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Find a story you can fall in love with!
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This is Part 5
CHAPTER XXVII Starts Below.
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Main Street is considered a classic because it fundamentally changed how American literature depicted small‑town life, combining sharp social satire, psychological realism, and a historically revealing portrait of early‑20th‑century America. – link2source-WIKI – It is a story set in the small town of Gopher Prairie, a fictionalized version of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis’s hometown.
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Main Street offers an unusually detailed, satirical, and historically specific portrait of everyday life in a Midwestern small town during the 1910s, right up through World War I and the onset of Prohibition.
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NOTES: from Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street.
link2source – literary devices DOT net – polysyndeton – an author creates a rhythm in their writing. (pronounced pol-ee-SIN-de-ton), the deliberate and repetitive use of conjunctions, like and, but, or, nor, in a series of words or phrases.
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link2source – Carol Kennicott’s first encounters with a radical, intellectual circle in Minneapolis/St. Paul.
link2source – openlibrary DOT org – books – OL33188620M – Main Street
link2source – American Literature DOT com – author – Sinclair Lewis – book – Main Street (starting on chapter one).
link2-ARCHIVE – Main Street : The Story of Carol Kennicot (Archive)
link2-TEXAN-GOLD – EPUB BOOK (Main Street) Free-of-Charge and Downloadable!
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Getting Above Your Highest Altitude: Part 5
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*** Main Street, a Double Take (a working title) ***
*** Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist and social critic, widely described as a satirist, who wrote about small‑town American life and was the author of the 1920 novel Main Street, which made his national reputation. ***
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was an American novelist and social critic, best known for his satirical depictions of small-town life, middle-class conformity, and American boosterism, and he was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. – link2source – ALSO: Later in his career, Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here (1935), which considers a Fascist takeover in the United States, and Kingsblood Royal (1947), a novel addressing race relations. — It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. — Lewis’s fiction typically satirizes American provincial life, business culture, and religious hypocrisy, often using detailed local speech and customs to expose social complacency. —
(From Wikipedia): Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first author from the United States (and the first from the Americas) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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A gawky, acne‑scarred, bookish boy, Sinclair Lewis immersed himself in reading and writing early; he worked on local newspapers and, later, for periodicals and publishers. He studied at Yale. – link2source – mnhs DOT org – mnopedia – search – index – person – Lewis, Harry Sinclair – 1885 – 1951.
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link2-gutenberg – Main Street – by Sinclair Lewis. — (This source included for your reference.)
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CHAPTER XXVII
A LETTER from Raymie Wutherspoon, in France, said that he had been sent to the front, been slightly wounded, been made a captain. From Vida’s pride Carol sought to draw a stimulant to rouse her from depression.
Miles had sold his dairy. He had several thousand dollars. To Carol he said good-by with a mumbled word, a harsh hand-shake, “Going to buy a farm in northern Alberta–far off from folks as I can get.” He turned sharply away, but he did not walk with his former spring. His shoulders seemed old.
It was said that before he went he cursed the town. There was talk of arresting him, of riding him on a rail. It was rumored that at the station old Champ Perry rebuked him, “You better not come back here. We’ve got respect for your dead, but we haven’t got any for a blasphemer and a traitor that won’t do anything for his country and only bought one Liberty Bond.”
Some of the people who had been at the station declared that Miles made some dreadful seditious retort: something about loving German workmen more than American bankers; but others asserted that he couldn’t find one word with which to answer the veteran; that he merely sneaked up on the platform of the train. He must have felt guilty, everybody agreed, for as the train left town, a farmer saw him standing in the vestibule and looking out.
His house–with the addition which he had built four months ago–was very near the track on which his train passed.
When Carol went there, for the last time, she found Olaf’s chariot with its red spool wheels standing in the sunny corner beside the stable. She wondered if a quick eye could have noticed it from a train.
That day and that week she went reluctantly to Red Cross work; she stitched and packed silently, while Vida read the war bulletins. And she said nothing at all when Kennicott commented, “From what Champ says, I guess Bjornstam was a bad egg, after all. In spite of Bea, don’t know but what the citizens’ committee ought to have forced him to be patriotic — let on like they could send him to jail if he didn’t volunteer and come through for bonds and the Y. M. C. A. They’ve worked that stunt fine with all these German farmers.”
*** II ***
She found no inspiration but she did find a dependable kindness in Mrs. Westlake, and at last she yielded to the old woman’s receptivity and had relief in sobbing the story of Bea.
Guy Pollock she often met on the street, but he was merely a pleasant voice which said things about Charles Lamb and sunsets.
Her most positive experience was the revelation of Mrs. Flickerbaugh, the tall, thin, twitchy wife of the attorney. Carol encountered her at the drug store.
“Walking?” snapped Mrs. Flickerbaugh.
“Why, yes.”
“Humph. Guess you’re the only female in this town that retains the use of her legs. Come home and have a cup o’ tea with me.”
Because she had nothing else to do, Carol went. But she was uncomfortable in the presence of the amused stares which Mrs. Flickerbaugh’s raiment drew. Today, in reeking early August, she wore a man’s cap, a skinny fur like a dead cat, a necklace of imitation pearls, a scabrous satin blouse, and a thick cloth skirt hiked up in front.
“Come in. Sit down. Stick the baby in that rocker. Hope you don’t mind the house looking like a rat’s nest. You don’t like this town. Neither do I,” said Mrs. Flickerbaugh.
“Why—-”
“Course you don’t!”
“Well then, I don’t! But I’m sure that some day I’ll find some solution. Probably I’m a hexagonal peg. Solution: find the hexagonal hole.” Carol was very brisk.
“How do you know you ever will find it?”
“There’s Mrs. Westlake. She’s naturally a big-city woman–she ought to have a lovely old house in Philadelphia or Boston–but she escapes by being absorbed in reading.”
“You be satisfied to never do anything but read?”
“No, but Heavens, one can’t go on hating a town always!”
“Why not? I can! I’ve hated it for thirty-two years. I’ll die here — and I’ll hate it till I die. I ought to have been a business woman. I had a good deal of talent for tending to figures. All gone now. Some folks think I’m crazy. Guess I am. Sit and grouch. Go to church and sing hymns. Folks think I’m religious. Tut! Trying to forget washing and ironing and mending socks. Want an office of my own, and sell things. Julius never hear of it. Too late.”
Carol sat on the gritty couch, and sank into fear. Could this drabness of life keep up forever, then? Would she some day so despise herself and her neighbors that she too would walk Main Street an old skinny eccentric woman in a mangy cat’s-fur? As she crept home she felt that the trap had finally closed. She went into the house, a frail small woman, still winsome but hopeless of eye as she staggered with the weight of the drowsy boy in her arms.
She sat alone on the porch, that evening. It seemed that Kennicott had to make a professional call on Mrs. Dave Dyer.
Under the stilly boughs and the black gauze of dusk the street was meshed in silence. There was but the hum of motor tires crunching the road, the creak of a rocker on the Howlands’ porch, the slap of a hand attacking a mosquito, a heat-weary conversation starting and dying, the precise rhythm of crickets, the thud of moths against the screen–sounds that were a distilled silence. It was a street beyond the end of the world, beyond the boundaries of hope. Though she should sit here forever, no brave procession, no one who was interesting, would be coming by. It was tediousness made tangible, a street builded of lassitude and of futility.
Myrtle Cass appeared, with Cy Bogart. She giggled and bounced when Cy tickled her ear in village love. They strolled with the half-dancing gait of lovers, kicking their feet out sideways or shuffling a dragging jig, and the concrete walk sounded to the broken two-four rhythm. Their voices had a dusky turbulence. Suddenly, to the woman rocking on the porch of the doctor’s house, the night came alive, and she felt that everywhere in the darkness panted an ardent quest which she was missing as she sank back to wait for —- There must be something.
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CHAPTER XXVIII
IT WAS at a supper of the Jolly Seventeen in August that Carol heard of “Elizabeth,” from Mrs. Dave Dyer.
Carol was fond of Maud Dyer, because she had been particularly agreeable lately; had obviously repented of the nervous distaste which she had once shown. Maud patted her hand when they met, and asked about Hugh.
Kennicott said that he was “kind of sorry for the girl, some ways; she’s too darn emotional, but still, Dave is sort of mean to her.” He was polite to poor Maud when they all went down to the cottages for a swim. Carol was proud of that sympathy in him, and now she took pains to sit with their new friend.
Mrs. Dyer was bubbling, “Oh, have you folks heard about this young fellow that’s just come to town that the boys call ‘Elizabeth’? He’s working in Nat Hicks’s tailor shop. I bet he doesn’t make eighteen a week, but my! isn’t he the perfect lady though! He talks so refined, and oh, the lugs he puts on–belted coat, and pique collar with a gold pin, and socks to match his necktie, and honest–you won’t believe this, but I got it straight–this fellow, you know he’s staying at Mrs. Gurrey’s punk old boarding-house, and they say he asked Mrs. Gurrey if he ought to put on a dress-suit for supper! Imagine! Can you beat that? And him nothing but a Swede tailor–Erik Valborg his name is. But he used to be in a tailor shop in Minneapolis (they do say he’s a smart needle-pusher, at that) and he tries to let on that he’s a regular city fellow. They say he tries to make people think he’s a poet–carries books around and pretends to read ’em. Myrtle Cass says she met him at a dance, and he was mooning around all over the place, and he asked her did she like flowers and poetry and music and everything; he spieled like he was a regular United States Senator; and Myrtle–she’s a devil, that girl, ha! ha!–she kidded him along, and got him going, and honest, what d’you think he said? He said he didn’t find any intellectual companionship in this town. Can you BEAT it? Imagine! And him a Swede tailor! My! And they say he’s the most awful mollycoddle–looks just like a girl. The boys call him ‘Elizabeth,’ and they stop him and ask about the books he lets on to have read, and he goes and tells them, and they take it all in and jolly him terribly, and he never gets onto the fact they’re kidding him. Oh, I think it’s just TOO funny!”
The Jolly Seventeen laughed, and Carol laughed with them. Mrs. Jack Elder added that this Erik Valborg had confided to Mrs. Gurrey that he would “love to design clothes for women.” Imagine! Mrs. Harvey Dillon had had a glimpse of him, but honestly, she’d thought he was awfully handsome. This was instantly controverted by Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker. Mrs. Gougerling had had, she reported, a good look at this Valborg fellow. She and B. J. had been motoring, and passed “Elizabeth” out by McGruder’s Bridge. He was wearing the awfullest clothes, with the waist pinched in like a girl’s. He was sitting on a rock doing nothing, but when he heard the Gougerling car coming he snatched a book out of his pocket, and as they went by he pretended to be reading it, to show off. And he wasn’t really good-looking–just kind of soft, as B. J. had pointed out.
When the husbands came they joined in the expose. “My name is Elizabeth. I’m the celebrated musical tailor. The skirts fall for me by the thou. Do I get some more veal loaf?” merrily shrieked Dave Dyer. He had some admirable stories about the tricks the town youngsters had played on Valborg. They had dropped a decaying perch into his pocket. They had pinned on his back a sign, “I’m the prize boob, kick me.”
Glad of any laughter, Carol joined the frolic, and surprised them by crying, “Dave, I do think you’re the dearest thing since you got your hair cut!” That was an excellent sally. Everybody applauded. Kennicott looked proud.
She decided that sometime she really must go out of her way to pass Hicks’s shop and see this freak.
*** II ***
She was at Sunday morning service at the Baptist Church, in a solemn row with her husband, Hugh, Uncle Whittier, Aunt Bessie.
Despite Aunt Bessie’s nagging the Kennicotts rarely attended church. The doctor asserted, “Sure, religion is a fine influence–got to have it to keep the lower classes in order–fact, it’s the only thing that appeals to a lot of those fellows and makes ’em respect the rights of property. And I guess this theology is O.K.; lot of wise old coots figured it all out, and they knew more about it than we do.” He believed in the Christian religion, and never thought about it, he believed in the church, and seldom went near it; he was shocked by Carol’s lack of faith, and wasn’t quite sure what was the nature of the faith that she lacked.
Carol herself was an uneasy and dodging agnostic.
When she ventured to Sunday School and heard the teachers droning that the genealogy of Shamsherai was a valuable ethical problem for children to think about; when she experimented with Wednesday prayer-meeting and listened to store-keeping elders giving their unvarying weekly testimony in primitive erotic symbols and such gory Chaldean phrases as “washed in the blood of the lamb” and “a vengeful God”; when Mrs. Bogart boasted that through his boyhood she had made Cy confess nightly upon the basis of the Ten Commandments; then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as Zoroastrianism–without the splendor. But when she went to church suppers and felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with which the sisters served cold ham and scalloped potatoes; when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to her, on an afternoon call, “My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes you to come into abiding grace,” then Carol found the humanness behind the sanguinary and alien theology. Always she perceived that the churches–Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Catholic, all of them–which had seemed so unimportant to the judge’s home in her childhood, so isolated from the city struggle in St. Paul, were still, in Gopher Prairie, the strongest of the forces compelling respectability.
This August Sunday she had been tempted by the announcement that the Reverend Edmund Zitterel would preach on the topic “America, Face Your Problems!” With the great war, workmen in every nation showing a desire to control industries, Russia hinting a leftward revolution against Kerensky, woman suffrage coming, there seemed to be plenty of problems for the Reverend Mr. Zitterel to call on America to face. Carol gathered her family and trotted off behind Uncle Whittier.
The congregation faced the heat with informality. Men with highly plastered hair, so painfully shaved that their faces looked sore, removed their coats, sighed, and unbuttoned two buttons of their uncreased Sunday vests. Large-bosomed, white-bloused, hot-necked, spectacled matrons–the Mothers in Israel, pioneers and friends of Mrs. Champ Perry–waved their palm-leaf fans in a steady rhythm. Abashed boys slunk into the rear pews and giggled, while milky little girls, up front with their mothers, self-consciously kept from turning around.
The church was half barn and half Gopher Prairie parlor. The streaky brown wallpaper was broken in its dismal sweep only by framed texts, “Come unto Me” and “The Lord is My Shepherd,” by a list of hymns, and by a crimson and green diagram, staggeringly drawn upon hemp-colored paper, indicating the alarming ease with which a young man may descend from Palaces of Pleasure and the House of Pride to Eternal Damnation. But the varnished oak pews and the new red carpet and the three large chairs on the platform, behind the bare reading-stand, were all of a rocking-chair comfort.
Carol was civic and neighborly and commendable today. She beamed and bowed. She trolled out with the others the hymn:
How pleasant ’tis on Sabbath morn To gather in the church And there I’ll have no carnal thoughts, Nor sin shall me besmirch.
With a rustle of starched linen skirts and stiff shirt-fronts, the congregation sat down, and gave heed to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel. The priest was a thin, swart, intense young man with a bang. He wore a black sack suit and a lilac tie. He smote the enormous Bible on the reading-stand, vociferated, “Come, let us reason together,” delivered a prayer informing Almighty God of the news of the past week, and began to reason.
It proved that the only problems which America had to face were Mormonism and Prohibition:
“Don’t let any of these self-conceited fellows that are always trying to stir up trouble deceive you with the belief that there’s anything to all these smart-aleck movements to let the unions and the Farmers’ Nonpartisan League kill all our initiative and enterprise by fixing wages and prices. There isn’t any movement that amounts to a whoop without it’s got a moral background. And let me tell you that while folks are fussing about what they call ‘economics’ and ‘socialism’ and ‘science’ and a lot of things that are nothing in the world but a disguise for atheism, the Old Satan is busy spreading his secret net and tentacles out there in Utah, under his guise of Joe Smith or Brigham Young or whoever their leaders happen to be today, it doesn’t make any difference, and they’re making game of the Old Bible that has led this American people through its manifold trials and tribulations to its firm position as the fulfilment of the prophecies and the recognized leader of all nations. ‘Sit thou on my right hand till I make thine enemies the footstool of my feet,’ said the Lord of Hosts, Acts II, the thirty-fourth verse–and let me tell you right now, you got to get up a good deal earlier in the morning than you get up even when you’re going fishing, if you want to be smarter than the Lord, who has shown us the straight and narrow way, and he that passeth therefrom is in eternal peril and, to return to this vital and terrible subject of Mormonism–and as I say, it is terrible to realize how little attention is given to this evil right here in our midst and on our very doorstep, as it were–it’s a shame and a disgrace that the Congress of these United States spends all its time talking about inconsequential financial matters that ought to be left to the Treasury Department, as I understand it, instead of arising in their might and passing a law that any one admitting he is a Mormon shall simply be deported and as it were kicked out of this free country in which we haven’t got any room for polygamy and the tyrannies of Satan.
“And, to digress for a moment, especially as there are more of them in this state than there are Mormons, though you never can tell what will happen with this vain generation of young girls, that think more about wearing silk stockings than about minding their mothers and learning to bake a good loaf of bread, and many of them listening to these sneaking Mormon missionaries–and I actually heard one of them talking right out on a street-corner in Duluth, a few years ago, and the officers of the law not protesting–but still, as they are a smaller but more immediate problem, let me stop for just a moment to pay my respects to these Seventh-Day Adventists. Not that they are immoral, I don’t mean, but when a body of men go on insisting that Saturday is the Sabbath, after Christ himself has clearly indicated the new dispensation, then I think the legislature ought to step in—-”
At this point Carol awoke.
She got through three more minutes by studying the face of a girl in the pew across: a sensitive unhappy girl whose longing poured out with intimidating self-revelation as she worshiped Mr. Zitterel. Carol wondered who the girl was. She had seen her at church suppers. She considered how many of the three thousand people in the town she did not know; to how many of them the Thanatopsis and the Jolly Seventeen were icy social peaks; how many of them might be toiling through boredom thicker than her own–with greater courage.
She examined her nails. She read two hymns. She got some satisfaction out of rubbing an itching knuckle. She pillowed on her shoulder the head of the baby who, after killing time in the same manner as his mother, was so fortunate as to fall asleep. She read the introduction, title-page, and acknowledgment of copyrights, in the hymnal. She tried to evolve a philosophy which would explain why Kennicott could never tie his scarf so that it would reach the top of the gap in his turn-down collar.
There were no other diversions to be found in the pew. She glanced back at the congregation. She thought that it would be amiable to bow to Mrs. Champ Perry.
Her slow turning head stopped, galvanized.
Across the aisle, two rows back, was a strange young man who shone among the cud-chewing citizens like a visitant from the sun-amber curls, low forehead, fine nose, chin smooth but not raw from Sabbath shaving. His lips startled her. The lips of men in Gopher Prairie are flat in the face, straight and grudging. The stranger’s mouth was arched, the upper lip short. He wore a brown jersey coat, a delft-blue bow, a white silk shirt, white flannel trousers. He suggested the ocean beach, a tennis court, anything but the sun-blistered utility of Main Street.
A visitor from Minneapolis, here for business? No. He wasn’t a business man. He was a poet. Keats was in his face, and Shelley, and Arthur Upson, whom she had once seen in Minneapolis. He was at once too sensitive and too sophisticated to touch business as she knew it in Gopher Prairie.
With restrained amusement he was analyzing the noisy Mr. Zitterel. Carol was ashamed to have this spy from the Great World hear the pastor’s maundering. She felt responsible for the town. She resented his gaping at their private rites. She flushed, turned away. But she continued to feel his presence.
How could she meet him? She must! For an hour of talk. He was all that she was hungry for. She could not let him get away without a word–and she would have to. She pictured, and ridiculed, herself as walking up to him and remarking, “I am sick with the Village Virus. Will you please tell me what people are saying and playing in New York?” She pictured, and groaned over, the expression of Kennicott if she should say, “Why wouldn’t it be reasonable for you, my soul, to ask that complete stranger in the brown jersey coat to come to supper tonight?”
She brooded, not looking back. She warned herself that she was probably exaggerating; that no young man could have all these exalted qualities. Wasn’t he too obviously smart, too glossy-new? Like a movie actor. Probably he was a traveling salesman who sang tenor and fancied himself in imitations of Newport clothes and spoke of “the swellest business proposition that ever came down the pike.” In a panic she peered at him. No! This was no hustling salesman, this boy with the curving Grecian lips and the serious eyes.
She rose after the service, carefully taking Kennicott’s arm and smiling at him in a mute assertion that she was devoted to him no matter what happened. She followed the Mystery’s soft brown jersey shoulders out of the church.
Fatty Hicks, the shrill and puffy son of Nat, flapped his hand at the beautiful stranger and jeered, “How’s the kid? All dolled up like a plush horse today, ain’t we!”
Carol was exceeding sick. Her herald from the outside was Erik Valborg, “Elizabeth.” Apprentice tailor! Gasoline and hot goose! Mending dirty jackets! Respectfully holding a tape-measure about a paunch!
And yet, she insisted, this boy was also himself.
*** III ***
They had Sunday dinner with the Smails, in a dining-room which centered about a fruit and flower piece and a crayon-enlargement of Uncle Whittier. Carol did not heed Aunt Bessie’s fussing in regard to Mrs. Robert B. Schminke’s bead necklace and Whittier’s error in putting on the striped pants, day like this. She did not taste the shreds of roast pork. She said vacuously:
“Uh–Will, I wonder if that young man in the white flannel trousers, at church this morning, was this Valborg person that they’re all talking about?”
“Yump. That’s him. Wasn’t that the darndest get-up he had on!” Kennicott scratched at a white smear on his hard gray sleeve.
“It wasn’t so bad. I wonder where he comes from? He seems to have lived in cities a good deal. Is he from the East?”
“The East? Him? Why, he comes from a farm right up north here, just this side of Jefferson. I know his father slightly–Adolph Valborg–typical cranky old Swede farmer.”
“Oh, really?” blandly.
“Believe he has lived in Minneapolis for quite some time, though. Learned his trade there. And I will say he’s bright, some ways. Reads a lot. Pollock says he takes more books out of the library than anybody else in town. Huh! He’s kind of like you in that!”
The Smails and Kennicott laughed very much at this sly jest. Uncle Whittier seized the conversation. “That fellow that’s working for Hicks? Milksop, that’s what he is. Makes me tired to see a young fellow that ought to be in the war, or anyway out in the fields earning his living honest, like I done when I was young, doing a woman’s work and then come out and dress up like a show-actor! Why, when I was his age—-”
Carol reflected that the carving-knife would make an excellent dagger with which to kill Uncle Whittier. It would slide in easily. The headlines would be terrible.
Kennicott said judiciously, “Oh, I don’t want to be unjust to him. I believe he took his physical examination for military service. Got varicose veins–not bad, but enough to disqualify him. Though I will say he doesn’t look like a fellow that would be so awful darn crazy to poke his bayonet into a Hun’s guts.”
“Will! PLEASE!”
“Well, he don’t. Looks soft to me. And they say he told Del Snafflin, when he was getting a hair-cut on Saturday, that he wished he could play the piano.”
“Isn’t it wonderful how much we all know about one another in a town like this,” said Carol innocently.
Kennicott was suspicious, but Aunt Bessie, serving the floating island pudding, agreed, “Yes, it is wonderful. Folks can get away with all sorts of meannesses and sins in these terrible cities, but they can’t here. I was noticing this tailor fellow this morning, and when Mrs. Riggs offered to share her hymn-book with him, he shook his head, and all the while we was singing he just stood there like a bump on a log and never opened his mouth. Everybody says he’s got an idea that he’s got so much better manners and all than what the rest of us have, but if that’s what he calls good manners, I want to know!”
Carol again studied the carving-knife. Blood on the whiteness of a tablecloth might be gorgeous.
Then:
“Fool! Neurotic impossibilist! Telling yourself orchard fairy-tales–at thirty. . . . Dear Lord, am I really THIRTY? That boy can’t be more than twenty-five.”
*** IV ***
She went calling.
Boarding with the Widow Bogart was Fern Mullins, a girl of twenty-two who was to be teacher of English, French, and gymnastics in the high school this coming session. Fern Mullins had come to town early, for the six-weeks normal course for country teachers. Carol had noticed her on the street, had heard almost as much about her as about Erik Valborg. She was tall, weedy, pretty, and incurably rakish. Whether she wore a low middy collar or dressed reticently for school in a black suit with a high-necked blouse, she was airy, flippant. “She looks like an absolute totty,” said all the Mrs. Sam Clarks, disapprovingly, and all the Juanita Haydocks, enviously.
That Sunday evening, sitting in baggy canvas lawn-chairs beside the house, the Kennicotts saw Fern laughing with Cy Bogart who, though still a junior in high school, was now a lump of a man, only two or three years younger than Fern. Cy had to go downtown for weighty matters connected with the pool-parlor. Fern drooped on the Bogart porch, her chin in her hands.
“She looks lonely,” said Kennicott.
“She does, poor soul. I believe I’ll go over and speak to her. I was introduced to her at Dave’s but I haven’t called.” Carol was slipping across the lawn, a white figure in the dimness, faintly brushing the dewy grass. She was thinking of Erik and of the fact that her feet were wet, and she was casual in her greeting: “Hello! The doctor and I wondered if you were lonely.”
Resentfully, “I am!”
Carol concentrated on her. “My dear, you sound so! I know how it is. I used to be tired when I was on the job–I was a librarian. What was your college? I was Blodgett.”
More interestedly, “I went to the U.” Fern meant the University of Minnesota.
“You must have had a splendid time. Blodgett was a bit dull.”
“Where were you a librarian?” challengingly.
“St. Paul–the main library.”
“Honest? Oh dear, I wish I was back in the Cities! This is my first year of teaching, and I’m scared stiff. I did have the best time in college: dramatics and basket-ball and fussing and dancing–I’m simply crazy about dancing. And here, except when I have the kids in gymnasium class, or when I’m chaperoning the basket-ball team on a trip out-of-town, I won’t dare to move above a whisper. I guess they don’t care much if you put any pep into teaching or not, as long as you look like a Good Influence out of school-hours–and that means never doing anything you want to. This normal course is bad enough, but the regular school will be FIERCE! If it wasn’t too late to get a job in the Cities, I swear I’d resign here. I bet I won’t dare to go to a single dance all winter. If I cut loose and danced the way I like to, they’d think I was a perfect hellion — poor harmless me! Oh, I oughtn’t to be talking like this. Fern, you never could be cagey!”
“Don’t be frightened, my dear! . . . Doesn’t that sound atrociously old and kind! I’m talking to you the way Mrs. Westlake talks to me! That’s having a husband and a kitchen range, I suppose. But I feel young, and I want to dance like a–like a hellion?–too. So I sympathize.”
Fern made a sound of gratitude. Carol inquired, “What experience did you have with college dramatics? I tried to start a kind of Little Theater here. It was dreadful. I must tell you about it —- ”
Two hours later, when Kennicott came over to greet Fern and to yawn, “Look here, Carrie, don’t you suppose you better be thinking about turning in? I’ve got a hard day tomorrow,” the two were talking so intimately that they constantly interrupted each other.
As she went respectably home, convoyed by a husband, and decorously holding up her skirts, Carol rejoiced, “Everything has changed! I have two friends, Fern and—-But who’s the other? That’s queer; I thought there was—-Oh, how absurd!”
*** V ***
She often passed Erik Valborg on the street; the brown jersey coat became unremarkable. When she was driving with Kennicott, in early evening, she saw him on the lake shore, reading a thin book which might easily have been poetry. She noted that he was the only person in the motorized town who still took long walks.
She told herself that she was the daughter of a judge, the wife of a doctor, and that she did not care to know a capering tailor. She told herself that she was not responsive to men . . . not even to Percy Bresnahan. She told herself that a woman of thirty who heeded a boy of twenty-five was ridiculous. And on Friday, when she had convinced herself that the errand was necessary, she went to Nat Hicks’s shop, bearing the not very romantic burden of a pair of her husband’s trousers. Hicks was in the back room. She faced the Greek god who, in a somewhat ungodlike way, was stitching a coat on a scaley sewing-machine, in a room of smutted plaster walls.
She saw that his hands were not in keeping with a Hellenic face. They were thick, roughened with needle and hot iron and plow-handle. Even in the shop he persisted in his finery. He wore a silk shirt, a topaz scarf, thin tan shoes.
This she absorbed while she was saying curtly, “Can I get these pressed, please?”
Not rising from the sewing-machine he stuck out his hand, mumbled, “When do you want them?”
“Oh, Monday.”
The adventure was over. She was marching out.
“What name?” he called after her.
He had risen and, despite the farcicality of Dr. Will Kennicott’s bulgy trousers draped over his arm, he had the grace of a cat.
“Kennicott.”
