Читать книгу Dodsworth - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 12

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Sam clumped up-stairs and found Fran, very brisk, fairly cheerful, still in her brocade dressing-gown but crouching over her desk, dashing off notes: suggestions to partisans in her various clubs, orders to the secretaries of the leagues which she supported—leagues for the study of democracy, leagues for the blind, societies for the collection of statistics about the effect of alcohol on plantation-hands in Mississippi. She was interested in every aspect of these leagues except perhaps the purposes for which they had been founded, and no Indiana politician was craftier at soaping enemies, advising friends, and building up a political machine to accomplish nothing in particular.

She shone at Sam as he lumbered in, but she said abruptly, “Sit down, please. I want to talk to you.”

(“Oh, Lord, what have I done now?”) He sat meekly in a chintz-covered overstuffed chair.

“Sam! I’ve been thinking lately. I didn’t want to speak to you about it till you had the U.A.C. business all finished. But I’m afraid you’ll get yourself tied up with some new job, and I want to go to Europe!”

“Well——”

“Wait! This may be our only chance, the only time you’ll be free till we’re so old we won’t enjoy wandering. Let’s take the chance! There’ll be time for you to create a dozen new kinds of cars when we come back. You’ll do it all the better if you have a real rest. A real one! I don’t want to go just for a few months, but for a solid year.”

“Good Heavens!”

“Yes, they are good! Think! Here’s Emily going to be married next month. Then she won’t need us. Brent has enough friends in college. He won’t need us. I can chuck all these beastly clubs and everything. They don’t mean anything; they’re just make-believe, to keep me busy. I’m a very active female, Sam, and I want to do something besides sitting around Zenith. Think what we could do! Spring on the Italian Lakes! Motoring through the Tyrol! London in the Season! And I’ve never seen Europe since I was a girl, and you’ve never seen it at all. Let yourself have a good time for once! Trust me, can’t you, dear?”

“Well, it would be kind of nice to get away from the grind. I’d like to look over the Rolls-Royce and Mercedes plants. And see Paris and the Alps. But a year——That’s a long time. I think we’d get pretty tired of Europe, living around in hotels. But——I really haven’t made any plans. The U.A.C. business was so sudden. I would like to see Italy. Those hilltowns must be very curious. And so old. We’ll talk about it tonight. Auf wiedersehen, old lady.”

He tramped out, apparently as dependable as an old Newfoundland and as little given to worrying about anything more complex than the hiding-places of bones. But he was fretting as he sat erect in his limousine, while Smith drove him into town.

These moments of driving were the only times when he was alone. He was as beset by people—his wife, his daughter, his son, his servants, his office-staff, his friends at lunch and on the golf course—as in his most frenziedly popular days at college, when it had been his “duty to old Yale” to be athletic and agreeable, and never to be alone, certainly never to sit and think. People came to him, swarmed about him, wanted his advice and his money and the spiritual support which they found in his ponderous caution. Yet he liked to be alone, he liked to meditate, and he made up for it on these morning rides.

“She’s right,” he worried. “I’d better not let her know how right she is, or she’ll yank me off to London before I can pack my flask. I wonder——Oh yes, of course, she does care for me, a lot. But sometimes I wish she weren’t quite so good a manager. She just tries to amuse me by playing at being a kitten. She isn’t one, not by a long shot. She’s a greyhound. Sometimes when I’m tired, I wish she just wanted to cuddle up and be lazy with me. She’s quicksilver. And quicksilver is hard, when you try to compress it!

“Oh, that’s unfair. She’s been the best wife——I haven’t given enough time to courting her, what with all this cursed business. And I’m tired of business. Like to sit around and chat and get acquainted with myself. And I’m tired of these streets!”

The limousine was laboring through a gusty snowstorm, skidding a bit on icy asphalt, creaking and lumbering as it climbed over drifts. The windows of the car were frost-emblazoned. Sam impatiently cleared a peep-hole with the heel of his glove.

They were creeping along Conklin Avenue, where the dreary rows of old red brick mansions, decayed into boarding houses, the cheap grocery shops and dirty laundries and gloomy little “undertaking parlors” and lunch-rooms with the blatant sign “Eats,” not very entrancing at any time, were turned by the rags of blown snow into the bleakness of a lumber-camp, while the breadth of the street made it only the more shelterless and unintimate. On either side were streets of signboards advertising oil and cigarettes, of wooden one-story shacks between old-fashioned yellow brick tenement-houses gloomy in the sunless snow; a region of poverty without picturesqueness and of labor without hope.

“Oh, Lord, I’d like to get away from it! Be nice to see the Mediterranean and a little sunshine,” Sam muttered. “Let’s go!”