When for two hours they had shopped up Regent Street and down Bond, Fran was in an expansive, youthful, rattling mood, and she cried, “Let’s go back to the hotel—it really is a nice sitting-room—and have tea there by our own fireplace.”
On the large table in their sitting-room was a box of roses.
“Oh, and you thought of me, this morning!” she rejoiced.
He had, but he had not thought of the flowers. They were from Major Lockert.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said, in a tone which suggested that it decidedly did matter, and while he was being oversolicitous about the kind of cakes she’d like with tea, Lockert himself was announced.
Lockert remarked, as though he had seen them five minutes before, “It’s cost me almost a bob at the club telephone to find out where you were. I say Dodsworth my cousin says you’re entirely wrong about hydraulic brakes I say won’t you come down to his place for the weekend awf’ly modest country cot sort of place he’d like awf’ly to have you no no tea thanks must run along forgive informality General’s a widower no Lady Herndon call on you do come.”
“At the same time,” Sam complained, “Hurd and your friend Lockert aren’t essentially different. (Oh, I don’t know whether we ought to go down to Lord Herndon’s or not—no reason why he should care to see me, and it’ll be one of these houses with forty servants.) Oh, Lockert talks more politely than Hurd, but at bottom they’re both bullies—they both want to do things for you that you don’t want done. I wish Tub Pearson were here!”
“You would! Of course we’re going to Herndon’s. And not because he’s a General and a Lord but because—Well. Yes. Because he’s a General and a Lord. That’s an interesting fact to discover about myself. Am I a snob? Splendid! I shall get on, if I can only be clear and resolute about it!”
IX
Lockert called for them in a long, sumptuous, two-seater Sunbeam which he drove himself. He insisted that there was plenty of room in the seat for the three of them, but it seemed to Sam that they were crowded, and that Fran, glossy in her gray squirrel coat and her small cloche hat, snuggled too contentedly against Lockert’s shoulder.
He forgot it in the pleasure of driving from the lowering smoke of London to the winter sunshine of the country; gray fields beginning to stir with green, breathing a faint bright mist, above which, in the shining branches of the trees, the rooks were jubilant. Little villages he saw, with homely tea rooms and inn signs—“The Rose and Crown,” “The Green Dragon,” and “The Faithful Friend”; then thatched farmhouses, oasthouses—he could not understand what these domestic lighthouses might be—and on a ridge the splayed ruin of a castle, his first castle!
Knights in tourney; Elaine in white samite, mystic, wonderful—no, it was Guinevere who wore the white samite, wasn’t it? must read some Tennyson again. Dukes riding out to the Crusades with minstrels playing on—what was it?—rebecks? Banners alive, and a thousand swords flashing. And these fairy stories really had happened, and around that wall up there, with its one broken lump of a tower! The cavalcade of knights—following this same road!—became more real to him than the motor, for he was bored by the talk of Fran and Lockert and lost the thread of it in ancient book-colored memories which returned as desirable and somehow tragic. The other two were chattering of cricket at Lord’s, of polo at Hurlingham; they were spitefully recalling the poor old rustic banker on the Ultima who came to dinner every evening in prehistoric dress clothes with the top of his trousers showing like a narrow black scarf above the opening of his baggy white waistcoat. Their superciliousness shut Sam out in the darkness along with the kindly old banker.
He wanted to escape from the hotel-and-theater London of the tourist and see the authentic English—Dorset shepherds—cotton operatives on the dole in Salford—collier captains in Bristol harbor—Cornish tin-miners—Cambridge dons—hop-pickers in Kentish pubs—great houses in the Dukeries. But they were too low or too high for Fran’s attention, and was it probable, he sighed, that he would see anything that she did not choose?
A little incredulously he perceived that Fran was really attracted by Lockert—she who had not been given to even the flimsiest of tea-table flirtations, who had blushed and looked soft-eyed only at the attentions of the very best of visiting celebrities: a lecturing English novelist or a young Italian baron who was studying motor factories; she who had ever been rude with a swift cold rudeness to such flappers as were known to indulge in that midnight pawing known in Zenith as “necking.” But Lockert seemed by his placid bullying to have broken her glistening shell of sexlessness. She, so touchy, so ready to take offense, accepted Lockert as though he were her oldest friend, to wrangle with, to laugh with.
“You drive much too fast,” she said.
“It would be too fast for anyone who wasn’t as good a driver as I am.”
“Oh, really! I suppose you’ve won races!”
“I have. With German shells. I was in the motor transport before they sent me to America. I’ve driven at night, on a road full of shell holes, without lights, at thirty miles an hour. … As I was saying, you’re too American, Mrs. Dodsworth. Americans understand themselves less and are less understood by the world than any nation that’s ever existed. You’re excellent at all the things in which you’re supposed to be lacking—lyric poetry, formal manners, lack of cupidity. And you’re so timid and incompetent at the things in which you’re
