Chapter: CHAPTER XIX


I

IN three years of exile from herself Carol had certain experiences
chronicled as important by the Dauntless, or discussed by the Jolly
Seventeen, but the event unchronicled, undiscussed, and supremely
controlling, was her slow admission of longing to find her own people.


II


Bea and Miles Bjornstam were married in June, a month after "The Girl
from Kankakee." Miles had turned respectable. He had renounced his
criticisms of state and society; he had given up roving as horse-trader,
and wearing red mackinaws in lumber-camps; he had gone to work as
engineer in Jackson Elder's planing-mill; he was to be seen upon the
streets endeavoring to be neighborly with suspicious men whom he had
taunted for years.

Carol was the patroness and manager of the wedding. Juanita Haydock
mocked, "You're a chump to let a good hired girl like Bea go. Besides!
How do you know it's a good thing, her marrying a sassy bum like this
awful Red Swede person? Get wise! Chase the man off with a mop, and
hold onto your Svenska while the holding's good. Huh? Me go to their
Scandahoofian wedding? Not a chance!"

The other matrons echoed Juanita. Carol was dismayed by the casualness
of their cruelty, but she persisted. Miles had exclaimed to her, "Jack
Elder says maybe he'll come to the wedding! Gee, it would be nice to
have Bea meet the Boss as a reg'lar married lady. Some day I'll be so
well off that Bea can play with Mrs. Elder--and you! Watch us!"

There was an uneasy knot of only nine guests at the service in the
unpainted Lutheran Church--Carol, Kennicott, Guy Pollock, and the Champ
Perrys, all brought by Carol; Bea's frightened rustic parents, her
cousin Tina, and Pete, Miles's ex-partner in horse-trading, a surly,
hairy man who had bought a black suit and come twelve hundred miles from
Spokane for the event.

Miles continuously glanced back at the church door. Jackson Elder did
not appear. The door did not once open after the awkward entrance of the
first guests. Miles's hand closed on Bea's arm.

He had, with Carol's help, made his shanty over into a cottage with
white curtains and a canary and a chintz chair.

Carol coaxed the powerful matrons to call on Bea. They half scoffed,
half promised to go.

Bea's successor was the oldish, broad, silent Oscarina, who was
suspicious of her frivolous mistress for a month, so that Juanita
Haydock was able to crow, "There, smarty, I told you you'd run into the
Domestic Problem!" But Oscarina adopted Carol as a daughter, and with
her as faithful to the kitchen as Bea had been, there was nothing
changed in Carol's life.


III


She was unexpectedly appointed to the town library-board by Ole Jenson,
the new mayor. The other members were Dr. Westlake, Lyman Cass, Julius
Flickerbaugh the attorney, Guy Pollock, and Martin Mahoney, former
livery-stable keeper and now owner of a garage. She was delighted. She
went to the first meeting rather condescendingly, regarding herself
as the only one besides Guy who knew anything about books or library
methods. She was planning to revolutionize the whole system.

Her condescension was ruined and her humility wholesomely increased when
she found the board, in the shabby room on the second floor of the house
which had been converted into the library, not discussing the weather
and longing to play checkers, but talking about books. She discovered
that amiable old Dr. Westlake read everything in verse and "light
fiction"; that Lyman Cass, the veal-faced, bristly-bearded owner of the
mill, had tramped through Gibbon, Hume, Grote, Prescott, and the other
thick historians; that he could repeat pages from them--and did. When
Dr. Westlake whispered to her, "Yes, Lym is a very well-informed man,
but he's modest about it," she felt uninformed and immodest, and scolded
at herself that she had missed the human potentialities in this vast
Gopher Prairie. When Dr. Westlake quoted the "Paradiso," "Don Quixote,"
"Wilhelm Meister," and the Koran, she reflected that no one she knew,
not even her father, had read all four.

She came diffidently to the second meeting of the board. She did not
plan to revolutionize anything. She hoped that the wise elders might be
so tolerant as to listen to her suggestions about changing the shelving
of the juveniles.

