Main Street
these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this
barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water.
And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want
to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that
built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keel
up.”
“Yes--that--that would be better. But I must run home. My poor nose is
nearly frozen.”
“Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an old bach's shack
is like.”
She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard that was
littered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless wash-tub. She was
disquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her the opportunity to be
delicate. He flung out his hand in a welcoming gesture which assumed
that she was her own counselor, that she was not a Respectable Married
Woman but fully a human being. With a shaky, “Well, just a moment, to
warm my nose,” she glanced down the street to make sure that she was not
spied on, and bolted toward the shanty.
She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more considerate
host than the Red Swede.
He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with
amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the
shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs--one
constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank--and a row of
books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of
gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on “The
Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle.”
There was but one picture--a magazine color-plate of a steep-roofed
village in the Harz Mountains which suggested kobolds and maidens with
golden hair.
Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, “Might throw open your
coat and put your feet up on the box in front of the stove.” He tossed
his dogskin coat into the bunk, lowered himself into the barrel chair,
and droned on:
“Yeh, I'm probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my independence by
doing odd jobs, and that's more 'n these polite cusses like the clerks
in the banks do. When I'm rude to some slob, it may be partly because I
don't know better (and God knows I'm not no authority on trick forks
and what pants you wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it's because I
mean something. I'm about the only man in Johnson County that remembers
the joker in the Declaration of Independence about Americans being
supposed to have the right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.'
“I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at me like he wants me
to remember he's a highmuckamuck and worth two hundred thousand dollars,
and he says, 'Uh, Bjornquist----'
“'Bjornstam's my name, Ezra,' I says. HE knows my name, all rightee.
“'Well, whatever your name is,' he says, 'I understand you have a
gasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw up four cords of maple
for me,' he says.
“'So you like my looks, eh?' I says, kind of innocent.
“'What difference does that make? Want you to saw that wood before
Saturday,' he says, real sharp. Common workman going and getting fresh
with a fifth of a million dollars all walking around in a hand-me-down
fur coat!
“'Here's the difference it makes,' I says, just to devil him. 'How do
you know I like YOUR looks?' Maybe he didn't look sore! 'Nope,' I says,
thinking it all over, 'I don't like your application for a loan. Take it
to another bank, only there ain't any,' I says, and I walks off on him.
“Sure. Probably I was surly--and foolish. But I figured there had to be
ONE man in town independent enough to sass the banker!”
He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talked
on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendliness
and half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was a
proletarian philosophy.
At the door, she hinted:
“Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought you
were affected?”
“Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over
silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals thought about my
flying?”
It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of Bjornstam's scorn
which carried her through town. She faced Juanita Haydock, cocked
her head at Maud Dyer's brief nod, and came home to Bea radiant. She
telephoned Vida Sherwin to “run over this evening.” She lustily played
Tschaikowsky--the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopher
of the tar-paper shack.
(When she hinted to Vida, “Isn't there a man here who amuses himself by
being irreverent to the village gods--Bjornstam, some such a name?”
the reform-leader said “Bjornstam? Oh yes. Fixes things. He's awfully
impertinent.”)
IV
Kennicott had returned at midnight. At breakfast he said four several
times that he had missed her every moment.
On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, “The top o' the mornin'
to yez! Going to stop and pass the time of day mit Sam'l? Warmer, eh?
What'd the doc's thermometer say it was? Say, you folks better come
round and visit with us, one of these evenings. Don't be so dog-gone
proud, staying by yourselves.”
Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator, stopped her in
the post-office, held her hand in his withered paws, peered at her
with faded eyes, and chuckled, “You are so fresh and blooming, my dear.
Mother was saying t'other day that a sight of you was better 'n a dose
of medicine.”
In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively buying a modest
gray scarf. “We haven't seen you for so long,” she said. “Wouldn't you
like to come in and play cribbage, some evening?” As though he meant it,
Pollock begged, “May I, really?”
While she was purchasing two yards of malines the vocal Raymie
Wutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long sallow face bobbing, and he
besought, “You've just got to come back to my department and see a pair
of patent leather slippers I set aside for you.”
