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Title: Dodsworth (1929)
Author: Sinclair Lewis
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0200431.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted: June 2002
Date most recently updated: June 2002

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Title:      Dodsworth
Author:     Sinclair Lewis





CHAPTER 1


The aristocracy of Zenith were dancing at the Kennepoose Canoe
Club.  They two-stepped on the wide porch, with its pillars of pine
trunks, its bobbing Japanese lanterns; and never were there dance-
frocks with wider sleeves nor hair more sensuously piled on little
smiling heads, never an August evening more moon-washed and
spacious and proper for respectable romance.

Three guests had come in these new-fangled automobiles, for it was
now 1903, the climax of civilization.  A fourth automobile was
approaching, driven by Samuel Dodsworth.

The scene was a sentimental chromo--crisping lake, lovers in canoes
singing "Nelly Was a Lady," all very lugubrious and happy; and Sam
Dodsworth enjoyed it.  He was a large and formidable young man,
with a healthy brown mustache and a chaos of brown hair on a
massive head.  He was, at twenty-eight, assistant superintendent of
that most noisy and unsentimental institution, the Zenith
Locomotive Works, and in Yale (class of 1896) he had played better
than average football, but he thought well of the most sentimental
sorts of moonlight.

Tonight he was particularly uplifted because he was driving his
first car.  And it was none of your old-fashioned "gasoline
buggies," with the engine under the seat.  The engine bulked in
front, under a proud hood over two feet long, and the steering
column was not straight but rakishly tilted.  The car was sporting
and rather dangerous, and the lights were powerful affairs fed by
acetylene gas.  Sam sped on, with a feeling of power, of dominating
the universe, at twelve dizzy miles an hour.

At the Canoe Club he was greeted by Tub Pearson, admirable in white
kid gloves.  Tub--Thomas J. Pearson--round and short and jolly,
class-jester and class-dandy at Yale, had been Sam Dodsworth's
roommate and chief admirer throughout college, but now Tub had
begun to take on an irritable dignity as teller and future
president of his father's bank in zenith.

"It runs!" Tub marveled, as Sam stepped in triumph from the car.
"I've got a horse all ready to tow you back!"

Tub had to be witty, whatever happened.

"Certainly it runs!  I'll bet I was up to eighteen miles an hour!"

"Yeh!  I'll bet that some day automobiles'll run forty!" Tub
jeered.  "Sure!  Why, they'll just about drive the poor old horse
right off the highway!"

"They will!  And I'm thinking of tying up with this new Revelation
Company to manufacture 'em."

"Not seriously, you poor chump?"

"Yes."

"Oh, my Lord!" Tub wailed affectionately.  "Don't be crazy, Sambo!
My dad says automobiles are nothing but a fad.  Cost too much to
run.  In five years, he says, they'll disappear."

Sam's answer was not very logical:

"Who's the young angel on the porch?"

If she was an angel, the girl at whom Sam was pointing, she was an
angel of ice; slim, shining, ash-blonde, her self-possessed voice
very cool as she parried the complimentary teasing of half a dozen
admirers; a crystal candle-stick of a girl among black-and-white
lumps of males.

"You remember her--Frances Voelker--Fran Voelker--old Herman's kid.
She's been abroad for a year, and she was East, in finishing-
school, before that.  Just a brat--isn't over nineteen or twenty,
I guess.  Golly, they say she speaks German and French and Italian
and Woof-woof and all known languages."

Herman Voelker had brewed his way into millions and respectability.
His house was almost the largest in Zenith--certainly it had the
greatest amount of turrets, colored glass windows, and lace
curtains--and he was leader among the German-Americans who were
supplanting the New Englanders throughout the state as controllers
of finance and merchandising.  He entertained German professors
when they came lecturing and looking, and it was asserted that one
of the genuine hand-painted pictures which he had recently brought
back from Nuremberg was worth nearly ten thousand dollars.  A
worthy citizen, Herman, and his tart beer was admirable, but that
this beef-colored burgher should have fathered anything so poised
and luminous as Fran was a miracle.

The sight of her made Sam Dodsworth feel clumsy as a St. Bernard
looking at a white kitten.  While he prophesied triumphs for the
motor car, while he danced with other girls, he observed her airy
dancing and her laughter.  Normally, he was not particularly afraid
of young women, but Fran Voelker seemed too fragile for his thick
hands.  Not till ten did he speak to her, when a partner left her,
a flushed Corybant, in a chair near Sam's.

"Do you remember me--Dodsworth?  Years since I've seen you."

"Remember!  Heavens!  I wondered if you were going to notice me.
I used to steal the newspaper from Dad to get the news of your
football heroisms.  And when I was a nice young devil of eight,
you once chased me out of your orchard for stealing apples."

"Did I?  Wouldn't dare to now!  Mavenex' dance?"

"Well--Let me see.  Oh.  The next is with Levering Mott, and he's
already ruined three of my two slippers.  Yes."



If he did not dance with any particular neatness, a girl knew where
she was, with Sam Dodsworth.  He had enough strength and decision
to let a young woman understand who was doing the piloting.  With
Fran Voelker, he was inspired; he waltzed as though he was proud of
his shining burden.  He held her lightly enough and, after the
chaste custom of the era, his hands were gloved.  But his finger-
tips felt a current from her body.  He knew that she was the most
exquisite child in the world; he knew that he was going to marry
her and keep her forever in a shrine; he knew that after years of
puzzled wonder about the purpose of life, he had found it.

"She's like a lily--no, she's too lively.  She's like a humming
bird--no, too kind of dignified.  She's--oh, she's a flame!"



They sat talking by the lake at midnight.  Out on the dappled
water, seen through a cloud of willow leaves, the youngsters in
canoes were now singing "My Old Kentucky Home."  Zenith was still
in the halcyon William Dean Howells days; not yet had it become the
duty of young people to be hard and brisk, and knowing about
radios, jazz, and gin.

Fran was a white shadow, in a lace shawl over her thin yellow
dancing frock, as she drooped down on a newspaper which he had
solemnly spread for her on the long grass.  Sam trembled a little,
and sounded very pompous, rather boyish:

"I suppose you went everywhere in Europe."

"More or less.  France and Spain and Austria and Switzerland and--
Oh, I've seen the Matterhorn by moonlight, and Santa Maria della
Salute at dawn.  And I've been almost frozen to death in a mistral
at Avignon!"

"I suppose you'll be bored in Zenith."

She laughed, in a small competent way.  "I know SO much about
Europe--I'm no Cook's tripper!--that I know I don't know anything!
All I can do in French is to order breakfast.  Six months from now,
all I'll remember of Germany is the names of nineteen towns, and
how the Potsdamer Platz looks when you're waiting for a droschke.
But you've DONE things.  What are you doing now, by the way?"

"Assistant supe at the Locomotive Works.  But I'm going to take a
big gamble and--Ever ride in an automobile?"

"Oh yes, several times, in Paris and New York."

"Well, I believe that in twenty years, say by 1923 or '4, they'll
be as common as buggies are now!  I'm going in on a new company
here--Revelation Automobile Company.  I'll get less salary, but
it's a swell gamble.  Wonderful future.  I've been working on my
mechanical drawing lately, and I've got the idea that they ought to
get away from imitating carriages.  Make a--it sounds highbrow, but
I mean what you might call a new kind of beauty for autos.  Kind of
long straight lines.  The Revelation boss thinks I'm crazy.  What
do you think?"

"Oh, splendid!"

"And I've bought me an automobile of my own."

"Oh, really?"

"Let me drive you home tonight!"

"No, sorry; Mama is coming for me."

"You've got to let me take you for a ride.  Soon!"

"Perhaps next Sunday. . . .  We must go back to the clubhouse,
don't you think?"

He sprang up, meekly.  As he lifted her to her feet, as he felt her
slim hands, he murmured, "Certainly like to see Europe some day.
When I graduated, I thought I'd be a civil engineer and see the
Brazil jungle and China and all over.  Reg'lar Richard Harding
Davis stuff!  But--Certainly going to see Europe, anyway.  Maybe I
might run into you over there, and you might show me some of it."

"I'd love to!"

Ah, if she desired Europe, he would master it, and give it to her
on a platter of polished gold!



There was the telephone call to her when he should have been
installing machinery at the Revelation Automobile Company.  There
was the drive with her in his new car, very careful, though once he
ventured on seventeen miles an hour.  There was the dinner at the
Voelkers', in the room with carved beams like a Hofbrauhaus, and
Sam's fear that if Fran was kept on food like this, roast goose and
stuffed cabbage and soup with Leberknodel, she would lose her race-
horse slimness.

And there was even a moment when, recalling his vow made in
Massachusetts Tech after graduating from Yale that he would cut
loose from America and see the great world, he warned himself that
between Fran and tying himself to the urgent new motor industry, he
would be caught for life.  The vision of himself as a Richard
Harding Davis hero returned wistfully. . . .  Riding a mountain
trail, two thousand sheer feet above a steaming valley; sun-helmet
and whipcord breeches; tropical rain on a tin-roofed shack; a shot
in the darkness as he sat over a square-face of gin with a ragged
tramp of Noble Ancestry.  But his mind fled back to the excitement
of Fran's image: her spun-glass hair, her tingling hands, her lips
that were forever pursing in fantastic pouts, her chatter that fell
suddenly into inexplicable silence, her cool sureness that made him
feel foggy and lumbering.



In a slaty November drizzle, they were tramping the cliffs along
the Chaloosa River.  Fran's cheeks were alight and she was humming,
but when they stopped to look at the wash of torn branches in the
flooded river Sam felt that he must be protective.  She was too
slight and precious for such hardship as an autumnal rain.  He drew
the edge of his mackintosh over her woolly English topcoat.

"You must be soaked!  I'm a brute to let you stay out!"

She smiled at him, very close.  "I like it!"

It seemed to him that she had snuggled closer.  He kissed her--for
the first time, and very badly indeed.

"Oh, please don't!" she begged, a little shocked, her lively self-
possession gone.

"Fran, you've got to marry me!"

She slipped from the shelter of his raincoat and, arms akimbo, said
impishly, "Oh, really?  Is that a new law?"

"It is!"

"The great Yale athlete speaks!  The automobile magnate!"

Very gravely:  "No, just a scared lump of meat that's telling you
he worships you!"

Still she stared at him, among the autumn-bedraggled weeds on the
river bank; she stared impudently, but quite suddenly she broke,
covered her eyes with her hands, and while he clumsily dabbled at
her cheeks with a huge handkerchief, she sobbed:

"Oh, Sam, my dear, but I'm so grasping!  I want the whole world,
not just Zenith!  I DON'T want to be a good wife and mother and
play cribbage prettily!  I want splendor!  Great horizons!  Can we
look for them together?"

"We will!" said Sam.



It was not till 1908, when he had been married for five years to
Fran Voelker and they had had two babies, Emily and Brent, that
Samuel Dodsworth came on his real struggle at the Revelation
Automobile Company.

His superiors in the company had equally prized him for his
steadiness and industry and fretted at him for being a dreamer.
He was crazy as a poet, they said.  Not only did he venture to
blaspheme against the great Renault-Darracq dogmas of car-
designing, not only did he keep on raving about long "stream-
lines," but he insisted that the largest profits would lie in
selling automobiles as cheaply as possible to as many customers as
possible.  He was only assistant manager of production in 1908, but
he owned a little stock, and his father-in-law, portly old Herman
Voelker, owned more.  It was hard to discharge Sam, even when he
growled at the president of the company, "If you keep the Rev
looking like the one-horse-shay, we'll go bankrupt."

They tried to buy him out, and Sam, who had been absorbed in blue
prints and steel castings, had to learn something about the tricks
of financing: about bonds, transfer of stock, call loans, discounts
to dealers.  With Voelker's money behind him, he secured twenty-
three per cent. of the stock, he was made vice president and
manager of production, he brought out the first four-door model,
and he saw the Revelation become the sensation of America for a
season and one of its best-selling cars for a score of years.

And never, these twenty years, did he come nearer to the Brazilian
jungle than Wall Street, nearer to the tinkling pagodas than the
Revelation agency in Kansas City.

But he was too busy to be discontented; and he managed to believe
that Fran loved him.



CHAPTER 2


Samuel Dodsworth discovered that there was a snowstorm, nearly a
blizzard, whirling about the house.  He closed the windows with a
bang and plumped back into bed till the room should be warm.  He
did not move so swiftly as he once had, and above the frogged silk
pajamas which Fran insisted on buying for him, his hair was gray.
He was healthy enough, and serene, but he was tired, and he seemed
far older than his fifty years.

Fran was asleep in the farther of the twin beds, vast walnut
structures with yellow silk draping.  Sam looked about the bedroom.
He had sometimes caught himself wondering if it wasn't too
elaborate, but usually its floridness pleased him, not only as a
sign of success but because it suited the luxurious Fran.  Now he
noted contentedly the chaise longue, with a green and silver robe
across it; the desk, with monogrammed stationery very severe and
near-English and snobbish; Fran's bedside table, with jeweled
traveling-clock, cigarettes, and the new novels; the bathroom with
its purple tiles.

Fran stirred, sighed and, while he chuckled at her resemblance to a
child trying to slip back into dreams, she furiously burrowed her
eyes into the little lacy pillow, which was crumpled with her
determined sleeping.

"No use," he said.  His rather heavy voice caressed her.  "You know
you're awake!  Rise and shine!  Face the problems of humanity and
the grape fruit!"

She sat up, looking at him with the astonishment she had never
quite lost at being married, breaking a yawn with a smile, tousling
her bobbed hair that was still ash-blond, without gray.  If Sam
seemed older than his age, she was far younger.  She was forty-one
now, in 1925, but, rosy with sleeping, she seemed thirty-one.

"I'm going to have breakfast in bed you're smoking before breakfast
again I haven't had breakfast in bed since yesterday," she yawned
amiably, while he swung his thick legs over the edge of his lilac
satin comforter and lighted a cigarette.

