Main Street
“Yes. . . . Then you don't think--you're quite sure I ought to stay here
in town?”
“I told you so! I certainly do!”
She crept back to her room, a small timorous figure in white.
“I can't face Will down--demand the right. He'd be obstinate. And I
can't even go off and earn my living again. Out of the habit of it. He's
driving me----I'm afraid of what he's driving me to. Afraid.
“That man in there, snoring in stale air, my husband? Could any ceremony
make him my husband?
“No. I don't want to hurt him. I want to love him. I can't, when I'm
thinking of Erik. Am I too honest--a funny topsy-turvy honesty--the
faithfulness of unfaith? I wish I had a more compartmental mind, like
men. I'm too monogamous--toward Erik!--my child Erik, who needs me.
“Is an illicit affair like a gambling debt--demands stricter honor than
the legitimate debt of matrimony, because it's not legally enforced?
“That's nonsense! I don't care in the least for Erik! Not for any man. I
want to be let alone, in a woman world--a world without Main Street,
or politicians, or business men, or men with that sudden beastly hungry
look, that glistening unfrank expression that wives know----
“If Erik were here, if he would just sit quiet and kind and talk, I
could be still, I could go to sleep.
“I am so tired. If I could sleep----”
CHAPTER XXXI
THEIR night came unheralded.
Kennicott was on a country call. It was cool but Carol huddled on the
porch, rocking, meditating, rocking. The house was lonely and repellent,
and though she sighed, “I ought to go in and read--so many things to
read--ought to go in,” she remained. Suddenly Erik was coming, turning
in, swinging open the screen door, touching her hand.
“Erik!”
“Saw your husband driving out of town. Couldn't stand it.”
“Well----You mustn't stay more than five minutes.”
“Couldn't stand not seeing you. Every day, towards evening, felt I had
to see you--pictured you so clear. I've been good though, staying away,
haven't I!”
“And you must go on being good.”
“Why must I?”
“We better not stay here on the porch. The Howlands across the street
are such window-peepers, and Mrs. Bogart----”
She did not look at him but she could divine his tremulousness as he
stumbled indoors. A moment ago the night had been coldly empty; now it
was incalculable, hot, treacherous. But it is women who are the calm
realists once they discard the fetishes of the premarital hunt. Carol
was serene as she murmured, “Hungry? I have some little honey-colored
cakes. You may have two, and then you must skip home.”
“Take me up and let me see Hugh asleep.”
“I don't believe----”
“Just a glimpse!”
“Well----”
She doubtfully led the way to the hallroom-nursery. Their heads close,
Erik's curls pleasant as they touched her cheek, they looked in at the
baby. Hugh was pink with slumber. He had burrowed into his pillow with
such energy that it was almost smothering him. Beside it was a celluloid
rhinoceros; tight in his hand a torn picture of Old King Cole.
“Shhh!” said Carol, quite automatically. She tiptoed in to pat the
pillow. As she returned to Erik she had a friendly sense of his waiting
for her. They smiled at each other. She did not think of Kennicott, the
baby's father. What she did think was that some one rather like Erik, an
older and surer Erik, ought to be Hugh's father. The three of them would
play--incredible imaginative games.
“Carol! You've told me about your own room. Let me peep in at it.”
“But you mustn't stay, not a second. We must go downstairs.”
“Yes.”
“Will you be good?”
“R-reasonably!” He was pale, large-eyed, serious.
“You've got to be more than reasonably good!” She felt sensible and
superior; she was energetic about pushing open the door.
Kennicott had always seemed out of place there but Erik surprisingly
harmonized with the spirit of the room as he stroked the books, glanced
at the prints. He held out his hands. He came toward her. She was weak,
betrayed to a warm softness. Her head was tilted back. Her eyes were
closed. Her thoughts were formless but many-colored. She felt his kiss,
diffident and reverent, on her eyelid.
Then she knew that it was impossible.
She shook herself. She sprang from him. “Please!” she said sharply.
He looked at her unyielding.
“I am fond of you,” she said. “Don't spoil everything. Be my friend.”
“How many thousands and millions of women must have said that! And now
you! And it doesn't spoil everything. It glorifies everything.”
“Dear, I do think there's a tiny streak of fairy in you--whatever you do
with it. Perhaps I'd have loved that once. But I won't. It's too late.
But I'll keep a fondness for you. Impersonal--I will be impersonal! It
needn't be just a thin talky fondness. You do need me, don't you? Only
you and my son need me. I've wanted so to be wanted! Once I wanted
love to be given to me. Now I'll be content if I can give. . . . Almost
content!
“We women, we like to do things for men. Poor men! We swoop on you when
you're defenseless and fuss over you and insist on reforming you. But
it's so pitifully deep in us. You'll be the one thing in which I haven't
failed. Do something definite! Even if it's just selling cottons. Sell
beautiful cottons--caravans from China----”
“Carol! Stop! You do love me!”
“I do not! It's just----Can't you understand? Everything crushes in on
me so, all the gaping dull people, and I look for a way out----Please
go. I can't stand any more. Please!”
