Main Street
“Of course the pure Samuel never speaks of such erring ladies in his
private conversations!”
“Not when there's ladies around! You can bet your life on that!”
“So the impurity lies in failing to pretend that----”
“Now we won't go into all that--eugenics or whatever damn fad you choose
to call it. As I say, first you shock him, and then you become so darn
flighty that nobody can follow you. Either you want to dance, or you
bang the piano, or else you get moody as the devil and don't want to
talk or anything else. If you must be temperamental, why can't you be
that way by yourself?”
“My dear man, there's nothing I'd like better than to be by myself
occasionally! To have a room of my own! I suppose you expect me to sit
here and dream delicately and satisfy my 'temperamentality' while you
wander in from the bathroom with lather all over your face, and shout,
'Seen my brown pants?'”
“Huh!” He did not sound impressed. He made no answer. He turned out of
bed, his feet making one solid thud on the floor. He marched from the
room, a grotesque figure in baggy union-pajamas. She heard him drawing
a drink of water at the bathroom tap. She was furious at the
contemptuousness of his exit. She snuggled down in bed, and looked
away from him as he returned. He ignored her. As he flumped into bed he
yawned, and casually stated:
“Well, you'll have plenty of privacy when we build a new house.
“When?”
“Oh, I'll build it all right, don't you fret! But of course I don't
expect any credit for it.”
Now it was she who grunted “Huh!” and ignored him, and felt independent
and masterful as she shot up out of bed, turned her back on him,
fished a lone and petrified chocolate out of her glove-box in the
top right-hand drawer of the bureau, gnawed at it, found that it had
cocoanut filling, said “Damn!” wished that she had not said it, so that
she might be superior to his colloquialism, and hurled the chocolate
into the wastebasket, where it made an evil and mocking clatter among
the debris of torn linen collars and toothpaste box. Then, in great
dignity and self-dramatization, she returned to bed.
All this time he had been talking on, embroidering his assertion that
he “didn't expect any credit.” She was reflecting that he was a rustic,
that she hated him, that she had been insane to marry him, that she had
married him only because she was tired of work, that she must get her
long gloves cleaned, that she would never do anything more for him,
and that she mustn't forget his hominy for breakfast. She was roused to
attention by his storming:
“I'm a fool to think about a new house. By the time I get it built
you'll probably have succeeded in your plan to get me completely in
Dutch with every friend and every patient I've got.”
She sat up with a bounce. She said coldly, “Thank you very much for
revealing your real opinion of me. If that's the way you feel, if I'm
such a hindrance to you, I can't stay under this roof another minute.
And I am perfectly well able to earn my own living. I will go at once,
and you may get a divorce at your pleasure! What you want is a nice
sweet cow of a woman who will enjoy having your dear friends talk about
the weather and spit on the floor!”
“Tut! Don't be a fool!”
“You will very soon find out whether I'm a fool or not! I mean it! Do
you think I'd stay here one second after I found out that I was injuring
you? At least I have enough sense of justice not to do that.”
“Please stop flying off at tangents, Carrie. This----”
“Tangents? TANGENTS! Let me tell you----”
“----isn't a theater-play; it's a serious effort to have us get together
on fundamentals. We've both been cranky, and said a lot of things we
didn't mean. I wish we were a couple o' bloomin' poets and just talked
about roses and moonshine, but we're human. All right. Let's cut out
jabbing at each other. Let's admit we both do fool things. See here: You
KNOW you feel superior to folks. You're not as bad as I say, but you're
not as good as you say--not by a long shot! What's the reason you're so
superior? Why can't you take folks as they are?”
Her preparations for stalking out of the Doll's House were not yet
visible. She mused:
“I think perhaps it's my childhood.” She halted. When she went on
her voice had an artificial sound, her words the bookish quality of
emotional meditation. “My father was the tenderest man in the world, but
he did feel superior to ordinary people. Well, he was! And the Minnesota
Valley----I used to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a
time, my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to write
poems. The shiny tilted roofs below me, and the river, and beyond it the
level fields in the mist, and the rim of palisades across----It held my
thoughts in. I LIVED, in the valley. But the prairie--all my thoughts go
flying off into the big space. Do you think it might be that?”
“Um, well, maybe, but----Carrie, you always talk so much about getting
all you can out of life, and not letting the years slip by, and here you
deliberately go and deprive yourself of a lot of real good home pleasure
by not enjoying people unless they wear frock coats and trot out----”
(“Morning clothes. Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean t' interrupt you.”)
“----to a lot of tea-parties. Take Jack Elder. You think Jack hasn't got
any ideas about anything but manufacturing and the tariff on lumber.
But do you know that Jack is nutty about music? He'll put a grand-opera
record on the phonograph and sit and listen to it and close his
eyes----Or you take Lym Cass. Ever realize what a well-informed man he
is?”
“But IS he? Gopher Prairie calls anybody 'well-informed' who's been
through the State Capitol and heard about Gladstone.”
“Now I'm telling you! Lym reads a lot--solid stuff--history. Or take
Mart Mahoney, the garageman. He's got a lot of Perry prints of famous
pictures in his office. Or old Bingham Playfair, that died here 'bout a
year ago--lived seven miles out. He was a captain in the Civil War,
and knew General Sherman, and they say he was a miner in Nevada right
alongside of Mark Twain. You'll find these characters in all these small
towns, and a pile of savvy in every single one of them, if you just dig
for it.”
