“My dear Major Lockert, I hope that the combination of your extraordinarily careful driving and your extraordinarily generous mind-reading isn’t tiring you too much!”
But she didn’t, Sam realized, succeed in making it nasty.
She had turned entirely toward Lockert. She no longer noticed Sam when he mumbled, “There’s a lovely old stone church,” or “Guess those are hop poles”; when he wanted to hold her hand and tell her with quick little pressures that they were sharing the English countryside.
“Oh, well—” he reflected.
He recalled Pickwick Papers, and the coach with the jovial, well-warmed philosophers swaying down the frosty roads for Christmas in the country.
“Great!” he said.
They stopped for lunch at a village inn. To Sam’s alert gratification they drove under an archway into a courtyard of coaching days. He was delighted by the signs on the low dark doors beneath the archway: Coffee Room, Lounge, Saloon Bar
.
They stamped their feet and swung their arms as the Pickwickians had done when they had stopped, perhaps, at this same inn. If Fran had ignored him, she took him in again and warmed him with her smile, with an excited “Isn’t this adorable, Sam! Just what we wanted!” She insisted, despite Lockert’s ruddy and spinsterish protests, on going into the taproom and there, with authentic-looking low rafters, paneling of black oak, floor of cherry-red tiles, they sat at a long wooden table between benches, and Sam and Lockert warmed themselves with whisky while Fran sipped half a pint of bitter out of a pewter mug—Sam secretly bought it from the barmaid afterward, and lost it in Paris.
The stairs to the dining-room were carpeted in warm dark red; the wall was plastered with Victorian pictures: Wellington at Waterloo, Melrose Abbey by Moonlight, Prince Collars and Cuffs, Rochester Castle; and on the landing was such a Cabinet of Curiosities as Sam had not seen since childhood: a Javanese fan, carved chessmen, Chinese coins, and a nugget of Australian gold.
The dining-room was dominated by a stone fireplace on which were carved the Tudor rose and the high-colored arms of the local Earl. Near it, on the oak buffet, crowned with enormous silver platters, were a noble ham, a brown-crusted veal and ham pie, a dish of gooseberry tart; and at a table two commercial travelers were gorging themselves on roast beef with Yorkshire pudding.
“Great!” Sam rejoiced, and his glow continued even through watery greens and disconsolate Brussels sprouts.
Beyond Sevenoaks, Lockert played a lively tattoo with the horn, and shouted, “Almost there! Welcome to the Stately Homes of England!”
They came to an estate, high-walled, with deer to be seen through grilled gates, and the twisted Tudor chimneys of a great house visible beyond a jungle of pines.
“Oh, Lord, is this the place?” Sam privately wondered. “It’ll be terrible! Ten footmen. I wonder if they do wear plush knee-pants? Whom does one tip?”
But the car raced past this grandeur, dipped into a red brick hamlet, turned off High Street and into a rough lane gloomy between hedges, and entered a driveway before a quite new, quite unpretentious house of ten or twelve rooms. As with thousands of houses they had passed in crawling out of London, there was a glassed-in porch littered with bicycles, rubbers, and rather consumptive geraniums. At one side of the house was a tennis-court, an arbor, and the skeletons of a rose-garden, but of lawn there was scarcely a quarter-acre.
“I told you it was only a box,” Lockert drawled, as he drew up with a sputter of gravel at the door.
There was a roar within. The door was opened by a maid, very stiff in cap and apron, but past her brushed the source of the roaring—a tiny, very slim image of a man, his cheeks almost too smoothly pink to be real, his mustache too precise and silvery, and his voice a parade-ground bellow too enormous to be credited in so miniature a soldier.
“How d’you do, Mrs. Dodsworth. Most awfully nice of you to come!” he thundered, and Lockert muttered, “This is the General.”
If, in his quest for romance, the exterior of the house was a jar to Sam, the drawing-room was precisely what he had desired, without knowing that he had desired it. Here was definitely Home, with a homeliness which existed no longer in most of the well-to-do houses of Zenith, where, between the great furniture factories and the young female decorators with their select notions about “harmony” and “periods,” any respectable living-room was as shiny and as impersonal as a new safety-razor blade. At Herndon’s, blessedly, no two bits of furniture belonged to the same family or age, yet the chintzes, the fireplace, the brass fire-irons, the white paneling, belonged together. On a round table in a corner were the General’s cups—polo cups, golf cups, the cup given him by his mess in India, a few medals, and a leering Siva; and through low casement windows the gray garden was seen sloping down to meadows and a willow-bordered pond. And the maid was wheeling in a tea-wagon with a tall old silver teapot, old silver slop-jar, mounds of buttered scones, and such thin bread and butter as Sam had never known could exist.
After a tea during which Herndon rumbled rather libelous stories about his fellow soldiers, they walked up the lane, across a common on which donkeys and embattled geese were grazing, past half-timbered shops with tiny windows containing a jar or two of sweets, to the fifteenth-century
