It was that evening, before they went out to dinner with Kurt, that he noticed her new habit of perfuming the back of her right hand, and reflected, “I wonder if it has anything to do with his kissing her hand? Wonder? You don’t wonder; you know!”
He saw further that she faintly perfumed the inside of her arm to the elbow, and he was a little sickened as he stalked out to the sitting-room and tried to divert himself by reading the list of Circular Tours in Great Britain and France in the European Travel Guide of the American Express Company, while waiting for her to finish dressing. It didn’t altogether absorb him. He looked about the room. There were roses—sent by Kurt. There was Feuchtwanger’s Jud Süß—sent by Kurt.
Then there was Kurt himself, knocking, coming in gaily, crying, “Is that wife of ours late again? Sam, I have brought you a box of real Havana cigars smuggled through without duty! Oh, my roses came! I am glad. Sam, haf you any idea how thankful a lonely poor man—and to a Wiener like me, Berlin is just as foreign as it is to you!—so thankful to have Fran and you tolerate me while you are here! You are so good! … Fran! Are you not dressed? You are keeping your poor children waiting! If I were Sam, I would beat you! And my friend probably waiting in the lobby.”
“Coming, Kurt!” she sang, lark-like.
And Kurt was kissing the back of her hand. And Sam Dodsworth said nothing at all.
But it was down in the bar, where they went to have cocktails and to wait for Kurt’s friend, that the new and almost honestly analytic Sam Dodsworth caught himself in a situation more shameful and enfeebling than anything that had happened in their apartment. An American motor salesman, whom Sam had met at the American Club luncheon, stopped at their table to nod his greetings, and Sam caught himself saying, a little proudly, “Mr. Ashley, I don’t think you’ve met my wife. And this is the Count Obersdorf.”
“Mighty pleased to meet you, Count,” said the motor man, after kissing Fran’s hand in what he considered a European manner.
Sam sharply cross-examined himself. “Look here, Sambo. Were you flattered to be able to introduce a Count? This tourist agency clerk! How long will it be before you become the kind of rotten soak that sits around boasting that his wife has a count for a lover? No! I’m not that bad, not yet. But I guess my mind is kind of sick, now. What the devil was it that hit me? I don’t understand. Emily, my darling, with a son! Doesn’t Fran want—”
Coolly, quite prosaically, he interrupted Kurt to demand of Fran, “Say, uh, remember I told you about that young lady—that cousin of mine—that’s just had a baby? Wouldn’t you like to skip back to America and see her?”
“Oh, I’d love to. But I don’t suppose we’ll see her till next autumn,” said Fran placidly.
“Here comes my friend. Soch a lovely fellow,” said Kurt.
The second message from Zenith, from home, came in a letter which was handed to Sam at the desk, three evenings later, as they were going out to dinner with Kurt.
“From old Tub!” he chuckled, and tucked it into his pocket. When they were at table he suggested, “Mind if I glance at my letter?”
Tub wrote, in schoolboyish script:
How are you and how’s all the lovely femmes in Europe? Well, you’re not going to get away with hogging them much longer. Matey and I have finally decided about time we ran over and had a look at the old country and get a decent drink. She’s a grand wife and likes her likker. We sail on May tenth, on the Olympic, arrive London probably 16th, and Paris the 21st—stay Savoy London and Continental Paris. In Paris about a week, then Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, south France, and sail from Cherbourg again on June 20th. Some fast trip, eh, but I bet we don’t miss much, your last postcard, and a hell of a tightwad you are about writing say you’re going to Germany but don’t see what you find there, can only get beer there and it’s the bubbles that cure all your trouble that I want to taste again, you remember old song, champagne.
Now if you’re too busy to remember old friends all right, but would be awfully glad if you could manage meet us London or Paris, or if along route afterwards send me schedule ℅ Equitable Trust, 23 rue de la Paix.
Don’t take any wooden money.
The letter had followed Sam from Paris to Rome to Berlin; Tub was already in London and would be in Paris in three days.
It was one of the few holograph letters Sam had received from Tub. Usually his laconic messages were dictated, typed on banking-house paper as stiff and luxuriously engraved as a bond. In it Sam felt an unfamiliar urgency; Tub was prepared to be angry, to consider himself deliberately slighted, if the Dodsworths did not appear in Paris to greet him and his jolly wife Matilde, otherwise Matey.
He interrupted Kurt—(“Damn it! Seems as though, these days, I always have to interrupt that fellow in order to be able to speak to my own wife!”) He crowed, “Say, who d’you think’s in London and going to Paris? Tub and Matey!”
“Oh, really?” she said politely. She showed considerably more warmth in explaining to Kurt, “Tub is an old friend of Sam—quite a prosperous banker. If they come to Berlin, they’d be awfully happy to meet you. Oh! You said one day you wished you could get into a bank in America. Tub—Mr. Pearson his name is—might be able—”
“But we’ll see him in Paris,” Sam interrupted again. “Not coming to Berlin. And we ought to skip right down and