Yet after four sessions of the library-board she was where she had been
before the first session. She had found that for all their pride in
being reading men, Westlake and Cass and even Guy had no conception of
making the library familiar to the whole town. They used it, they passed
resolutions about it, and they left it as dead as Moses. Only the Henty
books and the Elsie books and the latest optimisms by moral female
novelists and virile clergymen were in general demand, and the board
themselves were interested only in old, stilted volumes. They had no
tenderness for the noisiness of youth discovering great literature.

If she was egotistic about her tiny learning, they were at least as much
so regarding theirs. And for all their talk of the need of additional
library-tax none of them was willing to risk censure by battling for it,
though they now had so small a fund that, after paying for rent, heat,
light, and Miss Villets's salary, they had only a hundred dollars a year
for the purchase of books.

The Incident of the Seventeen Cents killed her none too enduring
interest.

She had come to the board-meeting singing with a plan. She had made
a list of thirty European novels of the past ten years, with twenty
important books on psychology, education, and economics which the
library lacked. She had made Kennicott promise to give fifteen dollars.
If each of the board would contribute the same, they could have the
books.

Lym Cass looked alarmed, scratched himself, and protested, "I think
it would be a bad precedent for the board-members to contribute
money--uh--not that I mind, but it wouldn't be fair--establish
precedent. Gracious! They don't pay us a cent for our services!
Certainly can't expect us to pay for the privilege of serving!"

Only Guy looked sympathetic, and he stroked the pine table and said
nothing.

The rest of the meeting they gave to a bellicose investigation of the
fact that there was seventeen cents less than there should be in the
Fund. Miss Villets was summoned; she spent half an hour in explosively
defending herself; the seventeen cents were gnawed over, penny by penny;
and Carol, glancing at the carefully inscribed list which had been
so lovely and exciting an hour before, was silent, and sorry for Miss
Villets, and sorrier for herself.

She was reasonably regular in attendance till her two years were up and
Vida Sherwin was appointed to the board in her place, but she did not
try to be revolutionary. In the plodding course of her life there was
nothing changed, and nothing new.


IV


Kennicott made an excellent land-deal, but as he told her none of the
details, she was not greatly exalted or agitated. What did agitate her
was his announcement, half whispered and half blurted, half tender and
half coldly medical, that they "ought to have a baby, now they could
afford it." They had so long agreed that "perhaps it would be just as
well not to have any children for a while yet," that childlessness had
come to be natural. Now, she feared and longed and did not know; she
hesitatingly assented, and wished that she had not assented.

As there appeared no change in their drowsy relations, she forgot all
about it, and life was planless.


V


Idling on the porch of their summer cottage at the lake, on afternoons
when Kennicott was in town, when the water was glazed and the whole air
languid, she pictured a hundred escapes: Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm,
with limousines, golden shops, a cathedral spire. A reed hut on
fantastic piles above the mud of a jungle river. A suite in Paris,
immense high grave rooms, with lambrequins and a balcony. The Enchanted
Mesa. An ancient stone mill in Maryland, at the turn of the road,
between rocky brook and abrupt hills. An upland moor of sheep and
flitting cool sunlight. A clanging dock where steel cranes unloaded
steamers from Buenos Ayres and Tsing-tao. A Munich concert-hall, and a
famous 'cellist playing--playing to her.

One scene had a persistent witchery:

She stood on a terrace overlooking a boulevard by the warm sea. She was
certain, though she had no reason for it, that the place was Mentone.
Along the drive below her swept barouches, with a mechanical tlot-tlot,
tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, and great cars with polished black hoods and
engines quiet as the sigh of an old man. In them were women erect,
slender, enameled, and expressionless as marionettes, their small hands
upon parasols, their unchanging eyes always forward, ignoring the men
beside them, tall men with gray hair and distinguished faces. Beyond the
drive were painted sea and painted sands, and blue and yellow pavilions.
Nothing moved except the gliding carriages, and the people were small
and wooden, spots in a picture drenched with gold and hard bright blues.
There was no sound of sea or winds; no softness of whispers nor of
falling petals; nothing but yellow and cobalt and staring light, and the
never-changing tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot----

She startled. She whimpered. It was the rapid ticking of the clock which
had hypnotized her into hearing the steady hoofs. No aching color of the
sea and pride of supercilious people, but the reality of a round-bellied
nickel alarm-clock on a shelf against a fuzzy unplaned pine wall, with
a stiff gray wash-rag hanging above it and a kerosene-stove standing
below.

