Читать книгу Mantrap - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 6

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WHITEWATER was once a sawmill town of fifteen hundred persons. But the patriotic lumber company has slashed away all the timber, that is, all the timber that was not carelessly burned, and the place has dwindled to a hundred souls—a cluster of tumbling shanties in a prickly wilderness of stumps and bogs.

The chief adornment is a tall iron sawmill chimney, covered with a dome of wire netting to keep in the sparks. But the chimney is ruined now and likely to collapse in the next storm. The secondary pride of Whitewater, rising loftily among the tar-paper shanties, is the Bunger House: Meals and Lodging.

It rises three whole stories. It has never been painted, and the dinginess of its gray clapboards is broken only by the clean yellowness of such new boards as Mr. Bert Bunger has been compelled to tack on to keep out the rain. Most of its windows are broken. Where once the lumber kings, or at least lumber knights, had suites of two rooms (both without bath—one room to sleep in and one to play poker), where once the dining-hall banged to the tread of lumberjacks’ clogs, now Mr. Bunger is lucky if he has a single roomer, and six mealers festive over the pork and beans.

But Mr. Bunger in poverty cannot forget that once he was powerful. It hurts him to have to do anything for guests. It disturbs his games of solitaire and his sense of seigniory to receive perfect strangers.

Ralph and Woodbury were to spend the night here before taking the river steamer Emily C. Just up the Flambeau River to Kittiko, where they would finally embark in canoes. They came mildly into the office of the Bunger House. Behind them was the sergeant of Mounted Police, as respectful as they. The Royal Mounted are not noted for timidity, but Mr. Bert Bunger was the only person in Whitewater who could provide food and lodging.

The office was rather like a pigsty. Then again it was like an attic filled with furniture of 1870. It was a largish room. On one side was a pile of rickety chairs and warped tables. Beside them was a porcelain bathtub, indecently public. Probably somebody had intended to install it in a room upstairs and connect it with water-pipes sometime; probably nobody ever would connect it with anything any time. (It must not be supposed that it was the only bathtub in the house. There was one other, in a room the key of which Mr. Bunger had chronically lost. But this was a scaly structure of tin with peeling paint, an extraordinarily rough object for plump and meditative persons to sit in.)

The rest of the office was agreeably filled with a pool-table of torn green cloth, a round pine table on which rested, for hotel library, a copy of the Montreal Star of six weeks ago, and the grained pine counter behind which Mr. Bunger played solitaire with cards over which soup—at least—must have been spilled.

Of the dust in corners, of the spider-webs in electroliers without electricity, of the general mixture of red mud, sawdust, and cigarette butts, it would not be refined to speak.

As Woodbury and Ralph and the sergeant filed up to the desk, Mr. Bunger raised his head in irritation.

“Could we get a couple of rooms for tonight, and supper?” inquired Woodbury, in his most flamboyant good-fellowship.

Mr. Bunger (and a skinny little man he was) carefully placed the nine of spades upon the eight thereof, dusted his hands, looked learned, placed the ten upon the nine, looked up again, and groaned, “Huh?”

“We’d like two rooms, and I guess the sergeant wants one. Be all right, eh, all right?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” sighed Mr. Bunger. “Will you guys register? Now who the hell has taken that register away? Somebody always monkeying with things here! I’m getting good and tired of it!”

Ralph, genially permitted by Mr. Bunger to carry his own bag and find his own room, discovered that it had most of the legal equipment of hotel rooms, namely a bed, a bureau, and a chair, though the bed was of so sensitive a nature that it squeaked when he merely looked at it, the bureau drawers would not open, and the lone chair had been unsuccessfully repaired with fence-wire. But one thing generally found in hotel rooms it did vigorously lack: breathable air. He found that the window had been nailed down. As a substitute for air there was an ancient scent of pink soap, crushed insects, and moldy linen.

He dumped his duffle-bag on the floor, took out only a handkerchief or two, and fled into the corridor.

Woodbury was fleeing with him. They met at the stairs.

“Fierce place! I think I’ll tell Brother Bunger how much I love him before we leave here,” growled Woodbury, and Ralph admired him again for that surly hardihood.

