Dodsworth

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 newfangled 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.

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 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?”

It was a complete triumph, there in the taxicab.

He came radiantly into their suite. On the couch, crushing her golden evening wrap, Fran lay sobbing.

He gaped from the doorway five full seconds before he chucked his opera hat at the table, dashed to her, plumped down on the couch, and cried:

“What is it? Sweet! What is it?”

She convulsively raised her face just enough to burrow it against his knee while she whimpered:

“I’ve always said⁠—oh, damn!⁠—I’ve always said it was really a compliment to a woman to be what they call ‘insulted.’ Well, maybe it is, but oh, Sam, I don’t like it! I don’t! Oh, I want to go home! Or anyway leave England. I can’t face it. Probably it was my fault that⁠—

“No, it wasn’t! I swear it wasn’t! I never gave him the slightest, littlest excuse to suppose that His Grace⁠—Oh, God, how I hate that man! He’s so supercilious, and what about? I ask you, what about? What is the fool after all but a failure, an international hobo? Even if his cousin is the real thing! What is he? I ask you!

“It was like this. Oh, Sam, Sam darling, I hate to tell you, because I must have been at fault⁠—partly. It was after the opera.

Fran was articulate enough about it. She half stood up in the taxi, crying, “Oh, look, Sam, look! Isn’t it adorable! Isn’t it too exciting! Oh, the darling funny little zincs! And the Cointreau ads, instead of chewing gum! These bald-faced high white houses! Everybody so noisy, and yet so gay! Oh, I adore it!”

But for Sam it was a motion picture produced by an insane asylum; it was an earthquake with a volcano erupting and a telephone bell ringing just after he’d gone to sleep; it was lightning flashes and steam whistles and newspaper extras and war.

Their taxicab, just missing an omnibus, sliding behind its rear platform. A policeman, absurdly little, with an absurd white baton. Two priests over glasses of beer at a café. Silver gray everywhere, instead of London’s golden brown. Two exceedingly naked plaster ladies upholding a fifth-story balcony. Piles of shoddy rugs in front of a shop, and beside them a Frenchman looking utterly content with his little business, instead of yearning at the department store opposite and feeling guilty as he would in New York or Chicago or Zenith. Fish. Bread. Beards. Brandy. Artichokes. Apples. Etchings. Fish. A stinking-looking alley. A splendid sweeping boulevard. Circular tin structures whose use he dared not suspect and which gave him a shocking new notion of Latin proprieties and of the apparently respectable and certainly bearded gentlemen who dashed toward them. Many books, bound in paper of a thin-looking yellow.