But he felt it with a brooding pity that made him the fonder—made it the harder for him to fight his way free from her capricious domination of his life.
So, after months given more to exploring themselves than to exploring Europe, they came in April to Berlin.
XXII
The good Herr Rechtsanwalt Biedner was giving a dinner, at his flat just off the Tiergarten, to his second cousin, Fran Dodsworth, and to Fran’s husband. Herr Dr. Biedner was very Prussian, with close-cropped head, small eyes, hard jaw, and sausage rolls at the back of his neck, and he was probably the kindest and pleasantest man the Dodsworths had ever met, and the most international-minded.
Now, in the spring of 1927, Berlin looked prosperous again; also Herr Biedner had an excellent law practise, and his home was as thick with comfort as a coffeecake with sugar. In the hallway was an armoire of carved oak, and the horns of a stag; in the living-room, about a monumental stove of green porcelain, was a perfect auction-room of old easy chairs, and what seemed like hundreds of portraits of the Kaiser, Bismarck, Von Moltke, Beethoven, and Bach clustered behind the grand piano.
Sam was edified to discover that a porcelain stove really could heat a room, and that the pianist of the family was not Frau Biedner or some unrevealed daughter but Herr Biedner himself, though he seemed to be a perfectly worthy and successful lawyer. He was also gratified by the sight of three wine glasses at each plate, and of slim green bottles of Deidesheimer Auslese, 1921.
But the conversation appalled him.
They were so kind, these half-dozen German businessmen and their wives whom Herr Biedner had assembled to greet his American cousins, and they all spoke English. But they talked of things which meant nothing in the world to Sam—of the Berlin theater, of the opera, of a Kokoschka Austellung, of Stresemann’s speech at the League of Nations Council, of the agrarian situation in Upper Silesia—
“Golly, this is going to be heavy going,” sighed Sam. “I wish somebody would tell a funny story.”
And with weighty politeness he answered the weightily polite queries of the woman next him: Was this his first trip to Germany? Was he going to stay long in Berlin? Was it really true that since Prohibition it was difficult to get wine in America?
The one light was the man beside Fran at dinner. With apparent gratification, Biedner had introduced him as Count Obersdorf, taking Sam aside to explain that Kurt von Obersdorf was the present head of one of the greatest Austrian families. His ancestors had owned castles, towns, thousands of acres, whole counties; they had had power of life and death; kings had bargained for their support. But the family had steadily grown poor the past two hundred years, and been finally ruined by the Great War, in which the Graf Kurt had served as major of Austrian artillery. Though his mother kept up a pretense of state, with two slew-footed peasant servants in a ruined old house in the Salzkammergut, Kurt was working in the Berlin bureau of the Internation Tourist Agency (the famous I.T.A.). He could not afford to marry. He had a reasonable salary; he was head of the I.T.A.’s banking department; but he had to “punch the time-clock,” said Herr Dr. Biedner, obviously proud of this Americanism. “He is a fine sport about it. And he uses not much his title. His ancestors probably hanged my ancestors for shooting rabbits, but now he is like one of us here in my household, and he says that nowhere else in Berlin can he get a proper Suppe mit Leberknödel.”
Being impressed by the title of count and by a vision of hard-riding ancestors in armor, Sam assured himself that he wasn’t in the least impressed by title or ancestors, and he studied the family hero attentively.
Kurt von Obersdorf was perhaps forty. He was a tall, loose, lively man, with thick black hair. He had dignity enough, but he was full of laughter, and you felt that by choice he would like to be a clown. He made love to every woman and made friends with every man. Fran blushed when he kissed her hand, and Sam felt less disconsolate, less swamped by foreigners, when Kurt shook his hand and babbled in an Oxford accent with occasional tumbles into comic-paper diction, “I know so much about your Revelation car. Herr Dr. Biedner tells me you were responsible for it. I am enchanted to see you here in Berlin. Since six years I have driven a Revelation, the same car, it belongs to a friend, it is very shabby but the other day I drove it to Wild Park at a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. I was arrested!”
Kurt demanded to see the Biedner grandchild (rather a nasty child, Sam thought, but Kurt chittered at it boisterously); then he played the piano; then he mixed the cocktails which Herr Biedner regarded as suitable to Americans and which the good burgher guests tasted with polite and beaming anxiety.
“Lively fellow, that count. Shows off too much. Never sits still,” Sam meditated, with a sound American disapproval of foreign monkey-tricks, and all the while he liked Kurt better than anyone he had met since Paris.
All through dinner, Kurt concentrated on Fran.
Sam became restive as he overheard Kurt dashingly tell Fran just what her “type” was, and cheerfully insult her by announcing what he liked and what he detested about that type.
“Yes,” Sam caught, “you regard yourself as very European, Mrs. Dodsworth, but you are altogedder American. You are brilliant. You are
