Chapter: CHAPTER XIV


SHE was marching home.

"No. I couldn't fall in love with him. I like him, very much. But
he's too much of a recluse. Could I kiss him? No! No! Guy Pollock at
twenty-six I could have kissed him then, maybe, even if I were married
to some one else, and probably I'd have been glib in persuading myself
that 'it wasn't really wrong.'

"The amazing thing is that I'm not more amazed at myself. I, the
virtuous young matron. Am I to be trusted? If the Prince Charming
came----

"A Gopher Prairie housewife, married a year, and yearning for a 'Prince
Charming' like a bachfisch of sixteen! They say that marriage is a magic
change. But I'm not changed. But----

"No! I wouldn't want to fall in love, even if the Prince did come. I
wouldn't want to hurt Will. I am fond of Will. I am! He doesn't stir me,
not any longer. But I depend on him. He is home and children.

"I wonder when we will begin to have children? I do want them.

"I wonder whether I remembered to tell Bea to have hominy tomorrow,
instead of oatmeal? She will have gone to bed by now. Perhaps I'll be up
early enough----

"Ever so fond of Will. I wouldn't hurt him, even if I had to lose the
mad love. If the Prince came I'd look once at him, and run. Darn fast!
Oh, Carol, you are not heroic nor fine. You are the immutable vulgar
young female.

"But I'm not the faithless wife who enjoys confiding that she's
'misunderstood.' Oh, I'm not, I'm not!

"Am I?

"At least I didn't whisper to Guy about Will's faults and his blindness
to my remarkable soul. I didn't! Matter of fact, Will probably
understands me perfectly! If only--if he would just back me up in
rousing the town.

"How many, how incredibly many wives there must be who tingle over the
first Guy Pollock who smiles at them. No! I will not be one of that
herd of yearners! The coy virgin brides. Yet probably if the Prince were
young and dared to face life----

"I'm not half as well oriented as that Mrs. Dillon. So obviously adoring
her dentist! And seeing Guy only as an eccentric fogy.

"They weren't silk, Mrs. Dillon's stockings. They were lisle. Her legs
are nice and slim. But no nicer than mine. I hate cotton tops on silk
stockings. . . . Are my ankles getting fat? I will NOT have fat ankles!

"No. I am fond of Will. His work--one farmer he pulls through diphtheria
is worth all my yammering for a castle in Spain. A castle with baths.

"This hat is so tight. I must stretch it. Guy liked it.

"There's the house. I'm awfully chilly. Time to get out the fur coat.
I wonder if I'll ever have a beaver coat? Nutria is NOT the same thing!
Beaver-glossy. Like to run my fingers over it. Guy's mustache like
beaver. How utterly absurd!

"I am, I AM fond of Will, and----Can't I ever find another word than
'fond'?

"He's home. He'll think I was out late.

"Why can't he ever remember to pull down the shades? Cy Bogart and all
the beastly boys peeping in. But the poor dear, he's absent-minded about
minute--minush--whatever the word is. He has so much worry and work,
while I do nothing but jabber to Bea.

"I MUSTN'T forget the hominy----"

She was flying into the hall. Kennicott looked up from the Journal of
the American Medical Society.

"Hello! What time did you get back?" she cried.

"About nine. You been gadding. Here it is past eleven!" Good-natured yet
not quite approving.

"Did it feel neglected?"

"Well, you didn't remember to close the lower draft in the furnace."

"Oh, I'm so sorry. But I don't often forget things like that, do I?"

She dropped into his lap and (after he had jerked back his head to save
his eye-glasses, and removed the glasses, and settled her in a position
less cramping to his legs, and casually cleared his throat) he kissed
her amiably, and remarked:

"Nope, I must say you're fairly good about things like that. I wasn't
kicking. I just meant I wouldn't want the fire to go out on us. Leave
that draft open and the fire might burn up and go out on us. And the
nights are beginning to get pretty cold again. Pretty cold on my drive.
I put the side-curtains up, it was so chilly. But the generator is
working all right now."

"Yes. It is chilly. But I feel fine after my walk."

"Go walking?"

"I went up to see the Perrys." By a definite act of will she added
the truth: "They weren't in. And I saw Guy Pollock. Dropped into his
office."

"Why, you haven't been sitting and chinning with him till eleven
o'clock?"

"Of course there were some other people there and----Will! What do you
think of Dr. Westlake?"

"Westlake? Why?"

"I noticed him on the street today."

"Was he limping? If the poor fish would have his teeth X-rayed, I'll bet
nine and a half cents he'd find an abscess there. 'Rheumatism' he calls
it. Rheumatism, hell! He's behind the times. Wonder he doesn't bleed
himself! Wellllllll----" A profound and serious yawn. "I hate to break
up the party, but it's getting late, and a doctor never knows when he'll
get routed out before morning." (She remembered that he had given this
explanation, in these words, not less than thirty times in the year.) "I
guess we better be trotting up to bed. I've wound the clock and looked
at the furnace. Did you lock the front door when you came in?"

They trailed up-stairs, after he had turned out the lights and twice
tested the front door to make sure it was fast. While they talked
they were preparing for bed. Carol still sought to maintain privacy by
undressing behind the screen of the closet door. Kennicott was not so
reticent. Tonight, as every night, she was irritated by having to push
the old plush chair out of the way before she could open the closet
door. Every time she opened the door she shoved the chair. Ten times an
hour. But Kennicott liked to have the chair in the room, and there was
no place for it except in front of the closet.

She pushed it, felt angry, hid her anger. Kennicott was yawning, more
portentously. The room smelled stale. She shrugged and became chatty:

"You were speaking of Dr. Westlake. Tell me--you've never summed him up:
Is he really a good doctor?"

"Oh yes, he's a wise old coot."

("There! You see there is no medical rivalry. Not in my house!" she said
triumphantly to Guy Pollock.)

She hung her silk petticoat on a closet hook, and went on, "Dr. Westlake
is so gentle and scholarly----"

"Well, I don't know as I'd say he was such a whale of a scholar. I've
always had a suspicion he did a good deal of four-flushing about that.
He likes to have people think he keeps up his French and Greek and Lord
knows what all; and he's always got an old Dago book lying around the
sitting-room, but I've got a hunch he reads detective stories 'bout like
the rest of us. And I don't know where he'd ever learn so dog-gone many
languages anyway! He kind of lets people assume he went to Harvard
or Berlin or Oxford or somewhere, but I looked him up in the medical
register, and he graduated from a hick college in Pennsylvania, 'way
back in 1861!"

"But this is the important thing: Is he an honest doctor?"

"How do you mean 'honest'? Depends on what you mean."

"Suppose you were sick. Would you call him in? Would you let me call him
in?"

"Not if I were well enough to cuss and bite, I wouldn't! No, SIR! I
wouldn't have the old fake in the house. Makes me tired, his everlasting
palavering and soft-soaping. He's all right for an ordinary bellyache
or holding some fool woman's hand, but I wouldn't call him in for an
honest-to-God illness, not much I wouldn't, NO-sir! You know I don't
do much back-biting, but same time----I'll tell you, Carrrie: I've never
got over being sore at Westlake for the way he treated Mrs. Jonderquist.
Nothing the matter with her, what she really needed was a rest, but
Westlake kept calling on her and calling on her for weeks, almost every
day, and he sent her a good big fat bill, too, you can bet! I never
did forgive him for that. Nice decent hard-working people like the
Jonderquists!"

In her batiste nightgown she was standing at the bureau engaged in the
invariable rites of wishing that she had a real dressing-table with a
triple mirror, of bending toward the streaky glass and raising her chin
to inspect a pin-head mole on her throat, and finally of brushing her
hair. In rhythm to the strokes she went on:

"But, Will, there isn't any of what you might call financial rivalry
between you and the partners--Westlake and McGanum--is there?"

He flipped into bed with a solemn back-somersault and a ludicrous kick
of his heels as he tucked his legs under the blankets. He snorted, "Lord
no! I never begrudge any man a nickel he can get away from me--fairly."

"But is Westlake fair? Isn't he sly?"

"Sly is the word. He's a fox, that boy!"

She saw Guy Pollock's grin in the mirror. She flushed.

