Читать книгу Ann Vickers - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 4

Table of Contents

WAUBANAKEE did not vastly care for the newly come cobbler, Oscar Klebs, father of the dashing Adolph. In Ann’s childhood, the prairie towns, from Zanesville to Dodge City, still had no notion that they were part of the Great World. They felt isolated—they were isolated.

Oh, it was all right to be German (only they said “Dutch”) like Oscar Klebs.

“There’s some darn’ good Dutchmen, by golly—just as good as you and me. Take the priest of the German Catholic Church. Course a lot of his congregation are dumm Dutch farmers, but he’s a real guy, he certainly is, and they say he’s studied in Rome, Italy, and a lot of these places. But believe me, he hasn’t got any more use for these darn Europeans than I have. But now this Dutch shoemaker, this fellow Klebs, they say he’s a Socialist, and I want to tell you, we haven’t got any room in this country for a bunch of soreheads that want to throw a lot of bombs and upset everything. No sir, we haven’t!”

But it chanced that the only other cobbler in town was a drunken Yankee who could never be trusted to half-sole shoes in time for the I.O.O.F. dance on Saturday evening, and, regretfully, irritably, the reigning burghers of Waubanakee took their work to a man who was so anarchistic as to insist, even right at the bar of the Lewis & Clarke Tavern, that the Stokeses and Vanderbilts had no right to their fortunes.

They were cross with him.

Mr. Evans, president of the Lincoln and Douglas Bank, said testily, “Now I’ll tell you, Klebs. This is a land of opportunity, and we don’t like these run-down and I might say degenerate Europeans telling us where we get off. In this country, a man that can do his work gets recognition, including financial, and if I may say so, sir, without being rude, you can’t hardly say it’s our fault if you haven’t made good!”

“By golly, sir, that’s right!” said the hired man for Lucas Bradley.

Professor Vickers was dimly astonished when Ann brought her everyday shoes to him and complained, “Papa, these need half-soling.” Customarily, Ann was unconscious of worn soles, missing buttons, or uncombed hair.

“Well, my little girl is beginning to look after her things! That’s fine! Yes, you take ’em around tomorrow. Have you done your Sunday school lesson?” he said, with the benign idiocy and inconsequentiality characteristic of parents.

This was on Sunday, the day after the miraculous appearance of Adolph Klebs, the king-Columbus. On Monday morning, at eight, Ann took the shoes to Oscar Klebs, in his new shop which had formerly been the Chic Jewelry Store (the first word to rhyme with Quick). On the shelf above his bench, there was already a row of shoes with that curiously human look that empty shoes maintain—the knobbly work-shoes of the farm-hand, with weariness in every thick and dusty crease, the dancing slippers of the slightly dubious village milliner, red and brave in the uppers but sleazy and worn below. Of these, Ann saw nothing. She stared at Oscar Klebs as she had stared at his son Adolph. He was quite the most beautiful old man she had ever seen—white-bearded, high and fine of forehead, with delicate pale blue veins in a delicate linen skin.

“Good-morning, young lady,” said Oscar. “And what can I do for you?”

“Please, I would like to get these shoes half-soled. They’re my everyday shoes. I got on my Sunday shoes!”

“And why do you wear a different pair for Sundays?”

“Because it is the Sabbath.”

“And isn’t every day the Sabbath for people that work?”

“Yes, I guess it is.... Where’s Adolph?”

“Did you ever stop to think, young lady, that the entire capitalist system is wrong? That you and I should work all day, but Evans, the banker, who just takes in our money and lends it back to us again, should be rich? I do not even know your name, young lady, but you have luffly eyes—I t’ink intelligent. T’ink of it! A new world! From each so much as he can give, to each so much as he needs. The Socialist state! From Marx. Do you like that, young lady? Hein? A state in which all of us work for each other?”

It was perhaps the first time in the life of Ann Vickers that a grown-up had talked to her as an equal; it was perhaps the first time in her life that she had been invited to consider any social problem more complicated than the question as to whether girls really ought to throw dead cats over fences. It was perhaps the beginning of her intellectual life.