"Yes.  Stay in bed.  Like to, myself.  Devil of a snowstorm," he
said, paddling round to stroke her hair, to nuzzle his ruddy cheek
against her soft fairness.  "By the way, did I ever remember to
tell you that I adore you?"

"Why--let me see--no, I don't believe so."

"Golly, I'm getting absent-minded!  I'll have my secretary remind
me to do it tomorrow."  Seriously:  "Realize that we finally wind
up the old Revelation Company today?  Sort of sorry."

"No!  I'm not a bit sorry!  I'm delighted.  You'll be free for the
first time in all these years.  Let's run off some place.  Oh,
don't let yourself get tied up with anything new!  So silly.  We
have enough money, and you go on stewing--'must change the design
of the carburetor float--simply must sell more cars in the
territory between Medicine Hat and Woolawoola.'  So silly!  What
does it MATTER!  Do ring for the maid, darling."

"Well, no, maybe it doesn't matter, but fellow likes to do his job.
It's kind of a battle; fun to beat the other fellow and put over a
thundering big sale.  But I am rather tired.  Wouldn't mind
skipping off to Florida or some place."

"Let's!"

He had dutifully brought her heavy silver mirror, her brush and
comb, her powder, her too-gorgeous lounging robe of Chinese
brocade.  When she had made herself a bit older by making herself
youthful, she sat up in bed to read the Zenith Advocate-Times.  If
she looked fluffy and agreeably useless, there was nothing fluffy
in her sharp comments on the news.  She sounded like a woman of
many affairs, many committees.

"Humph!  That idiot-boy alderman, Klingenger, is going to oppose
our playground bill.  I'll wring his neck! . . .  The D.A.R. are
going to do another pageant.  I will NOT be Martha Washington!
You might be George.  You have his detestable majesticness."

"Me?" as he came from his bath.  "I'm a clown.  Wait till you see
me in Florida!"

"Yes.  Pitching horseshoes.  I wouldn't put it past you, my
beloved! . . .  Huh!  It says here the Candlelight Club expect to
have Hugh Walpole lecture, next season.  I'll see our program
committee pinches him off 'em."

He was slowly dressing.  He always wore large grave suits, brown or
gray or plain blue, expensively tailored and not very interesting,
with decorous and uninteresting ties of dull silk and no jewelry
save a watch-chain.  But though you were not likely to see what he
wore, you noted him as a man of importance, as an executive, tall,
deep-chested, his kind eyes never truculent, but his mouth serious,
with crescents of wrinkles beside it.  His gray-threaded brown
mustache, trimmed every week by the best barber at the best hotel,
was fully as eccentric and showy as a doormat.

He made his toilet like a man who never wasted motions--and who,
incidentally, had a perfectly organized household to depend upon.
His hand went surely to the tall pile of shirts (Fran ordered them
from Jermyn Street) in the huge Flemish armoire, and to the glacial
nest of collars, always inspected by the parlor maid and discarded
for the slightest fraying.  He tied his tie, not swiftly but with
the unwasteful and extremely unadventurous precision of a man who
has introduced as much "scientific efficiency" into daily
domesticity as into his factory.

He kissed her and, while she nibbled at sweetbreads and drank her
coffee in bird-like sips and furiously rattled the newspaper in
bed, he marched down-stairs to the oak-beamed dining-room.  Over a
second copy of the Advocate, and a Chicago paper, he ponderously
and thoroughly attended to orange juice, porridge and thick cream,
bacon, corn cakes and syrup, and coffee in a cup twice as large as
the cup which Fran was jiggling in her thin hand as she galloped
through the paper up-stairs.

To the maid he said little, and that amiably, as one certain that
he would be well served.  He was not extraordinarily irritable even
when he was informed that Emily, his engaging daughter, had been up
late at a dance and would not be down for breakfast.  He liked
Emily's morning gossip, but he never dreamed of demanding her
presence--of demanding anything from her.  He smiled over the
letter of his son, Brent, now a junior in Yale.

Samuel Dodsworth was, perfectly, the American Captain of Industry,
believing in the Republican Party, high tariff and, so long as they
did not annoy him personally, in prohibition and the Episcopal
Church.  He was the president of the Revelation Motor Company; he
was a millionaire, though decidedly not a multimillionaire; his
large house was on Ridge Crest, the most fashionable street in
Zenith; he had some taste in etchings; he did not split many
infinitives; and he sometimes enjoyed Beethoven.  He would
certainly (so the observer assumed) produce excellent motor cars;
he would make impressive speeches to the salesmen; but he would
never love passionately, lose tragically, nor sit in contented
idleness upon tropic shores.



To define what Sam Dodsworth was, at fifty, it is easiest to state
what he was not.  He was none of the things which most Europeans
and many Americans expect in a leader of American industry.  He was
not a Babbitt, not a Rotarian, not an Elk, not a deacon.  He rarely
shouted, never slapped people on the back, and he had attended only
six baseball games since 1900.  He knew, and thoroughly, the
Babbitts and baseball fans, but only in business.

While he was bored by free verse and cubism, he thought rather
well of Dreiser, Cabell, and so much of Proust as he had rather
laboriously mastered.  He played golf reasonably well and did not
often talk of his scores.  He liked fishing-camps in Ontario, but
never made himself believe that he preferred hemlock boughs to a
mattress.  He was common sense apotheosized, he had the energy and
reliability of a dynamo, he liked whisky and poker and pate de foie
gras, and all the while he dreamed of motors like thunderbolts, as
poets less modern than himself might dream of stars and roses and
nymphs by a pool.



A crisis in life had been forced on him, for his Revelation Company
was being absorbed by the Unit Automotive Company--the imperial
U.A.C., with its seven makes of motors, its body-building works,
its billion dollars of capital.  Alec Kynance, president of the
U.A.C., was in Zenith, and today the final transfer of holdings was
to be made.

Sam had wanted to fight the U.A.C., to keep independent this
creation to which he had devoted twenty-two years, but his fellow
directors were afraid.  The U.A.C. could put on the market a car as
good as the Revelation at a lower price, and drive them from the
market.  If necessary, the U.A.C. could sell below cost for a year
or two.  But they wanted the Revelation label and would pay for it.
And the U.A.C. cossacks were good fellows.  They did not treat Sam
like a captive, but as a fellow warrior, to be welcomed to their
larger army, so at the last Sam hid from himself the belief that
the U.A.C., with their mass production, would cheapen and ruin the
Revelation and turn his thunderbolt into a standardized cigar-
lighter, and he had agreed to their generous purchase price.

He was not happy about it, when he let himself think abstractly.
But he was extremely well trained, from his first days in Zenith
High School, in not letting himself do anything so destructive as
abstract thinking.



Sam clumped up-stairs and found Fran, very brisk, fairly cheerful,
still in her brocade dressing-gown but crouching over her desk,
dashing off notes: suggestions to partisans in her various clubs,
orders to the secretaries of the leagues which she supported--
leagues for the study of democracy, leagues for the blind,
societies for the collection of statistics about the effect of
alcohol on plantation-hands in Mississippi.  She was interested in
every aspect of these leagues except perhaps the purposes for which
they had been founded, and no Indiana politician was craftier at
soaping enemies, advising friends, and building up a political
machine to accomplish nothing in particular.

She shone at Sam as he lumbered in, but she said abruptly, "Sit
down, please.  I want to talk to you."

("Oh, Lord, what have I done now?")  He sat meekly in a chintz-
covered overstuffed chair.

"Sam!  I've been thinking lately.  I didn't want to speak to you
about it till you had the U.A.C. business all finished.  But I'm
afraid you'll get yourself tied up with some new job, and I want to
go to Europe!"

"Well--"

"Wait!  This may be our only chance, the only time you'll be free
till we're so old we won't enjoy wandering.  Let's take the chance!
There'll be time for you to create a dozen new kinds of cars when
we come back.  You'll do it all the better if you have a real rest.
A real one!  I don't want to go just for a few months, but for a
solid year."

"Good Heavens!"

"Yes, they are good!  Think!  Here's Emily going to be married next
month.  Then she won't need us.  Brent has enough friends in
college.  He won't need us.  I can chuck all these beastly clubs
and everything.  They don't mean anything; they're just make-
believe, to keep me busy.  I'm a very active female, Sam, and I
want to do something besides sitting around Zenith.  Think what we
could do!  Spring on the Italian Lakes!  Motoring through the
Tyrol!  London in the Season!  And I've never seen Europe since I
was a girl, and you've never seen it at all.  Let yourself have a
good time for once!  Trust me, can't you, dear?"

"Well, it would be kind of nice to get away from the grind.  I'd
like to look over the Rolls-Royce and Mercedes plants.  And see
Paris and the Alps.  But a year--That's a long time.  I think we'd
get pretty tired of Europe, living around in hotels.  But--I really
haven't made any plans.  The U.A.C. business was so sudden.  I
would like to see Italy.  Those hill-towns must be very curious.
And so old.  We'll talk about it tonight.  Auf wiedersehen, old
lady."

He tramped out, apparently as dependable as an old Newfoundland and
as little given to worrying about anything more complex than the
hiding-places of bones.  But he was fretting as he sat erect in his
limousine, while Smith drove him into town.

These moments of driving were the only times when he was alone.
He was as beset by people--his wife, his daughter, his son, his
servants, his office-staff, his friends at lunch and on the golf
course--as in his most frenziedly popular days at college, when it
had been his "duty to old Yale" to be athletic and agreeable, and
never to be alone, certainly never to sit and think.  People came
to him, swarmed about him, wanted his advice and his money and the
spiritual support which they found in his ponderous caution.  Yet
he liked to be alone, he liked to meditate, and he made up for it
on these morning rides.

"She's right," he worried.  "I'd better not let her know how right
she is, or she'll yank me off to London before I can pack my flask.
I wonder--Oh yes, of course, she does care for me, a lot.  But
sometimes I wish she weren't quite so good a manager.  She just
tries to amuse me by playing at being a kitten.  She isn't one, not
by a long shot.  She's a greyhound.  Sometimes when I'm tired, I
wish she just wanted to cuddle up and be lazy with me.  She's
quicksilver.  And quicksilver is hard, when you try to compress it!

"Oh, that's unfair.  She's been the best wife--I haven't given
enough time to courting her, what with all this cursed business.
And I'm tired of business.  Like to sit around and chat and get
acquainted with myself.  And I'm tired of these streets!"

The limousine was laboring through a gusty snowstorm, skidding a
bit on icy asphalt, creaking and lumbering as it climbed over
drifts.  The windows of the car were frost-emblazoned.  Sam
impatiently cleared a peep-hole with the heel of his glove.

They were creeping along Conklin Avenue, where the dreary rows of
old red brick mansions, decayed into boarding houses, the cheap
grocery shops and dirty laundries and gloomy little "undertaking
parlors" and lunch-rooms with the blatant sign "Eats," not very
entrancing at any time, were turned by the rags of blown snow into
the bleakness of a lumber-camp, while the breadth of the street
made it only the more shelterless and unintimate.  On either side
were streets of signboards advertising oil and cigarettes, of
wooden one-story shacks between old-fashioned yellow brick
tenement-houses gloomy in the sunless snow; a region of poverty
without picturesqueness and of labor without hope.

"Oh, Lord, I'd like to get away from it!  Be nice to see the
Mediterranean and a little sunshine," Sam muttered.  "Let's go!"



The General Offices of the Revelation Motor Company were in an
immense glass and marble building on Constitution Avenue, North,
above Court House Square, opposite the flashing new skyscraper of
the Plymouth National Bank.  The entrance to the floor given to
executive offices was like the lobby of a pretentious hotel--
waiting-room in brocade and tapestry and Grand Rapids renaissance;
then something like an acre of little tables with typists and
typists and typists, very busy, and clerks and clerks and clerks,
with rattling papers; and a row of private offices resembling
furniture showrooms, distinguished by enormous desks in imitation
of refectory tables, covered with enormous sheets of plate glass,
and fanatically kept free of papers and all jolly disorder.

The arrival of President Dodsworth was like that of a General
Commanding.  "Good morning!" rumbled the uniformed doorman, a
retired sergeant.  "Good MORNING!" chirped the girl at the
inquiry desk, a charming girl whose gentleman-friend was said to be
uncommonly high up in the fur business.  "Good morning!" indicated
the typists and clerks, their heads bowing like leaves agitated by
a flitting breeze as he strode by them.  "GOOD morning!" caroled
Sam's private stenographer as he entered his own office.  "GOOD
MORNING!" shouted his secretary, an offensively high-pressure young
slave-driver.  And even the red-headed Jewish office boy, as he
took Sam's coat and hung it up so that it would not dry,
condescended "Mornin', boss."

Yet today all this obsequiousness, normally not unpleasant to the
Great Man, annoyed him; all this activity, this proof that ever so
many people were sending out ever so many letters about things
presumably of importance, seemed to him an irritating fussiness.
What did it matter whether he had another hundred thousand dollars
to leave to Brent?  What did it matter whether John B. Johnson of
Jonesburg did or did not take the local Revelation agency?  Why
were all these hundreds of young people willing to be turned into
machines for the purposes of rattling papers and bowing to the
president?

The Great Man approached his desk, put on his eye-glasses, and
graciously received a stock-report, as one accomplishing empires.

But the Great Man was thinking:

"They make me tired--poor devils!  Come on, Fran!  Let's go!  Let's
drift way round to China!"



Alec Kynance, president of the Unit Automotive Company, with his
regiment of officers, lawyers, secretaries, was not coming for half
an hour.  Sam said impulsively to his stenographer, "Miss Rachman,
skip down to the travel bureau at the Thornleigh, won't you please,
and bring me all the steamship folders and European travel
information and so on that they have there.  And round-the-world."

While he waited for her he turned over the papers in the wire
basket which his secretary had reverently laid on the glass-topped
vastness of his desk.  These matters had seemed significant a few
days ago, like orders given in battle, but now that the Revelation
Company was no longer his--

He sighed, he shuffled the papers indifferently:  The secret report
on the dissipations of the manager of the Northwestern Division.
The plans of the advertising agency for notices about the union of
the U.A.C. and the Revelation, which was to be announced with glad,
gaudy public rejoicing.  What did they MATTER, now that he was
turned from a bandit captain to a clerk?

