He saw that it was not a question of Ross Ireland being interested in kingdoms and of Tub being interested only in coupons and aces. He saw, slowly, that none of his prosperous industrialized friends in Zenith were very much interested in anything whatever. They had cultivated caution until they had lost the power to be interested. They were like old surly farmers. The things over which they were most exclamatory—money, golf, drinking—didn’t fascinate them as brushstrokes or woodwinds fascinated the peering Endicott Everett Atkins; these diversions were to the lords of Zenith not pleasures but ways of keeping so busy that they would not admit how bored they were, how empty their ambitions. They had as their politics only a testy fear of the working class. (Why, Sam perceived uneasily, the whole country turned the dramatic game of politics over to a few seedy professional vote-wranglers!) To them, women were only bedmates, housekeepers, producers of heirs, and a home audience that could not escape, and had to listen when everybody at the office was tired of hearing one’s grievances. The arts, to them, consisted only of jazz conducive to dancing with young girls, pictures which made a house look rich, and stories which were narcotics to make them forget the tedium of existence.
They did things, they rushed, they supervised, they contended—but they were not interested.
However difficult Fran might be at times, pondered Sam, however foolish Madame de Pénable with her false hair and her false gigolos, however pompous and patronizing Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins, they were fascinated by everything in human life, from their own amours to soup and aeroplanes.
He would like to be one of them. There was only one thing in the way. Could he?
Thus meditated Samuel Dodsworth, alone on the porch of the country club, awaiting the return of Tub Pearson.
What the devil was he doing here? He was as dead as though he were entombed. He had to “get busy”—either go back to work, at once, or join Fran.
Which?
Then, for a week or two, he became very busy peering into the Sans Souci Gardens development.
To the north of Zenith, among wooded hills above the Chaloosa River, there was being laid out one of the astonishing suburbs which have appeared in America since 1910. So far as possible, the builders kept the beauties of forest and hills and river; the roads were not to be broad straight gashes butting their way through hills, but winding byways, very inviting … if one could only kill off the motorists. Here, masked among trees and gardens, were springing up astonishing houses—considerably more desirable as residences than the gaunt fortified castles of the Rhine, the magnificent and quite untenantable museums of French châteaux. They were all imitative, of course—Italian villas and Spanish patios and Tyrolean inns and Tudor manor-houses and Dutch Colonial farmhouses, so mingled and crowding one another that the observer was dizzy. They were so imitative and so standardized that it was easy to laugh at them. But they were no more imitative of Munich than was Munich of Italy or than Italy of Greece, and like the rest of the great American Domestic Architecture of this era, they were probably the most comfortable residences in the world … for one who didn’t mind it if his Venetian balcony was only ten feet from his neighbor’s Swiss chalet, and if his neighbor’s washing got slightly in the way of tea on his own lawn.
Driving through the San Souci Gardens, Sam was fascinated. He liked the energy with which roads were being dug, houses rising, stone fountains from Florence being set up in squares and circles designated by arty little swinging street signs as “Piazza Santa Lucia” and “Assisi Crescent” and “Plaza Reäl.”
That there was something slightly ridiculous about mixing up Spain and Devon and Norway and Algiers, and transplanting them to the sandy hills of a Midwestern town, where of late the Indians had trapped rabbits and the rusty-bearded Yankees had trapped the Indians, did vaguely occur to Sam, but it was all a fantastic play to him, very gay and bright after the solemn respectabilities and the disapproving mansard roofs of the older residential avenues in Zenith.
Here, at least, he reflected, was all the color and irregularity he had gone abroad to seek; all the scarlets and yellows and frivolous pinks, all the twisty ironwork and scalloped tiles and striped awnings and Sicilian wine-jars he could swallow, along with (he thanked Heaven) all the mass-produced American electric refrigerators, oil furnaces, vacuum cleaners, garbage incinerators, overstuffed chairs and built-in garages which, for all of Fran’s scoffing and Mr. Atkins’ expatriate distress, Sam still approved.
It came to him that now there was but little pioneering in manufacturing motors; that he hadn’t much desire to fling out more cars on the packed highways. To create houses, perhaps less Coney-lsland-like than these—noble houses that would last three hundred years, and not be scrapped in a year, as cars were—
“That’d be interesting,” said Sam Dodsworth, the builder.
Of course he knew nothing about architecture. But he knew a good deal about engineering, about steel and wood and glass, about organizing companies, about getting along with labor.
“And say! Here’s something that Fran would take an interest in! And she’s an expert about decorations and all that stuff. … Might hold her here!”
In a leisurely way, apparently not much interested, Sam saw to it that he was introduced to the president of the Sans Souci Company and that they played golf together. He was invited to view the Gardens with the president, and afterward he spent a good deal of time walking through them, talking to architects, to carpenters, to gardeners. Otherwise he merely waited.
He was very good at waiting.
Twice a week letters from Fran had drawn him toward her and toward Europe. Her first letter had come on the day of his arrival in Zenith:
Villa Dorée,
Vevey,
Montreux,
La Suisse.Sam dear, it’s too glorious!
