Fran! That just the other day had been a girl, cool and sparkling and strange, on the Canoe Club porch—
Good Lord, the Canoe Club had burned down twenty years ago.
In the radiant May of Paris, with the horse chestnuts out on the Champs Élysées, he sat huddled, feeling cold.
He went to lunch with Fran, Madame de Pénable, and Billy Dawson, a young American who was the airiest and most objectionable of the De Pénable’s gentlemen valets. Sam was gravely polite. For two weeks he went with Fran and the De Pénable’s court to all sorts of restaurants reeking with cigarette smoke and expensive perfume and smart scandal. Between times, he sneaked off, like a small boy going to the circus, to low places, looking particularly for the roving correspondent, Ross Ireland, and when he found that Ireland was sailing on June fifteenth on the Aquitania, which would arrive in time for Sam’s thirtieth reunion at Yale, he anxiously engaged a stateroom for “self & wife.” He liked Ross Ireland; he found particularly amusing, very like his own cultural pretenses, the fact that since Ireland was totally unable to learn any language save Iowan, he thundered that English was “enough to take anybody anywhere” and that “these fellows that talk about your having to know French if you’re going to do political stuff in Europe are just trying to show what smart guys they are.” And he liked the way in which Ireland mingled stories of Burmese temples with stories of Old Doc Jevons back t’ home in Ioway.
This lowness Sam hid from his wife, and hid the fact that he was agonizingly bored by not having enough to do. Yet his devotion did not win her back. There was a courteous coolness about her, always.
When he had definitely to know about returning to America, she answered briskly:
“Yes, I’ve thought it over. I can understand that you need to go back. But I’m not going. I’ve practically promised Renée de Pénable to take a villa with her near Montreux for the summer. But I want you to go and see Tub and everyone and thoroughly enjoy yourself, and then come back and join me in the late summer, and we’ll think about the Orient.”
But when she saw him off at the Gare St. Lazare she was suddenly softened.
She cried; she clung; she sobbed, “Oh, I didn’t realize how much I’ll miss you! Perhaps I’ll come join you in Zenith. Do have the very best time you can, darling. Go camping with Tub—and give him my love—and tell him and Matey I hope they’ll come over here—and try to get Em and Brent to come. Oh, my dear, forgive your idiotic, featherbrained wife! But let her have her foolish fling now! I did make a real home for you, didn’t I? I shall again. Take care of yourself, my dear, and write me every day, and don’t be angry with me—or do be angry, if it’ll make you any happier! Bless you!”
And the first day out she sent him a radio: “You are a big brown bear and worth seventynine thousand gigolos even when their hair greased best butter stop did I remember to tell you that I adore you.
”
XVI
With Ambrose Channel ahead of them, Sam Dodsworth and his friend Ross Ireland spent a considerable part of their time in the smoking-room of the Aquitania arguing with other passengers about the glories of America. Sam was appreciative enough, but Ross was eloquent, he was lyric, he was tremendous.
At praise of Paris, Cambodia, Oslo, Glasgow, or any other foreign pride, he snorted, “Look here, son, that’s all applesauce, and I know! I’ve been hiking for three years. I’ve interviewed Count Bethlen and I’ve paddled up the Congo; I’ve done a swell piece about the Lena Gold Fields and I’ve driven three thousand miles in England. And believe me, I’m glad to be getting back to a real country, buddy!
“New York? Noisy? Say, why wouldn’t it be noisy? It’s got something going on! Believe me, they’re remodeling all the old parts of Heaven after New York skyscrapers! Say, if we get past the perils of the deep and I have the chance to hang my hat up in Park Row again, you’ll never get me farther away than an Elks’ Convention at Atlantic City! And don’t let anybody tell you that the Elks and the Rotarians and the National Civic Federation are any more grab-it-all than the English merchant, who hates our dollar-chasing so much that he wants to keep us from it by copping all the dollars there are to chase, or the elegant highbrow Frenchman who doesn’t love the franc any more than he loves God. Why say, even about drinking—I’ll admit I like a sidewalk café better than I do a speakeasy, but once I round up my old bunch at Denny’s and have a chance to stick my legs under the table with a lot of real home-baked he-Americans instead of these imitation-Frog Americans that loaf around abroad—Boy!”
Sam discovered, dropping into Ross Ireland’s stateroom, that Ross was guilty of secret intellectual practises. Except when, in morning clothes,
