Main Street
hour forgotten the searchlight, when she was scampering through a chill
dusk, happy in yellow windows against gray night, her heart checked
as she realized that a head covered with a shawl was thrust up over a
snow-tipped bush to watch her.
She admitted that she was taking herself too seriously; that villagers
gape at every one. She became placid, and thought well of her
philosophy. But next morning she had a shock of shame as she entered
Ludelmeyer's. The grocer, his clerk, and neurotic Mrs. Dave Dyer had been
giggling about something. They halted, looked embarrassed, babbled about
onions. Carol felt guilty. That evening when Kennicott took her to call
on the crochety Lyman Casses, their hosts seemed flustered at their
arrival. Kennicott jovially hooted, “What makes you so hang-dog, Lym?”
The Casses tittered feebly.
Except Dave Dyer, Sam Clark, and Raymie Wutherspoon, there were no
merchants of whose welcome Carol was certain. She knew that she read
mockery into greetings but she could not control her suspicion, could
not rise from her psychic collapse. She alternately raged and flinched
at the superiority of the merchants. They did not know that they
were being rude, but they meant to have it understood that they were
prosperous and “not scared of no doctor's wife.” They often said, “One
man's as good as another--and a darn sight better.” This motto, however,
they did not commend to farmer customers who had had crop failures. The
Yankee merchants were crabbed; and Ole Jenson, Ludelmeyer, and Gus Dahl,
from the “Old Country,” wished to be taken for Yankees. James Madison
Howland, born in New Hampshire, and Ole Jenson, born in Sweden, both
proved that they were free American citizens by grunting, “I don't
know whether I got any or not,” or “Well, you can't expect me to get it
delivered by noon.”
It was good form for the customers to fight back. Juanita Haydock
cheerfully jabbered, “You have it there by twelve or I'll snatch that
fresh delivery-boy bald-headed.” But Carol had never been able to play
the game of friendly rudeness; and now she was certain that she never
would learn it. She formed the cowardly habit of going to Axel Egge's.
Axel was not respectable and rude. He was still a foreigner, and he
expected to remain one. His manner was heavy and uninterrogative. His
establishment was more fantastic than any cross-roads store. No one save
Axel himself could find anything. A part of the assortment of children's
stockings was under a blanket on a shelf, a part in a tin ginger-snap
box, the rest heaped like a nest of black-cotton snakes upon a
flour-barrel which was surrounded by brooms, Norwegian Bibles, dried
cod for ludfisk, boxes of apricots, and a pair and a half of lumbermen's
rubber-footed boots. The place was crowded with Scandinavian farmwives,
standing aloof in shawls and ancient fawn-colored leg o' mutton jackets,
awaiting the return of their lords. They spoke Norwegian or Swedish, and
looked at Carol uncomprehendingly. They were a relief to her--they were
not whispering that she was a poseur.
But what she told herself was that Axel Egge's was “so picturesque and
romantic.”
It was in the matter of clothes that she was most self-conscious.
When she dared to go shopping in her new checked suit with the
black-embroidered sulphur collar, she had as good as invited all of
Gopher Prairie (which interested itself in nothing so intimately as in
new clothes and the cost thereof) to investigate her. It was a smart
suit with lines unfamiliar to the dragging yellow and pink frocks of the
town. The Widow Bogart's stare, from her porch, indicated, “Well I
never saw anything like that before!” Mrs. McGanum stopped Carol at
the notions shop to hint, “My, that's a nice suit--wasn't it terribly
expensive?” The gang of boys in front of the drug store commented, “Hey,
Pudgie, play you a game of checkers on that dress.” Carol could not
endure it. She drew her fur coat over the suit and hastily fastened the
buttons, while the boys snickered.
II
No group angered her quite so much as these staring young roues.
She had tried to convince herself that the village, with its fresh air,
its lakes for fishing and swimming, was healthier than the artificial
city. But she was sickened by glimpses of the gang of boys from fourteen
to twenty who loafed before Dyer's Drug Store, smoking cigarettes,
displaying “fancy” shoes and purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped
buttons, whistling the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, “Oh, you baby-doll”
at every passing girl.
She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind Del Snafflin's
barber shop, and shaking dice in “The Smoke House,” and gathered in
a snickering knot to listen to the “juicy stories” of Bert Tybee, the
bartender of the Minniemashie House. She heard them smacking moist lips
over every love-scene at the Rosebud Movie Palace. At the counter of the
Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful messes of decayed
bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream, and gelatinous ice-cream, they
screamed to one another, “Hey, lemme 'lone,” “Quit dog-gone you, looka
what you went and done, you almost spilled my glass swater,” “Like hell
I did,” “Hey, gol darn your hide, don't you go sticking your coffin
nail in my i-scream,” “Oh you Batty, how juh like dancing with Tillie
McGuire, last night? Some squeezing, heh, kid?”
By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered that this
was the only virile and amusing manner in which boys could function;
that boys who were not compounded of the gutter and the mining-camp
were mollycoddles and unhappy. She had taken this for granted. She had
studied the boys pityingly, but impersonally. It had not occurred to her
that they might touch her.
Now she was aware that they knew all about her; that they were waiting
for some affectation over which they could guffaw. No schoolgirl passed
their observation-posts more flushingly than did Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. In
shame she knew that they glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes,
speculating about her legs. Theirs were not young eyes--there was no
youth in all the town, she agonized. They were born old, grim and old
and spying and censorious.
