Main Street
inevitability, which the audience had heard most often.
The local superintendent, who remained through the week while the other
enlighteners went to other Chautauquas for their daily performances. The
superintendent was a bookish, underfed man who worked hard at rousing
artificial enthusiasm, at trying to make the audience cheer by dividing
them into competitive squads and telling them that they were intelligent
and made splendid communal noises. He gave most of the morning lectures,
droning with equal unhappy facility about poetry, the Holy Land, and the
injustice to employers in any system of profit-sharing.
The final item was a man who neither lectured, inspired, nor
entertained; a plain little man with his hands in his pockets. All the
other speakers had confessed, “I cannot keep from telling the citizens
of your beautiful city that none of the talent on this circuit have
found a more charming spot or more enterprising and hospitable people.”
But the little man suggested that the architecture of Gopher Prairie was
haphazard, and that it was sottish to let the lake-front be monopolized
by the cinder-heaped wall of the railroad embankment. Afterward the
audience grumbled, “Maybe that guy's got the right dope, but what's the
use of looking on the dark side of things all the time? New ideas are
first-rate, but not all this criticism. Enough trouble in life without
looking for it!”
Thus the Chautauqua, as Carol saw it. After it, the town felt proud and
educated.
VIII
Two weeks later the Great War smote Europe.
For a month Gopher Prairie had the delight of shuddering, then, as the
war settled down to a business of trench-fighting, they forgot.
When Carol talked about the Balkans, and the possibility of a German
revolution, Kennicott yawned, “Oh yes, it's a great old scrap, but it's
none of our business. Folks out here are too busy growing corn to monkey
with any fool war that those foreigners want to get themselves into.”
It was Miles Bjornstam who said, “I can't figure it out. I'm opposed to
wars, but still, seems like Germany has got to be licked because them
Junkers stands in the way of progress.”
She was calling on Miles and Bea, early in autumn. They had received
her with cries, with dusting of chairs, and a running to fetch water for
coffee. Miles stood and beamed at her. He fell often and joyously into
his old irreverence about the lords of Gopher Prairie, but always--with
a certain difficulty--he added something decorous and appreciative.
“Lots of people have come to see you, haven't they?” Carol hinted.
“Why, Bea's cousin Tina comes in right along, and the foreman at the
mill, and----Oh, we have good times. Say, take a look at that Bea!
Wouldn't you think she was a canary-bird, to listen to her, and to see
that Scandahoofian tow-head of hers? But say, know what she is? She's
a mother hen! Way she fusses over me--way she makes old Miles wear a
necktie! Hate to spoil her by letting her hear it, but she's one pretty
darn nice--nice----Hell! What do we care if none of the dirty snobs come
and call? We've got each other.”
Carol worried about their struggle, but she forgot it in the stress of
sickness and fear. For that autumn she knew that a baby was coming,
that at last life promised to be interesting in the peril of the great
change.
CHAPTER XX
I
THE baby was coming. Each morning she was nauseated, chilly, bedraggled,
and certain that she would never again be attractive; each twilight
she was afraid. She did not feel exalted, but unkempt and furious. The
period of daily sickness crawled into an endless time of boredom. It
became difficult for her to move about, and she raged that she, who
had been slim and light-footed, should have to lean on a stick, and be
heartily commented upon by street gossips. She was encircled by greasy
eyes. Every matron hinted, “Now that you're going to be a mother,
dearie, you'll get over all these ideas of yours and settle down.”
She felt that willy-nilly she was being initiated into the assembly
of housekeepers; with the baby for hostage, she would never escape;
presently she would be drinking coffee and rocking and talking about
diapers.
“I could stand fighting them. I'm used to that. But this being taken in,
being taken as a matter of course, I can't stand it--and I must stand
it!”
She alternately detested herself for not appreciating the kindly women,
and detested them for their advice: lugubrious hints as to how much she
would suffer in labor, details of baby-hygiene based on long experience
and total misunderstanding, superstitious cautions about the things she
must eat and read and look at in prenatal care for the baby's soul, and
always a pest of simpering baby-talk. Mrs. Champ Perry bustled in to
lend “Ben Hur,” as a preventive of future infant immorality. The Widow
Bogart appeared trailing pinkish exclamations, “And how is our lovely
'ittle muzzy today! My, ain't it just like they always say: being in
a Family Way does make the girlie so lovely, just like a Madonna. Tell
me--” Her whisper was tinged with salaciousness--“does oo feel the dear
itsy one stirring, the pledge of love? I remember with Cy, of course he
was so big----”
“I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogart. My complexion is rotten, and my hair
is coming out, and I look like a potato-bag, and I think my arches are
falling, and he isn't a pledge of love, and I'm afraid he WILL look like
us, and I don't believe in mother-devotion, and the whole business is a
confounded nuisance of a biological process,” remarked Carol.
Then the baby was born, without unusual difficulty: a boy with straight
back and strong legs. The first day she hated him for the tides of pain
and hopeless fear he had caused; she resented his raw ugliness. After
that she loved him with all the devotion and instinct at which she
had scoffed. She marveled at the perfection of the miniature hands as
noisily as did Kennicott, she was overwhelmed by the trust with
which the baby turned to her; passion for him grew with each unpoetic
irritating thing she had to do for him.