For the first time he admitted that if he went to the U.A.C., even
as first vice president, he would be nothing more than an office
boy.  He could make no daring decisions by himself. THEY had
taken from him the pride in pioneering which was one of his props
in life--and who THEY were, he didn't quite know. THEY were
something more than just Alec Kynance and a few other officers of
the U.A.C. THEY were part of a booming industrial flood which was
sweeping over him. THEY would give him a larger house, a yacht,
but THEY would not give him work that was really his own.  He had
helped to build a machine which was running away from him.  He had
no longer the dignity of a craftsman.  He made nothing; he meant
nothing; he was no longer Samuel Dodsworth, but merely part of a
crowd vigorously pushing one another toward nowhere.

He wandered to the window.  In that blast of snow, the shaft of the
Plymouth National Bank Building was aspiring as a cathedral; twenty
gray stories, with unbroken vertical lines swooping up beyond his
vision into the snowy fog.  It had nobility, but it seemed cruel,
as lone and contemptuous of friendly human efforts as a forgotten
tower on the Siberian steppes.  How indifferently it would watch
him starve and freeze!

With relief he looked at the travel brochures when his stenographer
brought them in--a lively girl, shaking the snow from her little
cloche hat, beaming at him, assuring him that he really did exist
and was something of importance still.  Then he was lost in the
pictures. . . .  Titanic walls of the Grand Canyon: scarlet pillars
and pyramids of orange.  A tawny road in Algiers, the sun baking,
nodding camels, and drivers with dusky malign faces under their
turbans.  St. Moritz, shadowed by the mountains, and a pretty girl
on a toboggan.  A terrace at Cannes, where through fig-trees and
palms and tumbling roses you looked on the sea with a lone felucca.
A valley of colored patchwork fields seen from a harsh tor of
Dartmoor.  Japanese children rollicking among cherry trees beside a
tiny temple.  Dark wood of carven mediaeval houses looming over the
Romerberg at Frankfort.  The Grand Canal, with the fantastic
columns of the piazzetta and the soft pink and cream of the ducal
palace.  The old sea-fronted walls of Ragusa.  The streets of
Paris--kiosks, impudent advertisements, a whisk of skirts, a
whirligig of traffic, and little tables at which to loaf all day
long.

"Wouldn't be so bad!" thought Sam.  "I'd like to wander around a
few months.  Only I'm not going to let Fran coax me into being one
of these wishy-washy expatriates, homeless, afraid of life, living
on the Riviera as though they were in a sanatorium for neurotics.
I'm going to go on doing something with life, and my place is here.
We'll go abroad, only I'll make her fight for it or she'll feel
she's running the whole show.  Then I'll come back here, and I'll
take Alec Kynance's show right away from him!"

"Mr. Kynance is here," announced his secretary.



CHAPTER 3


Mr. Alexander Kynance, president of the Unit Automotive Company,
was a small bustling man with a large head, an abrupt voice, a
lively mind, a magnificent lack of scruples, and a love for oratory
and Corona-Coronas.  He had been a section-hand and a railway
superintendent, he had the best cellar of Burgundies in Detroit,
and he made up for his runtiness by barking at people.

"Everything all ready?  Everything all ready?" he barked at Sam
Dodsworth, as the dozen representatives of the two companies
settled down and rested their elbows on the gigantic mirror-
surfaced table in the gold and oak directors'-room.

"I think so," Sam drawled.

"Just a few things left," said Kynance.  "We've about decided to
run the Revelation in between the Chromecar and the Highroad in
class--drop it three hundred below your price--two-door sedan at
eleven-fifty."

Sam wanted to protest.  Hadn't he kept the price down to the very
lowest at which his kind of car could be built?  But suddenly--What
difference did it make?  The Revelation wasn't his master, his
religion!  He was going to have a life of his own, with Fran,
lovely loyal Fran, whom he'd imprisoned here in Zenith!

Let's go!

He was scarcely listening to Kynance's observations on retaining
the slogan "You'll revel in a Revelation."  Sam had always detested
this battle-cry.  It was the invention of a particularly bright and
bounding young copy-writer who took regular exercise at the
Y.M.C.A., but the salesmen loved it.  As Kynance snapped, "Good
slogan--good slogan--full o' pep," Sam mused:

"They're all human megaphones.  And I'm tired."



When he had rather sadly signed the transfer of control to the
U.A.C. and his lifework was over, with no chance for retreat, Sam
shook hands a great deal with a number of people, and was left
alone with Alec Kynance.

"Now to real business, old man," Kynance blatted.  "You'll be
tickled to death at getting hooked up with a concern that can
control the world-market one of these days--regular empire, b'
God!--instead of crawling along having to depend on a bunch of so-
so assistants.  We want you to come with us, of course.  I haven't
been hinting around.  Hinting ain't my way.  When Alec Kynance has
something to say, by God he shoots!  I want to offer you the second
vice-presidency of the U.A.C., in general charge of production of
all our eight cars, including the Rev.  You've been getting sixty
thousand salary, besides your stock?"

"Yes."

"We can offer you eighty-five, and your share in the managers'
pool, with a good chance for a hundred thou in a few years, and
you'll probably succeed me when the bootlegged hootch gets me.  And
you'll have first-class production-men under you.  You can take it
easy and just think up mean ideas to shove over.  Other night you
were drooling about how you'd like to make real Ritzy motor
caravans with electric stoves and radios and everything built in.
Try it!  We've got the capital.  And this idea you had about a
motorized touring-school for boys in summer.  Try it!  Why, God, we
might run all these summer camps out of business and make a real
killing--get five hundred thousand customers--kid that hadn't gone
on one of our tours, no class to him at all!  Try it!  And the
U.A.C. getting into aeroplane manufacture.  Go ahead.  Draw up your
plans.  Yes sir, that's the kind of support we give a high-class
man.  When do you want to go to work?  I suppose you'll have to
move to Detroit, but you can get back here pretty often.  Want to
start right in, and see things zip?"

Sam's fantastic schemes for supercaravans, for an ambulatory summer
school in which boys should see the whole country from Maine pines
to San Joaquin wheat-fields, schemes which he had found stimulating
and not very practical, were soiled by the lobster-faced little
man's insistence on cashing in.  No!

"First, I think I'll take a vacation," Sam said doubtfully.
"Haven't had a real one for years.  Maybe I'll run over to Europe.
May stay three months or so."

"Europe?  Rats!  Dead's a doornail!  Place for women and long-
haired artists.  Dead!  Only American loans that keep 'em from
burying the corpse!  All this art!  More art in a good shiny spark-
plug than in all the fat Venus de Mylos they ever turned out.  Naw!
Go take a run through California, maybe grab a drink of good liquor
in Mexico, and then come with us.  Look here, Dodsworth.  My way of
being diplomatic is to come out flat.  You necking around with some
other concern?  We can't wait.  We got to turn out the cars!  I
can't keep this open, and I've offered you our pos-o-lutely highest
salary.  That's the way we do business.  Yes or no?"

"I'm not flirting with any other company.  I've had several offers
and turned them down.  Your offer is fair."

"Fine!  Let's sign the contract right now.  Got her here!  Put down
your John Hancock, and begin to draw the ole salary from this
minute, with a month's vacation on pay!  How's that?"

With the noisiness of a little man making an impression, Kynance
slapped the contract on the glowing directors'-table, flourished an
enormous red and black fountain pen, and patronizingly poked Sam in
the shoulder.

Irritably Sam rumbled, "I can't tie myself up without thinking it
over.  I'll give you my answer as soon as I can.  Probably in a
week or so.  But I may want to take a four-months rest in Europe.
Never mind about the pay meanwhile.  Rather feel free."

"My God, man, what do you think is the purpose of life?  Loafing?
Getting by with doing as little as you can?  I tell you, what I
always say is: there's no rest like a little extra work!  You ain't
tired--you're just fed up with this backwoods town.  Come up to
Detroit and see how we make things hum!  Come sit in with us and
hear us tell Congress where it gets off.  Work!  That's the caper!
I tell you," with a grotesque, evangelical sonorousness, "I tell
you, Dodsworth, to me, work is a religion.  'Turn not thy hand from
the plow.'  Do big things!  Think of it; by making autos we're
enabling half the civilized world to run into town from their pig-
sties and see the movies, and the other half to get out of town and
give Nature the once-over.  Twenty million cars in America!  And in
twenty more years we'll have the bloomin' Tibetans and Abyssinians
riding on cement roads in U.A.C. cars!  Talk about Napoleon!  Talk
about Shakespeare!  Why, we're pulling off the greatest miracle
since the Lord created the world!

"Europe?  How in hell would you put IN four months?  Think you
could stand more'n ten art galleries?  I KNOW!  I've seen Europe!
Their Notre Dame is all right for about half an hour, but I'd
rather see an American assembly-plant, thousand men working like a
watch, than all their old, bum-lighted, tumble-down churches--"

It was half an hour before Sam got rid of Kynance without
antagonizing him, and without signing a contract.

"I'd like," Sam reflected, "to sit under a linden tree for six
straight months and not hear one word about Efficiency or Doing Big
Things or anything more important than the temperature of the beer--
if there is anything more important."



He had fallen into rather a rigid routine.  Most days, between
office and home, he walked to the Union Club in winter, drove to
the golf course in summer.  But tonight he was restless.  He could
not endure the fustiness of the old boys at the club.  His
chauffeur would be waiting there, but on his way to the club Sam
stopped, with a vague notion of tasting foreignness, at a cheap
German restaurant.

It was dark, quiet, free of the bouncing grandeur of Kynances.  At
a greasy oilcloth-covered table he sat sipping coffee and nibbling
at sugar-crusted coffee-cake.

"Why should I wear myself out making more money for myself--no, for
Kynance!  He will like hell take my caravans away from me!"

He dreamed of a very masterwork of caravans: a tiny kitchen with
electric stove, electric refrigerator; a tiny toilet with
showerbath; a living-room which should become a bedroom by night--
a living-room with a radio, a real writing desk; and on one side of
the caravan, or at the back, a folding verandah.  He could see his
caravanners dining on the verandah in a forest fifty miles from any
house.

"Kind of a shame to have 'em ruin any more wilderness.  Oh, that's
just sentimentality," he assured himself.  "Let's see.  We ought to
make that up--"  He was figuring on a menu.  "We ought to produce
those in quantities for seventeen hundred dollars, and our selling-
point will be the saving in hotel bills.  Like to camp in one
myself!  I will not let Kynance have my ideas!  He'd turn the
caravans out, flimsy and uncomfortable, for eleven hundred, and all
he'd think about would be how many we could slam on the market.
Kynance!  Lord, to take his orders, to stand his back-slapping, at
fifty!  No!"

The German restaurant-keeper said, as one content with all seasons
and events, "Pretty bad snow tonight."

"Yes."

And to himself:  "There's a fellow who isn't worrying about Doing
Big Things.  And work isn't his religion.  His religion is roast
goose, which has some sense to it.  Yes, let's go, Fran!  Then
come back and play with the caravan. . . .  Or say, for an elaborate
rig, why not two caravans, one with kitchen and toilet and stores,
other with living-bedroom, and pitch 'em back to back, with a
kind of train-vestibule door, and have a real palace for four
people? . . .  I would like to see Monte Carlo.  Must be like a
comic opera."



His desire for Monte Carlo, for palms and sunshine and the
estimable fish of the Prince of Monaco, was enhanced by jogging
through the snowstorm in his car, by being held up in drifts, and
clutching the undercurving seat during a rather breathless slide
uphill to Ridge Crest.  But when he entered the warmth of the big
house, when he sat in the library alone (Fran was not yet back from
the Children's Welfare Bridge), with a whisky-soda and a volume of
Masereel woodcuts, when he considered his deep chair and the
hearth-log and the roses, Sam felt the security of his own cave and
the assurance to be found in familiar work, in his office-staff, in
his clubs, his habits and, most of all, his friends and Fran and
the children.

He regarded the library contentedly: the many books, some of them
read--volumes of history, philosophy, travels, detective stories;
the oak-framed fireplace with a Mary Cassatt portrait of children
above it; the blue davenport; the Biedermeyer rug from Fran's kin
in Germany; the particularly elaborate tantalus.

"Pretty nice.  Hotels--awful!  Oh yes, I'll probably go over to the
U.A.C.  But maybe take six weeks or a couple of months in Europe,
then move to Detroit.  But not sell this house!  Been mighty happy
here.  Like to come back here and spend our old days.  When I
really make my pile, I'll do something to help turn Zenith into
another Detroit.  Get a million people here.  Only, plan the city
right.  Make it the most beautiful city in the world.  Not just sit
around on my chair in Europe and look at famous cities, but
MAKE one!"



Once a month, Sam's closest friends, Tub Pearson, his humorous
classmate who was now the gray and oracular president of the
Centaur State Bank, Dr. Henry Hazzard, the heart specialist, Judge
Turpin, and Wheeler, the packing-house magnate, came in for dinner
and an evening of poker, with Fran as hostess at dinner but
conveniently disappearing after it.

Fran whisked in from her charity bridge as he was going up to
dress.  In her sleek coat of gray squirrel she was like a snow-
sprinkled cat pouncing on flying leaves.  She tossed her coat and
hat to the waiting maid, and kissed Sam abruptly.  She was virginal
as the winter wind, this girl who was the mother of Emily about to
be married.

"Terrible bore, the bridge.  I won seventeen dollars.  I'm a good
little bridge-player, I am.  We must hustle it's almost dinnertime
oh what a bore Lucile McKelvey is with her perpetual gabble about
Italy I bet I'll learn more Italian in three weeks than she has in
three trips come on my beloved we are LATE!"

"We are going then?"

"Going where?"

"To Europe."

"Oh, I don't know.  Think how nice it would be for you to 'pitch a
wicked horseshoe,' as dear Tub would say, in Florida."

"Oh, quit it!"

