Main Street
to be assured that she did not want bookish conversation alone; that she
did not expect the town to become a Bohemia. She was content now. She
did not criticize.
But in September, when the year was at its richest, custom dictated that
it was time to return to town; to remove the children from the waste
occupation of learning the earth, and send them back to lessons about
the number of potatoes which (in a delightful world untroubled by
commission-houses or shortages in freight-cars) William sold to John.
The women who had cheerfully gone bathing all summer looked doubtful
when Carol begged, “Let's keep up an outdoor life this winter, let's
slide and skate.” Their hearts shut again till spring, and the nine
months of cliques and radiators and dainty refreshments began all over.
III
Carol had started a salon.
Since Kennicott, Vida Sherwin, and Guy Pollock were her only lions,
and since Kennicott would have preferred Sam Clark to all the poets and
radicals in the entire world, her private and self-defensive clique did
not get beyond one evening dinner for Vida and Guy, on her first wedding
anniversary; and that dinner did not get beyond a controversy regarding
Raymie Wutherspoon's yearnings.
Guy Pollock was the gentlest person she had found here. He spoke of her
new jade and cream frock naturally, not jocosely; he held her chair
for her as they sat down to dinner; and he did not, like Kennicott,
interrupt her to shout, “Oh say, speaking of that, I heard a good story
today.” But Guy was incurably hermit. He sat late and talked hard, and
did not come again.
Then she met Champ Perry in the post-office--and decided that in the
history of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher Prairie, for all
of America. We have lost their sturdiness, she told herself. We must
restore the last of the veterans to power and follow them on the
backward path to the integrity of Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlers
dancing in a saw-mill.
She read in the records of the Minnesota Territorial Pioneers that only
sixty years ago, not so far back as the birth of her own father, four
cabins had composed Gopher Prairie. The log stockade which Mrs. Champ
Perry was to find when she trekked in was built afterward by the
soldiers as a defense against the Sioux. The four cabins were inhabited
by Maine Yankees who had come up the Mississippi to St. Paul and driven
north over virgin prairie into virgin woods. They ground their own
corn; the men-folks shot ducks and pigeons and prairie chickens; the
new breakings yielded the turnip-like rutabagas, which they ate raw
and boiled and baked and raw again. For treat they had wild plums and
crab-apples and tiny wild strawberries.
Grasshoppers came darkening the sky, and in an hour ate the farmwife's
garden and the farmer's coat. Precious horses painfully brought from
Illinois, were drowned in bogs or stampeded by the fear of blizzards.
Snow blew through the chinks of new-made cabins, and Eastern children,
with flowery muslin dresses, shivered all winter and in summer were red
and black with mosquito bites. Indians were everywhere; they camped in
dooryards, stalked into kitchens to demand doughnuts, came with rifles
across their backs into schoolhouses and begged to see the pictures
in the geographies. Packs of timber-wolves treed the children; and the
settlers found dens of rattle-snakes, killed fifty, a hundred, in a day.
Yet it was a buoyant life. Carol read enviously in the admirable
Minnesota chronicles called “Old Rail Fence Corners” the reminiscence of
Mrs. Mahlon Black, who settled in Stillwater in 1848:
“There was nothing to parade over in those days. We took it as it came
and had happy lives. . . . We would all gather together and in about two
minutes would be having a good time--playing cards or dancing. . . . We
used to waltz and dance contra dances. None of these new jigs and not
wear any clothes to speak of. We covered our hides in those days; no
tight skirts like now. You could take three or four steps inside our
skirts and then not reach the edge. One of the boys would fiddle a while
and then some one would spell him and he could get a dance. Sometimes
they would dance and fiddle too.”
She reflected that if she could not have ballrooms of gray and rose
and crystal, she wanted to be swinging across a puncheon-floor with a
dancing fiddler. This smug in-between town, which had exchanged “Money
Musk” for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic
old nor the sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet unimagined
how, turn it back to simplicity?
She herself knew two of the pioneers: the Perrys. Champ Perry was the
buyer at the grain-elevator. He weighed wagons of wheat on a rough
platform-scale, in the cracks of which the kernels sprouted every
spring. Between times he napped in the dusty peace of his office.
She called on the Perrys at their rooms above Howland & Gould's grocery.
When they were already old they had lost the money, which they had
invested in an elevator. They had given up their beloved yellow brick
house and moved into these rooms over a store, which were the Gopher
Prairie equivalent of a flat. A broad stairway led from the street
to the upper hall, along which were the doors of a lawyer's office, a
dentist's, a photographer's “studio,” the lodge-rooms of the Affiliated
Order of Spartans and, at the back, the Perrys' apartment.
