Main Street
out, came back with Dr. and Mrs. Dillon.
The four of them drank rather bad coffee which Pollock made on a
kerosene burner. They laughed, and spoke of Minneapolis, and were
tremendously tactful; and Carol started for home, through the November
wind.
CHAPTER XIV
SHE was marching home.
“No. I couldn't fall in love with him. I like him, very much. But
he's too much of a recluse. Could I kiss him? No! No! Guy Pollock at
twenty-six I could have kissed him then, maybe, even if I were married
to some one else, and probably I'd have been glib in persuading myself
that 'it wasn't really wrong.'
“The amazing thing is that I'm not more amazed at myself. I, the
virtuous young matron. Am I to be trusted? If the Prince Charming
came----
“A Gopher Prairie housewife, married a year, and yearning for a 'Prince
Charming' like a bachfisch of sixteen! They say that marriage is a magic
change. But I'm not changed. But----
“No! I wouldn't want to fall in love, even if the Prince did come. I
wouldn't want to hurt Will. I am fond of Will. I am! He doesn't stir me,
not any longer. But I depend on him. He is home and children.
“I wonder when we will begin to have children? I do want them.
“I wonder whether I remembered to tell Bea to have hominy tomorrow,
instead of oatmeal? She will have gone to bed by now. Perhaps I'll be up
early enough----
“Ever so fond of Will. I wouldn't hurt him, even if I had to lose the
mad love. If the Prince came I'd look once at him, and run. Darn fast!
Oh, Carol, you are not heroic nor fine. You are the immutable vulgar
young female.
“But I'm not the faithless wife who enjoys confiding that she's
'misunderstood.' Oh, I'm not, I'm not!
“Am I?
“At least I didn't whisper to Guy about Will's faults and his blindness
to my remarkable soul. I didn't! Matter of fact, Will probably
understands me perfectly! If only--if he would just back me up in
rousing the town.
“How many, how incredibly many wives there must be who tingle over the
first Guy Pollock who smiles at them. No! I will not be one of that
herd of yearners! The coy virgin brides. Yet probably if the Prince were
young and dared to face life----
“I'm not half as well oriented as that Mrs. Dillon. So obviously adoring
her dentist! And seeing Guy only as an eccentric fogy.
“They weren't silk, Mrs. Dillon's stockings. They were lisle. Her legs
are nice and slim. But no nicer than mine. I hate cotton tops on silk
stockings. . . . Are my ankles getting fat? I will NOT have fat ankles!
“No. I am fond of Will. His work--one farmer he pulls through diphtheria
is worth all my yammering for a castle in Spain. A castle with baths.
“This hat is so tight. I must stretch it. Guy liked it.
“There's the house. I'm awfully chilly. Time to get out the fur coat.
I wonder if I'll ever have a beaver coat? Nutria is NOT the same thing!
Beaver-glossy. Like to run my fingers over it. Guy's mustache like
beaver. How utterly absurd!
“I am, I AM fond of Will, and----Can't I ever find another word than
'fond'?
“He's home. He'll think I was out late.
“Why can't he ever remember to pull down the shades? Cy Bogart and all
the beastly boys peeping in. But the poor dear, he's absent-minded about
minute--minush--whatever the word is. He has so much worry and work,
while I do nothing but jabber to Bea.
“I MUSTN'T forget the hominy----”
She was flying into the hall. Kennicott looked up from the Journal of
the American Medical Society.
“Hello! What time did you get back?” she cried.
“About nine. You been gadding. Here it is past eleven!” Good-natured yet
not quite approving.
“Did it feel neglected?”
“Well, you didn't remember to close the lower draft in the furnace.”
“Oh, I'm so sorry. But I don't often forget things like that, do I?”
She dropped into his lap and (after he had jerked back his head to save
his eye-glasses, and removed the glasses, and settled her in a position
less cramping to his legs, and casually cleared his throat) he kissed
her amiably, and remarked:
“Nope, I must say you're fairly good about things like that. I wasn't
kicking. I just meant I wouldn't want the fire to go out on us. Leave
that draft open and the fire might burn up and go out on us. And the
nights are beginning to get pretty cold again. Pretty cold on my drive.
I put the side-curtains up, it was so chilly. But the generator is
working all right now.”
“Yes. It is chilly. But I feel fine after my walk.”
“Go walking?”
“I went up to see the Perrys.” By a definite act of will she added
the truth: “They weren't in. And I saw Guy Pollock. Dropped into his
office.”
“Why, you haven't been sitting and chinning with him till eleven
o'clock?”
“Of course there were some other people there and----Will! What do you
think of Dr. Westlake?”
“Westlake? Why?”
“I noticed him on the street today.”
“Was he limping? If the poor fish would have his teeth X-rayed, I'll bet
nine and a half cents he'd find an abscess there. 'Rheumatism' he calls
it. Rheumatism, hell! He's behind the times. Wonder he doesn't bleed
himself! Wellllllll----” A profound and serious yawn. “I hate to break
up the party, but it's getting late, and a doctor never knows when he'll
get routed out before morning.” (She remembered that he had given this
explanation, in these words, not less than thirty times in the year.) “I
guess we better be trotting up to bed. I've wound the clock and looked
at the furnace. Did you lock the front door when you came in?”
They trailed up-stairs, after he had turned out the lights and twice
tested the front door to make sure it was fast. While they talked
they were preparing for bed. Carol still sought to maintain privacy by
undressing behind the screen of the closet door. Kennicott was not so
reticent. Tonight, as every night, she was irritated by having to push
the old plush chair out of the way before she could open the closet
door. Every time she opened the door she shoved the chair. Ten times an
hour. But Kennicott liked to have the chair in the room, and there was
no place for it except in front of the closet.
