Читать книгу Cass Timberlane - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 5

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Bound for Dr. Drover’s and the presumable delights of dinner, he walked down Varennes Boulevard, past the houses of the very great: the red-roofed Touraine château of Webb Wargate, the white-pillared brick Georgian mansion (with a terrace, and box-trees in wine jars) of the fabulous contractor, Boone Havock, and the dark granite donjon and the bright white Colonial cottage (oversize) in which dwelt and mutually hated each other the rival bankers Norton Trock and John William Prutt.

On his judge’s salary, without the inheritance from his father, Cass could never have lived in this quarter. It was the Best Section; it was Mayfair, where only Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and the more Gothic Methodists—all Republicans and all golf-players—lived on a golden isle amid the leaden surges of democracy.

He turned left on Schoolcraft Way, into a neighborhood not so seraphic yet still soundly apostolic and Republican, and came to the square yellow-brick residence of his friend, Dr. Roy Drover. Roy said, and quite often, that his place might not be so fancy as some he knew, but it was the only completely air-conditioned house in town, and it had, in the Etruscan catacombs of its basement, the most powerful oil furnace and the best game-room, or rumpus room—with a red-and-silver bar, a billiard table, a dance-floor, and a rifle-range—in all of Grand Republic, which is to say in all of the Western Hemisphere.

With the possible exception of Bradd Criley the lawyer, Dr. Drover was Cass’s closest friend.

Roy was two years older than Cass, who was two years older than Bradd, and it is true that in boyhood, four years make a generation, yet from babyhood to college days, Cass and Roy and Bradd had formed an inseparable and insolently exclusive gang, to the terror of all small animals within hiking distance of Grand Republic. They did such pleasurable killing together; killing frogs, killing innocent and terrified snakes, killing gophers, and later, when they reached the maturity of shotguns, killing ducks and snipe and rabbits. Like Indians they had roamed this old Chippewa Indian land, familiars of swamp and crick (not creek), cousins to the mink and mushrat (not muskrat), heroes of swimming hole and ice-skating and of bobsledding down the long, dangerous Ottawa Heights. And once, finding a midden filled with stone slivers, they had been very near to their closest kin, the unknown Indians of ten thousand years ago, who came here for stone weapons when the last glacier was retreating.

Growing older, they had shown variations of civilization and maturity. Bradd Criley had become a fancy fellow, wavy-haired and slick about his neckties, a dancing man and a seducer of girls, adding industry to his natural talents for the destruction of women. Cass Timberlane had gone bookish and somewhat moral. Only Roy Drover, graduating from medical school and becoming a neat surgeon, a shrewd diagnostician, a skillful investor of money and, before forty, a rich man, had remained entirely unchanged, a savage and a small boy.

He preferred surgery, but in a city as small as Grand Republic, he could not specialize entirely, and he kept up his practice as a physician.

At forty-three, Dr. Drover looked fifty. He was a large man, tall as Cass Timberlane and much thicker, with a frontier mustache, a long black 1870-cavalryman mustache, a tremendous evangelical voice, and a wide but wrinkled face.

In a way, he was not a doctor at all. He cared nothing for people except as he could impress them with his large house, his log fishing-lodge, named “Roy’s Rest,” in the Arrowhead Lake Region, and his piratical airplane trips to Florida, where he noisily played roulette and, taking no particular pains to conceal it from his wife, made love to manicure girls posing as movie actresses and completely fooling the contemptuously shrewd Dr. Drover.

When Roy was drunk—that did not happen often, and never on a night before he was to operate—he got into fights with doormen and taxi-drivers, and always won them, and always got forgiven by the attendant policeman, who recognized him as one of their own hearty sort, as a medical policeman.

He played poker, very often and rather late, and he usually won. He read nothing except the Journal of the American Medical Association, the newspapers, and his ledger. Because he liked to have humble customers call him “Doc,” he believed that he was a great democrat, but he hated all Jews, Poles, Finns, and people from the Balkans, and he always referred to Negroes as “darkies” or “smokes.”

