Main Street
so useful that folks would pay him a million dollars for existing,' and
Perce gave him the once-over and come right back, 'Have, eh?' he says.
'Well,' he says, 'I've been looking for a man so useful sweeping floors
that I could pay him four dollars a day. Want the job, my friend?' Ha,
ha, ha! Say, you know how lippy Bjornstam is? Well for once he didn't
have a thing to say. He tried to get fresh, and tell what a rotten
town this is, and Perce come right back at him, 'If you don't like this
country, you better get out of it and go back to Germany, where you
belong!' Say, maybe us fellows didn't give Bjornstam the horse-laugh
though! Oh, Perce is the white-haired boy in this burg, all rightee!”
V
Bresnahan had borrowed Jackson Elder's motor; he stopped at the
Kennicotts'; he bawled at Carol, rocking with Hugh on the porch, “Better
come for a ride.”
She wanted to snub him. “Thanks so much, but I'm being maternal.”
“Bring him along! Bring him along!” Bresnahan was out of the seat,
stalking up the sidewalk, and the rest of her protests and dignities
were feeble.
She did not bring Hugh along.
Bresnahan was silent for a mile, in words, But he looked at her as
though he meant her to know that he understood everything she thought.
She observed how deep was his chest.
“Lovely fields over there,” he said.
“You really like them? There's no profit in them.”
He chuckled. “Sister, you can't get away with it. I'm onto you. You
consider me a big bluff. Well, maybe I am. But so are you, my dear--and
pretty enough so that I'd try to make love to you, if I weren't afraid
you'd slap me.”
“Mr. Bresnahan, do you talk that way to your wife's friends? And do you
call them 'sister'?”
“As a matter of fact, I do! And I make 'em like it. Score two!” But his
chuckle was not so rotund, and he was very attentive to the ammeter.
In a moment he was cautiously attacking: “That's a wonderful boy, Will
Kennicott. Great work these country practitioners are doing. The other
day, in Washington, I was talking to a big scientific shark, a professor
in Johns Hopkins medical school, and he was saying that no one has ever
sufficiently appreciated the general practitioner and the sympathy
and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the young scientific
fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories
that they miss the human element. Except in the case of a few freak
diseases that no respectable human being would waste his time having,
it's the old doc that keeps a community well, mind and body. And
strikes me that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed counter
practitioners I've ever met. Eh?”
“I'm sure he is. He's a servant of reality.”
“Come again? Um. Yes. All of that, whatever that is. . . . Say, child,
you don't care a whole lot for Gopher Prairie, if I'm not mistaken.”
“Nope.”
“There's where you're missing a big chance. There's nothing to these
cities. Believe me, I KNOW! This is a good town, as they go. You're
lucky to be here. I wish I could shy on!”
“Very well, why don't you?”
“Huh? Why--Lord--can't get away fr----”
“You don't have to stay. I do! So I want to change it. Do you know that
men like you, prominent men, do quite a reasonable amount of harm by
insisting that your native towns and native states are perfect? It's
you who encourage the denizens not to change. They quote you, and go on
believing that they live in paradise, and----” She clenched her fist.
“The incredible dullness of it!”
“Suppose you were right. Even so, don't you think you waste a lot of
thundering on one poor scared little town? Kind of mean!”
“I tell you it's dull. DULL!”
“The folks don't find it dull. These couples like the Haydocks have a
high old time; dances and cards----”
“They don't. They're bored. Almost every one here is. Vacuousness and
bad manners and spiteful gossip--that's what I hate.”
“Those things--course they're here. So are they in Boston! And every
place else! Why, the faults you find in this town are simply human
nature, and never will be changed.”
“Perhaps. But in a Boston all the good Carols (I'll admit I have no
faults) can find one another and play. But here--I'm alone, in a stale
pool--except as it's stirred by the great Mr. Bresnahan!”
“My Lord, to hear you tell it, a fellow 'd think that all the denizens,
as you impolitely call 'em, are so confoundedly unhappy that it's a
wonder they don't all up and commit suicide. But they seem to struggle
along somehow!”
“They don't know what they miss. And anybody can endure anything. Look
at men in mines and in prisons.”
He drew up on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. He glanced across
the reeds reflected on the water, the quiver of wavelets like crumpled
tinfoil, the distant shores patched with dark woods, silvery oats and
deep yellow wheat. He patted her hand. “Sis----Carol, you're a darling
girl, but you're difficult. Know what I think?”
“Yes.”
“Humph. Maybe you do, but----My humble (not too humble!) opinion is that
you like to be different. You like to think you're peculiar. Why, if you
knew how many tens of thousands of women, especially in New York, say
just what you do, you'd lose all the fun of thinking you're a lone
genius and you'd be on the band-wagon whooping it up for Gopher Prairie
and a good decent family life. There's always about a million young
women just out of college who want to teach their grandmothers how to
suck eggs.”
“How proud you are of that homely rustic metaphor! You use it at
'banquets' and directors' meetings, and boast of your climb from a
humble homestead.”