He was named Hugh, for her father.
Hugh developed into a thin healthy child with a large head and straight
delicate hair of a faint brown. He was thoughtful and casual--a
Kennicott.
For two years nothing else existed. She did not, as the cynical matrons
had prophesied, “give up worrying about the world and other folks'
babies soon as she got one of her own to fight for.” The barbarity of
that willingness to sacrifice other children so that one child might
have too much was impossible to her. But she would sacrifice herself.
She understood consecration--she who answered Kennicott's hints about
having Hugh christened: “I refuse to insult my baby and myself by asking
an ignorant young man in a frock coat to sanction him, to permit me
to have him! I refuse to subject him to any devil-chasing rites! If I
didn't give my baby--MY BABY--enough sanctification in those nine hours
of hell, then he can't get any more out of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel!”
“Well, Baptists hardly ever christen kids. I was kind of thinking more
about Reverend Warren,” said Kennicott.
Hugh was her reason for living, promise of accomplishment in the future,
shrine of adoration--and a diverting toy. “I thought I'd be a dilettante
mother, but I'm as dismayingly natural as Mrs. Bogart,” she boasted.
For two--years Carol was a part of the town; as much one of Our Young
Mothers as Mrs. McGanum. Her opinionation seemed dead; she had no
apparent desire for escape; her brooding centered on Hugh. While she
wondered at the pearl texture of his ear she exulted, “I feel like an
old woman, with a skin like sandpaper, beside him, and I'm glad of it!
He is perfect. He shall have everything. He sha'n't always stay here in
Gopher Prairie. . . . I wonder which is really the best, Harvard or Yale
or Oxford?”
II
The people who hemmed her in had been brilliantly reinforced by Mr. and
Mrs. Whittier N. Smail--Kennicott's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie.
The true Main Streetite defines a relative as a person to whose house
you go uninvited, to stay as long as you like. If you hear that Lym Cass
on his journey East has spent all his time “visiting” in Oyster Center,
it does not mean that he prefers that village to the rest of New
England, but that he has relatives there. It does not mean that he has
written to the relatives these many years, nor that they have ever given
signs of a desire to look upon him. But “you wouldn't expect a man to
go and spend good money at a hotel in Boston, when his own third cousins
live right in the same state, would you?”
When the Smails sold their creamery in North Dakota they visited Mr.
Smail's sister, Kennicott's mother, at Lac-qui-Meurt, then plodded on
to Gopher Prairie to stay with their nephew. They appeared unannounced,
before the baby was born, took their welcome for granted, and
immediately began to complain of the fact that their room faced north.
Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie assumed that it was their privilege as
relatives to laugh at Carol, and their duty as Christians to let her
know how absurd her “notions” were. They objected to the food, to
Oscarina's lack of friendliness, to the wind, the rain, and the
immodesty of Carol's maternity gowns. They were strong and enduring; for
an hour at a time they could go on heaving questions about her father's
income, about her theology, and about the reason why she had not put on
her rubbers when she had gone across the street. For fussy discussion
they had a rich, full genius, and their example developed in Kennicott a
tendency to the same form of affectionate flaying.
If Carol was so indiscreet as to murmur that she had a small headache,
instantly the two Smails and Kennicott were at it. Every five minutes,
every time she sat down or rose or spoke to Oscarina, they twanged, “Is
your head better now? Where does it hurt? Don't you keep hartshorn in
the house? Didn't you walk too far today? Have you tried hartshorn?
Don't you keep some in the house so it will be handy? Does it feel
better now? How does it feel? Do your eyes hurt, too? What time do you
usually get to bed? As late as THAT? Well! How does it feel now?”
In her presence Uncle Whittier snorted at Kennicott, “Carol get these
headaches often? Huh? Be better for her if she didn't go gadding around
to all these bridge-whist parties, and took some care of herself once in
a while!”
They kept it up, commenting, questioning, commenting, questioning,
till her determination broke and she bleated, “For heaven's SAKE, don't
dis-CUSS it! My head 's all RIGHT!”
She listened to the Smails and Kennicott trying to determine by
dialectics whether the copy of the Dauntless, which Aunt Bessie wanted
to send to her sister in Alberta, ought to have two or four cents
postage on it. Carol would have taken it to the drug store and weighed
it, but then she was a dreamer, while they were practical people (as
they frequently admitted). So they sought to evolve the postal rate from
their inner consciousnesses, which, combined with entire frankness in
thinking aloud, was their method of settling all problems.
The Smails did not “believe in all this nonsense” about privacy and
reticence. When Carol left a letter from her sister on the table, she
was astounded to hear from Uncle Whittier, “I see your sister says her
husband is doing fine. You ought to go see her oftener. I asked Will
and he says you don't go see her very often. My! You ought to go see her
oftener!”
If Carol was writing a letter to a classmate, or planning the week's
menus, she could be certain that Aunt Bessie would pop in and titter,
“Now don't let me disturb you, I just wanted to see where you were,