They received her (their first caller in a month) with aged fluttering
tenderness. Mrs. Perry confided, “My, it's a shame we got to entertain
you in such a cramped place. And there ain't any water except that ole
iron sink outside in the hall, but still, as I say to Champ, beggars
can't be choosers. 'Sides, the brick house was too big for me to sweep,
and it was way out, and it's nice to be living down here among folks.
Yes, we're glad to be here. But----Some day, maybe we can have a house
of our own again. We're saving up----Oh, dear, if we could have our own
home! But these rooms are real nice, ain't they!”
As old people will, the world over, they had moved as much as possible
of their familiar furniture into this small space. Carol had none of the
superiority she felt toward Mrs. Lyman Cass's plutocratic parlor. She
was at home here. She noted with tenderness all the makeshifts: the
darned chair-arms, the patent rocker covered with sleazy cretonne, the
pasted strips of paper mending the birch-bark napkin-rings labeled “Papa”
and “Mama.”
She hinted of her new enthusiasm. To find one of the “young folks” who
took them seriously, heartened the Perrys, and she easily drew from
them the principles by which Gopher Prairie should be born again--should
again become amusing to live in.
This was their philosophy complete . . . in the era of aeroplanes and
syndicalism:
The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational,
and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordained
standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. “We don't need
all this new-fangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that's
ruining our young men in colleges. What we need is to get back to the
true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have
it preached to us.”
The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the
agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs.
All socialists ought to be hanged.
“Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals
in his novels, and folks say he's made prett' near a million dollars out
of 'em.”
People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred
are wicked.
Europeans are still wickeder.
It doesn't hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody
who touches wine is headed straight for hell.
Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be.
Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody.
The farmers want too much for their wheat.
The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the salaries they
pay.
There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybody
worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm.
IV
Carol's hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the nodding
dwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home with a headache.
Next day she saw Miles Bjornstam on the street.
“Just back from Montana. Great summer. Pumped my lungs chuck-full of
Rocky Mountain air. Now for another whirl at sassing the bosses of
Gopher Prairie.” She smiled at him, and the Perrys faded, the pioneers
faded, till they were but daguerreotypes in a black walnut cupboard.
CHAPTER XIII
SHE tried, more from loyalty than from desire, to call upon the Perrys
on a November evening when Kennicott was away. They were not at home.
Like a child who has no one to play with she loitered through the dark
hall. She saw a light under an office door. She knocked. To the person
who opened she murmured, “Do you happen to know where the Perrys are?”
She realized that it was Guy Pollock.
“I'm awfully sorry, Mrs. Kennicott, but I don't know. Won't you come in
and wait for them?”
“W-why----” she observed, as she reflected that in Gopher Prairie it
is not decent to call on a man; as she decided that no, really, she
wouldn't go in; and as she went in.
“I didn't know your office was up here.”
“Yes, office, town-house, and chateau in Picardy. But you can't see
the chateau and town-house (next to the Duke of Sutherland's). They're
beyond that inner door. They are a cot and a wash-stand and my other
suit and the blue crepe tie you said you liked.”
“You remember my saying that?”
“Of course. I always shall. Please try this chair.”
She glanced about the rusty office--gaunt stove, shelves of tan
law-books, desk-chair filled with newspapers so long sat upon that they
were in holes and smudged to grayness. There were only two things which
suggested Guy Pollock. On the green felt of the table-desk, between
legal blanks and a clotted inkwell, was a cloissone vase. On a swing
shelf was a row of books unfamiliar to Gopher Prairie: Mosher editions
of the poets, black and red German novels, a Charles Lamb in crushed
levant.
Guy did not sit down. He quartered the office, a grayhound on the scent;
a grayhound with glasses tilted forward on his thin nose, and a silky
indecisive brown mustache. He had a golf jacket of jersey, worn through
at the creases in the sleeves. She noted that he did not apologize for
it, as Kennicott would have done.
He made conversation: “I didn't know you were a bosom friend of the
Perrys. Champ is the salt of the earth but somehow I can't imagine him
joining you in symbolic dancing, or making improvements on the Diesel
engine.”
“No. He's a dear soul, bless him, but he belongs in the National Museum,
along with General Grant's sword, and I'm----Oh, I suppose I'm seeking
for a gospel that will evangelize Gopher Prairie.”
“Really? Evangelize it to what?”
“To anything that's definite. Seriousness or frivolousness or both. I
wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it's merely
safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?”
“Is anything the matter with it? Isn't there perhaps something the
matter with you and me? (May I join you in the honor of having something
the matter?)”
“(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it's the town.”
“Because they enjoy skating more than biology?”
“But I'm not only more interested in biology than the Jolly Seventeen,
but also in skating! I'll skate with them, or slide, or throw snowballs,
just as gladly as talk with you.”
(“Oh no!”)
(“Yes!) But they want to stay home and embroider.”
“Perhaps. I'm not defending the town. It's merely----I'm a confirmed