Sam was not offended. Hurd was given to smutty limericks, to guffaws about young ladies of the night, yet there was a healthy earthiness about him which to Sam was infinitely cleaner than the suave references to perversions which he had increasingly been hearing in New York and in London, and which sickened him, made him glad to be normal and provincial and old-fashioned. Hurd—hang it, he liked Hurd! The man’s back-slapping was real. He could do with a little back-slapping, these days! Why should it be considered a less worthy greeting than chilly handshakes and fishy “Howjduh’s”?
When Sam returned to the hotel, Fran was having tea with Lockert.
“I can tell that you’ve been seeing one of your jocund American friends again,” said Lockert.
“How?”
“You have a rather decent voice when you’ve been under our purely insular influences for a week or so. Color in it. But the moment you slip off to America again, it sharpens and becomes monotonous.”
“ ’S too bad!” muttered Sam, leaning against the fireplace, very tall, wondering what would happen if he threw his tea—in the cup—at Lockert. Damn the fellow! Oh, of course he was friendly, he meant well, and probably he was right in his hints about the nice conduct of a clouded American barbarian in England. But still—Hang it, there were some pretty decent people who seemed to like Sam Dodsworth the way he was!
He interrupted Fran’s chronicle of shopping and Liberty silks to blurt, “Say, sweet, old Hurd wants to give me a bachelor dinner next Saturday evening—meet some of the American businessmen here. I think I ought to do it; he’s tried so hard to be nice.”
“And you’d like it? Be back in all the Rotarian joys of Zenith?”
“You bet your life I’d like it! We haven’t a date for that evening, if I remember. Could you get up a hen party or go to the movies or something? I’d kind of like—”
“My dear, you don’t have to ask permission to have an evening out!”
(“The hell I don’t!”) “No, of course not, but I don’t want you to feel stranded.”
“I say, Fran,” Lockert remarked, “would you care to dine with me that evening and go to the opera?”
“Well—” considered Fran.
“Fine,” said Sam. “It’s a go.”
Jack Starling popped in just then, very cheery, and Sam was silent while the other three hilariously scoffed at America. Sam was thinking, almost impersonally. It was a new occupation for him, and he was a little confused. It had become a disease with both nations, he reflected, this discussion of Britain vs. America; this incessant, irritated, family scolding. Of course back in the cornfields of the Middlewest, people didn’t often discuss it, nor did the villagers on the Yorkshire moors, nor Cornish fishermen. But the people who traveled and met their cousins of the other nation, the people who fed on newspapers on either side the water, they were all obsessed.
Fran and Lockert and Starling, chirping about it—
They found so much to laugh over—
Himself, he’d rather listen to Hurd’s stories—
No. That wasn’t true. He wouldn’t. These Londoners (and Fran and Starling were trying to become Londoners) did talk better than the citizenry of Zenith. They were often a little silly, a little giggling, more than a little spiteful, but they found life more amusing than his business-driven friends at home.
Couldn’t there be—weren’t there people in both England and America who were as enterprising and simple and hearty as Mr. A. B. Hurd, yet as gay as Fran or Jack Starling, as curiously learned as Lockert, who between pretenses of boredom gave glimpses of voodoo, of rajahs, of the eager and credulous boy he had been in public school and through long riverside holidays at his father’s vicarage in Berkshire?
Lockert—hang it, must Lockert always be in his thoughts?
It was true, the thing he had been trying to ignore. The beautiful intimacy which for a fortnight Fran and he had found in their loneliness, her contentment to be with him and let the world go hang, had thinned and vanished, and she was straining away from him as ardently as ever before.
Mr. Hurd’s bachelor dinner for Sam was at eight-thirty. Lockert and Fran left the Ritz at seven, to dine before the opera. Sam saw them off paternally, and most filially Fran cried, “I hope you’ll have a beautiful time, Sam, and do give my greetings to Mr. Hurd. I’m sure he’s really quite a good soul, really.” But she did not look back to wave at him as he watched them down the corridor to the lift. She had tucked her arm into Lockert’s; she was chattering, altogether absorbed.
For an hour Sam tramped the apartment, too lonely to think.
Hurd’s dinner was given in a private room at the Dindonneau Restaurant in Soho. There was a horseshoe table with seats for thirty. Along the table little American flags were set in pots of forget-me-nots. Behind the chairman’s table was a portrait of President Coolidge, draped with red, white and blue bunting, and about the wall—Heaven knows where Hurd could have collected them all—were shields and banners of Yale and Harvard and the University of Winnemac, of the Elks, the Oddfellows, the Moose, the Woodmen, of the Rotarians, the Kiwanians, and the Zenith Chamber of Commerce, with a four-sheet poster of the Revelation car.
Fran would have sneered. …
Outside was the dark and curving Soho alley, with the foggy lights of a Singhalese restaurant, a French bookshop, a wigmaker’s, an oyster bar. And the room was violently foreign, with frescoes by a sign-painter—or a barn-painter: Isola Bella, Fiesole, Castel Sant’ Angelo. But Sam did not look at them. He—who but once in his life had attended a Rotary lunch—looked at the Rotary wheel, and his smile was curiously timid. There was no reason for it apparent to him, but suddenly these banners made him feel that in the chill ignobility of exile he was still Some One.
He felt the more Some One as he was introduced to the guests.
They had