It was half-past five now, and the Bunger supper was at six. But they had to see that their Indian guides, their canoes and tents, had arrived. Ralph lost the feeling of desolation which had oppressed him, as they passed through the street of rotting log cabins and crazy shacks and came to a camp of white tents and wigwams in the shadow of jackpines.

“I really am in the North, among Indians!” he exulted.

Their Indian guides, who had come on by themselves from Bearpaw, escorting the supplies, were encamped with a band of Crees. When Woodbury inquired for them, they came filing out of their tent.

Ralph Prescott had been brought up on the Fenimore Cooper tradition of Indians. He expected all of them to look like the chieftain on the buffalo nickel, like the statue which in all proper parks stands between Goethe in marble and General Sherman in bronze—a sachem eagle-nosed, tall, magnificently grave. His heart was pinched as he saw shambling toward them four swart and runty loafers, introduced as Jesse, Louey, Charley, and Nick.

They did not look in the least like lords of the wilderness engaged in watching, under lean shadowing hands, the flight of a distant eagle. They looked like undersized Sicilians who had been digging a sewer, and their only human expression was their supercilious, self-conscious grins. Feathers and blankets they wore not, but rusty black suits from the cheaper kind of white man’s back-street shops. The one sign of Indian art was their moccasins and one hectic bead belt displaying the Union Jack. They spoke only Cree, except for Charley, an older Indian who could do well enough with English when he was not too bored.

Ralph was regretful that Woodbury had taken Charley for his own canoe, leaving himself in the hands of two smoky men whose language was as intelligible as that of a woodchuck. Still, Woodbury was the captain of the fleet; he would have to take the lead—

Woodbury was greeting the Indians with boisterousness: “Well, well, well, boys! Here we are! Ready to pull out tomorrow! Got all our stuff on the steamer?”

Charley grunted, “No, not yet.”

“Then what are you doing hanging around your tent? Got most of it aboard?”

“No-uh.”

“Got any of it?”

“Not ye-et.”

“Not yet! Not yet! Not yet! What do you think this is? Why didn’t you—What’s your explanation?”

Charley exchanged with the others a glance half sheepish, half amused at the rage of the tenderfoot over the insignificant matter of catching a steamer this week or next or a month after. Crees were not made for clocks. When Woodbury had finished his raving, ending with a powerful “And you get busy right now,” Charley pacifically answered, “All right.” He lounged toward the pile of supplies, contentedly followed by the others.

Charley was a moral man and a great canoe-steerer, but he was only fifty, he had only thirty-five years of experience in guiding white men. He was perfectly willing to do anything he was asked, but he never, by any chance, remembered to perform such duties as pitching tents or preparing meals or bailing out a canoe with three inches of frigid water gurgling about the miserable feet of his employer until he was reminded.

Woodbury’s rage made him take the longer in checking up their supplies, heaped under a tarpaulin: tent, blankets, canoes, paddles, sails, motor, gasoline, food. It was nearly seven when he finished barking items for Ralph, who looked like a diffident bookkeeper, to mark off on the list, and they started back to the Bunger House. As they entered the disheveled lobby, Mr. Bert Bunger, in shirt-sleeves and sweat-stained suspenders, picking his teeth and scratching his head, was resting from innumerable labors, tilted in a chair with his feet on the decayed billiard table.

Woodbury was cheerful now, and he boomed fondly at Mr. Bunger, “Supper ready?”

“Yeh—and et!”

“We better wash and skip in.”

“Wash all you want to, and skip all you want to, but you don’t get no supper here, not this time o’ night! Supper’s over.”

“Supper’s ov-er—at six-forty?”

“Supper’s ov-er!”

“Then have the cook shake us up something.”

“I will not have the cook shake you up nothing! The cook’s had all the work he wanted, feeding these hogs of railwaymen and teamsters, without working till midnight for a bunch of galoots that haven’t got the savvy to come to their meals on time. I’m the cook!”

“Then why didn’t you call us? We were at the Indian camp, not a hundred yards—”

“I’ve got enough to do, without going out and hunting for folks that’re too lazy to come to meals.”

