Once in a fortnight Sam was able to let himself be picked up in the bar by some American or English blade, and then he glowed and talked beamingly of motors, of Ross Ireland. And Fran welcomed and was gracious with such rescuers … whatever she said in the bedroom afterward about manners and vulgarity.
But it thrust them together, this aching tedium of marooned evenings, and they were often tender.
And Fran was getting tired of the isolation of travel. He gloated that before long, now, she would be content to go home with him, to stay, and at last, fed up on the syrupy marshmallows of what she had considered Romance, to become his wife.
Twilight in Naples, and from their room at Bertolini’s they looked across the bay. The water and the mountains in the water were the color of smoke, and a few little boats, far out, were fleeing home before dark. In the garden below them the fronds of a palm tree waved slowly, and lemon trees exhaled an acrid sweetness. The lights at the foot of Vesuvius were flickering steel points. Her hand slipped into his and she whispered, “I hope the boats get safely home!” They stood there till palms and sea had vanished and they could see only the lights of Naples. Someone afar was singing “Sant Lucia.” Sam Dodsworth did not know the song was hackneyed.
“Tee—ta—tah, tee de dee, tee—ta—tah, taaaa—da,” he hummed. Italy and Fran! The Bay of Naples! And they would go on—to sun-bright isles, to the moon-hushed desert, pagoda bells, and home! “Tee—ta—tah, tee de dee—Santaaaaa Lucia!” He had won her back to be his wife!
“And they still sing that horrible grind-organ garbage! Let’s go eat,” she said.
He startled and sighed.
They were again companions, as they had been in their first days of Paris, and sometimes they had whole afternoons that were gay, trusting, filled with the vigor of laughter and long walks. They had again the sweetness of depending on each other. But Sam was conscious that their relationship had become self-conscious.
Much of the time Fran was straining to be friendly. Getting into a rut of it, they quarreled more often over tinier things.
He knew that he had bruised her, humiliated her, by his bullying in Paris, but he could not, in all his hours of agonizing about it, see what else he could have done. He tried to win her with little gifts of flowers, of odd carved boxes, and he fretted over her being chilly at night, hot at noon, tired in galleries, till she wailed, “Oh, don’t fuss so! I’m all right!”
“If I could only do things naturally and easily, the way that fellow Israel probably does,” he sighed to himself … and fancied that she was sighing.
He caught himself being critical. For all his “trying to make it up to her,” as he put it, he was testily aware of certain childishnesses in her which he had ignored.
In the matter of money she was a brat. She talked, always, of her thoughtfulness about economy; of jewing down a milliner from a thousand francs to seven hundred, of doing without a personal maid. But she took it for granted that they should have the best suite in the best hotel in every town, and she so used the floor maid and the hairdresser and so had to tip them that a personal maid would have been cheaper.
Sam would have liked to economize a little. He still brooded on the Sans Souci Gardens—though he never subjected his dream to her brisk ridicule, for he guessed what she would say about the idiocy of Italian palaces in Zenith. If he could ever coax her back, he would try the gamble of building (if she permitted him!), and in it he could use all the capital he had.
But he never spoke to her of money, and she never suggested that an ordinary room would do them as well as the royal suite, and if she made any comment at all it was only on the inferiority of that suite.
For hours at a time he assured himself of Fran’s beauty, gracefulness, wit, and her knowledge of European languages and customs. He convinced himself—except in Venice, when they were with Mrs. Cortright.
Edith Cortright had been born in Michigan, daughter of a banker who became Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. In Washington she had married Cecil R. A. Cortright of the British Embassy, and gone with him to the Argentine, to Portugal, to Rome, to Romania, where he was minister, and on many vacations home to England. She was about the age of Fran, fortyish, and she had been a widow now for three years, wandering from England to Italy and back. A note from Jack Starling, Tub Pearson’s nephew in London, sent her to call on the Dodsworths at the Danieli in Venice, and she invited them to tea at her flat, a floor of the Ascagni Palace; echoing rooms, stone floored, with tall windows on the Grand Canal, with the light from a marble fireplace on chests of smoky walnut and vast tables worn satiny with age.
Sam was at first not vastly taken with Edith Cortright. She was abrupt as she talked of diplomats, of villas on the Riviera, of Roman society, of painting. She was dressed in soft black, worn a little sloppily, and she was pale. But he saw how lovely her hands were, and realized that her quiet voice was soothing. He guessed that her intense eyes missed nothing.
Fran played up to Mrs. Cortright. She too talked of diplomats, she too had notions about villas and society and painting, and on their way home she informed Sam that her Italian accent was much better than Mrs. Cortright’s. Suddenly, though resenting his own criticism as though someone else were daring to make it, he felt that Fran knew considerably less than he—and she—had always assumed. Her Italian! She knew a hundred words! Villas!