She pushed it, felt angry, hid her anger. Kennicott was yawning, more
portentously. The room smelled stale. She shrugged and became chatty:
“You were speaking of Dr. Westlake. Tell me--you've never summed him up:
Is he really a good doctor?”
“Oh yes, he's a wise old coot.”
(“There! You see there is no medical rivalry. Not in my house!” she said
triumphantly to Guy Pollock.)
She hung her silk petticoat on a closet hook, and went on, “Dr. Westlake
is so gentle and scholarly----”
“Well, I don't know as I'd say he was such a whale of a scholar. I've
always had a suspicion he did a good deal of four-flushing about that.
He likes to have people think he keeps up his French and Greek and Lord
knows what all; and he's always got an old Dago book lying around the
sitting-room, but I've got a hunch he reads detective stories 'bout like
the rest of us. And I don't know where he'd ever learn so dog-gone many
languages anyway! He kind of lets people assume he went to Harvard
or Berlin or Oxford or somewhere, but I looked him up in the medical
register, and he graduated from a hick college in Pennsylvania, 'way
back in 1861!”
“But this is the important thing: Is he an honest doctor?”
“How do you mean 'honest'? Depends on what you mean.”
“Suppose you were sick. Would you call him in? Would you let me call him
in?”
“Not if I were well enough to cuss and bite, I wouldn't! No, SIR! I
wouldn't have the old fake in the house. Makes me tired, his everlasting
palavering and soft-soaping. He's all right for an ordinary bellyache
or holding some fool woman's hand, but I wouldn't call him in for an
honest-to-God illness, not much I wouldn't, NO-sir! You know I don't
do much back-biting, but same time----I'll tell you, Carrrie: I've never
got over being sore at Westlake for the way he treated Mrs. Jonderquist.
Nothing the matter with her, what she really needed was a rest, but
Westlake kept calling on her and calling on her for weeks, almost every
day, and he sent her a good big fat bill, too, you can bet! I never
did forgive him for that. Nice decent hard-working people like the
Jonderquists!”
In her batiste nightgown she was standing at the bureau engaged in the
invariable rites of wishing that she had a real dressing-table with a
triple mirror, of bending toward the streaky glass and raising her chin
to inspect a pin-head mole on her throat, and finally of brushing her
hair. In rhythm to the strokes she went on:
“But, Will, there isn't any of what you might call financial rivalry
between you and the partners--Westlake and McGanum--is there?”
He flipped into bed with a solemn back-somersault and a ludicrous kick
of his heels as he tucked his legs under the blankets. He snorted, “Lord
no! I never begrudge any man a nickel he can get away from me--fairly.”
“But is Westlake fair? Isn't he sly?”
“Sly is the word. He's a fox, that boy!”
She saw Guy Pollock's grin in the mirror. She flushed.
Kennicott, with his arms behind his head, was yawning:
“Yump. He's smooth, too smooth. But I bet I make prett' near as much
as Westlake and McGanum both together, though I've never wanted to grab
more than my just share. If anybody wants to go to the partners instead
of to me, that's his business. Though I must say it makes me tired when
Westlake gets hold of the Dawsons. Here Luke Dawson had been coming to
me for every toeache and headache and a lot of little things that just
wasted my time, and then when his grandchild was here last summer and
had summer-complaint, I suppose, or something like that, probably--you
know, the time you and I drove up to Lac-qui-Meurt--why, Westlake got
hold of Ma Dawson, and scared her to death, and made her think the kid
had appendicitis, and, by golly, if he and McGanum didn't operate, and
holler their heads off about the terrible adhesions they found, and what
a regular Charley and Will Mayo they were for classy surgery. They let
on that if they'd waited two hours more the kid would have developed
peritonitis, and God knows what all; and then they collected a nice
fat hundred and fifty dollars. And probably they'd have charged three
hundred, if they hadn't been afraid of me! I'm no hog, but I certainly
do hate to give old Luke ten dollars' worth of advice for a dollar and a
half, and then see a hundred and fifty go glimmering. And if I can't do
a better 'pendectomy than either Westlake or McGanum, I'll eat my hat!”
As she crept into bed she was dazzled by Guy's blazing grin. She
experimented:
“But Westlake is cleverer than his son-in-law, don't you think?”
“Yes, Westlake may be old-fashioned and all that, but he's got a certain
amount of intuition, while McGanum goes into everything bull-headed, and
butts his way through like a damn yahoo, and tries to argue his patients
into having whatever he diagnoses them as having! About the best thing
Mac can do is to stick to baby-snatching. He's just about on a par with
this bone-pounding chiropractor female, Mrs. Mattie Gooch.”
“Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. McGanum, though--they're nice. They've been
awfully cordial to me.”
“Well, no reason why they shouldn't be, is there? Oh, they're nice
enough--though you can bet your bottom dollar they're both plugging for
their husbands all the time, trying to get the business. And I don't
know as I call it so damn cordial in Mrs. McGanum when I holler at her
on the street and she nods back like she had a sore neck. Still, she's
all right. It's Ma Westlake that makes the mischief, pussyfooting around
all the time. But I wouldn't trust any Westlake out of the whole lot,
and while Mrs. McGanum SEEMS square enough, you don't never want to
forget that she's Westlake's daughter. You bet!”