“—now what I never understood about Paris,” he was rumbling, “is how much of it is like a series of villages, with narrow streets and little bits of shops that don’t hardly keep the proprietor busy. You always hear of the big boulevards and the wild dance-halls, but what struck me was the simple little places—”
“Yes, that was so even in the war, when I was in Paris,” said McKee. “But there must be a lot of difference since then. Say, Dad, I’m afraid I have to hustle to the office. Hope to sell a few million bolts to the Axton Car people today. But I want to hear all about Paris. Be home by six-thirty. Awful good to have you back, sir. Goodbye, Emily of Emilies!”
After the kisses and flurry and engine-racings of McKee’s departure, Emily beamed her way back and caroled, “Oh, don’t eat that cold toast! I’ll make you a nice fresh slab. You must try this lovely apricot jam. Now go on and tell me some more about Paris. Oh, it’s perfectly ducky to be with you again! Harry is next to the nicest man living but you’re the—Oh, you must eat some more. Now tell me about Paris.”
“Well,” mildly, “I really haven’t much to tell. It’s hard to express how you feel about a foreign place. Something kind of different in the air. I’m afraid I’m not much on analyzing a thing like that. … Emily, uh—Harry doing pretty well financially?”
“Oh, splendidly! They’ve raised him another five thousand a year.”
“You don’t need a little check for yourself?”
“Oh, not a thing. Thanks, old darling. Drat him, Harry carried off the Advocate and I know you want to read it.”
Sam did not hear her reference to the Advocate. Flushed, he was reflecting, “Am I trying to pay my daughter to be interested in me? Trying to buy her affection?” He scuttled away from the thought, into a hasty description of Les Halles at dawn, as he had seen them when the De Pénable menagerie, with himself as an attendant keeper, had had an all-night round of cafés. He had begun to care for his own narration; he was saying, “Well, I’d never tried white wine and onion soup for breakfast, but I was willing to try anything once,” when the telephone began.
“Excuse me a second, Daddy,” said Emily, and for five minutes she held a lively conversation with one Mona about a tennis tournament, knitted suits, Dick, speed boats, lobster salad, Mrs. Logan, and a Next Thursday mentioned with such italicized awe that Sam felt ignorant in not knowing how it might differ from any other Thursday. He realized, too, that he did not know who Mona, Dick, or Mrs. Logan were.
The importance of having eaten onion soup for breakfast had cooled by the time Emily whisked back to the table. Before Sam had warmed up and begun the story of Captain Gioserro’s hiring a vegetable wagon to drive to the hotel, the sneering telephone called Emily again, and for three minutes she dealt with a tradesman who had apparently been sending bad meat. She dealt with him competently. She seemed to know everything about cuts of steak, the age of ducklings, and the trimming of a crown roast.
She was not his rollicking helpless girl. She was a Competent Young Matron.
“She doesn’t need me any more,” sighed Sam.
The Dodsworths had not rented their house but had left it tenantless, save for a caretaker who maintained a creeping ashen existence in a corner of the basement, spelling out old newspapers from garbage cans all day long. The caretaker, when he had admitted Sam after five minutes of ringing, wanted to show him through the house, but Sam said abruptly, “I’ll go by myself, thanks.”
The hall was dim as a tomb and as airless. His footfall on the carpetless floor was so loud that he began to tiptoe. There were presences which threatened him as an intruder in his own house. He stood in the door of the library. The room, once warm and tranquil, was bleakly unwelcoming. It was a dead room in a dead house. The rugs were rolled up, piled in a corner, their exposed undersides drab and pebbly. The bookshelves were covered with sheets, and the deep chairs, swathed in gray covers, were as shapeless and distasteful as the wrapper of a slovenly housewife. The fireplace had a stingy cleanness. But in a corner of it clung a scrap of paper with Fran’s hectic writing. He stooped slowly to pick it up, and made out the words “—call motor at ten and—” She seemed to dash into the room and flee away, leaving him the lonelier.
He climbed heavily up the stairway, steps clattering flatly, and shouldered into their bedroom. He looked about, silent.
The canopies of their two beds had been taken down, leaving the posts like bare masts; and the surfaces of those once suave and endearing retreats were mounds of pillows and folded blankets covered with coarse sheets.
He went to the drawn window blinds.
“Blinds getting cracked. Need new ones,” he said aloud.
He looked about again, and shivered. He went to the bed in which Fran had always slept, and stood staring at it. He patted the edge of the bed and quickly marched out of the room—out of the house.
Brent was to have returned to Zenith for a fortnight, and Sam had a hundred plans for motoring with him, fishing with him. But Brent telegraphed, “Invited corking yachting party Nova Scotia mind if not return
,” and Sam, perfectly expressionless, wrote his answer, “By all means go hope have splendid time.
” As he walked out of the Western Union office he sighed a little, and stood with his hands
