Chapter: CHAPTER XIII


SHE tried, more from loyalty than from desire, to call upon the Perrys
on a November evening when Kennicott was away. They were not at home.

Like a child who has no one to play with she loitered through the dark
hall. She saw a light under an office door. She knocked. To the person
who opened she murmured, "Do you happen to know where the Perrys are?"
She realized that it was Guy Pollock.

"I'm awfully sorry, Mrs. Kennicott, but I don't know. Won't you come in
and wait for them?"

"W-why----" she observed, as she reflected that in Gopher Prairie it
is not decent to call on a man; as she decided that no, really, she
wouldn't go in; and as she went in.

"I didn't know your office was up here."

"Yes, office, town-house, and chateau in Picardy. But you can't see
the chateau and town-house (next to the Duke of Sutherland's). They're
beyond that inner door. They are a cot and a wash-stand and my other
suit and the blue crepe tie you said you liked."

"You remember my saying that?"

"Of course. I always shall. Please try this chair."

She glanced about the rusty office--gaunt stove, shelves of tan
law-books, desk-chair filled with newspapers so long sat upon that they
were in holes and smudged to grayness. There were only two things which
suggested Guy Pollock. On the green felt of the table-desk, between
legal blanks and a clotted inkwell, was a cloissone vase. On a swing
shelf was a row of books unfamiliar to Gopher Prairie: Mosher editions
of the poets, black and red German novels, a Charles Lamb in crushed
levant.

Guy did not sit down. He quartered the office, a grayhound on the scent;
a grayhound with glasses tilted forward on his thin nose, and a silky
indecisive brown mustache. He had a golf jacket of jersey, worn through
at the creases in the sleeves. She noted that he did not apologize for
it, as Kennicott would have done.

He made conversation: "I didn't know you were a bosom friend of the
Perrys. Champ is the salt of the earth but somehow I can't imagine him
joining you in symbolic dancing, or making improvements on the Diesel
engine."

"No. He's a dear soul, bless him, but he belongs in the National Museum,
along with General Grant's sword, and I'm----Oh, I suppose I'm seeking
for a gospel that will evangelize Gopher Prairie."

"Really? Evangelize it to what?"

"To anything that's definite. Seriousness or frivolousness or both. I
wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it's merely
safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?"

"Is anything the matter with it? Isn't there perhaps something the
matter with you and me? (May I join you in the honor of having something
the matter?)"

"(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it's the town."

"Because they enjoy skating more than biology?"

"But I'm not only more interested in biology than the Jolly Seventeen,
but also in skating! I'll skate with them, or slide, or throw snowballs,
just as gladly as talk with you."

("Oh no!")

("Yes!) But they want to stay home and embroider."

"Perhaps. I'm not defending the town. It's merely----I'm a confirmed
doubter of myself. (Probably I'm conceited about my lack of conceit!)
Anyway, Gopher Prairie isn't particularly bad. It's like all villages in
all countries. Most places that have lost the smell of earth but not
yet acquired the smell of patchouli--or of factory-smoke--are just as
suspicious and righteous. I wonder if the small town isn't, with some
lovely exceptions, a social appendix? Some day these dull market-towns
may be as obsolete as monasteries. I can imagine the farmer and his
local store-manager going by monorail, at the end of the day, into a
city more charming than any William Morris Utopia--music, a university,
clubs for loafers like me. (Lord, how I'd like to have a real club!)"

She asked impulsively, "You, why do you stay here?"

"I have the Village Virus."

"It sounds dangerous."

"It is. More dangerous than the cancer that will certainly get me
at fifty unless I stop this smoking. The Village Virus is the germ
which--it's extraordinarily like the hook-worm--it infects ambitious
people who stay too long in the provinces. You'll find it epidemic among
lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants--all these
people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs,
but have returned to their swamp. I'm a perfect example. But I sha'n't
pester you with my dolors."

"You won't. And do sit down, so I can see you."

He dropped into the shrieking desk-chair. He looked squarely at her; she
was conscious of the pupils of his eyes; of the fact that he was a man,
and lonely. They were embarrassed. They elaborately glanced away, and
were relieved as he went on:

"The diagnosis of my Village Virus is simple enough. I was born in an
Ohio town about the same size as Gopher Prairie, and much less
friendly. It'd had more generations in which to form an oligarchy of
respectability. Here, a stranger is taken in if he is correct, if he
likes hunting and motoring and God and our Senator. There, we didn't
take in even our own till we had contemptuously got used to them. It
was a red-brick Ohio town, and the trees made it damp, and it smelled of
rotten apples. The country wasn't like our lakes and prairie. There were
small stuffy corn-fields and brick-yards and greasy oil-wells.