A thousand dreams governed by the fiction she had read, drawn from the
pictures she had envied, absorbed her drowsy lake afternoons, but
always in the midst of them Kennicott came out from town, drew on khaki
trousers which were plastered with dry fish-scales, asked, "Enjoying
yourself?" and did not listen to her answer.

And nothing was changed, and there was no reason to believe that there
ever would be change.


VI


Trains!

At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She realized
that in town she had depended upon them for assurance that there
remained a world beyond.

The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie.
It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel,
and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he
might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated
and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories,
colleges, army.

The East remembered generations when there had been no railroad, and had
no awe of it; but here the railroads had been before time was. The towns
had been staked out on barren prairie as convenient points for future
train-halts; and back in 1860 and 1870 there had been much profit, much
opportunity to found aristocratic families, in the possession of advance
knowledge as to where the towns would arise.

If a town was in disfavor, the railroad could ignore it, cut it off from
commerce, slay it. To Gopher Prairie the tracks were eternal verities,
and boards of railroad directors an omnipotence. The smallest boy or the
most secluded grandam could tell you whether No. 32 had a hot-box last
Tuesday, whether No. 7 was going to put on an extra day-coach; and the
name of the president of the road was familiar to every breakfast table.

Even in this new era of motors the citizens went down to the station
to see the trains go through. It was their romance; their only mystery
besides mass at the Catholic Church; and from the trains came lords of
the outer world--traveling salesmen with piping on their waistcoats, and
visiting cousins from Milwaukee.

Gopher Prairie had once been a "division-point." The roundhouse and
repair-shops were gone, but two conductors still retained residence,
and they were persons of distinction, men who traveled and talked to
strangers, who wore uniforms with brass buttons, and knew all about
these crooked games of con-men. They were a special caste, neither above
nor below the Haydocks, but apart, artists and adventurers.

The night telegraph-operator at the railroad station was the most
melodramatic figure in town: awake at three in the morning, alone in a
room hectic with clatter of the telegraph key. All night he "talked"
to operators twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away. It was always to be
expected that he would be held up by robbers. He never was, but round
him was a suggestion of masked faces at the window, revolvers, cords
binding him to a chair, his struggle to crawl to the key before he
fainted.

During blizzards everything about the railroad was melodramatic. There
were days when the town was completely shut off, when they had no mail,
no express, no fresh meat, no newspapers. At last the rotary snow-plow
came through, bucking the drifts, sending up a geyser, and the way to
the Outside was open again. The brakemen, in mufflers and fur caps,
running along the tops of ice-coated freight-cars; the engineers
scratching frost from the cab windows and looking out, inscrutable,
self-contained, pilots of the prairie sea--they were heroism, they were
to Carol the daring of the quest in a world of groceries and sermons.

To the small boys the railroad was a familiar playground. They climbed
the iron ladders on the sides of the box-cars; built fires behind piles
of old ties; waved to favorite brakemen. But to Carol it was magic.

She was motoring with Kennicott, the car lumping through darkness, the
lights showing mud-puddles and ragged weeds by the road. A train coming!
A rapid chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck. It was hurling
past--the Pacific Flyer, an arrow of golden flame. Light from the
fire-box splashed the under side of the trailing smoke. Instantly the
vision was gone; Carol was back in the long darkness; and Kennicott was
giving his version of that fire and wonder: "No. 19. Must be 'bout ten
minutes late."

In town, she listened from bed to the express whistling in the cut a
mile north. Uuuuuuu!--faint, nervous, distrait, horn of the free night
riders journeying to the tall towns where were laughter and
banners and the sound of bells--Uuuuu! Uuuuu!--the world going
by--Uuuuuuu!--fainter, more wistful, gone.

Down here there were no trains. The stillness was very great. The
prairie encircled the lake, lay round her, raw, dusty, thick. Only the
train could cut it. Some day she would take a train; and that would be a
great taking.


VII


She turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the dramatic
association, to the library-board.

