“Why should I?” demanded Fran.
It came to Sam that he had heard this before.
Major Lockert, telling Fran about herself, delighting her by talking about her, stirring her to a desire for men who desired her.
Yes. Lockert had started this biological process which had set Fran alight, changed her into something altogether different from the Fran who had sailed with him—Or had he? Perhaps her first romance had uncovered the real, the essential Fran, whom neither he nor herself had known in the chill polite years of Zenith.
Damn Lockert!
And that aviator fellow, that Italian, Gioserro, had carried on the process. Damn Gioserro!
And Arnold Israel had really broken the delicate coating of ice over her. Damn Arnold Israel!
And now Kurt von Obersdorf, a man who could laugh, was going to lure her—Oh, damn Kurt!
Or should he damn Fran instead? Fran to whom life was a fashion-show.
Or damn the Sam Dodsworth who had thought carburetors more fascinating than the souls and bodies of women?
Anyway, he wouldn’t have another Arnold Israel affair. Nipitinthebud. Certainly would!
He worked up a good sound rage at Kurt von Obersdorf, and had it ruined the moment Kurt came to him, with Fran in tow, after dinner.
“Mr. Dodsworth,” said Kurt, “I have behaved outrageously to your wife. She thinks I have insulted her because I say that she is only making believe when she thinks herself European—she is lovely, really, because she is American! But I am so pro-American! I admire all things American so much—huge buildings and central heating and adding-machines and Fords. Can I please take you about Berlin? I would be very happy!”
“Oh, we mustn’t trouble you.”
“But it would be a pleasure! Your cousins, the Biedners, they were so very kind to me when I first came from Vienna, and I have had so little chance to repay. And the Herr Doctor is so busy with legal t’ings—aber fabelhaft! I have much more time. Let me have the pleasure of doing something for the Herr Doctor!”
But from the way in which Kurt looked at Fran, Sam wondered if he might not have a livelier reason.
“Tomorrow—Sunday—are you free? May I take you out to a funny place for lunch?”
“That would be very kind of you,” Sam said unenthusiastically.
“Splendid! I call for you at twelve.”
Their suite in the Hotel Adlon looked on the eighteenth-century Pariser Platz, smacking of royal coaches and bewigged footmen, and beyond the Brandenburger Tor, at the end of Unter den Linden, they could see the thick woods and little paths of the Tiergarten. This Sunday morning, after the party at Herr Biedner’s, was flooded with spring, such exultant and surprised reawakening as only Northern cities know. Sam bullied Fran out of bed at eight-thirty, whistled while he shaved, devoured eggs in defiance of Fran’s daily objection to American breakfasts in Europe (but she always managed to eat them if they were ordered for her), and lured her into the Tiergarten. The statues of portentous armored Hohenzollerns along the Sieges Allee they admired—neither of them had yet been properly told that the statues were vulgar and absurd—and they followed paths beside brooks, over little bridges, along a lake, to the Coney Island minarets which leered at them over the wall about the Zoo. Quite lost, they rounded the Zoo, stumbled on the Bräustübl and had a second breakfast of Rostwürstchen and Munich beer thick as molasses. After the more languid airs of Italy, their northern blood was roused by the spring breeze, and they came back to the Adlon chattering, smiling, content, just in time to meet Graf Obersdorf in the Adlon lobby.
He bounced toward them as though he had known them a dozen years. “It is a good thing that I shall take you away today! It is such a beautiful weather and if you are not dragged off where you can only loaf, then conscientious tourists like you would go see museums and palaces and all kind of dreadful things!”
“I am not a conscientious tourist!” protested Fran.
Kurt shook his head. With his experience at the Internation Tourist Agency, he could not imagine an American who was not a collector of sights, who did not work at travel as though it were a tournament with the honors to the person who could last out the largest number of museums. He was as convinced that all Americans mark down credits for themselves in their Baedekers as are Americans that all Germans drink beer every evening.
He called a taxi. Sam was rather glad that Kurt had not wasted money on an apparently private limousine. If he were going to the country by himself, Sam fancied, Kurt would go quite gaily in a motor bus, and be friendly with the driver before they got there. Already he had seen Kurt plunge into lively conversations with the Adlon concierge, the newsstand man, two pages, and the taxi-driver; and most of the way out to the rustic haven disastrously named Pichelsberg, Kurt told riotously of how frightened he had been all through the war, of how he had been captured by a very small Italian with a very large rifle, and of how he had won a debate about the plays of Pirandello with the Italian major who had him in for questioning.
The driver stopped by the road to tighten the fan-belt, and Kurt skipped out to watch him.
“Kind of like an American, this fellow—this count,” said Sam. “Got a sense of humor, and don’t take himself too seriously.”
“Oh no,
