Main Street
of the bold free West. She tried to align him with the hairy-chested
heroes of the motion-pictures. She curled on the couch a pallid softness
in the twilight, and fought herself, and lost the battle. Spitting did
not identify him with rangers riding the buttes; it merely bound him to
Gopher Prairie--to Nat Hicks the tailor and Bert Tybee the bartender.
“But he gave it up for me. Oh, what does it matter! We're all filthy in
some things. I think of myself as so superior, but I do eat and digest,
I do wash my dirty paws and scratch. I'm not a cool slim goddess on
a column. There aren't any! He gave it up for me. He stands by me,
believing that every one loves me. He's the Rock of Ages--in a storm of
meanness that's driving me mad . . . it will drive me mad.”
All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when she noticed
that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled maternally at his
secret.
She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations
which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making
queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will
know hereafter), “Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying him?” She
quieted the doubt--without answering it.
IV
Kennicott had taken her north to Lac-qui-Meurt, in the Big Woods. It was
the entrance to a Chippewa Indian reservation, a sandy settlement among
Norway pines on the shore of a huge snow-glaring lake. She had her first
sight of his mother, except the glimpse at the wedding. Mrs. Kennicott
had a hushed and delicate breeding which dignified her woodeny
over-scrubbed cottage with its worn hard cushions in heavy rockers.
She had never lost the child's miraculous power of wonder. She asked
questions about books and cities. She murmured:
“Will is a dear hard-working boy but he's inclined to be too serious,
and you've taught him how to play. Last night I heard you both laughing
about the old Indian basket-seller, and I just lay in bed and enjoyed
your happiness.”
Carol forgot her misery-hunting in this solidarity of family life.
She could depend upon them; she was not battling alone. Watching Mrs.
Kennicott flit about the kitchen she was better able to translate
Kennicott himself. He was matter-of-fact, yes, and incurably mature. He
didn't really play; he let Carol play with him. But he had his mother's
genius for trusting, her disdain for prying, her sure integrity.
From the two days at Lac-qui-Meurt Carol drew confidence in herself,
and she returned to Gopher Prairie in a throbbing calm like those golden
drugged seconds when, because he is for an instant free from pain, a
sick man revels in living.
A bright hard winter day, the wind shrill, black and silver clouds
booming across the sky, everything in panicky motion during the brief
light. They struggled against the surf of wind, through deep snow.
Kennicott was cheerful. He hailed Loren Wheeler, “Behave yourself while
I been away?” The editor bellowed, “B' gosh you stayed so long that
all your patients have got well!” and importantly took notes for the
Dauntless about their journey. Jackson Elder cried, “Hey, folks! How's
tricks up North?” Mrs. McGanum waved to them from her porch.
“They're glad to see us. We mean something here. These people are
satisfied. Why can't I be? But can I sit back all my life and be
satisfied with 'Hey, folks'? They want shouts on Main Street, and I want
violins in a paneled room. Why----?”
V
Vida Sherwin ran in after school a dozen times. She was tactful,
torrentially anecdotal. She had scuttled about town and plucked
compliments: Mrs. Dr. Westlake had pronounced Carol a “very sweet,
bright, cultured young woman,” and Brad Bemis, the tinsmith at Clark's
Hardware Store, had declared that she was “easy to work for and awful
easy to look at.”
But Carol could not yet take her in. She resented this outsider's
knowledge of her shame. Vida was not too long tolerant. She hinted,
“You're a great brooder, child. Buck up now. The town's quit criticizing
you, almost entirely. Come with me to the Thanatopsis Club. They
have some of the BEST papers, and current-events discussions--SO
interesting.”
In Vida's demands Carol felt a compulsion, but she was too listless to
obey.
It was Bea Sorenson who was really her confidante.
However charitable toward the Lower Classes she may have thought
herself, Carol had been reared to assume that servants belong to
a distinct and inferior species. But she discovered that Bea was
extraordinarily like girls she had loved in college, and as a companion
altogether superior to the young matrons of the Jolly Seventeen. Daily
they became more frankly two girls playing at housework. Bea artlessly
considered Carol the most beautiful and accomplished lady in the
country; she was always shrieking, “My, dot's a swell hat!” or, “Ay
t'ink all dese ladies yoost die when dey see how elegant you do your
hair!” But it was not the humbleness of a servant, nor the hypocrisy of
a slave; it was the admiration of Freshman for Junior.
They made out the day's menus together. Though they began with
propriety, Carol sitting by the kitchen table and Bea at the sink or
blacking the stove, the conference was likely to end with both of them
by the table, while Bea gurgled over the ice-man's attempt to kiss her,
or Carol admitted, “Everybody knows that the doctor is lots more clever
than Dr. McGanum.” When Carol came in from marketing, Bea plunged into
the hall to take off her coat, rub her frostied hands, and ask, “Vos
dere lots of folks up-town today?”
This was the welcome upon which Carol depended.
VI
Through her weeks of cowering there was no change in her surface life.