Kennicott, with his arms behind his head, was yawning:

"Yump. He's smooth, too smooth. But I bet I make prett' near as much
as Westlake and McGanum both together, though I've never wanted to grab
more than my just share. If anybody wants to go to the partners instead
of to me, that's his business. Though I must say it makes me tired when
Westlake gets hold of the Dawsons. Here Luke Dawson had been coming to
me for every toeache and headache and a lot of little things that just
wasted my time, and then when his grandchild was here last summer and
had summer-complaint, I suppose, or something like that, probably--you
know, the time you and I drove up to Lac-qui-Meurt--why, Westlake got
hold of Ma Dawson, and scared her to death, and made her think the kid
had appendicitis, and, by golly, if he and McGanum didn't operate, and
holler their heads off about the terrible adhesions they found, and what
a regular Charley and Will Mayo they were for classy surgery. They let
on that if they'd waited two hours more the kid would have developed
peritonitis, and God knows what all; and then they collected a nice
fat hundred and fifty dollars. And probably they'd have charged three
hundred, if they hadn't been afraid of me! I'm no hog, but I certainly
do hate to give old Luke ten dollars' worth of advice for a dollar and a
half, and then see a hundred and fifty go glimmering. And if I can't do
a better 'pendectomy than either Westlake or McGanum, I'll eat my hat!"

As she crept into bed she was dazzled by Guy's blazing grin. She
experimented:

"But Westlake is cleverer than his son-in-law, don't you think?"

"Yes, Westlake may be old-fashioned and all that, but he's got a certain
amount of intuition, while McGanum goes into everything bull-headed, and
butts his way through like a damn yahoo, and tries to argue his patients
into having whatever he diagnoses them as having! About the best thing
Mac can do is to stick to baby-snatching. He's just about on a par with
this bone-pounding chiropractor female, Mrs. Mattie Gooch."

"Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. McGanum, though--they're nice. They've been
awfully cordial to me."

"Well, no reason why they shouldn't be, is there? Oh, they're nice
enough--though you can bet your bottom dollar they're both plugging for
their husbands all the time, trying to get the business. And I don't
know as I call it so damn cordial in Mrs. McGanum when I holler at her
on the street and she nods back like she had a sore neck. Still, she's
all right. It's Ma Westlake that makes the mischief, pussyfooting around
all the time. But I wouldn't trust any Westlake out of the whole lot,
and while Mrs. McGanum SEEMS square enough, you don't never want to
forget that she's Westlake's daughter. You bet!"

"What about Dr. Gould? Don't you think he's worse than either Westlake
or McGanum? He's so cheap--drinking, and playing pool, and always
smoking cigars in such a cocky way----"

"That's all right now! Terry Gould is a good deal of a tin-horn sport,
but he knows a lot about medicine, and don't you forget it for one
second!"

She stared down Guy's grin, and asked more cheerfully, "Is he honest,
too?"

"Ooooooooooo! Gosh I'm sleepy!" He burrowed beneath the bedclothes in
a luxurious stretch, and came up like a diver, shaking his head, as
he complained, "How's that? Who? Terry Gould honest? Don't start me
laughing--I'm too nice and sleepy! I didn't say he was honest. I said
he had savvy enough to find the index in 'Gray's Anatomy,' which is more
than McGanum can do! But I didn't say anything about his being honest.
He isn't. Terry is crooked as a dog's hind leg. He's done me more than
one dirty trick. He told Mrs. Glorbach, seventeen miles out, that I
wasn't up-to-date in obstetrics. Fat lot of good it did him! She came
right in and told me! And Terry's lazy. He'd let a pneumonia patient
choke rather than interrupt a poker game."

"Oh no. I can't believe----"

"Well now, I'm telling you!"

"Does he play much poker? Dr. Dillon told me that Dr. Gould wanted him
to play----"

"Dillon told you what? Where'd you meet Dillon? He's just come to town."

"He and his wife were at Mr. Pollock's tonight."

"Say, uh, what'd you think of them? Didn't Dillon strike you as pretty
light-waisted?"

"Why no. He seemed intelligent. I'm sure he's much more wide-awake than
our dentist."

"Well now, the old man is a good dentist. He knows his business. And
Dillon----I wouldn't cuddle up to the Dillons too close, if I were you.
All right for Pollock, and that's none of our business, but we----I
think I'd just give the Dillons the glad hand and pass 'em up."

"But why? He isn't a rival."

"That's--all--right!" Kennicott was aggressively awake now. "He'll work
right in with Westlake and McGanum. Matter of fact, I suspect they
were largely responsible for his locating here. They'll be sending him
patients, and he'll send all that he can get hold of to them. I don't
trust anybody that's too much hand-in-glove with Westlake. You give
Dillon a shot at some fellow that's just bought a farm here and drifts
into town to get his teeth looked at, and after Dillon gets through with
him, you'll see him edging around to Westlake and McGanum, every time!"

Carol reached for her blouse, which hung on a chair by the bed. She
draped it about her shoulders, and sat up studying Kennicott, her chin
in her hands. In the gray light from the small electric bulb down the
hall she could see that he was frowning.

"Will, this is--I must get this straight. Some one said to me the other
day that in towns like this, even more than in cities, all the doctors
hate each other, because of the money----"

"Who said that?"

"It doesn't matter."

"I'll bet a hat it was your Vida Sherwin. She's a brainy woman, but
she'd be a damn sight brainier if she kept her mouth shut and didn't let
so much of her brains ooze out that way."

"Will! O Will! That's horrible! Aside from the vulgarity----Some ways,
Vida is my best friend. Even if she HAD said it. Which, as a matter of
fact, she didn't." He reared up his thick shoulders, in absurd pink and
green flannelette pajamas. He sat straight, and irritatingly snapped his
fingers, and growled:

"Well, if she didn't say it, let's forget her. Doesn't make any
difference who said it, anyway. The point is that you believe it. God!
To think you don't understand me any better than that! Money!"

("This is the first real quarrel we've ever had," she was agonizing.)

He thrust out his long arm and snatched his wrinkly vest from a chair.
He took out a cigar, a match. He tossed the vest on the floor. He
lighted the cigar and puffed savagely. He broke up the match and snapped
the fragments at the foot-board.

She suddenly saw the foot-board of the bed as the foot-stone of the
grave of love.

The room was drab-colored and ill-ventilated--Kennicott did not "believe
in opening the windows so darn wide that you heat all outdoors." The
stale air seemed never to change. In the light from the hall they were
two lumps of bedclothes with shoulders and tousled heads attached.

She begged, "I didn't mean to wake you up, dear. And please don't smoke.
You've been smoking so much. Please go back to sleep. I'm sorry."

"Being sorry 's all right, but I'm going to tell you one or two things.
This falling for anybody's say-so about medical jealousy and competition
is simply part and parcel of your usual willingness to think the worst
you possibly can of us poor dubs in Gopher Prairie. Trouble with women
like you is, you always want to ARGUE. Can't take things the way they
are. Got to argue. Well, I'm not going to argue about this in any way,
shape, manner, or form. Trouble with you is, you don't make any effort
to appreciate us. You're so damned superior, and think the city is such
a hell of a lot finer place, and you want us to do what YOU want, all
the time----"

"That's not true! It's I who make the effort. It's they--it's you--who
stand back and criticize. I have to come over to the town's opinion;
I have to devote myself to their interests. They can't even SEE my
interests, to say nothing of adopting them. I get ever so excited about
their old Lake Minniemashie and the cottages, but they simply guffaw (in
that lovely friendly way you advertise so much) if I speak of wanting to
see Taormina also."

"Sure, Tormina, whatever that is--some nice expensive millionaire
colony, I suppose. Sure; that's the idea; champagne taste and beer
income; and make sure that we never will have more than a beer income,
too!"

"Are you by any chance implying that I am not economical?"

"Well, I hadn't intended to, but since you bring it up yourself, I don't
mind saying the grocery bills are about twice what they ought to be."

"Yes, they probably are. I'm not economical. I can't be. Thanks to you!"

"Where d' you get that 'thanks to you'?"

"Please don't be quite so colloquial--or shall I say VULGAR?"

"I'll be as damn colloquial as I want to. How do you get that 'thanks to
you'? Here about a year ago you jump me for not remembering to give you
money. Well, I'm reasonable. I didn't blame you, and I SAID I was to
blame. But have I ever forgotten it since--practically?"

"No. You haven't--practically! But that isn't it. I ought to have an
allowance. I will, too! I must have an agreement for a regular stated
amount, every month."

"Fine idea! Of course a doctor gets a regular stated amount! Sure! A
thousand one month--and lucky if he makes a hundred the next."

