Main Street
Latin like I do English; and Sam Clark, the hardware man, he's a
corker--not a better man in the state to go hunting with; and if
you want culture, besides Vida Sherwin there's Reverend Warren, the
Congregational preacher, and Professor Mott, the superintendent of
schools, and Guy Pollock, the lawyer--they say he writes regular poetry
and--and Raymie Wutherspoon, he's not such an awful boob when you get to
KNOW him, and he sings swell. And----And there's plenty of others. Lym
Cass. Only of course none of them have your finesse, you might call it.
But they don't make 'em any more appreciative and so on. Come on! We're
ready for you to boss us!”
They sat on the bank below the parapet of the old fort, hidden from
observation. He circled her shoulder with his arm. Relaxed after the
walk, a chill nipping her throat, conscious of his warmth and power, she
leaned gratefully against him.
“You know I'm in love with you, Carol!”
She did not answer, but she touched the back of his hand with an
exploring finger.
“You say I'm so darn materialistic. How can I help it, unless I have you
to stir me up?”
She did not answer. She could not think.
“You say a doctor could cure a town the way he does a person. Well, you
cure the town of whatever ails it, if anything does, and I'll be your
surgical kit.”
She did not follow his words, only the burring resoluteness of them.
She was shocked, thrilled, as he kissed her cheek and cried, “There's
no use saying things and saying things and saying things. Don't my arms
talk to you--now?”
“Oh, please, please!” She wondered if she ought to be angry, but it was
a drifting thought, and she discovered that she was crying.
Then they were sitting six inches apart, pretending that they had never
been nearer, while she tried to be impersonal:
“I would like to--would like to see Gopher Prairie.”
“Trust me! Here she is! Brought some snapshots down to show you.”
Her cheek near his sleeve, she studied a dozen village pictures. They
were streaky; she saw only trees, shrubbery, a porch indistinct in leafy
shadows. But she exclaimed over the lakes: dark water reflecting wooded
bluffs, a flight of ducks, a fisherman in shirt sleeves and a wide straw
hat, holding up a string of croppies. One winter picture of the edge of
Plover Lake had the air of an etching: lustrous slide of ice, snow in
the crevices of a boggy bank, the mound of a muskrat house, reeds in
thin black lines, arches of frosty grasses. It was an impression of cool
clear vigor.
“How'd it be to skate there for a couple of hours, or go zinging along
on a fast ice-boat, and skip back home for coffee and some hot wienies?”
he demanded.
“It might be--fun.”
“But here's the picture. Here's where you come in.”
A photograph of a forest clearing: pathetic new furrows straggling among
stumps, a clumsy log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with hay.
In front of it a sagging woman with tight-drawn hair, and a baby
bedraggled, smeary, glorious-eyed.
“Those are the kind of folks I practise among, good share of the time.
Nels Erdstrom, fine clean young Svenska. He'll have a corking farm in
ten years, but now----I operated his wife on a kitchen table, with my
driver giving the anesthetic. Look at that scared baby! Needs some woman
with hands like yours. Waiting for you! Just look at that baby's eyes,
look how he's begging----”
“Don't! They hurt me. Oh, it would be sweet to help him--so sweet.”
As his arms moved toward her she answered all her doubts with “Sweet, so
sweet.”
CHAPTER III
UNDER the rolling clouds of the prairie a moving mass of steel. An
irritable clank and rattle beneath a prolonged roar. The sharp scent of
oranges cutting the soggy smell of unbathed people and ancient baggage.
Towns as planless as a scattering of pasteboard boxes on an attic floor.
The stretch of faded gold stubble broken only by clumps of willows
encircling white houses and red barns.
No. 7, the way train, grumbling through Minnesota, imperceptibly
climbing the giant tableland that slopes in a thousand-mile rise from
hot Mississippi bottoms to the Rockies.
It is September, hot, very dusty.
There is no smug Pullman attached to the train, and the day coaches of
the East are replaced by free chair cars, with each seat cut into two
adjustable plush chairs, the head-rests covered with doubtful linen
towels. Halfway down the car is a semi-partition of carved oak columns,
but the aisle is of bare, splintery, grease-blackened wood. There is no
porter, no pillows, no provision for beds, but all today and all tonight
they will ride in this long steel box-farmers with perpetually tired
wives and children who seem all to be of the same age; workmen going to
new jobs; traveling salesmen with derbies and freshly shined shoes.
They are parched and cramped, the lines of their hands filled with
grime; they go to sleep curled in distorted attitudes, heads against the
window-panes or propped on rolled coats on seat-arms, and legs thrust
into the aisle. They do not read; apparently they do not think. They
wait. An early-wrinkled, young-old mother, moving as though her joints
were dry, opens a suit-case in which are seen creased blouses, a pair
of slippers worn through at the toes, a bottle of patent medicine, a tin
cup, a paper-covered book about dreams which the news-butcher has coaxed
her into buying. She brings out a graham cracker which she feeds to a
baby lying flat on a seat and wailing hopelessly. Most of the crumbs
drop on the red plush of the seat, and the woman sighs and tries to
brush them away, but they leap up impishly and fall back on the plush.