As they tramped up-stairs he tucked his arm about her, but she
released herself, she smiled at him too brightly--smile glittering
and flat as white enamel paint--urbane smile that these twenty
years had made him ashamed of his longing for her--and she said,
"We must hurry, lamb."  And too brightly she added, "Don't drink
too much tonight.  It's all right with people like Tub Pearson, but
Judge Turpin is so conservative--I know he doesn't like it."



She had a high art of deflating him, of enfeebling him, with one
quick, innocent-sounding phrase.  By the most careless comment on
his bulky new overcoat she could make him feel like a lout in it;
by crisply suggesting that he "try for once to talk about
SOMETHING besides motors and stocks," while they rode to a
formidable dinner to an elocutionary senator, she could make him
feel so unintelligent that he would be silent all evening.  The
easy self-confidence which weeks of industrial triumphs had built
up in him she could flatten in five seconds.  She was, in fact, a
genius at planting in him an assurance of his inferiority.  Thus
she did tonight, in her nicest and friendliest way, and instantly
the lumbering Ajax began to look doubtfully toward the poker he had
always enjoyed, to fear the opinion of Judge Turpin--an eye-glassed
sparrow of a man who seemed to admire Sam, and who showed his
reverence for the law by taking illicit drink for drink with him.

Sam felt unworthy and apologetic till he had dressed and been
cheered by a glimpse of his daughter, Emily.



Emily, as a child, had been his companion; he had always understood
her, seemed nearer to her than to Fran.  She had been a tomboy,
sturdy of shoulder, jolly as an old family dog out on a walk.

He used to come to the nursery door, lamenting:

"Milord, the Duke of Buckin'um lies wownded at the gate!"

Emily and Brent would wail joyously, "Not seriowsly, I trust," and
he answer, "Mortually, I fear."

They had paid him the compliment of being willing to play with him,
Emily more than the earnest young Brent.

But Emily had been drawn, these last five years, into the
tempestuous life of young Zenith; dances, movie parties, swimming
in summer, astonishingly unrestricted companionship with any number
of boys; a life which bewildered Sam.  Now, at twenty, she was to
be married to Harry McKee, assistant general manager of the
Vandering Bolt and Nut Company (considered in Zenith a most genteel
establishment), ex-tennis-champion, captain during the Great War, a
man of thirty-four who wore his clothes and his slang dashingly.
The parties had redoubled, and Sam realized wistfully that Emily
and he had no more of their old, easy, chuckling talks.

As he marched down to supervise the cocktails for dinner, Emily
flew in, blown on the storm, crying at him, "Oh, Samivel, you old
beautiful!  You look like a grand duke in your dinner jacket!  You
sweet thing!  Damn it, I've got to be at Mary Edge's in twenty
minutes!"

She galloped up-stairs, and he stood looking after her and sighed.

"I'd better begin to dig in against the lonely sixties," he
brooded.

He shivered as he went out to tell the butler-for-the-evening how
to prepare the cocktails, after which, he knew, the butler would
prepare them to suit himself, and probably drink most of them.



Sam remembered that this same matter of a butler for parties only
had been the subject of rather a lot of pourparlers between Fran
and himself.  She wanted a proper butler in the house, always.  And
certainly they could afford one.  But every human being has certain
extravagances which he dare not assume, lest he offend the
affectionate and jeering friends of his youth--the man who has
ventured on spats dares not take to a monocle--the statesman who
has ventured on humor dares not be so presumptuous as to venture on
honesty also.  Somehow, Sam believed that he could not face Tub
Pearson if he had anything so effete as a regular butler in the
house, and Fran had not won . . . not yet.



Tub Pearson--the Hon. Thos. J. Pearson, former state-senator,
honorary LL.D. of Winnemac University, president of the Centaur
State Bank, director in twelve companies, trustee of the Loring
Grammar School and of the Zenith Art Institute, chairman of the
Mayor's City Planning Commission--Tub Pearson was still as much the
jester as he had been at Yale.  He and his lively wife Matilde,
known as "Matey," had three children, but neither viceregal honors
nor domesticity had overlaid Tub's view of himself as a natural
comedian.

All through the poker-game, at the large table in Sam's library,
where they sat with rolled-up sleeves and loosened collars,
gurgling their whisky-sodas with gratified sighs, Tub jabbed at
Judge Turpin for sentencing bootleggers while he himself enjoyed
his whisky as thoroughly as any one in Zenith.  When they rested--
that is to say, re-filled their glasses--at eleven, and Sam
suggested, "May not have any more poker with you lads for a while,
because Fran and I may trot over to Europe for six months or so,"
then Tub had an opportunity suitable to his powers:

"Six months!  That's elegant, Sambo.  You'll come back with an
English accent:  'Hy sye, hold chappie, cawn't I 'ave the honor of
raising the bloomin' pot a couple o' berries, dear old dream?'"

"Ever hear an Englishman talk like that?"

"No, but you will!  Six months!  Oh, don't be a damn' fool!  Go for
two months, and then you'll be able to appreciate getting back to a
country where you can get ice and a bath-tub."

"I know it's a heresy," Sam drawled, "but I wonder if there aren't
a few bath-tubs in Europe?  Think I'll go over and see.  My deal."

He did not show it; he played steadily, a rectangular-faced, large
man, a cigar gripped in his mouth, cards dwarfed in his wide hand;
but he was raging within:

"I've been doing what people expected me to, all my life.  Football
in college, when I'd as soon've stuck in the physics laboratory.
Make money and play golf and be a good Republican ever since.
Human cash-register!  I'm finished!  I'm going!"

But they heard from him only "Whoop you two more.  Cards?"



CHAPTER 4


It was late when Sam yawned up to bed, for their poker-game had
lasted till after one.  The spacious chamber was half lighted from
the bathroom.  The dusky light caught the yellow silk curtains by
her bed, the crystal on her wide dressing-table.  She had left the
windows closed, and the air was not unpleasantly stuffy with cold
cream, powder, and steaminess lingering from a hot bath scented
with bath-salts.

He was eager for her breathing presence.  His determination to
escape with her had made Fran seem nearer and more desirable than
in months, but as he felt guilty about awakening her, he did not
admit that he was doing anything so unkind--he merely dropped his
shoes loudly.

She looked startled when she awoke.  How many times she had looked
startled, a little incredulous, when she had stirred to discover
him beside her!  She turned on her bedside light, she looked at him
vaguely, as though she wasn't quite sure who he was, but, after
all, one had to be polite.  She was incredibly young and unmarked
with wrinkles, a girl in a lace nightgown edged at the neck with
white fur.

He plumped down on the bed beside her, kissed her shoulder.  She
suffered it, unresponding, and said, too cheerily, "Please no!  Not
now.  Listen, dear, I want to talk.  Ohhhhh, gee, I'm sleepy!  I
tried to stay awake till you came up, but I dozed off.  So 'shamed!
But pull up the big chair and listen."

"Don't you want me to kiss you?"

"Why do you always ask that?  In that hurt way?  You're so silly!
You know you've had several drinks.  Oh, I don't mind--though Tub
and you, for men that are responsible citizens and don't really
drink at all, always do manage to tuck away a lot too much!  I
don't mind.  But don't you think it's a little icky, this sudden
passion for embracing when you're--well, exhilarated?"

"Don't you WANT me to kiss you?"

"Good Heavens, my dear man, haven't I been your wife for twenty-two
years?  Oh, please, dear, don't be quarrelsome!  Have I done
something to hurt you?  I'm so, so terribly sorry!  I am, truly,
dear.  Kiss me!"

It was the coolest, most brief of kisses that she gave him and,
that chore done, most briskly she rattled, "Now pull up the big
chair and listen, dear.  Or would you rather wait till tomorrow?"

She added, with the imitation of baby-talk which ordinarily tickled
him, "Is mos' awful' important!"

He dragged the wing-chair to her bed and decorously sat down,
wagging a varnished pump, but he said testily, "Good Lord, you
don't need to coax.  Let's have it."

"Oh, don't be such an old grump!  Now I ask you: IS that fair?
Because I don't like the reek of whisky?  Would you like it on my
breath?"

"No.  But I didn't take much.  But--Never mind.  Listen, Fran.  I
know what you want.  And I've decided.  Kynance tried to tie me up
with a contract to go to work right away, but I refused.  So we'll
go to Europe, and maybe for four-five months!"

"Oh.  That."

With all his experience of her zig-zag incalculability, her shreds
of knowledge that seemed to have no source, her ambitions and
desires that seemed not worth the pains, her veiled resentment of
hurts which he had not meant to inflict, her amiability when he had
expected her to be angry, he was surprised now at her indifference.

"It's more fundamental than going to Europe.  See here, Sam.  Even
if I didn't want to, oh, kiss you--Sorry I don't seem to be more
passionate.  I wish I were, for your sake.  But apparently I'm not.
But even so, we have been happy, haven't we!  We have built
something pretty fine!"

"Yes, we have.  What's worrying--"

"Even if we haven't been wild operatic lovers, I do think we mean
something awfully deep and irreplaceable to each other.  Don't we?"

His touchy ardor gave way to affection.  He reached his long arm
out and patted her slight, nervous fingers.  "Yes.  We differ on a
lot of things, but I guess we've got something solid for each other
that we can't find in anybody else."

"Something really permanent, Sam?  Dependable?  So we're like two
awfully good friends backing each other in a terrible street
fight?"

"Absolutely.  But what's--"

"Listen.  We've done the first part of our jobs.  We've made enough
money.  We've brought up the children.  You have something to show
for your work--this really marvelous car that you've created.  And
yet we're still young, comparatively.  Oh, let's not settle down
into contentment with the dregs of life!  Let's have a new life,
all over, and not worry any more about duties (and I've had my own,
young man--if you think it's easy to run a house like this, and
entertain everybody!).  Let's--oh, it's hard to express it, but I
mean: let's not tie ourselves down to saying we'll come back from
Europe (but it was sweet of you, dear, to consent without making me
beg), but I mean: let's not insist that we HAVE to be back from
Europe in four months--yes, or four years!  On the other hand, if
we don't like it, let's not feel we have to stay; let's take the
first boat back.  But let's--Oh, please now, get this!  Let's start
out of this stupid old town without one single solitary plan in our
heads beyond landing in Europe, and coming back when we really want
to, and going where we please when we please.  Maybe we'll be back
after two months on the Riviera, and then again, forty years from
now, we may be living in a bamboo shack in Java and thumbing our
noses at anybody who doesn't like it!  Why, I'd almost like to sell
this house, so we won't have anything to bind us."

"You're not serious?  Good Lord, we couldn't do that!  Why, it's
our home!  Wouldn't know what to do if we didn't have a safe harbor
like this to come back to!  Why, we've built ourselves into this
old place, from the Radiola to the new garage doors.  I guess I
know every dahlia in the garden by its middle name!  I love the
place the way I do Emily and you and the boy.  Only place where we
can slam the door and tell everybody to go to hell and be
ourselves!"

"But perhaps we'll get us some new selves, without losing the old
ones.  You'd--oh, you could be so magnificent, so tall and
impressive and fine, if you'd let yourself be, if you didn't feel
you had to be just an accessory to a beastly old medium-priced car,
if you'd get over this silly fear that people might think you were
affected and snobbish if you demanded the proper respect from them!
There ARE great people in the world--dukes and ambassadors and
generals and scientists and--And I don't believe that essentially
they're one bit bigger than we are.  It's just that they've been
trained to talk of world-affairs, instead of the price of vanadium
and what Mrs. Hibbletebibble is going to serve at her Hallowe'en
party.  I'm going to be one of 'em!  I'm not afraid of 'em!  If
you'd only get over this naive passion for 'simplicity' and all
those nice peasant virtues and let yourself be the big man that you
really are!  Not meekly say to His Excellency that though you look
like a grand-duke, you're really only little Sammy Dodsworth of
Zenith!  He won't know it unless you insist on telling him! . . .
And perhaps an ambassadorship for you, after you've been abroad
long enough to learn the tricks. . . .  Only to do all that, to
grab the world, we must NOT be bound by the feeling that we're
tied to this slow-pokey Zenith till death do us part from the fun
of adventuring!"

"But to sell the house--"

"Oh, we don't need to do that, of course, silly--not at first.  I
just mean it as an example of how free we ought to be.  Of course
we wouldn't sell it.  Heavens, we may be delighted to slink back
here in six months!  But don't let's plan to, that's what I mean.
Oh, Sam, I'm absolutely not going to let my life be over at forty--
well, at forty-one, but no one ever takes me for more than thirty-
five or even thirty-three.  And life would be over for me if I
simply went on forever with the idiotic little activities in this
half-baked town!  I won't, that's all!  You can stay here if you
insist, but I'm going to take the lovely things that--I have a
right to take them, because I understand them!  What do I care
whether some club of human, or half-human, tabby-cats in eye-
glasses study dietetics or Lithuanian art next year?  What do I
care whether a pretentious bunch of young millionaire manufacturers
have an imitation English polo team? . . . when I could have the
real thing, in England!  And yet if we stay here, we'll settle down
to doing the same things over and over.  We've drained everything
that Zenith can give us--yes, and almost everything that New York
and Long Island can give us.  And in this beastly country--In
Europe, a woman at forty is just getting to the age where important
men take a serious interest in her.  But here, she's a grandmother.
The flappers think I'm as venerable as the bishop's wife.  And they
MAKE me old, with their confounded respectfulness--and their
CHARMING rejoicing when I go home from a dance early--I who can
dance better, yes, and longer, than any of them--"

"Now, now!"

"Well, I can!  And so could you, if you didn't let business sap
every single ounce of energy you have!  But at the same time--I
only have five or ten more years to continue being young in.
It's the derniere cartouche.  And I won't waste it.  Can't you
understand?  Can't you understand?  I mean it, desperately!  I'm
begging for life--no, I'm not!--I'm demanding it!  And that means
something more than a polite little Cook's trip to Europe!"

"But see here now!  Do you actually mean to tell me, Fran, that you
think that just moving from Zenith to Paris is going to change
everything in your life and make you a kid again?  Don't you
realize that probably most people in Paris are about like most
people here, or anywhere else?"