"Very well then, a percentage. Or something else. No matter how much you
vary, you can make a rough average for----"

"But what's the idea? What are you trying to get at? Mean to say I'm
unreasonable? Think I'm so unreliable and tightwad that you've got to
tie me down with a contract? By God, that hurts! I thought I'd been
pretty generous and decent, and I took a lot of pleasure--thinks I,
'she'll be tickled when I hand her over this twenty'--or fifty, or
whatever it was; and now seems you been wanting to make it a kind of
alimony. Me, like a poor fool, thinking I was liberal all the while, and
you----"

"Please stop pitying yourself! You're having a beautiful time feeling
injured. I admit all you say. Certainly. You've given me money both
freely and amiably. Quite as if I were your mistress!"

"Carrie!"

"I mean it! What was a magnificent spectacle of generosity to you was
humiliation to me. You GAVE me money--gave it to your mistress, if she
was complaisant, and then you----"

"Carrie!"

"(Don't interrupt me!)--then you felt you'd discharged all obligation.
Well, hereafter I'll refuse your money, as a gift. Either I'm your
partner, in charge of the household department of our business, with a
regular budget for it, or else I'm nothing. If I'm to be a mistress,
I shall choose my lovers. Oh, I hate it--I hate it--this smirking and
hoping for money--and then not even spending it on jewels as a mistress
has a right to, but spending it on double-boilers and socks for you!
Yes indeed! You're generous! You give me a dollar, right out--the only
proviso is that I must spend it on a tie for you! And you give it when
and as you wish. How can I be anything but uneconomical?"

"Oh well, of course, looking at it that way----"

"I can't shop around, can't buy in large quantities, have to stick to
stores where I have a charge account, good deal of the time, can't plan
because I don't know how much money I can depend on. That's what I pay
for your charming sentimentalities about giving so generously. You make
me----"

"Wait! Wait! You know you're exaggerating. You never thought about that
mistress stuff till just this minute! Matter of fact, you never have
'smirked and hoped for money.' But all the same, you may be right. You
ought to run the household as a business. I'll figure out a definite
plan tomorrow, and hereafter you'll be on a regular amount or
percentage, with your own checking account."

"Oh, that IS decent of you!" She turned toward him, trying to be
affectionate. But his eyes were pink and unlovely in the flare of the
match with which he lighted his dead and malodorous cigar. His head
drooped, and a ridge of flesh scattered with pale small bristles bulged
out under his chin.

She sat in abeyance till he croaked:

"No. 'Tisn't especially decent. It's just fair. And God knows I want
to be fair. But I expect others to be fair, too. And you're so high and
mighty about people. Take Sam Clark; best soul that ever lived, honest
and loyal and a damn good fellow----"

("Yes, and a good shot at ducks, don't forget that!")

("Well, and he is a good shot, too!) Sam drops around in the evening to
sit and visit, and by golly just because he takes a dry smoke and rolls
his cigar around in his mouth, and maybe spits a few times, you look
at him as if he was a hog. Oh, you didn't know I was onto you, and I
certainly hope Sam hasn't noticed it, but I never miss it."

"I have felt that way. Spitting--ugh! But I'm sorry you caught my
thoughts. I tried to be nice; I tried to hide them."

"Maybe I catch a whole lot more than you think I do!"

"Yes, perhaps you do."

"And d' you know why Sam doesn't light his cigar when he's here?"

"Why?"

"He's so darn afraid you'll be offended if he smokes. You scare him.
Every time he speaks of the weather you jump him because he ain't
talking about poetry or Gertie--Goethe?--or some other highbrow junk.
You've got him so leery he scarcely dares to come here."

"Oh, I AM sorry. (Though I'm sure it's you who are exaggerating now.")

"Well now, I don't know as I am! And I can tell you one thing: if you
keep on you'll manage to drive away every friend I've got."

"That would be horrible of me. You KNOW I don't mean to Will, what is it
about me that frightens Sam--if I do frighten him."

"Oh, you do, all right! 'Stead of putting his legs up on another chair,
and unbuttoning his vest, and telling a good story or maybe kidding
me about something, he sits on the edge of his chair and tries to make
conversation about politics, and he doesn't even cuss, and Sam's never
real comfortable unless he can cuss a little!"

"In other words, he isn't comfortable unless he can behave like a
peasant in a mud hut!"

"Now that'll be about enough of that! You want to know how you scare
him? First you deliberately fire some question at him that you know darn
well he can't answer--any fool could see you were experimenting with
him--and then you shock him by talking of mistresses or something, like
you were doing just now----"

"Of course the pure Samuel never speaks of such erring ladies in his
private conversations!"

"Not when there's ladies around! You can bet your life on that!"

"So the impurity lies in failing to pretend that----"

"Now we won't go into all that--eugenics or whatever damn fad you choose
to call it. As I say, first you shock him, and then you become so darn
flighty that nobody can follow you. Either you want to dance, or you
bang the piano, or else you get moody as the devil and don't want to
talk or anything else. If you must be temperamental, why can't you be
that way by yourself?"

"My dear man, there's nothing I'd like better than to be by myself
occasionally! To have a room of my own! I suppose you expect me to sit
here and dream delicately and satisfy my 'temperamentality' while you
wander in from the bathroom with lather all over your face, and shout,
'Seen my brown pants?'"

"Huh!" He did not sound impressed. He made no answer. He turned out of
bed, his feet making one solid thud on the floor. He marched from the
room, a grotesque figure in baggy union-pajamas. She heard him drawing
a drink of water at the bathroom tap. She was furious at the
contemptuousness of his exit. She snuggled down in bed, and looked
away from him as he returned. He ignored her. As he flumped into bed he
yawned, and casually stated:

"Well, you'll have plenty of privacy when we build a new house.

"When?"

"Oh, I'll build it all right, don't you fret! But of course I don't
expect any credit for it."

Now it was she who grunted "Huh!" and ignored him, and felt independent
and masterful as she shot up out of bed, turned her back on him,
fished a lone and petrified chocolate out of her glove-box in the
top right-hand drawer of the bureau, gnawed at it, found that it had
cocoanut filling, said "Damn!" wished that she had not said it, so that
she might be superior to his colloquialism, and hurled the chocolate
into the wastebasket, where it made an evil and mocking clatter among
the debris of torn linen collars and toothpaste box. Then, in great
dignity and self-dramatization, she returned to bed.

All this time he had been talking on, embroidering his assertion that
he "didn't expect any credit." She was reflecting that he was a rustic,
that she hated him, that she had been insane to marry him, that she had
married him only because she was tired of work, that she must get her
long gloves cleaned, that she would never do anything more for him,
and that she mustn't forget his hominy for breakfast. She was roused to
attention by his storming:

"I'm a fool to think about a new house. By the time I get it built
you'll probably have succeeded in your plan to get me completely in
Dutch with every friend and every patient I've got."

She sat up with a bounce. She said coldly, "Thank you very much for
revealing your real opinion of me. If that's the way you feel, if I'm
such a hindrance to you, I can't stay under this roof another minute.
And I am perfectly well able to earn my own living. I will go at once,
and you may get a divorce at your pleasure! What you want is a nice
sweet cow of a woman who will enjoy having your dear friends talk about
the weather and spit on the floor!"

"Tut! Don't be a fool!"

"You will very soon find out whether I'm a fool or not! I mean it! Do
you think I'd stay here one second after I found out that I was injuring
you? At least I have enough sense of justice not to do that."

"Please stop flying off at tangents, Carrie. This----"

"Tangents? TANGENTS! Let me tell you----"

"----isn't a theater-play; it's a serious effort to have us get together
on fundamentals. We've both been cranky, and said a lot of things we
didn't mean. I wish we were a couple o' bloomin' poets and just talked
about roses and moonshine, but we're human. All right. Let's cut out
jabbing at each other. Let's admit we both do fool things. See here: You
KNOW you feel superior to folks. You're not as bad as I say, but you're
not as good as you say--not by a long shot! What's the reason you're so
superior? Why can't you take folks as they are?"

Her preparations for stalking out of the Doll's House were not yet
visible. She mused:

"I think perhaps it's my childhood." She halted. When she went on
her voice had an artificial sound, her words the bookish quality of
emotional meditation. "My father was the tenderest man in the world, but
he did feel superior to ordinary people. Well, he was! And the Minnesota
Valley----I used to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a
time, my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to write
poems. The shiny tilted roofs below me, and the river, and beyond it the
level fields in the mist, and the rim of palisades across----It held my
thoughts in. I LIVED, in the valley. But the prairie--all my thoughts go
flying off into the big space. Do you think it might be that?"

