Dodsworth

DODSW ORTH

COLLIER

DODSWORTH

SINCLAIR LEWIS

DODSW ORTH

P. F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY

NEW YORK

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

428)

DOROTHY

Tue 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 re-

spectable romance.

Three guests had come in these new-fangled automobiles,

for it was now 1903, the climax of civilization. A fourth auto-

mobile 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 unsen-

timental institution, the Zenith Locomotive Works, and in

Yale (class of 1896) he had played better than average foot-

ball, 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 steer-

ing 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, admi-

rable 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 through-

out college, but now Tub had begun to take on an irritable

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2 DODSWORTH

dignity as teller and future president of his father’s bank in

Zenith.

“Tt 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! Dll 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?”

“Ves,”

“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-pos-

sessed voice very cool as she parried the complimentary teas-

ing 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 nine-

teen or twenty, I guess. Golly, they say she speaks German

and French and Italian and Woof-woof and all known lan-

guages.”

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 merchan-

dising. He entertained German professors when they came lec-

turing and looking, and it was asserted that one of the genu-

SAMUEL DopswortH discovered that there was a snowstorm,

neatly 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 resem-

blance to a child trying to slip back into dreams, she furiously

burrowed her eyes into the little lacy pillow, which was crum-

pled 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.

“T’m going to have breakfast in bed you’re smoking before

breakfast again I haven’t had breakfast in bed since yester-

day,” she yawned amiably, ee he swung his thick legs over

DODSWORTH 9

the edge of his lilac satin comforter and lighted a cigarette.

“Ves. 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, ?m getting absent- minded! Tl 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. Tt’ 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.”

‘“hetsl?”

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. Ill wring his neck! ... The

D.A.R. are going to do another pageant. I will mot be Martha