Main Street
had been twitching at her; sought to dismiss all the opinionation of an
insurgent era. She wanted to shine upon the veal-faced bristly-bearded
Lyman Cass as much as upon Miles Bjornstam or Guy Pollock. She gave a
reception for the Thanatopsis Club. But her real acquiring of merit
was in calling upon that Mrs. Bogart whose gossipy good opinion was so
valuable to a doctor.
Though the Bogart house was next door she had entered it but three
times. Now she put on her new moleskin cap, which made her face small
and innocent, she rubbed off the traces of a lip-stick--and fled across
the alley before her admirable resolution should sneak away.
The age of houses, like the age of men, has small relation to their
years. The dull-green cottage of the good Widow Bogart was twenty years
old, but it had the antiquity of Cheops, and the smell of mummy-dust.
Its neatness rebuked the street. The two stones by the path were painted
yellow; the outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice
that it was not concealed at all; the last iron dog remaining in Gopher
Prairie stood among whitewashed conch-shells upon the lawn. The hallway
was dismayingly scrubbed; the kitchen was an exercise in mathematics,
with problems worked out in equidistant chairs.
The parlor was kept for visitors. Carol suggested, “Let's sit in the
kitchen. Please don't trouble to light the parlor stove.”
“No trouble at all! My gracious, and you coming so seldom and all, and
the kitchen is a perfect sight, I try to keep it clean, but Cy will
track mud all over it, I've spoken to him about it a hundred times if
I've spoken once, no, you sit right there, dearie, and I'll make a fire,
no trouble at all, practically no trouble at all.”
Mrs. Bogart groaned, rubbed her joints, and repeatedly dusted her hands
while she made the fire, and when Carol tried to help she lamented,
“Oh, it doesn't matter; guess I ain't good for much but toil and workin'
anyway; seems as though that's what a lot of folks think.”
The parlor was distinguished by an expanse of rag carpet from which, as
they entered, Mrs. Bogart hastily picked one sad dead fly. In the center
of the carpet was a rug depicting a red Newfoundland dog, reclining in a
green and yellow daisy field and labeled “Our Friend.” The parlor organ,
tall and thin, was adorned with a mirror partly circular, partly square,
and partly diamond-shaped, and with brackets holding a pot of geraniums,
a mouth-organ, and a copy of “The Oldtime Hymnal.” On the center
table was a Sears-Roebuck mail-order catalogue, a silver frame with
photographs of the Baptist Church and of an elderly clergyman, and
an aluminum tray containing a rattlesnake's rattle and a broken
spectacle-lens.
Mrs. Bogart spoke of the eloquence of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel,
the coldness of cold days, the price of poplar wood, Dave Dyer's new
hair-cut, and Cy Bogart's essential piety. “As I said to his Sunday
School teacher, Cy may be a little wild, but that's because he's got so
much better brains than a lot of these boys, and this farmer that claims
he caught Cy stealing 'beggies, is a liar, and I ought to have the law
on him.”
Mrs. Bogart went thoroughly into the rumor that the girl waiter at
Billy's Lunch was not all she might be--or, rather, was quite all she
might be.
“My lands, what can you expect when everybody knows what her mother was?
And if these traveling salesmen would let her alone she would be all
right, though I certainly don't believe she ought to be allowed to think
she can pull the wool over our eyes. The sooner she's sent to the
school for incorrigible girls down at Sauk Centre, the better for all
and----Won't you just have a cup of coffee, Carol dearie, I'm sure you
won't mind old Aunty Bogart calling you by your first name when you
think how long I've known Will, and I was such a friend of his dear
lovely mother when she lived here and--was that fur cap expensive?
But----Don't you think it's awful, the way folks talk in this town?”
Mrs. Bogart hitched her chair nearer. Her large face, with its
disturbing collection of moles and lone black hairs, wrinkled
cunningly. She showed her decayed teeth in a reproving smile, and in the
confidential voice of one who scents stale bedroom scandal she breathed:
“I just don't see how folks can talk and act like they do. You don't
know the things that go on under cover. This town--why it's only the
religious training I've given Cy that's kept him so innocent of--things.
Just the other day----I never pay no attention to stories, but I heard
it mighty good and straight that Harry Haydock is carrying on with a
girl that clerks in a store down in Minneapolis, and poor Juanita
not knowing anything about it--though maybe it's the judgment of
God, because before she married Harry she acted up with more than one
boy----Well, I don't like to say it, and maybe I ain't up-to-date, like
Cy says, but I always believed a lady shouldn't even give names to all
sorts of dreadful things, but just the same I know there was at least
one case where Juanita and a boy--well, they were just dreadful.
And--and----Then there's that Ole Jenson the grocer, that thinks he's so
plaguey smart, and I know he made up to a farmer's wife and----And this
awful man Bjornstam that does chores, and Nat Hicks and----”
There was, it seemed, no person in town who was not living a life of
shame except Mrs. Bogart, and naturally she resented it.
She knew. She had always happened to be there. Once, she whispered, she
was going by when an indiscreet window-shade had been left up a couple
of inches. Once she had noticed a man and woman holding hands, and right
at a Methodist sociable!
“Another thing----Heaven knows I never want to start trouble, but I
can't help what I see from my back steps, and I notice your hired girl
Bea carrying on with the grocery boys and all----”
“Mrs. Bogart! I'd trust Bea as I would myself!”