"They aren't, but even if they were--"

"What do you expect out of Europe?  A lot of culture?"

"No!  'Culture!'  I loathe the word, I loathe the people who use
it!  I certainly do not intend to collect the names of a lot of
painters--and of soups--and come back and air them.  Heavens, it
isn't just Europe!  We may not stay there at all.  It's being free
to wander wherever we like, as long as we like, or to settle down
and become part of some community or some set if we like, and not
feel that we have a duty to come back here.  Oh, I could love you
so much more if we weren't a pair of old horses in a treadmill!"

They sailed for Southampton in February, three weeks after Emily's
wedding.

Sam was absorbed in completing the Revelation Company transfer, and
in answering Fran when she complained, "Oh, work's become a disease
with you!  You go on with it when there's no need.  Let the
underlings finish up.  Dear, it's because I do love you that--Do
you think you'll ever learn to enjoy leisure, to enjoy just being
yourself and not an office?  You're not going to make me feel
guilty for having dragged you away, are you?"

"By God, I'll enjoy life if it kills me--and it probably will!" he
grumbled.  "You've got to give me time.  I've started this business
of being 'free' about thirty-five years too late.  I'm a good
citizen.  I've learned that Life is real and Life is earnest and
the presidency of a corporation is its goal.  What would I be doing
with anything so degenerate as enjoying myself?"



CHAPTER 5


The S. S. Ultima, thirty-two thousand tons burden, was four hours
out of New York.  As the winter twilight glowered on the tangle of
gloomy waves, Samuel Dodsworth was aware of the domination of the
sea, of the insignificance of the great ship and all mankind.  He
felt lost in the round of ocean, one universal gray except for a
golden gash on the western horizon.  His only voyaging had been on
lakes, or on the New York ferries.  He felt uneasy as he stood at
the after rail and saw how the rearing mass of the sea loomed over
the ship and threatened it when the stern dipped--down, unbelievably
down, as though she were sinking.  But he felt resolute again,
strong and very happy, as he swung about the deck. He had been
sickish only for the first hour.  The wind filled his chest,
exhilarated him.  Only now, the messy details of packing and
farewells over, and the artificially prolonged waving to friends on
the dock endured, did he feel that he was actually delivered from
duty, actually going--going to strange-colored, exciting places, to
do unknown and heroic things.

He hummed (for Kipling meant something to Sam Dodsworth which no
Shelley could, nor Dante)--he hummed "The Gipsy Trail":


     Follow the Romany patteran
        North where the blue bergs sail,
     And the bows are gray with the frozen spray,
        And the masts are shod with mail.
     Follow the Romany patteran
        West to the sinking sun,
     Till the junk-sails lift through the houseless drift,
        And the East and the West are one.
     Follow the Romany patteran
        East where the silence broods
     By a purple wave on an opal beach
        In the hush of the Mahim woods.


"Free!" he muttered.

He stopped abruptly by the line of windows enclosing the music-
room, forward on the promenade deck, as he fumbled for the memory
of the first time he had ever sung "The Gipsy Trail."

It must have been when the poem was first set to music.  Anyway,
Fran and he had been comparatively poor.  The money that old Herman
Voelker had lent them had gone into the business.  (A sudden,
meaningless spatter of snow, out on that cold sea.  How serene the
lights in the music room!  He began to feel the gallant security of
the ship, his enduring home.)  Yes, it was when they had gone off
on a vacation--no chauffeur then, nor suites at the best hotels,
but Sam driving all day in their shabby Revelation, with sleep in
an earth-scented, wind-stirred tent.  They had driven West--west,
two thousand miles toward the sunset, till it seemed they must
indeed come on the Pacific and junk-sails lifting against the
misted sun.  They had no responsibilities of position.  Together
they chanted "The Gipsy Trail," vowing that some day they would
wander together--

And they were doing it!

Such exultation filled him, such overwhelming tenderness, that he
wanted to dash down to their cabin and assure himself that he still
had the magic of Fran's companionship.  But he remembered with what
irritable efficiency she had been unpacking.  He had been married
for over twenty years.  He stayed on deck.



He explored the steamer.  It was to him, the mechanic, the most
sure and impressive mechanism he had ever seen; more satisfying
than a Rolls, a Delauney-Belleville, which to him had been the
equivalents of a Velasquez.  He marveled at the authoritative
steadiness with which the bow mastered the waves; at the powerful
sweep of the lines of the deck and the trim stowing of cordage.  He
admired the first officer, casually pacing the bridge.  He wondered
that in this craft which was, after all, but a floating iron egg-
shell, there should be the roseate music room, the smoking-room
with its Tudor fireplace--solid and terrestrial as a castle--and
the swimming-pool, green-lighted water washing beneath Roman
pillars.  He climbed to the boat deck, and some never realized
desire for sea-faring was satisfied as he looked along the sweep of
gangways, past the huge lifeboats, the ventilators like giant
saxophones, past the lofty funnels serenely dribbling black woolly
smoke, to the forward mast.  The snow-gusts along the deck, the
mysteriousness of this new world but half seen in the frosty
lights, only stimulated him.  He shivered and turned up his collar,
but he was pricked to imaginativeness, standing outside the
wireless room, by the crackle of messages springing across bleak
air-roads ocean-bounded to bright snug cities on distant plains.

"I'm at sea!"



He tramped down to tell Fran--he was not quite sure what it was
that he wanted to tell her, save that steamers were very fine
things indeed, and that ahead of them, in the murk of the horizon,
they could see the lanes of England.

She, in their cabin with its twin brass beds, its finicking
imitations of gray-blue French prints on the paneled walls, was
amid a litter of shaken-out frocks, heaps of shoes, dressing gowns,
Coty powder, three gift copies of "The Perennial Bachelor,"
binoculars, steamer letters, steamer telegrams, the candy and the
Charles & Company baskets of overgrown fruit and tiny conserves
with which they were to help out the steamer's scanty seven meals a
day, his dress-shirts (of which he was to, and certainly would not,
put on a fresh one every evening), and French novels (which she was
to, and certainly wouldn't, read in a stately, aloof, genteel
manner every day on deck).

"It's terrible!" she lamented.  "I'll get things put away just
about in time for landing. . . .  Oh, here's a wireless from Emily,
the darling, from California.  Harry and she seem to be standing
the honeymoon about as well as most victims."

"Chuck the stuff.  Come out on deck.  I love this ship.  It's so--
Man certainly has put it over Nature for once!  I think I could've
built ships!  Come out and see it."

"You do sound happy.  I'm glad.  But I must unpack.  You skip
along--"

It was not often, these years, that he was kittenish, but now he
picked her up, while she kicked and laughed, he lifted her over a
pile of sweaters and tennis shoes and bathing-suits and skates,
kissed her, and shouted, "Come on!  It's our own honeymoon!
Eloping!  Have I ever remembered to tell you that I adore you?
Come up and see some ocean with me.  There's an awful lot of ocean
around this ship. . . .  Oh, damn the unpacking!"

He sounded masterful, but it was always a satisfaction, when he was
masterful, to have her consent to be mastered.  He was pleased now
when she stopped being efficient about this business of enjoying
life, and consented to do something for no reason except that it
was agreeable.

In her shaggy Burberry, color of a dead maple leaf, and her orange
tam o' shanter, she suggested autumn days and brown uplands.  She
was a girl; certainly no mother of a married daughter.  He was
cumbersomely proud of her, of the glances which the men passengers
snatched at her as they swung round the deck.

"Funny how it comes over a fellow suddenly--I mean--this is almost
the first time we've ever really started out like lovers--no job to
call us back.  You were dead right, Fran--done enough work--now
we'll live!  Together--always!  But I'll have so much to learn, to
keep up with you.  You, and Europe!  Hell, I'm so sentimental!
D'you mind?  Just come out of state prison!  Did twenty years!"

Round and round the deck.  The long stretch on the starboard side,
filthy with deck chairs, with rug-wadded passengers turning a pale
green as the sea rose, with wind-ruffled magazines, cups left from
teatime, and children racing with toy carts.  The narrow passage
aft, where the wind swooped on them, pushing them back, and the
steamer dipped so that they had to labor up-hill, bending forward,
their limbs of lead.  But, as they toiled, a glimpse of ship
mysteries that were stirring to land-bound imaginations.  They
looked down into a hatchway--some one said there were half a dozen
Brazilian cougars being shipped down there--and along a dizzy
aerial gangway to the after deck and the wheelhouse and a lone
light in the weaving darkness.  They saw the last glimmer of the
streaky wake stretching back to New York.

Then, blown round the corner, released from climbing upward, a dash
along the cold port side, blessedly free of steamer chairs and of
lardy staring.  Swinging at five miles an hour.  The door of the
smoking-room, with a whiff of tobacco smoke, a pleasant reek of
beer, a sound of vocal Americans.  The place where the deck widened
into an alcove--thick walls of steel, dotted with lines of rivets
smeared with thick white paint--and the door of the stewards'
pantry from which, in the afternoon, came innumerable sandwiches
and cakes and cups and pots of tea.  The double door to the main
stairway, where, somehow, a stewardess in uniform was always
talking to a steward.  The steel-gripped windows of the music room,
with a glimpse of unhappy young-old women, accompanying their
mothers abroad, sitting flapping through magazines.  Where the deck
was unenclosed, the yellow scoured rail and the white stanchions,
bright in the deck light, brighter against the dark coil of sea.
Always before them, the long straight lines of the decking planks,
rigid as bars of music, divided by seams of glistening tar.  Deck--
ship--at sea!

Then forward, and the people along the rail--bold voyagers facing
the midwinter Atlantic through glass windows--honeymooners quickly
unclasping as the pestiferous deck-circlers passed--aged and sage
gentlemen commenting on the inferiority of the steerage passengers
who, on the deck below, altogether innocent of being condescendingly
observed by the gentry-by-right-of-passage-money, jigged beside a
tarpaulin-covered hatch to the pumping music of an accordion, and
blew blithely on frosted fingers.

And round all over again, walking faster, turning from casual
pedestrians into competitors in the ocean marathon.  Faster.
Cutting corners more sharply.  Superior to thrusting wind, to
tilting deck.  Gaining on that lone, lean, athletic girl, and
passing her. . . .

"That's the way to walk!  Say, Fran, I wonder if sometime we
couldn't get away from hotels and sort of take a walking-trip along
the Riviera--interesting, I should think. . . .  Darling!"

Gaining on but never quite passing that monocle-flashing, tweed-
coated man whom they detested on sight and who, within three days,
was to prove the simplest and heartiest of acquaintances.

A racing view of all their companions of the voyage, their fellow-
citizens in this brave village amid the desert of waters: strangers
to be hated on sight, to be snubbed lest they snub first, yet
presently to be known better and better loved and longer remembered
than neighbors seen for a lifetime on the cautious land.

Their permanent home, for a week; to become more familiar, thanks
to the accelerated sensitiveness which is the one blessing of
travel, than rooms paced for years.  Every stippling of soot on the
lifeboats, every chair in the smoking-room, every table along one's
own aisle in the dining salon, to be noted and recalled, in an
exhilarated and heightened observation.

"I do feel awfully well," said Sam, and Fran:  "So do I.  So long
since we've walked together like this!  And we'll keep it up; we
won't get caught by people.  But I must arise now and go to
Innisfree and finish the unpacking of the nine bean rows oh WHY
did I bring so many clothes!  Till dressing-time--MY DEAR!"



He was first dressed for dinner.  She had decided, after rather a
lot of conversation about it, that the belief that our better
people do not dress for dinner on the first night out was a
superstition.  He sauntered up to the smoking-room for his first
cocktail aboard, feeling very glossy and handsome and much-
traveled.  Then he was feeling very lonely, for the smoking-room
was filled with amiable-looking people who apparently all knew one
another.  And he knew nobody aboard save Fran.

"That's the one trouble.  I'm going to miss Tub and Doc Hazzard and
the rest horribly," he brooded.  "I wish they were along!  Then it
would be about perfect."

He was occupying an alcove with a semi-circular leather settee,
before a massy table.  The room was crowded, and a square-rigged
Englishman, blown into the room with a damp whiff of sea air,
stopped at Sam's table asking abruptly, "Mind if I sit here?"

The Englishman ordered his cocktail with competence:

"Now be very careful about this, steward.  I want half Booth gin
and half French vermouth, and just four drops of orange bitters,
and no Italian vermouth, remember, no Italian vermouth."  As the
Englishman gulped his drink, Sam enjoyed hating him.  The man was
perfectly expressionless, like a square-headed wooden idol, colored
like an idol of cedar wood.  "Supercilious as the devil.  Never
would be friendly, not till he'd known you ten years.  Well, he
needn't worry!  I'm not going to speak to him!  Curious how an
Englishman like that can make you feel that you're small and skinny
and your tie's badly tied without even looking at you!  Well, he--"

The Englishman spoke, curtly:

"Decent weather, for a February crossing."

"Is it?  I don't really know.  Never crossed before."

"Really?"

"You've crossed often?"

"Oh, perhaps twenty times.  I was with the British War Mission
during the late argument.  They were always chasing me across.
Lockert's my name.  I'm growing cocoa down in British Guiana now.
Hot there!  Going to stay in London?"

"I think so, for a while.  I'm on an indefinite vacation."

Sam had the American yearning to become acquainted, to tell all
about his achievements, not as boasting but to establish himself as
a worthy fellow.

"I've been manufacturing motor cars--the Revelation--thought it was
about time to quit and find out what the world was like.  Dodsworth
is my name."

"Pleased to meet you."  (Like most Europeans, Lockert believed that
all Americans of all classes always said "Pleased to meet you," and
expected so to be greeted in turn.)  "Revelation?  Jolly good car.
Had one in Kent.  My cousin--live with him when I'm home--bouncing
old retired general--he's dotty over motors.  Roars around on a
shocking old motor bike--mustache and dignity flying in the morning
breeze--atrocious bills for all the geese and curates he runs over.
He's insanely pro-American--am myself, except for your appalling
ice water.  Have another cocktail?"

