Читать книгу Cass Timberlane - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 9

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Cass was disappointed when Mrs. Fliegend telephoned to him not to dress for dinner. He would have liked to show Jinny how stately he could be. But she reported that Jinny was “so thrilled to meet you; she thinks you were wonderful on the bench—so wise—and of course Lucius and I do, too, Judge.”

He stroked Cleo, and sounded like her.

After pondering on precedents, he decided that it was far enough on in the spring for him to wear his white-flannel suit, with the tie from Marshall Field’s. While he put these on, gravely, as though he were studying a brief, he wondered how much he was going to like Jinny. So far, he merely loved her.

Would she be one of these Professional Youths? Would she reek with gum and with the slang suitable to it: “Oh boy!” and “No soap” and “That’s what you think”?

“Oh, quit it!” he said, aloud—and Cleo promised that she would.

He was so elegant tonight that he drove to the Fliegends’, instead of walking.

The Fliegends’ bulky old brown house was on South Beltrami, a block from Chris Grau’s.

He felt guilty of disloyalty to Chris in loving young Jinny, but he felt even wickeder as he reflected that though he had been born only three blocks from the Fliegends’, he had not been in their house since boyhood, and could not remember its rooms. Probably Chris and Bradd Criley and Boone Havock had never been inside it. In “The Friendly City,” as we call it, we don’t shoot Jews and Catholics and Socialists and saints. We just don’t go calling on them.

Then Mrs. Fliegend was beaming on him at the door, while he imagined her saying, “You phony politician! You’ve never condescended to come to our house till you wanted us to play procurers for you. You, the great Anglo-Saxon judge and gentleman—you Sioux bastard! Get out!”

Mrs. Fliegend must have wondered why Judge Timberlane seemed so pleased by her mild greeting.

Looking past his hosts into the square living-room which made up half the first floor, he saw no Jinny, but only a great blankness where she should have been.

—— Maybe she isn’t coming? Ditched me for that young man in the canoe?

Mrs. Fliegend was soothing him, “Oh, she’ll be here, Judge!”

—— Is my youthful romance as obvious as all that?

Remembering it only from childhood, he had expected the interior of the Fliegend house to be Oriental and over-rich. But it was the elder German and Yankee pioneers who had satin-brocaded walls and Tudor fireplaces. Here, the walls were of white paneled wood, dotted with old maps of Minnesota and portraits of its early heroes: Ramsey, Sibley, Steele, Pike, Taliaferro.

“I didn’t know you were such a collector of Minnesota items,” said Cass.

—— That sounded fatuous and condescending. I didn’t mean to be.

Lucius explained, “I was born in Minnesota, in Long Prairie, and my father before me, near Marine Mills, where my grandfather settled. He fought through the Civil War, in the Third Minnesota. We are of the old generation.”

Cass was meditating upon his rare gifts of ignorance when Jinny Marshland flew into the room.

She was no wild little hawk now, but a young lady. Her hair was put up, sleek and tamed, and she wore a dress of soft black with, at her pleated black girdle, one silver rose. She was quick-moving and friendly, and her greeting was almost excessive: “I’m terrified to meet you, Judge, after seeing you in court. I thought you were going to send me to Stillwater for contempt. You won’t now, will you?”

Yet no spark came to him from her, and she was just another pretty girl, another reed bending to the universal south wind.

The other guests, a couple who came in with shy bumptiousness, made him feel as guilty at his neglect of them as had the Fliegends. They were Dr. Silbersee, refugee Jewish eye-ear-throat specialist from Vienna, ’cellist in the amateur double-quartet that was Grand Republic’s only musical wonder, and his wife Helma, who was equally serious about the piano, Apfelkuchen, and the doctrines of the post-Freudian psychoanalysts.

Cass had been fretting all week, after his session with Chris Grau, that the local conversation was dull. He had wished, for the benefit of his unconscious protégée Jinny, to exhibit what he conceived to be a real European conversazione, complete with Rhine wine and seltzer. He got it, too, this evening, and he didn’t care much for it. He realized again, as he had in Washington and in waterfront dives in Trinidad, that most conversation is dull. Aside from shop-talk, which includes the whispering of lovers, anything printed, a time-table or the rich prose of a tomato-catsup label, is more stimulating than any talk, even the screaming of six economists and an intellectual actress.

