Читать книгу Cass Timberlane - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 16

Table of Contents

Judge Timberlane had heard of middle-aged satyrs who worked their will upon frail maidens by promising them riches and magenta-colored cars but never introduced them to the respectable families of their circles. But the Judge himself wanted his entire world to know his fleet Jinny. He stopped in at Miss Hatter’s, he discussed with Tracy Oleson the import of wood pulp, then got Jinny aside to whisper, “I’d like to have a buffet-supper for you and have you meet my friends—you needn’t like ’em if you don’t want to. And maybe you’d like to invite Tracy? He’s quite a bright fellow.”

Perhaps he sounded condescending, without meaning to, for she answered irritably, “I don’t want to meet a lot of rich people looking for somebody to snub!”

“But very few of them are rich and none of them are snobbish. I meant people like Abbott Hubbs, managing editor of the Banner. I’ll bet the owner, Greg Marl, doesn’t pay him enough to afford breakfast. And my sister, Rose Pennloss, and my old chum, Bradd Criley—good lawyer and the best dancer in town. People that you’d love, if you knew ’em.”

“I don’t want to be shown off, Cass. I’m perfectly happy right here where I am, and if I do ever get anywhere else, I want to do it by myself.”

It took him five minutes to persuade Cinderella that the glass slipper was pretty and then, just to keep him entirely confused, she said that she would love a party, and if she had sounded grudging, it had been only because she was surprised.

The buffet-supper for her was to be at the Heather Club, which was crowded only on Saturday evenings. When he picked her up in his car, she did not expect him to take Tracy Oleson, that muffler, along with them; and she was not prudish when he suggested that, as they were early, they could stop at his house on the way. (It was not on the way.)

At Bergheim she stepped out wonderingly under the wedding-cake carriage-porch and pronounced, “Oh, I love it! Like Walter Scott!”

She was wearing again the little black net dress in which she was so pathetically grown-up, and the one silver rose.

Silent, head turning quickly to one side and the other, she preceded him into the dolorous hall, into the drawing-room, which was too long, too narrow, and too high, and in one corner surprisingly darted off, under a varnished pine grill, into a semi-circular alcove which was the lowest story of the tower. It was an ill-lighted room, with wallpaper of Chinese pagodas and bridges, with overcarved and unwieldy furniture upholstered in plum-colored plush and ornamented with a Michigan version of Chinese dragons; a room profuse in Chinese vases, Aztec pottery, embossed brass coffee tables, Venetian glass lamps, and colored photographs of Lake Louise; a room that was unutterably all wrong, and yet was stately and a home.

Jinny stood in the middle and looked about, neither awed nor ridiculing it, belonging to it as (Cass fondly believed) she would belong to any setting she might encounter.

Then Cleo came bossily into the room on delicately haughty feet, wanting to know who the deuce this was in her house.

Jinny gave a passionate little moan, a sound not so unlike a cat’s, soft and imploring, and knelt before Cleo, smoothing the side of her jaw. The kitten recognized her as one of the tribe, and spoke to her in their language. Jinny sat crosslegged then and Cleo perched on her knee like a small brave statue. Acrobatically, not to disturb the kitten, Jinny reached out far for the evening purse that she had dropped, looked up at Cass apologetically, and brought out a tiny crystal model of a cat-goddess of the Nile.

“It’s my talisman. Dad gave it to me years ago, as a toy, but I almost let myself believe that it was alive and now—I know it’s childish, but I always take it everywhere—you know, so it can see the world and get educated, poor thing.”

“What’s its name?”

“Different names at different epochs. All of them silly. Just now it hasn’t one.”

“Why not call it—— The kitten is also an Egyptian national, and named Cleopatra. Why not call your statuette Isis?”

“Isis. ‘Slim, undulant deity Isis, mistress of life.’ Okay. Let’s see if Cleo will have sense enough to recognize a high-class goddess and worship it.”