He was gone. And she was not relieved by the quiet of the house. She was
empty and the house was empty and she needed him. She wanted to go
on talking, to get this threshed out, to build a sane friendship. She
wavered down to the living-room, looked out of the bay-window. He was
not to be seen. But Mrs. Westlake was. She was walking past, and in
the light from the corner arc-lamp she quickly inspected the porch, the
windows. Carol dropped the curtain, stood with movement and reflection
paralyzed. Automatically, without reasoning, she mumbled, “I will see
him again soon and make him understand we must be friends. But----The
house is so empty. It echoes so.”
II
Kennicott had seemed nervous and absent-minded through that supper-hour,
two evenings after. He prowled about the living-room, then growled:
“What the dickens have you been saying to Ma Westlake?”
Carol's book rattled. “What do you mean?”
“I told you that Westlake and his wife were jealous of us, and here you
been chumming up to them and----From what Dave tells me, Ma Westlake has
been going around town saying you told her that you hate Aunt Bessie,
and that you fixed up your own room because I snore, and you said
Bjornstam was too good for Bea, and then, just recent, that you were
sore on the town because we don't all go down on our knees and beg this
Valborg fellow to come take supper with us. God only knows what else she
says you said.”
“It's not true, any of it! I did like Mrs. Westlake, and I've called on
her, and apparently she's gone and twisted everything I've said----”
“Sure. Of course she would. Didn't I tell you she would? She's an old
cat, like her pussyfooting, hand-holding husband. Lord, if I was sick,
I'd rather have a faith-healer than Westlake, and she's another slice
off the same bacon. What I can't understand though----”
She waited, taut.
“----is whatever possessed you to let her pump you, bright a girl as
you are. I don't care what you told her--we all get peeved sometimes
and want to blow off steam, that's natural--but if you wanted to keep it
dark, why didn't you advertise it in the Dauntless, or get a megaphone
and stand on top of the hotel and holler, or do anything besides spill
it to her!”
“I know. You told me. But she was so motherly. And I didn't have any
woman----Vida 's become so married and proprietary.”
“Well, next time you'll have better sense.”
He patted her head, flumped down behind his newspaper, said nothing
more.
Enemies leered through the windows, stole on her from the hall. She had
no one save Erik. This kind good man Kennicott--he was an elder
brother. It was Erik, her fellow outcast, to whom she wanted to run for
sanctuary. Through her storm she was, to the eye, sitting quietly with
her fingers between the pages of a baby-blue book on home-dressmaking.
But her dismay at Mrs. Westlake's treachery had risen to active dread.
What had the woman said of her and Erik? What did she know? What had she
seen? Who else would join in the baying hunt? Who else had seen her
with Erik? What had she to fear from the Dyers, Cy Bogart, Juanita, Aunt
Bessie? What precisely had she answered to Mrs. Bogart's questioning?
All next day she was too restless to stay home, yet as she walked the
streets on fictitious errands she was afraid of every person she met.
She waited for them to speak; waited with foreboding. She repeated, “I
mustn't ever see Erik again.” But the words did not register. She had no
ecstatic indulgence in the sense of guilt which is, to the women of Main
Street, the surest escape from blank tediousness.
At five, crumpled in a chair in the living-room, she started at the
sound of the bell. Some one opened the door. She waited, uneasy. Vida
Sherwin charged into the room. “Here's the one person I can trust!”
Carol rejoiced.
Vida was serious but affectionate. She bustled at Carol with, “Oh, there
you are, dearie, so glad t' find you in, sit down, want to talk to you.”
Carol sat, obedient.
Vida fussily tugged over a large chair and launched out:
“I've been hearing vague rumors you were interested in this Erik
Valborg. I knew you couldn't be guilty, and I'm surer than ever of it
now. Here we are, as blooming as a daisy.”
“How does a respectable matron look when she feels guilty?”
Carol sounded resentful.
“Why----Oh, it would show! Besides! I know that you, of all people, are
the one that can appreciate Dr. Will.”
“What have you been hearing?”
“Nothing, really. I just heard Mrs. Bogart say she'd seen you and
Valborg walking together a lot.” Vida's chirping slackened. She looked
at her nails. “But----I suspect you do like Valborg. Oh, I don't mean in
any wrong way. But you're young; you don't know what an innocent liking
might drift into. You always pretend to be so sophisticated and all,
but you're a baby. Just because you are so innocent, you don't know what
evil thoughts may lurk in that fellow's brain.”
“You don't suppose Valborg could actually think about making love to
me?”
Her rather cheap sport ended abruptly as Vida cried, with contorted
face, “What do you know about the thoughts in hearts? You just play at
reforming the world. You don't know what it means to suffer.”
There are two insults which no human being will endure: the assertion
that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion
that he has never known trouble. Carol said furiously, “You think I
don't suffer? You think I've always had an easy----”
“No, you don't. I'm going to tell you something I've never told a living
soul, not even Ray.” The dam of repressed imagination which Vida had
builded for years, which now, with Raymie off at the wars, she was
building again, gave way.
“I was--I liked Will terribly well. One time at a party--oh, before
he met you, of course--but we held hands, and we were so happy. But I
didn't feel I was really suited to him. I let him go. Please don't think
I still love him! I see now that Ray was predestined to be my mate. But
because I liked him, I know how sincere and pure and noble Will is, and
his thoughts never straying from the path of rectitude, and----If I gave
him up to you, at least you've got to appreciate him! We danced together
and laughed so, and I gave him up, but----This IS my affair! I'm NOT