Main Street
solidly founded--not scholarly--doesn't know anything about political
economy--falls for every new idea that some windjamming crank puts out.
But she's a nice woman. She'll probably fix up the rest-room, and the
rest-room is a fine thing, brings a lot of business to town. And now
that Mrs. Kennicott's been away, maybe she's got over some of her fool
ideas. Maybe she realizes that folks simply laugh at her when she tries
to tell us how to run everything.”
“Sure. She'll take a tumble to herself,” said Nat Hicks, sucking in
his lips judicially. “As far as I'm concerned, I'll say she's as nice a
looking skirt as there is in town. But yow!” His tone electrified them.
“Guess she'll miss that Swede Valborg that used to work for me! They was
a pair! Talking poetry and moonshine! If they could of got away with it,
they'd of been so darn lovey-dovey----”
Sam Clark interrupted, “Rats, they never even thought about making love,
Just talking books and all that junk. I tell you, Carrie Kennicott's
a smart woman, and these smart educated women all get funny ideas, but
they get over 'em after they've had three or four kids. You'll see her
settled down one of these days, and teaching Sunday School and helping
at sociables and behaving herself, and not trying to butt into business
and politics. Sure!”
After only fifteen minutes of conference on her stockings, her son, her
separate bedroom, her music, her ancient interest in Guy Pollock, her
probable salary in Washington, and every remark which she was known to
have made since her return, the supreme council decided that they would
permit Carol Kennicott to live, and they passed on to a consideration of
Nat Hicks's New One about the traveling salesman and the old maid.
IV
For some reason which was totally mysterious to Carol, Maud Dyer seemed
to resent her return. At the Jolly Seventeen Maud giggled nervously,
“Well, I suppose you found war-work a good excuse to stay away and have
a swell time. Juanita! Don't you think we ought to make Carrie tell us
about the officers she met in Washington?”
They rustled and stared. Carol looked at them. Their curiosity seemed
natural and unimportant.
“Oh yes, yes indeed, have to do that some day,” she yawned.
She no longer took Aunt Bessie Smail seriously enough to struggle for
independence. She saw that Aunt Bessie did not mean to intrude; that
she wanted to do things for all the Kennicotts. Thus Carol hit upon the
tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth,
but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness,
so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected
with laughter. She divined that when Aunt Bessie came in with a jar of
wild-grape jelly she was waiting in hope of being asked for the recipe.
After that she could be irritated but she could not be depressed by Aunt
Bessie's simoom of questioning.
She wasn't depressed even when she heard Mrs. Bogart observe, “Now we've
got prohibition it seems to me that the next problem of the country
ain't so much abolishing cigarettes as it is to make folks observe the
Sabbath and arrest these law-breakers that play baseball and go to the
movies and all on the Lord's Day.”
Only one thing bruised Carol's vanity. Few people asked her about
Washington. They who had most admiringly begged Percy Bresnahan for his
opinions were least interested in her facts. She laughed at herself when
she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned
hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as
much as ever.
Her baby, born in August, was a girl. Carol could not decide whether she
was to become a feminist leader or marry a scientist or both, but did
settle on Vassar and a tricolette suit with a small black hat for her
Freshman year.
VI
Hugh was loquacious at breakfast. He desired to give his impressions of
owls and F Street.
“Don't make so much noise. You talk too much,” growled Kennicott.
Carol flared. “Don't speak to him that way! Why don't you listen to him?
He has some very interesting things to tell.”
“What's the idea? Mean to say you expect me to spend all my time
listening to his chatter?”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, he's got to learn a little discipline. Time for him to
start getting educated.”
“I've learned much more discipline, I've had much more education, from
him than he has from me.”
“What's this? Some new-fangled idea of raising kids you got in
Washington?”
“Perhaps. Did you ever realize that children are people?”
“That's all right. I'm not going to have him monopolizing the
conversation.”
“No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I'm going to bring him up
as a human being. He has just as many thoughts as we have, and I want
him to develop them, not take Gopher Prairie's version of them. That's
my biggest work now--keeping myself, keeping you, from 'educating' him.”
“Well, let's not scrap about it. But I'm not going to have him spoiled.”
Kennicott had forgotten it in ten minutes; and she forgot it--this time.
VII
The Kennicotts and the Sam Clarks had driven north to a duck-pass
between two lakes, on an autumn day of blue and copper.
Kennicott had given her a light twenty-gauge shotgun. She had a first
lesson in shooting, in keeping her eyes open, not wincing, understanding
that the bead at the end of the barrel really had something to do with
pointing the gun. She was radiant; she almost believed Sam when he
insisted that it was she who had shot the mallard at which they had
fired together.
She sat on the bank of the reedy lake and found rest in Mrs. Clark's
drawling comments on nothing. The brown dusk was still. Behind them were
dark marshes. The plowed acres smelled fresh. The lake was garnet and
silver. The voices of the men, waiting for the last flight, were clear
in the cool air.
“Mark left!” sang Kennicott, in a long-drawn call.
Three ducks were swooping down in a swift line. The guns banged, and
a duck fluttered. The men pushed their light boat out on the burnished
lake, disappeared beyond the reeds. Their cheerful voices and the slow
splash and clank of oars came back to Carol from the dimness. In the sky
a fiery plain sloped down to a serene harbor. It dissolved; the lake
was white marble; and Kennicott was crying, “Well, old lady, how about
hiking out for home? Supper taste pretty good, eh?”
“I'll sit back with Ethel,” she said, at the car.
It was the first time she had called Mrs. Clark by her given name; the
first time she had willingly sat back, a woman of Main Street.
“I'm hungry. It's good to be hungry,” she reflected, as they drove away.
She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was conscious of an
unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska, a dominion which
will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile.
Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire
and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum
inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia.
“Let's all go to the movies tomorrow night. Awfully exciting film,” said
Ethel Clark.
“Well, I was going to read a new book but----All right, let's go,” said
Carol.
VIII
“They're too much for me,” Carol sighed to Kennicott. “I've been
thinking about getting up an annual Community Day, when the whole town
would forget feuds and go out and have sports and a picnic and a dance.
But Bert Tybee (why did you ever elect him mayor?)--he's kidnapped my
idea. He wants the Community Day, but he wants to have some politician
'give an address.' That's just the stilted sort of thing I've tried to
avoid. He asked Vida, and of course she agreed with him.”
Kennicott considered the matter while he wound the clock and they
tramped up-stairs.
“Yes, it would jar you to have Bert butting in,” he said amiably. “Are
you going to do much fussing over this Community stunt? Don't you ever
get tired of fretting and stewing and experimenting?”
“I haven't even started. Look!” She led him to the nursery door, pointed
at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. “Do you see that object on the
pillow? Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you
Tories were wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these
children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will
see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an
industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to
Mars.”
“Yump, probably be changes all right,” yawned Kennicott.
She sat on the edge of his bed while he hunted through his bureau for a
collar which ought to be there and persistently wasn't.
“I'll go on, always. And I am happy. But this Community Day makes me see
how thoroughly I'm beaten.”
“That darn collar certainly is gone for keeps,” muttered Kennicott and,
louder, “Yes, I guess you----I didn't quite catch what you said, dear.”
She patted his pillows, turned down his sheets, as she reflected:
“But I have won in this: I've never excused my failures by sneering at
my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit
that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that
Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit
that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought
the good fight, but I have kept the faith.”
“Sure. You bet you have,” said Kennicott. “Well, good night. Sort of
feels to me like it might snow tomorrow. Have to be thinking about
putting up the storm-windows pretty soon. Say, did you notice whether
the girl put that screwdriver back?”