Main Street
have to go and work for four years, picking out the pupils for
debates, and drilling them, and nagging at them to get them to look up
references, and begging them to choose their own subjects--four years,
to get up a couple of good debates! And she comes rushing in, and
expects in one year to change the whole town into a lollypop paradise
with everybody stopping everything else to grow tulips and drink tea.
And it's a comfy homey old town, too!”
She had such an outburst after each of Carol's campaigns--for better
Thanatopsis programs, for Shavian plays, for more human schools--but she
never betrayed herself, and always she was penitent.
Vida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal. She believed that
details could excitingly be altered, but that things-in-general were
comely and kind and immutable. Carol was, without understanding or
accepting it, a revolutionist, a radical, and therefore possessed of
“constructive ideas,” which only the destroyer can have, since the
reformer believes that all the essential constructing has already been
done. After years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more
than the fancied loss of Kennicott's love which held Vida irritably
fascinated.
But the birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion. She was
indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in having borne
Kennicott's child. She admitted that Carol seemed to have affection and
immaculate care for the baby, but she began to identify herself now with
Kennicott, and in this phase to feel that she had endured quite too much
from Carol's instability.
She recalled certain other women who had come from the Outside and had
not appreciated Gopher Prairie. She remembered the rector's wife who had
been chilly to callers and who was rumored throughout the town to
have said, “Re-ah-ly I cawn't endure this bucolic heartiness in the
responses.” The woman was positively known to have worn handkerchiefs in
her bodice as padding--oh, the town had simply roared at her. Of course
the rector and she were got rid of in a few months.
Then there was the mysterious woman with the dyed hair and penciled
eyebrows, who wore tight English dresses, like basques, who smelled of
stale musk, who flirted with the men and got them to advance money
for her expenses in a lawsuit, who laughed at Vida's reading at a
school-entertainment, and went off owing a hotel-bill and the three
hundred dollars she had borrowed.
Vida insisted that she loved Carol, but with some satisfaction she
compared her to these traducers of the town.
II
Vida had enjoyed Raymie Wutherspoon's singing in the Episcopal choir;
she had thoroughly reviewed the weather with him at Methodist sociables
and in the Bon Ton. But she did not really know him till she moved to
Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house. It was five years after her affair with
Kennicott. She was thirty-nine, Raymie perhaps a year younger.
She said to him, and sincerely, “My! You can do anything, with your
brains and tact and that heavenly voice. You were so good in 'The Girl
from Kankakee.' You made me feel terribly stupid. If you'd gone on the
stage, I believe you'd be just as good as anybody in Minneapolis. But
still, I'm not sorry you stuck to business. It's such a constructive
career.”
“Do you really think so?” yearned Raymie, across the apple-sauce.
It was the first time that either of them had found a dependable
intellectual companionship. They looked down on Willis Woodford the
bank-clerk, and his anxious babycentric wife, the silent Lyman Casses,
the slangy traveling man, and the rest of Mrs. Gurrey's unenlightened
guests. They sat opposite, and they sat late. They were exhilarated to
find that they agreed in confession of faith:
“People like Sam Clark and Harry Haydock aren't earnest about music and
pictures and eloquent sermons and really refined movies, but then, on
the other hand, people like Carol Kennicott put too much stress on all
this art. Folks ought to appreciate lovely things, but just the same,
they got to be practical and--they got to look at things in a practical
way.”
Smiling, passing each other the pressed-glass pickle-dish, seeing Mrs.
Gurrey's linty supper-cloth irradiated by the light of intimacy, Vida
and Raymie talked about Carol's rose-colored turban, Carol's sweetness,
Carol's new low shoes, Carol's erroneous theory that there was no need
of strict discipline in school, Carol's amiability in the Bon Ton,
Carol's flow of wild ideas, which, honestly, just simply made you
nervous trying to keep track of them.
About the lovely display of gents' shirts in the Bon Ton window as
dressed by Raymie, about Raymie's offertory last Sunday, the fact that
there weren't any of these new solos as nice as “Jerusalem the Golden,”
and the way Raymie stood up to Juanita Haydock when she came into the
store and tried to run things and he as much as told her that she was
so anxious to have folks think she was smart and bright that she
said things she didn't mean, and anyway, Raymie was running the
shoe-department, and if Juanita, or Harry either, didn't like the way he
ran things, they could go get another man.
About Vida's new jabot which made her look thirty-two (Vida's estimate)
or twenty-two (Raymie's estimate), Vida's plan to have the high-school
Debating Society give a playlet, and the difficulty of keeping the
younger boys well behaved on the playground when a big lubber like Cy
Bogart acted up so.
About the picture post-card which Mrs. Dawson had sent to Mrs. Cass from
Pasadena, showing roses growing right outdoors in February, the change
in time on No. 4, the reckless way Dr. Gould always drove his auto, the
reckless way almost all these people drove their autos, the fallacy of
supposing that these socialists could carry on a government for as much
as six months if they ever did have a chance to try out their theories,
and the crazy way in which Carol jumped from subject to subject.