The little girl—she was so small, so innocent, so ignorant!—sat with her chin tight in her hand, in the terrible travail of her first abstract thinking.

“Yes,” she said, and “Yes.” Then, thought like lightning in her brain, “That is what we must have! Not some rich and some poor. All right! But, Mr. Klebs, what do we do? What shall I start doing now?”

Oscar Klebs smiled. He was not a smiling man—he suffered, as always the saints have suffered, because Man has not become God. But now he almost grinned, and betrayed himself, chuckling:

“Do? Do, my young lady? Oh, I suppose you’ll just go on talking, like me!”

“No,” she said pitifully. “I don’t want to just talk! I want Winthrop Zeiss to have as nice a house as Mr. Evans. Golly! He’s lots nicer, Winthrop is. I want to——Gee, Mr. Klebs, I’d like to do things in life!”

The old man stared at her, silently. “You will, my dear, God bless your soul!” said he—the atheist. And Ann forgot to ask again about the glorious Adolph.

But she did see Adolph, and often.

Oscar Klebs’s shop became her haunt, more thrilling even than the depot, where every afternoon at five all detachable children gathered to watch the Flyer go through to Chicago. Oscar told her of a world that hitherto had been colored but flat, a two-dimensional mystery in the geography; of working in 1871 in a lumber camp in Russia—where some day there would be a revolution, he said—of the Tyrol (he combined with atheism an angry belief that in the stables of the Tyrol the cows do talk aloud at Christmas midnight)—of carp that come up and ask you for crumbs in the pool at Fontainebleau—of the walls of Cartagena, which are ten feet thick and filled with gold hidden there by pirates—of the steamers on which he had sailed as mess-boy, and what scouse is like in the fo’c’sle—of the lone leper who sits forever on the beach in Barbados, looking out to sea and praying—of what sort of shoes the Empress Eugénie wore—of prime ministers and tavarishes and yogis and Iceland fishermen and numismatists and Erzherzogen and all manner of men unknown to Waubanakee, Illinois, till the Socialism to which Oscar converted her was not very clearly to be distinguished from the romance of Kipling.

And while he talked to the ruddy girl, on her stool, her eyes exalted, Oscar Klebs kept up a tat-tat-tat, tat-tat-tat, like a little drum.

And Adolph came in.

He never sat down. It was hard to think of that steel spring of a boy ever sitting. He belonged not to the sedentary and loquacious generation of his father, but to a restless new age of machinery, of flashing cam-shafts, polished steel, pistons ramming gayly into a hell of exploding gas, dynamos humming too deep for words. Had he been a boy in 1931 instead of 1901, he would have responded to all his father’s ponderous propositions with “Oh, yeah?” But in 1901 his “Yuh, sure!” was equally impertinent, sharp, and antagonistic to fuzzy philosophizing. Tall, mocking, swift, leaning against doors and walls as though he were about to leap, his hands ever in his pockets, he was to Ann Vickers the one perfect hero she had ever known.

Now the theory was that Ann was being respectably educated by her father and mother, by the Waubanakee public schools, and the Sunday school of the First (and only) Waubanakee Presbyterian Church, with the select and frilly children of Banker Evans for social guidance. Actually it was from the cobbler and his son, and from her father’s vices of paying debts and being loyal, that she learned most of what she was ever to know, and all this was dual and contradictory, so that she was herself to be dual and contradictory throughout her life. From old Oscar she learned that all of life was to foresee Utopia; from Adolph she learned that to be hard, self-contained, and ready was all of life.

Sitting by the Waubanakee River (which was no river, but a creek) she once or twice tried to tell Adolph what she regarded as her ideas:

That Oscar was right, and we must, preferably immediately, have a Socialist state in which, like monks, we labor one for another.

That it wasn’t a bit nice to drink beer, or to appear in certain curious revelations, behind barns, of the differences between little boys and little girls.

That algebra was pretty slick, once you got onto it.

That the Idylls of the King by Mr. Lord Tennyson was awful exciting.