“Kennicott. Oh! Oh say, you’re Mrs. Dr. Kennicott then, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” She stood at the door. Now that she had carried out her preposterous impulse to see what he was like, she was cold, she was as ready to detect familiarities as the virtuous Miss Ella Stowbody.
“I’ve heard about you. Myrtle Cass was saying you got up a dramatic club and gave a dandy play. I’ve always wished I had a chance to belong to a Little Theater, and give some European plays, or whimsical like Barrie, or a pageant.”
He pronounced it “pagent”; he rhymed “pag” with “rag.”
Carol nodded in the manner of a lady being kind to a tradesman, and one of her selves sneered, “Our Erik is indeed a lost John Keats.”
He was appealing, “Do you suppose it would be possible to get up another dramatic club this coming fall?”
“Well, it might be worth thinking of.” She came out of her several conflicting poses, and said sincerely, “There’s a new teacher, Miss Mullins, who might have some talent. That would make three of us for a nucleus. If we could scrape up half a dozen we might give a real play with a small cast. Have you had any experience?”
“Just a bum club that some of us got up in Minneapolis when I was working there. We had one good man, an interior decorator–maybe he was kind of sis and effeminate, but he really was an artist, and we gave one dandy play. But I—-Of course I’ve always had to work hard, and study by myself, and I’m probably sloppy, and I’d love it if I had training in rehearsing–I mean, the crankier the director was, the better I’d like it. If you didn’t want to use me as an actor, I’d love to design the costumes. I’m crazy about fabrics–textures and colors and designs.”
She knew that he was trying to keep her from going, trying to indicate that he was something more than a person to whom one brought trousers for pressing. He besought:
“Some day I hope I can get away from this fool repairing, when I have the money saved up. I want to go East and work for some big dressmaker, and study art drawing, and become a high-class designer. Or do you think that’s a kind of fiddlin’ ambition for a fellow? I was brought up on a farm. And then monkeyin’ round with silks! I don’t know. What do you think? Myrtle Cass says you’re awfully educated.”*** “I am. Awfully. Tell me: Have the boys made fun of your ambition?”
She was seventy years old, and sexless, and more advisory than Vida Sherwin.
“Well, they have, at that. They’ve jollied me a good deal, here and Minneapolis both. They say dressmaking is ladies’ work. (But I was willing to get drafted for the war! I tried to get in. But they rejected me. But I did try! ) I thought some of working up in a gents’ furnishings store, and I had a chance to travel on the road for a clothing house, but somehow–I hate this tailoring, but I can’t seem to get enthusiastic about salesmanship. I keep thinking about a room in gray oatmeal paper with prints in very narrow gold frames–or would it be better in white enamel paneling?–but anyway, it looks out on Fifth Avenue, and I’m designing a sumptuous—-” He made it “sump-too-ous”–“robe of linden green chiffon over cloth of gold! You know–tileul. It’s elegant. . . . What do you think?”
“Why not? What do you care for the opinion of city rowdies, or a lot of farm boys? But you mustn’t, you really mustn’t, let casual strangers like me have a chance to judge you.”
“Well—-You aren’t a stranger, one way. Myrtle Cass–Miss Cass, should say–she’s spoken about you so often. I wanted to call on you–and the doctor–but I didn’t quite have the nerve. One evening I walked past your house, but you and your husband were talking on the porch, and you looked so chummy and happy I didn’t dare butt in.”
Maternally, “I think it’s extremely nice of you to want to be trained in–in enunciation by a stage-director. Perhaps I could help you. I’m a thoroughly sound and uninspired schoolma’am by instinct; quite hopelessly mature.”
“Oh, you aren’t EITHER!”
She was not very successful at accepting his fervor with the air of amused woman of the world, but she sounded reasonably impersonal: “Thank you. Shall we see if we really can get up a new dramatic club? I’ll tell you: Come to the house this evening, about eight. I’ll ask Miss Mullins to come over, and we’ll talk about it.”
*** VI ***
“He has absolutely no sense of humor. Less than Will. But hasn’t he—–What is a ‘sense of humor’? Isn’t the thing he lacks the back-slapping jocosity that passes for humor here? Anyway—-Poor lamb, coaxing me to stay and play with him! Poor lonely lamb! If he could be free from Nat Hickses, from people who say ‘dandy’ and ‘bum,’ would he develop?
“I wonder if Whitman didn’t use Brooklyn back-street slang, as a boy?
“No. Not Whitman. He’s Keats–sensitive to silken things. ‘Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes as are the tiger-moth’s deep-damask’d wings.’ Keats, here! A bewildered spirit fallen on Main Street. And Main Street laughs till it aches, giggles till the spirit doubts his own self and tries to give up the use of wings for the correct uses of a ‘gents’ furnishings store.’ Gopher Prairie with its celebrated eleven miles of cement walk. . . . I wonder how much of the cement is made out of the tombstones of John Keatses?”
*** VII ***
Kennicott was cordial to Fern Mullins, teased her, told her he was a “great hand for running off with pretty school-teachers,” and promised that if the school-board should object to her dancing, he would “bat ’em one over the head and tell ’em how lucky they were to get a girl with some go to her, for once.”
But to Erik Valborg he was not cordial. He shook hands loosely, and said, “H’ are yuh.”
Nat Hicks was socially acceptable; he had been here for years, and owned his shop; but this person was merely Nat’s workman, and the town’s principle of perfect democracy was not meant to be applied indiscriminately.
The conference on a dramatic club theoretically included Kennicott, but he sat back, patting yawns, conscious of Fern’s ankles, smiling amiably on the children at their sport.
Fern wanted to tell her grievances; Carol was sulky every time she thought of “The Girl from Kankakee”; it was Erik who made suggestions. He had read with astounding breadth, and astounding lack of judgment. His voice was sensitive to liquids, but he overused the word “glorious.” He mispronounced a tenth of the words he had from books, but he knew it. He was insistent, but he was shy.
When he demanded, “I’d like to stage ‘Suppressed Desires,’ by Cook and Miss Glaspell,” Carol ceased to be patronizing. He was not the yearner: he was the artist, sure of his vision. “I’d make it simple. Use a big window at the back, with a cyclorama of a blue that would simply hit you in the eye, and just one tree-branch, to suggest a park below. Put the breakfast table on a dais. Let the colors be kind of arty and tea-roomy–orange chairs, and orange and blue table, and blue Japanese breakfast set, and some place, one big flat smear of black–bang! Oh. Another play I wish we could do is Tennyson Jesse’s ‘The Black Mask.’ I’ve never seen it but—-Glorious ending, where this woman looks at the man with his face all blown away, and she just gives one horrible scream.”
“Good God, is that your idea of a glorious ending?” bayed Kennicott.
“That sounds fierce! I do love artistic things, but not the horrible ones,” moaned Fern Mullins.
Erik was bewildered; glanced at Carol. She nodded loyally.
At the end of the conference they had decided nothing.
*** *** ***
CHAPTER XXIX
SHE had walked up the railroad track with Hugh, this Sunday afternoon.
She saw Erik Valborg coming, in an ancient highwater suit, tramping sullenly and alone, striking at the rails with a stick. For a second she unreasoningly wanted to avoid him, but she kept on, and she serenely talked about God, whose voice, Hugh asserted, made the humming in the telegraph wires. Erik stared, straightened. They greeted each other with “Hello.”
“Hugh, say how-do-you-do to Mr. Valborg.”
“Oh, dear me, he’s got a button unbuttoned,” worried Erik, kneeling. Carol frowned, then noted the strength with which he swung the baby in the air.
“May I walk along a piece with you?”
“I’m tired. Let’s rest on those ties. Then I must be trotting back.”
They sat on a heap of discarded railroad ties, oak logs spotted with cinnamon-colored dry-rot and marked with metallic brown streaks where iron plates had rested. Hugh learned that the pile was the hiding-place of Injuns; he went gunning for them while the elders talked of uninteresting things.
The telegraph wires thrummed, thrummed, thrummed above them; the rails were glaring hard lines; the goldenrod smelled dusty. Across the track was a pasture of dwarf clover and sparse lawn cut by earthy cow-paths; beyond its placid narrow green, the rough immensity of new stubble, jagged with wheat-stacks like huge pineapples.
Erik talked of books; flamed like a recent convert to any faith. He exhibited as many titles and authors as possible, halting only to appeal, “Have you read his last book? Don’t you think he’s a terribly strong writer?”
She was dizzy. But when he insisted, “You’ve been a librarian; tell me; do I read too much fiction?” she advised him loftily, rather discursively. He had, she indicated, never studied. He had skipped from one emotion to another. Especially–she hesitated, then flung it at him–he must not guess at pronunciations; he must endure the nuisance of stopping to reach for the dictionary.
“I’m talking like a cranky teacher,” she sighed.
“No! And I will study! Read the damned dictionary right through.” He crossed his legs and bent over, clutching his ankle with both hands. “I know what you mean. I’ve been rushing from picture to picture, like a kid let loose in an art gallery for the first time. You see, it’s so awful recent that I’ve found there was a world–well, a world where beautiful things counted. I was on the farm till I was nineteen. Dad is a good farmer, but nothing else. Do you know why he first sent me off to learn tailoring? I wanted to study drawing, and he had a cousin that’d made a lot of money tailoring out in Dakota, and he said tailoring was a lot like drawing, so he sent me down to a punk hole called Curlew, to work in a tailor shop. Up to that time I’d only had three months’ schooling a year–walked to school two miles, through snow up to my knees–and Dad never would stand for my having a single book except schoolbooks.
“I never read a novel till I got ‘Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall’ out of the library at Curlew. I thought it was the loveliest thing in the world! Next I read ‘Barriers Burned Away’ and then Pope’s translation of Homer. Some combination, all right! When I went to Minneapolis, just two years ago, I guess I’d read pretty much everything in that Curlew library, but I’d never heard of Rossetti or John Sargent or Balzac or Brahms. But—-Yump, I’ll study. Look here! Shall I get out of this tailoring, this pressing and repairing?”
“I don’t see why a surgeon should spend very much time cobbling shoes.”
“But what if I find I can’t really draw and design? After fussing around in New York or Chicago, I’d feel like a fool if I had to go back to work in a gents’ furnishings store!”
“Please say ‘haberdashery.’”
“Haberdashery? All right. I’ll remember.” He shrugged and spread his fingers wide.
She was humbled by his humility; she put away in her mind, to take out and worry over later, a speculation as to whether it was not she who was naive. She urged, “What if you do have to go back? Most of us do! We can’t all be artists–myself, for instance. We have to darn socks, and yet we’re not content to think of nothing but socks and darning-cotton. I’d demand all I could get–whether I finally settled down to designing frocks or building temples or pressing pants. What if you do drop back? You’ll have had the adventure. Don’t be too meek toward life! Go! You’re young, you’re unmarried. Try everything! Don’t listen to Nat Hicks and Sam Clark and be a ‘steady young man’–in order to help them make money. You’re still a blessed innocent. Go and play till the Good People capture you!”
“But I don’t just want to play. I want to make something beautiful. God! And I don’t know enough. Do you get it? Do you understand? Nobody else ever has! Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“And so—-But here’s what bothers me: I like fabrics; dinky things like that; little drawings and elegant words. But look over there at those fields. Big! New! Don’t it seem kind of a shame to leave this and go back to the East and Europe, and do what all those people have been doing so long? Being careful about words, when there’s millions of bushels off wheat here! Reading this fellow Pater, when I’ve helped Dad to clear fields!”
“It’s good to clear fields. But it’s not for you. It’s one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose. I thought that myself, when I first came to the prairie. ‘Big–new.’ Oh, I don’t want to deny the prairie future. It will be magnificent. But equally I’m hanged if I want to be bullied by it, go to war on behalf of Main Street, be bullied and BULLIED by the faith that the future is already here in the present, and that all of us must stay and worship wheat-stacks and insist that this is ‘God’s Country’–and never, of course, do anything original or gay-colored that would help to make that future! Anyway, you don’t belong here. Sam Clark and Nat Hicks, that’s what our big newness has produced. Go! Before it’s too late, as it has been for–for some of us. Young man, go East and grow up with the revolution! Then perhaps you may come back and tell Sam and Nat and me what to do with the land we’ve been clearing–if we’ll listen–if we don’t lynch you first!”
He looked at her reverently. She could hear him saying,
“I’ve always wanted to know a woman who would talk to me like that.”
Her hearing was faulty. He was saying nothing of the sort. He was saying:
“Why aren’t you happy with your husband?”
“I–you—-”
“He doesn’t care for the ‘blessed innocent’ part of you, does he!”
“Erik, you mustn’t—-”
“First you tell me to go and be free, and then you say that I ‘mustn’t’!”
“I know. But you mustn’t—-You must be more impersonal!”
He glowered at her like a downy young owl. She wasn’t sure but she thought that he muttered, “I’m damned if I will.” She considered with wholesome fear the perils of meddling with other people’s destinies, and she said timidly, “Hadn’t we better start back now?”
He mused, “You’re younger than I am. Your lips are for songs about rivers in the morning and lakes at twilight. I don’t see how anybody could ever hurt you. . . . Yes. We better go.”
He trudged beside her, his eyes averted. Hugh experimentally took his thumb. He looked down at the baby seriously. He burst out, “All right. I’ll do it. I’ll stay here one year. Save. Not spend so much money on clothes. And then I’ll go East, to art-school. Work on the side-tailor shop, dressmaker’s. I’ll learn what I’m good for: designing clothes, stage-settings, illustrating, or selling collars to fat men. All settled.” He peered at her, unsmiling.
“Can you stand it here in town for a year?”
“With you to look at?”
“Please! I mean: Don’t the people here think you’re an odd bird? (They do me, I assure you!)”
“I don’t know. I never notice much. Oh, they do kid me about not being in the army–especially the old warhorses, the old men that aren’t going themselves. And this Bogart boy. And Mr. Hicks’s son–he’s a horrible brat. But probably he’s licensed to say what he thinks about his father’s hired man!”
“He’s beastly!”
They were in town. They passed Aunt Bessie’s house. Aunt Bessie and Mrs. Bogart were at the window, and Carol saw that they were staring so intently that they answered her wave only with the stiffly raised hands of automatons. In the next block Mrs. Dr. Westlake was gaping from her porch. Carol said with an embarrassed quaver:
“I want to run in and see Mrs. Westlake. I’ll say good-by here.”
She avoided his eyes.
Mrs. Westlake was affable. Carol felt that she was expected to explain; and while she was mentally asserting that she’d be hanged if she’d explain, she was explaining:
“Hugh captured that Valborg boy up the track. They became such good friends. And I talked to him for a while. I’d heard he was eccentric, but really, I found him quite intelligent. Crude, but he reads–reads almost the way Dr. Westlake does.”
“That’s fine. Why does he stick here in town? What’s this I hear about his being interested in Myrtle Cass?”
“I don’t know. Is he? I’m sure he isn’t! He said he was quite lonely! Besides, Myrtle is a babe in arms!”
“Twenty-one if she’s a day!”
“Well—-Is the doctor going to do any hunting this fall?”
*** II ***
The need of explaining Erik dragged her back into doubting. For all his ardent reading, and his ardent life, was he anything but a small-town youth bred on an illiberal farm and in cheap tailor shops? He had rough hands. She had been attracted only by hands that were fine and suave, like those of her father. Delicate hands and resolute purpose. But this boy–powerful seamed hands and flabby will.
“It’s not appealing weakness like his, but sane strength that will animate the Gopher Prairies. Only—-Does that mean anything? Or am I echoing Vida? The world has always let ‘strong’ statesmen and soldiers–the men with strong voices–take control, and what have the thundering boobies done? What is ‘strength’?
“This classifying of people! I suppose tailors differ as much as burglars or kings.
“Erik frightened me when he turned on me. Of course he didn’t mean anything, but I mustn’t let him be so personal.
“Amazing impertinence!
“But he didn’t mean to be.
“His hands are FIRM. I wonder if sculptors don’t have thick hands, too?
“Of course if there really is anything I can do to HELP the boy—-
“Though I despise these people who interfere. He must be independent.”
*** III ***
She wasn’t altogether pleased, the week after, when Erik was independent and, without asking for her inspiration, planned the tennis tournament. It proved that he had learned to play in Minneapolis; that, next to Juanita Haydock, he had the best serve in town. Tennis was well spoken of in Gopher Prairie and almost never played. There were three courts: one belonging to Harry Haydock, one to the cottages at the lake, and one, a rough field on the outskirts, laid out by a defunct tennis association.
Erik had been seen in flannels and an imitation panama hat, playing on the abandoned court with Willis Woodford, the clerk in Stowbody’s bank. Suddenly he was going about proposing the reorganization of the tennis association, and writing names in a fifteen-cent note-book bought for the purpose at Dyer’s. When he came to Carol he was so excited over being an organizer that he did not stop to talk of himself and Aubrey Beardsley for more than ten minutes. He begged, “Will you get some of the folks to come in?” and she nodded agreeably.
He proposed an informal exhibition match to advertise the association; he suggested that Carol and himself, the Haydocks, the Woodfords, and the Dillons play doubles, and that the association be formed from the gathered enthusiasts. He had asked Harry Haydock to be tentative president. Harry, he reported, had promised, “All right. You bet. But you go ahead and arrange things, and I’ll O.K. ’em.” Erik planned that the match should be held Saturday afternoon, on the old public court at the edge of town. He was happy in being, for the first time, part of Gopher Prairie.
Through the week Carol heard how select an attendance there was to be.
Kennicott growled that he didn’t care to go.
Had he any objections to her playing with Erik?
No; sure not; she needed the exercise. Carol went to the match early. The court was in a meadow out on the New Antonia road. Only Erik was there. He was dashing about with a rake, trying to make the court somewhat less like a plowed field. He admitted that he had stage fright at the thought of the coming horde. Willis and Mrs. Woodford arrived, Willis in home-made knickers and black sneakers through at the toe; then Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon, people as harmless and grateful as the Woodfords.
Carol was embarrassed and excessively agreeable, like the bishop’s lady trying not to feel out of place at a Baptist bazaar.
They waited.
The match was scheduled for three. As spectators there assembled one youthful grocery clerk, stopping his Ford delivery wagon to stare from the seat, and one solemn small boy, tugging a smaller sister who had a careless nose.
“I wonder where the Haydocks are? They ought to show up, at least,” said Erik.
Carol smiled confidently at him, and peered down the empty road toward town. Only heat-waves and dust and dusty weeds.
At half-past three no one had come, and the grocery boy reluctantly got out, cranked his Ford, glared at them in a disillusioned manner, and rattled away. The small boy and his sister ate grass and sighed.
The players pretended to be exhilarated by practising service, but they startled at each dust-cloud from a motor car. None of the cars turned into the meadow-none till a quarter to four, when Kennicott drove in.
Carol’s heart swelled. “How loyal he is! Depend on him! He’d come, if nobody else did. Even though he doesn’t care for the game. The old darling!”
Kennicott did not alight. He called out, “Carrie! Harry Haydock ‘phoned me that they’ve decided to hold the tennis matches, or whatever you call ’em, down at the cottages at the lake, instead of here. The bunch are down there now: Haydocks and Dyers and Clarks and everybody. Harry wanted to know if I’d bring you down. I guess I can take the time–come right back after supper.”
Before Carol could sum it all up, Erik stammered, “Why, Haydock didn’t say anything to me about the change. Of course he’s the president, but—-”
Kennicott looked at him heavily, and grunted, “I don’t know a thing about it. . . . Coming, Carrie?”
“I am not! The match was to be here, and it will be here! You can tell Harry Haydock that he’s beastly rude!” She rallied the five who had been left out, who would always be left out. “Come on! We’ll toss to see which four of us play the Only and Original First Annual Tennis Tournament of Forest Hills, Del Monte, and Gopher Prairie!”
“Don’t know as I blame you,” said Kennicott. “Well have supper at home then?” He drove off.
She hated him for his composure. He had ruined her defiance. She felt much less like Susan B. Anthony as she turned to her huddled followers.
Mrs. Dillon and Willis Woodford lost the toss. The others played out the game, slowly, painfully, stumbling on the rough earth, muffing the easiest shots, watched only by the small boy and his sniveling sister. Beyond the court stretched the eternal stubble-fields. The four marionettes, awkwardly going through exercises, insignificant in the hot sweep of contemptuous land, were not heroic; their voices did not ring out in the score, but sounded apologetic; and when the game was over they glanced about as though they were waiting to be laughed at.
They walked home. Carol took Erik’s arm. Through her thin linen sleeve she could feel the crumply warmth of his familiar brown jersey coat. She observed that there were purple and red gold threads interwoven with the brown. She remembered the first time she had seen it.
Their talk was nothing but improvisations on the theme: “I never did like this Haydock. He just considers his own convenience.” Ahead of them, the Dillons and Woodfords spoke of the weather and B. J. Gougerling’s new bungalow. No one referred to their tennis tournament. At her gate Carol shook hands firmly with Erik and smiled at him.
Next morning, Sunday morning, when Carol was on the porch, the Haydocks drove up.
“We didn’t mean to be rude to you, dearie!” implored Juanita. “I wouldn’t have you think that for anything. We planned that Will and you should come down and have supper at our cottage.”
“No. I’m sure you didn’t mean to be.” Carol was super-neighborly. “But I do think you ought to apologize to poor Erik Valborg. He was terribly hurt.”
“Oh. Valborg. I don’t care so much what he thinks,” objected Harry. “He’s nothing but a conceited buttinsky. Juanita and I kind of figured he was trying to run this tennis thing too darn much anyway.”
“But you asked him to make arrangements.”
“I know, but I don’t like him. Good Lord, you couldn’t hurt his feelings! He dresses up like a chorus man–and, by golly, he looks like one!–but he’s nothing but a Swede farm boy, and these foreigners, they all got hides like a covey of rhinoceroses .”
“But he IS hurt!”
“Well—-I don’t suppose I ought to have gone off half-cocked, and not jollied him along. I’ll give him a cigar. He’ll—-”
Juanita had been licking her lips and staring at Carol. She interrupted her husband, “Yes, I do think Harry ought to fix it up with him. You LIKE him, DON’T you, Carol??”
Over and through Carol ran a frightened cautiousness. “Like him? I haven’t an í-dea. He seems to be a very decent young man. I just felt that when he’d worked so hard on the plans for the match, it was a shame not to be nice to him.”
“Maybe there’s something to that,” mumbled Harry; then, at sight of Kennicott coming round the corner tugging the red garden hose by its brass nozzle, he roared in relief, “What d’ you think you’re trying to do, doc?”
While Kennicott explained in detail all that he thought he was trying to do, while he rubbed his chin and gravely stated, “Struck me the grass was looking kind of brown in patches–didn’t know but what I’d give it a sprinkling,” and while Harry agreed that this was an excellent idea, Juanita made friendly noises and, behind the gilt screen of an affectionate smile, watched Carol’s face.
*** IV ***
She wanted to see Erik. She wanted some one to play with! There wasn’t even so dignified and sound an excuse as having Kennicott’s trousers pressed; when she inspected them, all three pairs looked discouragingly neat. She probably would not have ventured on it had she not spied Nat Hicks in the pool-parlor, being witty over bottle-pool. Erik was alone! She fluttered toward the tailor shop, dashed into its slovenly heat with the comic fastidiousness of a humming bird dipping into a dry tiger-lily. It was after she had entered that she found an excuse.
Erik was in the back room, cross-legged on a long table, sewing a vest. But he looked as though he were doing this eccentric thing to amuse himself.
“Hello. I wonder if you couldn’t plan a sports-suit for me?” she said breathlessly.*** He stared at her; he protested, “No, I won’t! God! I’m not going to be a tailor with you!”
“Why, Erik!” she said, like a mildly shocked mother.
It occurred to her that she did not need a suit, and that the order might have been hard to explain to Kennicott.
He swung down from the table. “I want to show you something.” He rummaged in the roll-top desk on which Nat Hicks kept bills, buttons, calendars, buckles, thread-channeled wax, shotgun shells, samples of brocade for “fancy vests,” fishing-reels, pornographic post-cards, shreds of buckram lining. He pulled out a blurred sheet of Bristol board and anxiously gave it to her. It was a sketch for a frock. It was not well drawn; it was too finicking; the pillars in the background were grotesquely squat. But the frock had an original back, very low, with a central triangular section from the waist to a string of jet beads at the neck.
“It’s stunning. But how it would shock Mrs. Clark!”
“Yes, wouldn’t it!”
“You must let yourself go more when you’re drawing.”
“Don’t know if I can. I’ve started kind of late. But listen! What do you think I’ve done this two weeks? I’ve read almost clear through a Latin grammar, and about twenty pages of Caesar.”
“Splendid! You are lucky. You haven’t a teacher to make you artificial.”
“You’re my teacher!”
There was a dangerous edge of personality to his voice. She was offended and agitated. She turned her shoulder on him, stared through the back window, studying this typical center of a typical Main Street block, a vista hidden from casual strollers. The backs of the chief establishments in town surrounded a quadrangle neglected, dirty, and incomparably dismal. From the front, Howland & Gould’s grocery was smug enough, but attached to the rear was a lean-to of storm streaked pine lumber with a sanded tar roof–a staggering doubtful shed behind which was a heap of ashes, splintered packing-boxes, shreds of excelsior, crumpled straw-board, broken olive-bottles, rotten fruit, and utterly disintegrated vegetables: orange carrots turning black, and potatoes with ulcers. The rear of the Bon Ton Store was grim with blistered black-painted iron shutters, under them a pile of once glossy red shirt-boxes, now a pulp from recent rain.
As seen from Main Street, Oleson & McGuire’s Meat Market had a sanitary and virtuous expression with its new tile counter, fresh sawdust on the floor, and a hanging veal cut in rosettes. But she now viewed a back room with a homemade refrigerator of yellow smeared with black grease. A man in an apron spotted with dry blood was hoisting out a hard slab of meat.
Behind Billy’s Lunch, the cook, in an apron which must long ago have been white, smoked a pipe and spat at the pest of sticky flies. In the center of the block, by itself, was the stable for the three horses of the drayman, and beside it a pile of manure.
The rear of Ezra Stowbody’s bank was whitewashed, and back of it was a concrete walk and a three-foot square of grass, but the window was barred, and behind the bars she saw Willis Woodford cramped over figures in pompous books. He raised his head, jerkily rubbed his eyes, and went back to the eternity of figures.
The backs of the other shops were an impressionistic picture of dirty grays, drained browns, writhing heaps of refuse.
“Mine is a back-yard romance–with a journeyman tailor!”
She was saved from self-pity as she began to think through Erik’s mind. She turned to him with an indignant, “It’s disgusting that this is all you have to look at.”
He considered it. “Outside there? I don’t notice much. I’m learning to look inside. Not awful easy!”
“Yes. . . . I must be hurrying.”
As she walked home–without hurrying–she remembered her father saying to a serious ten-year-old Carol, “Lady, only a fool thinks he’s superior to beautiful bindings, but only a double-distilled fool reads nothing but bindings.”
She was startled by the return of her father, startled by a sudden conviction that in this flaxen boy she had found the gray reticent judge who was divine love, perfect under-standing. She debated it, furiously denied it, reaffirmed it, ridiculed it. Of one thing she was unhappily certain: there was nothing of the beloved father image in Will Kennicott.
*** V ***
She wondered why she sang so often, and why she found so many pleasant things–lamplight seen though trees on a cool evening, sunshine on brown wood, morning sparrows, black sloping roofs turned to plates of silver by moonlight. Pleasant things, small friendly things, and pleasant places–a field of goldenrod, a pasture by the creek–and suddenly a wealth of pleasant people. Vida was lenient to Carol at the surgical-dressing class; Mrs. Dave Dyer flattered her with questions about her health, baby, cook, and opinions on the war.
Mrs. Dyer seemed not to share the town’s prejudice against Erik. “He’s a nice-looking fellow; we must have him go on one of our picnics some time.” Unexpectedly, Dave Dyer also liked him. The tight-fisted little farceur had a confused reverence for anything that seemed to him refined or clever. He answered Harry Haydock’s sneers, “That’s all right now! Elizabeth may doll himself up too much, but he’s smart, and don’t you forget it! I was asking round trying to find out where this Ukraine is, and darn if he didn’t tell me. What’s the matter with his talking so polite? Hell’s bells, Harry, no harm in being polite. There’s some regular he-men that are just as polite as women, prett’ near.”
Carol found herself going about rejoicing, “How neighborly the town is!” She drew up with a dismayed “Am I falling in love with this boy? That’s ridiculous! I’m merely interested in him. I like to think of helping him to succeed.”
