Читать книгу Drink We Deep - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 5

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Extract from the diary of Ann Doring, screen actress.

August 15, 1934

It is really the morning of the sixteenth, but this is the first chance I have had to get my diary up to date. Though it’s going to take simply hours to write down everything, I’m going to do it, because I don’t want to forget the least little bit of what has happened.

Was yesterday a day!

It began, calmly enough, with my driving alone from New York to visit Dick at Camp Wanooka, high in the Helderbergs. It ended with me in a doctor’s waiting room, somewhere in the outskirts of Albany, biting my nails and wondering whether the man I love would live through the night.

The man I love. It still seems queer to write that. Yesterday afternoon Hugh Lambert was only a name to me, and not an important one at that. By midnight I knew that if he died life would have no meaning for me any more.

It was Dick’s fault in the first place. That kid brother of mine wasn’t satisfied with my paying a thousand dollars for his summer at the ritziest boys’ camp in the East; he insisted on my coming up here for him to show me off. The brat knew how to wangle me into it, too. About his second or third letter he started raving about the camp director. This Hugh Lambert had everything. Looks. Strength. Personality. Not only had he been All-American halfback in ’26, but he’d explored half the blank spaces on the map since graduating from Dartmouth. He was managing the camp this summer only to get funds for another expedition to Cambodia or Patagonia or some place like that.

The camp, Dick wrote, was overrun every week-end with the year’s most glamorous debs, but Lambert didn’t give any sign he knew they existed, though he was the cause of their sudden access of sisterly and cousinly affection.

Leave it to those sophisticated youngsters to get on to that. And they did more than gossip about it. When Dick learned I was making a flying trip to New York between pictures, he wired me that he was on the long end of a bet Lambert would break down before the end of the summer, and that he had as good as lost. He begged me as a pal to rush up and save him from going about in rags and tatters all winter.

Now I ask you.

Well, I got to camp just about suppertime. I found Dick brown as a berry, and grown till he was half a head taller than I. I don’t think I would have known him if he hadn’t pounced on me, yelling like a Comanche.

After the family greeting was over, the young nut didn’t even give me a chance to fix up my face but dragged me into the mess hall and right up to the head table where that paragon of his was waiting for the kids to settle down.

I’ll swear Hugh Lambert never knew whether the boys ever did get to their places. He took one look at me and he was sunk. Maybe I didn’t think that was a compliment, too. Not because of the brother’s build-up, either.

That chap knows his women, or I don’t know my men. He hasn’t got that cleft in his chin, and that slow, crinkly smile around his gray quiet eyes for nothing. I knew, right away, that the reason he hadn’t fallen for the society girls was because they just didn’t stack up against the other women in his life, the exotic ones on the other side of nowhere.

I was rather in a daze myself, which was something new for me. The tops among the Hollywood glamour boys have made a play for me without raising my blood pressure two points. But Hugh Lambert is different.

He’s big. I don’t mean physically, though he’s that, too—wide-shouldered and narrow-waisted, his skin a slinky bronze sheath for flat, slithery muscles. But there’s the bigness of all outdoors in him, and a deep, deep, strength that comes from matching oneself against savage nature and overcoming it.

Against savage men, too. His blunt chin chin and one bony cheek are creased by a white scar Dick tells me was made by a Galla assegai.

Well, it was Ann and Hugh right away, as if we’d known each other forever, but what we said didn’t mean anything, because there were others at the table. The head councillor, Ed Hard; a couple of other men whose names I didn’t catch; and the freckle-faced, pug-nosed camp nurse, Edith Horne.

After supper Hugh excused himself. Dick begged me to go to some kind of entertainment in the recreation hall, but I made him carry my bags to my room in the guest house, where he chattered till I chased him out so I could wash up and change to that blue knitted sport suit I had Schiaparelli send over on the Normandie. I had a date, you see, to meet Hugh down by the lake after the kids were tucked away for the night.

He was there before me. A bugle sobbed taps, behind us, and then the quiet settled around us. Not silence. There was the lapping of the water at our feet, the trees whispering to a gentle breeze, the almost rhythmic shrill of a million crickets, but it was all hushed and dreamy, and somehow melancholy.

Lake Wanooka lies deep in a cup of high, wooded hills whose dark bulk shut it in last night so that although Albany is only an hour away civilization seemed as distant as the stars that dusted the soft glow of the sky.

The moon was a great golden half-globe hammocked in a black fold on the mountains’ crest. The shimmering silver film spread over the quiet waters was like limpid music magically visible, and all that nostalgic beauty was just for the two of us. There was no one else in the world.

Hugh’s voice, when at last he spoke, was a deep, throaty murmur. “They’ve waited for us since the beginning of Time, the Old Mountains and the ancient lake.”

“The Old Mountains. The Helderbergs.” Some imp of the perverse made me matter of fact. “Why did the Dutch call them that?”

“Because they are old, the oldest mountains in America next to the Laurentides.”

“And the lake?”

“The lake is almost as ancient. It has neither inlet nor outlet, and its bottom has never been plumbed. The geologists say that as the Great Glacier melted, its waters filled an immensely deep valley here. Fifty thousand year’s ago, that was.”

“Fifty thousand years,” I repeated, feeling creepy and insignificant as I matched that against the sixty or seventy years I might expect to exist.

