Читать книгу Mantrap - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 4

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AMONG the Fifth Avenue windows given over to silver cocktail-shakers, emerald bracelets, and gowns direct from the Faubourg St. Honoré, is the magnificent display of Messrs. Fulton & Hutchinson, the great sports outfitters.

It is a camping scene. How green the cotton grass, how aqueous the glass water, how affecting to any exiled Dan’l Boone must be the stuffed blackbird singing a soundless lyric on a lifeless reed. And how necessary for hardy camp-life are the portable radio set, the pneumatic cushion which becomes a life-belt, and the four-burner gasoline stove.

Ralph Prescott stared at this realistic scene reverently, marched into the store, and was directed to the Outing Garments Department, on the seventh floor.

“I’m going to northern Canada, fishing, and I want something durable and quite simple in the way of clothes,” he said modestly to the clerk who glided up.

“Certainly, sir. The entire outfit? May I recommend these whipcord riding-breeches, with laced boots, a real Ouspewidgeon flannel shirt, and a waterproofed canvas jacket with game pockets? Now these breeches, for example, they’ll last a lifetime, and they’re a very nice value at only sixty-eight dollars,” beamed the clerk.

Ralph winced, and squeaked slightly, but let himself be led into them. He chose two pea-soup shirts—one of black and crimson checks, one of green and yellow plaid. He added a bold two-gallon Bill Hart hat with an ornamental leather band, and in a triple mirror he regarded himself in all his bravery.

To Ralph, as to most males, trying on clothes was ordinarily a torture, and the newness of a new suit made everything he had worn before seem frayed and shabby. But out of his camping armor he had all the pleasure of a masquerade. He looked very virile and competent, he told himself. He straightened up with ferocity, he put both fists on his hips with a swagger, then he removed the rimless eyeglasses which took away slightly from his appearance as a tough man of action. At that moment he had no doubt of his competence to shoot rapids, tote three hundred pounds on the portage, and whip the most aggressive Indian.

“I’ll order some big round spectacles, like Wes Woodbury’s—look more outdoorish,” he determined.

The expert clerk, whose training in perilous exploration had not been entirely within the establishment of Messrs. Fulton & Hutchinson, but had included three weeks in a Y.M.C.A. camp on Lake Chautauqua, unloaded upon Ralph a few large red bandannas, coat and trousers and hat of oilskin, self-ventilating gloves, folding slippers, woolen socks especially made by some special firm for some special purpose about which the clerk was a little hazy, high laced boots, low laced boots, and shoes of canvas with rubber soles an inch thick.

By this time Ralph was recalling Wes Woodbury’s tense prayer, “Whatever you do, for the love of Mike keep your outfit small!”

He escaped from the seventh floor after buying, under the clerk’s ardent counsel, a duffle-bag so large that if it were entirely filled no Indian yet born could have carried it across a portage. It was a charming and tricky duffle-bag. It had inside pockets, outside pockets, and topside pockets, each with straps and flaps and delightful little padlocks. It had loops and whorls and thongs. There was only one trouble: the top flap was so ingenious that there was no way of fastening it to prevent its bulging open and admitting all the rains of heaven. Ralph did not discover this until he was in a canoe on Lake Warwick.

The rest of his outfit he purchased on the main floor.

Tents, blankets, canoes, and the like had been arranged for by Woodbury’s friend in Winnipeg, and would be awaiting them at railhead, at Whitewater, so Ralph contented himself with not more than two or three times as many things as he needed.

The sports-specialists managed to unload upon him certain toys which were later to give his Indian guides unmitigated delight: a ball-bearing compass, mosquito dope which the grateful mosquitoes regarded as nectar, an emergency ration of highly condensed and entirely indigestible food-tablets, and an apparatus which was variously a knife, a nail-file, an auger, a corkscrew, a pair of pliers, and a screw-driver. But several objects really were more or less useful on the trail: a magnificent electric torch, a twenty-gauge shotgun, and some small part of the reels, rods, flies, trolling-hooks, and fish-nets which the tackle-expert assured him were necessary.

For a first adventure in outfitting, Ralph had really been very self-denying, when it is considered with what dreadful hypnotized fascination he looked at tents with phonographs and folding ice-boxes and portraits of Roosevelt; at lovely duck-hunting suits of grass, like the costumes of Hawaiian dancers; and compellingly real wax models slumbering with every sign of comfort in eiderdown sleeping-bags.

It was done. Ralph shook hands with six, several clerks and the concierge, and took proud leave. All his purchases went with him in the taxicab. They were too delightful to wait for, and in their knobby suggestive packages they surrounded him on the seat and the floor of the taxi.

At home he did on his armor and stood before the long door-mirror which so recently had frightened him. He was a splendor of wide-brimmed hat, canvas jacket with huge pockets for game—yet uncaught—red and black checked shirt, whipcord breeches, boots, and the startling, the ferocious, spectacles which he had picked up at the oculist’s on the way home.

“Heh! I don’t look so bad! I look like the real thing! I—”

Inexplicably all the magic was shattered, and he was no longer a child playing at being a hero, at being free and swift and strong; he was only a tired scholar on the slope of middle age.

“Hell, I look like Ralph Prescott, dressed up in baggy clothes! I look like amateur theatricals! Those clerks at Fulton & Hutchinson’s are probably laughing themselves sick at me!”

He was suddenly as deep in self-conscious doubt as he had been high in selfless joy. In his costume of the wilds, stained as yet by no streak of mold, no drop of blood, no blot of rain, he sat miserable again and doubtful in a humorless red leather chair.

But out of his melancholy came one fact: He had a friend!

All his life he had known tepid and cautious acquaintances; loyal enough and sufficiently charted, intelligent and easy, but afraid of life, sore afraid of the sacrifices and hot partisanship of veritable friends. And in the same E. Wesson Woodbury at whom he had often laughed as a noisy and shallow fool, he had found the one enduring friendship.

“We’ll have a bully time in the wilds. Wes is a real he-man. He’ll make me get over my confounded cautiousness.”

With a pale reflection of his afternoon’s ecstasy, Ralph began packing. But it had come to him that this expedition might be perilous, and as he fussily arranged his treasures in the vast duffle-bag, he thought of canoes smashed in rapids, of broken legs in the wilderness, of bears prowling about lonely tents, of city weaklings lost in pathless forests.