Читать книгу Dodsworth - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 43

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Lockert called for them in a long, sumptuous, two-seater Sunbeam which he drove himself. He insisted that there was plenty of room in the seat for the three of them, but it seemed to Sam that they were crowded, and that Fran, glossy in her gray squirrel coat and her small cloche hat, snuggled too contentedly against Lockert’s shoulder.

He forgot it in the pleasure of driving from the lowering smoke of London to the winter sunshine of the country; gray fields beginning to stir with green, breathing a faint bright mist, above which, in the shining branches of the trees, the rooks were jubilant. Little villages he saw, with homely tea rooms and inn signs—“The Rose and Crown,” “The Green Dragon,” and “The Faithful Friend”; then thatched farmhouses, oasthouses—he could not understand what these domestic lighthouses might be—and on a ridge the splayed ruin of a castle, his first castle!

Knights in tourney; Elaine in white samite, mystic, wonderful—no, it was Guinevere who wore the white samite, wasn’t it? must read some Tennyson again. Dukes riding out to the Crusades with minstrels playing on—what was it?—rebecks? Banners alive, and a thousand swords flashing. And these fairy stories really had happened, and around that wall up there, with its one broken lump of a tower! The cavalcade of knights—following this same road!—became more real to him than the motor, for he was bored by the talk of Fran and Lockert and lost the thread of it in ancient book-colored memories which returned as desirable and somehow tragic. The other two were chattering of cricket at Lord’s, of polo at Hurlingham; they were spitefully recalling the poor old rustic banker on the Ultima who came to dinner every evening in prehistoric dress clothes with the top of his trousers showing like a narrow black scarf above the opening of his baggy white waistcoat. Their superciliousness shut Sam out in the darkness along with the kindly old banker.

He wanted to escape from the hotel-and-theater London of the tourist and see the authentic English—Dorset shepherds—cotton operatives on the dole in Salford—collier captains in Bristol harbor—Cornish tin-miners—Cambridge dons—hop-pickers in Kentish pubs—great houses in the Dukeries. But they were too low or too high for Fran’s attention, and was it probable, he sighed, that he would see anything that she did not choose?

A little incredulously he perceived that Fran was really attracted by Lockert—she who had not been given to even the flimsiest of tea-table flirtations, who had blushed and looked soft-eyed only at the attentions of the very best of visiting celebrities: a lecturing English novelist or a young Italian baron who was studying motor factories; she who had ever been rude with a swift cold rudeness to such flappers as were known to indulge in that midnight pawing known in Zenith as “necking.” But Lockert seemed by his placid bullying to have broken her glistening shell of sexlessness. She, so touchy, so ready to take offense, accepted Lockert as though he were her oldest friend, to wrangle with, to laugh with.

“You drive much too fast,” she said.

“It would be too fast for any one who wasn’t as good a driver as I am.”

“Oh, really! I suppose you’ve won races!”

“I have. With German shells. I was in the motor transport before they sent me to America. I’ve driven at night, on a road full of shell holes, without lights, at thirty miles an hour.... As I was saying, you’re too American, Mrs. Dodsworth. Americans understand themselves less and are less understood by the world than any nation that’s ever existed. You’re excellent at all the things in which you’re supposed to be lacking—lyric poetry, formal manners, lack of cupidity. And you’re so timid and incompetent at the things in which you’re supposed to excel—fast motoring, aviation, efficiency in business, pioneering—why, Britain has done more pioneering, in Canada and Africa and Australia and China, in any given ten years, than the States have in twenty. And you, who feel you’re so European, you’re so typically American! You have the most charming and childish misconceptions about yourself. You think you’re an arrogant, self-contained, rational, ambitious woman, whereas actually you’re warm-hearted and easily dazzled—you’re simply an eager young woman, and it’s only your shyness that keeps you going about doing the starry-eyed-wonder and trusting-little-niece sort of thing.”

“My dear Major Lockert, I hope that the combination of your extraordinarily careful driving and your extraordinarily generous mind-reading isn’t tiring you too much!”

But she didn’t, Sam realized, succeed in making it nasty.

She had turned entirely toward Lockert. She no longer noticed Sam when he mumbled, “There’s a lovely old stone church,” or “Guess those are hop poles”; when he wanted to hold her hand and tell her with quick little pressures that they were sharing the English countryside.

“Oh, well——” he reflected.

He recalled “Pickwick Papers,” and the coach with the jovial, well-warmed philosophers swaying down the frosty roads for Christmas in the country.

“Great!” he said.