Main Street
dramatic association--just because we didn't graduate into Ibsen the
very first thing. You want perfection all at once. Do you know what the
finest thing you've done is--aside from bringing Hugh into the world?
It was the help you gave Dr. Will during baby-welfare week. You didn't
demand that each baby be a philosopher and artist before you weighed
him, as you do with the rest of us.
“And now I'm afraid perhaps I'll hurt you. We're going to have a new
schoolbuilding in this town--in just a few years--and we'll have it
without one bit of help or interest from you!
“Professor Mott and I and some others have been dinging away at the
moneyed men for years. We didn't call on you because you would never
stand the pound-pound-pounding year after year without one bit of
encouragement. And we've won! I've got the promise of everybody who
counts that just as soon as war-conditions permit, they'll vote the
bonds for the schoolhouse. And we'll have a wonderful building--lovely
brown brick, with big windows, and agricultural and manual-training
departments. When we get it, that'll be my answer to all your theories!”
“I'm glad. And I'm ashamed I haven't had any part in getting it.
But----Please don't think I'm unsympathetic if I ask one question: Will
the teachers in the hygienic new building go on informing the children
that Persia is a yellow spot on the map, and 'Caesar' the title of a
book of grammatical puzzles?”
VIII
Vida was indignant; Carol was apologetic; they talked for another hour,
the eternal Mary and Martha--an immoralist Mary and a reformist Martha.
It was Vida who conquered.
The fact that she had been left out of the campaign for the new
schoolbuilding disconcerted Carol. She laid her dreams of perfection
aside. When Vida asked her to take charge of a group of Camp Fire Girls,
she obeyed, and had definite pleasure out of the Indian dances and
ritual and costumes. She went more regularly to the Thanatopsis. With
Vida as lieutenant and unofficial commander she campaigned for a village
nurse to attend poor families, raised the fund herself, saw to it that
the nurse was young and strong and amiable and intelligent.
Yet all the while she beheld the burly cynical Frenchman and the
diaphanous dancers as clearly as the child sees its air-born playmates;
she relished the Camp Fire Girls not because, in Vida's words, “this
Scout training will help so much to make them Good Wives,” but because
she hoped that the Sioux dances would bring subversive color into their
dinginess.
She helped Ella Stowbody to set out plants in the tiny triangular park
at the railroad station; she squatted in the dirt, with a small curved
trowel and the most decorous of gardening gauntlets; she talked to Ella
about the public-spiritedness of fuchsias and cannas; and she felt
that she was scrubbing a temple deserted by the gods and empty even of
incense and the sound of chanting. Passengers looking from trains saw
her as a village woman of fading prettiness, incorruptible virtue, and
no abnormalities; the baggageman heard her say, “Oh yes, I do think
it will be a good example for the children”; and all the while she saw
herself running garlanded through the streets of Babylon.
Planting led her to botanizing. She never got much farther than
recognizing the tiger lily and the wild rose, but she rediscovered
Hugh. “What does the buttercup say, mummy?” he cried, his hand full of
straggly grasses, his cheek gilded with pollen. She knelt to embrace
him; she affirmed that he made life more than full; she was altogether
reconciled . . . for an hour.
But she awoke at night to hovering death. She crept away from the hump
of bedding that was Kennicott; tiptoed into the bathroom and, by the
mirror in the door of the medicine-cabinet, examined her pallid face.
Wasn't she growing visibly older in ratio as Vida grew plumper and
younger? Wasn't her nose sharper? Wasn't her neck granulated? She
stared and choked. She was only thirty. But the five years since her
marriage--had they not gone by as hastily and stupidly as though she had
been under ether; would time not slink past till death? She pounded her
fist on the cool enameled rim of the bathtub and raged mutely against
the indifferent gods:
“I don't care! I won't endure it! They lie so--Vida and Will and Aunt
Bessie--they tell me I ought to be satisfied with Hugh and a good home
and planting seven nasturtiums in a station garden! I am I! When I die
the world will be annihilated, as far as I'm concerned. I am I! I'm not
content to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I want them for
me! Damn Vida! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe
that a display of potatoes at Howland & Gould's is enough beauty and
strangeness?”
CHAPTER XXIII
I
WHEN America entered the Great European War, Vida sent Raymie off to an
officers' training-camp--less than a year after her wedding. Raymie was
diligent and rather strong. He came out a first lieutenant of infantry,
and was one of the earliest sent abroad.
Carol grew definitely afraid of Vida as Vida transferred the passion
which had been released in marriage to the cause of the war; as she
lost all tolerance. When Carol was touched by the desire for heroism
in Raymie and tried tactfully to express it, Vida made her feel like an
impertinent child.
By enlistment and draft, the sons of Lyman Cass, Nat Hicks, Sam Clark
joined the army. But most of the soldiers were the sons of German and
Swedish farmers unknown to Carol. Dr. Terry Gould and Dr. McGanum became
captains in the medical corps, and were stationed at camps in Iowa and
Georgia. They were the only officers, besides Raymie, from the Gopher
Prairie district. Kennicott wanted to go with them, but the several
doctors of the town forgot medical rivalry and, meeting in council,
decided that he would do better to wait and keep the town well till he
should be needed. Kennicott was forty-two now; the only youngish doctor
left in a radius of eighteen miles. Old Dr. Westlake, who loved comfort
like a cat, protestingly rolled out at night for country calls, and
hunted through his collar-box for his G. A. R. button.
