Main Street
books. I'll make 'em put in a village green, and darling cottages, and a
quaint Main Street!”
Thus she triumphed through the class, which was a typical Blodgett
contest between a dreary teacher and unwilling children of twenty, won
by the teacher because his opponents had to answer his questions, while
their treacherous queries he could counter by demanding, “Have you
looked that up in the library? Well then, suppose you do!”
The history instructor was a retired minister. He was sarcastic today.
He begged of sporting young Mr. Charley Holmberg, “Now Charles, would it
interrupt your undoubtedly fascinating pursuit of that malevolent fly
if I were to ask you to tell us that you do not know anything about King
John?” He spent three delightful minutes in assuring himself of the fact
that no one exactly remembered the date of Magna Charta.
Carol did not hear him. She was completing the roof of a half-timbered
town hall. She had found one man in the prairie village who did not
appreciate her picture of winding streets and arcades, but she had
assembled the town council and dramatically defeated him.
III
Though she was Minnesota-born Carol was not an intimate of the prairie
villages. Her father, the smiling and shabby, the learned and teasingly
kind, had come from Massachusetts, and through all her childhood he
had been a judge in Mankato, which is not a prairie town, but in its
garden-sheltered streets and aisles of elms is white and green New
England reborn. Mankato lies between cliffs and the Minnesota River,
hard by Traverse des Sioux, where the first settlers made treaties
with the Indians, and the cattle-rustlers once came galloping before
hell-for-leather posses.
As she climbed along the banks of the dark river Carol listened to its
fables about the wide land of yellow waters and bleached buffalo bones
to the West; the Southern levees and singing darkies and palm trees
toward which it was forever mysteriously gliding; and she heard again
the startled bells and thick puffing of high-stacked river steamers
wrecked on sand-reefs sixty years ago. Along the decks she saw
missionaries, gamblers in tall pot hats, and Dakota chiefs with scarlet
blankets. . . . Far off whistles at night, round the river bend,
plunking paddles reechoed by the pines, and a glow on black sliding
waters.
Carol's family were self-sufficient in their inventive life, with
Christmas a rite full of surprises and tenderness, and “dressing-up
parties” spontaneous and joyously absurd. The beasts in the Milford
hearth-mythology were not the obscene Night Animals who jump out
of closets and eat little girls, but beneficent and bright-eyed
creatures--the tam htab, who is woolly and blue and lives in the
bathroom, and runs rapidly to warm small feet; the ferruginous oil
stove, who purrs and knows stories; and the skitamarigg, who will play
with children before breakfast if they spring out of bed and close the
window at the very first line of the song about puellas which father
sings while shaving.
Judge Milford's pedagogical scheme was to let the children read whatever
they pleased, and in his brown library Carol absorbed Balzac and
Rabelais and Thoreau and Max Muller. He gravely taught them the letters
on the backs of the encyclopedias, and when polite visitors asked about
the mental progress of the “little ones,” they were horrified to hear
the children earnestly repeating A-And, And-Aus, Aus-Bis, Bis-Cal,
Cal-Cha.
Carol's mother died when she was nine. Her father retired from the
judiciary when she was eleven, and took the family to Minneapolis. There
he died, two years after. Her sister, a busy proper advisory soul, older
than herself, had become a stranger to her even when they lived in the
same house.
From those early brown and silver days and from her independence of
relatives Carol retained a willingness to be different from brisk
efficient book-ignoring people; an instinct to observe and wonder
at their bustle even when she was taking part in it. But, she felt
approvingly, as she discovered her career of town-planning, she was now
roused to being brisk and efficient herself.
IV
In a month Carol's ambition had clouded. Her hesitancy about becoming a
teacher had returned. She was not, she worried, strong enough to endure
the routine, and she could not picture herself standing before grinning
children and pretending to be wise and decisive. But the desire for
the creation of a beautiful town remained. When she encountered an item
about small-town women's clubs or a photograph of a straggling Main
Street, she was homesick for it, she felt robbed of her work.
It was the advice of the professor of English which led her to study
professional library-work in a Chicago school. Her imagination carved
and colored the new plan. She saw herself persuading children to read
charming fairy tales, helping young men to find books on mechanics,
being ever so courteous to old men who were hunting for newspapers--the
light of the library, an authority on books, invited to dinners with
poets and explorers, reading a paper to an association of distinguished
scholars.
V
The last faculty reception before commencement. In five days they would
be in the cyclone of final examinations.
The house of the president had been massed with palms suggestive of
polite undertaking parlors, and in the library, a ten-foot room with a
globe and the portraits of Whittier and Martha Washington, the student
orchestra was playing “Carmen” and “Madame Butterfly.” Carol was dizzy
with music and the emotions of parting. She saw the palms as a jungle,
the pink-shaded electric globes as an opaline haze, and the eye-glassed
faculty as Olympians. She was melancholy at sight of the mousey girls
with whom she had “always intended to get acquainted,” and the half
dozen young men who were ready to fall in love with her.
