Читать книгу Mantrap - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 7

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THEIR tent, as the Indians set it up for them, was to Ralph not a mere shelter but a symbol of the wilds and of every gallant exploration. It was of balloon silk, with the bottom sewed to the sides, so that there was no crevice through which the man-eating mosquitoes of the North could creep. The five windows of netting were protected by silk flaps which in rain could be lowered by cords cunningly placed inside the tent.

There was a playhouse quality about these windows which roused in Ralph a gay childishness uncommon in that grave life of his. He chuckled as he lowered and raised the window-flaps, and Woodbury chuckled and exclaimed with him, and in wide good-humor they crawled out under the mosquito-netting to attack their first camp meal—the tea and bacon and bannock which old Charley, the chief guide, had prepared for them.

Now bannock is, technically, a variety of bread. But only among the copper-stomached Woods Crees is it considered to be an edible bread. It is well thought of as ballast, as a missile or an anchor, but for internal use it ranks with tripe and pemmican. Bannock is made without yeast. It is flour and water, caused to cleave together by boiling it in lard in a frying-pan over a maddened fire. Yet Ralph managed to swallow it, with liberal butter and marmalade; he found himself relishing the tea diluted with condensed milk; and he imitated the great Woodbury in eating the bacon with his fingers.

Woodbury was a zealot at showing how lusty and he-mannish he could be in the Great Open Spaces of which all city-dwellers speak so admiringly. He had as much pleasure now in acquiring grease as in New York he would have had in avoiding it. And he was mighty in discovering sportive events for the evening.

Now in June, in the far North, there was light until eleven, and they felt disinclined to go to bed, though they had to be up at five to catch the river steamer. The evening did rather drag. Ralph struggled to appreciate Woodbury’s companionship, but he became a little melancholy over undiluted conversation about municipal bonds and the beauties of the stocking business.

Other entertainments were few in the hamlet of Whitewater. There had never yet been a movie in town; the last theatrical company had been the Lionel Lornton Big London Tent Show in “Little Lass o’ Tennessee” and “The Perils of Limehouse,” seven years before; and, even had Ralph particularly relished prayer-meetings, there was none tonight in the bleak frame chapel. Their friend the Mounted Policeman had driven into the country to examine a Swede who wanted to be naturalized. So the two explored the place, craving excitement—and they discovered a social gathering.

In front of the “British Jack General Supply Company: Hats and Caps, Boots and Shoes, Clothing and Table Delicacies: Furs Bought at Best Prices and Whitefish Forwarded: Our Motto a Fair Deal to All,” which was a log cabin covered with tar-paper, the tin discs holding the paper rusted by years of rain, sat three men in overalls.

Ralph and Woodbury sat with them, greeted by not unfriendly grunts of “Haaryuh.”

For seventeen minutes the assembly argued as to whether hay could be grown north of Reindeer Lake. For nine minutes they discussed, with ardor, the reason why Pete Wrzska’s outboard motor—the one on his red rowboat, not the old motor Pete bought from Harry Larssen, two years ago—had not started this morning.

Ralph and Woodbury fled on to the next soirée; the four men and a woman in an apron standing in front of the doctor’s cottage and listening to the doctor’s account of the state of old Mrs. Bjone’s rheumatism. But this seemed a choosey, private affair, and they felt they could not intrude.

“Tell you what we’ll do—tell you what we’ll do!” rejoiced Woodbury. “You know that Provincial Policeman stationed here. Well, they’re always good fellows—real hard-boiled birds. We’ll rout him out and get up a poker game! You’ve never seen any poker up here in the North. Boy, they’re the boys can play! Trappers and traders and everybody, and some of the Injuns. Bluff on two deuces. Why, I’ve seen, I’ve seen a fur-buyer that was down to his last twenty dollars in the world—I’ve seen him bet every cent he had on the turn of one card. Great stuff! Playing up there in the woods, log cabin right among the thick pines, rough pine table, with one smoky ol’ oil lamp, playing till dawn, then all of ’em jumping into the lake for a swim, just as the sun came up across the water. Boy, that’s living!”

Ralph felt that to him it was a peculiarly painful way of living, but he warmed up his smile and, in as lively and anticipatory a way as possible, he followed as Woodbury galloped toward the Provincial Policeman’s house, emitting poker enthusiasms punctuated with “You’ll see—he’ll be wild for a game—tickled to death—they always like to get us tenderfeet into a game and try to trim us—but not me they won’t—you’ll see!”

Ralph was appropriating thirty dollars as the amount he would lose, and framing a treacherous play for escaping from the game before midnight.

It was nine-thirty, and the sunset was still burning across the muddy current of the Flambeau, beyond the willows along the bank, beyond the gaunt sheet-iron chimney of the abandoned sawmill. At the shiny yellow and white cottage of the Provincial Policeman, there was silence, no answer to their knock.

“This is fierce,” said Woodbury. “Nine-thirty is a little too early to go to bed in this metropolis—about a quarter of an hour too early—but it certainly is too blame’ late to be out indulging in the giddy delights of visiting. Something gone wrong. Probably Bert Bunger’s murdered the policeman in bed.”

From the whitewashed log cabin next door, with its brave posy-bed of pansies and frail wild roses, a gaffer with silvery chin-whisker and spectacles halfway down his nose came crouching out to bawl:

“Looking for somebody?”

“For the policeman.”

“For the policeman?”

“Yes.”

“Somebody done something?”

“No.”

“Well. Well! Strangers here, ain’t yuh?”

“Yes. Say, has—”

“Going on the river steamer tomorrow?”

“Yes. Say, has the policeman gone to bed, or what—”

“Heh?”

“Has he gone to bed?”

