Читать книгу Ann Vickers - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 7
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ОглавлениеPOINT ROYAL COLLEGE FOR WOMEN is a pleasant place of Georgian brick buildings, of lawns and oaks and elms, on the slope of a hill above the Housatonic River, in Connecticut.
Ann Vickers’s father had left her, at his death—he died very quietly and decently, for he was that sort of man—a thousand dollars, all his estate. For the rest of her tuition she waited on table at Dawley Hall, the college dining-room, and corrected papers in sociology.
She was a Junior, now, in the autumn of 1910.
Ann Vickers, aged nineteen, was “appallingly wholesome-looking.” That was her own phrase for it. She was rather tall, large-boned, threatened by fat unless, as she always did, she fought it. Her hair was brown and only by savage attention did she keep it from being mutinous. Her best feature was her eyes, surprisingly dark for her pale skin, and they were eyes that were never blank; they flashed quickly into gayety or anger. Though she was threatened with plumpness about her hips, she had beautiful slim legs, and long hands, very strong. And she, who thought of herself as a quiet person, a field mouse among these splendorous shining girls from Fifth Avenue and Farmington and Brookline, was actually never still, never meek, even to the daughter of a Pittsburgh steel millionaire. She was always being indignant or joyful or deep in sorrow or depressed—in what Lindsay Atwell was later to call her “small mood.” When a play came to Point Royal, and the other girls said “That was a nice show” or “I didn’t think that was so swell,” Ann walked for hours—well, minutes—after it, hating the villain, glorying with the heroine, sometimes loving the hero.
She was, without particularly wanting to be, Important. She was on the basketball team, she was secretary of the cautious Socialist Club, she was vice president of the Y.W.C.A. and, next year, as a Senior, likely to be its president.
For two years she had roomed alone. But this year she was sharing a handsome apartment (it had running water) with Eula Towers, the pale and lovely Eula, given to low lights and delicate colors, to a pale and lovely leaf-green art—a fin de siècle exquisite held over ten years too long. Eula was doing most of the drawings for the Class Annual: portraits of young ladies with swan necks and a certain lack of mammary glands, pre-Raphaelite young ladies, very artistic and pretty dull.
Ann had always admired Eula, and never known her. To Ann, who could bandage a leg bruised at basketball, or fret over the statistics in a sociology paper, or with false jollity reconcile the dreadful controversy in the Y.W. as to whether they should have a joint camp-meeting with Bethel College Y.W., it was overawing that Eula should be able to draw portraits of the faculty, that she should wear five bracelets at once, that she should sometimes wear a turban, and that for the Point Royal Literary Argus she should have written the moving poem:
Night—and the night is dark and full of fear—
Night—and I walk my lonely ways alone—
Oh you are far, and dear—you are too dear—
Under the deadened Moon.
And Eula was rich. Her father was a significant wholesale drug dealer in Buffalo. While Ann insisted on paying her half of the rent, she did let Eula furnish and decorate their two rooms, and what a furnishing, what a decoration that was! Eula was all for fainting pastels and a general escape from the bright exactitudes of the wholesale drug business. They had a study and a bedroom. The study, which she called “the studio,” Eula furnished in black and lavender; gold and lavender Japanese fabrics against the cream-colored plaster walls provided by the unesthetic college authorities; black carpet; a couch, covered with black silk, so wide and luxurious that it was impossible to sit on it without getting a backache; chairs of black-painted wood with lavender upholstery; and pictures and pictures and pictures.... Aubrey Beardsley, Bakst, Van Gogh, a precious signed photograph of Richard Mansfield, and what appeared to be several thousand Japanese prints, not necessarily from Japan.
This groundwork once laid, Eula attended to dimming the light and excluding the air. The three gas-mantel lights, one on each desk and one from the ceiling, she cloaked with triple lavender silk shades. The two good windows, looking on oaks and grassland and far hills, she corrected with curtains of lavender silk and drapes of black velvet.
And on a little table she had a gilded cast-iron Buddha.
Ann was agitated but silent. She fretted that she “didn’t know much about all this art.”
The beauty and wonder complete, Eula glowed to Ann, “Isn’t it lovely! The rooms at Point Royal, oh, they’re so hard and bold, most of ’em. So dreadfully masculine and vulgar and bromidic! We’ll have a real salon, where we can talk and loaf and invite our souls. And dreeeeeam! Now here’s what I plan for the bedroom. Let’s keep the black motif, but have old rose for the subsidiary theme. Black velvet drapes again, but——”
“Now look here!” Ann’s reverence for high and delicate things was gone in a demand for light and fresh air, two of the greatest gods in her small, hard Pantheon, along with courage, loyalty, and the curiosity of an Einstein about what makes the world go. “This room is certainly swell, dear. It certainly looks pretty. Yes, I guess it certainly is pretty. But I’m not going to have any heavy curtains or any swell lamp-shades in the bedroom. I got to have air. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to move my desk in there and study by the window, with just a green glass shade on the lamp. You keep this room. And then in the bedroom we’ll have a coupla cots and a coupla bureaus and a grass rug, and that’s enough.”
