“I will. But do I have to beat you very long at a time?”
“Probably. I’m rather a hussy. Only virtue is, I know it. And I did flirt with Clyde Lockert at Lord Herndon’s! It flattered me to stir him out of that ‘Damn your eyes’ superiority of his. And I did stir him, too! But I’m so ’shamed!”
In their apartment she nuzzled her cheek against his shoulder, whispering, “Oh, I’d just like to crawl inside you and be part of you. Don’t ever let me go!”
“I won’t!”
The Ouston debacle considerably checked Fran’s social career, though Lockert continued their mentor. He came to tea the next day, casual as ever, and drawled:
“Well, Merle Ouston was a bit of a public nuisance last night. So were you, Dodsworth!”
“Well, I couldn’t sit there and listen to her—”
“You should’ve smiled. You Americans are always so touchy. No Englishman ever minds criticism of England. He laughs at it.”
“Hm! I’ve heard that before—from Englishmen! I wonder if that isn’t one of your myths about yourselves, like our belief that every American is so hospitable that he’ll give any stranger his shirt. Well, I’ve never seen any of our New York bankers down at Ellis Island begging the Polack immigrants to come stay with them till they get jobs. Look here, Lockert! The Ouston woman said all our politicians were hogs. Suppose I started making nasty cracks about the King and the Prince of Wales—”
“That’s quite different! That’s a question of good taste! Never mind. Herndon and I are thoroughly pro-American.”
“I know,” said Fran. “You love America—except for the food, the manners, and the people.”
“At least, there’s one American that I esteem highly!” said Lockert, and his glance at her was ardent.
Sam waited for her to rebuke Lockert. She didn’t.
Lockert took them to Ciro’s, to dance; he had them made members of a rackety night club called “The Rigadoon,” where there was friendliness and gin and a good deal of smell. Potentates of the English motor-manufacturing companies called on them and escorted Sam to their factories. They met three or four stout matrons at a dinner given by Lord Herndon in the women’s annex of the Combined Services Club, and they were again admitted to the tedious perils of occasional dinner parties.
And all the while they were as unrelated to living English life as though they were sitting in a railway station waiting for the continental train. Lockert had gone off to the Riviera, a week after the Ouston dinner. Sam was relieved—then missed him surprisingly. And with Lockert away, their invitations were few.
“Well,” said Sam, “till we get acquainted with more folks here, let’s do the town. Historic spots and so on.”
He had studied Mr. Karl Baedeker’s philosophical volume on London, and he was eager to see the Tower, the Houses of Parliament, Kew Gardens, the Temple, the Roman bath, the National Gallery; eager to gallop up to Stratford and honor Shakespeare—not that he had honored Shakespeare by reading him, these twenty-five years past; and to gallop down to Canterbury—not that he had ever gone so far as to read Chaucer.
But Fran made him uncomfortable by complaining, “Oh, good Heavens, Sam, we’re not trippers! I hate these postcard places. Nobody who really belongs ever goes to them. I’ll bet Clyde Lockert has never been inside the Tower. Of course galleries and cathedrals are different—sophisticated people do study them. But to sit at the Cheshire Cheese with a lot of people from Iowa and Oklahoma, exclaiming over Dr. Johnson—atrocious!”
“I must say I don’t get you. What’s the idea of coming to a famous city and then not seeing the places that made it famous? You don’t have to send souvenir cards about ’em if you don’t want to! And I don’t believe the people from Iowa will bite you unless you attack ’em first!”
She tried to make clear to him the beauties of snobbishness in travel. But, in her loneliness, she did consent to go with him, even to eat lark and oyster pie at the Cheese, though she was rather snappish with the waiter who wanted to show them the volumes of visitors’ names.
Ambling through London with no duty of arriving anywhere in particular, Sam came to take its somber vastness as natural; felt the million histories being enacted behind the curtained windows of the million houses. On clear days, when rare thin sunshine caressed the gray-green bricks which composed the backs of London houses, even these ugly walls had for him, in relief at the passing of the mist-pall, a charm he had never found in the hoydenish glare of sunshine on bright winter days in Zenith. He loved, as he became familiar with them, even the absurd proud little shops with their gaudy glass and golden signs: chocolate shops with pictures of Royalty on the boxes of sweets, tobacco shops with cigarette-cases of imitation silver for Sunday-strolling clerks to flourish, even the ardors and fumes of fried fish shops. He was elated at learning the bus lines; saying judiciously, “Let’s take a 92 and ride home on top.” The virility of London, town of men back from conquering savages and ruling the lone desert, seemed akin to him. … But Fran began to speak of Paris, that feminine and flirtatious refuge from reality.
Between explorations they tasted a loneliness they had never known in their busy domination of Zenith.
Evening on evening they sat in their suite pretending that they were exhausted after a day’s “sightseeing”; that they were exhausted, and glad they were going to stroll out for dinner alone. All the while Sam knew that she was waiting, that he was waiting and praying, for the telephone to