"Um, well, maybe, but----Carrie, you always talk so much about getting
all you can out of life, and not letting the years slip by, and here you
deliberately go and deprive yourself of a lot of real good home pleasure
by not enjoying people unless they wear frock coats and trot out----"

("Morning clothes. Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean t' interrupt you.")

"----to a lot of tea-parties. Take Jack Elder. You think Jack hasn't got
any ideas about anything but manufacturing and the tariff on lumber.
But do you know that Jack is nutty about music? He'll put a grand-opera
record on the phonograph and sit and listen to it and close his
eyes----Or you take Lym Cass. Ever realize what a well-informed man he
is?"

"But IS he? Gopher Prairie calls anybody 'well-informed' who's been
through the State Capitol and heard about Gladstone."

"Now I'm telling you! Lym reads a lot--solid stuff--history. Or take
Mart Mahoney, the garageman. He's got a lot of Perry prints of famous
pictures in his office. Or old Bingham Playfair, that died here 'bout a
year ago--lived seven miles out. He was a captain in the Civil War,
and knew General Sherman, and they say he was a miner in Nevada right
alongside of Mark Twain. You'll find these characters in all these small
towns, and a pile of savvy in every single one of them, if you just dig
for it."

"I know. And I do love them. Especially people like Champ Perry. But I
can't be so very enthusiastic over the smug cits like Jack Elder."

"Then I'm a smug cit, too, whatever that is."

"No, you're a scientist. Oh, I will try and get the music out of Mr.
Elder. Only, why can't he let it COME out, instead of being ashamed of
it, and always talking about hunting dogs? But I will try. Is it all
right now?"

"Sure. But there's one other thing. You might give me some attention,
too!"

"That's unjust! You have everything I am!"

"No, I haven't. You think you respect me--you always hand out some
spiel about my being so 'useful.' But you never think of me as having
ambitions, just as much as you have----"

"Perhaps not. I think of you as being perfectly satisfied."

"Well, I'm not, not by a long shot! I don't want to be a plug general
practitioner all my life, like Westlake, and die in harness because I
can't get out of it, and have 'em say, 'He was a good fellow, but he
couldn't save a cent.' Not that I care a whoop what they say, after I've
kicked in and can't hear 'em, but I want to put enough money away so you
and I can be independent some day, and not have to work unless I feel
like it, and I want to have a good house--by golly, I'll have as good
a house as anybody in THIS town!--and if we want to travel and see your
Tormina or whatever it is, why we can do it, with enough money in our
jeans so we won't have to take anything off anybody, or fret about our
old age. You never worry about what might happen if we got sick and
didn't have a good fat wad salted away, do you!"

"I don't suppose I do."

"Well then, I have to do it for you. And if you think for one moment
I want to be stuck in this burg all my life, and not have a chance to
travel and see the different points of interest and all that, then you
simply don't get me. I want to have a squint at the world, much's you
do. Only, I'm practical about it. First place, I'm going to make the
money--I'm investing in good safe farmlands. Do you understand why now?"

"Yes."

"Will you try and see if you can't think of me as something more than
just a dollar-chasing roughneck?"

"Oh, my dear, I haven't been just! I AM difficile. And I won't call on
the Dillons! And if Dr. Dillon is working for Westlake and McGanum, I
hate him!"




CHAPTER XV


THAT December she was in love with her husband.

She romanticized herself not as a great reformer but as the wife of a
country physician. The realities of the doctor's household were colored
by her pride.

Late at night, a step on the wooden porch, heard through her confusion
of sleep; the storm-door opened; fumbling over the inner door-panels;
the buzz of the electric bell. Kennicott muttering "Gol darn it," but
patiently creeping out of bed, remembering to draw the covers up to keep
her warm, feeling for slippers and bathrobe, clumping down-stairs.

From below, half-heard in her drowsiness, a colloquy in the
pidgin-German of the farmers who have forgotten the Old Country language
without learning the new:

"Hello, Barney, wass willst du?"

"Morgen, doctor. Die Frau ist ja awful sick. All night she been having
an awful pain in de belly."

"How long she been this way? Wie lang, eh?"

"I dunno, maybe two days."

"Why didn't you come for me yesterday, instead of waking me up out of a
sound sleep? Here it is two o'clock! So spat--warum, eh?"

"Nun aber, I know it, but she got soch a lot vorse last evening. I
t'ought maybe all de time it go avay, but it got a lot vorse."

"Any fever?"

"Vell ja, I t'ink she got fever."

"Which side is the pain on?"

"Huh?"

"Das Schmertz--die Weh--which side is it on? Here?"

"So. Right here it is."

"Any rigidity there?"

"Huh?"

"Is it rigid--stiff--I mean, does the belly feel hard to the fingers?"

"I dunno. She ain't said yet."

"What she been eating?"

"Vell, I t'ink about vot ve alwis eat, maybe corn beef and cabbage and
sausage, und so weiter. Doc, sie weint immer, all the time she holler
like hell. I vish you come."

"Well, all right, but you call me earlier, next time. Look here, Barney,
you better install a 'phone--telephone haben. Some of you Dutchmen will
be dying one of these days before you can fetch the doctor."

The door closing. Barney's wagon--the wheels silent in the snow, but the
wagon-body rattling. Kennicott clicking the receiver-hook to rouse the
night telephone-operator, giving a number, waiting, cursing mildly,
waiting again, and at last growling, "Hello, Gus, this is the doctor.
Say, uh, send me up a team. Guess snow's too thick for a machine. Going
eight miles south. All right. Huh? The hell I will! Don't you go back
to sleep. Huh? Well, that's all right now, you didn't wait so very darn
long. All right, Gus; shoot her along. By!"

His step on the stairs; his quiet moving about the frigid room while he
dressed; his abstracted and meaningless cough. She was supposed to be
asleep; she was too exquisitely drowsy to break the charm by speaking.
On a slip of paper laid on the bureau--she could hear the pencil
grinding against the marble slab--he wrote his destination. He went out,
hungry, chilly, unprotesting; and she, before she fell asleep again,
loved him for his sturdiness, and saw the drama of his riding by night
to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured children
standing at a window, waiting for him. He suddenly had in her eyes the
heroism of a wireless operator on a ship in a collision; of an explorer,
fever-clawed, deserted by his bearers, but going on--jungle--going----

At six, when the light faltered in as through ground glass and bleakly
identified the chairs as gray rectangles, she heard his step on the
porch; heard him at the furnace: the rattle of shaking the grate, the
slow grinding removal of ashes, the shovel thrust into the coal-bin,
the abrupt clatter of the coal as it flew into the fire-box, the fussy
regulation of drafts--the daily sounds of a Gopher Prairie life, now
first appealing to her as something brave and enduring, many-colored
and free. She visioned the fire-box: flames turned to lemon and metallic
gold as the coal-dust sifted over them; thin twisty flutters of purple,
ghost flames which gave no light, slipping up between the dark banked
coals.

It was luxurious in bed, and the house would be warm for her when
she rose, she reflected. What a worthless cat she was! What were her
aspirations beside his capability?

She awoke again as he dropped into bed.

"Seems just a few minutes ago that you started out!"

"I've been away four hours. I've operated a woman for appendicitis, in
a Dutch kitchen. Came awful close to losing her, too, but I pulled her
through all right. Close squeak. Barney says he shot ten rabbits last
Sunday."

He was instantly asleep--one hour of rest before he had to be up and
ready for the farmers who came in early. She marveled that in what was
to her but a night-blurred moment, he should have been in a distant
place, have taken charge of a strange house, have slashed a woman, saved
a life.

What wonder he detested the lazy Westlake and McGanum! How could the
easy Guy Pollock understand this skill and endurance?

Then Kennicott was grumbling, "Seven-fifteen! Aren't you ever going
to get up for breakfast?" and he was not a hero-scientist but a rather
irritable and commonplace man who needed a shave. They had coffee,
griddle-cakes, and sausages, and talked about Mrs. McGanum's atrocious
alligator-hide belt. Night witchery and morning disillusion were alike
forgotten in the march of realities and days.


II

Familiar to the doctor's wife was the man with an injured leg, driven in
from the country on a Sunday afternoon and brought to the house. He
sat in a rocker in the back of a lumber-wagon, his face pale from the
anguish of the jolting. His leg was thrust out before him, resting on
a starch-box and covered with a leather-bound horse-blanket. His drab
courageous wife drove the wagon, and she helped Kennicott support him as
he hobbled up the steps, into the house.