But as she dusted the living-room, mended a collar-band, bathed Hugh, she was picturing herself and a young artistan Apollo nameless and evasive–building a house in the Berkshires or in Virginia; exuberantly buying a chair with his first check; reading poetry together, and frequently being earnest over valuable statistics about labor; tumbling out of bed early for a Sunday walk, and chattering (where Kennicott would have yawned) over bread and butter by a lake. Hugh was in her pictures, and he adored the young artist, who made castles of chairs and rugs for him. Beyond these playtimes she saw the “things I could do for Erik”–and she admitted that Erik did partly make up the image of her altogether perfect artist.
In panic she insisted on being attentive to Kennicott, when he wanted to be left alone to read the newspaper.
*** VI ***
She needed new clothes. Kennicott had promised, “We’ll have a good trip down to the Cities in the fall, and take plenty of time for it, and you can get your new glad-rags then.” But as she examined her wardrobe she flung her ancient black velvet frock on the floor and raged, “They’re disgraceful. Everything I have is falling to pieces.”
There was a new dressmaker and milliner, a Mrs. Swiftwaite. It was said that she was not altogether an elevating influence in the way she glanced at men; that she would as soon take away a legally appropriated husband as not; that if there WAS any Mr. Swiftwaite, “it certainly was strange that nobody seemed to know anything about him!” But she had made for Rita Gould an organdy frock and hat to match universally admitted to be “too cunning for words,” and the matrons went cautiously, with darting eyes and excessive politeness, to the rooms which Mrs. Swiftwaite had taken in the old Luke Dawson house, on Floral Avenue.
With none of the spiritual preparation which normally precedes the buying of new clothes in Gopher Prairie, Carol marched into Mrs. Swiftwaite’s, and demanded, “I want to see a hat, and possibly a blouse.”
In the dingy old front parlor which she had tried to make smart with a pier glass, covers from fashion magazines, anemic French prints, Mrs. Swiftwaite moved smoothly among the dress-dummies and hat-rests, spoke smoothly as she took up a small black and red turban. “I am sure the lady will find this extremely attractive.”
“It’s dreadfully tabby and small-towny,” thought Carol, while she soothed, “I don’t believe it quite goes with me.”
“It’s the choicest thing I have, and I’m sure you’ll find it suits you beautifully. It has a great deal of chic. Please try it on,” said Mrs. Swiftwaite, more smoothly than ever.
Carol studied the woman. She was as imitative as a glass diamond. She was the more rustic in her effort to appear urban. She wore a severe high-collared blouse with a row of small black buttons, which was becoming to her low-breasted slim neatness, but her skirt was hysterically checkered, her cheeks were too highly rouged, her lips too sharply penciled. She was magnificently a specimen of the illiterate divorcee of forty made up to look thirty, clever, and alluring.
While she was trying on the hat Carol felt very condescending. She took it off, shook her head, explained with the kind smile for inferiors, “I’m afraid it won’t do, though it’s unusually nice for so small a town as this.”
“But it’s really absolutely New-Yorkish.”
“Well, it—-”
“You see, I know my New York styles. I lived in New York for years, besides almost a year in Akron!”
“You did?” Carol was polite, and edged away, and went home unhappily. She was wondering whether her own airs were as laughable as Mrs. Swiftwaite’s. She put on the eye-glasses which Kennicott had recently given to her for reading, and looked over a grocery bill. She went hastily up to her room, to her mirror. She was in a mood of self-depreciation. Accurately or not, this was the picture she saw in the mirror:
Neat rimless eye-glasses. Black hair clumsily tucked under a mauve straw hat which would have suited a spinster. Cheeks clear, bloodless. Thin nose. Gentle mouth and chin. A modest voile blouse with an edging of lace at the neck. A virginal sweetness and timorousness–no flare of gaiety, no suggestion of cities, music, quick laughter.
“I have become a small-town woman. Absolute. Typical. Modest and moral and safe. Protected from life. GENTEEL! The Village Virus–the village virtuousness. My hair–just scrambled together. What can Erik see in that wedded spinster there? He does like me! Because I’m the only woman who’s decent to him! How long before he’ll wake up to me? . . . I’ve waked up to myself. . . . Am I as old as–as old as I am?
“Not really old. Become careless. Let myself look tabby.
“I want to chuck every stitch I own. Black hair and pale cheeks–they’d go with a Spanish dancer’s costume–rose behind my ear, scarlet mantilla over one shoulder, the other bare.”
She seized the rouge sponge, daubed her cheeks, scratched at her lips with the vermilion pencil until they stung, tore open her collar. She posed with her thin arms in the attitude of the fandango. She dropped them sharply. She shook her head. “My heart doesn’t dance,” she said. She flushed as she fastened her blouse.
“At least I’m much more graceful than Fern Mullins. Heavens! When I came here from the Cities, girls imitated me. Now I’m trying to imitate a city girl.”
*** *** ***
CHAPTER XXX
FERN Mullins rushed into the house on a Saturday morning early in September and shrieked at Carol, “School starts next Tuesday. I’ve got to have one more spree before I’m arrested. Let’s get up a picnic down the lake for this afternoon. Won’t you come, Mrs. Kennicott, and the doctor? Cy Bogart wants to go–he’s a brat but he’s lively.”
“I don’t think the doctor can go,” sedately. “He said something about having to make a country call this afternoon. But I’d love to.”
“That’s dandy! Who can we get?”
“Mrs. Dyer might be chaperon. She’s been so nice. And maybe Dave, if he could get away from the store.”
“How about Erik Valborg? I think he’s got lots more style than these town boys. You like him all right, don’t you?”
So the picnic of Carol, Fern, Erik, Cy Bogart, and the Dyers was not only moral but inevitable.
They drove to the birch grove on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. Dave Dyer was his most clownish self. He yelped, jigged, wore Carol’s hat, dropped an ant down Fern’s back, and when they went swimming (the women modestly changing in the car with the side curtains up, the men undressing behind the bushes, constantly repeating, “Gee, hope we don’t run into poison ivy”), Dave splashed water on them and dived to clutch his wife’s ankle. He infected the others. Erik gave an imitation of the Greek dancers he had seen in vaudeville, and when they sat down to picnic supper spread on a lap-robe on the grass, Cy climbed a tree to throw acorns at them.
But Carol could not frolic.
She had made herself young, with parted hair, sailor blouse and large blue bow, white canvas shoes and short linen skirt. Her mirror had asserted that she looked exactly as she had in college, that her throat was smooth, her collar-bone not very noticeable. But she was under restraint. When they swam she enjoyed the freshness of the water but she was irritated by Cy’s tricks, by Dave’s excessive good spirits. She admired Erik’s dance; he could never betray bad taste, as Cy did, and Dave. She waited for him to come to her. He did not come. By his joyousness he had apparently endeared himself to the Dyers. Maud watched him and, after supper, cried to him, “Come sit down beside me, bad boy!” Carol winced at his willingness to be a bad boy and come and sit, at his enjoyment of a not very stimulating game in which Maud, Dave, and Cy snatched slices of cold tongue from one another’s plates. Maud, it seemed, was slightly dizzy from the swim. She remarked publicly, “Dr. Kennicott has helped me so much by putting me on a diet,” but it was to Erik alone that she gave the complete version of her peculiarity in being so sensitive, so easily hurt by the slightest cross word, that she simply had to have nice cheery friends.
Erik was nice and cheery.
Carol assured herself, “Whatever faults I may have, I certainly couldn’t ever be jealous. I do like Maud; she’s always so pleasant. But I wonder if she isn’t just a bit fond of fishing for men’s sympathy? Playing with Erik, and her married—-Well—-But she looks at him in that languishing, swooning, mid-Victorian way. Disgusting!”
Cy Bogart lay between the roots of a big birch, smoking his pipe and teasing Fern, assuring her that a week from now, when he was again a high-school boy and she his teacher, he’d wink at her in class. Maud Dyer wanted Erik to “come down to the beach to see the darling little minnies.” Carol was left to Dave, who tried to entertain her with humorous accounts of Ella Stowbody’s fondness for chocolate peppermints. She watched Maud Dyer put her hand on Erik’s shoulder to steady herself.
“Disgusting!” she thought.
Cy Bogart covered Fern’s nervous hand with his red paw, and when she bounced with half-anger and shrieked, “Let go, I tell you!” he grinned and waved his pipe–a gangling twenty-year-old satyr.
“Disgusting!”
When Maud and Erik returned and the grouping shifted, Erik muttered at Carol, “There’s a boat on shore. Let’s skip off and have a row.”
“What will they think?” she worried. She saw Maud Dyer peer at Erik with moist possessive eyes. “Yes! Let’s!” she said.
She cried to the party, with the canonical amount of sprightliness, “Good-by, everybody. We’ll wireless you from China.”
As the rhythmic oars plopped and creaked, as she floated on an unreality of delicate gray over which the sunset was poured out thin, the irritation of Cy and Maud slipped away. Erik smiled at her proudly. She considered him–coatless, in white thin shirt. She was conscious of his male differentness, of his flat masculine sides, his thin thighs, his easy rowing. They talked of the library, of the movies. He hummed and she softly sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” A breeze shivered across the agate lake. The wrinkled water was like armor damascened and polished. The breeze flowed round the boat in a chill current. Carol drew the collar of her middy blouse over her bare throat.
“Getting cold. Afraid we’ll have to go back,” she said.
“Let’s not go back to them yet. They’ll be cutting up. Let’s keep along the shore.”
“But you enjoy the ‘cutting up!’ Maud and you had a beautiful time.”
“Why! We just walked on the shore and talked about fishing!”
She was relieved, and apologetic to her friend Maud. “Of course. I was joking.”
“I’ll tell you! Let’s land here and sit on the shore–that bunch of hazel-brush will shelter us from the wind–and watch the sunset. It’s like melted lead. Just a short while! We don’t want to go back and listen to them!”
“No, but—-” She said nothing while he sped ashore. The keel clashed on the stones. He stood on the forward seat, holding out his hand. They were alone, in the ripple-lapping silence. She rose slowly, slowly stepped over the water in the bottom of the old boat. She took his hand confidently. Unspeaking they sat on a bleached log, in a russet twilight which hinted of autumn. Linden leaves fluttered about them.
“I wish—-Are you cold now?” he whispered.
“A little.” She shivered. But it was not with cold.
“I wish we could curl up in the leaves there, covered all up, and lie looking out at the dark.”
“I wish we could.” As though it was comfortably understood that he did not mean to be taken seriously.
“Like what all the poets say–brown nymph and faun.”
“No. I can’t be a nymph any more. Too old—-Erik, am I old? Am I faded and small-towny?”
“Why, you’re the youngest—-Your eyes are like a girl’s. They’re so–well, I mean, like you believed everything. Even if you do teach me, I feel a thousand years older than you, instead of maybe a year younger.”
“Four or five years younger!”
“Anyway, your eyes are so innocent and your cheeks so soft—-Damn it, it makes me want to cry, somehow, you’re so defenseless; and I want to protect you and—-There’s nothing to protect you against!”
“Am I young? Am I? Honestly? Truly?” She betrayed for a moment the childish, mock-imploring tone that comes into the voice of the most serious woman when an agreeable man treats her as a girl; the childish tone and childish pursed-up lips and shy lift of the cheek.
“Yes, you are!”
“You’re dear to believe it, Will–ERIK!”
“Will you play with me? A lot?”
“Perhaps.”
“Would you really like to curl in the leaves and watch the stars swing by overhead?”
“I think it’s rather better to be sitting here!” He twined his fingers with hers. “And Erik, we must go back.”
“Why?”
“It’s somewhat late to outline all the history of social custom!”
“I know. We must. Are you glad we ran away though?”
“Yes.” She was quiet, perfectly simple. But she rose.
He circled her waist with a brusque arm. She did not resist. She did not care. He was neither a peasant tailor, a potential artist, a social complication, nor a peril. He was himself, and in him, in the personality flowing from him, she was unreasoningly content. In his nearness she caught a new view of his head; the last light brought out the planes of his neck, his flat ruddied cheeks, the side of his nose, the depression of his temples. Not as coy or uneasy lovers but as companions they walked to the boat, and he lifted her up on the prow.
She began to talk intently, as he rowed: “Erik, you’ve got to work! You ought to be a personage. You’re robbed of your kingdom. Fight for it! Take one of these correspondence courses in drawing–they mayn’t be any good in themselves, but they’ll make you try to draw and—-”
As they reached the picnic ground she perceived that it was dark, that they had been gone for a long time.
“What will they say?” she wondered.
The others greeted them with the inevitable storm of humor and slight vexation: “Where the deuce do you think you’ve been?” “You’re a fine pair, you are!” Erik and Carol looked self-conscious; failed in their effort to be witty. All the way home Carol was embarrassed. Once Cy winked at her. That Cy, the Peeping Tom of the garage-loft, should consider her a fellow-sinner—-She was furious and frightened and exultant by turns, and in all her moods certain that Kennicott would read her adventuring in her face.
She came into the house awkwardly defiant.
Her husband, half asleep under the lamp, greeted her, “Well, well, have nice time?”
She could not answer. He looked at her. But his look did not sharpen. He began to wind his watch, yawning the old “Welllllll, guess it’s about time to turn in.”
That was all. Yet she was not glad. She was almost disappointed.
*** II ***
Mrs. Bogart called next day. She had a hen-like, crumb-pecking, diligent appearance. Her smile was too innocent. The pecking started instantly:
“Cy says you had lots of fun at the picnic yesterday. Did you enjoy it?”
“Oh yes. I raced Cy at swimming. He beat me badly. He’s so strong, isn’t he!”
“Poor boy, just crazy to get into the war, too, but—-This Erik Valborg was along, wa’n’t he?”
“Yes.”
“I think he’s an awful handsome fellow, and they say he’s smart. Do you like him?”
“He seems very polite.”
“Cy says you and him had a lovely boat-ride. My, that must have been pleasant.”
“Yes, except that I couldn’t get Mr. Valborg to say a word. I wanted to ask him about the suit Mr. Hicks is making for my husband. But he insisted on singing. Still, it was restful, floating around on the water and singing. So happy and innocent. Don’t you think it’s a shame, Mrs. Bogart, that people in this town don’t do more nice clean things like that, instead of all this horrible gossiping?”
“Yes. . . . Yes.”
Mrs. Bogart sounded vacant. Her bonnet was awry; she was incomparably dowdy. Carol stared at her, felt contemptuous, ready at last to rebel against the trap, and as the rusty goodwife fished again, “Plannin’ some more picnics?” she flung out, “I haven’t the slightest idea! Oh. Is that Hugh crying? I must run up to him.”
But up-stairs she remembered that Mrs. Bogart had seen her walking with Erik from the railroad track into town, and she was chilly with disquietude.
At the Jolly Seventeen, two days after, she was effusive to Maud Dyer, to Juanita Haydock. She fancied that every one was watching her, but she could not be sure, and in rare strong moments she did not care. She could rebel against the town’s prying now that she had something, however indistinct, for which to rebel.
In a passionate escape there must be not only a place from which to flee but a place to which to flee. She had known that she would gladly leave Gopher Prairie, leave Main Street and all that it signified, but she had had no destination. She had one now. That destination was not Erik Valborg and the love of Erik. She continued to assure herself that she wasn’t in love with him but merely “fond of him, and interested in his success.” Yet in him she had discovered both her need of youth and the fact that youth would welcome her. It was not Erik to whom she must escape, but universal and joyous youth, in class-rooms, in studios, in offices, in meetings to protest against Things in General. . . . But universal and joyous youth rather resembled Erik.
All week she thought of things she wished to say to him. High, improving things. She began to admit that she was lonely without him. Then she was afraid.
It was at the Baptist church supper, a week after the picnic, that she saw him again. She had gone with Kennicott and Aunt Bessie to the supper, which was spread on oilcloth-covered and trestle-supported tables in the church basement. Erik was helping Myrtle Cass to fill coffee cups for the waitresses. The congregation had doffed their piety. Children tumbled under the tables, and Deacon Pierson greeted the women with a rolling, “Where’s Brother Jones, sister, where’s Brother Jones? Not going to be with us tonight? Well, you tell Sister Perry to hand you a plate, and make ’em give you enough oyster pie!”
Erik shared in the cheerfulness. He laughed with Myrtle, jogged her elbow when she was filling cups, made deep mock bows to the waitresses as they came up for coffee. Myrtle was enchanted by his humor. From the other end of the room, a matron among matrons, Carol observed Myrtle, and hated her, and caught herself at it. “To be jealous of a wooden-faced village girl!” But she kept it up. She detested Erik; gloated over his gaucheries–his “breaks,” she called them. When he was too expressive, too much like a Russian dancer, in saluting Deacon Pierson, Carol had the ecstasy of pain in seeing the deacon’s sneer. When, trying to talk to three girls at once, he dropped a cup and effeminately wailed, “Oh dear!” she sympathized with–and ached over–the insulting secret glances of the girls.
From meanly hating him she rose to compassion as she saw that his eyes begged every one to like him. She perceived how inaccurate her judgments could be. At the picnic she had fancied that Maud Dyer looked upon Erik too sentimentally, and she had snarled, “I hate these married women who cheapen themselves and feed on boys.” But at the supper Maud was one of the waitresses; she bustled with platters of cake, she was pleasant to old women; and to Erik she gave no attention at all. Indeed, when she had her own supper, she joined the Kennicotts, and how ludicrous it was to suppose that Maud was a gourmet of emotions Carol saw in the fact that she talked not to one of the town beaux but to the safe Kennicott himself!
When Carol glanced at Erik again she discovered that Mrs. Bogart had an eye on her. It was a shock to know that at last there was something which could make her afraid of Mrs. Bogart’s spying.
“What am I doing? Am I in love with Erik? Unfaithful? I? I want youth but I don’t want him–I mean, I don’t want youth–enough to break up my life. I must get out of this. Quick.”
She said to Kennicott on their way home, “Will! I want to run away for a few days. Wouldn’t you like to skip down to Chicago?”
“Still be pretty hot there. No fun in a big city till winter. What do you want to go for?”
“People! To occupy my mind. I want stimulus.”
“Stimulus?” He spoke good-naturedly. “Who’s been feeding you meat? You got that ‘stimulus’ out of one of these fool stories about wives that don’t know when they’re well off. Stimulus! Seriously, though, to cut out the jollying, I can’t get away.”
“Then why don’t I run off by myself?”
“Why—-‘Tisn’t the money, you understand. But what about Hugh?”
“Leave him with Aunt Bessie. It would be just for a few days.”
“I don’t think much of this business of leaving kids around. Bad for ’em.”
“So you don’t think—-”
“I’ll tell you: I think we better stay put till after the war. Then we’ll have a dandy long trip. No, I don’t think you better plan much about going away now.”
So she was thrown at Erik.
*** III ***
She awoke at ebb-time, at three of the morning, woke sharply and fully; and sharply and coldly as her father pronouncing sentence on a cruel swindler she gave judgment:
“A pitiful and tawdry love-affair.
“No splendor, no defiance. A self-deceived little woman whispering in corners with a pretentious little man.
“No, he is not. He is fine. Aspiring. It’s not his fault. His eyes are sweet when he looks at me. Sweet, so sweet.”
She pitied herself that her romance should be pitiful; she sighed that in this colorless hour, to this austere self, it should seem tawdry.
Then, in a very great desire of rebellion and unleashing of all her hatreds, “The pettier and more tawdry it is, the more blame to Main Street. It shows how much I’ve been longing to escape. Any way out! Any humility so long as I can flee. Main Street has done this to me. I came here eager for nobilities, ready for work, and now—-Any way out.
“I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don’t know, they don’t understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound.
“Tawdry! Pitiful! Carol–the clean girl that used to walk so fast!–sneaking and tittering in dark corners, being sentimental and jealous at church suppers!”
At breakfast-time her agonies were night-blurred, and persisted only as a nervous irresolution.
*** IV ***
Few of the aristocrats of the Jolly Seventeen attended the humble folk-meets of the Baptist and Methodist church suppers, where the Willis Woodfords, the Dillons, the Champ Perrys, Oleson the butcher, Brad Bemis the tinsmith, and Deacon Pierson found release from loneliness. But all of the smart set went to the lawn-festivals of the Episcopal Church, and were reprovingly polite to outsiders.
The Harry Haydocks gave the last lawn-festival of the season; a splendor of Japanese lanterns and card-tables and chicken patties and Neapolitan ice-cream. Erik was no longer entirely an outsider. He was eating his ice-cream with a group of the people most solidly “in”–the Dyers, Myrtle Cass, Guy Pollock, the Jackson Elders. The Haydocks themselves kept aloof, but the others tolerated him. He would never, Carol fancied, be one of the town pillars, because he was not orthodox in hunting and motoring and poker. But he was winning approbation by his liveliness, his gaiety–the qualities least important in him.
When the group summoned Carol she made several very well-taken points in regard to the weather.
Myrtle cried to Erik, “Come on! We don’t belong with these old folks. I want to make you ‘quainted with the jolliest girl, she comes from Wakamin, she’s staying with Mary Howland.”
Carol saw him being profuse to the guest from Wakamin. She saw him confidentially strolling with Myrtle. She burst out to Mrs. Westlake, “Valborg and Myrtle seem to have quite a crush on each other.”
Mrs. Westlake glanced at her curiously before she mumbled, “Yes, don’t they.”
“I’m mad, to talk this way,” Carol worried.
She had regained a feeling of social virtue by telling Juanita Haydock “how darling her lawn looked with the Japanese lanterns” when she saw that Erik was stalking her. Though he was merely ambling about with his hands in his pockets, though he did not peep at her, she knew that he was calling her. She sidled away from Juanita. Erik hastened to her. She nodded coolly (she was proud of her coolness).
“Carol! I’ve got a wonderful chance! Don’t know but what some ways it might be better than going East to take art. Myrtle Cass says—-I dropped in to say howdy to Myrtle last evening, and had quite a long talk with her father, and he said he was hunting for a fellow to go to work in the flour mill and learn the whole business, and maybe become general manager. I know something about wheat from my farming, and I worked a couple of months in the flour mill at Curlew when I got sick of tailoring. What do you think? You said any work was artistic if it was done by an artist. And flour is so important. What do you think?”
“Wait! Wait!”
This sensitive boy would be very skilfully stamped into conformity by Lyman Cass and his sallow daughter; but did she detest the plan for this reason? “I must be honest. I mustn’t tamper with his future to please my vanity.” But she had no sure vision. She turned on him:
“How can I decide? It’s up to you. Do you want to become a person like Lym Cass, or do you want to become a person like–yes, like me! Wait! Don’t be flattering. Be honest. This is important.”
“I know. I am a person like you now! I mean, I want to rebel.”
“Yes. We’re alike,” gravely.
“Only I’m not sure I can put through my schemes. I really can’t draw much. I guess I have pretty fair taste in fabrics, but since I’ve known you I don’t like to think about fussing with dress-designing. But as a miller, I’d have the means–books, piano, travel.”
“I’m going to be frank and beastly. Don’t you realize that it isn’t just because her papa needs a bright young man in the mill that Myrtle is amiable to you? Can’t you understand what she’ll do to you when she has you, when she sends you to church and makes you become respectable?”
He glared at her. “I don’t know. I suppose so.”
“You are thoroughly unstable!”
“What if I am? Most fish out of water are! Don’t talk like Mrs. Bogart! How can I be anything but ‘unstable’–wandering from farm to tailor shop to books, no training, nothing but trying to make books talk to me! Probably I’ll fail. Oh, I know it; probably I’m uneven. But I’m not unstable in thinking about this job in the mill–and Myrtle. I know what I want. I want you!”
“Please, please, oh, please!”
“I do. I’m not a schoolboy any more. I want you. If I take Myrtle, it’s to forget you.”
“Please, please!”
“It’s you that are unstable! You talk at things and play at things, but you’re scared. Would I mind it if you and I went off to poverty, and I had to dig ditches? I would not! But you would. I think you would come to like me, but you won’t admit it. I wouldn’t have said this, but when you sneer at Myrtle and the mill—-If I’m not to have good sensible things like those, d’ you think I’ll be content with trying to become a damn dressmaker, after YOU? Are you fair? Are you?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Do you like me? Do you?”
“Yes—-No! Please! I can’t talk any more.”
“Not here. Mrs. Haydock is looking at us.”
“No, nor anywhere. O Erik, I am fond of you, but I’m afraid.”
“What of?”
“Of Them! Of my rulers–Gopher Prairie. . . . My dear boy, we are talking very foolishly. I am a normal wife and a good mother, and you are–oh, a college freshman.”
“You do like me! I’m going to make you love me!”
She looked at him once, recklessly, and walked away with a serene gait that was a disordered flight.
Kennicott grumbled on their way home, “You and this Valborg fellow seem quite chummy.”
“Oh, we are. He’s interested in Myrtle Cass, and I was telling him how nice she is.”
In her room she marveled, “I have become a liar. I’m snarled with lies and foggy analyses and desires–I who was clear and sure.”
She hurried into Kennicott’s room, sat on the edge of his bed. He flapped a drowsy welcoming hand at her from the expanse of quilt and dented pillows.
“Will, I really think I ought to trot off to St. Paul or Chicago or some place.”
“I thought we settled all that, few nights ago! Wait till we can have a real trip.” He shook himself out of his drowsiness. “You might give me a good-night kiss.”
She did–dutifully. He held her lips against his for an intolerable time. “Don’t you like the old man any more?” he coaxed. He sat up and shyly fitted his palm about the slimness of her waist.
“Of course. I like you very much indeed.” Even to herself it sounded flat. She longed to be able to throw into her voice the facile passion of a light woman. She patted his cheek.
He sighed, “I’m sorry you’re so tired. Seems like—-But of course you aren’t very strong.”
“Yes. . . . Then you don’t think–you’re quite sure I ought to stay here in town?”
“I told you so! I certainly do!”
She crept back to her room, a small timorous figure in white.
“I can’t face Will down–demand the right. He’d be obstinate. And I can’t even go off and earn my living again. Out of the habit of it. He’s driving me—-I’m afraid of what he’s driving me to. Afraid.
“That man in there, snoring in stale air, my husband? Could any ceremony make him my husband?
“No. I don’t want to hurt him. I want to love him. I can’t, when I’m thinking of Erik. Am I too honest–a funny topsy-turvy honesty–the faithfulness of unfaith? I wish I had a more compartmental mind, like men. I’m too monogamous–toward Erik!–my child Erik, who needs me.
“Is an illicit affair like a gambling debt–demands stricter honor than the legitimate debt of matrimony, because it’s not legally enforced?
“That’s nonsense! I don’t care in the least for Erik! Not for any man. I want to be let alone, in a woman world–a world without Main Street, or politicians, or business men, or men with that sudden beastly hungry look, that glistening unfrank expression that wives know—-
“If Erik were here, if he would just sit quiet and kind and talk, I could be still, I could go to sleep.
“I am so tired. If I could sleep—-”
*** *** ***
CHAPTER XXXI
THEIR night came unheralded.
Kennicott was on a country call. It was cool but Carol huddled on the porch, rocking, meditating, rocking. The house was lonely and repellent, and though she sighed, “I ought to go in and read–so many things to read–ought to go in,” she remained. Suddenly Erik was coming, turning in, swinging open the screen door, touching her hand.
“Erik!”
“Saw your husband driving out of town. Couldn’t stand it.”
“Well—-You mustn’t stay more than five minutes.”
“Couldn’t stand not seeing you. Every day, towards evening, felt I had to see you–pictured you so clear. I’ve been good though, staying away, haven’t I!”
“And you must go on being good.”
“Why must I?”
“We better not stay here on the porch. The Howlands across the street are such window-peepers, and Mrs. Bogart—-”
She did not look at him but she could divine his tremulousness as he stumbled indoors. A moment ago the night had been coldly empty; now it was incalculable, hot, treacherous. But it is women who are the calm realists once they discard the fetishes of the premarital hunt. Carol was serene as she murmured, “Hungry? I have some little honey-colored cakes. You may have two, and then you must skip home.”
“Take me up and let me see Hugh asleep.”
“I don’t believe—-”
“Just a glimpse!”
“Well—-”
She doubtfully led the way to the hallroom-nursery. Their heads close, Erik’s curls pleasant as they touched her cheek, they looked in at the baby. Hugh was pink with slumber. He had burrowed into his pillow with such energy that it was almost smothering him. Beside it was a celluloid rhinoceros; tight in his hand a torn picture of Old King Cole.
