Читать книгу Mantrap - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 5

Table of Contents

WHEN Ralph awoke and rolled up the blind, the train was steaming through the Manitoba prairie.

He had seen the immensity of the Alps, he had seen steamers dwarfed in the unending round of ocean, but he had never felt the boundlessness of the world so sharply as now, looking across these level acres broken only by distant farmhouses with scant cottonwood windbreaks. It was a land valiant and young. As he lay relaxed and expectant in his swaying berth, he wanted to ride on forever.

They saw the pleasant city of Winnipeg; they had a night at Bearpaw Junction; then all day long they lumbered through swamp and jack-pine forest on the mixed train to Whitewater, which is on the Flambeau River.

The train had a caboose and an aged passenger car behind the long brown creaking line of freight-cars. Trains had to Ralph been affairs of steel Pullmans, disdaining the country through which they dashed, and it had never occurred to him that it might be agreeable to talk with a trainman. Now he sat in the caboose, tilted back in a wooden chair, and listened to the aged conductor, who had woolly hair in his ears and a drawling endless wisdom in his gossip of weather and government and traveling-men and the reason why wives are, of many, accounted irritable.

It was Woodbury who had secured for them the chance to ride in the caboose, sacred to trainmen, instead of in the crammed passenger car. Woodbury was the sort of man who knew how to get passes to theaters, discounts on tires, and tables in restaurants on a holiday eve. By the time they had been aboard for five minutes, he knew that the conductor had a grandson in business college, he had advised the brakeman regarding his dyspepsia, and moved Ralph and himself into the caboose.

It was like the office of a lumber-camp, the interior of the little red car at the end of the train. There was a desk, a shelf-table which could be folded up against the wall, and hard-looking chairs. Here gathered the aristocracy of the train: the conductor, a traveling salesman for groceries who knew every person and every scandal from Bearpaw to Kittiko, and a real sergeant of the Royal Mounted Police, as good as a movie in his taut scarlet coat, his broad hat, his incredibly well-cut riding breeches.

The train jogged on so slowly, the earth, seen through the open rear door of the car, was so close, that Ralph felt identified with its drowsy strength. He no longer belonged to the hectic city. No, he was one with these brown swamps stretching to a far horizon tragic with black skeletons of trees burned in forest fires. He liked the roughness of the caboose; he was released by it—released from all the stuffy neatness of offices and polite flats. He was strong and serene and ungarrulous; he was—

Then he was highly uncomfortable, jarred out of his reverie by the talk of the policeman.

“Terrible thing—never found his body—must have smashed all to pieces among the rocks—found part of his canoe and a paddle—never could understand how as good a waterman as he was ever tried to shoot Singing Rapids,” the policeman was fretting.

“Wh-what rapids are those?” Ralph mumbled to Woodbury.

“Singing Rapids, on the Mantrap. The sergeant was just telling us about how a half-breed—corking good canoeman he was, too—how he got drowned in ’em.”

Suddenly Ralph knew that he was a coward.

He knew that he was afraid, and deathly afraid, of rapids and of all the unknown risks of the wilderness. And because he was afraid he sought to sound careless as he chuckled:

“Hum. Really? Well, then, I hope we won’t shoot ’em, Wes!”

“No. We go up ’em. Our route is up river.”

“I see. But would, uh—What do you think about that sort of thing? Would you take a chance and try to shoot ’em if they were so kind as to be going our way? And what do you do? Line up ’em, or what?”

“Prob’ly portage around ’em. Time enough to think of that when we come to ’em.... They getting much moonshine up here now, sergeant?” said Woodbury, with booming amiability.

“Time enough to think of them....”

Ralph’s time to think of them, he shuddered, began right now.

“Am I going to be afraid all the while?” he agonized. His joy in adventure had dimmed; it almost vanished as he listened to the chatter, as he heard of wolves, of forest fires, of canoes capsized while sailing on lakes ten miles wide, of canoes sinking in a storm when they struck hidden snags.

And with his dreary apprehensions was a certain boredom.

For nearly four days he had been constantly with E. Wesson Woodbury, and he was a shade weary of that barking laugh, that loud patronage, that story about monkey glands which he had heard now seven times.

“Just as well we’ll have separate canoes. Wes is a prince, but he’s never learned to be quiet,” Ralph sighed; and, “Now if we were in the rapids—if the canoe struck a rock and you had to swim—What if the current banged your head against a rock?”

Thus afraid of being afraid, which is of all fears the most unmanning and pitiful, Ralph sat paralyzed; and hour by tedious hour, as they crept through the dusty jackpines, as the train stopped at every lone wheat-elevator, and switched box-cars for interminable vacuities, his torpor was broken only by irritation at Woodbury’s manly laughter.

It was a relief when the train reluctantly staggered into Whitewater, on the Flambeau River—end of rail, jumping-off place, end of what is called civilization—and it was a relief to see his first rapids and get it over.

The Flambeau crawls like a bloated boa constrictor through the shaggy woods. At the edge of town, beside the railroad, it breaks into the Whitewater Rapids. The whole stream is flung between two black granite bastions, gushing as smoothly as though it were poured from a million-gallon bottle. But below, among the slippery boulders, it is broken up into a welter of milky foam. No canoe could live in that chaos, where the tortured water is dashed up in rainbow-streaked foam, to fall in a curdle of snowy whirlpools.

Yet Ralph was comforted.

Like most silent and too-imaginative men, he was chiefly afraid of what he could not see. He had pictured all rapids as cloaked in menacing darkness, and however turbulent this cataract, it was something real and conquerable, under the light of the tardy northern sun. Swim it?—certainly he could swim it—well, perhaps he could—if he had to!

With a renewed joy of adventure and, tangentially, a renewed liking for E. Wesson Woodbury, he climbed down from the train, his shotgun and fishing-tackle clattering and his new boots making the most touching and satisfactory clump on the plank platform, and came to his first frontier town.