Читать книгу Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 39

III

For the Digamma Ball, the University Armory was extremely decorated. The brick walls were dizzy with bunting, spotty with paper chrysanthemums and plaster skulls and wooden scalpels ten feet long.

In six years at Mohalis, Martin had gone to less than a score of dances, though the refined titillations of communal embracing were the chief delight of the co-educational university. When he arrived at the Armory, with Leora timorously brave in a blue crepe de chine made in no recognized style, he did not care whether he had a single two-step, though he did achingly desire to have the men crowd in and ask Leora, admire her and make her welcome. Yet he was too proud to introduce her about, lest he seem to be begging his friends to dance with her. They stood alone, under the balcony, disconsolately facing the vastness of the floor, while beyond them flashed the current of dancers, beautiful, formidable, desirable. Leora and he had assured each other that, for a student affair, dinner jacket and black waistcoat would be the thing, as stated in the Benson, Hanley and Koch Chart of Correct Gents’ Wearing Apparel, but he grew miserable at the sight of voluptuous white waistcoats, and when that embryo famous surgeon, Angus Duer, came by, disdainful as a greyhound and pushing on white gloves (which are the whitest, the most superciliously white objects on earth), then Martin felt himself a hobbledehoy.

“Come on, we’ll dance,” he said, as though it were a defiance to all Angus Duers.

He very much wanted to go home.

He did not enjoy the dance, though she waltzed easily and himself not too badly. He did not even enjoy having her in his arms. He could not believe that she was in his arms. As they revolved he saw Duer join a brilliance of pretty girls and distinguished-looking women about the great Dr. Silva, dean of the medical school. Angus seemed appallingly at home, and he waltzed off with the prettiest girl, sliding, swinging, deft. Martin tried to hate him as a fool, but he remembered that yesterday Angus had been elected to the honorary society of Sigma Xi.

Leora and he crept back to the exact spot beneath the balcony where they had stood before, to their den, their one safe refuge. While he tried to be nonchalant and talk up to his new clothes, he was cursing the men he saw go by laughing with girls, ignoring his Leora.

“Not many here yet,” he fussed. “Pretty soon they’ll all be coming, and then you’ll have lots of dances.”

“Oh, I don’t mind.”

(“God, won’t somebody come and ask the poor kid?”)

He fretted over his lack of popularity among the dancing-men of the medical school. He wished Clif Clawson were present—Clif liked any sort of assembly, but he could not afford dress-clothes. Then, rejoicing as at sight of the best-beloved, he saw Irving Watters, that paragon of professional normality, wandering toward them, but Watters passed by, merely nodding. Thrice Martin hoped and desponded, and now all his pride was gone. If Leora could be happy—

“I wouldn’t care a hoot if she fell for the gabbiest fusser in the whole U., and gave me the go-by all evening. Anything to let her have a good time! If I could coax Duer over—No, that’s one thing I couldn’t stand: crawling to that dirty snob—I will!”

Up ambled Fatty Pfaff, just arrived. Martin pounced on him lovingly. “H’lo, old Fat! You a stag tonight? Meet my friend Miss Tozer.”

Fatty’s bulbous eyes showed approval of Leora’s cheeks and amber hair. He heaved, “Pleasedmeetch—dance starting—have the honor?” in so flattering a manner that Martin could have kissed him.

That he himself stood alone through the dance did not occur to him. He leaned against a pillar and gloated. He felt gorgeously unselfish. . . . That various girl wallflowers were sitting near him, waiting to be asked, did not occur to him either.

He saw Fatty introduce Leora to a decorative pair of Digams, one of whom begged her for the next. Thereafter she had more invitations than she could take. Martin’s excitement cooled. It seemed to him that she clung too closely to her partners, that she followed their steps too eagerly. After the fifth dance he was agitated. “Course! she’s enjoying herself! Hasn’t got time to notice that I just stand here—yes, by thunder, and hold her scarf! Sure! Fine for her. Fact I might like a little dancing myself—And the way she grins and gawps at that fool Brindle Morgan, the—the—the damnedest—Oh, you and I are going to have a talk, young woman! And those hounds trying to pinch her off me—the one thing I’ve ever loved! Just because they dance better than I can, and spiel a lot of foolishness—And that damn’ orchestra playing that damn’ peppery music—And she falling for all their damn’ cheap compliments and—You and I are going to have one lovely little understanding!”

When she next returned to him, besieged by three capering medics, he muttered to her, “Oh, it doesn’t matter about me!”

“Would you like this one? Course you shall have it!” She turned to him fully; she had none of Madeline’s sense of having to act for the benefit of observers. Through a strained eternity of waiting, while he glowered, she babbled of the floor, the size of the room, and her “dandy partners.” At the sound of the music he held out his arms.

“No,” she said. “I want to talk to you.” She led him to a corner and hurled at him, “Sandy, this is the last time I’m going to stand for your looking jealous. Oh, I know! See here! If we’re going to stick together—and we are!—I’m going to dance with just as many men as I want to, and I’m going to be just as foolish with ’em as I want to. Dinners and those things—I suppose I’ll always go on being a clam. Nothing to say. But I love dancing, and I’m going to do exactly what I want to, and if you had any sense whatever, you’d know I don’t care a hang for anybody but you. Yours! Absolute. No matter what fool things you do—and they’ll probably be a plenty. So when you go and get jealous on me again, you sneak off and get rid of it. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself!”

“I wasn’t jealous—Yes, I was. Oh, I can’t help it! I love you so much. I’d be one fine lover, now wouldn’t I, if I never got jealous!”

“All right. Only you’ve got to keep it under cover. Now we’ll finish the dance.”

He was her slave.