Carol did not quite know what she thought about Kennicott's going.
Certainly she was no Spartan wife. She knew that he wanted to go; she
knew that this longing was always in him, behind his unchanged
trudging and remarks about the weather. She felt for him an admiring
affection--and she was sorry that she had nothing more than affection.
Cy Bogart was the spectacular warrior of the town. Cy was no longer the
weedy boy who had sat in the loft speculating about Carol's egotism and
the mysteries of generation. He was nineteen now, tall, broad, busy, the
“town sport,” famous for his ability to drink beer, to shake dice, to
tell undesirable stories, and, from his post in front of Dyer's drug
store, to embarrass the girls by “jollying” them as they passed. His
face was at once peach-bloomed and pimply.
Cy was to be heard publishing it abroad that if he couldn't get the
Widow Bogart's permission to enlist, he'd run away and enlist without
it. He shouted that he “hated every dirty Hun; by gosh, if he could just
poke a bayonet into one big fat Heinie and learn him some decency and
democracy, he'd die happy.” Cy got much reputation by whipping a farmboy
named Adolph Pochbauer for being a “damn hyphenated German.” . . . This
was the younger Pochbauer, who was killed in the Argonne, while he was
trying to bring the body of his Yankee captain back to the lines. At
this time Cy Bogart was still dwelling in Gopher Prairie and planning to
go to war.
II
Everywhere Carol heard that the war was going to bring a basic change
in psychology, to purify and uplift everything from marital relations to
national politics, and she tried to exult in it. Only she did not find
it. She saw the women who made bandages for the Red Cross giving
up bridge, and laughing at having to do without sugar, but over the
surgical-dressings they did not speak of God and the souls of men, but
of Miles Bjornstam's impudence, of Terry Gould's scandalous carryings-on
with a farmer's daughter four years ago, of cooking cabbage, and of
altering blouses. Their references to the war touched atrocities only.
She herself was punctual, and efficient at making dressings, but she
could not, like Mrs. Lyman Cass and Mrs. Bogart, fill the dressings with
hate for enemies.
When she protested to Vida, “The young do the work while these old ones
sit around and interrupt us and gag with hate because they're too feeble
to do anything but hate,” then Vida turned on her:
“If you can't be reverent, at least don't be so pert and opinionated,
now when men and women are dying. Some of us--we have given up so much,
and we're glad to. At least we expect that you others sha'n't try to be
witty at our expense.”
There was weeping.
Carol did desire to see the Prussian autocracy defeated; she did
persuade herself that there were no autocracies save that of Prussia;
she did thrill to motion-pictures of troops embarking in New York; and
she was uncomfortable when she met Miles Bjornstam on the street and he
croaked:
“How's tricks? Things going fine with me; got two new cows. Well, have
you become a patriot? Eh? Sure, they'll bring democracy--the democracy
of death. Yes, sure, in every war since the Garden of Eden the workmen
have gone out to fight each other for perfectly good reasons--handed to
them by their bosses. Now me, I'm wise. I'm so wise that I know I don't
know anything about the war.”
It was not a thought of the war that remained with her after Miles's
declamation but a perception that she and Vida and all of the
good-intentioners who wanted to “do something for the common people”
were insignificant, because the “common people” were able to do things
for themselves, and highly likely to, as soon as they learned the
fact. The conception of millions of workmen like Miles taking control
frightened her, and she scuttled rapidly away from the thought of a time
when she might no longer retain the position of Lady Bountiful to the
Bjornstams and Beas and Oscarinas whom she loved--and patronized.
III
It was in June, two months after America's entrance into the war, that
the momentous event happened--the visit of the great Percy Bresnahan,
the millionaire president of the Velvet Motor Car Company of Boston, the
one native son who was always to be mentioned to strangers.
For two weeks there were rumors. Sam Clark cried to Kennicott, “Say, I
hear Perce Bresnahan is coming! By golly it'll be great to see the old
scout, eh?” Finally the Dauntless printed, on the front page with a No. 1
head, a letter from Bresnahan to Jackson Elder:
DEAR JACK:
Well, Jack, I find I can make it. I'm to go to Washington as a dollar
a year man for the government, in the aviation motor section, and tell
them how much I don't know about carburetors. But before I start in
being a hero I want to shoot out and catch me a big black bass and cuss
out you and Sam Clark and Harry Haydock and Will Kennicott and the rest
of you pirates. I'll land in G. P. on June 7, on No. 7 from Mpls. Shake
a day-day. Tell Bert Tybee to save me a glass of beer.
Sincerely yours,
Perce.
All members of the social, financial, scientific, literary, and sporting
sets were at No. 7 to meet Bresnahan; Mrs. Lyman Cass was beside Del
Snafflin the barber, and Juanita Haydock almost cordial to Miss Villets
the librarian. Carol saw Bresnahan laughing down at them from the train
vestibule--big, immaculate, overjawed, with the eye of an executive. In
the voice of the professional Good Fellow he bellowed, “Howdy, folks!”
As she was introduced to him (not he to her) Bresnahan looked into her