At dinner, the Fliegends and the Silbersees said that this fellow Hitler was no good, that it had been warm today, that it might be warmer tomorrow, that Toscanini was a good conductor, that rents in Grand Republic were very high just now, and that there was a Little Armenian Restaurant in Milwaukee.

It was, in perfection, New York, minus the taxi horns, and still Cass was not satisfied, and, so far as he could see, neither was Jinny.

At first, as the conversation took fire, she hadn’t so much as a chip to throw into it. She sat mute, with her hands folded small and flat and meek, and she had no observations on the subject of Debussy, regarding which Lucius had represented her as highly eloquent. Cass decided that she was stupid, and that there wasn’t much to be said for himself either.

But he noticed how quickly her dark eyes turned from speaker to speaker; how she weighed, and did not think very much of, her ponderous elders. Slowly he was hypnotized by her again; he felt her independence and her impatience to do things. Restless under this middle-aged droning, he wanted to be on her side. And he was a little afraid of her.

But he made a good deal of progress in his romance. To his original fourteen words of address to her, he had now added sixty-seven others, including, “No, no, you weren’t late. I think I was ahead of time. I guess my watch is fast.” No flowery squire could have said it more colorfully.

The Fliegends were lenient hosts, and after dinner (roast goose and potato pancakes, such heavenly stuff as Grand Republic rarely knew), they wedged the Silbersees in beside the grand piano, and sent Cass and Jinny “out to see the garden.”

Like most houses in Grand Republic, where the first settlers huddled together instead of taking ten acres for each garden, the Fliegend abode was too close to its neighbors. But they had planted cedar hedges, and made a pool surrounded with wicker benches that were, surprisingly, meant to be sat upon. Cass and Jinny did sit upon them, and he did not in the least feel that he was sitting upon a pink cloud. He was anxious to find out, while still posing as a big superior man, whether Jinny considered him a stuffy old party.

“Nice dinner,” he said.

“Wasn’t it?”

“This, uh, this Roy Harris they were talking about—do you know his music?”

“Just a little.”

“Uh——”

“I’ve just heard some of it played.”

“Yes, uh—— I guess—I guess Dr. Silbersee is a very fine musician.”

“Yes, isn’t he.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve heard him play, Judge?”

“Yes, uh—oh yes, I’ve heard him play. A very fine ’cellist.”

“Of course I don’t know music well enough to tell, but I think he must be and——”

Then it broke:

“Jinny! Were you bored tonight?”

“How?”

“Our pompous talk.”

“Why, I thought it was lovely talk. I was so interested about the conductors: Mitropoulos and Bruno Walter.”

“Oh. You like musicians?”

“Love ’em. If I really knew any. But one thing did bother me.”

“What?”

“I thought you were bored. I was watching you, Judge.”

“And I was watching you.”

“Two kids among the grown-ups!”

They both laughed very much, and he was grateful for being included in her conspiracy of youth.

The silent Jinny talked enough now. “I thought they were all so nice, and oh boy! are they ever learned! I guess the people in Vienna must be like them. But I wanted to hear you talk.”

“Why?” It was too flagrant even to be called “fishing.”

“I wanted to know how do criminals get that way, and can you help them, and—— I’ll bet they’re awed by you.”

“Not much.”

“I would be. I was sort of disappointed by the court room, though. I thought there’d be a whole mob, holding their breaths, and sixteen reporters writing like mad, but they were—oh, as if they were waiting for a bus. But then when I looked at you—honestly, you scared me, Judge!”

“Now, now!”

“You did!”

“How could I? Judge Blackstaff might, but I’m just a home-town lawyer.”

“You are not a home-town lawyer! Oh, I mean you are, of course, but I mean—you aren’t any home-town lawyer!” She sounded proud of him, and eager. “On the bench, you looked as if you knew everything, and maybe you might be kind of sorry for me, for having murdered my Aunt Aggie and stolen the sewing-machine oil-can, but you’d put me away for ten years, for the good of society. Wouldn’t you?”

“No, I’m afraid I’d resign from the bench first, Jinny.”

“M!” She sounded gratified, and with some energy he kept himself from seizing her hand. It was fated that he should now take the next step, with “You came by bus, didn’t you? May I drive you home?”

He, it seemed, might.

He said good night to the Fliegends and Silbersees with a feeling of having enlarged his knowledge of Grand Republic. When Jinny was beside him in his car, the major purposes of his life seemed to have been accomplished, even if he could express the ultimate glory only by a hesitating, “It was a very pleasant evening, didn’t you think?”