“Huh! You may have my number. I'm not telling. But look here: You're
so prejudiced against Gopher Prairie that you overshoot the mark;
you antagonize those who might be inclined to agree with you in some
particulars but----Great guns, the town can't be all wrong!”
“No, it isn't. But it could be. Let me tell you a fable. Imagine a
cavewoman complaining to her mate. She doesn't like one single thing;
she hates the damp cave, the rats running over her bare legs, the stiff
skin garments, the eating of half-raw meat, her husband's bushy face,
the constant battles, and the worship of the spirits who will hoodoo her
unless she gives the priests her best claw necklace. Her man protests,
'But it can't all be wrong!' and he thinks he has reduced her to
absurdity. Now you assume that a world which produces a Percy Bresnahan
and a Velvet Motor Company must be civilized. It is? Aren't we only
about half-way along in barbarism? I suggest Mrs. Bogart as a test. And
we'll continue in barbarism just as long as people as nearly intelligent
as you continue to defend things as they are because they are.”
“You're a fair spieler, child. But, by golly, I'd like to see you try
to design a new manifold, or run a factory and keep a lot of your fellow
reds from Czech-slovenski-magyar-godknowswheria on the job! You'd drop
your theories so darn quick! I'm not any defender of things as they are.
Sure. They're rotten. Only I'm sensible.”
He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty
to friends. She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside
of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when
an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing
statistics.
He was so much the man, the worker, the friend, that she liked him when
she most tried to stand out against him; he was so much the successful
executive that she did not want him to despise her. His manner of
sneering at what he called “parlor socialists” (though the phrase was
not overwhelmingly new) had a power which made her wish to placate his
company of well-fed, speed-loving administrators. When he demanded,
“Would you like to associate with nothing but a lot of turkey-necked,
horn-spectacled nuts that have adenoids and need a hair-cut, and that
spend all their time kicking about 'conditions' and never do a lick of
work?” she said, “No, but just the same----” When he asserted, “Even
if your cavewoman was right in knocking the whole works, I bet some
red-blooded Regular Fellow, some real He-man, found her a nice dry cave,
and not any whining criticizing radical,” she wriggled her head feebly,
between a nod and a shake.
His large hands, sensual lips, easy voice supported his self-confidence.
He made her feel young and soft--as Kennicott had once made her feel.
She had nothing to say when he bent his powerful head and experimented,
“My dear, I'm sorry I'm going away from this town. You'd be a darling
child to play with. You ARE pretty! Some day in Boston I'll show you how
we buy a lunch. Well, hang it, got to be starting back.”
The only answer to his gospel of beef which she could find, when she was
home, was a wail of “But just the same----”
She did not see him again before he departed for Washington.
His eyes remained. His glances at her lips and hair and shoulders had
revealed to her that she was not a wife-and-mother alone, but a girl;
that there still were men in the world, as there had been in college
days.
That admiration led her to study Kennicott, to tear at the shroud of
intimacy, to perceive the strangeness of the most familiar.
CHAPTER XXIV
I
ALL that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott. She recalled
a hundred grotesqueries: her comic dismay at his having chewed tobacco,
the evening when she had tried to read poetry to him; matters which had
seemed to vanish with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that
he had been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She made
much of her consoling affection for him in little things. She liked the
homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his strength and handiness
as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; his boyishness when he ran
to her to be comforted because he had found rust in the barrel of his
pump-gun. But at the highest he was to her another Hugh, without the
glamor of Hugh's unknown future.
There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning.
Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other doctors the
Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage but remained in town, dusty
and irritable. In the afternoon, when she went to Oleson & McGuire's
(formerly Dahl & Oleson's), Carol was vexed by the assumption of
the youthful clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be
neighborly and rude. He was no more brusquely familiar than a dozen
other clerks of the town, but her nerves were heat-scorched.
When she asked for codfish, for supper, he grunted, “What d'you want
that darned old dry stuff for?”
“I like it!”
“Punk! Guess the doc can afford something better than that. Try some of
the new wienies we got in. Swell. The Haydocks use 'em.”
She exploded. “My dear young man, it is not your duty to instruct me in
housekeeping, and it doesn't particularly concern me what the Haydocks
condescend to approve!”
He was hurt. He hastily wrapped up the leprous fragment of fish; he
gaped as she trailed out. She lamented, “I shouldn't have spoken so. He
didn't mean anything. He doesn't know when he is being rude.”
Her repentance was not proof against Uncle Whittier when she stopped in
at his grocery for salt and a package of safety matches. Uncle Whittier,
in a shirt collarless and soaked with sweat in a brown streak down his
back, was whining at a clerk, “Come on now, get a hustle on and lug
that pound cake up to Mis' Cass's. Some folks in this town think a
storekeeper ain't got nothing to do but chase out 'phone-orders. . . .
Hello, Carrie. That dress you got on looks kind of low in the neck to
me. May be decent and modest--I suppose I'm old-fashioned--but I never
thought much of showing the whole town a woman's bust! Hee, hee, hee!