A soiled man and woman munch sandwiches and throw the crusts on the
floor. A large brick-colored Norwegian takes off his shoes, grunts in
relief, and props his feet in their thick gray socks against the seat in
front of him.
An old woman whose toothless mouth shuts like a mud-turtle's, and whose
hair is not so much white as yellow like moldy linen, with bands of pink
skull apparent between the tresses, anxiously lifts her bag, opens it,
peers in, closes it, puts it under the seat, and hastily picks it up and
opens it and hides it all over again. The bag is full of treasures and
of memories: a leather buckle, an ancient band-concert program,
scraps of ribbon, lace, satin. In the aisle beside her is an extremely
indignant parrakeet in a cage.
Two facing seats, overflowing with a Slovene iron-miner's family,
are littered with shoes, dolls, whisky bottles, bundles wrapped in
newspapers, a sewing bag. The oldest boy takes a mouth-organ out of his
coat pocket, wipes the tobacco crumbs off, and plays “Marching through
Georgia” till every head in the car begins to ache.
The news-butcher comes through selling chocolate bars and lemon drops.
A girl-child ceaselessly trots down to the water-cooler and back to her
seat. The stiff paper envelope which she uses for cup drips in the aisle
as she goes, and on each trip she stumbles over the feet of a carpenter,
who grunts, “Ouch! Look out!”
The dust-caked doors are open, and from the smoking-car drifts back a
visible blue line of stinging tobacco smoke, and with it a crackle of
laughter over the story which the young man in the bright blue suit and
lavender tie and light yellow shoes has just told to the squat man in
garage overalls.
The smell grows constantly thicker, more stale.
II
To each of the passengers his seat was his temporary home, and most of
the passengers were slatternly housekeepers. But one seat looked clean
and deceptively cool. In it were an obviously prosperous man and a
black-haired, fine-skinned girl whose pumps rested on an immaculate
horsehide bag.
They were Dr. Will Kennicott and his bride, Carol.
They had been married at the end of a year of conversational courtship,
and they were on their way to Gopher Prairie after a wedding journey in
the Colorado mountains.
The hordes of the way-train were not altogether new to Carol. She had
seen them on trips from St. Paul to Chicago. But now that they had
become her own people, to bathe and encourage and adorn, she had an
acute and uncomfortable interest in them. They distressed her. They
were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American
peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination
and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man
working over his order-blanks. But the older people, Yankees as well
as Norwegians, Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission to
poverty. They were peasants, she groaned.
“Isn't there any way of waking them up? What would happen if they
understood scientific agriculture?” she begged of Kennicott, her hand
groping for his.
It had been a transforming honeymoon. She had been frightened to
discover how tumultuous a feeling could be roused in her. Will had been
lordly--stalwart, jolly, impressively competent in making camp, tender
and understanding through the hours when they had lain side by side in a
tent pitched among pines high up on a lonely mountain spur.
His hand swallowed hers as he started from thoughts of the practise to
which he was returning. “These people? Wake 'em up? What for? They're
happy.”
“But they're so provincial. No, that isn't what I mean. They're--oh, so
sunk in the mud.”
“Look here, Carrie. You want to get over your city idea that because a
man's pants aren't pressed, he's a fool. These farmers are mighty keen
and up-and-coming.”
“I know! That's what hurts. Life seems so hard for them--these lonely
farms and this gritty train.”
“Oh, they don't mind it. Besides, things are changing. The auto, the
telephone, rural free delivery; they're bringing the farmers in closer
touch with the town. Takes time, you know, to change a wilderness like
this was fifty years ago. But already, why, they can hop into the Ford
or the Overland and get in to the movies on Saturday evening quicker
than you could get down to 'em by trolley in St. Paul.”
“But if it's these towns we've been passing that the farmers run to for
relief from their bleakness----Can't you understand? Just LOOK at them!”
Kennicott was amazed. Ever since childhood he had seen these towns from
trains on this same line. He grumbled, “Why, what's the matter with 'em?
Good hustling burgs. It would astonish you to know how much wheat and
rye and corn and potatoes they ship in a year.”
“But they're so ugly.”
“I'll admit they aren't comfy like Gopher Prairie. But give 'em time.”
“What's the use of giving them time unless some one has desire and
training enough to plan them? Hundreds of factories trying to make
attractive motor cars, but these towns--left to chance. No! That can't
be true. It must have taken genius to make them so scrawny!”
“Oh, they're not so bad,” was all he answered. He pretended that his
hand was the cat and hers the mouse. For the first time she tolerated
him rather than encouraged him. She was staring out at Schoenstrom, a
hamlet of perhaps a hundred and fifty inhabitants, at which the train
was stopping.
A bearded German and his pucker-mouthed wife tugged their enormous
imitation-leather satchel from under a seat and waddled out. The station
agent hoisted a dead calf aboard the baggage-car. There were no other
visible activities in Schoenstrom. In the quiet of the halt, Carol could
hear a horse kicking his stall, a carpenter shingling a roof.
The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block, facing
the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops covered with galvanized
iron, or with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow. The buildings
were as ill-assorted, as temporary-looking, as a mining-camp street in
the motion-pictures. The railroad station was a one-room frame box, a