Читать книгу Cass Timberlane - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 14

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The select golf-and-tennis association of Grand Republic was the Heather Club, three miles from the business center, on a peninsula reaching out from the south shore of Dead Squaw Lake. Surrounding it was the smart new real-estate development called the Country Club District, habitat of such gilded young married couples as the Harley Bozards, the Don Pennlosses, the Beecher Filligans, and the playground of Jay Laverick, the town’s principal professional Gay Bachelor, who happened to be a widower. The houses were Spanish, like Hollywood, or French, like Great Neck, and the Heather clubhouse was a memory of Venice, with balconies, iron railings, and a canal thirty-six feet long.

To the Heather Club in late June Cass came for one of the famous Saturday Evening Keno Games. Keno (a sport beloved by the more aged and pious Irishwomen also) consists in placing a bean upon a number called out by some swindler unknown, through an unseen loud-speaker, and after you have breathlessly placed enough beans upon enough numbers, you fail to get the prize. It is not so intellectual as chess or skipping the rope, but it is a favorite among Grand Republic’s leading citizens, who gather at the Heather Club on every Saturday evening in summer, to drink cocktails and play keno and then drink a lot more.

With only one cocktail in him, Cass was deaf to the joys of keno this evening, and he wished that he were deaf to the crackling voices about him at the dozen long tables, as he somberly put down his beans. Roy Drover’s shouts of “Send us a thirty-two, baby, send us a thirty-two, come on, baby, come on, hand us a thirty-two” merely rivaled Queenie Havock’s parrot shrieks and Norton Trock’s high giggling, while Eve Champeris had a flushed mild imbecility about her lily face. Delia Lent, a purposeful lady though rich, sat beside Cass, babbling about trout-fishing, but presently he could hear nothing that she said. All the hundred voices were woven into a blanket of sound that covered Cass and choked him.

Abruptly, while Mrs. Lent stared at his lack of manners, Cass bolted from the table, charged toward the bar. He would have to have a quantity of drinks, if he was going to survive these pleasures. He passed an alcove in which two grim women, too purposeful about gambling to waste time on keno, were hour after hour yanking the handles of twenty-five-cent slot machines. He passed a deep chair in which sat two married people—not married to each other. He looked into the card room where Boone Havock, Mayor Stopple, Judge Flaaten, Counselor Oliver Beehouse, and Alfred Umbaugh, the hardware king, were playing tough poker in a refined way.

Jinny’s spirit walked with him derisively.

He had almost reached the forgetfulness to be found at the bar when beyond it, in the Ladies’ Lounge, he saw Chris Grau, having a liqueur with Lillian Drover. He stopped, in cold guiltiness, and the imaginary Jinny fled.

He had not seen Chris for ten days, and as she looked at him, all her kindness in her good brown eyes, he shivered. But he obediently chain-ganged into the lounge. Lillian Drover rose, tittering, in washed-out imitation of her husband’s humor, “I guess I better leave you two young lovers alone, if I know what’s good for me.”

Chris’s smile indicated that that would be fine.

The Ladies’ Lounge, which had been named that by Diantha Marl, after having been christened the Rubens Room by the Milwaukee architect-decorator who had done the club in the finest Moorish style known in his city, was a harem, with grilled windows, a turquoise-blue tiled floor, and a resigned fountain. It was suitable to the harem feeling that Chris should be wearing a loose-throated lilac dress.

Cass sat facing her, with an entirely mechanical “Can I get you another drink?”

“Not for me. There’s too much drinking here. I’m glad you’re so sober. But then, you always are. It’s these younger people that are breaking down the bulwarks of society with their guzzling and shrieking and indecent dancing.”

“Now, now, Chris, the drunkest person here tonight is Queenie Havock, and she’s well over fifty, and I saw Bernice Claywheel, and she must be over forty, out dancing on the terrace with Jay Laverick as though she expected to eat him.”

“Ye-es I know, but—— You simply love the sweet young things, don’t you, Cassy—Cass.”

“M?”

“I’m sure you had a wonderful time with your beautiful unknown at the Unstable, two weeks ago!”

“Why, I—— Yes I did!”

“And did you enjoy holding hands in the moonlight?”

He tried to be jaunty. “Enjoyed it very much. Especially as I don’t suppose I’ll have another chance, alas!”

—— Why don’t you tell Chris to go to the devil? She’s not your guardian.

“So you don’t think you’ll see her again, eh, Cass darling. Honestly, now—honestlee—you know I’m not the nagging sort of girl that would even ask who she was, and certainly I’m not the kind that would go around hinting and whispering that a man who isn’t so young any more——”

“What do you——”

“——is making a fool of himself over some young tramp. I was just teasing you about this girl. Of course I know you’d never fall for her, whoever she is. So let’s not say anything more about it, dear.”

“I hadn’t said anything at all!”

“That’s what I say. Honestly, I was just joking. Now tell me: will you get the Fleeber-Biskness case in the fall, or will they settle it?”

Now the affaire Fleeber-Biskness was a fascinating controversy, to Judge Timberlane, but it had not seemed so to the crass public. It was a conversion case, dealing with the possession of a warehouse 28′ 7″ × 62′ 8″. Cass was glad once more to see what a sympathetic brain Chris had and, as he looked at them again, what sleek legs. As the palace of pleasure rang with the bacchanalia of keno, he explained to this willing hearer the low tricks Mr. Biskness was accused of having played with a carload of clay. He stumbled as she crossed her legs and he realized that, with innocent spinster boldness, she had come without stockings.

This was in the prim pre-war era of 1941, when it is true that bathing-suits had been reduced to an emphasized nudity, but when perfect ladies still did not display naked legs in public rooms. The Judge was a person of decorum and modesty, but he was interested.

—— Chris would give a lover such solid affection—probably much more than a filly like Jinny Marshland.

Not unmindful of the careless lilac-colored skirt but determined to be high-minded, he went on with the case, winding up, “You understand, that’s only Fleeber’s version, and it’s a matter of record. I’m not giving away any secrets.”

“Sure. I know you never tell tales out of court,” said Chris, fondly.

“If I ever did, you’d be the one person I could rely on. What’s say we have a drink?”

“I’d love to,” gurgled the strange woman in lilac.