“It’s a long time Lake Wanooka has been waiting for us to come together on her shore.” Hugh’s arm crept around my waist. “Five hundred centuries, Ann dear.”

He was a fast worker, I thought. Too fast. I’d better put the brakes on. “Who lived here before the ice melted,” I said, laughing. “The Eskimos?”

“No one,” he answered. “No human existed in this region until long after the Ice Age.”^[1]

Just then the echo of my laugh came back from across the glimmering lake. It must have been an echo, but I had an eerie feeling that it was the mountain itself that laughed.

Hugh must have noticed the little shudder that ran through me, because he shrugged me closer to him and asked, very tenderly, “Cold, Ann?”

“Not any more,” I managed, my heart beating against my ribs wildly. “Not....”

His body was suddenly rigid against mine, and I knew he wasn’t listening to me. He was staring at the lake, his brow furrowing.

“What—” I gasped. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s there again.” Hugh wasn’t answering me; he was thinking aloud. “Queer. Damn queer.”

I followed the direction of his eyes. About a hundred feet from the lake’s far end there was a disk of greater luminosity on the water, for all the world as if a searchlight were shining up through it from far below. Within the circumference of that pale glow, the surface was strangely smooth, glistening like silk stretched tight over an embroidery hoop.

“It is queer,” I whispered, not knowing why I whispered. “I never saw anything like it before.”

Just then a tiny black spot marred the silver shimmer, not in but right next to the strange radiance. From where it had been (it was gone at once) something darted toward the shore, an invisible something one was aware of only by the long narrow triangle of its wake creasing the water.

Hugh gulped, swallowed.

I whispered. “What makes that light?”

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. He shook himself, and then he was looking down at me, and his tender smile was crinkling the corners of his eyes, making me warm again, warm all over. “What does it matter what it is? We’re together, and—”

A twig snapped, in the woods behind us! Hugh whirled around to stare into the shadows where the moonlight was shut out by the thick foliage. I was terribly frightened. Then I wasn’t frightened any more but mad. I’d heard a boyish giggle in there, and the hiss of a whisper, quickly hushed.

“Some of those darn kids, prowling around,” Hugh growled. “If I get hold of them....”

“Oh, what’s the difference?” My hand on his arm kept him from diving into the brush, as he was about to do. “Let them have their fun. Come on, we’ll go for a ride in my car.” I had to stop him. I didn’t want him to catch Dickie, though my brother’d hear plenty from me tomorrow.

Of course it was Dick—I’d know that giggle anywhere—and probably the kid with whom he had bet. The merry brats had been spying on us to see who’d win.

“Fine.” Hugh responded to my suggestion. “Come on.” Then he had my arm and we were running up the long campus hill to the little plateau where the camp buildings clustered.

[1]	Editor’s note: Mr. Lambert’s statement agrees with the findings published in Bulletin 33, Smithsonian Institute, bureau of Ethnology, q.v. But cf. Races of Man, J. Deniker, pp. 510, 511, where are mentioned certain eoliths and early paleoliths as dating back before the end of the Pleistocene.

As we were getting near the gate where I had parked my roadster, I asked him a question the reply to which still has me wondering. “Why should a fish breaking water and swimming towards shore startle you, Hugh?”

“It shouldn’t,” he replied. “Except that there are no fish in Lake Wanooka.”

Hugh insisted on driving. I got in alongside him and we started off. The little clearing around the camp entrance was bright under the moon, but when we had crossed that the road dived into the woods, and we were in darkness.

I heard Hugh’s hand fumble at the dashboard, and a click. The headlights didn’t come on. “Oh,” I exclaimed. “The bulbs both went last night. I meant to buy new ones on the way up here, but I forgot. Now we won’t be able to have our ride.” I was almost crying with disappointment.

He must have noticed that, for he said, “Yes, we will. I know this trail so well I can drive it blindfolded, and when we get to the main highway we’ll get some bulbs.”

The road was so narrow the tree boughs met overhead and the underbrush scraped along both sides of the car. After it got around the spur of the hill it pitched steeply downward. I realized how confidently Hugh drove, and then I was rather glad it was so dark. It brought back that feeling of there being just the two of us, and no one and nothing else in all the world.

After a while the road was smoother; Hugh started going faster. I saw, just ahead, the paleness of the concrete highway. It came swiftly toward us—and was blotched out by the black shape of a man who lurched out of the brush right in front of the roadster.

There was a deep ditch on our left, a telegraph pole on our right. Hugh shouted. His right arm shoved me down in the seat as his left twisted the wheel. There was an awful crash, the smash of splintering glass, a scream. I just had time to think, “We’ve hit the pole, but we’ve hit the man too,” when the roadster careened over, flinging me out of it.

Half stunned, I shoved my hands against dirt, pushing myself up. I saw Hugh lying terribly still in the road. I saw his leg plainly in the moonlight. A dark pool was spreading around it, and a stream was feeding that pool, a stream of blood that spurted from his leg, where glass from the windshield gashed it!

Editor’s note: In dealing with this material I shall take no liberties with the actual text but will cut and arrange it so as to present its narrative in a coherent, chronological order. In pursuance of this policy I here omit the balance of Miss Doring’s entry and present the following letter.

A. L. Z.