Eula smote her breast at this Philistinism. (It was in 1910: they still used the word “Philistine.”) She wailed, like a silver trumpet in a funeral march, “Ann! Oh, my darling! I did it only because I thought you liked—you liked——Oh, if you had only said!”
“Sure, it’s swell to have the sitting-room like this. But gotta have one room to work in. You see how it is!”
“Oh, of course. My darling! Whatever you want!” Eula advanced on Ann like a snake: she clasped Ann to her, kissing her neck. “I just want to do what you want! Anything that my talent can add to your greatness——”
“Oh, stop it! Quit it!” The curious thing is that Ann was more alarmed than angered by this soapy attack. It seemed unholy. With no visible gallantry, she fled. “Got to hustle to the gym,” she grumbled, breaking, away, seizing her tam-o’-shanter.
“I don’t understand it. I don’t like it when girls hug you like that. Gee, I just felt somehow kind of scared. Not nice, like Adolph!” she marveled, on her way to the library.
But after a happy hour with Danby’s Principles of Taxation and Its Relationship to Tariffs, she sighed, “Oh, it’s just one of those idiotic school girl crushes. Just because she kisses you, you get up on your ear. You think you’re so sacred! ... But we’re not going to have any Babylonian—Carthaginian, is it? whatever it is—decorations in the bedroom!”
They didn’t.
Eula, though she squeaked plaintively against windows open on cold nights, declared in company that she was enchanted by “the fine Spartan simplicity of our sleeping-quarters.”
Six girls were in Eula’s “salon,” this third day of their Junior year. The room was not yet completely furnished, but the wide black couch and a few hundred Japanese prints were in place. The six sat about a chafing dish in which Welsh rabbit was evilly bubbling. It was rather like six young gentlemen of Harvard or Yale or Princeton in a dormitory room about a precious bottle of gin in 1932, except that the Welsh rabbit was more poisonous.
They talked—they trilled—they gabbled—they quivered with the discovery of life. The first two years of college, they had been schoolgirls. Now they looked out to the Great World and to the time when they would be Graduates and command thrones and powers and principalities, splendid jobs in the best high schools, or lordly husbands (preferably professional men); when they would travel in France, or perform earnest good-doing upon the poor and uneducated.
“There’s so many girls in the class that just want to get married. I don’t want to get married. To wash a lot of brats and listen to a husband at breakfast! I want a career,” said Tess Morrissey.
It was 1910. They talked then, ardent girls, as though marriage and a “career” were necessarily at war.
“Oh, I don’t! I don’t think it’s quite nice to talk about family life like that!” said Amy Jones. “After all, isn’t civilization founded on the hearthstone? And how could a really nice woman influence the world more than by giving an example to her husband and sons?”
“Oh, rats, you’re so old-fashioned!” protested Edna Derby. “Why do you suppose we go to college? Women have always been the slaves of men. Now it’s women’s hour! We ought to demand all the freedom and—and travel and fame and so on and so forth that men have. And our own spending money! Oh, I’m going to have a career, too! I’m going to be an actress. Like le belle Sarah. Think! The lights! The applause! The scent of—of make-up and all sorts of Interesting People coming into your dressing-room and congratulating you! The magic world! Oh, I must have it.... Or I might take up landscape gardening, I hear that pays slick.”
“I suppose,” Ann snarled, “that if you went on the stage you’d do some plays as well as get applauded!”
“Oh, of course. I’d like to help elevate the stage. It’s so lowbrow now. Shakespeare.”
“Well, I don’t care,” said Mary Vance. “I think Amy is right. It’s all very well to have a career, and I want to keep up my piano and banjo, but I do want to have a home. That’s why you get a swell education—so you can marry a really dandy fellow, with brains and all, and understand and help him, and the two of you face the world just like—like that French king, you remember and his wife.”
“I’m not afraid of the world. I’m going to be a painter. Study. Paris! Oh, dear Paris, gray old town beside the Seine. And canvases that will hang in the salons forever!” opined Eula.
“Yes, and I want to write,” mooned Tess.
“Write what?” Ann snapped.