“The policeman? Gone to bed?”

“Yes!”

“Why, no! Course not!”

The aged one felt wounded surprise. “Him and his missus have gone down to Milligan’s, to do the crossword puzzle in the Winnipeg paper that come today.”

“Think he’d like a game of poker?”

“Him? The policeman? Why, he’s a Seventh-Day Adventist! He ain’t got a single vice, not one. Oh, maybe except chewing tobacco, and lapping up a little moonshine, just a little, when he pinches a still. No, sir. That’s a good moral fellow. Now me, when I was a trapper, years ago, that was before I went with the trading company—I worked for them quite some time and then I come down with the rheumatism, but my daughter she married Ed Toggerman, a fine steady hard-working fellow he is, too, when he keeps off the booze, he sends me sixty dollars a month regular as a clock, he’s got a new job over to Regina in a lumberyard, got a good thing of it. Zis saying, when I was a trapper I played some, but don’t know’s ever cared much for cards, always rather get in a little sleep. Still, guess if you gentlemen’d like a game, try to oblige you. Guess I remember how to play all right, and maybe we could get my granddaughter. She ain’t only twelve, but she’s smart ’s a whip—she ain’t Ed’s daughter, she’s my other daughter’s daughter that works in the Bon Ton Store, and I don’t know if she plays poker, but I know her and her ma play casino sometimes—”

They averted the calamity of family poker. They sat in front of their tent, on a bucket and a box of canned pears, and watched the river run.

It kept running.

Before eleven they were abed.

For Ralph, his bed-roll had something of the ingenious fascination of the tent. It was a sleeping-bag covered with festive green and brown canvas, lined with blankets filled with soft eiderdown. There were buttons, straps, snaps; there was a flap to cover his head in case of rain. It was in itself a little house and, feeling at once adventurous and secure in privacy, Ralph crawled into its cave.

He had started to undress, but Woodbury had snorted, “What do you think you’re doing? All you take off in the North is your shoes and coat, you poor fish! And—You don’t mean to tell me you’ve brought a pillow along?”

Ralph had, and a very nice little pillow it was, of the best down. To him a pillow was the noblest part of sleep. He liked to snuggle into it, to tuck it up about his sound-wearied ears as a protection from the intrusive world. He had felt proud of the practicality of his new traveling pillow. It was so conveniently small, and it was covered with gay dirt-proof calico in a pattern of parrakeets and orchids among which any one ought to be glad to sleep.

“Why not a pillow?” he squeaked.

“Good Lord! Takes up enough room for a three-days’ ration! Besides, everybody will die laughing at you up here, if you’re going to be such a mollycoddle. Roll up your coat and sleep on it, like a real man!”

Ralph rolled up his coat, but he was not so successful at sleeping on it like a real man.

For a second, weary with the day’s cramped riding and the Bunger squabble, he stretched out luxuriously between his blankets. But this trodden ground beside the river was curiously hard. In ratio as he grew more drowsy, it thrust up the more viciously against him. It fought him. It heaved up and hit him. He discovered the importance of his shoulders and the points of his hips. They were sore with the incessant banging.

Woodbury had for a moment dropped snoringly into sleep, but he too was roused by the unyielding earth, and he stirred with the obscure cloudy sounds of night-time. The tent was not yet dark. Ralph lay studying the reënforced seams along the ridge; suffering with sleepiness and unable to sink into it—there was no sinking about this resolute ground.

And the manly rolled coat was like a pine board to his ear.

“Awake?” grunted Woodbury.

Ralph was silent.

“Awake?”

Still Ralph restrained himself. For no very definite reason he longed to hit Woodbury with something—something heavy, but smooth to the clasping hand.

“Doggone earth’s so doggone hard it makes every bone in your doggone body ache. Well, gotta get used to it,” Woodbury said illuminatingly, then turned again and apparently slept.

While Ralph lay in the clutch of creeping paralysis, he remembered and tried to forget and remembered again that he conceivably could desert Woodbury—and that this was his last chance to leave him. He pictured camp-hotels in Maine: the pines as gracious as here, the lake as joyous, but with food meant for self-respecting stomachs and reasonable beds in fragrant log cabins. He recalled a friendly old inn on a hilltop in New Hampshire. He saw a pension in the Bavarian Oberland, with mountains beyond the carved eaves of peasant houses; an inn on the Breton coast; a path through Highland heather. In six days he could be on a steamer, among civilized people who would talk of something besides municipal bonds and the stocking business; in twelve days he could be landing at Southampton—see again the chimney-pots and the Bovril advertisements and sniff at the smoky exhilarating odor which meant distant London.

To escape from this narrow companionship with Woodbury, from this raw and traditionless land, from this senseless discomfort ...

“The most blatant of all our American myths: roughing it in the wilds!

“The virile open spaces—Wes Woodbury trying to play poker!”

Then he swore:

“No. I won’t do it. I don’t like this place. It occurs to me that I don’t like this man Woodbury. But I’ve lived too soft. I must stick by it. Only—”

As though he were defying a throng of accusing sportsmen he clamored, and mighty was the noise, though it was entirely within his brain:

“Only let me tell you fellows right now that baseball bores me, and I think fishing is dull, and poker is duller, and even if it makes me lose my American citizenship, I maintain that sleeping on the ground is rot!”

Exhausted by this declaration of agnosticism, he slept for half an hour, and awoke to a further defiance so dreadful that his cloud of accusers gasped.

“And I’d just as soon shoot a duck sitting as on the wing. I don’t know that it makes such a whale of a lot of difference to a duck whether he gets murdered sportingly or otherwise. Understand?

“And I won’t throw away my little pillow! I’ll sneak it along with me!”