“Shhh!” said Carol, quite automatically. She tiptoed in to pat the pillow. As she returned to Erik she had a friendly sense of his waiting for her. They smiled at each other. She did not think of Kennicott, the baby’s father. What she did think was that some one rather like Erik, an older and surer Erik, ought to be Hugh’s father. The three of them would play–incredible imaginative games.
“Carol! You’ve told me about your own room. Let me peep in at it.”
“But you mustn’t stay, not a second. We must go downstairs.”
“Yes.”
“Will you be good?”
“R-reasonably!” He was pale, large-eyed, serious.
“You’ve got to be more than reasonably good!” She felt sensible and superior; she was energetic about pushing open the door.
Kennicott had always seemed out of place there but Erik surprisingly harmonized with the spirit of the room as he stroked the books, glanced at the prints. He held out his hands. He came toward her. She was weak, betrayed to a warm softness. Her head was tilted back. Her eyes were closed. Her thoughts were formless but many-colored. She felt his kiss, diffident and reverent, on her eyelid.
Then she knew that it was impossible.
She shook herself. She sprang from him. “Please!” she said sharply.
He looked at her unyielding.
“I am fond of you,” she said. “Don’t spoil everything. Be my friend.”
“How many thousands and millions of women must have said that! And now you! And it doesn’t spoil everything. It glorifies everything.”
“Dear, I do think there’s a tiny streak of fairy in you–whatever you do with it. Perhaps I’d have loved that once. But I won’t. It’s too late. But I’ll keep a fondness for you. Impersonal–I will be impersonal! It needn’t be just a thin talky fondness. You do need me, don’t you? Only you and my son need me. I’ve wanted so to be wanted! Once I wanted love to be given to me. Now I’ll be content if I can give. . . . Almost content!
“We women, we like to do things for men. Poor men! We swoop on you when you’re defenseless and fuss over you and insist on reforming you. But it’s so pitifully deep in us. You’ll be the one thing in which I haven’t failed. Do something definite! Even if it’s just selling cottons. Sell beautiful cottons–caravans from China—-”
“Carol! Stop! You do love me!”
“I do not! It’s just—-Can’t you understand? Everything crushes in on me so, all the gaping dull people, and I look for a way out—-Please go. I can’t stand any more. Please!”
He was gone. And she was not relieved by the quiet of the house. She was empty and the house was empty and she needed him. She wanted to go on talking, to get this threshed out, to build a sane friendship. She wavered down to the living-room, looked out of the bay-window. He was not to be seen. But Mrs. Westlake was. She was walking past, and in the light from the corner arc-lamp she quickly inspected the porch, the windows. Carol dropped the curtain, stood with movement and reflection paralyzed. Automatically, without reasoning, she mumbled, “I will see him again soon and make him understand we must be friends. But—-The house is so empty. It echoes so.”
*** II ***
Kennicott had seemed nervous and absent-minded through that supper-hour, two evenings after. He prowled about the living-room, then growled:
“What the dickens have you been saying to Ma Westlake?”
Carol’s book rattled. “What do you mean?”
“I told you that Westlake and his wife were jealous of us, and here you been chumming up to them and—-From what Dave tells me, Ma Westlake has been going around town saying you told her that you hate Aunt Bessie, and that you fixed up your own room because I snore, and you said Bjornstam was too good for Bea, and then, just recent, that you were sore on the town because we don’t all go down on our knees and beg this Valborg fellow to come take supper with us. God only knows what else she says you said.”
“It’s not true, any of it! I did like Mrs. Westlake, and I’ve called on her, and apparently she’s gone and twisted everything I’ve said—-”
“Sure. Of course she would. Didn’t I tell you she would? She’s an old cat, like her pussyfooting, hand-holding husband. Lord, if I was sick, I’d rather have a faith-healer than Westlake, and she’s another slice off the same bacon. What I can’t understand though—-”
She waited, taut.
“—-is whatever possessed you to let her pump you, bright a girl as you are. I don’t care what you told her–we all get peeved sometimes and want to blow off steam, that’s natural–but if you wanted to keep it dark, why didn’t you advertise it in the Dauntless, or get a megaphone and stand on top of the hotel and holler, or do anything besides spill it to her!”
“I know. You told me. But she was so motherly. And I didn’t have any woman—-Vida ‘s become so married and proprietary.”
“Well, next time you’ll have better sense.”
He patted her head, flumped down behind his newspaper, said nothing more.
Enemies leered through the windows, stole on her from the hall. She had no one save Erik. This kind good man Kennicott–he was an elder brother. It was Erik, her fellow outcast, to whom she wanted to run for sanctuary. Through her storm she was, to the eye, sitting quietly with her fingers between the pages of a baby-blue book on home-dressmaking. But her dismay at Mrs. Westlake’s treachery had risen to active dread. What had the woman said of her and Erik? What did she know? What had she seen? Who else would join in the baying hunt? Who else had seen her with Erik? What had she to fear from the Dyers, Cy Bogart, Juanita, Aunt Bessie? What precisely had she answered to Mrs. Bogart’s questioning?
All next day she was too restless to stay home, yet as she walked the streets on fictitious errands she was afraid of every person she met. She waited for them to speak; waited with foreboding. She repeated, “I mustn’t ever see Erik again.” But the words did not register. She had no ecstatic indulgence in the sense of guilt which is, to the women of Main Street, the surest escape from blank tediousness.
At five, crumpled in a chair in the living-room, she started at the sound of the bell. Some one opened the door. She waited, uneasy. Vida Sherwin charged into the room. “Here’s the one person I can trust!” Carol rejoiced.
Vida was serious but affectionate. She bustled at Carol with, “Oh, there you are, dearie, so glad t’ find you in, sit down, want to talk to you.”
Carol sat, obedient.
Vida fussily tugged over a large chair and launched out:
“I’ve been hearing vague rumors you were interested in this Erik Valborg. I knew you couldn’t be guilty, and I’m surer than ever of it now. Here we are, as blooming as a daisy.”
“How does a respectable matron look when she feels guilty?”
Carol sounded resentful.
“Why—-Oh, it would show! Besides! I know that you, of all people, are the one that can appreciate Dr. Will.”
“What have you been hearing?”
“Nothing, really. I just heard Mrs. Bogart say she’d seen you and Valborg walking together a lot.” Vida’s chirping slackened. She looked at her nails. “But—-I suspect you do like Valborg. Oh, I don’t mean in any wrong way. But you’re young; you don’t know what an innocent liking might drift into. You always pretend to be so sophisticated and all, but you’re a baby. Just because you are so innocent, you don’t know what evil thoughts may lurk in that fellow’s brain.”
“You don’t suppose Valborg could actually think about making love to me?”
Her rather cheap sport ended abruptly as Vida cried, with contorted face, “What do you know about the thoughts in hearts? You just play at reforming the world. You don’t know what it means to suffer.”
There are two insults which no human being will endure: the assertion that he hasn’t a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble. Carol said furiously, “You think I don’t suffer? You think I’ve always had an easy—-”
“No, you don’t. I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told a living soul, not even Ray.” The dam of repressed imagination which Vida had builded for years, which now, with Raymie off at the wars, she was building again, gave way.
“I was–I liked Will terribly well. One time at a party–oh, before he met you, of course–but we held hands, and we were so happy. But I didn’t feel I was really suited to him. I let him go. Please don’t think I still love him! I see now that Ray was predestined to be my mate. But because I liked him, I know how sincere and pure and noble Will is, and his thoughts never straying from the path of rectitude, and—-If I gave him up to you, at least you’ve got to appreciate him! We danced together and laughed so, and I gave him up, but—-This IS my affair! I’m NOT intruding! I see the whole thing as he does, because of all I’ve told you. Maybe it’s shameless to bare my heart this way, but I do it for him–for him and you!”
Carol understood that Vida believed herself to have recited minutely and brazenly a story of intimate love; understood that, in alarm, she was trying to cover her shame as she struggled on, “Liked him in the most honorable way–simply can’t help it if I still see things through his eyes—-If I gave him up, I certainly am not beyond my rights in demanding that you take care to avoid even the appearance of evil and—-” She was weeping; an insignificant, flushed, ungracefully weeping woman.
Carol could not endure it. She ran to Vida, kissed her forehead, comforted her with a murmur of dove-like sounds, sought to reassure her with worn and hastily assembled gifts of words: “Oh, I appreciate it so much,” and “You are so fine and splendid,” and “Let me assure you there isn’t a thing to what you’ve heard,” and “Oh, indeed, I do know how sincere Will is, and as you say, so–so sincere.”
Vida believed that she had explained many deep and devious matters. She came out of her hysteria like a sparrow shaking off rain-drops. She sat up, and took advantage of her victory:
“I don’t want to rub it in, but you can see for yourself now, this is all a result of your being so discontented and not appreciating the dear good people here. And another thing: People like you and me, who want to reform things, have to be particularly careful about appearances. Think how much better you can criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can’t say you’re attacking them to excuse your own infractions.”
To Carol was given a sudden great philosophical understanding, an explanation of half the cautious reforms in history. “Yes. I’ve heard that plea. It’s a good one. It sets revolts aside to cool. It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: ‘You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don’t believe in it, then you MUST live up to it!’”
“I don’t think so at all,” said Vida vaguely. She began to look hurt, and Carol let her be oracular.
*** III ***
Vida had done her a service; had made all agonizing seem so fatuous that she ceased writhing and saw that her whole problem was simple as mutton: she was interested in Erik’s aspiration; interest gave her a hesitating fondness for him; and the future would take care of the event. . . . But at night, thinking in bed, she protested, “I’m not a falsely accused innocent, though! If it were some one more resolute than Erik, a fighter, an artist with bearded surly lips—-They’re only in books. Is that the real tragedy, that I never shall know tragedy, never find anything but blustery complications that turn out to be a farce?
“No one big enough or pitiful enough to sacrifice for. Tragedy in neat blouses; the eternal flame all nice and safe in a kerosene stove. Neither heroic faith nor heroic guilt. Peeping at love from behind lace curtains–on Main Street!”
Aunt Bessie crept in next day, tried to pump her, tried to prime the pump by again hinting that Kennicott might have his own affairs. Carol snapped, “Whatever I may do, I’ll have you to understand that Will is only too safe!” She wished afterward that she had not been so lofty. How much would Aunt Bessie make of “Whatever I may do?”
When Kennicott came home he poked at things, and hemmed, and brought out, “Saw aunty, this afternoon. She said you weren’t very polite to her.”
Carol laughed. He looked at her in a puzzled way and fled to his newspaper.
*** IV ***
She lay sleepless. She alternately considered ways of leaving Kennicott, and remembered his virtues, pitied his bewilderment in face of the subtle corroding sicknesses which he could not dose nor cut out. Didn’t he perhaps need her more than did the book-solaced Erik? Suppose Will were to die, suddenly. Suppose she never again saw him at breakfast, silent but amiable, listening to her chatter. Suppose he never again played elephant for Hugh. Suppose—-A country call, a slippery road, his motor skidding, the edge of the road crumbling, the car turning turtle, Will pinned beneath, suffering, brought home maimed, looking at her with spaniel eyes–or waiting for her, calling for her, while she was in Chicago, knowing nothing of it. Suppose he were sued by some vicious shrieking woman for malpractice. He tried to get witnesses; Westlake spread lies; his friends doubted him; his self-confidence was so broken that it was horrible to see the indecision of the decisive man; he was convicted, handcuffed, taken on a train—-
She ran to his room. At her nervous push the door swung sharply in, struck a chair. He awoke, gasped, then in a steady voice: “What is it, dear? Anything wrong?” She darted to him, fumbled for the familiar harsh bristly cheek. How well she knew it, every seam, and hardness of bone, and roll of fat! Yet when he sighed, “This is a nice visit,” and dropped his hand on her thin-covered shoulder, she said, too cheerily, “I thought I heard you moaning. So silly of me. Good night, dear.”
*** V ***
She did not see Erik for a fortnight, save once at church and once when she went to the tailor shop to talk over the plans, contingencies, and strategy of Kennicott’s annual campaign for getting a new suit. Nat Hicks was there, and he was not so deferential as he had been. With unnecessary jauntiness he chuckled, “Some nice flannels, them samples, heh?” Needlessly he touched her arm to call attention to the fashion-plates, and humorously he glanced from her to Erik. At home she wondered if the little beast might not be suggesting himself as a rival to Erik, but that abysmal bedragglement she would not consider.
She saw Juanita Haydock slowly walking past the house–as Mrs. Westlake had once walked past.
She met Mrs. Westlake in Uncle Whittier’s store, and before that alert stare forgot her determination to be rude, and was shakily cordial.
She was sure that all the men on the street, even Guy Pollock and Sam Clark, leered at her in an interested hopeful way, as though she were a notorious divorcee. She felt as insecure as a shadowed criminal. She wished to see Erik, and wished that she had never seen him. She fancied that Kennicott was the only person in town who did not know all–know incomparably more than there was to know–about herself and Erik. She crouched in her chair as she imagined men talking of her, thick-voiced, obscene, in barber shops and the tobacco-stinking pool parlor.
Through early autumn Fern Mullins was the only person who broke the suspense. The frivolous teacher had come to accept Carol as of her own youth, and though school had begun she rushed in daily to suggest dances, welsh-rabbit parties.
Fern begged her to go as chaperon to a barn-dance in the country, on a Saturday evening. Carol could not go. The next day, the storm crashed.
CHAPTER XXXII
CAROL was on the back porch, tightening a bolt on the baby’s go-cart, this Sunday afternoon. Through an open window of the Bogart house she heard a screeching, heard Mrs. Bogart’s haggish voice:
“ . . . did too, and there’s no use your denying it no you don’t, you march yourself right straight out of the house . . . never in my life heard of such . . . never had nobody talk to me like . . . walk in the ways of sin and nastiness . . . leave your clothes here, and heaven knows that’s more than you deserve . . . any of your lip or I’ll call the policeman.”
The voice of the other interlocutor Carol did not catch, nor, though Mrs. Bogart was proclaiming that he was her confidant and present assistant, did she catch the voice of Mrs. Bogart’s God.
“Another row with Cy,” Carol inferred.
She trundled the go-cart down the back steps and tentatively wheeled it across the yard, proud of her repairs. She heard steps on the sidewalk. She saw not Cy Bogart but Fern Mullins, carrying a suit-case, hurrying up the street with her head low. The widow, standing on the porch with buttery arms akimbo, yammered after the fleeing girl:
“And don’t you dare show your face on this block again. You can send the drayman for your trunk. My house has been contaminated long enough. Why the Lord should afflict me—-”
Fern was gone. The righteous widow glared, banged into the house, came out poking at her bonnet, marched away. By this time Carol was staring in a manner not visibly to be distinguished from the window-peeping of the rest of Gopher Prairie. She saw Mrs. Bogart enter the Howland house, then the Casses’. Not till suppertime did she reach the Kennicotts. The doctor answered her ring, and greeted her, “Well, well? how’s the good neighbor?”
The good neighbor charged into the living-room, waving the most unctuous of black kid gloves and delightedly sputtering:
“You may well ask how I am! I really do wonder how I could go through the awful scenes of this day–and the impudence I took from that woman’s tongue, that ought to be cut out—-”
“Whoa! Whoa! Hold up!” roared Kennicott. “Who’s the hussy, Sister Bogart? Sit down and take it cool and tell us about it.”
“I can’t sit down, I must hurry home, but I couldn’t devote myself to my own selfish cares till I’d warned you, and heaven knows I don’t expect any thanks for trying to warn the town against her, there’s always so much evil in the world that folks simply won’t see or appreciate your trying to safeguard them—-And forcing herself in here to get in with you and Carrie, many ‘s the time I’ve seen her doing it, and, thank heaven, she was found out in time before she could do any more harm, it simply breaks my heart and prostrates me to think what she may have done already, even if some of us that understand and know about things—-”
“Whoa-up! Who are you talking about?”
“She’s talking about Fern Mullins,” Carol put in, not pleasantly.
“Huh?”
Kennicott was incredulous.
“I certainly am!” flourished Mrs. Bogart, “and good and thankful you may be that I found her out in time, before she could get YOU into something, Carol, because even if you are my neighbor and Will’s wife and a cultured lady, let me tell you right now, Carol Kennicott, that you ain’t always as respectful to–you ain’t as reverent–you don’t stick by the good old ways like they was laid down for us by God in the Bible, and while of course there ain’t a bit of harm in having a good laugh, and I know there ain’t any real wickedness in you, yet just the same you don’t fear God and hate the transgressors of his commandments like you ought to, and you may be thankful I found out this serpent I nourished in my bosom–and oh yes! oh yes indeed! my lady must have two eggs every morning for breakfast, and eggs sixty cents a dozen, and wa’n’t satisfied with one, like most folks–what did she care how much they cost or if a person couldn’t make hardly nothing on her board and room, in fact I just took her in out of charity and I might have known from the kind of stockings and clothes that she sneaked into my house in her trunk—-”
Before they got her story she had five more minutes of obscene wallowing. The gutter comedy turned into high tragedy, with Nemesis in black kid gloves. The actual story was simple, depressing, and unimportant. As to details Mrs. Bogart was indefinite, and angry that she should be questioned.
Fern Mullins and Cy had, the evening before, driven alone to a barn-dance in the country. (Carol brought out the admission that Fern had tried to get a chaperon.) At the dance Cy had kissed Fern–she confessed that. Cy had obtained a pint of whisky; he said that he didn’t remember where he had got it; Mrs. Bogart implied that Fern had given it to him; Fern herself insisted that he had stolen it from a farmer’s overcoat–which, Mrs. Bogart raged, was obviously a lie. He had become soggily drunk. Fern had driven him home; deposited him, retching and wabbling, on the Bogart porch.
Never before had her boy been drunk, shrieked Mrs. Bogart. When Kennicott grunted, she owned, “Well, maybe once or twice I’ve smelled licker on his breath.” She also, with an air of being only too scrupulously exact, granted that sometimes he did not come home till morning. But he couldn’t ever have been drunk, for he always had the best excuses: the other boys had tempted him to go down the lake spearing pickerel by torchlight, or he had been out in a “machine that ran out of gas.” Anyway, never before had her boy fallen into the hands of a “designing woman.”
“What do you suppose Miss Mullins could design to do with him?” insisted Carol.
Mrs. Bogart was puzzled, gave it up, went on. This morning, when she had faced both of them, Cy had manfully confessed that all of the blame was on Fern, because the teacher–his own teacher–had dared him to take a drink. Fern had tried to deny it.
“Then,” gabbled Mrs. Bogart, “then that woman had the impudence to say to me, ‘What purpose could I have in wanting the filthy pup to get drunk?’ That’s just what she called him–pup. ‘I’ll have no such nasty language in my house,’ I says, ‘and you pretending and pulling the wool over people’s eyes and making them think you’re educated and fit to be a teacher and look out for young people’s morals–you’re worse ‘n any street-walker!’ I says. I let her have it good. I wa’n’t going to flinch from my bounden duty and let her think that decent folks had to stand for her vile talk. ‘Purpose?’ I says, ‘Purpose? I’ll tell you what purpose you had! Ain’t I seen you making up to everything in pants that’d waste time and pay attention to your impert’nence? Ain’t I seen you showing off your legs with them short skirts of yours, trying to make out like you was so girlish and la-de-da, running along the street?’”
Carol was very sick at this version of Fern’s eager youth, but she was sicker as Mrs. Bogart hinted that no one could tell what had happened between Fern and Cy before the drive home. Without exactly describing the scene, by her power of lustful imagination the woman suggested dark country places apart from the lanterns and rude fiddling and banging dance-steps in the barn, then madness and harsh hateful conquest. Carol was too sick to interrupt. It was Kennicott who cried, “Oh, for God’s sake quit it! You haven’t any idea what happened. You haven’t given us a single proof yet that Fern is anything but a rattle-brained youngster.”
“I haven’t, eh? Well, what do you say to this? I come straight out and I says to her, ‘Did you or did you not taste the whisky Cy had?’ and she says, ‘I think I did take one sip–Cy made me,’ she said. She owned up to that much, so you can imagine—-”
“Does that prove her a prostitute?” asked Carol.
“Carrie! Don’t you never use a word like that again!” wailed the outraged Puritan.
“Well, does it prove her to be a bad woman, that she took a taste of whisky? I’ve done it myself!”
“That’s different. Not that I approve your doing it. What do the Scriptures tell us? ‘Strong drink is a mocker’! But that’s entirely different from a teacher drinking with one of her own pupils.”
“Yes, it does sound bad. Fern was silly, undoubtedly. But as a matter of fact she’s only a year or two older than Cy and probably a good many years younger in experience of vice.”
“That’s–not–true! She is plenty old enough to corrupt him!
“The job of corrupting Cy was done by your sinless town, five years ago!”
Mrs. Bogart did not rage in return. Suddenly she was hopeless. Her head drooped. She patted her black kid gloves, picked at a thread of her faded brown skirt, and sighed, “He’s a good boy, and awful affectionate if you treat him right. Some thinks he’s terrible wild, but that’s because he’s young. And he’s so brave and truthful–why, he was one of the first in town that wanted to enlist for the war, and I had to speak real sharp to him to keep him from running away. I didn’t want him to get into no bad influences round these camps–and then,” Mrs. Bogart rose from her pitifulness, recovered her pace, “then I go and bring into my own house a woman that’s worse, when all’s said and done, than any bad woman he could have met. You say this Mullins woman is too young and inexperienced to corrupt Cy. Well then, she’s too young and inexperienced to teach him, too, one or t’other, you can’t have your cake and eat it! So it don’t make no difference which reason they fire her for, and that’s practically almost what I said to the school-board.”
“Have you been telling this story to the members of the school-board?”
“I certainly have! Every one of ’em! And their wives I says to them, ”Tain’t my affair to decide what you should or should not do with your teachers,’ I says, ‘and I ain’t presuming to dictate in any way, shape, manner, or form. I just want to know,’ I says, ‘whether you’re going to go on record as keeping here in our schools, among a lot of innocent boys and girls, a woman that drinks, smokes, curses, uses bad language, and does such dreadful things as I wouldn’t lay tongue to but you know what I mean,’ I says, ‘and if so, I’ll just see to it that the town learns about it.’ And that’s what I told Professor Mott, too, being superintendent–and he’s a righteous man, not going autoing on the Sabbath like the school-board members. And the professor as much as admitted he was suspicious of the Mullins woman himself.”
*** II ***
Kennicott was less shocked and much less frightened than Carol, and more articulate in his description of Mrs. Bogart, when she had gone.
Maud Dyer telephoned to Carol and, after a rather improbable question about cooking lima beans with bacon, demanded, “Have you heard the scandal about this Miss Mullins and Cy Bogart?”
“I’m sure it’s a lie.”
“Oh, probably is.” Maud’s manner indicated that the falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness.
Carol crept to her room, sat with hands curled tight together as she listened to a plague of voices. She could hear the town yelping with it, every soul of them, gleeful at new details, panting to win importance by having details of their own to add. How well they would make up for what they had been afraid to do by imagining it in another! They who had not been entirely afraid (but merely careful and sneaky), all the barber-shop roues and millinery-parlor mondaines, how archly they were giggling (this second–she could hear them at it); with what self-commendation they were cackling their suavest wit: “You can’t tell ME she ain’t a gay bird; I’m wise!”
And not one man in town to carry out their pioneer tradition of superb and contemptuous cursing, not one to verify the myth that their “rough chivalry” and “rugged virtues” were more generous than the petty scandal-picking of older lands, not one dramatic frontiersman to thunder, with fantastic and fictional oaths, “What are you hinting at? What are you snickering at? What facts have you? What are these unheard-of sins you condemn so much–and like so well?”
No one to say it. Not Kennicott nor Guy Pollock nor Champ Perry.
Erik? Possibly. He would sputter uneasy protest.
She suddenly wondered what subterranean connection her interest in Erik had with this affair. Wasn’t it because they had been prevented by her caste from bounding on her own trail that they were howling at Fern?
*** III ***
Before supper she found, by half a dozen telephone calls, that Fern had fled to the Minniemashie House. She hastened there, trying not to be self-conscious about the people who looked at her on the street. The clerk said indifferently that he “guessed” Miss Mullins was up in Room 37, and left Carol to find the way. She hunted along the stale-smelling corridors with their wallpaper of cerise daisies and poison-green rosettes, streaked in white spots from spilled water, their frayed red and yellow matting, and rows of pine doors painted a sickly blue. She could not find the number. In the darkness at the end of a corridor she had to feel the aluminum figures on the door-panels. She was startled once by a man’s voice: “Yep? Whadyuh want?” and fled. When she reached the right door she stood listening. She made out a long sobbing. There was no answer till her third knock; then an alarmed “Who is it? Go away!”
Her hatred of the town turned resolute as she pushed open the door.
Yesterday she had seen Fern Mullins in boots and tweed skirt and canary-yellow sweater, fleet and self-possessed. Now she lay across the bed, in crumpled lavender cotton and shabby pumps, very feminine, utterly cowed. She lifted her head in stupid terror. Her hair was in tousled strings and her face was sallow, creased. Her eyes were a blur from weeping.
“I didn’t! I didn’t!” was all she would say at first, and she repeated it while Carol kissed her cheek, stroked her hair, bathed her forehead. She rested then, while Carol looked about the room–the welcome to strangers, the sanctuary of hospitable Main Street, the lucrative property of Kennicott’s friend, Jackson Elder. It smelled of old linen and decaying carpet and ancient tobacco smoke. The bed was rickety, with a thin knotty mattress; the sand-colored walls were scratched and gouged; in every corner, under everything, were fluffy dust and cigar ashes; on the tilted wash-stand was a nicked and squatty pitcher; the only chair was a grim straight object of spotty varnish; but there was an altogether splendid gilt and rose cuspidor.
She did not try to draw out Fern’s story; Fern insisted on telling it.
She had gone to the party, not quite liking Cy but willing to endure him for the sake of dancing, of escaping from Mrs. Bogart’s flow of moral comments, of relaxing after the first strained weeks of teaching. Cy “promised to be good.” He was, on the way out. There were a few workmen from Gopher Prairie at the dance, with many young farm-people. Half a dozen squatters from a degenerate colony in a brush-hidden hollow, planters of potatoes, suspected thieves, came in noisily drunk. They all pounded the floor of the barn in old-fashioned square dances, swinging their partners, skipping, laughing, under the incantations of Del Snafflin the barber, who fiddled and called the figures. Cy had two drinks from pocket-flasks. Fern saw him fumbling among the overcoats piled on the feedbox at the far end of the barn; soon after she heard a farmer declaring that some one had stolen his bottle. She taxed Cy with the theft; he chuckled, “Oh, it’s just a joke; I’m going to give it back.” He demanded that she take a drink. Unless she did, he wouldn’t return the bottle.
“I just brushed my lips with it, and gave it back to him,” moaned Fern. She sat up, glared at Carol. “Did you ever take a drink?”
“I have. A few. I’d love to have one right now! This contact with righteousness has about done me up!”
Fern could laugh then. “So would I! I don’t suppose I’ve had five drinks in my life, but if I meet just one more Bogart and Son—-Well, I didn’t really touch that bottle–horrible raw whisky–though I’d have loved some wine. I felt so jolly. The barn was almost like a stage scene–the high rafters, and the dark stalls, and tin lanterns swinging, and a silage-cutter up at the end like some mysterious kind of machine. And I’d been having lots of fun dancing with the nicest young farmer, so strong and nice, and awfully intelligent. But I got uneasy when I saw how Cy was. So I doubt if I touched two drops of the beastly stuff. Do you suppose God is punishing me for even wanting wine?”
“My dear, Mrs. Bogart’s god may be–Main Street’s god. But all the courageous intelligent people are fighting him . . . though he slay us.”
Fern danced again with the young farmer; she forgot Cy while she was talking with a girl who had taken the University agricultural course. Cy could not have returned the bottle; he came staggering toward her–taking time to make himself offensive to every girl on the way and to dance a jig. She insisted on their returning. Cy went with her, chuckling and jigging. He kissed her, outside the door. . . . “And to think I used to think it was interesting to have men kiss you at a dance!”. . . She ignored the kiss, in the need of getting him home before he started a fight. A farmer helped her harness the buggy, while Cy snored in the seat. He awoke before they set out; all the way home he alternately slept and tried to make love to her.