That if Jesus died for us—as, of course, He did—it was simply horrid of us to sleep late on Sunday, and not take our baths in time to get to Sunday school.

Adolph smiled always while she was earnestly talking. He smiled while his father was talking. All his life he was to smile while people were talking. But it cut Ann and made her a little timid. She did mean, so intently, the “ideas” which she babbled forth—on a sand barge, by a slow river flowing in the shadow of willows that slowly waved in the tepid August airs.

If his supercilious smile was really from a higher wisdom, fitted to the steel of the machine age, or if it was only a splendidly total lack of intellect, neither Ann nor any one else will ever know. Some day he was to be the manager of a fairly good garage in Los Angeles, and Oscar to sleep irritably in the Catholic Cemetery of Waubanakee, Illinois.

Even without old Oscar, Ann would never have been completely a conformist. In Sunday school in the Girls’ Intermediate Class (teacher, Mrs. Fred Graves, wife of the owner of the lumber yard) she first exploded as a feminist.

The lesson was of the destruction of Sodom, with the livelier portions of the tale omitted. Mrs. Graves was droning, drowsy as a bumblebee, “But Lot’s wife looked back at the awful city instead of despising it; and so she was turned into a pillar of salt, which is a very important lesson for us all, it shows us the penalty of disobedience, and also how we hadn’t ought to even look at or hanker for wicked things and folks. That’s just as bad as if we actually had something to do with them or indulged——”

“Please, Mrs. Graves!” Ann’s voice, a little shrill. “Why shouldn’t Mrs. Lot look back at her own hometown? She had all her neighbors there, and maybe she’d had some lovely times with them. She just wanted to say good-bye to Sodom!”

“Now, Annie, when you get wiser than the Bible——! Lot’s wife was disobedient; she wanted to question and argue, like some little girls I know! See, it says in Verse 17: ‘Look not behind thee.’ That was a divine command.”

“But couldn’t the Lord change her back into a lady again, after He’d been so cranky with her?”

Mrs. Graves was becoming holy. Her eyes glittered, her eyeglasses quivered on their hook on her righteous brown-silk bosom. The other girls crouched with the beginnings of fear—and giggling. Ann felt the peril, but she simply had to understand these problems over which she had fretted in “getting” the Sunday school lesson.

“Couldn’t the Lord have given her another chance, Mrs. Graves? I would, if I was Him!”

“I have never in my life heard such sacrilegious——”

“No, but—Lot was awful mean! He never sorrowed and carried on about Mrs. Lot a bit! He just went off and left her there, a lonely pillar of salt. Why didn’t he speak to the Lord about it? In those days folks were always talking to the Lord; it says so, right in the Bible. Why didn’t he tell the Lord to not be so mean and go losing His temper like that?”

“Ann Emily Vickers, I shall speak to your father about this! I have never heard such talk! You can march yourself right out of this class and out of this Sunday school, right now, and later I’ll talk to your father!”

Stunned, anarchistic with this early discovery of Injustice yet too amazed to start a riot, Ann crawled down the church aisle, through an innumerable horde of children giggling and sharpening their fingers at her shame, into a world where no birds sang; a Sabbath world of terrible and reproving piety. Her indignation was stirring, though, and when she reached home, to find her father just dressed for church, shoe-shined, bathed, and wearing the Prince Albert, she burst out with the uncensored story of her martyrdom.

He laughed. “Well, it doesn’t sound very serious to me, Annie. Don’t worry about what Sister Graves will say.”

“But it’s very important about how that nasty man Lot acted! I got to do something!”

He was opening the front door, still laughing.

She fled through the kitchen, past the hired girl, astonished in her cooking of the regulation fricasseed chicken, through the back yard, to the path up Sycamore Hill. She scolded to herself, “Yes, it’s men like Lot and the Lord and my Dad—laughing!—that make all the trouble for us women!” She did not look around; she kept her sturdy back toward the village till she had dog-trotted halfway up the hillock.

She swung about, held out her hands to the roofs of Waubanakee, and cried, “Farewell, farewell! Sodom, I adore thee! All right, God!” And she raised expectant eyes to Heaven.