Main Street
fathers' factories! All of you are more or less useful to me, but only
a few of you can take my place, because I have one virtue (only one): I
have given up father and mother and children for the love of God.
“Here's the test for you: Do you come to 'conquer the East,' as people
say, or do you come to conquer yourself?
“It's so much more complicated than any of you know--so much more
complicated than I knew when I put on Ground Grippers and started out to
reform the world. The final complication in 'conquering Washington' or
'conquering New York' is that the conquerors must beyond all things not
conquer! It must have been so easy in the good old days when authors
dreamed only of selling a hundred thousand volumes, and sculptors
of being feted in big houses, and even the Uplifters like me had a
simple-hearted ambition to be elected to important offices and invited
to go round lecturing. But we meddlers have upset everything. Now the
one thing that is disgraceful to any of us is obvious success. The
Uplifter who is very popular with wealthy patrons can be pretty sure
that he has softened his philosophy to please them, and the author who
is making lots of money--poor things, I've heard 'em apologizing for it
to the shabby bitter-enders; I've seen 'em ashamed of the sleek luggage
they got from movie rights.
“Do you want to sacrifice yourself in such a topsy-turvy world, where
popularity makes you unpopular with the people you love, and the only
failure is cheap success, and the only individualist is the person who
gives up all his individualism to serve a jolly ungrateful proletariat
which thumbs its nose at him?”
Carol smiled ingratiatingly, to indicate that she was indeed one who
desired to sacrifice, but she sighed, “I don't know; I'm afraid I'm not
heroic. I certainly wasn't out home. Why didn't I do big effective----”
“Not a matter of heroism. Matter of endurance. Your Middlewest is
double-Puritan--prairie Puritan on top of New England Puritan; bluff
frontiersman on the surface, but in its heart it still has the ideal of
Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm. There's one attack you can make on it,
perhaps the only kind that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on
looking at one thing after another in your home and church and bank, and
ask why it is, and who first laid down the law that it had to be that
way. If enough of us do this impolitely enough, then we'll become
civilized in merely twenty thousand years or so, instead of having
to wait the two hundred thousand years that my cynical anthropologist
friends allow. . . . Easy, pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives:
asking people to define their jobs. That's the most dangerous doctrine I
know!”
Carol was mediating, “I will go back! I will go on asking questions.
I've always done it, and always failed at it, and it's all I can do. I'm
going to ask Ezra Stowbody why he's opposed to the nationalization of
railroads, and ask Dave Dyer why a druggist always is pleased when he's
called 'doctor,' and maybe ask Mrs. Bogart why she wears a widow's veil
that looks like a dead crow.”
The woman leader straightened. “And you have one thing. You have a baby
to hug. That's my temptation. I dream of babies--of a baby--and I sneak
around parks to see them playing. (The children in Dupont Circle are
like a poppy-garden.) And the antis call me 'unsexed'!”
Carol was thinking, in panic, “Oughtn't Hugh to have country air? I
won't let him become a yokel. I can guide him away from street-corner
loafing. . . . I think I can.”
On her way home: “Now that I've made a precedent, joined the union and
gone out on one strike and learned personal solidarity, I won't be
so afraid. Will won't always be resisting my running away. Some day I
really will go to Europe with him . . . or without him.
“I've lived with people who are not afraid to go to jail. I could invite
a Miles Bjornstam to dinner without being afraid of the Haydocks . . . I
think I could.
“I'll take back the sound of Yvette Guilbert's songs and Elman's violin.
They'll be only the lovelier against the thrumming of crickets in the
stubble on an autumn day.
“I can laugh now and be serene . . . I think I can.”
Though she should return, she said, she would not be utterly defeated.
She was glad of her rebellion. The prairie was no longer empty land in
the sun-glare; it was the living tawny beast which she had fought and
made beautiful by fighting; and in the village streets were shadows of
her desires and the sound of her marching and the seeds of mystery and
greatness.
IX
Her active hatred of Gopher Prairie had run out. She saw it now as a
toiling new settlement. With sympathy she remembered Kennicott's defense
of its citizens as “a lot of pretty good folks, working hard and trying
to bring up their families the best they can.” She recalled tenderly the
young awkwardness of Main Street and the makeshifts of the little brown
cottages; she pitied their shabbiness and isolation; had compassion for
their assertion of culture, even as expressed in Thanatopsis papers, for
their pretense of greatness, even as trumpeted in “boosting.” She saw
Main Street in the dusty prairie sunset, a line of frontier shanties
with solemn lonely people waiting for her, solemn and lonely as an old
man who has outlived his friends. She remembered that Kennicott and Sam
Clark had listened to her songs, and she wanted to run to them and sing.
“At last,” she rejoiced, “I've come to a fairer attitude toward the
town. I can love it, now.”
She was, perhaps, rather proud of herself for having acquired so much
tolerance.
She awoke at three in the morning, after a dream of being tortured by
Ella Stowbody and the Widow Bogart.