She placed the crystal Isis on a mat made of her handkerchief, on the cabbage-rose carpet, and Cleo before the shrine. They watched gravely, Cass’s hand on Jinny’s shoulder, while Cleo walked three times around the goddess, sniffing, then, with a careful paw, pushed it over and glanced up at them, much pleased with herself.

“They’re friends, anyway,” said Jinny.

“Like us.”

“Uh-huh.”

He kissed her, without prejudice.

He herded her into the kitchen, and announced, “Mrs. Higbee, this is my friend Miss Marshland. The house is hers.”

Well, Jinny smiled, Mrs. Higbee smiled, Cleo, sticking around and quietly running everything from behind the scenes as usual, made a sound that corresponded to smiling, and the augury was bright.

Then Cass remembered that Mrs. Higbee liked Chris Grau, also, and that Chris would formidably be at the buffet-supper tonight.

They drove up to the Heather Country Club, which resembled the Home of a Famous Movie Star, and Jinny was apparently delighted by its yellow tile roof and its grilled windows and blue plaques set in white plaster walls. They crossed the clattering stone-floored lobby to the outdoor terrace on which, this fine June night, the supper was handsomely set out: a baked ham, with cloves stuck all over its sugary bulk, lobster salad and chicken salad and cold salmon, and an exuberant ice cream mold decked with spun sugar. These treasures were assembled, like a jovial combination of Christmas and Fourth of July, on a long table at one end of the thatch-roofed outdoor bar. At the other end of the bar was the real business: a case of Bourbon, half a case of Scotch, and a cocktail-shaker of the size and menace of a trench-mortar, all guarded by the club bartender, who knew all the amorous and financial secrets of the members. As to wine, most prominent citizens of Grand Republic, including Cass, were unaware of it except as something you nervously ordered on a liner.

There were to be twenty-six at the supper, and six tables, lacy and silver-laid, were on the terrace, with Dead Squaw Lake swaying beyond them, and the pine-darkened hills and the red-roofed yacht club visible on the farther shore.

But none of this luxury did Cass behold. What he saw was Chris Grau, happily arranging the flowers, and her happiness chilled him.

He had not told Chris nor any one else that this supper was to be the introduction of a Miss Virginia Marshland to his friends, and it was assumed that this was another of the duty dinners which unmarried favorites like Cass and Bradd Criley and Jay Laverick give—the technical word is “throw”—now and then when their social obligations have reached the saturation point. Chris had insisted that he let her order the supper, be the hostess.

She was busy now, in her fresh cream-colored linen dress, her gaudiest costume jewelry, arranging the huge bunches of peonies. At Cass’s footstep, she looked up with a smile that went cold when she saw him with an unknown wench who was too airy and much too pretty.

The oratorical pride of the Bar Association could do no better than: “Chris—Miss Grau! Miss Marshland—uh—Jinny Marshland.”

Both women said “Jdoo” with good healthy feminine hatred, and Cass was rather surprised.

In making up his list of guests, he had not been able to avoid having Roy and Lillian Drover, though he did not expect Jinny to like them. He thought she might like his sister Rose and the Gadds and Greg Marls and the Abbott Hubbses and the Avondene girls and even the giggling Scott Zagos. He was sure that she would like Bradd Criley and once, a few days ago, before he had lost his innocence, he had hoped that Jinny and Chris might “hit it off nicely,” having no sounder reason for that hope than that it would be considerably more convenient for him if they did. And Eve Champeris, of Paris, California, and Grand Republic, the most exquisite and linguistic woman in town—he himself had never been comfortable with Eve, and he had invited her entirely to impress Jinny.

He had been more daring than anyone can know who does not live permanently in Grand Republic in leaving out Boone and Queenie Havock—daring and sensible, since at one macaw scream from Queenie, Jinny might very well have started walking home. But the Havock scion, Curtiss, he had invited. Curtiss was a bulky, cheerful, unmarried, somewhat oafish young man who was supposed to work in the Blue Ox National Bank but who was more earnest about fast driving and who was supposed, for reasons incomprehensible to Cass, to be attractive to young women.