In twenty minutes, Sam and Major Clyde Lockert had agreed that the
"labor turnover" was too high, that driving by night into the
brilliance of headlights was undesirable, that Bobby Jones was a
player of golf, and that they themselves were men of the world and
cheery companions.

"I'll meet lots of people.  And I like this ship.  This is the
greatest day of my life--next to my marriage, of course," Sam
gloated, as the second dinner gong flooded the ship with waves of
hysterical sound and he marched out to rouse Fran from her
mysterious activities.

There was awaiting him in his cabin a wireless from Tub Pearson:


          BON VOYAGE STOP LONDON SURE SEE MY NEPHEW
          JACK STARLING AMERICAN EMBASSY LIVING GEORGIAN
          HOUSE STOP DONT RAISE ON BOBTAILED STRAIGHTS
          WISH WITH YOU TUB.


He wondered about introducing Major Lockert to Fran.

He was never able to guess how she would receive the people whom he
found in the alley and proudly dragged in to her.  Business men
whom he regarded as upstanding and vigorous, she often pronounced
dull; European visitors whom he found elegant, she was likely to
call "not quite the real thing"; and men whom he had doubtfully
presented to her as worthy but rather mutton-headed, she had been
known to consider fine and very sensitive.  And for all her
theoretical desire to make their house a refuge for him and for
whomever he liked to invite, she had never learned to keep her
opinions of people to herself.  When she was bored by callers, she
would beg "Do you mind if I run up to bed now--such a headache,"
with a bright friendliness which fooled no one save herself, and
which left their guests chilled and awkward.

Would she find Lockert heavy?

While they sat in the music room over after-dinner coffee, with a
dance beginning in the cleared space, Lockert came ambling up to
them.

"Mr. Lockert--my wife," Sam mumbled.

Lockert's stolidity did not change as he bowed, as he sat down in
answer to a faint invitation, but Sam noted that his pale blue eyes
came quickly alive and searched Fran with approval. . . .  Fran's
lovely pallor, in a robe de style such as only her slenderness
could bear.

Sam settled back with his cigar and let them talk.  To him, always,
the best talk was no brilliance of his own, but conversation that
amused Fran and drew her out of her silken sulkiness.

"You've been long in America, Mr. Lockert?"

"Not this time.  I've been living in British Guiana--plantation--
no soda for your whisky, and always the chance of finding a snake
curled up in your chair on the verandah--nice big snakes, all
striped, very handsome and friendly--don't seem to get used to
'em."

Lockert spoke to her not with such impersonal friendliness as he
had for Sam, not with the bored dutifulness which most men in
Zenith showed toward any woman over a flapperish eighteen, but a
concentration, an eagerness in the presence of attractive women, an
authentic need for women, which seemed to flatter Fran and to rouse
her, yet make her timid.  She had first looked at Lockert with
metallic courtesy.  "Here was another of those ponderous business
men that Sam was always dragging around."  Now she concentrated on
him, she forgot Sam, and murmured youthfully:

"It sounds dreadful.  And yet so exciting!  I think I should be
glad of a nice striped snake, for a change!  I'm terribly fed up
with the sound, safe American cities where you never find anything
in your chair more thrilling than the morning paper.  I think I'll
go look for snakes!"

"Are you going East?"

"Don't know.  Isn't it nice!  No plans beyond London."

"You'll stay in London a bit?"

"Yes, if there aren't too many Americans there.  Why IS it that
the travelling American is such a dreadful person?  Look at those
ghastly people at that second table there--no, just beyond the
pillar--father with horn-rimmed spectacles, certain to be talking
about either Coolidge or Prohibition--earnest mother in home-made
frock out to hunt down Culture and terribly grim about it--daughter
with a voice like a file.  Why IS it?"

"And why is it that you Americans, the nice ones, are so much more
snobbish than the English?"

She gasped, and Sam awaited a thunderbolt, which did not come.
Lockert was calm and agreeable, and she astonishingly bent to his
domination with a puzzled:  "Are we, really?"

"Appallingly!  I know only two classes of people who hate their own
race--or tribe or nation or whatever you care to call it--who
travel principally to get away from their own people, who never
speak of them except with loathing, who are pleased not to be taken
as belonging to them.  That is, the Americans and the Jews!"

"Oh, come now, that's idiotic!  I'm as proud of being--No!  That's
so.  Partly.  You're right.  Why is it?"

"I suppose it's because your boosters go so much to the other
extreme, talking about 'God's Country'"

"But that expression is never used any more."

"It isn't?  Anyway: 'greatest country on earth' and 'we won the
war.'  And your ghastly city-boosting tours and Elks' conventions--
people like you hate this bellowing.  And then I do think the
English have, as you would say, 'put something over on you'--"

"I've NEVER used the phrase!"

"--by sitting back and quietly assuming that we're the noblest and
rightest people on earth.  And if any man or any nation has the
courage or the magnificent egotism to do that long enough, almost
every one will accept it from him.  Oh, the English are essentially
more insufferable than the Americans--"

"But not so noisy about it," mused Fran.

Sam was not at all sure that he liked this discussion.



"Perhaps not," said Lockert; "though if there's anything noisier
than the small even voice with which an Englishman can murmur,
'Don't be so noisy, my dear fellow--!'  Physically, it may carry
only a yard, but spiritually it rings clear up through the Heavens!
And I'll be hearing it, now that I've become a Colownial.  Even my
cousin--I was speaking to your husband about him--absolute fanatic
about motor transport--I'm to stay with him in Kent.  And he'll be
pleasant to me, and gently rebuking--And he's rather a decent old
thing--General Herndon."

"General LORD Herndon?  Of the Italian drive?" said Fran.

"Yes.  You see, my revered great-grandfather did so well out of
cotton that he was rewarded with a peerage."

"And you're so proud of it!  That's why you enjoy your mock
humility.  You had a quite American thrill in admitting that your
cousin is a lordship.  It's bunk--I mean, it's nonsense, the
British assertion that only Americans take titles seriously.  You
have as much satisfaction out of not calling your cousin 'Lord' as--"

"As any charming American woman would out of calling him 'Lord'!"

She seemed helpless against Lockert's bland impertinence; she
seemed to enjoy being bullied; she admitted, "Yes, perhaps," and
they smiled at each other.

"But seriously," said Lockert, "you'll be more English than I am,
after you've lived there a year.  I've knocked about so much in
South America and Colorado and Ceylon that I'm merely a tramp.
Jungle rat."

"You really think so--that I'll become English?"  She was
unguardedly frank, she the ever-guarded.

"Quite. . . .  I say, may I have this dance?"

Lockert, for all his squareness--he was as solid and ungraceful-
looking as his favorite mutton-chop--danced easily.  Sam drooped in
his chair and watched them.

"Nice she has somebody to play with already," he insisted.

And within three days she had a dozen men to "play with," to dance
and argue with, and race with around the deck.  But always it was
Lockert who assumed that he was her patron, who looked over her new
acquaintances one by one, and was not at all shy about giving his
verdict on them.  She became helplessly angry at his assumptions,
and he apologized so affably and so insincerely that she enjoyed
quarreling with him for hours at a time, snuggled in a steamer robe
on deck.  And when Lockert and she found that they were both
devoted to dogs and they became learned about wire-haired terriers,
Sam leaned back listening as though she were his clever daughter.

Between times she was gayer with him and more affectionate than she
had been for years; and day by day the casualness suitable to a
manufacturer like Sam broke down into surprising, uncharted
emotions.



CHAPTER 6


On their last day out--they were due in Southampton at noon,
tomorrow--there was on the Ultima all the kindly excitement, all
the anticipation and laughter, of the day before Christmas.  When
the Dodsworths came up to the smoking-room for their cocktail
before dinner they were welcomed by the dozen people whom Lockert,
the mixer of the voyage, had attracted to the round table in the
center of the room.

What delightful people!  Sam glowed; what a pleasure to travel with
them:  Lockert, the stolidly loquacious English adventurer; the
jolly and vulgar little Jewish millinery buyer from Denver, who was
quite the cleverest man aboard; Lechintsky, the pianist; Colonel
Endersley, American military attache at Constantinople; Sally
O'Leary, the satiny movie actress, whose real name was Gwendolyn
Alcovar; kindly and ruminating old Professor Deakins, the
Assyriologist; Max Ristad, the Norwegian aviator; Pierce Pattison,
the New York banker.

"Come on, you're late!" and "Sit down here; I've had mine," and "We
missed you!" they cried.  They were as friendly as a college
reunion, as free of jealousy, and just as undiscriminating.

The Jewish buyer had two new anecdotes (against his own race,
naturally), and they flowed down to dinner in a group.

The Captain's Dinner on the Ultima occurred on the last night of
the voyage, and much was made of it.  The dining salon was draped
in scarlet, the stewards were in red hunting-coats, champagne was
served at the expense of the Line.  Even prohibitionists were
betrayed into smiles which indicated that they wanted to keep up
the friendships of this halcyon week.  Toasts were drunk from table
to table, with many bows, and the large Seattle contractor, who
always overdid everything, threw confetti, and tonight no one
minded his alcoholic philanthropy.  The Comtesse de Val Montique,
who had been born in Chicago, who owned nine million dollars, two
chateaux, and part of a beautifully varnished husband, who crossed
the ocean regularly twice a year and was so aristocratic that she
had for friends only her servants, was moved tonight to look
amiable as people passed her table.  And the old captain, his beard
like a whisk broom, went about the room patting shoulders and
chuckling, "You cross again with Papa, eh?"



Sam was raised to a quivering sensitiveness toward all of them.  He
was not drunk, certainly, but after two cocktails, half a bottle of
champagne, and a cognac or two, he was released from his customary
caution, his habitual concentration on his own affairs.  He was
excited by their merriment at first; then it seemed to him pitiful
that all of them, and he himself, should so rarely cease thus their
indignant assertion of the importance of their own little offices
and homes and learnings, and let themselves rejoice in friendliness.
They seemed to him like children, excitedly playing now, but soon to
be caught by weary maturity.  He felt a little the lacrimae rerum of
the whole world.  He wanted to weep over the pride of the waiters
as--the one moment on the voyage when they were important and
beautiful and to be noticed--they bore in the platters of flaming
ice cream.  He wanted to weep over the bedraggled small-town bride
who for the moment forgot that she had not found honeymooning quite
so glorious, nor the sea so restful. And he saw as pitiful the fact
that Fran expected to find youth again merely by changing skies.

All the while he looked as little sentimental as possible, the
large, grave man plodding through the courses.



That was the great dance of the trip, with Japanese lanterns making
the starboard deck curiously like the verandah of the Kennepoose
Canoe Club, years and years ago, when he had found Fran.  But he
did not explain it to her.  He couldn't.  He said, "I adore you!
You look mighty well in that gold and ivory dress."  He had,
indeed, little chance for sentimental explanations.  No flapper
aboard had more partners than Fran; certainly none danced so
smoothly.  Lockert was proprietorially about her, always, and to
Sam he snapped, "Want to have you at Lord Herndon's for a week-end,
if you'll come, and I'd like to show you a bit of London.  We'll
dine at Claridge's."

Sam was not at all sure that Lockert would do anything of the kind;
he suspected that Lockert could forget people as quickly as he
picked them up; yet it gave him a feeling of belonging a little to
England.  And there was Tub Pearson's nephew at the American
Embassy, and of course Hurd, the manager of the London Revelation
agency.  He belonged!

He was emboldened to ask for a dance with Sally O'Leary, the movie
queen who had made seduction famous.

"I'm not much good at this," he grumbled, as the steamer rolled and
they struggled to dance up-hill.  "You ought to be dancing with one
of these young fellows."

"Don't be silly!  You're a lovely partner.  You're a man, not one
of these gigolos, or whatever the damn' word is.  If you didn't
have such a lovely wife, I'd probably lay my head on your lovely
big chest and ask you to go out to Hollywood and kill a coupla
lovely beauty-parlor cowboys for me!"

He was pleased to believe that she meant it.  His heightened
sensitiveness, his wistful perception of the loneliness of the
world, was gone in a boisterous well-being.  When he danced with
Fran and she dutifully pointed out his roughness, he laughed.
Always she had a genius for keeping herself superior to him by just
the right comment on his clumsiness, the most delicate and needle-
pointed comparison of him with defter men.  But tonight he
chuckled, "I'm no Nijinsky, but I'm enjoying myself so much that
even you can't make me mad!"  He whirled her again, mercilessly; he
slid gloatingly down the long deck, and marched her back to their
table.

And, when Fran assured him they needed no more wine, there were
joyful invasions of the smoking-room, where tablefuls of the
shamelessly happy greeted him, "Come sit down!"

They liked him!  He was Somebody!  Not just as the president of the
Revelation but in himself, in whatever surroundings!

He did sit down; he wandered from table to table in an ecstasy
of friendliness . . . which became a little blurred, a little
dizzy. . . .  But they were the best company he'd ever known,
everybody on board, all of 'em. . . .  But he'd better watch out;
he was slightly lit. . . .  But they were the BEST folks--

He went out on deck, to clear his head; he swayed up to the boat
deck.  Then he stood fixed, and all his boisterousness vanished in
a high, thin, clear ecstasy.

On the horizon was a light, stationary, ON LAND, after these days
of shifting waters and sliding hulls.  He waited to be certain.
Yes!  It was a lighthouse, swinging its blade of flame.  They had
done it, they had fulfilled the adventure, they had found their way
across the blind immensity and, the barren sea miles over, they had
come home to England.  He did not know (he never knew) whether the
light was on Bishop's Rock or the English mainland, but his
released imagination saw the murkiness to northward there as
England itself.  Mother England!  Land of his ancestors; land of
the only kings who, to an American schoolboy, had been genuine
monarchs--Charles I and Henry VIII and Victoria; not a lot of
confusing French and German rulers.  Land where still, for the
never quite matured Sammy Dodsworth, Coeur de Lion went riding, the
Noir Faineant went riding, to rescue Ivanhoe, where Oliver Twist
still crept through evil alleys, where Falstaff's belly-laugh
discommoded the godly, where Uncle Ponderevo puffed and mixed,
where Jude wavered by dusk across the moorland, where Old Jolyon
sat with quiet eyes, in immortality more enduring than human life.
And his own people--he had lost track of them, but he had far-off
cousins in Wiltshire, in Durham.  And all of them there--in a motor
boat he could be ashore in half an hour!  Perhaps there was a town
just off there--He saw it, from pictures in Punch and the
Illustrated London News, from Cruikshank illustrations of his
childhood.