“I've been making the town a myth. This is how people keep up the
tradition of the perfect home-town, the happy boyhood, the brilliant
college friends. We forget so. I've been forgetting that Main Street
doesn't think it's in the least lonely and pitiful. It thinks it's God's
Own Country. It isn't waiting for me. It doesn't care.”
But the next evening she again saw Gopher Prairie as her home, waiting
for her in the sunset, rimmed round with splendor.
She did not return for five months more; five months crammed with greedy
accumulation of sounds and colors to take back for the long still days.
She had spent nearly two years in Washington.
When she departed for Gopher Prairie, in June, her second baby was
stirring within her.
CHAPTER XXXIX
SHE wondered all the way home what her sensations would be. She wondered
about it so much that she had every sensation she had imagined. She was
excited by each familiar porch, each hearty “Well, well!” and flattered
to be, for a day, the most important news of the community. She bustled
about, making calls. Juanita Haydock bubbled over their Washington
encounter, and took Carol to her social bosom. This ancient opponent
seemed likely to be her most intimate friend, for Vida Sherwin, though
she was cordial, stood back and watched for imported heresies.
In the evening Carol went to the mill. The mystical Om-Om-Om of the
dynamos in the electric-light plant behind the mill was louder in the
darkness. Outside sat the night watchman, Champ Perry. He held up his
stringy hands and squeaked, “We've all missed you terrible.”
Who in Washington would miss her?
Who in Washington could be depended upon like Guy Pollock? When she saw
him on the street, smiling as always, he seemed an eternal thing, a part
of her own self.
After a week she decided that she was neither glad nor sorry to be back.
She entered each day with the matter-of-fact attitude with which she
had gone to her office in Washington. It was her task; there would be
mechanical details and meaningless talk; what of it?
The only problem which she had approached with emotion proved
insignificant. She had, on the train, worked herself up to such devotion
that she was willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her
life with Kennicott.
He mumbled, ten minutes after she had entered the house, “Say, I've kept
your room for you like it was. I've kind of come round to your way of
thinking. Don't see why folks need to get on each other's nerves just
because they're friendly. Darned if I haven't got so I like a little
privacy and mulling things over by myself.”
II
She had left a city which sat up nights to talk of universal transition;
of European revolution, guild socialism, free verse. She had fancied
that all the world was changing.
She found that it was not.
In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were prohibition, the place
in Minneapolis where you could get whisky at thirteen dollars a quart,
recipes for home-made beer, the “high cost of living,” the presidential
election, Clark's new car, and not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart.
Their problems were exactly what they had been two years ago, what they
had been twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years to
come. With the world a possible volcano, the husbandmen were plowing at
the base of the mountain. A volcano does occasionally drop a river
of lava on even the best of agriculturists, to their astonishment and
considerable injury, but their cousins inherit the farms and a year or
two later go back to the plowing.
She was unable to rhapsodize much over the seven new bungalows and the
two garages which Kennicott had made to seem so important. Her intensest
thought about them was, “Oh yes, they're all right I suppose.” The
change which she did heed was the erection of the schoolbuilding, with
its cheerful brick walls, broad windows, gymnasium, classrooms for
agriculture and cooking. It indicated Vida's triumph, and it stirred her
to activity--any activity. She went to Vida with a jaunty, “I think I
shall work for you. And I'll begin at the bottom.”
She did. She relieved the attendant at the rest-room for an hour a
day. Her only innovation was painting the pine table a black and orange
rather shocking to the Thanatopsis. She talked to the farmwives and
soothed their babies and was happy.
Thinking of them she did not think of the ugliness of Main Street as she
hurried along it to the chatter of the Jolly Seventeen.
She wore her eye-glasses on the street now. She was beginning to ask
Kennicott and Juanita if she didn't look young, much younger than
thirty-three. The eye-glasses pinched her nose. She considered
spectacles. They would make her seem older, and hopelessly settled.
No! She would not wear spectacles yet. But she tried on a pair at
Kennicott's office. They really were much more comfortable.
III
Dr. Westlake, Sam Clark, Nat Hicks, and Del Snafflin were talking in
Del's barber shop.
“Well, I see Kennicott's wife is taking a whirl at the rest-room, now,”
said Dr. Westlake. He emphasized the “now.”
Del interrupted the shaving of Sam and, with his brush dripping lather,
he observed jocularly:
“What'll she be up to next? They say she used to claim this burg wasn't
swell enough for a city girl like her, and would we please tax ourselves
about thirty-seven point nine and fix it all up pretty, with tidies on
the hydrants and statoos on the lawns----”
Sam irritably blew the lather from his lips, with milky small bubbles,
and snorted, “Be a good thing for most of us roughnecks if we did have
a smart woman to tell us how to fix up the town. Just as much to her
kicking as there was to Jim Blausser's gassing about factories. And you
can bet Mrs. Kennicott is smart, even if she is skittish. Glad to see
her back.”
Dr. Westlake hastened to play safe. “So was I! So was I! She's got a
nice way about her, and she knows a good deal about books, or fiction
anyway. Of course she's like all the rest of these women--not