"Fellow cut his leg with an ax--pretty bad gash--Halvor Nelson, nine
miles out," Kennicott observed.

Carol fluttered at the back of the room, childishly excited when she was
sent to fetch towels and a basin of water. Kennicott lifted the farmer
into a chair and chuckled, "There we are, Halvor! We'll have you out
fixing fences and drinking aquavit in a month." The farmwife sat on
the couch, expressionless, bulky in a man's dogskin coat and unplumbed
layers of jackets. The flowery silk handkerchief which she had worn over
her head now hung about her seamed neck. Her white wool gloves lay in
her lap.

Kennicott drew from the injured leg the thick red "German sock," the
innumerous other socks of gray and white wool, then the spiral bandage.
The leg was of an unwholesome dead white, with the black hairs feeble
and thin and flattened, and the scar a puckered line of crimson. Surely,
Carol shuddered, this was not human flesh, the rosy shining tissue of
the amorous poets.

Kennicott examined the scar, smiled at Halvor and his wife, chanted,
"Fine, b' gosh! Couldn't be better!"

The Nelsons looked deprecating. The farmer nodded a cue to his wife and
she mourned:

"Vell, how much ve going to owe you, doctor?"

"I guess it'll be----Let's see: one drive out and two calls. I guess
it'll be about eleven dollars in all, Lena."

"I dunno ve can pay you yoost a little w'ile, doctor."

Kennicott lumbered over to her, patted her shoulder, roared, "Why, Lord
love you, sister, I won't worry if I never get it! You pay me next fall,
when you get your crop. . . . Carrie! Suppose you or Bea could shake up
a cup of coffee and some cold lamb for the Nelsons? They got a long cold
drive ahead."


III


He had been gone since morning; her eyes ached with reading; Vida
Sherwin could not come to tea. She wandered through the house, empty as
the bleary street without. The problem of "Will the doctor be home in
time for supper, or shall I sit down without him?" was important in
the household. Six was the rigid, the canonical supper-hour, but at
half-past six he had not come. Much speculation with Bea: Had the
obstetrical case taken longer than he had expected? Had he been called
somewhere else? Was the snow much heavier out in the country, so that he
should have taken a buggy, or even a cutter, instead of the car? Here in
town it had melted a lot, but still----

A honking, a shout, the motor engine raced before it was shut off.

She hurried to the window. The car was a monster at rest after furious
adventures. The headlights blazed on the clots of ice in the road so
that the tiniest lumps gave mountainous shadows, and the taillight cast
a circle of ruby on the snow behind. Kennicott was opening the door,
crying, "Here we are, old girl! Got stuck couple times, but we made it,
by golly, we made it, and here we be! Come on! Food! Eatin's!"

She rushed to him, patted his fur coat, the long hairs smooth but chilly
to her fingers. She joyously summoned Bea, "All right! He's here! We'll
sit right down!"


IV


There were, to inform the doctor's wife of his successes no clapping
audiences nor book-reviews nor honorary degrees. But there was a
letter written by a German farmer recently moved from Minnesota to
Saskatchewan:


Dear sor, as you haf bin treading mee for a fue Weaks dis Somer and
seen wat is rong wit mee so in Regarding to dat i wont to tank you. the
Doctor heir say wat shot bee rong wit mee and day give mee som Madsin
but it diten halp mee like wat you dit. Now day glaim dat i Woten Neet
aney Madsin ad all wat you tink?

Well i haven ben tacking aney ting for about one & 1/2 Mont but i dont
get better so i like to heir Wat you tink about it i feel like dis
Disconfebil feeling around the Stomac after eating and dat Pain around
Heard and down the arm and about 3 to 3 1/2 Hour after Eating i feel
weeak like and dissy and a dull Hadig. Now you gust lett mee know Wat
you tink about mee, i do Wat you say.


V


She encountered Guy Pollock at the drug store. He looked at her as
though he had a right to; he spoke softly. "I haven't see you, the last
few days."

"No. I've been out in the country with Will several times. He's so----Do
you know that people like you and me can never understand people like
him? We're a pair of hypercritical loafers, you and I, while he quietly
goes and does things."

She nodded and smiled and was very busy about purchasing boric acid. He
stared after her, and slipped away.

When she found that he was gone she was slightly disconcerted.


VI


She could--at times--agree with Kennicott that the shaving-and-corsets
familiarity of married life was not dreary vulgarity but a wholesome
frankness; that artificial reticences might merely be irritating. She
was not much disturbed when for hours he sat about the living-room in
his honest socks. But she would not listen to his theory that "all this
romance stuff is simply moonshine--elegant when you're courting, but no
use busting yourself keeping it up all your life."

She thought of surprises, games, to vary the days. She knitted an
astounding purple scarf, which she hid under his supper plate. (When
he discovered it he looked embarrassed, and gasped, "Is today an
anniversary or something? Gosh, I'd forgotten it!")

Once she filled a thermos bottle with hot coffee a corn-flakes box with
cookies just baked by Bea, and bustled to his office at three in the
afternoon. She hid her bundles in the hall and peeped in.

The office was shabby. Kennicott had inherited it from a medical
predecessor, and changed it only by adding a white enameled
operating-table, a sterilizer, a Roentgen-ray apparatus, and a small
portable typewriter. It was a suite of two rooms: a waiting-room with
straight chairs, shaky pine table, and those coverless and unknown
magazines which are found only in the offices of dentists and
doctors. The room beyond, looking on Main Street, was business-office,
consulting-room, operating-room, and, in an alcove, bacteriological
and chemical laboratory. The wooden floors of both rooms were bare; the
furniture was brown and scaly.

Waiting for the doctor were two women, as still as though they were
paralyzed, and a man in a railroad brakeman's uniform, holding his
bandaged right hand with his tanned left. They stared at Carol. She sat
modestly in a stiff chair, feeling frivolous and out of place.

Kennicott appeared at the inner door, ushering out a bleached man with
a trickle of wan beard, and consoling him, "All right, Dad. Be careful
about the sugar, and mind the diet I gave you. Gut the prescription
filled, and come in and see me next week. Say, uh, better, uh, better
not drink too much beer. All right, Dad."

His voice was artificially hearty. He looked absently at Carol. He was
a medical machine now, not a domestic machine. "What is it, Carrie?" he
droned.

"No hurry. Just wanted to say hello."

"Well----"

Self-pity because he did not divine that this was a surprise party
rendered her sad and interesting to herself, and she had the pleasure of
the martyrs in saying bravely to him, "It's nothing special. If you're
busy long I'll trot home."

While she waited she ceased to pity and began to mock herself. For the
first time she observed the waiting-room. Oh yes, the doctor's family
had to have obi panels and a wide couch and an electric percolator, but
any hole was good enough for sick tired common people who were nothing
but the one means and excuse for the doctor's existing! No. She couldn't
blame Kennicott. He was satisfied by the shabby chairs. He put up with
them as his patients did. It was her neglected province--she who had
been going about talking of rebuilding the whole town!

When the patients were gone she brought in her bundles.

"What's those?" wondered Kennicott.

"Turn your back! Look out of the window!"

He obeyed--not very much bored. When she cried "Now!" a feast of cookies
and small hard candies and hot coffee was spread on the roll-top desk in
the inner room.

His broad face lightened. "That's a new one on me! Never was more
surprised in my life! And, by golly, I believe I am hungry. Say, this is
fine."

When the first exhilaration of the surprise had declined she demanded,
"Will! I'm going to refurnish your waiting-room!"

"What's the matter with it? It's all right."

"It is not! It's hideous. We can afford to give your patients a better
place. And it would be good business." She felt tremendously politic.

"Rats! I don't worry about the business. You look here now: As I told
you----Just because I like to tuck a few dollars away, I'll be switched
if I'll stand for your thinking I'm nothing but a dollar-chasing----"

"Stop it! Quick! I'm not hurting your feelings! I'm not criticizing! I'm
the adoring least one of thy harem. I just mean----"

Two days later, with pictures, wicker chairs, a rug, she had made the
waiting-room habitable; and Kennicott admitted, "Does look a lot better.
Never thought much about it. Guess I need being bullied."

She was convinced that she was gloriously content in her career as
doctor's-wife.


VII


She tried to free herself from the speculation and disillusionment which
had been twitching at her; sought to dismiss all the opinionation of an
insurgent era. She wanted to shine upon the veal-faced bristly-bearded
Lyman Cass as much as upon Miles Bjornstam or Guy Pollock. She gave a
reception for the Thanatopsis Club. But her real acquiring of merit
was in calling upon that Mrs. Bogart whose gossipy good opinion was so
valuable to a doctor.

