Читать книгу Dodsworth - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 45

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Beyond Sevenoaks, Lockert played a lively tattoo with the horn, and shouted, “Almost there! Welcome to the Stately Homes of England!”

They came to an estate, high-walled, with deer to be seen through grilled gates, and the twisted Tudor chimneys of a great house visible beyond a jungle of pines.

“Oh, Lord, is this the place?” Sam privately wondered. “It’ll be terrible! Ten footmen. I wonder if they do wear plush knee-pants? Whom does one tip?”

But the car raced past this grandeur, dipped into a red brick hamlet, turned off High Street and into a rough lane gloomy between hedges, and entered a driveway before a quite new, quite unpretentious house of ten or twelve rooms. As with thousands of houses they had passed in crawling out of London, there was a glassed-in porch littered with bicycles, rubbers, and rather consumptive geraniums. At one side of the house was a tennis-court, an arbor, and the skeletons of a rose-garden, but of lawn there was scarcely a quarter-acre.

“I told you it was only a box,” Lockert drawled, as he drew up with a sputter of gravel at the door.

There was a roar within. The door was opened by a maid, very stiff in cap and apron, but past her brushed the source of the roaring—a tiny, very slim image of a man, his cheeks almost too smoothly pink to be real, his mustache too precise and silvery, and his voice a parade-ground bellow too enormous to be credited in so miniature a soldier.

“How d’you do, Mrs. Dodsworth. Most awfully nice of you to come!” he thundered, and Lockert muttered, “This is the General.”

If, in his quest for romance, the exterior of the house was a jar to Sam, the drawing-room was precisely what he had desired, without knowing that he had desired it. Here was definitely Home, with a homeliness which existed no longer in most of the well-to-do houses of Zenith, where, between the great furniture factories and the young female decorators with their select notions about “harmony” and “periods,” any respectable living-room was as shiny and as impersonal as a new safety-razor blade. At Herndon’s, blessedly, no two bits of furniture belonged to the same family or age, yet the chintzes, the fireplace, the brass fire-irons, the white paneling, belonged together. On a round table in a corner were the General’s cups—polo cups, golf cups, the cup given him by his mess in India, a few medals, and a leering Siva; and through low casement windows the gray garden was seen sloping down to meadows and a willow-bordered pond. And the maid was wheeling in a tea-wagon with a tall old silver teapot, old silver slop-jar, mounds of buttered scones, and such thin bread and butter as Sam had never known could exist.

After a tea during which Herndon rumbled rather libelous stories about his fellow soldiers, they walked up the lane, across a common on which donkeys and embattled geese were grazing, past half-timbered shops with tiny windows containing a jar or two of sweets, to the fifteenth-century flint church, in itself a history of all Kent. The tower was square, crenelated, looking as though it would endure forever. In the low stone-paved porch were parish registers, and the names of the vicars of the parish since the Norman Gilles de Pierrefort of 1190. The pillars along the nave were ponderous stone; on the wall were brasses with epitaphs in black and red; in the chancel were the ancient stone shelf of the piscina of Roman Catholic days, and a slab commemorating Thos Siwickley, Kt.—all but the name and the florid arms had been worn away by generations of priestly feet.

While Herndon was lecturing them on the beauties of the church—with rather more than a hint about the iron-bound chest in which tourists, particularly American tourists, were permitted to deposit funds for the restoration of the roof—the vicar came in, a man innocent and enthusiastic at forty-five, tall, stooped, much spectacled, speaking an Oxonian English so thick that Sam could understand nothing beyond “strawdnerly well-proportioned arches,” which did not much enlighten him.

As they ambled home he saw candles in cottage windows.

They stopped to greet a porcelain-cheeked little old woman with a wreck of a black hat, a black bag of a suit, and exquisite gloves and shoes, whom Herndon introduced as Lady Somebody-or-other——

“But,” Sam reflected, “it isn’t real! It’s fiction! The whole thing, village and people and everything, is an English novel—and I’m in it! This is Chapter Two, and it’s lovely. But I wonder about Chapter Twenty. Will there be the deuce to play? ... Just because life is more easy and human here, I feel more out of it. So accustomed to having my office and the boys to boss around——Now that I’ve quit, I’ve got nothing but myself—and Fran, of course—to keep me busy. These people, Lockert and Lord Herndon, they can live in themselves more. They don’t need a movie palace and a big garage to be content. I’ve got to learn that, but——Oh, I enjoyed seeing that church, and yet I feel lonely for old Tub making a hell of a racket.”

The glow in him faded as he trudged with Lockert, both of them silent, behind the chattering Fran and Herndon.

And he was irritated when Herndon turned back to crow, in the most flattering way, “You know, I should never in the world have taken Mrs. Dodsworth and you for Americans. I should have thought you were an English couple who had lived for some time in the Colonies.”

Sam grumbled within, childishly, “I suppose that’s an Englishman’s notion of the best compliment he can pay you!”

But Herndon was so cordial that he could not hint his resentment. He would, just that moment, have preferred rudeness and the chance of an enlivening row. But his loneliness, his uncharted apprehension, vanished with the whisky and soda which both Herndon and Lockert deemed it necessary for him to take before dinner, to ward off all possible colds and other ills. As he stalked up to their bedroom (the reddest red and the shiniest brass and the most voluble little fire), Sam fretted, “I’m getting to be as touchy and fanciful and changeable as an old maid. Yet I never was cranky in the office ... never very cranky. Am I too old to learn to loaf? I will!” And he said, as he entered the room and was startled anew at Fran’s shiningness in a combination of white glove silk, “Oh, honey, speaking of old churches, you fitted into that stone aisle as if you were the lady of the manor!”

“And you were so big and straight! Lockert and the General are sweet but——Oh, you old sweet stone statue!”

He remembered for weeks their warm shared affection in the warm red room, as they laughed and dressed. His slight jealousies disappeared at the thought of Lockert off somewhere dressing alone, probably in a room as chill as the drafty corridor.