But it was Stewart Snyder whom she encouraged. He was so much manlier
than the others; he was an even warm brown, like his new ready-made suit
with its padded shoulders. She sat with him, and with two cups of
coffee and a chicken patty, upon a pile of presidential overshoes in the
coat-closet under the stairs, and as the thin music seeped in, Stewart
whispered:
“I can't stand it, this breaking up after four years! The happiest years
of life.”
She believed it. “Oh, I know! To think that in just a few days we'll be
parting, and we'll never see some of the bunch again!”
“Carol, you got to listen to me! You always duck when I try to talk
seriously to you, but you got to listen to me. I'm going to be a big
lawyer, maybe a judge, and I need you, and I'd protect you----”
His arm slid behind her shoulders. The insinuating music drained her
independence. She said mournfully, “Would you take care of me?” She
touched his hand. It was warm, solid.
“You bet I would! We'd have, Lord, we'd have bully times in Yankton,
where I'm going to settle----”
“But I want to do something with life.”
“What's better than making a comfy home and bringing up some cute kids
and knowing nice homey people?”
It was the immemorial male reply to the restless woman. Thus to the
young Sappho spake the melon-venders; thus the captains to Zenobia; and
in the damp cave over gnawed bones the hairy suitor thus protested to
the woman advocate of matriarchy. In the dialect of Blodgett College but
with the voice of Sappho was Carol's answer:
“Of course. I know. I suppose that's so. Honestly, I do love children.
But there's lots of women that can do housework, but I--well, if you
HAVE got a college education, you ought to use it for the world.”
“I know, but you can use it just as well in the home. And gee, Carol,
just think of a bunch of us going out on an auto picnic, some nice
spring evening.”
“Yes.”
“And sleigh-riding in winter, and going fishing----”
Blarrrrrrr! The orchestra had crashed into the “Soldiers' Chorus”; and
she was protesting, “No! No! You're a dear, but I want to do things.
I don't understand myself but I want--everything in the world! Maybe I
can't sing or write, but I know I can be an influence in library work.
Just suppose I encouraged some boy and he became a great artist! I
will! I will do it! Stewart dear, I can't settle down to nothing but
dish-washing!”
Two minutes later--two hectic minutes--they were disturbed by
an embarrassed couple also seeking the idyllic seclusion of the
overshoe-closet.
After graduation she never saw Stewart Snyder again. She wrote to him
once a week--for one month.
VI
A year Carol spent in Chicago. Her study of library-cataloguing,
recording, books of reference, was easy and not too somniferous. She
reveled in the Art Institute, in symphonies and violin recitals and
chamber music, in the theater and classic dancing. She almost gave up
library work to become one of the young women who dance in cheese-cloth
in the moonlight. She was taken to a certified Studio Party, with
beer, cigarettes, bobbed hair, and a Russian Jewess who sang the
Internationale. It cannot be reported that Carol had anything
significant to say to the Bohemians. She was awkward with them, and
felt ignorant, and she was shocked by the free manners which she had for
years desired. But she heard and remembered discussions of Freud, Romain
Rolland, syndicalism, the Confederation Generale du Travail, feminism
vs. haremism, Chinese lyrics, nationalization of mines, Christian
Science, and fishing in Ontario.
She went home, and that was the beginning and end of her Bohemian life.
The second cousin of Carol's sister's husband lived in Winnetka, and
once invited her out to Sunday dinner. She walked back through Wilmette
and Evanston, discovered new forms of suburban architecture, and
remembered her desire to recreate villages. She decided that she would
give up library work and, by a miracle whose nature was not very clearly
revealed to her, turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and Japanese
bungalows.
The next day in library class she had to read a theme on the use of the
Cumulative Index, and she was taken so seriously in the discussion that
she put off her career of town-planning--and in the autumn she was in
the public library of St. Paul.
VII
Carol was not unhappy and she was not exhilarated, in the St. Paul
Library. She slowly confessed that she was not visibly affecting lives.
She did, at first, put into her contact with the patrons a willingness
which should have moved worlds. But so few of these stolid worlds wanted
to be moved. When she was in charge of the magazine room the readers did
not ask for suggestions about elevated essays. They grunted, “Wanta find
the Leather Goods Gazette for last February.” When she was giving
out books the principal query was, “Can you tell me of a good, light,
exciting love story to read? My husband's going away for a week.”
She was fond of the other librarians; proud of their aspirations. And by
the chance of propinquity she read scores of books unnatural to her gay
white littleness: volumes of anthropology with ditches of foot-notes
filled with heaps of small dusty type, Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes
for curry, voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American
improvements, treatises upon success in the real-estate business. She
took walks, and was sensible about shoes and diet. And never did she
feel that she was living.
She went to dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances.
Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's
slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her
throat tense, as she slid down the room.
During her three years of library work several men showed diligent
interest in her--the treasurer of a fur-manufacturing firm, a teacher, a