Читать книгу Cass Timberlane - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 11

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The Unstable had been a stable and it had been a speakeasy and now it was the local Pré-Catelan, nine miles out of town, on the bank of the Big Eagle River, facing the rugged bluffs. The interior was in bright green, with chairs of polished steel and crimson composition tables decorated with aluminum blossoms, in semi-circular booths, and it had an orchestra of piano, saxophone, violin, and drum. By day, piano was a dry-goods clerk, saxophone was a Wargate warehouse-hand, violin was a lady hair-dresser, and drum was asleep. Its food was the standard Steak & Chicken, but its whisky was excellent. Its most pious contribution to living was that in this land where autumn too often trips on the heels of spring and, except on picnics, people dine inside, it did have outdoor tables, not of composition but of honest, old-fashioned, beer-stained pine.

At such a table, in a grape-arbor, Cass and Jinny had dined slowly, looking at each other oftener than at the crisp chicken, the fresh radishes. They had talked of their childhoods, and they seemed united by fate when they found that he had, as a boy, hunted prairie chickens in the vast round of wheat stubble just beyond her native village of Pioneer Falls.

He urged, “You know what I’d like most to do, besides learning a little law and maybe having a farm way up in the hills above the Sorshay Valley? I’d like to paddle a canoe, or at least my half of the canoe, from New York City to Hudson’s Bay, by way of the Hudson and the Great Lakes and the old fur-trappers’ trail at Grand Portage, up here on Lake Superior. It would take maybe six months, camping out all that time. Wouldn’t that be exciting?”

“Ye-es.”

“Do you think you’d like to go along?”

“I don’t know—— I’m afraid I’ve never planned anything like that.”

“You can come in imagination, can’t you?”

“Oh—maybe. Provided we could go to New Orleans—in imagination!—to rest up afterward, and live in the French Quarter in a flat with an iron balcony, and eat gumbo. Could we do that?”

“Why not!”

They saw that they need not all their lives stick to courts and factories and city streets, but actually do such pleasant, extravagant things ... if they shaped life together.

He cried, “Approval from the higher court! Look!”

The moon had come out from a black-hearted, brazen-edged cloud, to illuminate the wide barley fields on the uplands across the river, with one small yellow light in a farmhouse, and the fantastically carved and poplar-robed bluffs of the Big Eagle. Wild roses gave their dusty scent, and inside the rackety roadhouse, the jukebox softly played Jerome Kern. It was everything that was most Christmas-calendar and banal: June, moon, roses, song, a man and a girl; banal as birth and death and war, banal and eternal; the Perfect Moment which a man knows but a score of times in his whole life. All respectable-citizen thoughts about whether they should be married, and should they keep the maple bedstead in the gray room, were burned out of him, and he loved the maid as simply and fiercely as any warrior. He ceased to be just Cass Timberlane; he was a flame-winged seraph guarding the gentle angel. They floated together in beauty. They were not doing anything so common as to hold hands; it was their spirits that reached and clung, made glorious by the moment that would die.

When the moon was gone under a marbled cloud and the music ceased and there was only silence and lingering awe, she whispered, so low that he was not quite sure that she had said it, “That frightened me! It was too beautiful. ‘On such a night——’ Oh, Cass!”

She was chatty and audible enough afterward, and she carefully called him “Judge,” but he knew that they were intimates.

As they drove home she prattled, “Judge, I have an important message. Tilda Hatter wants to give a party for you at the boarding-house—all of us do, of course.”

“Except Eino, who objects?”

She giggled. “But don’t you think his objection is flattering? I’ve only heard him object before to Henry James and Germany and stamp-collecting.... You will come? You’ll love Lyra Coggs.”

“I’m sure I will. She’s a great girl.... What are you snickering at?”

“You do try so hard not to be the judge, tolerating us noisy brats!”

“I swear that’s not so. Surely you’re onto me by now. More than anything else, I’m still the earnest schoolboy that wants to learn everything. And there’s so much you can teach me. I certainly don’t regard myself as aged, at only forty-one, but still you—you were born the year of the Russian revolution, you’ve always known airplanes and the radio. I want to understand them as you do.”

“And the things I want to learn! Biology and hockey and Swedish!”

“How about anthropology and crop-rotation?”

“Okay. And fencing and flower-arrangement and gin-rummy and Buddhism.”

“Do most of the kids at Miss Hatter’s want to learn anything? They sound smug to me.”

“They are not! If you knew how we talk when we’re alone! Oh, maybe too much slang and cursing and talk about sex.”

He winced. He did not care for the picture of Eino Roskinen “talking about sex” with a helpless Jinny ... if she was helpless.

“But that’s because we’re sick of the pompous way that all you older people go on, over and over, about politics and affairs in Europe and how you think we drink too much.”

“Well, don’t you?”

“Maybe. But we know how to handle our liquor.”

“I doubt it.”

“So do I!” She laughed, and he was in love with her again, after a measureless five seconds during which he had detested her for the egotism of youth. She piped on, “But I do think we’re a terribly honest lot.”

“You don’t think I’m the kind of politician that hates honesty?”

She said her “Oh, you’re different,” and the good man found the wisdom to stop talking and to feel the magic of having her there cozily beside him: her smooth arms, her hands folded in her lap, her thin corn-yellow dress and the small waist belted with glittering jet whose coolness his hand wanted to follow. She was there with him, this girl who was different from any female since Eve, and he was thus sanctified.... And did it really matter when she unfolded the fairy hands and smoked her seventh cigarette that evening?

Didn’t the vestal Chris smoke too much?

The intrusion of Chris worried him. She had no hold on him but—well—if Chris saw him driving with this girl, there would be trouble.

—— Why should there be trouble? I’m independent of her and of everybody else—well, maybe not of Jinny.

He said aloud, “What about your drafting at Fliegends’? I suppose you want to go study in Paris, and become a famous artist.”

“No, I have no real ideas. I’m just a fair workman, at best. I’ll never have what they call a ‘career.’ ”

He was so little Feminist as to be pleased.

As they drove up to Miss Hatter’s he wound up all the tinsel of his thoughts in one bright ball and tossed it to her: “I certainly have enjoyed this evening!”

She answered with equal poesy, “So have I!”

He tentatively kissed her hand. She could not have noticed it, for she said only, “You’ll come to our party, week from Thursday, then?”

“Yes, sweet. Good night.”