For years Fran had ridden twice a week with an English ex-groom, turned gentleman teacher and trainer in America, his Cockney accent accepted in Zenith as the breath of British gentility. With her slim straightness she sat her aged nag like a young cavalry officer. Lockert and Lord Herndon looked at her more admiringly than ever, spoke to her more cheerily, as though she were one of their own.
Sam’s riding had been a boyhood-vacation trifling; he was about as confident on a horse as he would have been in an aeroplane; he had never quite got over feeling, on a horse’s back, that he was appallingly far up from the ground. Herndon had a shaky leg, and Sam and he rode slowly. Suddenly Lockert and Fran left them, in a gallop along the pleasant plateau at the top of the Downs.
“Don’t you want to keep up with ’em? My leg’s not up to much today,” said Herndon.
“No, I’ll trail,” Sam sighed.
In a quarter-hour Fran and Lockert came cantering back. She was laughing. She had taken off her tam, and her hair was wild.
“Sorry we ran away, but the air was so delicious—simply had to have a scamper!” she cried and, to Sam, “Oh, was oo left alone! Poor boy!”
All the way back she insisted on riding beside him, consoling him.
A month ago he had felt that he had to protect her frailness. He was conscious now that his breath was short, that he had a corporation … and that Fran, turning to call back to Lockert, was bored by him.
Most insecure of all was Sam that afternoon when they motored for tea to Woughton Hall, the country place of Sir Francis Ouston, the new hope of the Liberals in Parliament. Here—so overwhelmingly that Sam gasped—was one of the great houses of which he had been apprehensive. Up a mile-long driveway of elms they came to a lofty Palladian façade, as stern as a courthouse, with a rough stone wing at one end. “That’s the old part, that stone—built about 1480,” said Herndon.
In front was a terrace rimmed with clipped cypresses in the shape of roosters, crescents, pyramids, with old Italian wine-jars of stone. To the right, beyond a pair of tennis-courts, half a mile of lawn slipped in pale winter green toward rough meadows; to the left the stables were a red brick village. There was about the whole monstrous palace a quietness dotted only with the sound of sparrows and distant rooks. To Sam, just now, the millionaire country houses he had seen on Long Island and the North Shore above Chicago—Tudor castles, Italian villas, French châteaux, elephantine Mount Vernons, mansions which he had admired and a little coveted—were raw as new factories beside a soft old pasture.
Through a vast entrance hall with tapestries on walls of carved stucco, and high Italian candlesticks at the foot of a walnut stairway, they were shepherded to a carved oak drawing-room high as a church, and much noisier. After that Sam knew nothing but confusion and babble. First and last there must have been fifty people popping in for tea, people with gaudy titles and cheery manners, people so amiable to him that he could not hate them as he longed to. What they were all talking about, he never knew. They spoke of Sybil, who seemed to be an actress, and of politicians (he guessed they were politicians) to whom they referred as Nancy and F. E. and Jix and Winston and the P.M. One man mentioned something called the Grand National, and Sam was not sure whether this was the name of a bank, an insurance company, or a hotel.
What could he do when a lady, entirely unidentified, asked, “Have you seen H. G.’s latest?”
“Not yet,” he answered intelligently, but who or what H. G. might be, he never did learn.
And through the bright-colored maelstrom of people, his heart aching with loneliness, he saw Fran move placidly, shiningly, man-conscious and man-conquering and at home. They were all one family; they took her in; but himself, how to get in he had no notion. He had addressed conventions of bankers; he had dragooned a thousand dancing people at a Union Club ball; but here—these people were so close-knit, so serenely sure, that he was an outsider.
He escaped from the lady who knew about H. G.; he crawled through the mass of suspended teacups and struggled to Fran’s side. She was confiding (not very truthfully) to a man with a single eyeglass that she had a high, passionate, unresting interest in polo.
When Sam had the chance, he sighed to her, “Let’s get out. Too darn many people for me!”
“They’re darlings! And I’ve made the most terrific hit with Lady Ouston. She wants us to come to dinner in town.”
“Well—I’d just like—Thought we might get a little fresh air before dinner. I feel sort of out of it here. They all chirp so fast.”
“You didn’t seem to be doing so badly. I saw you in the corner with the Countess of Baliol.”
“Was I? Which one? All the women I talked to just looked like women. Why the devil don’t they wear their coronets? Honestly, Fran, this is too rich for my blood. I can stand meeting a couple hundred people at once, but not the entire British aristocracy. They—”
“My dear Sam, you are talking exactly like Mr. A. B. Hurd.”
“I feel exactly like Mr. A. B. Hurd!”
“Are you going to demand that we take Zenith with us every place we go? Are you going to refuse to like anything that’s the least bit different from a poker party at Tub Pearson’s? And are you going to insist that I be scared and old, too, and not reach out for the great life that I can learn to master—oh, I can, I can! I’m doing it! Must I go