Vida had once beheld Raymie as a thin man with spectacles, mournful
drawn-out face, and colorless stiff hair. Now she noted that his jaw was
square, that his long hands moved quickly and were bleached in a refined
manner, and that his trusting eyes indicated that he had “led a clean
life.” She began to call him “Ray,” and to bounce in defense of his
unselfishness and thoughtfulness every time Juanita Haydock or Rita
Gould giggled about him at the Jolly Seventeen.
On a Sunday afternoon of late autumn they walked down to Lake
Minniemashie. Ray said that he would like to see the ocean; it must be a
grand sight; it must be much grander than a lake, even a great big lake.
Vida had seen it, she stated modestly; she had seen it on a summer trip
to Cape Cod.
“Have you been clear to Cape Cod? Massachusetts? I knew you'd traveled,
but I never realized you'd been that far!”
Made taller and younger by his interest she poured out, “Oh my yes.
It was a wonderful trip. So many points of interest through
Massachusetts--historical. There's Lexington where we turned back
the redcoats, and Longfellow's home at Cambridge, and Cape Cod--just
everything--fishermen and whale-ships and sand-dunes and everything.”
She wished that she had a little cane to carry. He broke off a willow
branch.
“My, you're strong!” she said.
“No, not very. I wish there was a Y. M. C. A. here, so I could take up
regular exercise. I used to think I could do pretty good acrobatics, if
I had a chance.”
“I'm sure you could. You're unusually lithe, for a large man.”
“Oh no, not so very. But I wish we had a Y. M. It would be dandy to have
lectures and everything, and I'd like to take a class in improving
the memory--I believe a fellow ought to go on educating himself and
improving his mind even if he is in business, don't you, Vida--I guess
I'm kind of fresh to call you 'Vida'!”
“I've been calling you 'Ray' for weeks!”
He wondered why she sounded tart.
He helped her down the bank to the edge of the lake but dropped her hand
abruptly, and as they sat on a willow log and he brushed her sleeve, he
delicately moved over and murmured, “Oh, excuse me--accident.”
She stared at the mud-browned chilly water, the floating gray reeds.
“You look so thoughtful,” he said.
She threw out her hands. “I am! Will you kindly tell me what's the use
of--anything! Oh, don't mind me. I'm a moody old hen. Tell me about your
plan for getting a partnership in the Bon Ton. I do think you're right:
Harry Haydock and that mean old Simons ought to give you one.”
He hymned the old unhappy wars in which he had been Achilles and the
mellifluous Nestor, yet gone his righteous ways unheeded by the cruel
kings. . . . “Why, if I've told 'em once, I've told 'em a dozen times to
get in a side-line of light-weight pants for gents' summer wear, and of
course here they go and let a cheap kike like Rifkin beat them to it and
grab the trade right off 'em, and then Harry said--you know how Harry
is, maybe he don't mean to be grouchy, but he's such a sore-head----”
He gave her a hand to rise. “If you don't MIND. I think a fellow is
awful if a lady goes on a walk with him and she can't trust him and he
tries to flirt with her and all.”
“I'm sure you're highly trustworthy!” she snapped, and she sprang up
without his aid. Then, smiling excessively, “Uh--don't you think Carol
sometimes fails to appreciate Dr. Will's ability?”
III
Ray habitually asked her about his window-trimming, the display of the
new shoes, the best music for the entertainment at the Eastern Star, and
(though he was recognized as a professional authority on what the town
called “gents' furnishings”) about his own clothes. She persuaded him
not to wear the small bow ties which made him look like an elongated
Sunday School scholar. Once she burst out:
“Ray, I could shake you! Do you know you're too apologetic? You always
appreciate other people too much. You fuss over Carol Kennicott when she
has some crazy theory that we all ought to turn anarchists or live on
figs and nuts or something. And you listen when Harry Haydock tries to
show off and talk about turnovers and credits and things you know lots
better than he does. Look folks in the eye! Glare at 'em! Talk deep!
You're the smartest man in town, if you only knew it. You ARE!”
He could not believe it. He kept coming back to her for confirmation. He
practised glaring and talking deep, but he circuitously hinted to Vida
that when he had tried to look Harry Haydock in the eye, Harry had
inquired, “What's the matter with you, Raymie? Got a pain?” But
afterward Harry had asked about Kantbeatum socks in a manner which, Ray
felt, was somehow different from his former condescension.
They were sitting on the squat yellow satin settee in the boarding-house
parlor. As Ray reannounced that he simply wouldn't stand it many more
years if Harry didn't give him a partnership, his gesticulating hand
touched Vida's shoulders.
“Oh, excuse me!” he pleaded.
“It's all right. Well, I think I must be running up to my room.
Headache,” she said briefly.
IV
Ray and she had stopped in at Dyer's for a hot chocolate on their way
home from the movies, that March evening. Vida speculated, “Do you know
that I may not be here next year?”
“What do you mean?”
With her fragile narrow nails she smoothed the glass slab which formed
the top of the round table at which they sat. She peeped through the
glass at the perfume-boxes of black and gold and citron in the hollow
table. She looked about at shelves of red rubber water-bottles, pale
yellow sponges, wash-rags with blue borders, hair-brushes of polished
cherry backs. She shook her head like a nervous medium coming out of a
trance, stared at him unhappily, demanded:
“Why should I stay here? And I must make up my mind. Now. Time to renew