Besides the permanent Mother Chautauqua, in New York, there are, all
over these States, commercial Chautauqua companies which send out to
every smallest town troupes of lecturers and "entertainers" to give a
week of culture under canvas. Living in Minneapolis, Carol had never
encountered the ambulant Chautauqua, and the announcement of its coming
to Gopher Prairie gave her hope that others might be doing the vague
things which she had attempted. She pictured a condensed university
course brought to the people. Mornings when she came in from the lake
with Kennicott she saw placards in every shop-window, and strung on
a cord across Main Street, a line of pennants alternately worded
"The Boland Chautauqua COMING!" and "A solid week of inspiration and
enjoyment!" But she was disappointed when she saw the program. It did
not seem to be a tabloid university; it did not seem to be any kind of
a university; it seemed to be a combination of vaudeville performance Y.
M. C. A. lecture, and the graduation exercises of an elocution class.

She took her doubt to Kennicott. He insisted, "Well, maybe it won't be
so awful darn intellectual, the way you and I might like it, but it's
a whole lot better than nothing." Vida Sherwin added, "They have
some splendid speakers. If the people don't carry off so much actual
information, they do get a lot of new ideas, and that's what counts."

During the Chautauqua Carol attended three evening meetings, two
afternoon meetings, and one in the morning. She was impressed by the
audience: the sallow women in skirts and blouses, eager to be made to
think, the men in vests and shirt-sleeves, eager to be allowed to laugh,
and the wriggling children, eager to sneak away. She liked the plain
benches, the portable stage under its red marquee, the great tent over
all, shadowy above strings of incandescent bulbs at night and by day
casting an amber radiance on the patient crowd. The scent of dust
and trampled grass and sun-baked wood gave her an illusion of Syrian
caravans; she forgot the speakers while she listened to noises outside
the tent: two farmers talking hoarsely, a wagon creaking down Main
Street, the crow of a rooster. She was content. But it was the
contentment of the lost hunter stopping to rest.

For from the Chautauqua itself she got nothing but wind and chaff and
heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and
primitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm.

These were the several instructors in the condensed university's
seven-day course:

Nine lecturers, four of them ex-ministers, and one an ex-congressman,
all of them delivering "inspirational addresses." The only facts or
opinions which Carol derived from them were: Lincoln was a celebrated
president of the United States, but in his youth extremely poor. James
J. Hill was the best-known railroad-man of the West, and in his youth
extremely poor. Honesty and courtesy in business are preferable
to boorishness and exposed trickery, but this is not to be taken
personally, since all persons in Gopher Prairie are known to be honest
and courteous. London is a large city. A distinguished statesman once
taught Sunday School.

Four "entertainers" who told Jewish stories, Irish stories, German
stories, Chinese stories, and Tennessee mountaineer stories, most of
which Carol had heard.

A "lady elocutionist" who recited Kipling and imitated children.

A lecturer with motion-pictures of an Andean exploration; excellent
pictures and a halting narrative.

Three brass-bands, a company of six opera-singers, a Hawaiian sextette,
and four youths who played saxophones and guitars disguised as
wash-boards. The most applauded pieces were those, such as the "Lucia"
inevitability, which the audience had heard most often.

The local superintendent, who remained through the week while the other
enlighteners went to other Chautauquas for their daily performances. The
superintendent was a bookish, underfed man who worked hard at rousing
artificial enthusiasm, at trying to make the audience cheer by dividing
them into competitive squads and telling them that they were intelligent
and made splendid communal noises. He gave most of the morning lectures,
droning with equal unhappy facility about poetry, the Holy Land, and the
injustice to employers in any system of profit-sharing.

The final item was a man who neither lectured, inspired, nor
entertained; a plain little man with his hands in his pockets. All the
other speakers had confessed, "I cannot keep from telling the citizens
of your beautiful city that none of the talent on this circuit have
found a more charming spot or more enterprising and hospitable people."
But the little man suggested that the architecture of Gopher Prairie was
haphazard, and that it was sottish to let the lake-front be monopolized
by the cinder-heaped wall of the railroad embankment. Afterward the
audience grumbled, "Maybe that guy's got the right dope, but what's the
use of looking on the dark side of things all the time? New ideas are
first-rate, but not all this criticism. Enough trouble in life without
looking for it!"

Thus the Chautauqua, as Carol saw it. After it, the town felt proud and
educated.


VIII


Two weeks later the Great War smote Europe.