“Oh, you know. Write! You know—poems and essays and novels and criticisms and all like that. I think I’ll start out reading manuscripts for a publishing house. Or I might take a position on a New York newspaper. I’ve got the cutest idea for an essay right now—about how books are our best friends and never turn you down no matter if you do hit bad luck. But what are you crabbing about? You don’t mean to say you’re going to fall for this husband and hearthside stuff, after getting educated? Aren’t you going to have a career, Ann?”
“You bet your life I am! But where I differ from you dilettantes—you Marys—I always did think Martha got a raw deal that time!—but where I differ is, I expect to work! I want all the cheers and money I can get, but I expect to work for them. Besides! I want to do something that will have some effect on the human race. Maybe if I could paint like Velasquez and make your eyes bung out, or play Lady Macbeth so people would fall off their seats, I’d be crazy to do it, but to paint footling little snow-scenes——”
“Why, Aaann!” from Eula.
“—or play Charles Klein, that’s all goulash! I want to be something that affects people—I don’t know what yet—I’m too ignorant. Maybe a missionary? Or is that just a way of getting to China? Maybe a lady doc? Maybe work in a settlement house? I don’t know. But I want to get my hands on the world.”
“Oh, yes,” that future literary genius, Tess, said virtuously, “of course I want to help people, too. Elevate them.”
“Oh, I don’t mean pass around the coal and blankets and teach the South Sea Islanders to wear pants. I mean——” If Ann was struggling harder than the others to say, to discover for herself, what she meant, it was because in some elementary way she did have something to mean. “It’s like what you get in this new novel by H. G. Wells, this Tono-Bungay. I’d like to contribute, oh, one-millionth of a degree to helping make this race of fat-heads and grouches something more like the angels.”
“Why, Ann Vickers!” said the refined Amy Jones. “Do you think it’s nice to call the human race, that the Bible says were created in God’s image, a bunch of fat-heads?”
“Well, John the Baptist called his hometown folks a generation of vipers. But I don’t think we’re as good as that—we haven’t got as much speed or smoothness as a nice viper. We need more poison, not less. We’re all so—so—so darn soft! So scared of life!”
Into the room slammed Francine Merriweather, and the discussion of the purposes of life, which had become exciting, curled up and died instantly as Francine shrieked, in the manner of Greek tragedy:
“Listen, sistern! What do you think! The Sigma Digamma gang are going to run Snippy Mueller for class president, and Gertie for chairman of the Lit.! We got to do something!”
“Do something!” cried Ann. There was singularly little of the savior of mankind in her now; she was all briskness and fury. “Girls! Let’s put up Mag Dougherty for president! Let’s get busy! And if you don’t mind, I think I’ll just pinch me off the vice-presidency for myself! And we’ll nominate Mitzi Brewer for secretary.”
“Why, you said just yesterday she was nothing but a tart!” wailed Edna Derby.
“Oh,” vaguely, “I didn’t mean it that way. Besides, if we ring her in, prob’ly we’ll get the whole vote of the Music Association. They’re a bunch of simps, but their votes are just as good as anybody else’s.”
“Why, Ann Vickers, you sound like nothing but a politician. I don’t believe you mean a word you said—all about making mankind like H. G. Wells and all that.”
Ann was authentically astonished. “Me? A politician? Why, politicians are horrid! I wasn’t thinking about any politics. I was just thinking about how to get the best class ticket—I mean, the best that we can put over!”
As sharply as practical affairs had cut into their solution of the problems of life, so sharply did a yet more interesting topic cut into politics when the newly come Francine thrilled, “Oh, girls, have any of you met the new European History prof, Dr. Hargis? I saw him in his office.”
“What’s he like?” the maidens cooed in chorus.
“Listen! He’s swell! Be still, my fluttering heart! What the Regents have let in on this nunnery! He’s one of these good-looking red-headed men.”
“Are there any good-looking red-headed men? Women, yes, but men!” sniffed Eula.
“Wait’ll you see this Greek god! The kind of red that’s almost golden. And curly! And lovely gray eyes, and all tanned, like he’d been swimming all summer, and swell shoulders and a grin—oh, how you young Portias are going to fall for him!”
“How old is he?” in a chorus.
“Not over thirty, and they say he’s a Chicago Ph.D., and Germany and everything. I bet he dances like a whiz. Do I take European History? All in favor signify by raising the right hand! The ayes have it!”
But Ann vowed privately, “Then I won’t take European History.... Still, there is that one hole in my curriculum yet.... But I’m not going to have any Greek gods in mine. Men are troglodytes—whatever that is! ... What was it Father used to say: ‘Men is veasels and vimmen is vipers and children is vorms’? No, men are just animals.... But still, I couldn’t stand much of Eula here.... But I’m never going to fall for any male again, as long as I live.... But I do suppose I might consult this Hargis person about the course.”