A seaside town: a crescent of flat-faced houses, the brass-sheathed
door of a select pub and, countrywards, a governess-cart creeping
among high hedges to a village green, a chalky hill with Roman
earthworks up to which panted the bookish vicar beside a white-
mustached ex-proconsul who had ruled jungles and maharajahs and
lost temples where peacocks screamed.

Mother England!  Home!



He dashed down to Fran.  He had to share it with her.  For all his
training in providing suitable company for her and then not
interrupting his betters, he burst through her confidences as
Lockert and she stood aloof from the dance.  He seized her shoulder
and rumbled, "Light ahead!  We're there!  Come up on the top deck.
Oh, hell, never MIND a coat!  Just a second, to see it!"

His insistence bore Fran away, and with her alone, unchaperoned by
that delightful Major Lockert, he stood huddled by a lifeboat, in
his shirtsleeves, his dress coat around her, looking at the cheery
wink of the light that welcomed them.

They had full five minutes of romancing and of tenderness before
Lockert came along, placidly bumbling that they would catch
cold . . . that they would find Kent an estimable county . . . that
Dodsworth must never make the mistake of ordering his street-boots
and his riding-boots from the same maker.



The smell of London is a foggy smell, a sooty smell, a coal-fire
smell, yet to certain wanderers it is more exhilarating, more
suggestive of greatness and of stirring life, than springtime
hillsides or the chill sweetness of autumnal nights; and that
unmistakable smell, which men long for in rotting perfumes along
the Orinoco, in the greasy reek of South Chicago, in the hot odor
of dusty earth among locust-buzzing Alberta wheatfields, that
luring breath of the dark giant among cities, reaches halfway to
Southampton to greet the traveler.  Sam sniffed at it, uneasily,
restlessly, while he considered how strange was the British fashion
of having railway compartments instead of an undivided car with a
nice long aisle along which you could observe ankles, magazines,
Rotary buttons, clerical collars, and all the details that made
travel interesting.

And the strangeness of having framed pictures of scenery behind the
seats; of having hand straps--the embroidered silk covering so
rough to the finger tips, the leather inside so smooth and cool--
beside the doors.  And the greater strangeness of admitting that
these seats were more comfortable than the flinty Pullman chairs of
America.  And of seeing outside, in the watery February sunshine,
not snow-curdled fields but springtime greenness; pollarded willows
and thatched roofs and half-timbered facades--

Just like in the pictures!  England!

Like most people who have never traveled abroad, Sam had not
emotionally believed that these "foreign scenes" veritably existed;
that human beings really could live in environments so different
from the front yards of Zenith suburbs; that Europe was anything
save a fetching myth like the Venusberg.  But finding it actually
visible, he gave himself up to grasping it as enthusiastically as,
these many years, he had given himself to grinding out motor cars.



CHAPTER 7


Not the charge and roaring of the huge red busses, not the glimpse
of Westminster's towers beside the Thames, not the sight of the
pale tall houses of Carlton House Terrace, so much delighted Sam
and proved to him that incredibly he was in London as did a milk
cart on its afternoon delivery--that absurd little cart, drawn by a
pony, with the one big brassy milk container, instead of a truck
filled with precise bottles.

"That certainly is old-fashioned!" he muttered in the taxicab,
greatly content.

They planned to stay at the Berkeley, but when Sam stood at the
booking-desk, making himself as large and impassive and traveled-
looking as possible, and said casually, "I'd like a suite," the
clerk remarked, "Very sorry, sir--full up."

"But we wirelessed for reservations!" snapped Fran.

"Come to think of it, I forgot all about sending the radio," said
Sam, looking apologetically at the clerk, apologizing for the
rudeness of Fran, his child.

She breathed quickly, angrily, but never yet had she quarreled with
him in public.

"You might try the Savoy, sir.  Or the Ritz--just across
Piccadilly," the clerk suggested.

They drooped back to the taxicab waiting with their luggage,
feeling unwelcome, and when they were safely inside the car, she
opened up:

"I do think you might have remembered to send that wireless,
considering that you had absolutely nothing else to do aboard--
except drink!  When I did all the packing and--Sam, do you ever
realize that it really wouldn't injure your titanic industrial mind
if you were occasionally just the least little bit thoughtful
toward me, if you didn't leave absolutely everything about the
house and traveling for me to do?  I don't think it was very nice
of you!  And I'm so tired, after the customs and--"

"Hell!  I suppose you got the tickets to Europe!  I suppose you got
our passports--"

"No.  Your secretary did!  I'm afraid you don't get any vast credit
for that, my dear man!"

That was all the family scene for which they had time before they
disembarked at the Ritz, but Fran was able to keep up quite a high
level of martyrdom and bad temper, for the Ritz was nearly full,
also, and they could not have a suite till the next day.  Tonight,
Fran had to endure a mere double bedroom with a private bath.

"I suppose," she stormed, "that I'm expected to spend my entire
time in London packing and unpacking and moving and unpacking all
over again!  This awful room!  Oh, I do think you might have
remembered--"

All the gaiety was gone from Sam's large face.  He held her arm,
painfully, and growled, "Now that'll do!  You ought to be ashamed
of yourself!  I always deny it, even to you, but you CAN be the
nagging wife!  Just the kind you hate!  We've never had a better
room than this, and tomorrow we'll have a suite, and you needn't
unpack anything besides a toothbrush this evening--we needn't dress
for dinner.  You make me sick when you get this suffering, abused,
tragedy fit.  I know it's because you're tired and jumpy, but can't
you ever be tired and jumpy without insisting that every one around
you be the same way?"

"Is it necessary for you to shout at me, as a proof of YOUR
calmness--your superb masculine calmness--and is it necessary to
break my arm?  I am not a nagger!  I've never nagged you!  But the
fact that you, who are so fond of talking about yourself as the
great executive who never forgets a detail--"

"Never say anything of the kind!"

"--could forget to send that wireless, and then you're too self-
satisfied even to be sorry about it--"

"Fran!"  His arm circled her; he led her to the window.  "Look down
there!  Piccadilly!  London!  I've always wanted to see it, just as
much as you have.  Are we going to quarrel now?  Do you remember
the very first evening I met you, after you'd come back from
Europe, and I said we'd come here together?  And we have.  Togeth--
Oh, I guess I sound sentimental, but to be here in England, where
all our people came from, with you--"

"I'm sorry.  I was naughty.  I'm sorry."  Then she laughed.  "Only
my people didn't come from here!  My revered ancestors galloped
around the Bavarian mountains in short green pants, and yodeled,
and undoubtedly they fought your ancestors on all possible
occasions!"

But her laughter was not very convincing; her restoration to
happiness not complete.  She said, while she was unpacking her
smaller bag, gliding in and out of the bathroom--she said, in
rather a lonely, discouraged way:

"Same time, my dear, you aren't always thoughtful about me.
American husbands never are.  You're no worse than the rest, but
you're just as bad.  You think of nothing beyond business and golf.
It never occurs to you that a woman, poor idiot, is lots more
pleased when you remember to send her flowers, or when you 'phone
to her at odd hours, just to say you love her, than she would be by
a new motor car.  Please don't think I'm nagging--maybe I was
before, but I'm not now, really!  I do so want us to be happy
together!  And now that you don't have to think about business,
don't you think it might be nice to get acquainted with me?  I'm
really quite a nice person!"

"Nice?  Oh, Lord!"

She was cheerfuller, after their long kiss, and he--he became very
busy trying to be a thoughtful husband.

And she agreed that it was jolly that they needn't dress for
dinner, and then she unpacked their evening clothes.



It was toward evening; he must make her first night in London
exciting; and, like most American husbands, he assumed that the
best way to do it was to invite some one, if possible some one a
little younger and livelier than himself, to join them.

Major Lockert?

Oh, damn Major Lockert!

They'd seen too much of him on the ship--and the patronizing way in
which he'd ambled into their compartment on the boat train and
thrust a Graphic and a Tatler on them--And the way he'd explained
that you mustn't confuse a florin and a half-crown--

Still, Lockert was younger than himself--perhaps half a dozen
years--and he could gabble about baccarat and Paris-Plage and other
things that Fran seemed to find important--

"Let's get hold of somebody for dinner, honey," he said, "and then
maybe we'll take in a show.  How about it?  Shall I try to get hold
of Lockert?"

"Oh no!"

He was pleased; considerably less pleased when she went on, "He's
been so kind to us, and so helpful, and we mustn't bother him on
his first evening home.  What about this young Starling, Tub's
nevvy, at the American Embassy?"

"We'll try him."

The Embassy was closed, and at his bachelor apartment, Dunger, the
porter, explained that Mr. Starling had gone to the Riviera for a
fortnight.

"Do you remember any of the people you met here when you came
abroad as a kid?" Sam asked.

"No, not really.  And I haven't any relatives here--all in Germany.
Hang it, I do think that after all these centuries my family might
have provided me with one respectable English earl as kinsman!"

"What about Hurd, the Revelation agent?  I think he came to our
house once when he was in Zenith."

"Oh, he--he's a terrible person--absolute roughneck--how you ever
happened to send an American like Hurd over here when you might
have had a nice Englishman as London agent and--Why, don't you
remember I asked you not to write him we were coming?  I WON'T be
the 'president's little lady' to that awful bunch of back-slapping
salesmen!"

"Now Hurd's a mighty good fellow!  He's cocky, and I don't suppose
he's read a book since he used to look at the lingerie ads in the
Sears-Roebuck catalogue as a kid, but he's a whirlwind at selling,
and he tells mighty good stories, and he would know the best
restaurants in London."

Softened, a bit motherly--or at least a bit sisterly--she comforted
him, "You really would like to see him, wouldn't you?  Well then,
let's get him, by all means."

"No, this is your party.  I want somebody that you'd like.  Plenty
of time to see Hurd; go call on him tomorrow, maybe."

"No, really, I think it would be lovely to have your Mr. Hurd.  He
wasn't so bad.  I was exaggerating.  Yes, do call him up--please
do!  I'd feel terrible if I felt that I'd kept you from seeing--And
perhaps you do owe it to the business.  He may have some cables
from the U.A.C."

"Well, all right.  And if I don't get him, how about trying Colonel
Enderley and his wife--I thought they were about the nicest people
on the boat, and they may not have a date for tonight.  Or that
aviator, Ristad?"

"Splendid."

Hurd's office was closed.

Hurd's home address not in the telephone book.

Colonel and Mrs. Enderley not at the Savoy, after all.

Max Ristad not in.

Who else?



How many millions of American husbands had sat on the edges of how
many millions of hotel beds, from San Francisco to Stockholm,
sighing to the unsympathetic telephone, "Oh, not in?" ruffling
through the telephone book, and again sighing, "Oh, not in?"--
looking for playmates for their handsome wives, while the wives
listened blandly and never once cried, "But I don't want any one
else!  Aren't we two enough?"



A little melancholy at having to struggle through their Second
Honeymoon unassisted, they dined at the hotel and went to the
theater.  In the taxicab, he had a confused timidity--no fear of
violence, no sense of threatened death, but a feeling of
incompetence in this strange land, of making a fool of himself, of
being despised by Fran and by these self-assured foreigners; a fear
of loneliness; a fear that he might never be restored to the
certainties of Zenith.  He saw his club, the office, the dear
imprisonment of home, against the background of London, with its
lines of severe facades, its roaring squares, corners clamorous
with newspaper vendors, and a whole nest of streets that irritated
him because they weren't reasonable--he didn't know where they led!
And a tremendous restaurant that looked bigger than any clashing
Childs' in New York, which was annoying in a land where he had
expected to find everything as tiny and stiff and unambitious as a
Japanese toy garden.

And the taxi-driver hadn't understood his pronunciation--he had had
to let the hotel porter give the name of the theater--and what
ought he to tip the fellow?  He couldn't ask Fran's advice.  He was
making up for his negligence about the radiogram for hotel
reservations by being brusque and competent--a man on whom she
could rely, whom she would love the more as she saw his superiority
in new surroundings.  God, he loved her more than ever, now that he
had the time for it!

And what was that about not confusing a half-crown (let's see: that
was fifty cents, almost exactly, wasn't it?) and a florin?  Why had
Lockert gone and mixed him all up by cautioning him so much about
them?  Curse Lockert--nice chap--awfully kind, but treating him as
though he were a baby who would be disgraced in decent English
society unless he had a genteel guide to tell him what he might
wear and what he might say in mixed society!  He'd managed to
become president of quite a fair-sized corporation without
Lockert's aid, hadn't he!

He felt, at the theater, even more forlorn.

He did not understand more than two-thirds of what the actors said
on the stage.  He had been brought up to believe that the English
language and the American language were one, but what could a
citizen of Zenith make of "Ohs rath, eastill in labtry"?

What were they talking about?  What was the play about?  He knew
that in America, even in the Midwestern saneness of Zenith, where
the factories and skyscrapers were not too far from the healing
winds across the cornfields, an incredible anarchy had crept into
the family life which, he believed, had been the foundation of
American greatness.  People that you knew, people like his own
cousin, Jerry Loring, after a decent career as a banker had taken
up with loose girls and had stood for his wife's having a lover
without killing the fellow.  By God if he, Sam Dodsworth, ever
found HIS wife being too friendly with a man--

No, he probably wouldn't.  Not kill them.  She had a right to her
own way.  She was better than he--that slender, shining being, in
the golden frock she had insisted on digging out of a wardrobe
trunk.  She was a divine thing, while he was a clodhopper--and how
he'd like to kiss her, if it weren't for shocking all these people
so chillily calm about him!  If conceivably she COULD look at
another man, he'd just leave her . . . and kill himself.