For a month Gopher Prairie had the delight of shuddering, then, as the
war settled down to a business of trench-fighting, they forgot.

When Carol talked about the Balkans, and the possibility of a German
revolution, Kennicott yawned, "Oh yes, it's a great old scrap, but it's
none of our business. Folks out here are too busy growing corn to monkey
with any fool war that those foreigners want to get themselves into."

It was Miles Bjornstam who said, "I can't figure it out. I'm opposed to
wars, but still, seems like Germany has got to be licked because them
Junkers stands in the way of progress."

She was calling on Miles and Bea, early in autumn. They had received
her with cries, with dusting of chairs, and a running to fetch water for
coffee. Miles stood and beamed at her. He fell often and joyously into
his old irreverence about the lords of Gopher Prairie, but always--with
a certain difficulty--he added something decorous and appreciative.

"Lots of people have come to see you, haven't they?" Carol hinted.

"Why, Bea's cousin Tina comes in right along, and the foreman at the
mill, and----Oh, we have good times. Say, take a look at that Bea!
Wouldn't you think she was a canary-bird, to listen to her, and to see
that Scandahoofian tow-head of hers? But say, know what she is? She's
a mother hen! Way she fusses over me--way she makes old Miles wear a
necktie! Hate to spoil her by letting her hear it, but she's one pretty
darn nice--nice----Hell! What do we care if none of the dirty snobs come
and call? We've got each other."

Carol worried about their struggle, but she forgot it in the stress of
sickness and fear. For that autumn she knew that a baby was coming,
that at last life promised to be interesting in the peril of the great
change.

 Bjornstam marries Bea Sorenson. Though Carol persuades all her friends to attend Bjornstam 's wedding none of them do it. Though Jackson Elder promises Bjornstam that he will attend the wedding he does not do so. The Kennicotts, Guy Pollock, and the Perry's are the only people who attend the wedding. Bjornstam takes up a job as an engineer in the planning mill. His ambition is to see Bea acquire status equal to that of Carol and Mrs. Elder. Juanita and the others laugh at Carol for letting such a good maid like Bea to go away. But Carol manages to get another maid called Oscarina, who loves Carol as her own daughter. Ole Jenson, who is the mayor, appoints Carol as a member of the library board. Dr. Westlake, Lym Cass, Julius Flickerbaugh and Guy Pollock are the other members. Carol who goes to the first meeting to educate them feels humble when she discovers how learned they are. Lym Cass has read historians like Gibbon, and Hume, and has through knowledge. Dr. Westlake quotes from Paradiso, Donquixote, Wilhelm Meister and the Koran. Carol feels quite diffident in their presence. But after a few meetings she realizes that they had no idea about how to make the library more useful to the whole town. The library did not have enough books. Nor did it have enough funds. She makes a list of twenty books and submits it to the board along with the proposal that each member should contribute fifteen dollars to buy the books. The members reject the proposal on the grounds that it would set bad precedent. They grill Miss. Villets about the shortage of the seventeen cents in the account. Carol gives up all hopes of improving the library. When Kennicott decides that it is the right time to have a baby, she feels frightened of the accompanying problems but she agrees to have one. She longs to get away from the town. She is fascinated by the trains and considers them to be the means by which she will get away. The entire town holds the railways and its employees in high esteem. A Chatauqua is to be held in Gopher Prairie and she feels very enthusiastic. She believes it to be a part of the university that would deliver lectures and enact plays. She is disappointed to find it to be a combination of Y.M.C. A. lectures, Vaudeville comedies and elocution classes. The lectures inform her that Abraham Lincoln, who was a great president, was a poor man in his youth and James. J. Hill, the railroad man was also poor in his youth. The brass bands play popular songs and the audience cheers them lustily. All the members of the Chatauqua praise Gopher Prairie as the most beautiful town but the architect who gives the last lecture points out that the plan of the town is haphazard and that the railway embankment spoilt the beautiful view of the lake. The people of Gopher Prairie consider the architect to be a crank. The war starts in Europe but the people of Gopher Prairie do not take it seriously. Kennicott finds it boring to discuss the war though Carol wants to discuss it. Only Bjornstam agrees with Carol that the Germans should not be allowed to advance. He feels sad that none of the matrons called on Bea. But their life is quite comfortable and they are very happy.