Though the Bogart house was next door she had entered it but three
times. Now she put on her new moleskin cap, which made her face small
and innocent, she rubbed off the traces of a lip-stick--and fled across
the alley before her admirable resolution should sneak away.

The age of houses, like the age of men, has small relation to their
years. The dull-green cottage of the good Widow Bogart was twenty years
old, but it had the antiquity of Cheops, and the smell of mummy-dust.
Its neatness rebuked the street. The two stones by the path were painted
yellow; the outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice
that it was not concealed at all; the last iron dog remaining in Gopher
Prairie stood among whitewashed conch-shells upon the lawn. The hallway
was dismayingly scrubbed; the kitchen was an exercise in mathematics,
with problems worked out in equidistant chairs.

The parlor was kept for visitors. Carol suggested, "Let's sit in the
kitchen. Please don't trouble to light the parlor stove."

"No trouble at all! My gracious, and you coming so seldom and all, and
the kitchen is a perfect sight, I try to keep it clean, but Cy will
track mud all over it, I've spoken to him about it a hundred times if
I've spoken once, no, you sit right there, dearie, and I'll make a fire,
no trouble at all, practically no trouble at all."

Mrs. Bogart groaned, rubbed her joints, and repeatedly dusted her hands
while she made the fire, and when Carol tried to help she lamented,
"Oh, it doesn't matter; guess I ain't good for much but toil and workin'
anyway; seems as though that's what a lot of folks think."

The parlor was distinguished by an expanse of rag carpet from which, as
they entered, Mrs. Bogart hastily picked one sad dead fly. In the center
of the carpet was a rug depicting a red Newfoundland dog, reclining in a
green and yellow daisy field and labeled "Our Friend." The parlor organ,
tall and thin, was adorned with a mirror partly circular, partly square,
and partly diamond-shaped, and with brackets holding a pot of geraniums,
a mouth-organ, and a copy of "The Oldtime Hymnal." On the center
table was a Sears-Roebuck mail-order catalogue, a silver frame with
photographs of the Baptist Church and of an elderly clergyman, and
an aluminum tray containing a rattlesnake's rattle and a broken
spectacle-lens.

Mrs. Bogart spoke of the eloquence of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel,
the coldness of cold days, the price of poplar wood, Dave Dyer's new
hair-cut, and Cy Bogart's essential piety. "As I said to his Sunday
School teacher, Cy may be a little wild, but that's because he's got so
much better brains than a lot of these boys, and this farmer that claims
he caught Cy stealing 'beggies, is a liar, and I ought to have the law
on him."

Mrs. Bogart went thoroughly into the rumor that the girl waiter at
Billy's Lunch was not all she might be--or, rather, was quite all she
might be.

"My lands, what can you expect when everybody knows what her mother was?
And if these traveling salesmen would let her alone she would be all
right, though I certainly don't believe she ought to be allowed to think
she can pull the wool over our eyes. The sooner she's sent to the
school for incorrigible girls down at Sauk Centre, the better for all
and----Won't you just have a cup of coffee, Carol dearie, I'm sure you
won't mind old Aunty Bogart calling you by your first name when you
think how long I've known Will, and I was such a friend of his dear
lovely mother when she lived here and--was that fur cap expensive?
But----Don't you think it's awful, the way folks talk in this town?"

Mrs. Bogart hitched her chair nearer. Her large face, with its
disturbing collection of moles and lone black hairs, wrinkled
cunningly. She showed her decayed teeth in a reproving smile, and in the
confidential voice of one who scents stale bedroom scandal she breathed:

"I just don't see how folks can talk and act like they do. You don't
know the things that go on under cover. This town--why it's only the
religious training I've given Cy that's kept him so innocent of--things.
Just the other day----I never pay no attention to stories, but I heard
it mighty good and straight that Harry Haydock is carrying on with a
girl that clerks in a store down in Minneapolis, and poor Juanita
not knowing anything about it--though maybe it's the judgment of
God, because before she married Harry she acted up with more than one
boy----Well, I don't like to say it, and maybe I ain't up-to-date, like
Cy says, but I always believed a lady shouldn't even give names to all
sorts of dreadful things, but just the same I know there was at least
one case where Juanita and a boy--well, they were just dreadful.
And--and----Then there's that Ole Jenson the grocer, that thinks he's so
plaguey smart, and I know he made up to a farmer's wife and----And this
awful man Bjornstam that does chores, and Nat Hicks and----"

There was, it seemed, no person in town who was not living a life of
shame except Mrs. Bogart, and naturally she resented it.

She knew. She had always happened to be there. Once, she whispered, she
was going by when an indiscreet window-shade had been left up a couple
of inches. Once she had noticed a man and woman holding hands, and right
at a Methodist sociable!

"Another thing----Heaven knows I never want to start trouble, but I
can't help what I see from my back steps, and I notice your hired girl
Bea carrying on with the grocery boys and all----"

"Mrs. Bogart! I'd trust Bea as I would myself!"

"Oh, dearie, you don't understand me! I'm sure she's a good girl. I mean
she's green, and I hope that none of these horrid young men that there
are around town will get her into trouble! It's their parents' fault,
letting them run wild and hear evil things. If I had my way there
wouldn't be none of them, not boys nor girls neither, allowed to know
anything about--about things till they was married. It's terrible the
bald way that some folks talk. It just shows and gives away what awful
thoughts they got inside them, and there's nothing can cure them except
coming right to God and kneeling down like I do at prayer-meeting every
Wednesday evening, and saying, 'O God, I would be a miserable sinner
except for thy grace.'

"I'd make every last one of these brats go to Sunday School and learn
to think about nice things 'stead of about cigarettes and goings-on--and
these dances they have at the lodges are the worst thing that ever
happened to this town, lot of young men squeezing girls and finding
out----Oh, it's dreadful. I've told the mayor he ought to put a stop
to them and----There was one boy in this town, I don't want to be
suspicious or uncharitable but----"

It was half an hour before Carol escaped.

She stopped on her own porch and thought viciously:

"If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I
must be on the side of the devil. But--isn't she like me? She too wants
to 'reform the town'! She too criticizes everybody! She too thinks the
men are vulgar and limited! AM I LIKE HER? This is ghastly!"

That evening she did not merely consent to play cribbage with Kennicott;
she urged him to play; and she worked up a hectic interest in land-deals
and Sam Clark.


VIII


In courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph of Nels
Erdstrom's baby and log cabin, but she had never seen the Erdstroms.
They had become merely "patients of the doctor." Kennicott telephoned
her on a mid-December afternoon, "Want to throw your coat on and drive
out to Erdstrom's with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice."

"Oh yes!" She hastened to put on woolen stockings, high boots, sweater,
muffler, cap, mittens.

The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for the motor. They
drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked over them was a blue woolen
cover, prickly to her wrists, and outside of it a buffalo robe, humble
and moth-eaten now, used ever since the bison herds had streaked the
prairie a few miles to the west.

The scattered houses between which they passed in town were small and
desolate in contrast to the expanse of huge snowy yards and wide
street. They crossed the railroad tracks, and instantly were in the farm
country. The big piebald horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to
trot. The carriage squeaked in rhythm. Kennicott drove with clucks of
"There boy, take it easy!" He was thinking. He paid no attention to
Carol. Yet it was he who commented, "Pretty nice, over there," as they
approached an oak-grove where shifty winter sunlight quivered in the
hollow between two snow-drifts.

They drove from the natural prairie to a cleared district which twenty
years ago had been forest. The country seemed to stretch unchanging to
the North Pole: low hill, brush-scraggly bottom, reedy creek, muskrat
mound, fields with frozen brown clods thrust up through the snow.

Her ears and nose were pinched; her breath frosted her collar; her
fingers ached.

"Getting colder," she said.

"Yup."

That was all their conversation for three miles. Yet she was happy.

They reached Nels Erdstrom's at four, and with a throb she recognized
the courageous venture which had lured her to Gopher Prairie: the
cleared fields, furrows among stumps, a log cabin chinked with mud and
roofed with dry hay. But Nels had prospered. He used the log cabin as a
barn; and a new house reared up, a proud, unwise, Gopher Prairie
house, the more naked and ungraceful in its glossy white paint and pink
trimmings. Every tree had been cut down. The house was so unsheltered,
so battered by the wind, so bleakly thrust out into the harsh clearing,
that Carol shivered. But they were welcomed warmly enough in the
kitchen, with its crisp new plaster, its black and nickel range, its
cream separator in a corner.

