Heavy with meditation, happy in being unobserved and not having to act up to the splendors of Fran, he paid his bill and ambled across the bridge and into the cathedral.
It bothered him, as always, that there were no prim and cushioned pews such as he knew in Protestant churches in America; it made the cathedral seem bare and a little unfriendly; but beside a vast pillar, eternal as mountains or the sea, he found a chair, tipped a verger, forgot his irritation with people who buzzed up and wanted to guide him, and lost himself in impenetrable thoughts.
He roused himself to read, patiently, in Baedeker: “Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of Henry II of England, was buried beneath the high altar in 1186. In 1430 Henry VI of England was crowned king of France and in 1560 Mary Stuart (afterward Mary Queen of Scots) was crowned as queen-consort of Francis II. The coronation of Napoleon I and Josephine de Beauharnais by Pope Pius VII (1804) … was celebrated here with great ceremony.”
(And in Saurier’s studio brassy women were chattering about the races!)
Plantagenet! Rearing lions on scarlet banners edged with bullion. Mary Stuart and her proud little head. Napoleon himself—here, where Sam Dodsworth was sitting.
“Humph!” he said.
He stared at the Rose Window, but he was seeing what it meant, not what it said. He saw life as something greater and more exciting than food and a little sleep. He felt that he was no longer merely a peddler of motor cars; he felt that he could adventure into this Past about him—and possibly adventure into the far more elusive Present. He saw, unhappily, that the Atkins and De Pénable existence into which Fran had led him was not the realization of the “great life” for which he had yearned, but its very negation—the bustle, the little snobberies, the cheap little titles, the cheap little patronage of “art.”
“I’m going to get out of this town and do something—Something exciting. And I’ll make her go with me! I’ve been too weak with her,” he said weakly.
His longing for low and intelligent company could not be denied. He went to the New York Bar. Through the correspondent of a New York newspaper whom he had known as a reporter in Zenith, Sam had met a dozen journalists there, and he felt at home with them. They did not heap on him the slightly patronizing compliments which he had from the women in Madame de Pénable’s den of celebrities. He was stimulated by what was to the journalists only commonplace shop-talk: how Trotsky really got along with Stalin—what Briand had said to Sir Austen Chamberlain—what was the low-down on the international battle of oil.
This afternoon he met Ross Ireland.
Sam had heard of Ireland, roving foreign correspondent of the Quackenbos Feature Syndicate, as one of the best fellows among the American journalists. The former Zenith reporter introduced Sam to him. Ross Ireland was a man of forty, as large as Sam, and in his oversized rimless spectacles he looked like a surgeon.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Dodsworth,” he said, and his voice still had all the innocence of Iowa. “Staying over here long?”
“Well, yes—some months.”
“This your first trip across?”
“Yes.”
“Say, I’ve just been driving one of your Revelation cars in the jungle in India. Great performance, even in rough going—”
“India?”
“Yes, just back. Real Kipling country. Oh, I don’t know as I saw any Mowglis gassing with tigers and sixteen-foot snakes, and I heard more about jute and indigo than I did about Mrs. Hauksbees, but it certainly knocks your eye out! That big temple at Tanjore—tower eleven stories high, all carved. And the life there—everything different—smells different (and sometimes not so good!)—and the people still in masquerade costumes, and queer curry kind of grub, and Eurasian shops where the Babus will tell you grand lies—everyone good for a mail-story. You ought to get out there, if you can take the time. And then beyond India, Burma—take a river-boat—regular floating marketplace, with natives in funny turbans squatting all over the decks—go up the Irrawaddy to Mandalay and on to Bhamo. Or you can get steamers at Rangoon for Penang and Sandoway and Akyab and Chittagong and all kinds of fancy places.”
(Rangoon! Akyab! Chittagong!)
“And then around to Java and China and Japan, and home by way of California.”
“I’d like to do it,” said Sam. “Paris is a lovely city, but—”
“Oh, Paris! Paris is nothing but a postgraduate course in Broadway.”
“Looks good to me,” said the ex-Zenith-newspaperman.
“It would! Paris is a town for Americans that can’t stand work,” said Ross Ireland. “I’m keen to see America; tickled to death I’m going back in June. I’ve been away three years—first time I’ve ever been away. I’m homesick as the devil. But I like my America straight. I don’t want it in the form of a lot of expatriates sitting around Paris cafés. And when I want to travel, I want to travel! Say, you land in Bangkok, with that big gold temple rising over the town, and the boatmen singing in—whatever it is that they do sing in—or you go to Moscow and see the muzhiks in felt boots and sheepskin coats, with the church spires absolutely like white and gold lacework against the sky—Say, that’s travel!”
Yes. That’s the stuff! Sam was going to travel like that. He’d go—Oh, to Constantinople, back through Italy or Austria, and home for his thirtieth class reunion—just time to do it now, if he hustled. Then Fran and he might start out again next autumn and see Egypt and Morocco—Yes.
It is a favorite American Credo that “if the acting is good enough, you can enjoy a play in a language you don’t understand as well as in English.” Fran held to that credo. Sam urgently did not. He hated to sit through French