She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel on the day when
she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock.
Cyrus N. Bogart, son of the righteous widow who lived across the alley,
was at this time a boy of fourteen or fifteen. Carol had already seen
quite enough of Cy Bogart. On her first evening in Gopher Prairie Cy
had appeared at the head of a “charivari,” banging immensely upon a
discarded automobile fender. His companions were yelping in imitation
of coyotes. Kennicott had felt rather complimented; had gone out and
distributed a dollar. But Cy was a capitalist in charivaris. He returned
with an entirely new group, and this time there were three automobile
fenders and a carnival rattle. When Kennicott again interrupted his
shaving, Cy piped, “Naw, you got to give us two dollars,” and he got it.
A week later Cy rigged a tic-tac to a window of the living-room, and the
tattoo out of the darkness frightened Carol into screaming. Since
then, in four months, she had beheld Cy hanging a cat, stealing melons,
throwing tomatoes at the Kennicott house, and making ski-tracks across
the lawn, and had heard him explaining the mysteries of generation,
with great audibility and dismaying knowledge. He was, in fact, a museum
specimen of what a small town, a well-disciplined public school, a
tradition of hearty humor, and a pious mother could produce from the
material of a courageous and ingenious mind.
Carol was afraid of him. Far from protesting when he set his mongrel on
a kitten, she worked hard at not seeing him.
The Kennicott garage was a shed littered with paint-cans, tools, a
lawn-mower, and ancient wisps of hay. Above it was a loft which Cy
Bogart and Earl Haydock, young brother of Harry, used as a den, for
smoking, hiding from whippings, and planning secret societies. They
climbed to it by a ladder on the alley side of the shed.
This morning of late January, two or three weeks after Vida's
revelations, Carol had gone into the stable-garage to find a hammer.
Snow softened her step. She heard voices in the loft above her:
“Ah gee, lez--oh, lez go down the lake and swipe some mushrats out of
somebody's traps,” Cy was yawning.
“And get our ears beat off!” grumbled Earl Haydock.
“Gosh, these cigarettes are dandy. 'Member when we were just kids, and
used to smoke corn-silk and hayseed?”
“Yup. Gosh!”
Spit. “Silence.”
“Say Earl, ma says if you chew tobacco you get consumption.”
“Aw rats, your old lady is a crank.”
“Yuh, that's so.” Pause. “But she says she knows a fella that did.”
“Aw, gee whiz, didn't Doc Kennicott used to chew tobacco all the time
before he married this-here girl from the Cities? He used to spit---Gee!
Some shot! He could hit a tree ten feet off.”
This was news to the girl from the Cities.
“Say, how is she?” continued Earl.
“Huh? How's who?”
“You know who I mean, smarty.”
A tussle, a thumping of loose boards, silence, weary narration from Cy:
“Mrs. Kennicott? Oh, she's all right, I guess.” Relief to Carol, below.
“She gimme a hunk o' cake, one time. But Ma says she's stuck-up as hell.
Ma's always talking about her. Ma says if Mrs. Kennicott thought as much
about the doc as she does about her clothes, the doc wouldn't look so
peaked.”
Spit. Silence.
“Yuh. Juanita's always talking about her, too,” from Earl. “She says
Mrs. Kennicott thinks she knows it all. Juanita says she has to laugh
till she almost busts every time she sees Mrs. Kennicott peerading along
the street with that 'take a look--I'm a swell skirt' way she's got. But
gosh, I don't pay no attention to Juanita. She's meaner 'n a crab.”
“Ma was telling somebody that she heard that Mrs. Kennicott claimed she
made forty dollars a week when she was on some job in the Cities, and
Ma says she knows posolutely that she never made but eighteen a week--Ma
says that when she's lived here a while she won't go round making a fool
of herself, pulling that bighead stuff on folks that know a whole lot
more than she does. They're all laughing up their sleeves at her.”
“Say, jever notice how Mrs. Kennicott fusses around the house? Other
evening when I was coming over here, she'd forgot to pull down the
curtain, and I watched her for ten minutes. Jeeze, you'd 'a' died
laughing. She was there all alone, and she must 'a' spent five minutes
getting a picture straight. It was funny as hell the way she'd stick out
her finger to straighten the picture--deedle-dee, see my tunnin' 'ittle
finger, oh my, ain't I cute, what a fine long tail my cat's got!”
“But say, Earl, she's some good-looker, just the same, and O Ignatz! the
glad rags she must of bought for her wedding. Jever notice these low-cut
dresses and these thin shimmy-shirts she wears? I had a good squint at
'em when they were out on the line with the wash. And some ankles she's
got, heh?”
Then Carol fled.
In her innocence she had not known that the whole town could discuss
even her garments, her body. She felt that she was being dragged naked
down Main Street.
The moment it was dusk she pulled down the window-shades, all the shades
flush with the sill, but beyond them she felt moist fleering eyes.
III
She remembered, and tried to forget, and remembered more sharply the
vulgar detail of her husband's having observed the ancient customs
of the land by chewing tobacco. She would have preferred a prettier
vice--gambling or a mistress. For these she might have found a luxury
of forgiveness. She could not remember any fascinatingly wicked hero of
fiction who chewed tobacco. She asserted that it proved him to be a man