No one save Vida was aware of her agonizing. On her most despairing
days she chatted to women on the street, in stores. But without
the protection of Kennicott's presence she did not go to the Jolly
Seventeen; she delivered herself to the judgment of the town only when
she went shopping and on the ritualistic occasions of formal afternoon
calls, when Mrs. Lyman Cass or Mrs. George Edwin Mott, with clean gloves
and minute handkerchiefs and sealskin card-cases and countenances of
frozen approbation, sat on the edges of chairs and inquired, “Do you
find Gopher Prairie pleasing?” When they spent evenings of social
profit-and-loss at the Haydocks' or the Dyers' she hid behind Kennicott,
playing the simple bride.
Now she was unprotected. Kennicott had taken a patient to Rochester
for an operation. He would be away for two or three days. She had not
minded; she would loosen the matrimonial tension and be a fanciful girl
for a time. But now that he was gone the house was listeningly empty.
Bea was out this afternoon--presumably drinking coffee and talking about
“fellows” with her cousin Tina. It was the day for the monthly supper
and evening-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, but Carol dared not go.
She sat alone.
CHAPTER X
THE house was haunted, long before evening. Shadows slipped down the
walls and waited behind every chair.
Did that door move?
No. She wouldn't go to the Jolly Seventeen. She hadn't energy enough to
caper before them, to smile blandly at Juanita's rudeness. Not today.
But she did want a party. Now! If some one would come in this afternoon,
some one who liked her--Vida or Mrs. Sam Clark or old Mrs. Champ Perry
or gentle Mrs. Dr. Westlake. Or Guy Pollock! She'd telephone----
No. That wouldn't be it. They must come of themselves.
Perhaps they would.
Why not?
She'd have tea ready, anyway. If they came--splendid. If not--what did
she care? She wasn't going to yield to the village and let down; she was
going to keep up a belief in the rite of tea, to which she had always
looked forward as the symbol of a leisurely fine existence. And it would
be just as much fun, even if it was so babyish, to have tea by herself
and pretend that she was entertaining clever men. It would!
She turned the shining thought into action. She bustled to the kitchen,
stoked the wood-range, sang Schumann while she boiled the kettle, warmed
up raisin cookies on a newspaper spread on the rack in the oven. She
scampered up-stairs to bring down her filmiest tea-cloth. She arranged
a silver tray. She proudly carried it into the living-room and set it on
the long cherrywood table, pushing aside a hoop of embroidery, a volume
of Conrad from the library, copies of the Saturday Evening Post, the
Literary Digest, and Kennicott's National Geographic Magazine.
She moved the tray back and forth and regarded the effect. She shook
her head. She busily unfolded the sewing-table set it in the bay-window,
patted the tea-cloth to smoothness, moved the tray. “Some time I'll have
a mahogany tea-table,” she said happily.
She had brought in two cups, two plates. For herself, a straight chair,
but for the guest the big wing-chair, which she pantingly tugged to the
table.
She had finished all the preparations she could think of. She sat and
waited. She listened for the door-bell, the telephone. Her eagerness was
stilled. Her hands drooped.
Surely Vida Sherwin would hear the summons.
She glanced through the bay-window. Snow was sifting over the ridge
of the Howland house like sprays of water from a hose. The wide
yards across the street were gray with moving eddies. The black trees
shivered. The roadway was gashed with ruts of ice.
She looked at the extra cup and plate. She looked at the wing-chair. It
was so empty.
The tea was cold in the pot. With wearily dipping fingertip she tested
it. Yes. Quite cold. She couldn't wait any longer.
The cup across from her was icily clean, glisteningly empty.
Simply absurd to wait. She poured her own cup of tea. She sat and stared
at it. What was it she was going to do now? Oh yes; how idiotic; take a
lump of sugar.
She didn't want the beastly tea.
She was springing up. She was on the couch, sobbing.
II
She was thinking more sharply than she had for weeks.
She reverted to her resolution to change the town--awaken it, prod it,
“reform” it. What if they were wolves instead of lambs? They'd eat her
all the sooner if she was meek to them. Fight or be eaten. It was easier
to change the town completely than to conciliate it! She could not take
their point of view; it was a negative thing; an intellectual squalor;
a swamp of prejudices and fears. She would have to make them take hers.
She was not a Vincent de Paul, to govern and mold a people. What of
that? The tiniest change in their distrust of beauty would be the
beginning of the end; a seed to sprout and some day with thickening
roots to crack their wall of mediocrity. If she could not, as she
desired, do a great thing nobly and with laughter, yet she need not be
content with village nothingness. She would plant one seed in the blank
wall.
Was she just? Was it merely a blank wall, this town which to three
thousand and more people was the center of the universe? Hadn't she,
returning from Lac-qui-Meurt, felt the heartiness of their greetings?
No. The ten thousand Gopher Prairies had no monopoly of greetings and
friendly hands. Sam Clark was no more loyal than girl librarians she
knew in St. Paul, the people she had met in Chicago. And those others
had so much that Gopher Prairie complacently lacked--the world of gaiety
and adventure, of music and the integrity of bronze, of remembered
mists from tropic isles and Paris nights and the walls of Bagdad, of
industrial justice and a God who spake not in doggerel hymns.
One seed. Which seed it was did not matter. All knowledge and freedom
were one. But she had delayed so long in finding that seed. Could she
do something with this Thanatopsis Club? Or should she make her house
so charming that it would be an influence? She'd make Kennicott like