“Then where can we get something to eat?”

With delicious enjoyment, punctuating his drawl by sucking his toothpick, Mr. Bunger drawled, “No place a-tall!”

“Then by thunder—”

Woodbury was off again. He shouted, he shook his fist; he would have the law on Bunger; if they didn’t have supper at once, he would do something dreadful.

The dirty little man looked at him with contempt. Suddenly Ralph had enough of this dog-fight.

“Oh, don’t make so much noise!” he snarled at Woodbury; then, apologetically, “I mean—there’s no use talking to a swine like this.”

“Who you calling a swine?” yapped Bunger. “You better be careful who you go calling names around here!”

As to the shooting of rapids, Ralph might be timorous enough, but he was accustomed to handling angry men and threatening men in courtrooms, and he ignored Bunger with a disdain more infuriating than words, as he continued to Woodbury:

“No use wasting time on this poor white trash. It’s his inn—such as it is. Can’t force him to cook after hours. Let’s have our Indians prepare some bacon, and have ’em put up the tent. We’ll take our stuff out of the rooms here and camp tonight.”

“You can,” bawled Mr. Bunger, “sleep in your tent all you damn’ want to, but you’ll pay for your rooms! You registered. It’s the law!”

Woodbury emitted a portentous “Oh, it is, is it!” but Ralph cut him off with a sharp, “And I’m a lawyer! See here, my man!” (But that was a mistake. Bunger was so far down in the social scale that he didn’t even know he was being insulted by “my man.”) “The Mounted Police sergeant is over at the railway station. Just go to the door and shout for him, will you? Please ask him to arrest us for jumping our board-bill. Please! And then you listen while I ask him a few things about the lex talionis nisi sub super cum poena, code 47! Just call him, will you, while we go up and pack!”

Woodbury was swelling with desire to spoil the chill judicial effect by throwing another of his rotund and pumpkin-like orations into the debate, but Ralph held him with an unfriendly eye, with a sound halfway between a grunt and an exasperated sigh, and led him to their sour-smelling rooms.

“That was a good bluff you threw,” Woodbury admitted. “By golly, I’d rather pay a hundred-dollar fine and a lawyer’s fee than give him the three dollars for our rooms!”

“Yes. Lawyers love to hear people talk like that,” said Ralph. “I wouldn’t. And it isn’t the principle of the thing—it’s the hundred dollars. But I’ll do that hog out of anything I can.”

“You called him fine! Great stuff! He won’t dare holler for the sergeant. That was a bully stunt of yours, to walk out on him. He won’t do a thing.”

Woodbury was for the first time adoring—and Ralph liked his pompous adoration as little as he had liked his undisciplined rage.

“Come in my room. Look,” said Ralph. He pointed to the station platform a few yards away, where the sergeant of Mounted Police was talking to the local Provincial Policeman. In a moment he saw the raging Bert Bunger—but respectable now, with his coat on and even an aged tie—run across to the two functionaries.

“Bluff’s called!” said Ralph. “Nothing we can do, I fancy. We registered, and got in too late for supper. Let’s move anyway, and not let him make anything on our breakfasts. But we pay for the rooms.”

Woodbury was instantly the oratorical business man, going-to-by-golly-do-something-about-it.

“We do not pay! If any man thinks he can get away with the stuff that fellow’s trying to pull on us in this God-forsaken rat-hole, then let me tell you, let me tell you—”

Ralph left him abruptly, stalked downstairs, to meet Bunger and both the policemen as they entered the lobby.

Bunger shouted at him, “Now we’ll see—” But Ralph ignored him, and of the Mounted Policeman, who looked sympathetic, he demanded, “From what I’ve heard of Canadian law, you have certain magisterial powers?”

“Yes.”

“Then will you permit me to treat you as the court, and pay you the three dollars which we owe for the two rooms which we shall not occupy? You know the opinion that every decent person must have of this man. I hate to trouble you about this, but may I say, without libel, that he’s so dirty that I’m really afraid to hand him the money myself.”

