Читать книгу Cass Timberlane - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 13

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Bergheim, Cass’s house, the old Eisenherz country place, looked out over the bluffs. It had neither a city nor a suburban aspect, but suggested a comfortable village. At the back, where the grass was more like an ancient pasture than a prim lawn, there was a green-painted wooden well, and the white-painted stable, with its pert cupola, suggested a print of the 1880’s and long gentlemen with whiskers and driving-gloves, lace ladies with parasols, and spotted coach-dogs with their tails aloft in that fresher breeze. But what to Cass had always been, still was, a last touch of European elegance in Bergheim was that it had walnut-colored Venetian blinds.

Across the street from Cass was the abode of Scott and Juliet Zago, who had for years been notorious as being happily married. They called their house, which displayed fake half-timbering, and wavy shingles imitating thatch, sometimes “The Playhouse” and sometimes “The Doll’s House,” Juliet, you see, being the doll. She was thirty-five to Scott’s fifty, but she let people think that the gap was ten years greater. She was the chronic child-wife; she talked baby-talk and wriggled and beamed and poked her forefinger at things; and she often pretended to be the big sister of her two small daughters.

Scott dealt in insurance, and he made jokes and made puns. Juliet read all the books about China and Tibet and gave you her condensed version of them—not much condensed, at that—with her own system of pronunciation of Chinese proper names.

Yet Cass, who disliked puns and was readily sickened by baby-talk, did not detest the Zagos, and theirs was the only house in the neighborhood to which Cleo ever wandered. For they were the kindest of neighbors, as affectionate as parakeets.

On one side of Cass’s place lived the Perfect Prutts.

John William Prutt, the father, was a banker; the most first-rate second-rate banker in the entire state. He was president of the Second National Bank. It could just as well have been called the First National Bank, since the institution once so named had perished, but Mr. Prutt’s bank would have to be a second, never a first nor yet a last. He was fifty years old and always had been. He was perfect; in everything that was second-class he was perfect. He was a vestryman, but not the leading vestryman, of St. Anselm’s Church; he had been a vice-president but never the president of the Federal Club. He was tall and solemnly handsome, and he never split an infinitive or a bottle.

His wife, Henrietta Prutt, his son, Jack Prutt, his daughter, Margaret Prutt, his dog, Dick Prutt, and even his Buick car, the Buick of the Prutts, were as full of perfection and Pruttery as John William Prutt himself.

The Prutts lived in a supposedly little white Colonial cottage that had somehow grown into a huge white Colonial army-barracks, yet still breathed the purity of Jonathan Edwards, and just beyond it, in a hulk of grim dark native stone, lived another banker, Norton Trock, who collected china and sounded like a lady.

On the other side of Cass’s house was the blindingly white, somewhat Spanish and somewhat packing-box, stucco residence of Gregory Marl, owner of the presumably liberal and Independent Republican newspapers, the Banner and the Evening Frontier, with the Sunday Frontier-Banner, the only English-language newspapers in Grand Republic. He was a large, quiet, secretly industrious man of thirty-five; he had inherited the paper but had raised their circulations; he was a rose-grower and a Bermuda yachtsman. The star of his household, and a bright and menacing November star, was his wife Diantha, who was on every committee in town, and who knew something and talked a great deal about painting and the drama and a mystery called Foreign Affairs. But her major art was as hostess, and as the Marls had no children, Diantha could spend weeks in planning a party. She was the rival of Madge Dedrick as the general utility duchess and Mrs. Astor of the city.

Madge Dedrick, relict of Sylvanus Dedrick, the lumber baron, lived a little beyond the Prutts, in a handsome, high-pillared Georgian house that had exactly the same lines (condensed) as Boone Havock’s and did not in the least look like it. Madge’s half-dozen small flower-gardens looked like gardens of flowers, while Mr. Havock’s looked like paper posies, the larger size, bought last night and pinned on crooked in the darkness.

At seventy, Mrs. Dedrick was small and soft-voiced, powdery of cheek, with tiny plump hands and great powers, held shrewdly under control, of derision and obscenity. Now living with her was her tall, doe-eyed, aloof, divorced daughter, Eve Dedrick Champeris, who had been reared in Grand Republic, Farmington, New York, Cannes, and Santa Barbara, and who had divorced the charming Mr. Raymond Champeris on the good, old-fashioned grounds of drinking like a sot and passing out at costly parties. It seemed like such a waste of champagne, Eve explained.