He said loudly, “Speaking as a doctor, I must tell you that it is a scientifically proven fact that all darkies, without exception, are mentally just children, and when you hear of a smart one, he’s just quoting from some renegade white man. Down South, at Orlando, I got to talking to some black caddies, and they said, ‘Yessir, Mr. White Man, you’re dead right. We don’t want to go No’th. Up there, they put you to work!’ All the darkies are lazy and dumb, but that’s all right with me. They’ll never have a better friend than I am, and they all know it, because they can see I understand ’em!”

Roy’s most disgusted surprise had been in meeting a New York internist who told him that in that Sidon there was an orchestra made up of doctors, who put their spare time in on Mozart instead of duck-hunting.

From land investments, which he made in co-operation with Norton Trock, Roy had enough capital to make sure that his two sons would not have to be driven and martyred doctors, like him, but could become gentlemanly brokers.

Roy and his pallid wife, Lillian, were considered, in Grand Republic, prime examples of the Happy Couple.

She hated him, and dreaded his hearty but brief embraces, and prayed that he would not turn the two boys, William Mayo Drover and John Erdmann Drover, into his sort of people, Sound, Sensible, Successful Citizens with No Nonsense about Them.

Cass Timberlane knew, in moments of mystic enlightenment, that whether or not Roy Drover was his best friend, there was no question but that Roy was his most active enemy.

He had for years mocked Cass’s constant reading, his legal scruples, his failure to make slick investments, and his shocking habit of listening to Farmer-Laborites. After Cass had become a judge, Roy grumbled, “I certainly wish I could make my money as easy as that guy does—sitting up there on his behind and letting the other fellows do the work.” Tonight, Cass sighed that Roy would certainly ridicule Jinny Marshland, if he ever met that young woman.

But Roy had been his intimate since before he could remember. There had never been any special reason for breaking with him and, like son with father, like ex-pupil with ex-teacher, Cass had an uneasy awe of his senior and a longing—entirely futile—to make an impression on him. Cass’s pride in being elected to Congress and the bench was less than in being a better duck-shot than Roy.

There were present, for dinner and two tables of bridge, the Drovers, Cass, Christabel Grau, the Boone Havocks, and the Don Pennlosses.

Chris Grau was the orphaned daughter of a wagon-manufacturer. She was much younger than the others, and she was invited as an extra-woman partner for Cass. She was a plump and rather sweet spinster of thirty-two who, until the recent taking off, had suffered from too much affectionate mother. She not only believed that in the natural course of events Cass would fall in love with her and marry her, but also that there is any natural course of events. Rose Pennloss, wife of the rather dull and quite pleasant Donald, the grain-dealer, was Cass’s sister, but Cass and she liked each other and let each other alone.

It was Boone Havock and his immense and parrot-squawking wife Queenie who were the great people, the belted earl and terraced countess, of the occasion; they were somewhat more energetic and vastly more wealthy than Dr. Drover, and it was said that Boone was one of the sixteen most important men in Minnesota.

He had started as a lumberjack and saloon-bouncer and miner and prizefighter—indeed, he had never left off, and his success in railroad-contracting, bridge-building, and factory-construction was due less to his knowledge of how to handle steel than to his knowledge of how to battle with steel-workers. But he owned much of the stock in the genteel Blue Ox National Bank, and he was received with flutters in the gray-velvet and stilly office of the bank-president, Norton Trock.

Queenie Havock had the brassiest voice and the most predictable anti-labor prejudices in Grand Republic; her hair looked like brass, and her nose looked somewhat like brass, and she was such a brass-hearted, cantankerous, vain, grasping, outrageous old brazen harridan that people describing her simply had to add, “But Queenie does have such a sense of humor and such a kind heart.”

It was true. She had the odd and interesting sense of humor of a grizzly bear.

For a town which was shocked by the orgies of New York and Hollywood, there was a good deal of drinking in Grand Republic. All of them, except Chris Grau and Roy Drover, had three cocktails before dinner. Roy had four.

Throughout dinner, and during vacations from the toil of bridge, the standard conversation of their class and era was carried on. If Cass and his sister, Rose, did not chime in, they were too accustomed to the liturgy to be annoyed by it.

