Читать книгу Cass Timberlane - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 7

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His panic was gone before he had stepped like a soldier eight blocks in that nipping northern air and begun to mount the Heights. The streets were friendly with the fresh-leaved elms and maples for which Grand Republic was notable; the cherries were in blossom, and the white lilacs and mountain ash.

There were dark groves along the way, and alleys that rose sharply and vanished around curves, there were gates in brick walls and hedges; a quality by night which was odd and exciting to Cass Timberlane, a life to be guessed at, not too plain. This was no prairie town, flat and rectangular, with every virtue and crusted sin exposed.

As he climbed, he could see the belated lights of farm-houses on the uplands across the valley, the lights of buses down on Chippewa Avenue, and in simplicity he loved his city now instead of fretting that its typical evening conversation was dull—as dull as that of Congressmen in the cloakroom or newspaper correspondents over the poker table. But he fretted over himself and his perilous single state, with nervousness about the fact that Chris Grau was likely at any time to pick him up and marry him.

—— No, I’ll never marry again. I’d never be a good husband. I’m too solemn—maybe too stuffy. I’m too devoted to the law.

—— Am I?

—— I must get married. I can’t carry on alone. Life is too meaningless when you have no one for whom you want to buy gifts, or steal them.

—— If I did marry, I think that this time I could make a go of it. I understand women a little better now. I shouldn’t have minded Blanche’s love of tinsel, but just laughed at her. And Chris thinks of other people. With her, I’d be happier and happier as the years went by——

—— Lord, that sounds so aged! It was her youth that I liked so much in that girl on the witness-stand yesterday—or today, was it? What was her name again—Virginia something? ... Curious. I can’t see her any more!

In law school, at the University of Minnesota, Cass had listened to a lecture by that great advocate, Hugo Lebanon of Minneapolis, had gone up glowingly to talk with him, and had been invited to dinner at the Lebanon marble palace on Lake of the Isles. There was a tall, pale, beautiful daughter named Blanche.

So Cass married the daughter.

She was emphatic about being a pure Anglo-Saxon who went right back, even if Warwickshire remained curiously unstirred about her going right back, to a gray stone house in Warwick. She was the more vigorously pure about it because there were whispers of Jewish blood. She found it hard to put up with the mongrel blood of the furniture-dealing Timberlanes, and she was revolted when Cass estimated that through his father, he was three-eighths British stock, one-sixteenth French Canadian, and one-sixteenth Sioux Indian—whence, he fondly believed, came his tall, high-cheeked spareness—and through his mother he was two-eighths Swedish, one-eighth German, one-eighth Norwegian.

Blanche did not, after the magnitude and salons of Minneapolis, much like Grand Republic. When she came there as a bride, in 1928, the Renoir had not yet arrived, so there was no one to talk to.

She encouraged Cass to run for Congress; she served rye, with her own suave hands, to aldermen and county commissioners. Cass and she attained Washington, and she loved it like a drunkard, and loved the chance of meeting—at least of being in the same populous rooms with—French diplomats and Massachusetts senators and assorted Roosevelts. When Cass felt swamped, as a lone representative among more than four hundred, when he longed for the duck-pass and his law-office and the roaring of Roy Drover, when he refused to run for re-election, Blanche rebelled. She was not going back to listen to Queenie Havock shrieking about her love-life, she shouted, and Cass could not blame her, though he did sigh that there were also other sounds audible in Grand Republic.

There was a mild, genial Englishman, Fox Boneyard, an importer of textiles, who lived in New York but was often about Washington; he had the unfortunate illusions about beautiful American women that Englishmen sometimes do have, and he also had more money than the Honorable Cass Timberlane.

Blanche married him.

During the divorce, Cass did have sense enough to refuse to pay alimony to a woman who was marrying a richer man, and who had never consented to having children. But he still loved Blanche enough to hate her, and to hate convulsively the sight of a coat she had left behind, and the wrinkles in it that had come from her strong shoulders. He underwent the familiar leap from partisanship and love to enmity and a sick feeling that he had been betrayed.

He grimly finished his last days in Congress, and then quite dramatically went to pieces. He was a feeling man, and with a whisky breath and unshaved, he was an interesting figure in waterfront cafés in Trinidad and Cartagena, and to his white cruel love he paid the tribute of being sick in toilets and talking to other saintly idiots about having lost his soul.

But even love for Blanche could not keep Cass Timberlane at this romantic business for more than two months, and after another six, most of them sedately spent in and about the Temple in London, he returned to the affection of Grand Republic, and practised law for three more years before he was elected to the bench.

Election was not easy. The routine politicians disliked him because he had left Congress, because he could not be guided, and because he made fun of all clauses in political speeches beginning with “than whom.” The churches, particularly the Lutherans, who were powerful in Radisson County, disapproved of him because he had been divorced. The Republicans were doubtful about him because he had been amiable with Farmer-Labor leaders, and the Farmer-Laborites distrusted him because he lived in a large house. In fact, there was really no reason for his being elected except that he was known to be honest, courageous, and learned, and that he had once lent a grateful and active Norwegian farmer five dollars.

But he was a judge now, and the district had the fixed habit of him, and if he would only marry a sound churchwoman, like Christabel Grau, and give a little more attention to the Chamber of Commerce and to his bridge game, he might go on forever, a sound and contented Leading Citizen.