“Oh, dearie, you don't understand me! I'm sure she's a good girl. I mean
she's green, and I hope that none of these horrid young men that there
are around town will get her into trouble! It's their parents' fault,
letting them run wild and hear evil things. If I had my way there
wouldn't be none of them, not boys nor girls neither, allowed to know
anything about--about things till they was married. It's terrible the
bald way that some folks talk. It just shows and gives away what awful
thoughts they got inside them, and there's nothing can cure them except
coming right to God and kneeling down like I do at prayer-meeting every
Wednesday evening, and saying, 'O God, I would be a miserable sinner
except for thy grace.'
“I'd make every last one of these brats go to Sunday School and learn
to think about nice things 'stead of about cigarettes and goings-on--and
these dances they have at the lodges are the worst thing that ever
happened to this town, lot of young men squeezing girls and finding
out----Oh, it's dreadful. I've told the mayor he ought to put a stop
to them and----There was one boy in this town, I don't want to be
suspicious or uncharitable but----”
It was half an hour before Carol escaped.
She stopped on her own porch and thought viciously:
“If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I
must be on the side of the devil. But--isn't she like me? She too wants
to 'reform the town'! She too criticizes everybody! She too thinks the
men are vulgar and limited! AM I LIKE HER? This is ghastly!”
That evening she did not merely consent to play cribbage with Kennicott;
she urged him to play; and she worked up a hectic interest in land-deals
and Sam Clark.
VIII
In courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph of Nels
Erdstrom's baby and log cabin, but she had never seen the Erdstroms.
They had become merely “patients of the doctor.” Kennicott telephoned
her on a mid-December afternoon, “Want to throw your coat on and drive
out to Erdstrom's with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice.”
“Oh yes!” She hastened to put on woolen stockings, high boots, sweater,
muffler, cap, mittens.
The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for the motor. They
drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked over them was a blue woolen
cover, prickly to her wrists, and outside of it a buffalo robe, humble
and moth-eaten now, used ever since the bison herds had streaked the
prairie a few miles to the west.
The scattered houses between which they passed in town were small and
desolate in contrast to the expanse of huge snowy yards and wide
street. They crossed the railroad tracks, and instantly were in the farm
country. The big piebald horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to
trot. The carriage squeaked in rhythm. Kennicott drove with clucks of
“There boy, take it easy!” He was thinking. He paid no attention to
Carol. Yet it was he who commented, “Pretty nice, over there,” as they
approached an oak-grove where shifty winter sunlight quivered in the
hollow between two snow-drifts.
They drove from the natural prairie to a cleared district which twenty
years ago had been forest. The country seemed to stretch unchanging to
the North Pole: low hill, brush-scraggly bottom, reedy creek, muskrat
mound, fields with frozen brown clods thrust up through the snow.
Her ears and nose were pinched; her breath frosted her collar; her
fingers ached.
“Getting colder,” she said.
“Yup.”
That was all their conversation for three miles. Yet she was happy.
They reached Nels Erdstrom's at four, and with a throb she recognized
the courageous venture which had lured her to Gopher Prairie: the
cleared fields, furrows among stumps, a log cabin chinked with mud and
roofed with dry hay. But Nels had prospered. He used the log cabin as a
barn; and a new house reared up, a proud, unwise, Gopher Prairie
house, the more naked and ungraceful in its glossy white paint and pink
trimmings. Every tree had been cut down. The house was so unsheltered,
so battered by the wind, so bleakly thrust out into the harsh clearing,
that Carol shivered. But they were welcomed warmly enough in the
kitchen, with its crisp new plaster, its black and nickel range, its
cream separator in a corner.
Mrs. Erdstrom begged her to sit in the parlor, where there was a
phonograph and an oak and leather davenport, the prairie farmer's
proofs of social progress, but she dropped down by the kitchen stove and
insisted, “Please don't mind me.” When Mrs. Erdstrom had followed the
doctor out of the room Carol glanced in a friendly way at the grained
pine cupboard, the framed Lutheran Konfirmations Attest, the traces
of fried eggs and sausages on the dining table against the wall, and a
jewel among calendars, presenting not only a lithographic young woman
with cherry lips, and a Swedish advertisement of Axel Egge's grocery,
but also a thermometer and a match-holder.
She saw that a boy of four or five was staring at her from the hall,
a boy in gingham shirt and faded corduroy trousers, but large-eyed,
firm-mouthed, wide-browed. He vanished, then peeped in again, biting his
knuckles, turning his shoulder toward her in shyness.
Didn't she remember--what was it?--Kennicott sitting beside her at Fort
Snelling, urging, “See how scared that baby is. Needs some woman like
you.”
Magic had fluttered about her then--magic of sunset and cool air and the
curiosity of lovers. She held out her hands as much to that sanctity as
to the boy.
He edged into the room, doubtfully sucking his thumb.
“Hello,” she said. “What's your name?”
“Hee, hee, hee!”
“You're quite right. I agree with you. Silly people like me always ask
children their names.”
“Hee, hee, hee!”
“Come here and I'll tell you the story of--well, I don't know what it
will be about, but it will have a slim heroine and a Prince Charming.”