The Mounted Policeman looked beatific. “So am I,” he crooned—straight and formidable in his scarlet and blue, turning a razor glance on the infuriated Mr. Bunger. “I’m a little afraid of germs myself. I think we’ll leave the job to the Provincial Policeman here. The Mounted are expected to get shot and frozen, but I don’t believe they ought to take a chance on an infection like this.”

Both policemen radiated delight. They knew that for a hundred miles about—gossip flying from frontiersman to frontiersman as though it were a boarding-house of old women—for a hundred miles and for ten years, every one who had suffered under Mr. Bert Bunger would yelp at the tale of the man who said Bunger was so dirty he would not hand money to him.

Their ecstasy was not lessened when, as the Provincial Policeman handed him the money, Bunger tore up the three bills and hysterically trampled on them.

But in Ralph there was no delight. His rage had gone dead. He left the lobby abruptly, clumped up to his room, and answered Woodbury’s rumbling query with a curt “All settled. Let’s pack and get out.”

He sat on the edge of his frowsy bed, brooding.

It was his misfortune as a private citizen, and his blessing as a lawyer, that he could see both sides of any controversy, both of two conflicting personalities, even when one of them happened to be himself. Yet he was too thin-skinned for heroism—not so resolute as often to act on the knowledge when he saw that his opponent was right. It is such men who flee to monasteries, to narcotic reading, to a gregariousness hateful yet protective; unable either to tolerate or to change the childish hurts and squabbles with which we poison life.

He loathed himself, suddenly, for the cheapness of his triumph.

“Lord, how petty! So proud of myself for actually thinking up a way of insulting that mangy alley cat! Brought up in a log stable—how should he have courtesy? And is he any worse than the city lad who seems polite when he really hates you? And I so cocky! Oh, yes! ‘Call the cop! I’ll tell him something about lex talionis sub nisi!’

“The great I! The great lawyer! The clever city-man! Worse than Wes. He’s simple and courageous. And he too—I’ve been feeling so superior to him, with his anecdotes—”

He perceived that much of his depression was due to the enfeeblement of his admiration for Woodbury. He perceived how necessary authentic friendship had become to him in a world left vacuous and bewildering by the death of his mother. In such circles of thought as had maddened him in his lonely flat, in black and sleepless reveries by night, he began to admire Woodbury again.

He did not veil the man’s irritating qualities—his boasting, his noisiness, his fuss over inessentials, his pretentious ignorance—but he found assurance in that driving self-confidence, that cheerfulness which made Woodbury of good flavor between tantrums, that physical strength, gone flabby now.

He sprang up, flung into his duffle-bag the few things he had taken out, and closed it before Woodbury appeared at the door with his own luggage.

“Sorry I started all this scrapping, Wes. Do forget it. Let’s get out of this absurd place and sleep on the decent honest ground.”

Five minutes before, Ralph’s hard fury had turned Woodbury into an anxious follower.

(You could see Wes as a boy, a puffy boy, the butt of his Gang, more ingenious than any of them at devising plans for stealing melons and torturing cats, but the first and only one to be, in a most unhygienic manner, initiated into the fraternities they founded and forgot within a vacation-time week; a wistful fat boy, complaining “Ah—gee—quit, can’t yah?” and with drooping bulbous lips following a sharp-nosed little leader half his size; always longing for some one to bully as he had been bullied.)

Now, instantly, he bounded back into command with:

“I tell you, son, you got to learn to never fuss, up here in the woods. Take things the way they come, Ralph—take things the way they come—just the way they happen to come. No sense in cussing and discussing with that pup Bunger. I’d just have handed him one and walked out. This trip’ll be a fine thing for you; teach you to pack all your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile—that’s the ticket—that’s what we said at my officers’ training-camp—that’s the stunt up here, in the big outdoors—pack up your grouches and smile, smile, smile. Well, we’ll forget it now. Tell you”—brightly—“what we’ll do. We’ll sleep on the ground. That’ll make you husky.”

Thus, wavering with his duffle-bag, Ralph followed the generalissimo who had thought up all these plans and beneficial ideas, and he had the manner of meek discipleship.

But he was again dreading a plunge into the wilds with no protection from Wes Woodbury’s nobleness.