! He’d managed to become president of quite a fair-sized corporation without Lockert’s aid, hadn’t he!
He felt, at the theater, even more forlorn.
He did not understand more than two-thirds of what the actors said on the stage. He had been brought up to believe that the English language and the American language were one, but what could a citizen of Zenith make of “Ohs rath, eastill in labtry”?
What were they talking about? What was the play about?
He knew that in America, even in the Midwestern saneness of Zenith, where the factories and skyscrapers were not too far from the healing winds across the cornfields, an incredible anarchy had crept into the family life which, he believed, had been the foundation of American greatness. People that you knew, people like his own cousin, Jerry Loring, after a decent career as a banker had taken up with loose girls and had stood for his wife’s having a lover without killing the fellow. By God if he, Sam Dodsworth, ever found his wife being too friendly with a man—
No, he probably wouldn’t. Not kill them. She had a right to her own way. She was better than he—that slender, shining being, in the golden frock she had insisted on digging out of a wardrobe trunk. She was a divine thing, while he was a clodhopper—and how he’d like to kiss her, if it weren’t for shocking all these people so chillily calm about him! If conceivably she could look at another man, he’d just leave her … and kill himself.
But he must attend to the play, considering that he was being educated, and so expensively.
He concluded that the play was nonsense. In America there was a criminal amount of divorcing and of meriting divorce, but surely that collapse of all the decencies was impossible in Old England, the one land that these hundreds of years had upheld the home, the church, the throne! Yet here on the stage, with no one hissing, an English gentleman was represented as being the lover of a decent woman, wife of a chemist, and as protesting against running away with her because then they would be unable to continue having tea and love together at the husband’s expense. And the English audience, apparently