Mrs. Erdstrom begged her to sit in the parlor, where there was a
phonograph and an oak and leather davenport, the prairie farmer's
proofs of social progress, but she dropped down by the kitchen stove and
insisted, "Please don't mind me." When Mrs. Erdstrom had followed the
doctor out of the room Carol glanced in a friendly way at the grained
pine cupboard, the framed Lutheran Konfirmations Attest, the traces
of fried eggs and sausages on the dining table against the wall, and a
jewel among calendars, presenting not only a lithographic young woman
with cherry lips, and a Swedish advertisement of Axel Egge's grocery,
but also a thermometer and a match-holder.

She saw that a boy of four or five was staring at her from the hall,
a boy in gingham shirt and faded corduroy trousers, but large-eyed,
firm-mouthed, wide-browed. He vanished, then peeped in again, biting his
knuckles, turning his shoulder toward her in shyness.

Didn't she remember--what was it?--Kennicott sitting beside her at Fort
Snelling, urging, "See how scared that baby is. Needs some woman like
you."

Magic had fluttered about her then--magic of sunset and cool air and the
curiosity of lovers. She held out her hands as much to that sanctity as
to the boy.

He edged into the room, doubtfully sucking his thumb.

"Hello," she said. "What's your name?"

"Hee, hee, hee!"

"You're quite right. I agree with you. Silly people like me always ask
children their names."

"Hee, hee, hee!"

"Come here and I'll tell you the story of--well, I don't know what it
will be about, but it will have a slim heroine and a Prince Charming."

He stood stoically while she spun nonsense. His giggling ceased. She was
winning him. Then the telephone bell--two long rings, one short.

Mrs. Erdstrom galloped into the room, shrieked into the transmitter,
"Vell? Yes, yes, dis is Erdstrom's place! Heh? Oh, you vant de doctor?"

Kennicott appeared, growled into the telephone:

"Well, what do you want? Oh, hello Dave; what do you want? Which
Morgenroth's? Adolph's? All right. Amputation? Yuh, I see. Say, Dave,
get Gus to harness up and take my surgical kit down there--and have him
take some chloroform. I'll go straight down from here. May not get
home tonight. You can get me at Adolph's. Huh? No, Carrie can give the
anesthetic, I guess. G'-by. Huh? No; tell me about that tomorrow--too
damn many people always listening in on this farmers' line."

He turned to Carol. "Adolph Morgenroth, farmer ten miles southwest of
town, got his arm crushed-fixing his cow-shed and a post caved in on
him--smashed him up pretty bad--may have to amputate, Dave Dyer says.
Afraid we'll have to go right from here. Darn sorry to drag you clear
down there with me----"

"Please do. Don't mind me a bit."

"Think you could give the anesthetic? Usually have my driver do it."

"If you'll tell me how."

"All right. Say, did you hear me putting one over on these goats that
are always rubbering in on party-wires? I hope they heard me! Well. . . .
Now, Bessie, don't you worry about Nels. He's getting along all right.
Tomorrow you or one of the neighbors drive in and get this prescription
filled at Dyer's. Give him a teaspoonful every four hours. Good-by.
Hel-lo! Here's the little fellow! My Lord, Bessie, it ain't possible
this is the fellow that used to be so sickly? Why, say, he's a great big
strapping Svenska now--going to be bigger 'n his daddy!"

Kennicott's bluffness made the child squirm with a delight which Carol
could not evoke. It was a humble wife who followed the busy doctor out
to the carriage, and her ambition was not to play Rachmaninoff better,
nor to build town halls, but to chuckle at babies.

The sunset was merely a flush of rose on a dome of silver, with oak
twigs and thin poplar branches against it, but a silo on the horizon
changed from a red tank to a tower of violet misted over with gray. The
purple road vanished, and without lights, in the darkness of a world
destroyed, they swayed on--toward nothing.

It was a bumpy cold way to the Morgenroth farm, and she was asleep when
they arrived.

Here was no glaring new house with a proud phonograph, but a low
whitewashed kitchen smelling of cream and cabbage. Adolph Morgenroth was
lying on a couch in the rarely used dining-room. His heavy work-scarred
wife was shaking her hands in anxiety.

Carol felt that Kennicott would do something magnificent and startling.
But he was casual. He greeted the man, "Well, well, Adolph, have to fix
you up, eh?" Quietly, to the wife, "Hat die drug store my schwartze bag
hier geschickt? So--schon. Wie viel Uhr ist 's? Sieben? Nun, lassen uns
ein wenig supper zuerst haben. Got any of that good beer left--giebt 's
noch Bier?"

He had supped in four minutes. His coat off, his sleeves rolled up, he
was scrubbing his hands in a tin basin in the sink, using the bar of
yellow kitchen soap.

Carol had not dared to look into the farther room while she labored over
the supper of beer, rye bread, moist cornbeef and cabbage, set on the
kitchen table. The man in there was groaning. In her one glance she
had seen that his blue flannel shirt was open at a corded tobacco-brown
neck, the hollows of which were sprinkled with thin black and gray
hairs. He was covered with a sheet, like a corpse, and outside the sheet
was his right arm, wrapped in towels stained with blood.

But Kennicott strode into the other room gaily, and she followed him.
With surprising delicacy in his large fingers he unwrapped the towels
and revealed an arm which, below the elbow, was a mass of blood and raw
flesh. The man bellowed. The room grew thick about her; she was very
seasick; she fled to a chair in the kitchen. Through the haze of nausea
she heard Kennicott grumbling, "Afraid it will have to come off, Adolph.
What did you do? Fall on a reaper blade? We'll fix it right up. Carrie!
CAROL!"

She couldn't--she couldn't get up. Then she was up, her knees like
water, her stomach revolving a thousand times a second, her eyes filmed,
her ears full of roaring. She couldn't reach the dining-room. She was
going to faint. Then she was in the dining-room, leaning against the
wall, trying to smile, flushing hot and cold along her chest and sides,
while Kennicott mumbled, "Say, help Mrs. Morgenroth and me carry him
in on the kitchen table. No, first go out and shove those two tables
together, and put a blanket on them and a clean sheet."

It was salvation to push the heavy tables, to scrub them, to be exact in
placing the sheet. Her head cleared; she was able to look calmly in at
her husband and the farmwife while they undressed the wailing man, got
him into a clean nightgown, and washed his arm. Kennicott came to lay
out his instruments. She realized that, with no hospital facilities, yet
with no worry about it, her husband--HER HUSBAND--was going to perform
a surgical operation, that miraculous boldness of which one read in
stories about famous surgeons.

She helped them to move Adolph into the kitchen. The man was in such a
funk that he would not use his legs. He was heavy, and smelled of sweat
and the stable. But she put her arm about his waist, her sleek head by
his chest; she tugged at him; she clicked her tongue in imitation of
Kennicott's cheerful noises.

When Adolph was on the table Kennicott laid a hemispheric steel and
cotton frame on his face; suggested to Carol, "Now you sit here at his
head and keep the ether dripping--about this fast, see? I'll watch
his breathing. Look who's here! Real anesthetist! Ochsner hasn't got a
better one! Class, eh? . . . Now, now, Adolph, take it easy. This won't
hurt you a bit. Put you all nice and asleep and it won't hurt a bit.
Schweig' mal! Bald schlaft man grat wie ein Kind. So! So! Bald geht's
besser!"

As she let the ether drip, nervously trying to keep the rhythm that
Kennicott had indicated, Carol stared at her husband with the abandon of
hero-worship.

He shook his head. "Bad light--bad light. Here, Mrs. Morgenroth, you
stand right here and hold this lamp. Hier, und dieses--dieses lamp
halten--so!"

By that streaky glimmer he worked, swiftly, at ease. The room was still.
Carol tried to look at him, yet not look at the seeping blood, the
crimson slash, the vicious scalpel. The ether fumes were sweet, choking.
Her head seemed to be floating away from her body. Her arm was feeble.

It was not the blood but the grating of the surgical saw on the living
bone that broke her, and she knew that she had been fighting off nausea,
that she was beaten. She was lost in dizziness. She heard Kennicott's
voice--

"Sick? Trot outdoors couple minutes. Adolph will stay under now."