“I know. And I do love them. Especially people like Champ Perry. But I
can't be so very enthusiastic over the smug cits like Jack Elder.”
“Then I'm a smug cit, too, whatever that is.”
“No, you're a scientist. Oh, I will try and get the music out of Mr.
Elder. Only, why can't he let it COME out, instead of being ashamed of
it, and always talking about hunting dogs? But I will try. Is it all
right now?”
“Sure. But there's one other thing. You might give me some attention,
too!”
“That's unjust! You have everything I am!”
“No, I haven't. You think you respect me--you always hand out some
spiel about my being so 'useful.' But you never think of me as having
ambitions, just as much as you have----”
“Perhaps not. I think of you as being perfectly satisfied.”
“Well, I'm not, not by a long shot! I don't want to be a plug general
practitioner all my life, like Westlake, and die in harness because I
can't get out of it, and have 'em say, 'He was a good fellow, but he
couldn't save a cent.' Not that I care a whoop what they say, after I've
kicked in and can't hear 'em, but I want to put enough money away so you
and I can be independent some day, and not have to work unless I feel
like it, and I want to have a good house--by golly, I'll have as good
a house as anybody in THIS town!--and if we want to travel and see your
Tormina or whatever it is, why we can do it, with enough money in our
jeans so we won't have to take anything off anybody, or fret about our
old age. You never worry about what might happen if we got sick and
didn't have a good fat wad salted away, do you!”
“I don't suppose I do.”
“Well then, I have to do it for you. And if you think for one moment
I want to be stuck in this burg all my life, and not have a chance to
travel and see the different points of interest and all that, then you
simply don't get me. I want to have a squint at the world, much's you
do. Only, I'm practical about it. First place, I'm going to make the
money--I'm investing in good safe farmlands. Do you understand why now?”
“Yes.”
“Will you try and see if you can't think of me as something more than
just a dollar-chasing roughneck?”
“Oh, my dear, I haven't been just! I AM difficile. And I won't call on
the Dillons! And if Dr. Dillon is working for Westlake and McGanum, I
hate him!”
CHAPTER XV
THAT December she was in love with her husband.
She romanticized herself not as a great reformer but as the wife of a
country physician. The realities of the doctor's household were colored
by her pride.
Late at night, a step on the wooden porch, heard through her confusion
of sleep; the storm-door opened; fumbling over the inner door-panels;
the buzz of the electric bell. Kennicott muttering “Gol darn it,” but
patiently creeping out of bed, remembering to draw the covers up to keep
her warm, feeling for slippers and bathrobe, clumping down-stairs.
From below, half-heard in her drowsiness, a colloquy in the
pidgin-German of the farmers who have forgotten the Old Country language
without learning the new:
“Hello, Barney, wass willst du?”
“Morgen, doctor. Die Frau ist ja awful sick. All night she been having
an awful pain in de belly.”
“How long she been this way? Wie lang, eh?”
“I dunno, maybe two days.”
“Why didn't you come for me yesterday, instead of waking me up out of a
sound sleep? Here it is two o'clock! So spat--warum, eh?”
“Nun aber, I know it, but she got soch a lot vorse last evening. I
t'ought maybe all de time it go avay, but it got a lot vorse.”
“Any fever?”
“Vell ja, I t'ink she got fever.”
“Which side is the pain on?”
“Huh?”
“Das Schmertz--die Weh--which side is it on? Here?”
“So. Right here it is.”
“Any rigidity there?”
“Huh?”
“Is it rigid--stiff--I mean, does the belly feel hard to the fingers?”
“I dunno. She ain't said yet.”
“What she been eating?”
“Vell, I t'ink about vot ve alwis eat, maybe corn beef and cabbage and
sausage, und so weiter. Doc, sie weint immer, all the time she holler
like hell. I vish you come.”
“Well, all right, but you call me earlier, next time. Look here, Barney,
you better install a 'phone--telephone haben. Some of you Dutchmen will
be dying one of these days before you can fetch the doctor.”
The door closing. Barney's wagon--the wheels silent in the snow, but the
wagon-body rattling. Kennicott clicking the receiver-hook to rouse the
night telephone-operator, giving a number, waiting, cursing mildly,
waiting again, and at last growling, “Hello, Gus, this is the doctor.
Say, uh, send me up a team. Guess snow's too thick for a machine. Going
eight miles south. All right. Huh? The hell I will! Don't you go back
to sleep. Huh? Well, that's all right now, you didn't wait so very darn
long. All right, Gus; shoot her along. By!”
His step on the stairs; his quiet moving about the frigid room while he
dressed; his abstracted and meaningless cough. She was supposed to be
asleep; she was too exquisitely drowsy to break the charm by speaking.
On a slip of paper laid on the bureau--she could hear the pencil
grinding against the marble slab--he wrote his destination. He went out,
hungry, chilly, unprotesting; and she, before she fell asleep again,
loved him for his sturdiness, and saw the drama of his riding by night
to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured children
standing at a window, waiting for him. He suddenly had in her eyes the
heroism of a wireless operator on a ship in a collision; of an explorer,