“I’m almost as strong as he is. I managed to keep him away while I drove–such a rickety buggy. I didn’t feel like a girl; I felt like a scrubwoman–no, I guess I was too scared to have any feelings at all. It was terribly dark. I got home, somehow. But it was hard, the time I had to get out, and it was quite muddy, to read a sign-post–I lit matches that I took from Cy’s coat pocket, and he followed me–he fell off the buggy step into the mud, and got up and tried to make love to me, and—-I was scared. But I hit him. Quite hard. And got in, and so he ran after the buggy, crying like a baby, and I let him in again, and right away again he was trying—-But no matter. I got him home. Up on the porch. Mrs. Bogart was waiting up. . . .
“You know, it was funny; all the time she was–oh, talking to me–and Cy was being terribly sick–I just kept thinking, ‘I’ve still got to drive the buggy down to the livery stable. I wonder if the livery man will be awake?’ But I got through somehow. I took the buggy down to the stable, and got to my room. I locked my door, but Mrs. Bogart kept saying things, outside the door. Stood out there saying things about me, dreadful things, and rattling the knob. And all the while I could hear Cy in the back yard-being sick. I don’t think I’ll ever marry any man. And then today—-
“She drove me right out of the house. She wouldn’t listen to me, all morning. Just to Cy. I suppose he’s over his headache now. Even at breakfast he thought the whole thing was a grand joke. I suppose right this minute he’s going around town boasting about his ‘conquest.’ You understand–oh, DON’T you understand? I DID keep him away! But I don’t see how I can face my school. They say country towns are fine for bringing up boys in, but—-I can’t believe this is me, lying here and saying this. I don’t BELIEVE what happened last night.
“Oh. This was curious: When I took off my dress last night–it was a darling dress, I loved it so, but of course the mud had spoiled it. I cried over it and—-No matter. But my white silk stockings were all torn, and the strange thing is, I don’t know whether I caught my legs in the briers when I got out to look at the sign-post, or whether Cy scratched me when I was fighting him off.”
*** IV ***
Sam Clark was president of the school-board. When Carol told him Fern’s story Sam looked sympathetic and neighborly, and Mrs. Clark sat by cooing, “Oh, isn’t that too bad.” Carol was interrupted only when Mrs. Clark begged, “Dear, don’t speak so bitter about ‘pious’ people. There’s lots of sincere practising Christians that are real tolerant. Like the Champ Perrys.”
“Yes. I know. Unfortunately there are enough kindly people in the churches to keep them going.”
When Carol had finished, Mrs. Clark breathed, “Poor girl; I don’t doubt her story a bit,” and Sam rumbled, “Yuh, sure. Miss Mullins is young and reckless, but everybody in town, except Ma Bogart, knows what Cy is. But Miss Mullins was a fool to go with him.”
“But not wicked enough to pay for it with disgrace?”
“N-no, but—-” Sam avoided verdicts, clung to the entrancing horrors of the story. “Ma Bogart cussed her out all morning, did she? Jumped her neck, eh? Ma certainly is one hell-cat.”
“Yes, you know how she is; so vicious.”
“Oh no, her best style ain’t her viciousness. What she pulls in our store is to come in smiling with Christian Fortitude and keep a clerk busy for one hour while she picks out half a dozen fourpenny nails. I remember one time—-”
“Sam!” Carol was uneasy. “You’ll fight for Fern, won’t you? When Mrs. Bogart came to see you did she make definite charges?”
“Well, yes, you might say she did.”
“But the school-board won’t act on them?”
“Guess we’ll more or less have to.”
“But you’ll exonerate Fern?”
“I’ll do what I can for the girl personally, but you know what the board is. There’s Reverend Zitterel; Sister Bogart about half runs his church, so of course he’ll take her say-so; and Ezra Stowbody, as a banker he has to be all hell for morality and purity. Might ‘s well admit it, Carrie; I’m afraid there’ll be a majority of the board against her. Not that any of us would believe a word Cy said, not if he swore it on a stack of Bibles, but still, after all this gossip, Miss Mullins wouldn’t hardly be the party to chaperon our basket-ball team when it went out of town to play other high schools, would she!”
“Perhaps not, but couldn’t some one else?”
“Why, that’s one of the things she was hired for.” Sam sounded stubborn.
“Do you realize that this isn’t just a matter of a job, and hiring and firing; that it’s actually sending a splendid girl out with a beastly stain on her, giving all the other Bogarts in the world a chance at her? That’s what will happen if you discharge her.”
Sam moved uncomfortably, looked at his wife, scratched his head, sighed, said nothing.
“Won’t you fight for her on the board? If you lose, won’t you, and whoever agrees with you, make a minority report?”
“No reports made in a case like this. Our rule is to just decide the thing and announce the final decision, whether it’s unanimous or not.”
“Rules! Against a girl’s future! Dear God! Rules of a school-board! Sam! Won’t you stand by Fern, and threaten to resign from the board if they try to discharge her?”
Rather testy, tired of so many subtleties, he complained, “Well, I’ll do what I can, but I’ll have to wait till the board meets.”
And “I’ll do what I can,” together with the secret admission “Of course you and I know what Ma Bogart is,” was all Carol could get from Superintendent George Edwin Mott, Ezra Stowbody, the Reverend Mr. Zitterel or any other member of the school-board.
Afterward she wondered whether Mr. Zitterel could have been referring to herself when he observed, “There’s too much license in high places in this town, though, and the wages of sin is death–or anyway, bein’ fired.” The holy leer with which the priest said it remained in her mind.
She was at the hotel before eight next morning. Fern longed to go to school, to face the tittering, but she was too shaky. Carol read to her all day and, by reassuring her, convinced her own self that the school-board would be just. She was less sure of it that evening when, at the motion pictures, she heard Mrs. Gougerling exclaim to Mrs. Howland, “She may be so innocent and all, and I suppose she probably is, but still, if she drank a whole bottle of whisky at that dance, the way everybody says she did, she may have forgotten she was so innocent! Hee, hee, hee!” Maud Dyer, leaning back from her seat, put in, “That’s what I’ve said all along. I don’t want to roast anybody, but have you noticed the way she looks at men?”
“When will they have me on the scaffold?” Carol speculated.
Nat Hicks stopped the Kennicotts on their way home. Carol hated him for his manner of assuming that they two had a mysterious understanding. Without quite winking he seemed to wink at her as he gurgled, “What do you folks think about this Mullins woman? I’m not strait-laced, but I tell you we got to have decent women in our schools. D’ you know what I heard? They say whatever she may of done afterwards, this Mullins dame took two quarts of whisky to the dance with her, and got stewed before Cy did! Some tank, that wren! Ha, ha, ha!”
“Rats, I don’t believe it,” Kennicott muttered.
He got Carol away before she was able to speak.
She saw Erik passing the house, late, alone, and she stared after him, longing for the lively bitterness of the things he would say about the town. Kennicott had nothing for her but “Oh, course, ev’body likes a juicy story, but they don’t intend to be mean.”
She went up to bed proving to herself that the members of the school-board were superior men.
It was Tuesday afternoon before she learned that the board had met at ten in the morning and voted to “accept Miss Fern Mullins’s resignation.” Sam Clark telephoned the news to her. “We’re not making any charges. We’re just letting her resign. Would you like to drop over to the hotel and ask her to write the resignation, now we’ve accepted it? Glad I could get the board to put it that way. It’s thanks to you.”
“But can’t you see that the town will take this as proof of the charges?”
“We’re–not–making–no–charges–whatever!” Sam was obviously finding it hard to be patient.
Fern left town that evening.
Carol went with her to the train. The two girls elbowed through a silent lip-licking crowd. Carol tried to stare them down but in face of the impishness of the boys and the bovine gaping of the men, she was embarrassed. Fern did not glance at them. Carol felt her arm tremble, though she was tearless, listless, plodding. She squeezed Carol’s hand, said something unintelligible, stumbled up into the vestibule.
Carol remembered that Miles Bjornstam had also taken a train. What would be the scene at the station when she herself took departure?
She walked up-town behind two strangers.
One of them was giggling, “See that good-looking wench that got on here? The swell kid with the small black hat? She’s some charmer! I was here yesterday, before my jump to Ojibway Falls, and I heard all about her. Seems she was a teacher, but she certainly was a high-roller–O boy!–high, wide, and fancy! Her and couple of other skirts bought a whole case of whisky and went on a tear, and one night, darned if this bunch of cradle-robbers didn’t get hold of some young kids, just small boys, and they all got lit up like a White Way, and went out to a roughneck dance, and they say—-”
The narrator turned, saw a woman near and, not being a common person nor a coarse workman but a clever salesman and a householder, lowered his voice for the rest of the tale. During it the other man laughed hoarsely.
Carol turned off on a side-street.
She passed Cy Bogart. He was humorously narrating some achievement to a group which included Nat Hicks, Del Snafflin, Bert Tybee the bartender, and A. Tennyson O’Hearn the shyster lawyer. They were men far older than Cy but they accepted him as one of their own, and encouraged him to go on.
It was a week before she received from Fern a letter of which this was a part:
. . . & of course my family did not really believe the story but as they were sure I must have done something wrong they just lectured me generally, in fact jawed me till I have gone to live at a boarding house. The teachers’ agencies must know the story, man at one almost slammed the door in my face when I went to ask about a job, & at another the woman in charge was beastly. Don’t know what I will do. Don’t seem to feel very well. May marry a fellow that’s in love with me but he’s so stupid that he makes me SCREAM.
Dear Mrs. Kennicott you were the only one that believed me. I guess it’s a joke on me, I was such a simp, I felt quite heroic while I was driving the buggy back that night & keeping Cy away from me. I guess I expected the people in Gopher Prairie to admire me. I did use to be admired for my athletics at the U.–just five months ago.
CHAPTER XXXIII
FOR a month which was one suspended moment of doubt she saw Erik only casually, at an Eastern Star dance, at the shop, where, in the presence of Nat Hicks, they conferred with immense particularity on the significance of having one or two buttons on the cuff of Kennicott’s New Suit. For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous.
Thus barred from him, depressed in the thought of Fern, Carol was suddenly and for the first time convinced that she loved Erik.
She told herself a thousand inspiriting things which he would say if he had the opportunity; for them she admired him, loved him. But she was afraid to summon him. He understood, he did not come. She forgot her every doubt of him, and her discomfort in his background. Each day it seemed impossible to get through the desolation of not seeing him. Each morning, each afternoon, each evening was a compartment divided from all other units of time, distinguished by a sudden “Oh! I want to see Erik!” which was as devastating as though she had never said it before.
There were wretched periods when she could not picture him. Usually he stood out in her mind in some little moment–glancing up from his preposterous pressing-iron, or running on the beach with Dave Dyer. But sometimes he had vanished; he was only an opinion. She worried then about his appearance: Weren’t his wrists too large and red? Wasn’t his nose a snub, like so many Scandinavians? Was he at all the graceful thing she had fancied? When she encountered him on the street she was as much reassuring herself as rejoicing in his presence. More disturbing than being unable to visualize him was the darting remembrance of some intimate aspect: his face as they had walked to the boat together at the picnic; the ruddy light on his temples, neck-cords, flat cheeks.
On a November evening when Kennicott was in the country she answered the bell and was confused to find Erik at the door, stooped, imploring, his hands in the pockets of his topcoat. As though he had been rehearsing his speech he instantly besought:
“Saw your husband driving away. I’ve got to see you. I can’t stand it. Come for a walk. I know! People might see us. But they won’t if we hike into the country. I’ll wait for you by the elevator. Take as long as you want to–oh, come quick!”
“In a few minutes,” she promised.
She murmured, “I’ll just talk to him for a quarter of an hour and come home.” She put an her tweed coat and rubber overshoes, considering how honest and hopeless are rubbers, how clearly their chaperonage proved that she wasn’t going to a lovers’ tryst.
She found him in the shadow of the grain-elevator, sulkily kicking at a rail of the side-track. As she came toward him she fancied that his whole body expanded. But he said nothing, nor she; he patted her sleeve, she returned the pat, and they crossed the railroad tracks, found a road, clumped toward open country.
“Chilly night, but I like this melancholy gray,” he said.
“Yes.”
They passed a moaning clump of trees and splashed along the wet road. He tucked her hand into the side-pocket of his overcoat. She caught his thumb and, sighing, held it exactly as Hugh held hers when they went walking. She thought about Hugh. The current maid was in for the evening, but was it safe to leave the baby with her? The thought was distant and elusive.
Erik began to talk, slowly, revealingly. He made for her a picture of his work in a large tailor shop in Minneapolis: the steam and heat, and the drudgery; the men in darned vests and crumpled trousers, men who “rushed growlers of beer” and were cynical about women, who laughed at him and played jokes on him. “But I didn’t mind, because I could keep away from them outside. I used to go to the Art Institute and the Walker Gallery, and tramp clear around Lake Harriet, or hike out to the Gates house and imagine it was a chateau in Italy and I lived in it. I was a marquis and collected tapestries–that was after I was wounded in Padua. The only really bad time was when a tailor named Finkelfarb found a diary I was trying to keep and he read it aloud in the shop–it was a bad fight.” He laughed. “I got fined five dollars. But that’s all gone now. Seems as though you stand between me and the gas stoves–the long flames with mauve edges, licking up around the irons and making that sneering sound all day–aaaaah!”
Her fingers tightened about his thumb as she perceived the hot low room, the pounding of pressing-irons, the reek of scorched cloth, and Erik among giggling gnomes. His fingertip crept through the opening of her glove and smoothed her palm. She snatched her hand away, stripped off her glove, tucked her hand back into his.
He was saying something about a “wonderful person.” In her tranquillity she let the words blow by and heeded only the beating wings of his voice.
She was conscious that he was fumbling for impressive speech.
“Say, uh–Carol, I’ve written a poem about you.”
“That’s nice. Let’s hear it.”
“Damn it, don’t be so casual about it! Can’t you take me seriously?”
“My dear boy, if I took you seriously—-! I don’t want us to be hurt more than–more than we will be. Tell me the poem. I’ve never had a poem written about me!”
“It isn’t really a poem. It’s just some words that I love because it seems to me they catch what you are. Of course probably they won’t seem so to anybody else, but—-Well—-
Little and tender and merry and wise
With eyes that meet my eyes.
Do you get the idea the way I do?”
“Yes! I’m terribly grateful!” And she was grateful–while she impersonally noted how bad a verse it was.
She was aware of the haggard beauty in the lowering night. Monstrous tattered clouds sprawled round a forlorn moon; puddles and rocks glistened with inner light. They were passing a grove of scrub poplars, feeble by day but looming now like a menacing wall. She stopped. They heard the branches dripping, the wet leaves sullenly plumping on the soggy earth.
“Waiting–waiting–everything is waiting,” she whispered. She drew her hand from his, pressed her clenched fingers against her lips. She was lost in the somberness. “I am happy–so we must go home, before we have time to become unhappy. But can’t we sit on a log for a minute and just listen?”
“No. Too wet. But I wish we could build a fire, and you could sit on my overcoat beside it. I’m a grand fire-builder! My cousin Lars and me spent a week one time in a cabin way up in the Big Woods, snowed in. The fireplace was filled with a dome of ice when we got there, but we chopped it out, and jammed the thing full of pine-boughs. Couldn’t we build a fire back here in the woods and sit by it for a while?”
She pondered, half-way between yielding and refusal. Her head ached faintly. She was in abeyance. Everything, the night, his silhouette, the cautious-treading future, was as undistinguishable as though she were drifting bodiless in a Fourth Dimension. While her mind groped, the lights of a motor car swooped round a bend in the road, and they stood farther apart. “What ought I to do?” she mused. “I think—-Oh, I won’t be robbed! I AM good! If I’m so enslaved that I can’t sit by the fire with a man and talk, then I’d better be dead!”
The lights of the thrumming car grew magically; were upon them; abruptly stopped. From behind the dimness of the windshield a voice, annoyed, sharp: “Hello there!”
She realized that it was Kennicott.
The irritation in his voice smoothed out. “Having a walk?”
They made schoolboyish sounds of assent.
“Pretty wet, isn’t it? Better ride back. Jump up in front here, Valborg.”
His manner of swinging open the door was a command. Carol was conscious that Erik was climbing in, that she was apparently to sit in the back, and that she had been left to open the rear door for herself. Instantly the wonder which had flamed to the gusty skies was quenched, and she was Mrs. W. P. Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, riding in a squeaking old car, and likely to be lectured by her husband.*** She feared what Kennicott would say to Erik. She bent toward them. Kennicott was observing, “Going to have some rain before the night ‘s over, all right.”
“Yes,” said Erik.
“Been funny season this year, anyway. Never saw it with such a cold October and such a nice November. ‘Member we had a snow way back on October ninth! But it certainly was nice up to the twenty-first, this month–as I remember it, not a flake of snow in November so far, has there been? But I shouldn’t wonder if we’d be having some snow ‘most any time now.”
“Yes, good chance of it,” said Erik.
“Wish I’d had more time to go after the ducks this fall. By golly, what do you think?” Kennicott sounded appealing. “Fellow wrote me from Man Trap Lake that he shot seven mallards and couple of canvas-back in one hour!”
“That must have been fine,” said Erik.
Carol was ignored. But Kennicott was blustrously cheerful. He shouted to a farmer, as he slowed up to pass the frightened team, “There we are–schon gut!” She sat back, neglected, frozen, unheroic heroine in a drama insanely undramatic. She made a decision resolute and enduring. She would tell Kennicott—-What would she tell him? She could not say that she loved Erik. DID she love him? But she would have it out. She was not sure whether it was pity for Kennicott’s blindness, or irritation at his assumption that he was enough to fill any woman’s life, which prompted her, but she knew that she was out of the trap, that she could be frank; and she was exhilarated with the adventure of it . . . while in front he was entertaining Erik:
“Nothing like an hour on a duck-pass to make you relish your victuals and—-Gosh, this machine hasn’t got the power of a fountain pen. Guess the cylinders are jam-cram-full of carbon again. Don’t know but what maybe I’ll have to put in another set of piston-rings.”
He stopped on Main Street and clucked hospitably, “There, that’ll give you just a block to walk. G’ night.”
Carol was in suspense. Would Erik sneak away?
He stolidly moved to the back of the car, thrust in his hand, muttered, “Good night–Carol. I’m glad we had our walk.” She pressed his hand. The car was flapping on. He was hidden from her–by a corner drug store on Main Street!
Kennicott did not recognize her till he drew up before the house. Then he condescended, “Better jump out here and I’ll take the boat around back. Say, see if the back door is unlocked, will you?” She unlatched the door for him. She realized that she still carried the damp glove she had stripped off for Erik. She drew it on. She stood in the center of the living-room, unmoving, in damp coat and muddy rubbers. Kennicott was as opaque as ever. Her task wouldn’t be anything so lively as having to endure a scolding, but only an exasperating effort to command his attention so that he would understand the nebulous things she had to tell him, instead of interrupting her by yawning, winding the clock, and going up to bed. She heard him shoveling coal into the furnace. He came through the kitchen energetically, but before he spoke to her he did stop in the hall, did wind the clock.
He sauntered into the living-room and his glance passed from her drenched hat to her smeared rubbers. She could hear–she could hear, see, taste, smell, touch–his “Better take your coat off, Carrie; looks kind of wet.” Yes, there it was:
“Well, Carrie, you better—-” He chucked his own coat on a chair, stalked to her, went on with a rising tingling voice, “—-you better cut it out now. I’m not going to do the out-raged husband stunt. I like you and I respect you, and I’d probably look like a boob if I tried to be dramatic. But I think it’s about time for you and Valborg to call a halt before you get in Dutch, like Fern Mullins did.”
“Do you—-”
“Course. I know all about it. What d’ you expect in a town that’s as filled with busybodies, that have plenty of time to stick their noses into other folks’ business, as this is? Not that they’ve had the nerve to do much tattling to me, but they’ve hinted around a lot, and anyway, I could see for myself that you liked him. But of course I knew how cold you were, I knew you wouldn’t stand it even if Valborg did try to hold your hand or kiss you, so I didn’t worry. But same time, I hope you don’t suppose this husky young Swede farmer is as innocent and Platonic and all that stuff as you are! Wait now, don’t get sore! I’m not knocking him. He isn’t a bad sort. And he’s young and likes to gas about books. Course you like him. That isn’t the real rub. But haven’t you just seen what this town can do, once it goes and gets moral on you, like it did with Fern? You probably think that two young folks making love are alone if anybody ever is, but there’s nothing in this town that you don’t do in company with a whole lot of uninvited but awful interested guests. Don’t you realize that if Ma Westlake and a few others got started they’d drive you up a tree, and you’d find yourself so well advertised as being in love with this Valborg fellow that you’d HAVE to be, just to spite ’em!”
“Let me sit down,” was all Carol could say. She drooped on the couch, wearily, without elasticity.
He yawned, “Gimme your coat and rubbers,” and while she stripped them off he twiddled his watch-chain, felt the radiator, peered at the thermometer. He shook out her wraps in the hall, hung them up with exactly his usual care. He pushed a chair near to her and sat bolt up. He looked like a physician about to give sound and undesired advice.
Before he could launch into his heavy discourse she desperately got in, “Please! I want you to know that I was going to tell you everything, tonight.”
“Well, I don’t suppose there’s really much to tell.”
“But there is. I’m fond of Erik. He appeals to something in here.” She touched her breast. “And I admire him. He isn’t just a ‘young Swede farmer.’ He’s an artist—-”
“Wait now! He’s had a chance all evening to tell you what a whale of a fine fellow he is. Now it’s my turn. I can’t talk artistic, but—-Carrie, do you understand my work?” He leaned forward, thick capable hands on thick sturdy thighs, mature and slow, yet beseeching. “No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You’re all the things that I see in a sunset when I’m driving in from the country, the things that I like but can’t make poetry of. Do you realize what my job is? I go round twenty-four hours a day, in mud and blizzard, trying my damnedest to heal everybody, rich or poor. You–that ‘re always spieling about how scientists ought to rule the world, instead of a bunch of spread-eagle politicians–can’t you see that I’m all the science there is here? And I can stand the cold and the bumpy roads and the lonely rides at night. All I need is to have you here at home to welcome me. I don’t expect you to be passionate–not any more I don’t–but I do expect you to appreciate my work. I bring babies into the world, and save lives, and make cranky husbands quit being mean to their wives. And then you go and moon over a Swede tailor because he can talk about how to put ruchings on a skirt! Hell of a thing for a man to fuss over!”
She flew out at him: “You make your side clear. Let me give mine. I admit all you say–except about Erik. But is it only you, and the baby, that want me to back you up, that demand things from me? They’re all on me, the whole town! I can feel their hot breaths on my neck! Aunt Bessie and that horrible slavering old Uncle Whittier and Juanita and Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. Bogart and all of them. And you welcome them, you encourage them to drag me down into their cave! I won’t stand it! Do you hear? Now, right now, I’m done. And it’s Erik who gives me the courage. You say he just thinks about ruches (which do not usually go on skirts, by the way!). I tell you he thinks about God, the God that Mrs. Bogart covers up with greasy gingham wrappers! Erik will be a great man some day, and if I could contribute one tiny bit to his success—-”
“Wait, wait, wait now! Hold up! You’re assuming that your Erik will make good. As a matter of fact, at my age he’ll be running a one-man tailor shop in some burg about the size of Schoenstrom.”
“He will not!”
“That’s what he’s headed for now all right, and he’s twenty-five or -six and—-What’s he done to make you think he’ll ever be anything but a pants-presser?”
“He has sensitiveness and talent—-”
“Wait now! What has he actually done in the art line? Has he done one first-class picture or–sketch, d’ you call it? Or one poem, or played the piano, or anything except gas about what he’s going to do?”
She looked thoughtful.
“Then it’s a hundred to one shot that he never will. Way I understand it, even these fellows that do something pretty good at home and get to go to art school, there ain’t more than one out of ten of ’em, maybe one out of a hundred, that ever get above grinding out a bum living–about as artistic as plumbing. And when it comes down to this tailor, why, can’t you see–you that take on so about psychology–can’t you see that it’s just by contrast with folks like Doc McGanum or Lym Cass that this fellow seems artistic? Suppose you’d met up with him first in one of these reg’lar New York studios! You wouldn’t notice him any more ‘n a rabbit!”
She huddled over folded hands like a temple virgin shivering on her knees before the thin warmth of a brazier. She could not answer.
Kennicott rose quickly, sat on the couch, took both her hands. “Suppose he fails–as he will! Suppose he goes back to tailoring, and you’re his wife. Is that going to be this artistic life you’ve been thinking about? He’s in some bum shack, pressing pants all day, or stooped over sewing, and having to be polite to any grouch that blows in and jams a dirty stinking old suit in his face and says, ‘Here you, fix this, and be blame quick about it.’ He won’t even have enough savvy to get him a big shop. He’ll pike along doing his own work–unless you, his wife, go help him, go help him in the shop, and stand over a table all day, pushing a big heavy iron. Your complexion will look fine after about fifteen years of baking that way, won’t it! And you’ll be humped over like an old hag. And probably you’ll live in one room back of the shop. And then at night–oh, you’ll have your artist–sure! He’ll come in stinking of gasoline, and cranky from hard work, and hinting around that if it hadn’t been for you, he’d of gone East and been a great artist. Sure! And you’ll be entertaining his relatives—-Talk about Uncle Whit! You’ll be having some old Axel Axelberg coming in with manure on his boots and sitting down to supper in his socks and yelling at you, ‘Hurry up now, you vimmin make me sick!’ Yes, and you’ll have a squalling brat every year, tugging at you while you press clothes, and you won’t love ’em like you do Hugh up-stairs, all downy and asleep—-”
“Please! Not any more!”
Her face was on his knee.
He bent to kiss her neck. “I don’t want to be unfair. I guess love is a great thing, all right. But think it would stand much of that kind of stuff? Oh, honey, am I so bad? Can’t you like me at all? I’ve–I’ve been so fond of you!”
She snatched up his hand, she kissed it. Presently she sobbed, “I won’t ever see him again. I can’t, now. The hot living-room behind the tailor shop—-I don’t love him enough for that. And you are—-Even if I were sure of him, sure he was the real thing, I don’t think I could actually leave you. This marriage, it weaves people together. It’s not easy to break, even when it ought to be broken.”
“And do you want to break it?”
“No!”
He lifted her, carried her up-stairs, laid her on her bed, turned to the door.
“Come kiss me,” she whimpered.
He kissed her lightly and slipped away. For an hour she heard him moving about his room, lighting a cigar, drumming with his knuckles on a chair. She felt that he was a bulwark between her and the darkness that grew thicker as the delayed storm came down in sleet.
*** II ***
He was cheery and more casual than ever at breakfast. All day she tried to devise a way of giving Erik up. Telephone? The village central would unquestionably “listen in.” A letter? It might be found. Go to see him? Impossible. That evening Kennicott gave her, without comment, an envelope. The letter was signed “E. V.”
I know I can’t do anything but make trouble for you, I think. I am going to Minneapolis tonight and from there as soon as I can either to New York or Chicago. I will do as big things as I can. I–I can’t write I love you too much–God keep you.
Until she heard the whistle which told her that the Minneapolis train was leaving town, she kept herself from thinking, from moving. Then it was all over. She had no plan nor desire for anything.
When she caught Kennicott looking at her over his newspaper she fled to his arms, thrusting the paper aside, and for the first time in years they were lovers. But she knew that she still had no plan in life, save always to go along the same streets, past the same people, to the same shops.
*** III ***
A week after Erik’s going the maid startled her by announcing, “There’s a Mr. Valborg down-stairs say he vant to see you.”
She was conscious of the maid’s interested stare, angry at this shattering of the calm in which she had hidden. She crept down, peeped into the living-room. It was not Erik Valborg who stood there; it was a small, gray-bearded, yellow-faced man in mucky boots, canvas jacket, and red mittens. He glowered at her with shrewd red eyes.
“You de doc’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Adolph Valborg, from up by Jefferson. I’m Erik’s father.”
“Oh!” He was a monkey-faced little man, and not gentle.
“What you done wit’ my son?”
“I don’t think I understand you.”
“I t’ink you’re going to understand before I get t’rough! Where is he?”
“Why, really—-I presume that he’s in Minneapolis.”
“You presume!” He looked through her with a contemptuousness such as she could not have imagined. Only an insane contortion of spelling could portray his lyric whine, his mangled consonants. He clamored, “Presume! Dot’s a fine word! I don’t want no fine words and I don’t want no more lies! I want to know what you KNOW!”