Especially for Jinny, he had asked Tracy Oleson, Fred Nimbus, announcer at Station KICH, Lucius and Erica Fliegend, and to keep the Fliegends from feeling chilled at the Heather Club, in which they had not been present five times in ten years, he had invited that intelligent young couple, Richard and Francia Wolke (the Chippewa Avenue jewelers) who had never been in the club. Chris had not seen his list and now, as she looked over the party, she tenderly thought that she had never known her Cass to show so superbly the trusting social ineptitude for which she loved him and wanted to mother him. Curtiss Havock would insult the glibly handsome Fred Nimbus who would annoy Eve Champeris who would be insolent to the Wolkes who would bite the Zagos who would nauseate Dr. Drover who would be rude to the Hubbses who hated their bosses, Gregory and Diantha Marl, while Chris herself would have been just as glad if he had not invited Stella Avondene Wrenchard, that impoverished and aristocratic young widow who was so resolutely after Cass for herself that she went around saying, “I adore Chris—poor dear.”

And when Chris found that he had added this unknown young fly-by-night called Miss Virginia Mushland or something, then she was almost as irritated as she was tender. So far as Chris could see, he had done everything to insure his social ruin in Grand Republic except to invite the local labor-organizers.

This Mushland doll was evidently too awkward and untutored to be of any use, and Chris went ardently to work at what is called “making the party a success.” While Cass filled the unwanted girl’s plate at the buffet and sat beside her at table, shamelessly beaming, Chris maneuvered the guests to suitable tables, kept Curtiss Havock from having too many drinks and the Fliegends from having too few, had Jinny switch seats with Stella Avondene, to prevent scandal and to keep Cass’s errant fancies on the move, got Fred Nimbus, the radio genius, to sing, got Fred Nimbus to make a comic speech, got Fred Nimbus to start the dancing—with Jinny.

Chris saw to it that Jinny also danced with Bradd Criley, Curtiss Havock, Dick Wolke, Greg Marl, and only twice with Cass, to the end that Jinny, who had at first been embarrassed by the strangers, had a lively evening and loved Cass for it—Cass, not Chris.

All this good sacrifice Chris made for Cass, and was sorry only that he did not see it.

But Cass did see it, and he knew now how a burglar felt when he was facing Judge Timberlane.

He understood Chris’s loyalty and her plump charms. He wondered why the Fates should so arrange it that he could feel only amiable toward Chris, who wanted him, and be wan and adoring with the Jinny who as yet considered him merely another traveling-man.

With a jar he found that Jinny, too, was seeing everything that she couldn’t possibly see. When, long after eleven, he had his second dance with her—he had watched the match-unmaking Chris throw her to such dogs as Fred Nimbus—Jinny said with an affection he had never heard from her:

“Dear Cass, I am having such a gay time, thanks to you and to your Miss Grau. That nice woman. She does try so hard to hate me, but she doesn’t know how. She tried to snoot me by asking how I liked ‘working in a factory,’ but before she got through, I had her longing to get off her chaise-longue and be big and brave and punch a time-clock. Cass, you are so good and so bungling. You know I’m just a stray cat, like Cleo. I wouldn’t want to—because I am so fond of you—I wouldn’t want to make any trouble between you and Chris the girlfriend. Honestly.”

He made the suitable arguments.

He knew that, seen as just one of the “country-club bunch,” he had lost for her something of his dignity as a Public Figure, but he also knew that she was now responsive to him. He was proud of her debut. She had been so easy with even the most difficult of his guests, with his over-inquisitive sister and with the roaring Roy Drover. Bradd Criley had informed him that Jinny was a “lovely, intelligent girl, and a stepper.” That was news!