This was the credo, and four years later, the war would make small difference in its articles:

Maids and laundresses are now entirely unavailable; nobody at all has any servants whatsoever; and those who do have, pay too much and get nothing but impertinence.

Strikes must be stopped by law, but the Government must never in any way interfere with industry.

All labor leaders are crooks. The rank and file are all virtuous, but misled by these leaders.

The rank and file are also crooks.

Children are now undisciplined and never go to bed till all-hours, but when we were children, we went to bed early and cheerfully.

All public schools are atrocious, but it is not true that the teachers are underpaid, and, certainly, taxes must be kept down.

Taxes, indeed, are already so oppressive that not one of the persons here present knows where his next meal or even his next motor car will come from, and these taxes are a penalty upon the industrious and enterprising, imposed by a branch of the Black Hand called “Bureaucracy.”

America will not get into this war between Hitler and Great Britain, which will be over by June, 1942.

But we are certainly against Fascism—because why?—because Fascism just means Government Control, and we’re against Government Control in Germany or in the United States! When our Government quits interfering and gives Industry the green light to go ahead, then we’ll show the world what the American System of Free Enterprise can do to provide universal prosperity.

Boone Havock can still, at sixty, lick any seven Squareheads in his construction gangs; he carries on his enterprises not for profit—for years and years that has been entirely consumed by these taxes—but solely out of a desire to give work to the common people. He once provided a fine running shower-bath for a gang in Kittson County, but none of the men ever used it, and though he himself started with a shovel, times have changed since then, and all selfless love for the job has departed.

Dr. Drover also carries on solely out of patriotism.

The wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a woman who has so betrayed her own class that she believes that miners and Negroes and women are American citizens, ought to be compelled by law to stay home.

We rarely go to the movies, but we did just happen to see a pretty cute film about gang-murder.

The Reverend Dr. Quentin Yarrow, pastor of St. Anselm’s P.E., is a fine man, very broad-minded and well-read, and just as ready to take a drink or shoot a game of golf as any regular guy.

Jay Laverick, of the flour mills, is a fine man, a regular guy, always ready to shoot a game of golf or take a drink, but he has been hitting up the hard stuff pretty heavy since his little wife passed away, and he ought to remarry.

Cass should certainly remarry, and we suspect that it is Chris Grau, also present, whom Cass has chosen and already kissed—at least.

You can’t change human nature.

We don’t fall for any of these ’isms.

While we appreciate wealth—it shows that a man has ability—maybe Berthold Eisenherz, with his brewery and half the properties on the Blue Ox Range that are still producing iron ore, and this damn showy picture of his by some Frenchman named Renoir, is too wealthy. He never shoots golf or shoots ducks, which looks pretty queer for a man rich as that. What the devil does he do with himself?

Some of these smart-aleck critics claim that Middlewestern businessmen haven’t changed much since that book—what’s its name?—by this Communist writer, Upton Sinclair—“Babbitt,” is it?—not changed much since that bellyache appeared, some twenty years ago. Well, we’d like to tell those fellows that in these twenty-odd years, the American businessman has changed completely. He has traveled to Costa Rica and Cuba and Guatemala, as well as Paris, and in the Reader’s Digest he has learned all about psychology and modern education. He’s been to a symphony concert, and by listening to the commentators on the radio, he has now become intimate with every branch of Foreign Affairs.

“As an ex-Congressman, don’t you think that’s true?” demanded Don Pennloss.

“Why, I guess it is,” said Cass.

He had tried to bring into the conversation the name of Jinny Marshland, but he had found no links between her and taxes or Costa Rica. Now he blurted, “Say, I had a pleasant experience in court today.”

Roy Drover scoffed, “You mean you’re still working there? The State still paying you good money for just yelling ‘Overruled!’ every time a lawyer belches?”

“They seem to be. Well, we had a pretty dull sidewalk case, but one witness was an unusually charming girl——”

“We know. You took her into your chambers and conferred with her!” bellowed Boone Havock.

“He did not. He’s no fat wolf like you, you lumberjack!” screamed Queenie.

“Good gracious, I didn’t know it was so late. Quarter past eleven. Can I give you a lift, Cass?” said Chris Grau.