“See here, Mr. Valborg, you may stop this bullying right now. I’m not one of your farmwomen. I don’t know where your son is, and there’s no reason why I should know.” Her defiance ran out in face of his immense flaxen stolidity. He raised his fist, worked up his anger with the gesture, and sneered:
“You dirty city women wit’ your fine ways and fine dresses! A father come here trying to save his boy from wickedness, and you call him a bully! By God, I don’t have to take nothin’ off you nor your husband! I ain’t one of your hired men. For one time a woman like you is going to hear de trut’ about what you are, and no fine city words to it, needer.”
“Really, Mr. Valborg—-”
“What you done wit’ him? Heh? I’ll yoost tell you what you done! He was a good boy, even if he was a damn fool. I want him back on de farm. He don’t make enough money tailoring. And I can’t get me no hired man! I want to take him back on de farm. And you butt in and fool wit’ him and make love wit’ him, and get him to run away!”
“You are lying! It’s not true that—-It’s not true, and if it were, you would have no right to speak like this.”
“Don’t talk foolish. I know. Ain’t I heard from a fellow dot live right here in town how you been acting wit’ de boy? I know what you done! Walking wit’ him in de country! Hiding in de woods wit’ him! Yes and I guess you talk about religion in de woods! Sure! Women like you–you’re worse dan street-walkers! Rich women like you, wit’ fine husbands and no decent work to do–and me, look at my hands, look how I work, look at those hands! But you, oh God no, you mustn’t work, you’re too fine to do decent work. You got to play wit’ young fellows, younger as you are, laughing and rolling around and acting like de animals! You let my son alone, d’ you hear?” He was shaking his fist in her face. She could smell the manure and sweat. “It ain’t no use talkin’ to women like you. Get no trut’ out of you. But next time I go by your husband!”
He was marching into the hall. Carol flung herself on him, her clenching hand on his hayseed-dusty shoulder. “You horrible old man, you’ve always tried to turn Erik into a slave, to fatten your pocketbook! You’ve sneered at him, and overworked him, and probably you’ve succeeded in preventing his ever rising above your muck-heap! And now because you can’t drag him back, you come here to vent—-Go tell my husband, go tell him, and don’t blame me when he kills you, when my husband kills you–he will kill you—-”
The man grunted, looked at her impassively, said one word, and walked out.
She heard the word very plainly.
She did not quite reach the couch. Her knees gave way, she pitched forward. She heard her mind saying, “You haven’t fainted. This is ridiculous. You’re simply dramatizing yourself. Get up.” But she could not move. When Kennicott arrived she was lying on the couch. His step quickened. “What’s happened, Carrie? You haven’t got a bit of blood in your face.”
She clutched his arm. “You’ve got to be sweet to me, and kind! I’m going to California–mountains, sea. Please don’t argue about it, because I’m going.”
Quietly, “All right. We’ll go. You and I. Leave the kid here with Aunt Bessie.”
“Now!”
“Well yes, just as soon as we can get away. Now don’t talk any more. Just imagine you’ve already started.” He smoothed her hair, and not till after supper did he continue: “I meant it about California. But I think we better wait three weeks or so, till I get hold of some young fellow released from the medical corps to take my practice. And if people are gossiping, you don’t want to give them a chance by running away. Can you stand it and face ’em for three weeks or so?”
“Yes,” she said emptily.
*** IV ***
People covertly stared at her on the street. Aunt Bessie tried to catechize her about Erik’s disappearance, and it was Kennicott who silenced the woman with a savage, “Say, are you hinting that Carrie had anything to do with that fellow’s beating it? Then let me tell you, and you can go right out and tell the whole bloomin’ town, that Carrie and I took Val–took Erik riding, and he asked me about getting a better job in Minneapolis, and I advised him to go to it. . . . Getting much sugar in at the store now?”
Guy Pollock crossed the street to be pleasant apropos of California and new novels. Vida Sherwin dragged her to the Jolly Seventeen. There, with every one rigidly listening, Maud Dyer shot at Carol, “I hear Erik has left town.”
Carol was amiable. “Yes, so I hear. In fact, he called me up–told me he had been offered a lovely job in the city. So sorry he’s gone. He would have been valuable if we’d tried to start the dramatic association again. Still, I wouldn’t be here for the association myself, because Will is all in from work, and I’m thinking of taking him to California. Juanita–you know the Coast so well–tell me: would you start in at Los Angeles or San Francisco, and what are the best hotels?”
The Jolly Seventeen looked disappointed, but the Jolly Seventeen liked to give advice, the Jolly Seventeen liked to mention the expensive hotels at which they had stayed. (A meal counted as a stay.) Before they could question her again Carol escorted in with drum and fife the topic of Raymie Wutherspoon. Vida had news from her husband. He had been gassed in the trenches, had been in a hospital for two weeks, had been promoted to major, was learning French.
She left Hugh with Aunt Bessie.
But for Kennicott she would have taken him. She hoped that in some miraculous way yet unrevealed she might find it possible to remain in California. She did not want to see Gopher Prairie again.
The Smails were to occupy the Kennicott house, and quite the hardest thing to endure in the month of waiting was the series of conferences between Kennicott and Uncle Whittier in regard to heating the garage and having the furnace flues cleaned.
Did Carol, Kennicott inquired, wish to stop in Minneapolis to buy new clothes?
“No! I want to get as far away as I can as soon as I can. Let’s wait till Los Angeles.”
“Sure, sure! Just as you like. Cheer up! We’re going to have a large wide time, and everything ‘ll be different when we come back.”
*** VI ***
Dusk on a snowy December afternoon. The sleeper which would connect at Kansas City with the California train rolled out of St. Paul with a chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick as it crossed the other tracks. It bumped through the factory belt, gained speed. Carol could see nothing but gray fields, which had closed in on her all the way from Gopher Prairie. Ahead was darkness.
“For an hour, in Minneapolis, I must have been near Erik. He’s still there, somewhere. He’ll be gone when I come back. I’ll never know where he has gone.”
As Kennicott switched on the seat-light she turned drearily to the illustrations in a motion-picture magazine.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THEY journeyed for three and a half months. They saw the Grand Canyon, the adobe walls of Sante Fe and, in a drive from El Paso into Mexico, their first foreign land. They jogged from San Diego and La Jolla to Los Angeles, Pasadena, Riverside, through towns with bell-towered missions and orange-groves; they viewed Monterey and San Francisco and a forest of sequoias. They bathed in the surf and climbed foothills and danced, they saw a polo game and the making of motion-pictures, they sent one hundred and seventeen souvenir post-cards to Gopher Prairie, and once, on a dune by a foggy sea when she was walking alone, Carol found an artist, and he looked up at her and said, “Too damned wet to paint; sit down and talk,” and so for ten minutes she lived in a romantic novel.
Her only struggle was in coaxing Kennicott not to spend all his time with the tourists from the ten thousand other Gopher Prairies. In winter, California is full of people from Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma, who, having traveled thousands of miles from their familiar villages, hasten to secure an illusion of not having left them. They hunt for people from their own states to stand between them and the shame of naked mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel porches, at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and crops and county politics back home. Kennicott discussed land-prices with them, he went into the merits of the several sorts of motor cars with them, he was intimate with train porters, and he insisted on seeing the Luke Dawsons at their flimsy bungalow in Pasadena, where Luke sat and yearned to go back and make some more money. But Kennicott gave promise of learning to play. He shouted in the pool at the Coronado, and he spoke of (though he did nothing more radical than speak of) buying evening-clothes. Carol was touched by his efforts to enjoy picture galleries, and the dogged way in which he accumulated dates and dimensions when they followed monkish guides through missions.
She felt strong. Whenever she was restless she dodged her thoughts by the familiar vagabond fallacy of running away from them, of moving on to a new place, and thus she persuaded herself that she was tranquil. In March she willingly agreed with Kennicott that it was time to go home. She was longing for Hugh.
They left Monterey on April first, on a day of high blue skies and poppies and a summer sea.
As the train struck in among the hills she resolved, “I’m going to love the fine Will Kennicott quality that there is in Gopher Prairie. The nobility of good sense. It will be sweet to see Vida and Guy and the Clarks. And I’m going to see my baby! All the words he’ll be able to say now! It’s a new start. Everything will be different!”
Thus on April first, among dappled hills and the bronze of scrub oaks, while Kennicott seesawed on his toes and chuckled, “Wonder what Hugh’ll say when he sees us?”
Three days later they reached Gopher Prairie in a sleet storm.
*** II ***
No one knew that they were coming; no one met them; and because of the icy roads, the only conveyance at the station was the hotel ‘bus, which they missed while Kennicott was giving his trunk-check to the station agent–the only person to welcome them. Carol waited for him in the station, among huddled German women with shawls and umbrellas, and ragged-bearded farmers in corduroy coats; peasants mute as oxen, in a room thick with the steam of wet coats, the reek of the red-hot stove, the stench of sawdust boxes which served as cuspidors. The afternoon light was as reluctant as a winter dawn.
“This is a useful market-center, an interesting pioneer post, but it is not a home for me,” meditated the stranger Carol.
Kennicott suggested, “I’d ‘phone for a flivver but it’d take quite a while for it to get here. Let’s walk.”
They stepped uncomfortably from the safety of the plank platform and, balancing on their toes, taking cautious strides, ventured along the road. The sleety rain was turning to snow. The air was stealthily cold. Beneath an inch of water was a layer of ice, so that as they wavered with their suit-cases they slid and almost fell. The wet snow drenched their gloves; the water underfoot splashed their itching ankles. They scuffled inch by inch for three blocks. In front of Harry Haydock’s Kennicott sighed:
“We better stop in here and ‘phone for a machine.”
She followed him like a wet kitten.
The Haydocks saw them laboring up the slippery concrete walk, up the perilous front steps, and came to the door chanting:
“Well, well, well, back again, eh? Say, this is fine! Have a fine trip? My, you look like a rose, Carol. How did you like the coast, doc? Well, well, well! Where-all did you go?”
But as Kennicott began to proclaim the list of places achieved, Harry interrupted with an account of how much he himself had seen, two years ago. When Kennicott boasted, “We went through the mission at Santa Barbara,” Harry broke in, “Yeh, that’s an interesting old mission. Say, I’ll never forget that hotel there, doc. It was swell. Why, the rooms were made just like these old monasteries. Juanita and I went from Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo. You folks go to San Luis Obispo?”
“No, but—-”
“Well you ought to gone to San Luis Obispo. And then we went from there to a ranch, least they called it a ranch—-”
Kennicott got in only one considerable narrative, which began:
“Say, I never knew–did you, Harry?–that in the Chicago district the Kutz Kar sells as well as the Overland? I never thought much of the Kutz. But I met a gentleman on the train–it was when we were pulling out of Albuquerque, and I was sitting on the back platform of the observation car, and this man was next to me and he asked me for a light, and we got to talking, and come to find out, he came from Aurora, and when he found out I came from Minnesota he asked me if I knew Dr. Clemworth of Red Wing, and of course, while I’ve never met him, I’ve heard of Clemworth lots of times, and seems he’s this man’s brother! Quite a coincidence! Well, we got to talking, and we called the porter–that was a pretty good porter on that car–and we had a couple bottles of ginger ale, and I happened to mention the Kutz Kar, and this man–seems he’s driven a lot of different kinds of cars–he’s got a Franklin now–and he said that he’d tried the Kutz and liked it first-rate. Well, when we got into a station–I don’t remember the name of it–Carrie, what the deuce was the name of that first stop we made the other side of Albuquerque?–well, anyway, I guess we must have stopped there to take on water, and this man and I got out to stretch our legs, and darned if there wasn’t a Kutz drawn right up at the depot platform, and he pointed out something I’d never noticed, and I was glad to learn about it: seems that the gear lever in the Kutz is an inch longer—-”
Even this chronicle of voyages Harry interrupted, with remarks on the advantages of the ball-gear-shift.
Kennicott gave up hope of adequate credit for being a traveled man, and telephoned to a garage for a Ford taxicab, while Juanita kissed Carol and made sure of being the first to tell the latest, which included seven distinct and proven scandals about Mrs. Swiftwaite, and one considerable doubt as to the chastity of Cy Bogart.
They saw the Ford sedan making its way over the water-lined ice, through the snow-storm, like a tug-boat in a fog. The driver stopped at a corner. The car skidded, it turned about with comic reluctance, crashed into a tree, and stood tilted on a broken wheel.
The Kennicotts refused Harry Haydock’s not too urgent offer to take them home in his car “if I can manage to get it out of the garage–terrible day–stayed home from the store–but if you say so, I’ll take a shot at it.” Carol gurgled, “No, I think we’d better walk; probably make better time, and I’m just crazy to see my baby.” With their suit-cases they waddled on. Their coats were soaked through.
Carol had forgotten her facile hopes. She looked about with impersonal eyes. But Kennicott, through rain-blurred lashes, caught the glory that was Back Home.
She noted bare tree-trunks, black branches, the spongy brown earth between patches of decayed snow on the lawns. The vacant lots were full of tall dead weeds. Stripped of summer leaves the houses were hopeless–temporary shelters.
Kennicott chuckled, “By golly, look down there! Jack Elder must have painted his garage. And look! Martin Mahoney has put up a new fence around his chicken yard. Say, that’s a good fence, eh? Chicken-tight and dog-tight. That’s certainly a dandy fence. Wonder how much it cost a yard? Yes, sir, they been building right along, even in winter. Got more enterprise than these Californians. Pretty good to be home, eh?”
She noted that all winter long the citizens had been throwing garbage into their back yards, to be cleaned up in spring. The recent thaw had disclosed heaps of ashes, dog-bones, torn bedding, clotted paint-cans, all half covered by the icy pools which filled the hollows of the yards. The refuse had stained the water to vile colors of waste: thin red, sour yellow, streaky brown.
Kennicott chuckled, “Look over there on Main Street! They got the feed store all fixed up, and a new sign on it, black and gold. That’ll improve the appearance of the block a lot.”
She noted that the few people whom they passed wore their raggedest coats for the evil day. They were scarecrows in a shanty town. . . . “To think,” she marveled, “of coming two thousand miles, past mountains and cities, to get off here, and to plan to stay here! What conceivable reason for choosing this particular place?”
She noted a figure in a rusty coat and a cloth cap.
Kennicott chuckled, “Look who’s coming! It’s Sam Clark! Gosh, all rigged out for the weather.”
The two men shook hands a dozen times and, in the Western fashion, bumbled, “Well, well, well, well, you old hell-hound, you old devil, how are you, anyway? You old horse-thief, maybe it ain’t good to see you again!” While Sam nodded at her over Kennicott’s shoulder, she was embarrassed.
“Perhaps I should never have gone away. I’m out of practise in lying. I wish they would get it over! Just a block more and–my baby!”
They were home. She brushed past the welcoming Aunt Bessie and knelt by Hugh. As he stammered, “O mummy, mummy, don’t go away! Stay with me, mummy!” she cried, “No, I’ll never leave you again!”
He volunteered, “That’s daddy.”
“By golly, he knows us just as if we’d never been away!” said Kennicott. “You don’t find any of these California kids as bright as he is, at his age!”
When the trunk came they piled about Hugh the bewhiskered little wooden men fitting one inside another, the miniature junk, and the Oriental drum, from San Francisco Chinatown; the blocks carved by the old Frenchman in San Diego; the lariat from San Antonio.
“Will you forgive mummy for going away? Will you?” she whispered.
Absorbed in Hugh, asking a hundred questions about him–had he had any colds? did he still dawdle over his oatmeal? what about unfortunate morning incidents? she viewed Aunt Bessie only as a source of information, and was able to ignore her hint, pointed by a coyly shaken finger, “Now that you’ve had such a fine long trip and spent so much money and all, I hope you’re going to settle down and be satisfied and not—-”
“Does he like carrots yet?” replied Carol.
She was cheerful as the snow began to conceal the slatternly yards. She assured herself that the streets of New York and Chicago were as ugly as Gopher Prairie in such weather; she dismissed the thought, “But they do have charming interiors for refuge.” She sang as she energetically looked over Hugh’s clothes.
The afternoon grew old and dark. Aunt Bessie went home. Carol took the baby into her own room. The maid came in complaining, “I can’t get no extra milk to make chipped beef for supper.” Hugh was sleepy, and he had been spoiled by Aunt Bessie. Even to a returned mother, his whining and his trick of seven times snatching her silver brush were fatiguing. As a background, behind the noises of Hugh and the kitchen, the house reeked with a colorless stillness.
From the window she heard Kennicott greeting the Widow Bogart as he had always done, always, every snowy evening: “Guess this ‘ll keep up all night.” She waited. There they were, the furnace sounds, unalterable, eternal: removing ashes, shoveling coal.
Yes. She was back home! Nothing had changed. She had never been away. California? Had she seen it? Had she for one minute left this scraping sound of the small shovel in the ash-pit of the furnace? But Kennicott preposterously supposed that she had. Never had she been quite so far from going away as now when he believed she had just come back. She felt oozing through the walls the spirit of small houses and righteous people. At that instant she knew that in running away she had merely hidden her doubts behind the officious stir of travel.
“Dear God, don’t let me begin agonizing again!” she sobbed. Hugh wept with her.
“Wait for mummy a second!” She hastened down to the cellar, to Kennicott.
He was standing before the furnace. However inadequate the rest of the house, he had seen to it that the fundamental cellar should be large and clean, the square pillars whitewashed, and the bins for coal and potatoes and trunks convenient. A glow from the drafts fell on the smooth gray cement floor at his feet. He was whistling tenderly, staring at the furnace with eyes which saw the black-domed monster as a symbol of home and of the beloved routine to which he had returned–his gipsying decently accomplished, his duty of viewing “sights” and “curios” performed with thoroughness. Unconscious of her, he stooped and peered in at the blue flames among the coals. He closed the door briskly, and made a whirling gesture with his right hand, out of pure bliss.
He saw her. “Why, hello, old lady! Pretty darn good to be back, eh?”
“Yes,” she lied, while she quaked, “Not now. I can’t face the job of explaining now. He’s been so good. He trusts me. And I’m going to break his heart!”
She smiled at him. She tidied his sacred cellar by throwing an empty bluing bottle into the trash bin. She mourned, “It’s only the baby that holds me. If Hugh died—-” She fled upstairs in panic and made sure that nothing had happened to Hugh in these four minutes.
She saw a pencil-mark on a window-sill. She had made it on a September day when she had been planning a picnic for Fern Mullins and Erik. Fern and she had been hysterical with nonsense, had invented mad parties for all the coming winter. She glanced across the alley at the room which Fern had occupied. A rag of a gray curtain masked the still window.
She tried to think of some one to whom she wanted to telephone. There was no one.
The Sam Clarks called that evening and encouraged her to describe the missions. A dozen times they told her how glad they were to have her back.
“It is good to be wanted,” she thought. “It will drug me. But—-Oh, is all life, always, an unresolved But?
*** *** ***
CHAPTER XXXV
SHE tried to be content, which was a contradiction in terms. She fanatically cleaned house all April. She knitted a sweater for Hugh. She was diligent at Red Cross work. She was silent when Vida raved that though America hated war as much as ever, we must invade Germany and wipe out every man, because it was now proven that there was no soldier in the German army who was not crucifying prisoners and cutting off babies’ hands.
Carol was volunteer nurse when Mrs. Champ Perry suddenly died of pneumonia.
In her funeral procession were the eleven people left out of the Grand Army and the Territorial Pioneers, old men and women, very old and weak, who a few decades ago had been boys and girls of the frontier, riding broncos through the rank windy grass of this prairie. They hobbled behind a band made up of business men and high-school boys, who straggled along without uniforms or ranks or leader, trying to play Chopin’s Funeral March–a shabby group of neighbors with grave eyes, stumbling through the slush under a solemnity of faltering music.
Champ was broken. His rheumatism was worse. The rooms over the store were silent. He could not do his work as buyer at the elevator. Farmers coming in with sled-loads of wheat complained that Champ could not read the scale, that he seemed always to be watching some one back in the darkness of the bins. He was seen slipping through alleys, talking to himself, trying to avoid observation, creeping at last to the cemetery. Once Carol followed him and found the coarse, tobacco-stained, unimaginative old man lying on the snow of the grave, his thick arms spread out across the raw mound as if to protect her from the cold, her whom he had carefully covered up every night for sixty years, who was alone there now, uncared for.
The elevator company, Ezra Stowbody president, let him go. The company, Ezra explained to Carol, had no funds for giving pensions.
She tried to have him appointed to the postmastership, which, since all the work was done by assistants, was the one sinecure in town, the one reward for political purity. But it proved that Mr. Bert Tybee, the former bartender, desired the postmastership.
At her solicitation Lyman Cass gave Champ a warm berth as night watchman. Small boys played a good many tricks on Champ when he fell asleep at the mill.
*** II ***
She had vicarious happiness in the return of Major Raymond Wutherspoon. He was well, but still weak from having been gassed; he had been discharged and he came home as the first of the war veterans. It was rumored that he surprised Vida by coming unannounced, that Vida fainted when she saw him, and for a night and day would not share him with the town. When Carol saw them Vida was hazy about everything except Raymie, and never went so far from him that she could not slip her hand under his. Without understanding why Carol was troubled by this intensity. And Raymie–surely this was not Raymie, but a sterner brother of his, this man with the tight blouse, the shoulder emblems, the trim legs in boots. His face seemed different, his lips more tight. He was not Raymie; he was Major Wutherspoon; and Kennicott and Carol were grateful when he divulged that Paris wasn’t half as pretty as Minneapolis, that all of the American soldiers had been distinguished by their morality when on leave. Kennicott was respectful as he inquired whether the Germans had good aeroplanes, and what a salient was, and a cootie, and Going West.
In a week Major Wutherspoon was made full manager of the Bon Ton. Harry Haydock was going to devote himself to the half-dozen branch stores which he was establishing at crossroads hamlets. Harry would be the town’s rich man in the coming generation, and Major Wutherspoon would rise with him, and Vida was jubilant, though she was regretful at having to give up most of her Red Cross work. Ray still needed nursing, she explained.
When Carol saw him with his uniform off, in a pepper-and salt suit and a new gray felt hat, she was disappointed. He was not Major Wutherspoon; he was Raymie.
For a month small boys followed him down the street, and everybody called him Major, but that was presently shortened to Maje, and the small boys did not look up from their marbles as he went by.
*** III ***
The town was booming, as a result of the war price of wheat.
The wheat money did not remain in the pockets of the farmers; the towns existed to take care of all that. Iowa farmers were selling their land at four hundred dollars an acre and coming into Minnesota. But whoever bought or sold or mortgaged, the townsmen invited themselves to the feast–millers, real-estate men, lawyers, merchants, and Dr. Will Kennicott. They bought land at a hundred and fifty, sold it next day at a hundred and seventy, and bought again. In three months Kennicott made seven thousand dollars, which was rather more than four times as much as society paid him for healing the sick.
In early summer began a “campaign of boosting.” The Commercial Club decided that Gopher Prairie was not only a wheat-center but also the perfect site for factories, summer cottages, and state institutions. In charge of the campaign was Mr. James Blausser, who had recently come to town to speculate in land. Mr. Blausser was known as a Hustler. He liked to be called Honest Jim. He was a bulky, gauche, noisy, humorous man, with narrow eyes, a rustic complexion, large red hands, and brilliant clothes. He was attentive to all women. He was the first man in town who had not been sensitive enough to feel Carol’s aloofness. He put his arm about her shoulder while he condescended to Kennicott, “Nice lil wifey, I’ll say, doc,” and when she answered, not warmly, “Thank you very much for the imprimatur,” he blew on her neck, and did not know that he had been insulted.
He was a layer-on of hands. He never came to the house without trying to paw her. He touched her arm, let his fist brush her side. She hated the man, and she was afraid of him. She wondered if he had heard of Erik, and was taking advantage. She spoke ill of him at home and in public places, but Kennicott and the other powers insisted, “Maybe he is kind of a roughneck, but you got to hand it to him; he’s got more git-up-and-git than any fellow that ever hit this burg. And he’s pretty cute, too. Hear what he said to old Ezra? Chucked him in the ribs and said, ‘Say, boy, what do you want to go to Denver for? Wait ‘ll I get time and I’ll move the mountains here. Any mountain will be tickled to death to locate here once we get the White Way in!’”
The town welcomed Mr. Blausser as fully as Carol snubbed him. He was the guest of honor at the Commercial Club Banquet at the Minniemashie House, an occasion for menus printed in gold (but injudiciously proof-read), for free cigars, soft damp slabs of Lake Superior whitefish served as fillet of sole, drenched cigar-ashes gradually filling the saucers of coffee cups, and oratorical references to Pep, Punch, Go, Vigor, Enterprise, Red Blood, He-Men, Fair Women, God’s Country, James J. Hill, the Blue Sky, the Green Fields, the Bountiful Harvest, Increasing Population, Fair Return on Investments, Alien Agitators Who Threaten the Security of Our Institutions, the Hearthstone the Foundation of the State, Senator Knute Nelson, One Hundred Per Cent. Americanism, and Pointing with Pride.
Harry Haydock, as chairman, introduced Honest Jim Blausser. “And I am proud to say, my fellow citizens, that in his brief stay here Mr. Blausser has become my warm personal friend as well as my fellow booster, and I advise you all to very carefully attend to the hints of a man who knows how to achieve.”
Mr. Blausser reared up like an elephant with a camel’s neck–red faced, red eyed, heavy fisted, slightly belching–a born leader, divinely intended to be a congressman but deflected to the more lucrative honors of real-estate. He smiled on his warm personal friends and fellow boosters, and boomed:
“I certainly was astonished in the streets of our lovely little city, the other day. I met the meanest kind of critter that God ever made–meaner than the horned toad or the Texas lallapaluza! (Laughter.) And do you know what the animile was? He was a knocker! (Laughter and applause.)
“I want to tell you good people, and it’s just as sure as God made little apples, the thing that distinguishes our American commonwealth from the pikers and tin-horns in other countries is our Punch. You take a genuwine, honest-to-God homo Americanibus and there ain’t anything he’s afraid to tackle. Snap and speed are his middle name! He’ll put her across if he has to ride from hell to breakfast, and believe me, I’m mighty good and sorry for the boob that’s so unlucky as to get in his way, because that poor slob is going to wonder where he was at when Old Mr. Cyclone hit town! (Laughter.)
“Now, frien’s, there’s some folks so yellow and small and so few in the pod that they go to work and claim that those of us that have the big vision are off our trolleys. They say we can’t make Gopher Prairie, God bless her! just as big as Minneapolis or St. Paul or Duluth. But lemme tell you right here and now that there ain’t a town under the blue canopy of heaven that’s got a better chance to take a running jump and go scooting right up into the two-hundred-thousand class than little old G. P.! And if there’s anybody that’s got such cold kismets that he’s afraid to tag after Jim Blausser on the Big Going Up, then we don’t want him here! Way I figger it, you folks are just patriotic enough so that you ain’t going to stand for any guy sneering and knocking his own town, no matter how much of a smart Aleck he is–and just on the side I want to add that this Farmers’ Nonpartisan League and the whole bunch of socialists are right in the same category, or, as the fellow says, in the same scategory, meaning This Way Out, Exit, Beat It While the Going’s Good, This Means You, for all knockers of prosperity and the rights of property!
“Fellow citizens, there’s a lot of folks, even right here in this fair state, fairest and richest of all the glorious union, that stand up on their hind legs and claim that the East and Europe put it all over the golden Northwestland. Now let me nail that lie right here and now. ‘Ah-ha,’ says they, ‘so Jim Blausser is claiming that Gopher Prairie is as good a place to live in as London and Rome and–and all the rest of the Big Burgs, is he? How does the poor fish know?’ says they. Well I’ll tell you how I know! I’ve seen ’em! I’ve done Europe from soup to nuts! They can’t spring that stuff on Jim Blausser and get away with it! And let me tell you that the only live thing in Europe is our boys that are fighting there now! London–I spent three days, sixteen straight hours a day, giving London the once-over, and let me tell you that it’s nothing but a bunch of fog and out-of-date buildings that no live American burg would stand for one minute. You may not believe it, but there ain’t one first-class skyscraper in the whole works. And the same thing goes for that crowd of crabs and snobs Down East, and next time you hear some zob from Yahooville-on-the-Hudson chewing the rag and bulling and trying to get your goat, you tell him that no two-fisted enterprising Westerner would have New York for a gift!
“Now the point of this is: I’m not only insisting that Gopher Prairie is going to be Minnesota’s pride, the brightest ray in the glory of the North Star State, but also and furthermore that it is right now, and still more shall be, as good a place to live in, and love in, and bring up the Little Ones in, and it’s got as much refinement and culture, as any burg on the whole bloomin’ expanse of God’s Green Footstool, and that goes, get me, that goes!”