But he must attend to the play, considering that he was being
educated, and so expensively.

He concluded that the play was nonsense.  In America there was a
criminal amount of divorcing and of meriting divorce, but surely
that collapse of all the decencies was impossible in Old England,
the one land that these hundreds of years had upheld the home, the
church, the throne!  Yet here on the stage, with no one hissing, an
English gentleman was represented as being the lover of a decent
woman, wife of a chemist, and as protesting against running away
with her because then they would be unable to continue having tea
and love together at the husband's expense.  And the English
audience, apparently good honest people, laughed.

The queer cold bewilderment crept closer to him in the entr'acte,
when he paced the lobby with Fran.  The people among whom he was
strolling were so blankly indifferent to him.  In Zenith, he would
have been certain to meet acquaintances at the theater; even in New
York there was a probability of meeting classmates or automobile
men.  But here--He felt like a lost dog.  He felt as he had on the
first day of his Freshman year in college.

And his evening clothes, he perceived, were all wrong.



They went to bed rather silently, Sam and Fran.  He would have
given a great deal if she had suggested that they take a steamer
back to America tomorrow.  What, actually, she was thinking, he did
not know.  She had retired into the mysteriousness which had hidden
her essential self ever since the night when he had first made love
to her, at the Kennepoose Canoe Club.  She was pleasant now--too
pleasant; she said, too easily, that she had enjoyed the play; and
she said, without saying it, that she was far from him and that he
was not to touch her body, her sacred, proud, passionately cared-
for body, save in a fleeting good-night kiss.  She seemed as
strange to him as the London audience at the theater.  It was
inconceivable that he had lived with her for over twenty years;
impossible that she should be the mother of his two children;
equally impossible that it could mean anything to her to travel
with him--he so old and tired and aimless, she so fresh and
unwrinkled and sure.

Tonight, she wasn't forty-two to his fifty-one; she was thirty to
his sixty.

He heard the jesting of Tub Pearson, the friendliness of his
chauffeur at home, the respectful questions of his stenographer.

He realized that Fran was also lying awake and that, as quietly as
possible, her face rammed into her pillow, she was crying.

And he was afraid to comfort her.



CHAPTER 8


Sam had never, for all of Fran's years of urging that it was a
genteel and superior custom, been able to get himself to enjoy
breakfast in bed.  It seemed messy.  Prickly crumbs of toast crept
in between the sheets, honey got itself upon his pajamas, and it
was impossible to enjoy an honest cup of coffee unless he squared
up to it at an honest table.  He hated to desert her, their first
morning in London, but he was hungry.  Before he dared sneak down
to the restaurant, he fussed about, trying to see to it that she
had a proper breakfast.  There was a room waiter, very morose, who
spoke of creamed haddock and kippers.  Now whatever liberalisms
Samuel Dodsworth might have about politics and four-wheel brakes,
he was orthodox about American breakfasts, and nothing could have
sent him more gloomily to his own decent Cream of Wheat than Fran's
willingness to take a thing called a kipper.



No, said Fran, after breakfast, she thought she would stay in bed
till ten.  But he needed exercise, she said.  Why, she said, with a
smile which snapped back after using as abruptly as a stretched
rubber band, didn't he take a nice walk?

He did take a nice walk.

He felt friendly with such old-fashioned shops as were left on St.
James's Street; brick shopfronts with small-paned windows which had
known all the beaux and poets of the eighteenth century: a hat-
making shop with antiquated toppers and helmets in the window; a
wine office with old hand-blown bottles.  Beyond these relics was a
modern window full of beautiful shiny shotguns.  He had not
believed, somehow, that the English would have such beautiful shiny
shotguns.  Things were looking up.  England and he would get along
together.

But it was foggy, a little raw, and in that gray air the aloof and
white-faced clubs of Pall Mall depressed him.  He was relieved by
the sign of an American bank, the Guaranty Trust Company, looking
very busy and cheerful behind the wide windows.  He would go in
there and get acquainted but--Today he could think of no reason; he
had plenty of money, and there had been no time yet for mail to
arrive--curse it!--how he'd like a good breezy letter from Tub
Pearson, even a business letter from the U.A.C., full of tricky
questions to be answered, anything to assure him that he was some
one and meant something, here in this city of traditional,
unsmiling stateliness, among these unhurried, well-dressed people
who so thoroughly ignored him.

The next steamer back--

Too late in life, now, to "make new contacts," as they said in
Zenith.

He realized that Fran's thesis, halfway convincing to him when they
had first planned to go to Europe, her belief that they could make
more passionate lives merely by running away to a more complex and
graceful civilization, had been as sophomoric as the belief of a
village girl that if she could but go off to New York, she would
magically become beautiful and clever and happy.

He had, for a few days, forgotten that wherever he traveled, he
must take his own familiar self along, and that that self would
loom up between him and new skies, however rosy.  It was a good
self.  He liked it, for he had worked with it.  Perhaps it could
learn things.  But would it learn any more here, where it was
chilled by the unfamiliarity, than in his quiet library, in
solitary walks, in honestly auditing his life, back in Zenith?  And
just what were these new things that Fran confidently expected it
to learn?

Pictures?  Why talk stupidly about pictures when he could talk
intelligently about engines?  Languages?  If he had nothing to say,
what was the good of saying it in three languages?  Manners?  These
presumable dukes and dignitaries whom he was passing on Pall Mall
might be able to enter a throne-room more loftily, but he didn't
want to enter a throne-room.  He'd rather awe Alec Kynance of the
U.A.C. than anybody who'd only inherited the right to be called a
king!

No.  He was simply going to be more of Sam Dodsworth than he had
ever been.  He wasn't going to let Europe make him apologetic.
Fran would certainly get notions; want to climb into circles with
fancy-dress titles.  Oh, Lord, and he was so fond of her that he'd
probably back her up!  But he'd fight; he'd try to get her happily
home in six months.

So!

He knew now what he'd do--and what he'd make her do!

He became happy again, and considered the Londoners with a
friendly, unenvious, almost superior air . . . and discovered that
his hat was just as wrong as his evening clothes.  It was a good
hat, too, and imported; a Borsalino, guaranteed by the Hub Hatters
of Zenith to be the smartest hat in America.  But it slanted down
in front with too Western and rakish an air.

And, swearing that he'd let no English passers-by tell him what
HE was going to wear, he stalked toward Piccadilly and into a
hat-shop he remembered having seen.  He'd just glance in there.
Certainly they couldn't SELL him anything!  English people
couldn't sell like Americans!  So he entered the shop and came out
with a new gray felt hat for town, a new brown one for the country,
a bowler, a silk evening hat, and a cap, and he was proud of
himself for having begun the Europeanization which he wasn't going
to begin.



For lunch he invited Hurd--Mr. A. B. Hurd, manager of the London
agency of the Revelation Motor Company, an American who had lived
in England for six years.

Fran was fairly amiable about meeting Mr. Hurd, for the hotel
management had given her the suite which she had demanded, with a
vast sitting-room in blue and gold.

"I was cross, last evening," she said to Sam.  "I felt kind of
lonely.  I was naughty, and you were so sweet.  I'll be good now."

But she couldn't help being a little over-courteous to Hurd when he
came in.

Mr. Hurd was a round-faced, horn-spectacled, heavy-voiced man who
believed that he had become so English in manner and speech that no
one could possibly take him for an American, and who, if he lived
in England for fifty years, would never be taken for anything save
an American.  He looked so like every fourth man to be found at the
Zenith Athletic Club that traveling Middlewesterners grew homesick
just at sight of him, and the homesicker when they heard his good,
meaty, uninflected Iowa voice.  He was proud of being able to say
that the "goods vans with the motors were being shunted," though if
he was in a hurry he was likely to observe that the "goods vans
with the autos were by God being switched."

His former awe of Sam and of the elegance of Fran was lost now in
his superiority as one who certainly did know his England and who
could help these untraveled friends.

He bounded into their suite, shook hands, and crowed:

"Well, by Jove, d'you know you could've doggone near knocked me
down with a feather when I found you folks were in town!  I say, if
you'd just told us you were coming, we'd've been down to the depot
with the town brass band!  By golly, d'you know, Chief, I'm almost
sorry we're going in with the U.A.C.  It's always been a pleasure
to have a straight-shooter like you for boss, and all of us hope
that you're going with the U.A.C. yourself.  Say, maybe we aren't
shoving over what we got left of the old Series V on the
Britishers, too!  Now I don't know what plans you folks have, and
the one thing we learn here in England about handling our guests--"

(Sam wondered if Hurd noticed the sudden rigidity with which Fran
received the suggestion that she could ever be considered a guest
of Mr. A. B. Hurd.)

"--is not to bother 'em, like the Americans do, but let 'em alone
when they want to be let alone.  Now this noon you folks come grab
lunch with me at the Savoy Grill--say, I've got the waiters there
trained, and I'll tell 'em they're not to treat you like ordinary
Americans--they all think I'm English; they think I'm kidding 'em
when I tell 'em I'm a good Yank and proud of it!  And then tomorrow
evening I'll get Mrs. Hurd to come in from the country--we're
living at Beaconsfield, got practically an acre there--and we might
all take in a show.  You folks will enjoy the English stage--real
highbrow actors that know how to talk the English language, not a
lot of these New York roughnecks.  And then maybe next week-end you
might like to come down and stay with us, and I'll drive you around
and show you some real English landscape, and you'll meet some of
the real sure'nough English.  There's a very high-class Englishman
living right near us, in fact he's a knight, Sir Wilkie Absolom,
the famous solicitor, that I know your good lady will fall for
hard, Chief.  Him and I play golf together right along, and I tell
you he's a real democratic guy--he'll take you in and treat you
just like you were English yourselves!"

"I THINK, Mr. Hurd," said Fran, "that we'd better be starting off
and--"  (So sweetly; as to a maid whom she was going to discharge
come Saturday.)  "--we can discuss plans on the way.  You're very
kind to bother with us, but I'm afraid that just these next few
days we're going to be rather horribly busy.  We've already,
unfortunately, accepted a week-end invitation from some old
friends--you see, I lived here a long time, before I was married--
and tomorrow evening we're dining out.  But now let's go and have
lunch, and Sam and you will have such a nice chance to discuss all
the details of the U.A.C.  Just forget that I'm there."

And Hurd was unconscious that anything whatever had happened.

"Huh!  Guess it'd be pretty hard to ever forget YOU were around,
Mrs. Dodsworth!  But I certainly would like to get the real,
honest-to-God low-down on the combine.  And maybe you'll be able to
come out to us for the week-end after that.  One American thing we
do stick to--real central heating!  Maybe won't be as swell as some
of these castles, but lot more comfy all right!"

"Oh, I'm sure of it.  Shall we go now?"

Sam raged within, "I'm not going to stand her highhatting him like
that!  He's being as polite as he can."  And, as heartily as Hurd,
he shouted, "Wait there!  Hold your horses, Fran!  If Hurd is
buying us all this expensive food, we got to give him a cocktail
first.  He'll be our housewarming party here."

He stamped firmly across the floor, rang for a waiter, and ordered
cocktails, ignoring her flashed fury, though he knew that he would
have to pay for it afterward.  But he did hope that Hurd wouldn't
say, drinking, "Well, here's looking at you, Chief!"

Hurd didn't.  He said, "Well, here's mud in your eye!  Ha, ha, ha!
Say, by golly, I guess it's a year since I've heard anybody get
that off!  But there's a few of the good old American expressions a
fellow likes to keep up, even when he's lived as long among the
English as I have.  Well, let's go feed the old faces.  Certainly
is awful' nice to have you folks here.  We must see a lot of each
other."



Not that Fran said anything rude at lunch.  It would have been
better so.  She merely knotted her brows and looked suffering.
Fortunately Hurd did not seem to care; probably he did not look at
her; probably he was one of the American men of whom Fran had
complained that they never bothered to look at a woman of over
nineteen.

Hurd was unflagging.  "Guess you folks would like some American
grub for a change.  I do myself, after all these years here," he
chuckled, and ordered clam chowder, fried chicken, and sugar corn.
"You folks will do fine in this burg," he said.  "You'll meet some
of the best.  I wouldn't wonder if quite a few men in the City
(that's what we call the Wall Street Section, here) have heard of
you, Chief.  And your good lady ought to be able to get along fine
with the ladies here. . . .  Oh yes, you said you were here as a
girl.  Well, you'll find all that coming back to you before long.
Shouldn't wonder if you took to English life quicker'n I did
myself, and say, I took to it like a duck to water.  Of course I'm
a one-hundred-per-cent. American, but I do like English ways, and
this damn' Prohibition--excuse me, Mrs. Dodsworth, but I'm agin
Prohibition--I guess that's about the only subject where I haven't
got any come-back when my English pals razz me about the States.
And the wages for servants here--Say, ain't it simply incredible,
by Jove, what kitchen mechanics expect to get in America, and never
do a lick of work for it!  Sure, you'll like it here.  But say, you
must be sure to not make one mistake that even a lot of high-class
Americans make when they first come over.  Don't ever boast about
how much money you make--"

(Surely Hurd must catch Fran's choke of rage.)

"--because the British think that's what they call putting on side.
Not that you would do that, of course, but I mean--Surprise you how
many of the real bon ton do.  And of course I don't need to suggest
to anybody with a social position like yours, Chief, that you can't
just get to talking to fellows in a hotel bar here, like we would
back home.  Oh, you bet.  I shouldn't wonder if you'd catch onto
English ways even quicker than--Well, as I was saying, I don't want
to intrude on you folks, but it'd be a mighty great pleasure to
give you any hints I can about the British slant on things, and to
start you off with a genuine English bunch of acquaintances."

"It's frightfully kind of you, and it's been such a nice lunch,"
said Fran.  "But do you mind if we run along now?  I'm afraid I'm a
little late for my engagement at the hairdresser's."



When, quite wordless, they had walked through Trafalgar Square, he
snarled at Fran, "Oh, SAY it!"

"Need I?"

"Better get it over!"

"You seem to be saying it to yourself, quite succ