"I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating
the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has
never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it. From
college I went to New York, to the Columbia Law School. And for four
years I lived. Oh, I won't rhapsodize about New York. It was dirty and
noisy and breathless and ghastly expensive. But compared with the moldy
academy in which I had been smothered----! I went to symphonies twice
a week. I saw Irving and Terry and Duse and Bernhardt, from the top
gallery. I walked in Gramercy Park. And I read, oh, everything.

"Through a cousin I learned that Julius Flickerbaugh was sick and
needed a partner. I came here. Julius got well. He didn't like my way of
loafing five hours and then doing my work (really not so badly) in one.
We parted.

"When I first came here I swore I'd 'keep up my interests.' Very lofty!
I read Browning, and went to Minneapolis for the theaters. I thought I
was 'keeping up.' But I guess the Village Virus had me already. I was
reading four copies of cheap fiction-magazines to one poem. I'd put off
the Minneapolis trips till I simply had to go there on a lot of legal
matters.

"A few years ago I was talking to a patent lawyer from Chicago, and
I realized that----I'd always felt so superior to people like Julius
Flickerbaugh, but I saw that I was as provincial and behind-the-times as
Julius. (Worse! Julius plows through the Literary Digest and the Outlook
faithfully, while I'm turning over pages of a book by Charles Flandrau
that I already know by heart.)

"I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the world. Then I
found that the Village Virus had me, absolute: I didn't want to face
new streets and younger men--real competition. It was too easy to go on
making out conveyances and arguing ditching cases. So----That's all of
the biography of a living dead man, except the diverting last chapter,
the lies about my having been 'a tower of strength and legal wisdom'
which some day a preacher will spin over my lean dry body."

He looked down at his table-desk, fingering the starry enameled vase.

She could not comment. She pictured herself running across the room
to pat his hair. She saw that his lips were firm, under his soft faded
mustache. She sat still and maundered, "I know. The Village Virus.
Perhaps it will get me. Some day I'm going----Oh, no matter. At least,
I am making you talk! Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness,
but now I'm sitting at your feet."

"It would be rather nice to have you literally sitting at my feet, by a
fire."

"Would you have a fireplace for me?"

"Naturally! Please don't snub me now! Let the old man rave. How old are
you, Carol?"

"Twenty-six, Guy."

"Twenty-six! I was just leaving New York, at twenty-six. I heard Patti
sing, at twenty-six. And now I'm forty-seven. I feel like a child, yet
I'm old enough to be your father. So it's decently paternal to imagine
you curled at my feet. . . . Of course I hope it isn't, but we'll
reflect the morals of Gopher Prairie by officially announcing that it
is! . . . These standards that you and I live up to! There's one thing
that's the matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class
(there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democracy).
And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our subjects watch us
every minute. We can't get wholesomely drunk and relax. We have to be
so correct about sex morals, and inconspicuous clothes, and doing our
commercial trickery only in the traditional ways, that none of us can
live up to it, and we become horribly hypocritical. Unavoidably. The
widow-robbing deacon of fiction can't help being hypocritical. The
widows themselves demand it! They admire his unctuousness. And look at
me. Suppose I did dare to make love to--some exquisite married woman.
I wouldn't admit it to myself. I giggle with the most revolting
salaciousness over La Vie Parisienne, when I get hold of one in Chicago,
yet I shouldn't even try to hold your hand. I'm broken. It's the
historical Anglo-Saxon way of making life miserable. . . . Oh, my dear,
I haven't talked to anybody about myself and all our selves for years."

"Guy! Can't we do something with the town? Really?"

"No, we can't!" He disposed of it like a judge ruling out an improper
objection; returned to matters less uncomfortably energetic: "Curious.
Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her
grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the
devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.
Here in Gopher Prairie we've cleared the fields, and become soft, so
we make ourselves unhappy artificially, at great expense and exertion:
Methodists disliking Episcopalians, the man with the Hudson laughing at
the man with the flivver. The worst is the commercial hatred--the grocer
feeling that any man who doesn't deal with him is robbing him. What
hurts me is that it applies to lawyers and doctors (and decidedly
to their wives!) as much as to grocers. The doctors--you know about
that--how your husband and Westlake and Gould dislike one another."

"No! I won't admit it!"

He grinned.

"Oh, maybe once or twice, when Will has positively known of a case where
Doctor--where one of the others has continued to call on patients longer
than necessary, he has laughed about it, but----"

He still grinned.

"No, REALLY! And when you say the wives of the doctors share these
jealousies----Mrs. McGanum and I haven't any particular crush on each
other; she's so stolid. But her mother, Mrs. Westlake--nobody could be
sweeter."

"Yes, I'm sure she's very bland. But I wouldn't tell her my heart's
secrets if I were you, my dear. I insist that there's only one
professional-man's wife in this town who doesn't plot, and that is you,
you blessed, credulous outsider!"