Half an hour later Chairman Haydock moved a vote of thanks to Mr. Blausser.
The boosters’ campaign was on.
The town sought that efficient and modern variety of fame which is known as “publicity.” The band was reorganized, and provided by the Commercial Club with uniforms of purple and gold. The amateur baseball-team hired a semi-professional pitcher from Des Moines, and made a schedule of games with every town for fifty miles about. The citizens accompanied it as “rooters,” in a special car, with banners lettered “Watch Gopher Prairie Grow,” and with the band playing “Smile, Smile, Smile.” Whether the team won or lost the Dauntless loyally shrieked, “Boost, Boys, and Boost Together–Put Gopher Prairie on the Map–Brilliant Record of Our Matchless Team.”
Then, glory of glories, the town put in a White Way. White Ways were in fashion in the Middlewest. They were composed of ornamented posts with clusters of high-powered electric lights along two or three blocks on Main Street. The Dauntless confessed: “White Way Is Installed–Town Lit Up Like Broadway–Speech by Hon. James Blausser–Come On You Twin Cities–Our Hat Is In the Ring.”
The Commercial Club issued a booklet prepared by a great and expensive literary person from a Minneapolis advertising agency, a red-headed young man who smoked cigarettes in a long amber holder. Carol read the booklet with a certain wonder. She learned that Plover and Minniemashie Lakes were world-famed for their beauteous wooded shores and gamey pike and bass not to be equalled elsewhere in the entire country; that the residences of Gopher Prairie were models of dignity, comfort, and culture, with lawns and gardens known far and wide; that the Gopher Prairie schools and public library, in its neat and commodious building, were celebrated throughout the state; that the Gopher Prairie mills made the best flour in the country; that the surrounding farm lands were renowned, where’er men ate bread and butter, for their incomparable No. 1 Hard Wheat and Holstein-Friesian cattle; and that the stores in Gopher Prairie compared favorably with Minneapolis and Chicago in their abundance of luxuries and necessities and the ever-courteous attention of the skilled clerks. She learned, in brief, that this was the one Logical Location for factories and wholesale houses.
“THERE’S where I want to go; to that model town Gopher Prairie,” said Carol.
Kennicott was triumphant when the Commercial Club did capture one small shy factory which planned to make wooden automobile-wheels, but when Carol saw the promoter she could not feel that his coming much mattered–and a year after, when he failed, she could not be very sorrowful.
Retired farmers were moving into town. The price of lots had increased a third. But Carol could discover no more pictures nor interesting food nor gracious voices nor amusing conversation nor questing minds. She could, she asserted, endure a shabby but modest town; the town shabby and egomaniac she could not endure. She could nurse Champ Perry, and warm to the neighborliness of Sam Clark, but she could not sit applauding Honest Jim Blausser. Kennicott had begged her, in courtship days, to convert the town to beauty. If it was now as beautiful as Mr. Blausser and the Dauntless said, then her work was over, and she could go.
*** *** ***
CHAPTER XXXVI
KENNICOTT was not so inhumanly patient that he could continue to forgive Carol’s heresies, to woo her as he had on the venture to California. She tried to be inconspicuous, but she was betrayed by her failure to glow over the boosting. Kennicott believed in it; demanded that she say patriotic things about the White Way and the new factory. He snorted, “By golly, I’ve done all I could, and now I expect you to play the game. Here you been complaining for years about us being so poky, and now when Blausser comes along and does stir up excitement and beautify the town like you’ve always wanted somebody to, why, you say he’s a roughneck, and you won’t jump on the band-wagon.”
Once, when Kennicott announced at noon-dinner, “What do you know about this! They say there’s a chance we may get another factory–cream-separator works!” he added, “You might try to look interested, even if you ain’t!” The baby was frightened by the Jovian roar; ran wailing to hide his face in Carol’s lap; and Kennicott had to make himself humble and court both mother and child. The dim injustice of not being understood even by his son left him irritable. He felt injured.
An event which did not directly touch them brought down his wrath.
In the early autumn, news came from Wakamin that the sheriff had forbidden an organizer for the National Nonpartisan League to speak anywhere in the county. The organizer had defied the sheriff, and announced that in a few days he would address a farmers’ political meeting. That night, the news ran, a mob of a hundred business men led by the sheriff–the tame village street and the smug village faces ruddled by the light of bobbing lanterns, the mob flowing between the squatty rows of shops–had taken the organizer from his hotel, ridden him on a fence-rail, put him on a freight train, and warned him not to return.
The story was threshed out in Dave Dyer’s drug store, with Sam Clark, Kennicott, and Carol present.
“That’s the way to treat those fellows–only they ought to have lynched him!” declared Sam, and Kennicott and Dave Dyer joined in a proud “You bet!”
Carol walked out hastily, Kennicott observing her.
Through supper-time she knew that he was bubbling and would soon boil over. When the baby was abed, and they sat composedly in canvas chairs on the porch, he experimented; “I had a hunch you thought Sam was kind of hard on that fellow they kicked out of Wakamin.”
“Wasn’t Sam rather needlessly heroic?”
“All these organizers, yes, and a whole lot of the German and Squarehead farmers themselves, they’re seditious as the devil–disloyal, non-patriotic, pro-German pacifists, that’s what they are!”
“Did this organizer say anything pro-German?”
“Not on your life! They didn’t give him a chance!” His laugh was stagey.
“So the whole thing was illegal–and led by the sheriff! Precisely how do you expect these aliens to obey your law if the officer of the law teaches them to break it? Is it a new kind of logic?”
“Maybe it wasn’t exactly regular, but what’s the odds? They knew this fellow would try to stir up trouble. Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it’s justifiable to set aside ordinary procedure.”
“What editorial did he get that from?” she wondered, as she protested, “See here, my beloved, why can’t you Tories declare war honestly? You don’t oppose this organizer because you think he’s seditious but because you’re afraid that the farmers he is organizing will deprive you townsmen of the money you make out of mortgages and wheat and shops. Of course, since we’re at war with Germany, anything that any one of us doesn’t like is ‘pro-German,’ whether it’s business competition or bad music. If we were fighting England, you’d call the radicals ‘pro-English.’ When this war is over, I suppose you’ll be calling them ‘red anarchists.’ What an eternal art it is–such a glittery delightful art–finding hard names for our opponents! How we do sanctify our efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for ourselves! The churches have always done it, and the political orators–and I suppose I do it when I call Mrs. Bogart a ‘Puritan’ and Mr. Stowbody a ‘capitalist.’ But you business men are going to beat all the rest of us at it, with your simple-hearted, energetic, pompous—-”
She got so far only because Kennicott was slow in shaking off respect for her. Now he bayed:
“That’ll be about all from you! I’ve stood for your sneering at this town, and saying how ugly and dull it is. I’ve stood for your refusing to appreciate good fellows like Sam. I’ve even stood for your ridiculing our Watch Gopher Prairie Grow campaign. But one thing I’m not going to stand: I’m not going to stand my own wife being seditious. You can camouflage all you want to, but you know darn well that these radicals, as you call ’em, are opposed to the war, and let me tell you right here and now, and you and all these long-haired men and short-haired women can beef all you want to, but we’re going to take these fellows, and if they ain’t patriotic, we’re going to make them be patriotic. And–Lord knows I never thought I’d have to say this to my own wife–but if you go defending these fellows, then the same thing applies to you! Next thing, I suppose you’ll be yapping about free speech. Free speech! There’s too much free speech and free gas and free beer and free love and all the rest of your damned mouthy freedom, and if I had my way I’d make you folks live up to the established rules of decency even if I had to take you—-”
“Will!” She was not timorous now. “Am I pro-German if I fail to throb to Honest Jim Blausser, too? Let’s have my whole duty as a wife!”
He was grumbling, “The whole thing’s right in line with the criticism you’ve always been making. Might have known you’d oppose any decent constructive work for the town or for—-”
“You’re right. All I’ve done has been in line. I don’t belong to Gopher Prairie. That isn’t meant as a condemnation of Gopher Prairie, and it may be a condemnation of me. All right! I don’t care! I don’t belong here, and I’m going. I’m not asking permission any more. I’m simply going.”
He grunted. “Do you mind telling me, if it isn’t too much trouble, how long you’re going for?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps for a year. Perhaps for a lifetime.”
“I see. Well, of course, I’ll be tickled to death to sell out my practise and go anywhere you say. Would you like to have me go with you to Paris and study art, maybe, and wear velveteen pants and a woman’s bonnet, and live on spaghetti?”
“No, I think we can save you that trouble. You don’t quite understand. I am going–I really am–and alone! I’ve got to find out what my work is—-”
“Work? Work? Sure! That’s the whole trouble with you! You haven’t got enough work to do. If you had five kids and no hired girl, and had to help with the chores and separate the cream, like these farmers’ wives, then you wouldn’t be so discontented.”
“I know. That’s what most men–and women–like you WOULD say. That’s how they would explain all I am and all I want. And I shouldn’t argue with them. These business men, from their crushing labors of sitting in an office seven hours a day, would calmly recommend that I have a dozen children. As it happens, I’ve done that sort of thing. There’ve been a good many times when we hadn’t a maid, and I did all the housework, and cared for Hugh, and went to Red Cross, and did it all very efficiently. I’m a good cook and a good sweeper, and you don’t dare say I’m not!”
“N-no, you’re—-”
“But was I more happy when I was drudging? I was not. I was just bedraggled and unhappy. It’s work–but not my work. I could run an office or a library, or nurse and teach children. But solitary dish-washing isn’t enough to satisfy me–or many other women. We’re going to chuck it. We’re going to wash ’em by machinery, and come out and play with you men in the offices and clubs and politics you’ve cleverly kept for yourselves! Oh, we’re hopeless, we dissatisfied women! Then why do you want to have us about the place, to fret you? So it’s for your sake that I’m going!”
“Of course a little thing like Hugh makes no difference!”
“Yes, all the difference. That’s why I’m going to take him with me.”
“Suppose I refuse?”
“You won’t!”
Forlornly, “Uh—-Carrie, what the devil is it you want, anyway?”
“Oh, conversation! No, it’s much more than that. I think it’s a greatness of life–a refusal to be content with even the healthiest mud.”
“Don’t you know that nobody ever solved a problem by running away from it?”
“Perhaps. Only I choose to make my own definition of ‘running away’ I don’t call—-Do you realize how big a world there is beyond this Gopher Prairie where you’d keep me all my life? It may be that some day I’ll come back, but not till I can bring something more than I have now. And even if I am cowardly and run away–all right, call it cowardly, call me anything you want to! I’ve been ruled too long by fear of being called things. I’m going away to be quiet and think. I’m–I’m going! I have a right to my own life.”
“So have I to mine!”
“Well?”
“I have a right to my life–and you’re it, you’re my life! You’ve made yourself so. I’m damned if I’ll agree to all your freak notions, but I will say I’ve got to depend on you. Never thought of that complication, did you, in this ‘off to Bohemia, and express yourself, and free love, and live your own life’ stuff!”
“You have a right to me if you can keep me. Can you?”
He moved uneasily.
*** II ***
For a month they discussed it. They hurt each other very much, and sometimes they were close to weeping, and invariably he used banal phrases about her duties and she used phrases quite as banal about freedom, and through it all, her discovery that she really could get away from Main Street was as sweet as the discovery of love. Kennicott never consented definitely. At most he agreed to a public theory that she was “going to take a short trip and see what the East was like in wartime.”
She set out for Washington in October–just before the war ended.
She had determined on Washington because it was less intimidating than the obvious New York, because she hoped to find streets in which Hugh could play, and because in the stress of war-work, with its demand for thousands of temporary clerks, she could be initiated into the world of offices.
Hugh was to go with her, despite the wails and rather extensive comments of Aunt Bessie.
She wondered if she might not encounter Erik in the East but it was a chance thought, soon forgotten.
*** III ***
The last thing she saw on the station platform was Kennicott, faithfully waving his hand, his face so full of uncomprehending loneliness that he could not smile but only twitch up his lips. She waved to him as long as she could, and when he was lost she wanted to leap from the vestibule and run back to him. She thought of a hundred tendernesses she had neglected.
She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb.
She sighed, “I couldn’t do this if it weren’t for Will’s kindness, his giving me money.” But a second after: “I wonder how many women would always stay home if they had the money?”
Hugh complained, “Notice me, mummy!” He was beside her on the red plush seat of the day-coach; a boy of three and a half. “I’m tired of playing train. Let’s play something else. Let’s go see Auntie Bogart.”
“Oh, NO! Do you really like Mrs. Bogart?”
“Yes. She gives me cookies and she tells me about the Dear Lord. You never tell me about the Dear Lord. Why don’t you tell me about the Dear Lord? Auntie Bogart says I’m going to be a preacher. Can I be a preacher? Can I preach about the Dear Lord?”
“Oh, please wait till my generation has stopped rebelling before yours starts in!”
“What’s a generation?”
“It’s a ray in the illumination of the spirit.”
“That’s foolish.” He was a serious and literal person, and rather humorless. She kissed his frown, and marveled:
“I am running away from my husband, after liking a Swedish ne’er-do-well and expressing immoral opinions, just as in a romantic story. And my own son reproves me because I haven’t given him religious instruction. But the story doesn’t go right. I’m neither groaning nor being dramatically saved. I keep on running away, and I enjoy it. I’m mad with joy over it. Gopher Prairie is lost back there in the dust and stubble, and I look forward—-”
She continued it to Hugh: “Darling, do you know what mother and you are going to find beyond the blue horizon rim?”
“What?” flatly.
“We’re going to find elephants with golden howdahs from which peep young maharanees with necklaces of rubies, and a dawn sea colored like the breast of a dove, and a white and green house filled with books and silver tea-sets.”
“And cookies?”
“Cookies? Oh, most decidedly cookies. We’ve had enough of bread and porridge. We’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.”
“That’s foolish.”
“It is, O male Kennicott!”
“Huh!” said Kennicott II, and went to sleep on her shoulder.
*** IV ***
The theory of the Dauntless regarding Carol’s absence:
Mrs. Will Kennicott and son Hugh left on No. 24 on Saturday last for a stay of some months in Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Washington. Mrs. Kennicott confided to Ye Scribe that she will be connected with one of the multifarious war activities now centering in the Nation’s Capital for a brief period before returning. Her countless friends who appreciate her splendid labors with the local Red Cross realize how valuable she will be to any war board with which she chooses to become connected. Gopher Prairie thus adds another shining star to its service flag and without wishing to knock any neighboring communities, we would like to know any town of anywheres near our size in the state that has such a sterling war record. Another reason why you’d better Watch Gopher Prairie Grow.
* * * Mr. and Mrs. David Dyer, Mrs. Dyer’s sister, Mrs. Jennie Dayborn of Jackrabbit, and Dr. Will Kennicott drove to Minniemashie on Tuesday for a delightful picnic.
CHAPTER XXXVII
SHE found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. Though the armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks after her coming to Washington, the work of the bureau continued. She filed correspondence all day; then she dictated answers to letters of inquiry. It was an endurance of monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found “real work.”
Disillusions she did have. She discovered that in the afternoon, office routine stretches to the grave. She discovered that an office is as full of cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie. She discovered that most of the women in the government bureaus lived unhealthfully, dining on snatches in their crammed apartments. But she also discovered that business women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men and may revel in a bliss which no housewife attains–a free Sunday. It did not appear that the Great World needed her inspiration, but she felt that her letters, her contact with the anxieties of men and women all over the country, were a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main Street and a kitchen but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid.
She perceived that she could do office work without losing any of the putative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cooking and cleaning, when divested of the fussing of an Aunt Bessie, take but a tenth of the time which, in a Gopher Prairie, it is but decent to devote to them.
Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly Seventeen, not to have to report to Kennicott at the end of the day all that she had done or might do, was a relief which made up for the office weariness. She felt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of a human being.
*** II ***
Washington gave her all the graciousness in which she had had faith: white columns seen across leafy parks, spacious avenues, twisty alleys. Daily she passed a dark square house with a hint of magnolias and a courtyard behind it, and a tall curtained second-story window through which a woman was always peering. The woman was mystery, romance, a story which told itself differently every day; now she was a murderess, now the neglected wife of an ambassador. It was mystery which Carol had most lacked in Gopher Prairie, where every house was open to view, where every person was but too easy to meet, where there were no secret gates opening upon moors over which one might walk by moss-deadened paths to strange high adventures in an ancient garden.
As she flitted up Sixteenth Street after a Kreisler recital, given late in the afternoon for the government clerks, as the lamps kindled in spheres of soft fire, as the breeze flowed into the street, fresh as prairie winds and kindlier, as she glanced up the elm alley of Massachusetts Avenue, as she was rested by the integrity of the Scottish Rite Temple, she loved the city as she loved no one save Hugh. She encountered negro shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains and pots of mignonette; marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue, with butlers and limousines; and men who looked like fictional explorers and aviators. Her days were swift, and she knew that in her folly of running away she had found the courage to be wise.
She had a dispiriting first month of hunting lodgings in the crowded city. She had to roost in a hall-room in a moldy mansion conducted by an indignant decayed gentlewoman, and leave Hugh to the care of a doubtful nurse. But later she made a home.
*** III ***
Her first acquaintances were the members of the Tincomb Methodist Church, a vast red-brick tabernacle. Vida Sherwin had given her a letter to an earnest woman with eye-glasses, plaid silk waist, and a belief in Bible Classes, who introduced her to the Pastor and the Nicer Members of Tincomb. Carol recognized in Washington as she had in California a transplanted and guarded Main Street. Two-thirds of the church-members had come from Gopher Prairies. The church was their society and their standard; they went to Sunday service, Sunday School, Christian Endeavor, missionary lectures, church suppers, precisely as they had at home; they agreed that ambassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidel scientists of the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; and by cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ideals from all contamination.
They welcomed Carol, asked about her husband, gave her advice regarding colic in babies, passed her the gingerbread and scalloped potatoes at church suppers, and in general made her very unhappy and lonely, so that she wondered if she might not enlist in the militant suffrage organization and be allowed to go to jail.
Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she would have perceived in New York or London) a thick streak of Main Street. The cautious dullness of a Gopher Prairie appeared in boarding-houses where ladylike bureau-clerks gossiped to polite young army officers about the movies; a thousand Sam Clarks and a few Widow Bogarts were to be identified in the Sunday motor procession, in theater parties, and at the dinners of State Societies, to which the emigres from Texas or Michigan surged that they might confirm themselves in the faith that their several Gopher Prairies were notoriously “a whole lot peppier and chummier than this stuck-up East.”
But she found a Washington which did not cleave to Main Street.
Guy Pollock wrote to a cousin, a temporary army captain, a confiding and buoyant lad who took Carol to tea-dances, and laughed, as she had always wanted some one to laugh, about nothing in particular. The captain introduced her to the secretary of a congressman, a cynical young widow with many acquaintances in the navy. Through her Carol met commanders and majors, newspapermen, chemists and geographers and fiscal experts from the bureaus, and a teacher who was a familiar of the militant suffrage headquarters. The teacher took her to headquarters. Carol never became a prominent suffragist. Indeed her only recognized position was as an able addresser of envelopes. But she was casually adopted by this family of friendly women who, when they were not being mobbed or arrested, took dancing lessons or went picnicking up the Chesapeake Canal or talked about the politics of the American Federation of Labor.
With the congressman’s secretary and the teacher Carol leased a small flat. Here she found home, her own place and her own people. She had, though it absorbed most of her salary, an excellent nurse for Hugh. She herself put him to bed and played with him on holidays. There were walks with him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chiefly Washington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting about the flat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but always excitedly. It was not at all the “artist’s studio” of which, because of its persistence in fiction, she had dreamed. Most of them were in offices all day, and thought more in card-catalogues or statistics than in mass and color. But they played, very simply, and they saw no reason why anything which exists cannot also be acknowledged.
She was sometimes shocked quite as she had shocked Gopher Prairie by these girls with their cigarettes and elfish knowledge. When they were most eager about soviets or canoeing, she listened, longed to have some special learning which would distinguish her, and sighed that her adventure had come so late. Kennicott and Main Street had drained her self-reliance; the presence of Hugh made her feel temporary. Some day–oh, she’d have to take him back to open fields and the right to climb about hay-lofts.
But the fact that she could never be eminent among these scoffing enthusiasts did not keep her from being proud of them, from defending them in imaginary conversations with Kennicott, who grunted (she could hear his voice), “They’re simply a bunch of wild impractical theorists sittin’ round chewing the rag,” and “I haven’t got the time to chase after a lot of these fool fads; I’m too busy putting aside a stake for our old age.”
Most of the men who came to the flat, whether they were army officers or radicals who hated the army, had the easy gentleness, the acceptance of women without embarrassed banter, for which she had longed in Gopher Prairie. Yet they seemed to be as efficient as the Sam Clarks. She concluded that it was because they were of secure reputation, not hemmed in by the fire of provincial jealousies. Kennicott had asserted that the villager’s lack of courtesy is due to his poverty. “We’re no millionaire dudes,” he boasted. Yet these army and navy men, these bureau experts, and organizers of multitudinous leagues, were cheerful on three or four thousand a year, while Kennicott had, outside of his land speculations, six thousand or more, and Sam had eight.
Nor could she upon inquiry learn that many of this reckless race died in the poorhouse. That institution is reserved for men like Kennicott who, after devoting fifty years to “putting aside a stake,” incontinently invest the stake in spurious oil-stocks.
*** IV ***
She was encouraged to believe that she had not been abnormal in viewing Gopher Prairie as unduly tedious and slatternly. She found the same faith not only in girls escaped from domesticity but also in demure old ladies who, tragically deprived of esteemed husbands and huge old houses, yet managed to make a very comfortable thing of it by living in small flats and having time to read.
But she also learned that by comparison Gopher Prairie was a model of daring color, clever planning, and frenzied intellectuality. From her teacher-housemate she had a sardonic description of a Middlewestern railroad-division town, of the same size as Gopher Prairie but devoid of lawns and trees, a town where the tracks sprawled along the cinder-scabbed Main Street, and the railroad shops, dripping soot from eaves and doorway, rolled out smoke in greasy coils.
Other towns she came to know by anecdote: a prairie village where the wind blew all day long, and the mud was two feet thick in spring, and in summer the flying sand scarred new-painted houses and dust covered the few flowers set out in pots. New England mill-towns with the hands living in rows of cottages like blocks of lava. A rich farming-center in New Jersey, off the railroad, furiously pious, ruled by old men, unbelievably ignorant old men, sitting about the grocery talking of James G. Blaine. A Southern town, full of the magnolias and white columns which Carol had accepted as proof of romance, but hating the negroes, obsequious to the Old Families. A Western mining-settlement like a tumor. A booming semi-city with parks and clever architects, visited by famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from a struggle between union labor and the manufacturers’ association, so that in even the gayest of the new houses there was a ceaseless and intimidating heresy-hunt.
*** V ***
The chart which plots Carol’s progress is not easy to read. The lines are broken and uncertain of direction; often instead of rising they sink in wavering scrawls; and the colors are watery blue and pink and the dim gray of rubbed pencil marks. A few lines are traceable.
Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness. Carol had hidden in none of these refuges from reality, but she, who was tender and merry, had been made timorous by Gopher Prairie. Even her flight had been but the temporary courage of panic. The thing she gained in Washington was not information about office-systems and labor unions but renewed courage, that amiable contempt called poise. Her glimpse of tasks involving millions of people and a score of nations reduced Main Street from bloated importance to its actual pettiness. She could never again be quite so awed by the power with which she herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers and Bogarts.
From her work and from her association with women who had organized suffrage associations in hostile cities, or had defended political prisoners, she caught something of an impersonal attitude; saw that she had been as touchily personal as Maud Dyer.
And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals? Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembittered laughter.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
SHE had lived in Washington for a year. She was tired of the office. It was tolerable, far more tolerable than housework, but it was not adventurous.
She was having tea and cinnamon toast, alone at a small round table on the balcony of Rauscher’s Confiserie. Four debutantes clattered in. She had felt young and dissipated, had thought rather well of her black and leaf-green suit, but as she watched them, thin of ankle, soft under the chin, seventeen or eighteen at most, smoking cigarettes with the correct ennui and talking of “bedroom farces” and their desire to “run up to New York and see something racy,” she became old and rustic and plain, and desirous of retreating from these hard brilliant children to a life easier and more sympathetic. When they flickered out and one child gave orders to a chauffeur, Carol was not a defiant philosopher but a faded government clerk from Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.
She started dejectedly up Connecticut Avenue. She stopped, her heart stopped. Coming toward her were Harry and Juanita Haydock. She ran to them, she kissed Juanita, while Harry confided, “Hadn’t expected to come to Washington–had to go to New York for some buying–didn’t have your address along–just got in this morning–wondered how in the world we could get hold of you.”
She was definitely sorry to hear that they were to leave at nine that evening, and she clung to them as long as she could. She took them to St. Mark’s for dinner. Stooped, her elbows on the table, she heard with excitement that “Cy Bogart had the ‘flu, but of course he was too gol-darn mean to die of it.”
“Will wrote me that Mr. Blausser has gone away. How did he get on?”
“Fine! Fine! Great loss to the town. There was a real public-spirited fellow, all right!”
She discovered that she now had no opinions whatever about Mr. Blausser, and she said sympathetically, “Will you keep up the town-boosting campaign?”
Harry fumbled, “Well, we’ve dropped it just temporarily, but–sure you bet! Say, did the doc write you about the luck B. J. Gougerling had hunting ducks down in Texas?”
When the news had been told and their enthusiasm had slackened she looked about and was proud to be able to point out a senator, to explain the cleverness of the canopied garden. She fancied that a man with dinner-coat and waxed mustache glanced superciliously at Harry’s highly form-fitting bright-brown suit and Juanita’s tan silk frock, which was doubtful at the seams. She glared back, defending her own, daring the world not to appreciate them.
Then, waving to them, she lost them down the long train shed. She stood reading the list of stations: Harrisburg, Pittsburg, Chicago. Beyond Chicago—-? She saw the lakes and stubble fields, heard the rhythm of insects and the creak of a buggy, was greeted by Sam Clark’s “Well, well, how’s the little lady?”
Nobody in Washington cared enough for her to fret about her sins as Sam did.
But that night they had at the flat a man just back from Finland.
*** II ***
She was on the Powhatan roof with the captain. At a table, somewhat vociferously buying improbable “soft drinks” for two fluffy girls, was a man with a large familiar back.
“Oh! I think I know him,” she murmured.
“Who? There? Oh, Bresnahan, Percy Bresnahan.”
“Yes. You’ve met him? What sort of a man is he?”
“He’s a good-hearted idiot. I rather like him, and I believe that as a salesman of motors he’s a wonder. But he’s a nuisance in the aeronautic section. Tries so hard to be useful but he doesn’t know anything–he doesn’t know anything. Rather pathetic: rich man poking around and trying to be useful. Do you want to speak to him?”
“No–no–I don’t think so.”
*** III ***
She was at a motion-picture show. The film was a highly advertised and abysmal thing smacking of simpering hair-dressers, cheap perfume, red-plush suites on the back streets of tenderloins, and complacent fat women chewing gum. It pretended to deal with the life of studios. The leading man did a portrait which was a masterpiece. He also saw visions in pipe-smoke, and was very brave and poor and pure. He had ringlets, and his masterpiece was strangely like an enlarged photograph.
Carol prepared to leave.
On the screen, in the role of a composer, appeared an actor called Eric Valour.
She was startled, incredulous, then wretched. Looking straight out at her, wearing a beret and a velvet jacket, was Erik Valborg.
He had a pale part, which he played neither well nor badly. She speculated, “I could have made so much of him—-” She did not finish her speculation.
She went home and read Kennicott’s letters. They had seemed stiff and undetailed, but now there strode from them a personality, a personality unlike that of the languishing young man in the velvet jacket playing a dummy piano in a canvas room.
*** IV ***
Kennicott first came to see her in November, thirteen months after her arrival in Washington. When he announced that he was coming she was not at all sure that she wished to see him. She was glad that he had made the decision himself.
She had leave from the office for two days.
She watched him marching from the train, solid, assured, carrying his heavy suit-case, and she was diffident–he was such a bulky person to handle. They kissed each other questioningly, and said at the same time, “You’re looking fine; how’s the baby?” and “You’re looking awfully well, dear; how is everything?”
