“As a matter of fact, you do think very quickly, once you have your facts, but you have a superstition—I fancy it started back in college, when you had to play up to Silent Hero role. You have some kind of a childish idea—oh, I know you so much better than you do yourself!—you have an idea that it’s somehow ridiculous for so big and solid a man as you are to speak quickly, and you’ve always suffered from it—”
“We’re getting away from the point. Let me finish. As I say, this is a project that you could do as much with, and have as much fun with, as I could, and maybe more. Here’s the idea:”
And, rather lumberingly, much interrupted, he outlined his notion of a better Sans Souci Gardens.
He had scarcely finished when she volleyed, “Oh, it’s too utterly impossible!”
“Why?”
“You haven’t the taste for that sort of thing—domestic architecture and decoration and so on. Why, Sam, I bet you can’t tell me what the color of the last curtains we had in the drawing-room at home was!”
“They were—well, they were a kind—Now let’s see. They were pale red.”
“They were a sort of beige, with so little red in it that it didn’t matter. Dear, I do see the fun of a new venture like that, but for you—”
“Well, I personally attended to picking out the body colors and upholstery of the Revelation, the last five years, and I think it’s generally admitted that they were the swellest—”
“You didn’t, really. You depended on that awful lizzie, Willy Dutberry, that you had in the designing shop.”
“Well, anyway, I picked out Willy, didn’t I? And I had sense enough to follow his steer, didn’t I?—even if he did wear side-whiskers and a pink tie! And for my development, I’ll pick out—Hell, Fran, I do know how to pick men! I don’t pretend to know everything, even about autos. I don’t need to. But I can—”
“And another thing, Sam. I do love you for wanting to produce something individual and lasting. But an American garden suburb—Phooey! Nasty, jammed-together huddle of World’s Fair exhibition buildings, with pretentious street-names—”
“Then make one that isn’t pretentious or jammed! People have to live somewhere! And I’d depend on you a lot for suggestions about good taste and all that—”
“It’s awfully flattering of you, my dear, but I certainly do not intend—or certainly not till I’m a lot older—I don’t intend to give all my days and nights to being sweet to a lot of horrible parvenus who want Touraine châteaux with Frigidaire furnishings and all at mail-order prices!”
They argued for an hour. Fran had recovered from her Duse role, and was alternately airy and pityingly maternal. Sam felt that he had somehow not made clear his plan, but she blocked his each new effort at being articulate, and they went to bed at three with nothing clear except that, while she might condescend to go home with him in a vague four or five or six months, she was not going to help him “build stone castles of cement, and brick manor-houses of linoleum,” and that she was refraining entirely on account of her artistic ethics.
Remumbling the whole talk again as he lay awake, Sam could not get quite straight how it had happened that he had again failed to lure her home.
“And she says I’m a bully. Well, as a bully, I class about ½ hp, 2 mph,” he sighed, as he fell asleep.
He dreamed that Fran had fallen from a cliff and lay dead below him, and that Minna von Escher had come to smirk temptingly at him. He awoke to revile himself, then to rejoice that it wasn’t so. In the dawn, he sat up in bed to look at Fran, and she was so childish, even her little nose hidden under the sheets, that he could think of no slogan of deliverance from her power.
Dining with Kurt—at Hiller’s, Borchardt’s, Peltzer’s, at the Bristol and Kaiserhof, at the simpler Siechen’s and Pschorrbräu. Dining at the Winter Garten, on the terrace, watching the vaudeville performance. Dining at outdoor places round about the Tiergarten, as the weather grew warmer and the beer more refreshing. A motor flight to the country house of a friend of Kurt, where all one glorious Sunday afternoon they loafed in the garden or bathed in the Havel.
But the point was that they were always with Kurt.
And Kurt, though he liked Sam, admired him, yet had conceived that Sam and Fran, like so many other American couples he had seen squabbling into and out of the Internation Tourist Agency, were on the point of breaking. And to him, the Viennese, accustomed to tempestuous strays from the bitter mountains and gray plains to Eastward and the North, this cool eager American woman was more exotic, more stimulating, than any Russian or Croatian or Zingara. … And she had a useful income of her own. … And there was, in all honor, no reason why he should not be there when the breakup came, nor why Fran should not have the privilege of buttressing the ancient house of Obersdorf.
At least, so Sam guessed at Kurt’s opinion, and he could not protest that the chart was altogether in error.
It was a slow task for Sam to admit that he, with the training of an executive and the body of a coal-heaver, could not bully or coax his slim wife into reasonableness when her romanticizing ran away with her and she disclosed a belief that she was so superior that he ought to accompany her wherever she cared to stroll, or to stand acquiescent while she beamed at Kurt.
It was impossible, but it was so.
Sam tried all the recognized methods of bullying her. Their naked and wretched squabble after Kurt’s party was repeated. He insisted that she was “coming home to America and coming right now!” But what was he to do when she reminded him