"I won't be cajoled! I won't believe that medicine, the priesthood of
healing, can be turned into a penny-picking business."

"See here: Hasn't Kennicott ever hinted to you that you'd better be nice
to some old woman because she tells her friends which doctor to call in?
But I oughtn't to----"

She remembered certain remarks which Kennicott had offered regarding the
Widow Bogart. She flinched, looked at Guy beseechingly.

He sprang up, strode to her with a nervous step, smoothed her hand. She
wondered if she ought to be offended by his caress. Then she wondered if
he liked her hat, the new Oriental turban of rose and silver brocade.

He dropped her hand. His elbow brushed her shoulder. He flitted over to
the desk-chair, his thin back stooped. He picked up the cloisonne vase.
Across it he peered at her with such loneliness that she was startled.
But his eyes faded into impersonality as he talked of the jealousies
of Gopher Prairie. He stopped himself with a sharp, "Good Lord, Carol,
you're not a jury. You are within your legal rights in refusing to
be subjected to this summing-up. I'm a tedious old fool analyzing the
obvious, while you're the spirit of rebellion. Tell me your side. What
is Gopher Prairie to you?"

"A bore!"

"Can I help?"

"How could you?"

"I don't know. Perhaps by listening. I haven't done that tonight.
But normally----Can't I be the confidant of the old French plays, the
tiring-maid with the mirror and the loyal ears?"

"Oh, what is there to confide? The people are savorless and proud of
it. And even if I liked you tremendously, I couldn't talk to you without
twenty old hexes watching, whispering."

"But you will come talk to me, once in a while?"

"I'm not sure that I shall. I'm trying to develop my own large capacity
for dullness and contentment. I've failed at every positive thing I've
tried. I'd better 'settle down,' as they call it, and be satisfied to
be--nothing."

"Don't be cynical. It hurts me, in you. It's like blood on the wing of a
humming-bird."

"I'm not a humming-bird. I'm a hawk; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to
death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens. But I am grateful to
you for confirming me in the faith. And I'm going home!"

"Please stay and have some coffee with me."

"I'd like to. But they've succeeded in terrorizing me. I'm afraid of
what people might say."

"I'm not afraid of that. I'm only afraid of what you might say!" He
stalked to her; took her unresponsive hand. "Carol! You have been happy
here tonight? (Yes. I'm begging!)"

She squeezed his hand quickly, then snatched hers away. She had but
little of the curiosity of the flirt, and none of the intrigante's joy
in furtiveness. If she was the naive girl, Guy Pollock was the clumsy
boy. He raced about the office; he rammed his fists into his pockets.
He stammered, "I--I--I----Oh, the devil! Why do I awaken from smooth
dustiness to this jagged rawness? I'll make I'm going to trot down the
hall and bring in the Dillons, and we'll all have coffee or something."

"The Dillons?"

"Yes. Really quite a decent young pair--Harvey Dillon and his wife. He's
a dentist, just come to town. They live in a room behind his office,
same as I do here. They don't know much of anybody----"

"I've heard of them. And I've never thought to call. I'm horribly
ashamed. Do bring them----"

She stopped, for no very clear reason, but his expression said, her
faltering admitted, that they wished they had never mentioned the
Dillons. With spurious enthusiasm he said, "Splendid! I will." From the
door he glanced at her, curled in the peeled leather chair. He slipped
out, came back with Dr. and Mrs. Dillon.

The four of them drank rather bad coffee which Pollock made on a
kerosene burner. They laughed, and spoke of Minneapolis, and were
tremendously tactful; and Carol started for home, through the November
wind.

 Carol keeps calling on the Champ Perrys out of loyalty more than anything else. But the next time she calls on them, they aren't at home. She sees a light under one of the other doors in their building, and she knocks on it, only to find Guy Pollock, her husband's lawyer friend, on the other side. Carol sits down with Guy, and they soon get to talking about Gopher Prairie. Carol realizes that Guy is a kindred spirit who thinks that there's much more to life than Gopher Prairie has to offer. Unfortunately, Guy is too scared to rock the boat or move anywhere else. The way he puts it, there is a "Village Virus" that's gotten into his system and made him spineless. The more Carol and Guy walk, the more Carol feels a romantic attraction to him. But she also feels repulsed by his submission to Gopher Prairie, because it's the exact kind of thing she's trying to avoid. Guy starts tiptoeing around the idea that he wants to be romantically involved with Carol, but then he admits he's too much of a coward to do so. He gets to talking about how even Carol's husband Will is in unfriendly competition with the other doctors in town, but Carol is unwilling to believe he's so petty. Guy crosses his room and caresses Carol's hand , but then he retreats. It's getting late, and Carol wants to leave before her meeting with Guy becomes any more inappropriate. But he convinces her to stay by inviting some neighbors over to keep everything on the up and up.