Diantha Marl tempted society with high intellectual conversation plus string quartets and dynamite cocktails; Madge and Eve Dedrick with cool Rhine wines in a low-lit, satin-paneled room filled with silver and crystal and cushions and exquisite legs and lively spitefulness, so that the Wargates, who had ten times as much money, politely accepted the invitations of both Diantha and the Dedricks.

On all these rulers of Grand Republic Cass meditated, while he fretted the question of whether Jinny would really like being lifted from her boarding-house to the stuffy elegance of Ottawa Heights. He wanted to persuade himself that she would like Boone Havock and Eve Champeris better than Eino Roskinen and Sweeney Fishberg. It was hard to play Prince to the Cinderella when he suspected that all the windows in Castle Charming were glued shut. He conducted extensive imaginary conversations with her, trying to give both sides, which is likely to be confusing.

“Scott and Juliet—jolly people—wonderful at an outdoor barbecue,” he heard himself informing Jinny, who snapped back, “Silly pair of clowns!”

“Gregory and Diantha Marl—leaders in public thought.”

“Scared conservatives throwing calico babies to the union wolves!”

“Bradd Criley and Jay Laverick and Frank Brightwing—very amusing fellows.”

“That’s something like it. Just let me meet them, and you keep the others.”

—— Now what kind of a mind have I got, to give a nonexistent antagonist the best of an argument? As I’m making the whole thing up anyway, why don’t I have Jinny vanquished and humble and adoring?

If he ever married Jinny, he would have to lure in new dinner-guests without offending the old ones, and then, probably, Jinny would not like the novelties. He thought of a party at which he introduced the Rev. Dr. Evan Brewster, Negro pastor of an unpainted Baptist church in the North End, and Ph.D. of Columbia, to Dr. Drover and Eve Champeris, and how bored Dr. Brewster would be by their patter and how much danger there would be that Jinny would too openly agree.

Then, “Oh dry up!” said Cass to his imagination.

When the spring term of court was over, he was free for all summer, except for special sessions and a few days in the outlying towns of the district. They wound up with a solemn meeting of Judges Blackstaff, Flaaten, and Timberlane in re the portentous question: should the judges of this district, when on the bench, wear silk robes, as in Minneapolis?

The three dignitaries sat about the long oak table in Judge Blackstaff’s chambers, smoking unaccustomed cigars, the gift of their host, and grew red-faced with the ardor of their debate.

“It’s a matter of dignity,” maintained Judge Blackstaff, looking more than usual like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. “I don’t hold with these English wigs and heavy robes, but I do think we have to show the public, which is so irreverent and flippant today, all jazz and comic strips, that we represent the sanctity of Justice.”

“Dignity, hell!” Judge Flaaten protested. “Every time some Norske or Svenske saw me in a black-silk nightshirt, it would cost me ten votes. Besides, robes are hot.”

Judge Timberlane put in, “Not very, Conrad. They can be quite light. Besides, Grand Republic is the coolest city in the state south of Duluth. Besides, do you want to have the boys on the bench in Minneapolis go on laughing at us as a bunch of farmer j.p.s?”

“I don’t care a damn what they laugh at as long as the voting Lut’erans like us,” insisted Judge Flaaten. He glared at Judge Blackstaff. “Steve, this is a serious matter. Are we going to yield up the high principles of common democracy to the bawds—uh—the gauds of the outworn Old World?”

“Hurray!” breathed Judge Timberlane.

“Cass, can’t you be serious?” worried Judge Blackstaff. “This is a special court of protocol, which may go far to determine the standing of the judiciary in Grand Republic for all time to come. Write your votes on the yellow pads, boys, and fold ’em—and give me back those pencils when you get done with ’em. It’s a caution the way my pencils get stolen!”

Silk robes for district judges won by two to one, and when autumn came, none of them more proudly showed his robe to his relatives than Judge Flaaten. Judge Timberlane did not care so much. There was only one person for whom he wanted to wear his robe, and by prodigious chicanery he lured her into the court to see it. But—such is life—she only laughed.