He grumbled, “I don’t want to butt in on any plans you’ve made or your friends or anything, but if you’ve got time for it, I’d like to chase around Washington, and take in some restaurants and shows and stuff, and forget work for a while.”
She realized, in the taxicab, that he was wearing a soft gray suit, a soft easy hat, a flippant tie.
“Like the new outfit? Got ’em in Chicago. Gosh, I hope they’re the kind you like.”
They spent half an hour at the flat, with Hugh. She was flustered, but he gave no sign of kissing her again.
As he moved about the small rooms she realized that he had had his new tan shoes polished to a brassy luster. There was a recent cut on his chin. He must have shaved on the train just before coming into Washington.
It was pleasant to feel how important she was, how many people she recognized, as she took him to the Capitol, as she told him (he asked and she obligingly guessed) how many feet it was to the top of the dome, as she pointed out Senator LaFollette and the vice-president, and at lunch-time showed herself an habitue by leading him through the catacombs to the senate restaurant.
She realized that he was slightly more bald. The familiar way in which his hair was parted on the left side agitated her. She looked down at his hands, and the fact that his nails were as ill-treated as ever touched her more than his pleading shoe-shine.
“You’d like to motor down to Mount Vernon this afternoon, wouldn’t you?” she said.
It was the one thing he had planned. He was delighted that it seemed to be a perfectly well bred and Washingtonian thing to do.
He shyly held her hand on the way, and told her the news: they were excavating the basement for the new schoolbuilding, Vida “made him tired the way she always looked at the Maje,” poor Chet Dashaway had been killed in a motor accident out on the Coast. He did not coax her to like him. At Mount Vernon he admired the paneled library and Washington’s dental tools.
She knew that he would want oysters, that he would have heard of Harvey’s apropos of Grant and Blaine, and she took him there. At dinner his hearty voice, his holiday enjoyment of everything, turned into nervousness in his desire to know a number of interesting matters, such as whether they still were married. But he did not ask questions, and he said nothing about her returning. He cleared his throat and observed, “Oh say, been trying out the old camera. Don’t you think these are pretty good?”
He tossed over to her thirty prints of Gopher Prairie and the country about. Without defense, she was thrown into it. She remembered that he had lured her with photographs in courtship days; she made a note of his sameness, his satisfaction with the tactics which had proved good before; but she forgot it in the familiar places. She was seeing the sun-speckled ferns among birches on the shore of Minniemashie, wind-rippled miles of wheat, the porch of their own house where Hugh had played, Main Street where she knew every window and every face.
She handed them back, with praise for his photography, and he talked of lenses and time-exposures.
Dinner was over and they were gossiping of her friends at the flat, but an intruder was with them, sitting back, persistent, inescapable. She could not endure it. She stammered:
“I had you check your bag at the station because I wasn’t quite sure where you’d stay. I’m dreadfully sorry we haven’t room to put you up at the flat. We ought to have seen about a room for you before. Don’t you think you better call up the Willard or the Washington now?”
He peered at her cloudily. Without words he asked, without speech she answered, whether she was also going to the Willard or the Washington. But she tried to look as though she did not know that they were debating anything of the sort. She would have hated him had he been meek about it. But he was neither meek nor angry. However impatient he may have been with her blandness he said readily:
“Yes, guess I better do that. Excuse me a second. Then how about grabbing a taxi (Gosh, isn’t it the limit the way these taxi shuffers skin around a corner? Got more nerve driving than I have!) and going up to your flat for a while? Like to meet your friends–must be fine women–and I might take a look and see how Hugh sleeps. Like to know how he breathes. Don’t think he has adenoids, but I better make sure, eh?” He patted her shoulder.
At the flat they found her two housemates and a girl who had been to jail for suffrage. Kennicott fitted in surprisingly. He laughed at the girl’s story of the humors of a hunger-strike; he told the secretary what to do when her eyes were tired from typing; and the teacher asked him–not as the husband of a friend but as a physician–whether there was “anything to this inoculation for colds.”
His colloquialisms seemed to Carol no more lax than their habitual slang.
Like an older brother he kissed her good-night in the midst of the company.
“He’s terribly nice,” said her housemates, and waited for confidences. They got none, nor did her own heart. She could find nothing definite to agonize about. She felt that she was no longer analyzing and controlling forces, but swept on by them.
He came to the flat for breakfast, and washed the dishes. That was her only occasion for spite. Back home he never thought of washing dishes!
She took him to the obvious “sights”–the Treasury, the Monument, the Corcoran Gallery, the Pan-American Building, the Lincoln Memorial, with the Potomac beyond it and the Arlington hills and the columns of the Lee Mansion. For all his willingness to play there was over him a melancholy which piqued her. His normally expressionless eyes had depths to them now, and strangeness. As they walked through Lafayette Square, looking past the Jackson statue at the lovely tranquil facade of the White House, he sighed, “I wish I’d had a shot at places like this. When I was in the U., I had to earn part of my way, and when I wasn’t doing that or studying, I guess I was roughhousing. My gang were a great bunch for bumming around and raising Cain. Maybe if I’d been caught early and sent to concerts and all that—-Would I have been what you call intelligent?”
“Oh, my dear, don’t be humble! You are intelligent! For instance, you’re the most thorough doctor—-”
He was edging about something he wished to say. He pounced on it:
“You did like those pictures of G. P. pretty well, after all, didn’t you!”
“Yes, of course.”
“Wouldn’t be so bad to have a glimpse of the old town, would it!”
“No, it wouldn’t. Just as I was terribly glad to see the Haydocks. But please understand me! That doesn’t mean that I withdraw all my criticisms. The fact that I might like a glimpse of old friends hasn’t any particular relation to the question of whether Gopher Prairie oughtn’t to have festivals and lamb chops.”
Hastily, “No, no! Sure not. I und’stand.”
“But I know it must have been pretty tiresome to have to live with anybody as perfect as I was.”
He grinned. She liked his grin.
*** V ***
He was thrilled by old negro coachmen, admirals, aeroplanes, the building to which his income tax would eventually go, a Rolls-Royce, Lynnhaven oysters, the Supreme Court Room, a New York theatrical manager down for the try-out of a play, the house where Lincoln died, the cloaks of Italian officers, the barrows at which clerks buy their box-lunches at noon, the barges on the Chesapeake Canal, and the fact that District of Columbia cars had both District and Maryland licenses.
She resolutely took him to her favorite white and green cottages and Georgian houses. He admitted that fanlights, and white shutters against rosy brick, were more homelike than a painty wooden box. He volunteered, “I see how you mean. They make me think of these pictures of an old-fashioned Christmas. Oh, if you keep at it long enough you’ll have Sam and me reading poetry and everything. Oh say, d’ I tell you about this fierce green Jack Elder’s had his machine painted?”
*** VI ***
They were at dinner.
He hinted, “Before you showed me those places today, I’d already made up my mind that when I built the new house we used to talk about, I’d fix it the way you wanted it. I’m pretty practical about foundations and radiation and stuff like that, but I guess I don’t know a whole lot about architecture.”
“My dear, it occurs to me with a sudden shock that I don’t either!”
“Well–anyway–you let me plan the garage and the plumbing, and you do the rest, if you ever–I mean–if you ever want to.”
Doubtfully, “That’s sweet of you.”
“Look here, Carrie; you think I’m going to ask you to love me. I’m not. And I’m not going to ask you to come back to Gopher Prairie!”
She gaped.
“It’s been a whale of a fight. But I guess I’ve got myself to see that you won’t ever stand G. P. unless you WANT to come back to it. I needn’t say I’m crazy to have you. But I won’t ask you. I just want you to know how I wait for you. Every mail I look for a letter, and when I get one I’m kind of scared to open it, I’m hoping so much that you’re coming back. Evenings—-You know I didn’t open the cottage down at the lake at all, this past summer. Simply couldn’t stand all the others laughing and swimming, and you not there. I used to sit on the porch, in town, and I–I couldn’t get over the feeling that you’d simply run up to the drug store and would be right back, and till after it got dark I’d catch myself watching, looking up the street, and you never came, and the house was so empty and still that I didn’t like to go in. And sometimes I fell asleep there, in my chair, and didn’t wake up till after midnight, and the house—-Oh, the devil! Please get me, Carrie. I just want you to know how welcome you’ll be if you ever do come. But I’m not asking you to.”
“You’re—-It’s awfully—-”
“’Nother thing. I’m going to be frank. I haven’t always been absolutely, uh, absolutely, proper. I’ve always loved you more than anything else in the world, you and the kid. But sometimes when you were chilly to me I’d get lonely and sore, and pike out and—-Never intended—-”
She rescued him with a pitying, “It’s all right. Let’s forget it.”
“But before we were married you said if your husband ever did anything wrong, you’d want him to tell you.”
“Did I? I can’t remember. And I can’t seem to think. Oh, my dear, I do know how generously you’re trying to make me happy. The only thing is—-I can’t think. I don’t know what I think.”
“Then listen! Don’t think! Here’s what I want you to do! Get a two-weeks leave from your office. Weather’s beginning to get chilly here. Let’s run down to Charleston and Savannah and maybe Florida.
“A second honeymoon?” indecisively.
“No. Don’t even call it that. Call it a second wooing. I won’t ask anything. I just want the chance to chase around with you. I guess I never appreciated how lucky I was to have a girl with imagination and lively feet to play with. So—-Could you maybe run away and see the South with me? If you wanted to, you could just–you could just pretend you were my sister and—-I’ll get an extra nurse for Hugh! I’ll get the best dog-gone nurse in Washington!”
*** VII ***
It was in the Villa Margherita, by the palms of the Charleston Battery and the metallic harbor, that her aloofness melted.
When they sat on the upper balcony, enchanted by the moon glitter, she cried, “Shall I go back to Gopher Prairie with you? Decide for me. I’m tired of deciding and undeciding.”
“No. You’ve got to do your own deciding. As a matter of fact, in spite of this honeymoon, I don’t think I want you to come home. Not yet.”
She could only stare.
“I want you to be satisfied when you get there. I’ll do everything I can to keep you happy, but I’ll make lots of breaks, so I want you to take time and think it over.”
She was relieved. She still had a chance to seize splendid indefinite freedoms. She might go–oh, she’d see Europe, somehow, before she was recaptured. But she also had a firmer respect for Kennicott. She had fancied that her life might make a story. She knew that there was nothing heroic or obviously dramatic in it, no magic of rare hours, nor valiant challenge, but it seemed to her that she was of some significance because she was commonplaceness, the ordinary life of the age, made articulate and protesting. It had not occurred to her that there was also a story of Will Kennicott, into which she entered only so much as he entered into hers; that he had bewilderments and concealments as intricate as her own, and soft treacherous desires for sympathy.
Thus she brooded, looking at the amazing sea, holding his hand.
*** VIII ***
She was in Washington; Kennicott was in Gopher Prairie, writing as dryly as ever about water-pipes and goose-hunting and Mrs. Fageros’s mastoid.
She was talking at dinner to a generalissima of suffrage. Should she return?
The leader spoke wearily:
“My dear, I’m perfectly selfish. I can’t quite visualize the needs of your husband, and it seems to me that your baby will do quite as well in the schools here as in your barracks at home.”
“Then you think I’d better not go back?” Carol sounded disappointed.
“It’s more difficult than that. When I say that I’m selfish I mean that the only thing I consider about women is whether they’re likely to prove useful in building up real political power for women. And you? Shall I be frank? Remember when I say ‘you’ I don’t mean you alone. I’m thinking of thousands of women who come to Washington and New York and Chicago every year, dissatisfied at home and seeking a sign in the heavens–women of all sorts, from timid mothers of fifty in cotton gloves, to girls just out of Vassar who organize strikes in their own fathers’ factories! All of you are more or less useful to me, but only a few of you can take my place, because I have one virtue (only one): I have given up father and mother and children for the love of God.
“Here’s the test for you: Do you come to ‘conquer the East,’ as people say, or do you come to conquer yourself?
“It’s so much more complicated than any of you know–so much more complicated than I knew when I put on Ground Grippers and started out to reform the world. The final complication in ‘conquering Washington’ or ‘conquering New York’ is that the conquerors must beyond all things not conquer! It must have been so easy in the good old days when authors dreamed only of selling a hundred thousand volumes, and sculptors of being feted in big houses, and even the Uplifters like me had a simple-hearted ambition to be elected to important offices and invited to go round lecturing. But we meddlers have upset everything. Now the one thing that is disgraceful to any of us is obvious success. The Uplifter who is very popular with wealthy patrons can be pretty sure that he has softened his philosophy to please them, and the author who is making lots of money–poor things, I’ve heard ’em apologizing for it to the shabby bitter-enders; I’ve seen ’em ashamed of the sleek luggage they got from movie rights.
“Do you want to sacrifice yourself in such a topsy-turvy world, where popularity makes you unpopular with the people you love, and the only failure is cheap success, and the only individualist is the person who gives up all his individualism to serve a jolly ungrateful proletariat which thumbs its nose at him?”
Carol smiled ingratiatingly, to indicate that she was indeed one who desired to sacrifice, but she sighed, “I don’t know; I’m afraid I’m not heroic. I certainly wasn’t out home. Why didn’t I do big effective—-”
“Not a matter of heroism. Matter of endurance. Your Middlewest is double-Puritan–prairie Puritan on top of New England Puritan; bluff frontiersman on the surface, but in its heart it still has the ideal of Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm. There’s one attack you can make on it, perhaps the only kind that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on looking at one thing after another in your home and church and bank, and ask why it is, and who first laid down the law that it had to be that way. If enough of us do this impolitely enough, then we’ll become civilized in merely twenty thousand years or so, instead of having to wait the two hundred thousand years that my cynical anthropologist friends allow. . . . Easy, pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives: asking people to define their jobs. That’s the most dangerous doctrine I know!”
Carol was mediating, “I will go back! I will go on asking questions. I’ve always done it, and always failed at it, and it’s all I can do. I’m going to ask Ezra Stowbody why he’s opposed to the nationalization of railroads, and ask Dave Dyer why a druggist always is pleased when he’s called ‘doctor,’ and maybe ask Mrs. Bogart why she wears a widow’s veil that looks like a dead crow.”
The woman leader straightened. “And you have one thing. You have a baby to hug. That’s my temptation. I dream of babies–of a baby–and I sneak around parks to see them playing. (The children in Dupont Circle are like a poppy-garden.) And the antis call me ‘unsexed’!”
Carol was thinking, in panic, “Oughtn’t Hugh to have country air? I won’t let him become a yokel. I can guide him away from street-corner loafing. . . . I think I can.”
On her way home: “Now that I’ve made a precedent, joined the union and gone out on one strike and learned personal solidarity, I won’t be so afraid. Will won’t always be resisting my running away. Some day I really will go to Europe with him . . . or without him.
“I’ve lived with people who are not afraid to go to jail. I could invite a Miles Bjornstam to dinner without being afraid of the Haydocks . . . I think I could.
“I’ll take back the sound of Yvette Guilbert’s songs and Elman’s violin. They’ll be only the lovelier against the thrumming of crickets in the stubble on an autumn day.*** “I can laugh now and be serene . . . I think I can.”
Though she should return, she said, she would not be utterly defeated. She was glad of her rebellion. The prairie was no longer empty land in the sun-glare; it was the living tawny beast which she had fought and made beautiful by fighting; and in the village streets were shadows of her desires and the sound of her marching and the seeds of mystery and greatness.
*** IX ***
Her active hatred of Gopher Prairie had run out. She saw it now as a toiling new settlement. With sympathy she remembered Kennicott’s defense of its citizens as “a lot of pretty good folks, working hard and trying to bring up their families the best they can.” She recalled tenderly the young awkwardness of Main Street and the makeshifts of the little brown cottages; she pitied their shabbiness and isolation; had compassion for their assertion of culture, even as expressed in Thanatopsis papers, for their pretense of greatness, even as trumpeted in “boosting.” She saw Main Street in the dusty prairie sunset, a line of frontier shanties with solemn lonely people waiting for her, solemn and lonely as an old man who has outlived his friends. She remembered that Kennicott and Sam Clark had listened to her songs, and she wanted to run to them and sing.
“At last,” she rejoiced, “I’ve come to a fairer attitude toward the town. I can love it, now.”
She was, perhaps, rather proud of herself for having acquired so much tolerance.
She awoke at three in the morning, after a dream of being tortured by Ella Stowbody and the Widow Bogart.
“I’ve been making the town a myth. This is how people keep up the tradition of the perfect home-town, the happy boyhood, the brilliant college friends. We forget so. I’ve been forgetting that Main Street doesn’t think it’s in the least lonely and pitiful. It thinks it’s God’s Own Country. It isn’t waiting for me. It doesn’t care.”
But the next evening she again saw Gopher Prairie as her home, waiting for her in the sunset, rimmed round with splendor.
She did not return for five months more; five months crammed with greedy accumulation of sounds and colors to take back for the long still days.
She had spent nearly two years in Washington.
When she departed for Gopher Prairie, in June, her second baby was stirring within her.
*** *** ***
CHAPTER XXXIX
SHE wondered all the way home what her sensations would be. She wondered about it so much that she had every sensation she had imagined. She was excited by each familiar porch, each hearty “Well, well!” and flattered to be, for a day, the most important news of the community. She bustled about, making calls. Juanita Haydock bubbled over their Washington encounter, and took Carol to her social bosom. This ancient opponent seemed likely to be her most intimate friend, for Vida Sherwin, though she was cordial, stood back and watched for imported heresies.
In the evening Carol went to the mill. The mystical Om-Om-Om of the dynamos in the electric-light plant behind the mill was louder in the darkness. Outside sat the night watchman, Champ Perry. He held up his stringy hands and squeaked, “We’ve all missed you terrible.”
Who in Washington would miss her?
Who in Washington could be depended upon like Guy Pollock? When she saw him on the street, smiling as always, he seemed an eternal thing, a part of her own self.
After a week she decided that she was neither glad nor sorry to be back. She entered each day with the matter-of-fact attitude with which she had gone to her office in Washington. It was her task; there would be mechanical details and meaningless talk; what of it?
The only problem which she had approached with emotion proved insignificant. She had, on the train, worked herself up to such devotion that she was willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her life with Kennicott.
He mumbled, ten minutes after she had entered the house, “Say, I’ve kept your room for you like it was. I’ve kind of come round to your way of thinking. Don’t see why folks need to get on each other’s nerves just because they’re friendly. Darned if I haven’t got so I like a little privacy and mulling things over by myself.”
*** II ***
She had left a city which sat up nights to talk of universal transition; of European revolution, guild socialism, free verse. She had fancied that all the world was changing.
She found that it was not.
In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were prohibition, the place in Minneapolis where you could get whisky at thirteen dollars a quart, recipes for home-made beer, the “high cost of living,” the presidential election, Clark’s new car, and not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart. Their problems were exactly what they had been two years ago, what they had been twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years to come. With the world a possible volcano, the husbandmen were plowing at the base of the mountain. A volcano does occasionally drop a river of lava on even the best of agriculturists, to their astonishment and considerable injury, but their cousins inherit the farms and a year or two later go back to the plowing.
She was unable to rhapsodize much over the seven new bungalows and the two garages which Kennicott had made to seem so important. Her intensest thought about them was, “Oh yes, they’re all right I suppose.” The change which she did heed was the erection of the schoolbuilding, with its cheerful brick walls, broad windows, gymnasium, classrooms for agriculture and cooking. It indicated Vida’s triumph, and it stirred her to activity–any activity. She went to Vida with a jaunty, “I think I shall work for you. And I’ll begin at the bottom.”
She did. She relieved the attendant at the rest-room for an hour a day. Her only innovation was painting the pine table a black and orange rather shocking to the Thanatopsis. She talked to the farmwives and soothed their babies and was happy.
Thinking of them she did not think of the ugliness of Main Street as she hurried along it to the chatter of the Jolly Seventeen.
She wore her eye-glasses on the street now. She was beginning to ask Kennicott and Juanita if she didn’t look young, much younger than thirty-three. The eye-glasses pinched her nose. She considered spectacles. They would make her seem older, and hopelessly settled. No! She would not wear spectacles yet. But she tried on a pair at Kennicott’s office. They really were much more comfortable.
*** III ***
Dr. Westlake, Sam Clark, Nat Hicks, and Del Snafflin were talking in Del’s barber shop.
“Well, I see Kennicott’s wife is taking a whirl at the rest-room, now,” said Dr. Westlake. He emphasized the “now.”
Del interrupted the shaving of Sam and, with his brush dripping lather, he observed jocularly:***
“What’ll she be up to next? They say she used to claim this burg wasn’t swell enough for a city girl like her, and would we please tax ourselves about thirty-seven point nine and fix it all up pretty, with tidies on the hydrants and statoos on the lawns—-”
Sam irritably blew the lather from his lips, with milky small bubbles, and snorted, “Be a good thing for most of us roughnecks if we did have a smart woman to tell us how to fix up the town. Just as much to her kicking as there was to Jim Blausser’s gassing about factories. And you can bet Mrs. Kennicott is smart, even if she is skittish. Glad to see her back.”
Dr. Westlake hastened to play safe. “So was I! So was I! She’s got a nice way about her, and she knows a good deal about books, or fiction anyway. Of course she’s like all the rest of these women–not solidly founded–not scholarly–doesn’t know anything about political economy–falls for every new idea that some windjamming crank puts out. But she’s a nice woman. She’ll probably fix up the rest-room, and the rest-room is a fine thing, brings a lot of business to town. And now that Mrs. Kennicott’s been away, maybe she’s got over some of her fool ideas. Maybe she realizes that folks simply laugh at her when she tries to tell us how to run everything.”
“Sure. She’ll take a tumble to herself,” said Nat Hicks, sucking in his lips judicially. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ll say she’s as nice a looking skirt as there is in town. But yow!” His tone electrified them. “Guess she’ll miss that Swede Valborg that used to work for me! They was a pair! Talking poetry and moonshine! If they could of got away with it, they’d of been so darn lovey-dovey —- ”
Sam Clark interrupted, “Rats, they never even thought about making love, Just talking books and all that junk. I tell you, Carrie Kennicott’s a smart woman, and these smart educated women all get funny ideas, but they get over ’em after they’ve had three or four kids. You’ll see her settled down one of these days, and teaching Sunday School and helping at sociables and behaving herself, and not trying to butt into business and politics. Sure!”
After only fifteen minutes of conference on her stockings, her son, her separate bedroom, her music, her ancient interest in Guy Pollock, her probable salary in Washington, and every remark which she was known to have made since her return, the supreme council decided that they would permit Carol Kennicott to live, and they passed on to a consideration of Nat Hicks’s New One about the traveling salesman and the old maid.
*** IV ***
For some reason which was totally mysterious to Carol, Maud Dyer seemed to resent her return. At the Jolly Seventeen Maud giggled nervously, “Well, I suppose you found war-work a good excuse to stay away and have a swell time. Juanita! Don’t you think we ought to make Carrie tell us about the officers she met in Washington?”
They rustled and stared. Carol looked at them. Their curiosity seemed natural and unimportant.
“Oh yes, yes indeed, have to do that some day,” she yawned.
She no longer took Aunt Bessie Smail seriously enough to struggle for independence. She saw that Aunt Bessie did not mean to intrude; that she wanted to do things for all the Kennicotts. Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness, so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected with laughter. She divined that when Aunt Bessie came in with a jar of wild-grape jelly she was waiting in hope of being asked for the recipe. After that she could be irritated but she could not be depressed by Aunt Bessie’s simoom of questioning.
She wasn’t depressed even when she heard Mrs. Bogart observe, “Now we’ve got prohibition it seems to me that the next problem of the country ain’t so much abolishing cigarettes as it is to make folks observe the Sabbath and arrest these law-breakers that play baseball and go to the movies and all on the Lord’s Day.”
Only one thing bruised Carol’s vanity. Few people asked her about Washington. They who had most admiringly begged Percy Bresnahan for his opinions were least interested in her facts. She laughed at herself when she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as much as ever.
Her baby, born in August, was a girl. Carol could not decide whether she was to become a feminist leader or marry a scientist or both, but did settle on Vassar and a tricolette suit with a small black hat for her Freshman year.
*** VI ***
Hugh was loquacious at breakfast. He desired to give his impressions of owls and F Street.
“Don’t make so much noise. You talk too much,” growled Kennicott.
Carol flared. “Don’t speak to him that way! Why don’t you listen to him? He has some very interesting things to tell.”
“What’s the idea? Mean to say you expect me to spend all my time listening to his chatter?”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, he’s got to learn a little discipline. Time for him to start getting educated.”
“I’ve learned much more discipline, I’ve had much more education, from him than he has from me.”
“What’s this? Some new-fangled idea of raising kids you got in Washington?”
“Perhaps. Did you ever realize that children are people?”
“That’s all right. I’m not going to have him monopolizing the conversation.”
“No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I’m going to bring him up as a human being. He has just as many thoughts as we have, and I want him to develop them, not take Gopher Prairie’s version of them. That’s my biggest work now — keeping myself, keeping you, from ‘educating’ him.”
“Well, let’s not scrap about it. But I’m not going to have him spoiled.”
Kennicott had forgotten it in ten minutes; and she forgot it–this time.
*** VII ***
The Kennicotts and the Sam Clarks had driven north to a duck-pass between two lakes, on an autumn day of blue and copper.
Kennicott had given her a light twenty-gauge shotgun. She had a first lesson in shooting, in keeping her eyes open, not wincing, understanding that the bead at the end of the barrel really had something to do with pointing the gun. She was radiant; she almost believed Sam when he insisted that it was she who had shot the mallard at which they had fired together.
She sat on the bank of the reedy lake and found rest in Mrs. Clark’s drawling comments on nothing. The brown dusk was still. Behind them were dark marshes. The plowed acres smelled fresh. The lake was garnet and silver. The voices of the men, waiting for the last flight, were clear in the cool air.
“Mark left!” sang Kennicott, in a long-drawn call.
Three ducks were swooping down in a swift line. The guns banged, and a duck fluttered. The men pushed their light boat out on the burnished lake, disappeared beyond the reeds. Their cheerful voices and the slow splash and clank of oars came back to Carol from the dimness. In the sky a fiery plain sloped down to a serene harbor. It dissolved; the lake was white marble; and Kennicott was crying, “Well, old lady, how about hiking out for home? Supper taste pretty good, eh?”
“I’ll sit back with Ethel,” she said, at the car.
It was the first time she had called Mrs. Clark by her given name; the first time she had willingly sat back, a woman of Main Street.
“I’m hungry. It’s good to be hungry,” she reflected, as they drove away.
She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was conscious of an unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska, a dominion which will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile. Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia.
“Let’s all go to the movies tomorrow night. Awfully exciting film,” said Ethel Clark.
“Well, I was going to read a new book but —- All right, let’s go,” said Carol.
*** VIII ***
“They’re too much for me,” Carol sighed to Kennicott. “I’ve been thinking about getting up an annual Community Day, when the whole town would forget feuds and go out and have sports and a picnic and a dance. But Bert Tybee (why did you ever elect him mayor?)–he’s kidnapped my idea. He wants the Community Day, but he wants to have some politician ‘give an address.’ That’s just the stilted sort of thing I’ve tried to avoid. He asked Vida, and of course she agreed with him.”
Kennicott considered the matter while he wound the clock and they tramped up-stairs.
“Yes, it would jar you to have Bert butting in,” he said amiably. “Are you going to do much fussing over this Community stunt? Don’t you ever get tired of fretting and stewing and experimenting?”
“I haven’t even started. Look!” She led him to the nursery door, pointed at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. “Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what it is? It’s a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you wouldn’t arrest anarchists; you’d arrest all these children while they’re asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to Mars.”
“Yump, probably be changes all right,” yawned Kennicott.
She sat on the edge of his bed while he hunted through his bureau for a collar which ought to be there and persistently wasn’t.
“I’ll go on, always. And I am happy. But this Community Day makes me see how thoroughly I’m beaten.”
“That darn collar certainly is gone for keeps,” muttered Kennicott and, louder, “Yes, I guess you —- I didn’t quite catch what you said, dear.”
She patted his pillows, turned down his sheets, as she reflected:
“But I have won in this: I’ve never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith.”
“Sure. You bet you have,” said Kennicott. “Well, good night. Sort of feels to me like it might snow tomorrow. Have to be thinking about putting up the storm-windows pretty soon. Say, did you notice whether the girl put that screwdriver back?”
*** *** ***
THE END
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Cliff Notes : link2source – cliffsnotes DOT com – literature – m – Main Street – character list
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Getting Above Your Highest Altitude!
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