Читать книгу Dodsworth - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 27

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He tramped down to tell Fran—he was not quite sure what it was that he wanted to tell her, save that steamers were very fine things indeed, and that ahead of them, in the murk of the horizon, they could see the lanes of England.

She, in their cabin with its twin brass beds, its finicking imitations of gray-blue French prints on the paneled walls, was amid a litter of shaken-out frocks, heaps of shoes, dressing gowns, Coty powder, three gift copies of “The Perennial Bachelor,” binoculars, steamer letters, steamer telegrams, the candy and the Charles & Company baskets of overgrown fruit and tiny conserves with which they were to help out the steamer’s scanty seven meals a day, his dress-shirts (of which he was to, and certainly would not, put on a fresh one every evening), and French novels (which she was to, and certainly wouldn’t, read in a stately, aloof, genteel manner every day on deck).

“It’s terrible!” she lamented. “I’ll get things put away just about in time for landing.... Oh, here’s a wireless from Emily, the darling, from California. Harry and she seem to be standing the honeymoon about as well as most victims.”

“Chuck the stuff. Come out on deck. I love this ship. It’s so——Man certainly has put it over Nature for once! I think I could’ve built ships! Come out and see it.”

“You do sound happy. I’m glad. But I must unpack. You skip along——”

It was not often, these years, that he was kittenish, but now he picked her up, while she kicked and laughed, he lifted her over a pile of sweaters and tennis shoes and bathing-suits and skates, kissed her, and shouted, “Come on! It’s our own honeymoon! Eloping! Have I ever remembered to tell you that I adore you? Come up and see some ocean with me. There’s an awful lot of ocean around this ship.... Oh, damn the unpacking!”

He sounded masterful, but it was always a satisfaction, when he was masterful, to have her consent to be mastered. He was pleased now when she stopped being efficient about this business of enjoying life, and consented to do something for no reason except that it was agreeable.

In her shaggy Burberry, color of a dead maple leaf, and her orange tam o’ shanter, she suggested autumn days and brown uplands. She was a girl; certainly no mother of a married daughter. He was cumbersomely proud of her, of the glances which the men passengers snatched at her as they swung round the deck.

“Funny how it comes over a fellow suddenly—I mean—this is almost the first time we’ve ever really started out like lovers—no job to call us back. You were dead right, Fran—done enough work—now we’ll live! Together—always! But I’ll have so much to learn, to keep up with you. You, and Europe! Hell, I’m so sentimental! D’you mind? Just come out of state prison! Did twenty years!”

Round and round the deck. The long stretch on the starboard side, filthy with deck chairs, with rug-wadded passengers turning a pale green as the sea rose, with wind-ruffled magazines, cups left from tea-time, and children racing with toy carts. The narrow passage aft, where the wind swooped on them, pushing them back, and the steamer dipped so that they had to labor up-hill, bending forward, their limbs of lead. But, as they toiled, a glimpse of ship mysteries that were stirring to land-bound imaginations. They looked down into a hatchway—some one said there were half a dozen Brazilian cougars being shipped down there—and along a dizzy aerial gangway to the after deck and the wheelhouse and a lone light in the weaving darkness. They saw the last glimmer of the streaky wake stretching back to New York.

Then, blown round the corner, released from climbing upward, a dash along the cold port side, blessedly free of steamer chairs and of lardy staring. Swinging at five miles an hour. The door of the smoking-room, with a whiff of tobacco smoke, a pleasant reek of beer, a sound of vocal Americans. The place where the deck widened into an alcove—thick walls of steel, dotted with lines of rivets smeared with thick white paint—and the door of the stewardspantry from which, in the afternoon, came innumerable sandwiches and cakes and cups and pots of tea. The double door to the main stairway, where, somehow, a stewardess in uniform was always talking to a steward. The steel-gripped windows of the music room, with a glimpse of unhappy young-old women, accompanying their mothers abroad, sitting flapping through magazines. Where the deck was unenclosed, the yellow scoured rail and the white stanchions, bright in the deck light, brighter against the dark coil of sea. Always before them, the long straight lines of the decking planks, rigid as bars of music, divided by seams of glistening tar. Deck—ship—at sea!

Then forward, and the people along the rail—bold voyagers facing the midwinter Atlantic through glass windows—honeymooners quickly unclasping as the pestiferous deck-circlers passed—aged and sage gentlemen commenting on the inferiority of the steerage passengers who, on the deck below, altogether innocent of being condescendingly observed by the gentry-by-right-of-passage-money, jigged beside a tarpaulin-covered hatch to the pumping music of an accordion, and blew blithely on frosted fingers.

And round all over again, walking faster, turning from casual pedestrians into competitors in the ocean marathon. Faster. Cutting corners more sharply. Superior to thrusting wind, to tilting deck. Gaining on that lone, lean, athletic girl, and passing her....

“That’s the way to walk! Say, Fran, I wonder if sometime we couldn’t get away from hotels and sort of take a walking-trip along the Riviera—interesting, I should think.... Darling!”

Gaining on but never quite passing that monocle-flashing, tweed-coated man whom they detested on sight and who, within three days, was to prove the simplest and heartiest of acquaintances.

A racing view of all their companions of the voyage, their fellow-citizens in this brave village amid the desert of waters: strangers to be hated on sight, to be snubbed lest they snub first, yet presently to be known better and better loved and longer remembered than neighbors seen for a lifetime on the cautious land.

Their permanent home, for a week; to become more familiar, thanks to the accelerated sensitiveness which is the one blessing of travel, than rooms paced for years. Every stippling of soot on the lifeboats, every chair in the smoking-room, every table along one’s own aisle in the dining salon, to be noted and recalled, in an exhilarated and heightened observation.

“I do feel awfully well,” said Sam, and Fran: “So do I. So long since we’ve walked together like this! And we’ll keep it up; we won’t get caught by people. But I must arise now and go to Innisfree and finish the unpacking of the nine bean rows oh why did I bring so many clothes! Till dressing-time—my dear!”