Yet he was dependent on them. Though Fran was making much now of reading the Matin daily and of knowing all about art exhibitions and the hours when theaters began, she had to turn to the tall and patronizing concierge for information about what train to take to Versailles—where to buy slippers—who was the best American dentist—how much one ought to pay for a lacquered Japanese cigarette case—why the deuce Mathilde et Cie. hadn’t delivered the evening scarf they’d promised for this afternoon—and just what was the general reputation of Mathilde et Cie. for delivering things and for overcharging?
He sank heavily into accepting the hotel as his natural dwelling, as a prisoner sinks into accepting a jail. Presently he was not bothered by the devious way from the elevator to their suite—to the right, sharp turning right again, turning left by that dusty old trunk with the red and green stripes which had apparently stood there in the corridor forever, then seventh door on the left—the door with the long scratch under the knob. He came to accept it as any other peasant accepts the long way to his hut, dark and meaningless and weary to tired legs. He was no longer annoyed by the too openwork and too generally brassy and light-minded appearance of the French elevator; he learned that the elevator was the “lift” or the “ascenseur” or indeed almost anything except the “elevator”; he learned that the room service-bell never worked and that the best way to get a waiter was to stand in the door and bellow “Gar-song”; and he learned that the Mr. Samuel Dodsworth who once had been received with a certain deference in the General Offices of the Revelation Motor Company in Zenith was fortunate here when the Greek boots nodded to him in the hall.
He even got used to living in a lack of privacy like that of a monkey in a Zoo. After a time he could without self-consciousness sit and read the Paris editions of the American papers in the old-fashioned lounge of the hotel—he went there daily, despite having a drawing-room of his own, in a sneaking, never-admitted hope that some day he would be recognized and picked up by a fellow American exile. The lounge was modern in its small and hideous tables covered with pebbled beaten brass, its fountain, with Neptune undistinguishable from any other marble tombstone, and the number of cocktails gulped daily at five o’clock by young ladies who spoke Chicagoese with a very fair imitation of a French accent. But the modernity of the lounge had not run to new chairs; they were of red and golden plush, made delicate and chaste with antimacassars, and looking rather as though they had been dedicated by Napoleon III.
It had not been easy for Sam to get used to reading in the lounge, to dressing his mind in public. He was accustomed to the communism of clubs, but there, no one paid attention to anyone else. In the lounge, no one had very much to do except to pay attention. They stared, and always resentfully. The English mother and daughter who were the most exclusive and the most resentful toward strangers were precisely the people who spent the most time in the lounge being exclusive and resentful. The French provincial magnate who had arrived just that morning was precisely the person who looked with the greatest irritation at a veteran like Sam, now settled here two whole weeks, when Sam annoyed him by taking the next chair and moving it two inches. And there were always elderly, slightly belching, very hairy couples who spent all their time catching his eye and then looking indignant because he had caught their eyes.
But after a fortnight he could enter the lounge, ignore the human furniture, and rustle his newspaper with almost as much relaxation as he had felt in his library in Zenith.
He was becoming accustomed to the home of the homeless.
He discovered slowly, and always with a little astonishment, that the French were human, even according to the standard of the United States of America.
He found that in certain French bathrooms one can have hot water without waiting for a geyser. He found that he needn’t have brought two dozen tubes of his favorite (and very smelly) toothpaste from America—one actually could buy toothpaste, corn-plasters, New York Sunday papers, Bromo-Seltzer, Lucky Strikes, safety-razor blades, and ice cream almost as easily in Paris as in the United States; and a man he met at Luigi’s Bar insisted that if one quested earnestly enough, he could find B.V.D.’s.
And he discovered that French chauffeurs drove better than Americans.
He meditated on it, alone with a cognac and soda (he had learned to say “Une fine à l’eau de seltz,” and often the waiters understood him) in front of Weber’s, during a not ungrateful hour of freedom when Fran was trying on hats.
“Just what did I expect in France? Oh, I don’t know. Funny! Kind of hard to remember now just how I did picture it. Guess I thought there wouldn’t be any comforts—no bathrooms, and everybody taking red wine and snails for breakfast, and no motor busses or comfortable trains, and no cocktails, and all the men wearing waxed mustaches and funny beards. And saying, ‘Ze hired girl iz vun lofely girl—oo la la—’
“And then these young Frenchmen, in London clothes, driving Hispano-Suizas at a hundred kilometers an hour—And you hear ’em at the Ritz, talking perfect English, talking about English stainless steel and about building bridges in the Argentine and the influence of the Soviets in China and—
“I suppose I felt that the entire known world revolved around the General Offices of the Revelation Motor Company, Constitution Avenue, Zenith, and all the time—Towers and cathedrals and alleys, and Europe not caring what Sam Dodsworth thought about making the 1928 models a Delft blue—
“It seemed so