In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced her boots,
tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid on the slippers. She took them.
“You're a good salesman,” she said.
“I'm not a salesman at all! I just like elegant things. All this is so
inartistic.” He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves of
shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in rosettes, the display of
shoe-trees and tin boxes of blacking, the lithograph of a smirking
young woman with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry of
advertising, “My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection was
till I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes.”
“But sometimes,” Raymie sighed, “there is a pair of dainty little shoes
like these, and I set them aside for some one who will appreciate. When
I saw these I said right away, 'Wouldn't it be nice if they fitted Mrs.
Kennicott,' and I meant to speak to you first chance I had. I haven't
forgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey's!”
That evening Guy Pollock came in and, though Kennicott instantly
impressed him into a cribbage game, Carol was happy again.
V
She did not, in recovering something of her buoyancy, forget her
determination to begin the liberalizing of Gopher Prairie by the easy
and agreeable propaganda of teaching Kennicott to enjoy reading poetry
in the lamplight. The campaign was delayed. Twice he suggested that they
call on neighbors; once he was in the country. The fourth evening
he yawned pleasantly, stretched, and inquired, “Well, what'll we do
tonight? Shall we go to the movies?”
“I know exactly what we're going to do. Now don't ask questions! Come
and sit down by the table. There, are you comfy? Lean back and forget
you're a practical man, and listen to me.”
It may be that she had been influenced by the managerial Vida Sherwin;
certainly she sounded as though she was selling culture. But she dropped
it when she sat on the couch, her chin in her hands, a volume of Yeats
on her knees, and read aloud.
Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town.
She was in the world of lonely things--the flutter of twilight linnets,
the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept
out of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal
glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold,
the woful incessant chanting and the----
“Heh-cha-cha!” coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She remembered that
he was the sort of person who chewed tobacco. She glared, while he
uneasily petitioned, “That's great stuff. Study it in college? I
like poetry fine--James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow--this
'Hiawatha.' Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But
I guess I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks.”
With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to giggle, she
consoled him, “Then let's try some Tennyson. You've read him?”
“Tennyson? You bet. Read him in school. There's that:
And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell
When I put out to sea,
But let the----
Well, I don't remember all of it but----Oh, sure! And there's that 'I
met a little country boy who----' I don't remember exactly how it goes,
but the chorus ends up, 'We are seven.'”
“Yes. Well----Shall we try 'The Idylls of the King?' They're so full of
color.”
“Go to it. Shoot.” But he hastened to shelter himself behind a cigar.
She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an eye cocked on him,
and when she saw how much he was suffering she ran to him, kissed his
forehead, cried, “You poor forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent
turnip!”
“Look here now, that ain't----”
“Anyway, I sha'n't torture you any longer.”
She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great deal of
emphasis:
There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the GRAND Trunk ROAD.
He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. But
when he complimented her, “That was fine. I don't know but what you
can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody,” she banged the book and
suggested that they were not too late for the nine o'clock show at the
movies.
That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine
unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon and
the sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at Ole Jenson's Grocery.
But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered herself
laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an actor who stuffed
spaghetti down a woman's evening frock. For a second she loathed her
laughter; mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippi
she had walked the battlements with queens. But the celebrated cinema
jester's conceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into
unwilling tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled
through darkness.
VI
She went to the Jolly Seventeen's afternoon bridge. She had learned
the elements of the game from the Sam Clarks. She played quietly and
reasonably badly. She had no opinions on anything more polemic than
woolen union-suits, a topic on which Mrs. Howland discoursed for five
minutes. She smiled frequently, and was the complete canary-bird in her
manner of thanking the hostess, Mrs. Dave Dyer.
Her only anxious period was during the conference on husbands.
The young matrons discussed the intimacies of domesticity with a
frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol. Juanita Haydock
communicated Harry's method of shaving, and his interest in
deer-shooting. Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation,
her husband's inappreciation of liver and bacon. Maud Dyer chronicled
Dave's digestive disorders; quoted a recent bedtime controversy with