“But, mind you, I am glad I’m an American! But—
“Life was a lot simpler then. We knew we were It! We knew that all of Europe was unbathed and broke, and that America was the world’s only bulwark against Bolshevism and famine. They lie so! These speakers at club meetings, and these writers in the magazines! They tell us that no European has ever played tennis or taught the Ten Commandments to his kids or built a railroad, and that the only thing that keeps Europe from reverting to the caveman is American cash.
“Rot!
“And yet, I’m never going to be European! Fran might—Oh, Fran, my darling, are you going to drift away from me? Every day you get snootier about my poor old provincial Americanism! You’re just waiting for some really slick European to come along—And, by God, there’s one thing I won’t stand—her telling me how inferior I am to some gigolo—
“Fool! Of course the girl—Say! That’s what she still is; she’s still a girl! Little older than Emily, but not so sensible. Of course she gets excited by Europe. She’s done her job, hasn’t she? She’s run the house and brought Emily and Brent up, hasn’t she? I’ve got to be patient.
“But falling for a featherweight like Lockert—
“Hell! I wish Tub were here. Fran and I haven’t got anybody—
“And you’re still dodging the issue, my lad!
“What is Sam Dodsworth going to do about the fact that he’s as provincial as a prairie-dog, and that he’s only fifty-one, with a chance of another thirty years, and that he’s discovered a world—
“Nothing, I guess! Too late. I’d be a pretty spectacle, now wouldn’t I, as one of these American businessmen that come over here and try to hide the fact that they made their coin out of soap or pork—And so they collect first editions and apologize for being themselves! But just now and then I’ll learn to sit still like this, and not feel I have to be efficient and hustle—
“My God! Five o’clock! I’ve got to hustle and meet Fran!”
But he had one comfort, given to him by his wife. He had been uncomfortably impressed by the fact that Mathieu, his customary room-waiter at the Grand Universel, a fat, curly-haired, and unctuous person with fascinatingly different spots on his dress-suit lapels every day, spoke English so perfectly.
According to the good American custom, Sam had said to him at his very first breakfast, “Where’d you learn your English?”
Mathieu chuckled, “I wass fife years in Tchicago.”
Mathieu was rather more colloquially American than Sam in his suggestions for breakfast, or for lunch when it was too rainy for them to go out, or when there was a glorious American mail. “How about a nice little minute steak?” he would say, in the very accent of Chicago; or “Say, boss, there’s some nice caviar just come in from Rooshia.”
Whence it happened that Sam believed Mathieu spoke the American language.
But on the third day, at breakfast, Fran said, “Mathieu! Do you happen to know where these movie theaters are on the Left Bank that are putting on modernistic films?”
Mathieu stared.
“Pardon, Madame!” he said.
“Theaters—modern films—cinemas—oh, whatever you call ’em—!”
Fran slipped across the room to the bottle-green-and-golden dictionary on the flimsy desk.
“Le—cinématograph moderne—est-ce qu’il y a—I mean, are there any on the Left Bank?”
Mathieu looked at her with a most superior intelligence:
“Oh yez. You ask the concierge. He tell you! De veal steak iss fine today—just like Tchicago!”
When Mathieu had gone out to fetch the veal steak that was so fine today, Fran murmured, “I have made a great discovery! Aside from food-vocabulary, the Mathieus speak English no better than we do French! We’re not so bad, my beloved!”
“You’re not, of course. But I’m terrible!”
“Don’t be silly! Yesterday you said ‘A quelle heure est le Louvre fermé?’—as a matter of fact, I think you did say ‘est le Louvre closed?’ but the taxi-driver understood it perfectly, and I know you’d learn to speak a really splendid French, if you gave your mind to it.”
“Honestly?” said Sam.
XIV
They had ventured to the Left Bank for an evening at the Café Novgorod, the favorite of the more arty Americans. The café seemed to Sam less related to Paris than he was himself. … The French street: bourgeois fathers strolling with their brood; dark-eyed men jesting with girls in red kerchiefs; an old woman crawling along muttering to herself. But here, in the Café Novgorod, under the awning, a bumble of American voices:
“—get a little Citroën and tour Normandy—”
“—a complete meal for six francs, with lovely roast beef, though prob’ly it’s horse-meat—”
“—that Elliot Paul is the only really distinguished essayist in—”
The young Americans there were so dispositive. Sam heard them, at the tables about, dispose of Californian scenery, the institution of marriage, Whistler, corn fritters, President Wilson, cement roads, and the use of catsup. He became gloomier than at the thickest dinner-party in London, and he was thinking of bed when his gloom was interrupted by a voice like that of a female impersonator.
Lycurgus Watts (only he liked to be called “Jerry”) was standing by their table and beaming in fondest affection.
Lycurgus (or Jerry) Watts was the professional amateur of Zenith. He was a large-faced man, as wide as a truck-driver, but he had a whiney, caressing voice, and he giggled at his own jokes, which were incessant and very bad. He was reputed to be fifty years old, and he looked anywhere from twenty-five to a hundred. He came from what was known as a “good family”—anyway, it was a wealthy family. His father had died when he was ten. He had lived and traveled with his widowed mother till he was forty-three, and he told everyone that she was the noblest character he had ever known. Compared with her, all young women were such hussies that he would never marry. But he made up for it by a number of highly confidential friendships with men whose