She was fumbling at a door-knob which whirled in insulting circles;
she was on the stoop, gasping, forcing air into her chest, her head
clearing. As she returned she caught the scene as a whole: the cavernous
kitchen, two milk-cans a leaden patch by the wall, hams dangling from a
beam, bats of light at the stove door, and in the center, illuminated
by a small glass lamp held by a frightened stout woman, Dr. Kennicott
bending over a body which was humped under a sheet--the surgeon, his
bare arms daubed with blood, his hands, in pale-yellow rubber gloves,
loosening the tourniquet, his face without emotion save when he threw
up his head and clucked at the farmwife, "Hold that light steady just a
second more--noch blos esn wenig."

"He speaks a vulgar, common, incorrect German of life and death and
birth and the soil. I read the French and German of sentimental
lovers and Christmas garlands. And I thought that it was I who had the
culture!" she worshiped as she returned to her place.

After a time he snapped, "That's enough. Don't give him any more ether."
He was concentrated on tying an artery. His gruffness seemed heroic to
her.

As he shaped the flap of flesh she murmured, "Oh, you ARE wonderful!"

He was surprised. "Why, this is a cinch. Now if it had been like last
week----Get me some more water. Now last week I had a case with an ooze
in the peritoneal cavity, and by golly if it wasn't a stomach ulcer that
I hadn't suspected and----There. Say, I certainly am sleepy. Let's turn
in here. Too late to drive home. And tastes to me like a storm coming."


IX


They slept on a feather bed with their fur coats over them; in the
morning they broke ice in the pitcher--the vast flowered and gilt
pitcher.

Kennicott's storm had not come. When they set out it was hazy and
growing warmer. After a mile she saw that he was studying a dark cloud
in the north. He urged the horses to the run. But she forgot his unusual
haste in wonder at the tragic landscape. The pale snow, the prickles of
old stubble, and the clumps of ragged brush faded into a gray obscurity.
Under the hillocks were cold shadows. The willows about a farmhouse were
agitated by the rising wind, and the patches of bare wood where the bark
had peeled away were white as the flesh of a leper. The snowy slews were
of a harsh flatness. The whole land was cruel, and a climbing cloud of
slate-edged blackness dominated the sky.

"Guess we're about in for a blizzard," speculated Kennicott "We can make
Ben McGonegal's, anyway."

"Blizzard? Really? Why----But still we used to think they were fun when
I was a girl. Daddy had to stay home from court, and we'd stand at the
window and watch the snow."

"Not much fun on the prairie. Get lost. Freeze to death. Take no
chances." He chirruped at the horses. They were flying now, the carriage
rocking on the hard ruts.

The whole air suddenly crystallized into large damp flakes. The horses
and the buffalo robe were covered with snow; her face was wet; the
thin butt of the whip held a white ridge. The air became colder. The
snowflakes were harder; they shot in level lines, clawing at her face.

She could not see a hundred feet ahead.

Kennicott was stern. He bent forward, the reins firm in his coonskin
gauntlets. She was certain that he would get through. He always got
through things.

Save for his presence, the world and all normal living disappeared. They
were lost in the boiling snow. He leaned close to bawl, "Letting the
horses have their heads. They'll get us home."

With a terrifying bump they were off the road, slanting with two wheels
in the ditch, but instantly they were jerked back as the horses fled
on. She gasped. She tried to, and did not, feel brave as she pulled the
woolen robe up about her chin.

They were passing something like a dark wall on the right. "I know that
barn!" he yelped. He pulled at the reins. Peeping from the covers she
saw his teeth pinch his lower lip, saw him scowl as he slackened and
sawed and jerked sharply again at the racing horses.

They stopped.

"Farmhouse there. Put robe around you and come on," he cried.

It was like diving into icy water to climb out of the carriage, but
on the ground she smiled at him, her face little and childish and pink
above the buffalo robe over her shoulders. In a swirl of flakes which
scratched at their eyes like a maniac darkness, he unbuckled the
harness. He turned and plodded back, a ponderous furry figure, holding
the horses' bridles, Carol's hand dragging at his sleeve.

They came to the cloudy bulk of a barn whose outer wall was directly
upon the road. Feeling along it, he found a gate, led them into a yard,
into the barn. The interior was warm. It stunned them with its languid
quiet.

He carefully drove the horses into stalls.

Her toes were coals of pain. "Let's run for the house," she said.

"Can't. Not yet. Might never find it. Might get lost ten feet away from
it. Sit over in this stall, near the horses. We'll rush for the house
when the blizzard lifts."

"I'm so stiff! I can't walk!"

He carried her into the stall, stripped off her overshoes and boots,
stopping to blow on his purple fingers as he fumbled at her laces.
He rubbed her feet, and covered her with the buffalo robe and
horse-blankets from the pile on the feed-box. She was drowsy, hemmed in
by the storm. She sighed:

"You're so strong and yet so skilful and not afraid of blood or storm
or----"

"Used to it. Only thing that's bothered me was the chance the ether
fumes might explode, last night."

"I don't understand."

"Why, Dave, the darn fool, sent me ether, instead of chloroform like I
told him, and you know ether fumes are mighty inflammable, especially
with that lamp right by the table. But I had to operate, of
course--wound chuck-full of barnyard filth that way."

"You knew all the time that----Both you and I might have been blown up?
You knew it while you were operating?"

"Sure. Didn't you? Why, what's the matter?"




CHAPTER XVI


KENNICOTT was heavily pleased by her Christmas presents, and he gave her
a diamond bar-pin. But she could not persuade herself that he was much
interested in the rites of the morning, in the tree she had decorated,
the three stockings she had hung, the ribbons and gilt seals and hidden
messages. He said only:

"Nice way to fix things, all right. What do you say we go down to Jack
Elder's and have a game of five hundred this afternoon?"

She remembered her father's Christmas fantasies: the sacred old rag
doll at the top of the tree, the score of cheap presents, the punch and
carols, the roast chestnuts by the fire, and the gravity with which the
judge opened the children's scrawly notes and took cognizance of demands
for sled-rides, for opinions upon the existence of Santa Claus. She
remembered him reading out a long indictment of himself for being a
sentimentalist, against the peace and dignity of the State of Minnesota.
She remembered his thin legs twinkling before their sled----

She muttered unsteadily, "Must run up and put on my shoes--slippers so
cold." In the not very romantic solitude of the locked bathroom she sat
on the slippery edge of the tub and wept.


II


Kennicott had five hobbies: medicine, land-investment, Carol, motoring,
and hunting. It is not certain in what order he preferred them. Solid
though his enthusiasms were in the matter of medicine--his admiration
of this city surgeon, his condemnation of that for tricky ways of
persuading country practitioners to bring in surgical patients,
his indignation about fee-splitting, his pride in a new X-ray
apparatus--none of these beatified him as did motoring.

He nursed his two-year-old Buick even in winter, when it was stored in
the stable-garage behind the house. He filled the grease-cups, varnished
a fender, removed from beneath the back seat the debris of gloves,
copper washers, crumpled maps, dust, and greasy rags. Winter noons he
wandered out and stared owlishly at the car. He became excited over a
fabulous "trip we might take next summer." He galloped to the station,
brought home railway maps, and traced motor-routes from Gopher Prairie
to Winnipeg or Des Moines or Grand Marais, thinking aloud and expecting
her to be effusive about such academic questions as "Now I wonder if we
could stop at Baraboo and break the jump from La Crosse to Chicago?"

To him motoring was a faith not to be questioned, a high-church cult,
with electric sparks for candles, and piston-rings possessing the
sanctity of altar-vessels. His liturgy was composed of intoned and
metrical road-comments: "They say there's a pretty good hike from Duluth
to International Falls."

Hunting was equally a devotion, full of metaphysical concepts veiled
from Carol. All winter he read sporting-catalogues, and thought about
remarkable past shots: "'Member that time when I got two ducks on a
long chance, just at sunset?" At least once a month he drew his favorite
repeating shotgun, his "pump gun," from its wrapper of greased canton
flannel; he oiled the trigger, and spent silent ecstatic moments aiming
at the ceiling. Sunday mornings Carol heard him trudging up to the
attic and there, an hour later, she found him turning over boots, wooden
duck-decoys, lunch-boxes, or reflectively squinting at old shells,
rubbing their brass caps with his sleeve and shaking his head as he
thought about their uselessness.

He kept the loading-tools he had used as a boy: a capper for shot-gun
shells, a mold for lead bullets. When once, in a housewifely frenzy for
getting rid of things, she raged, "Why don't you give these away?" he
solemnly defended them, "Well, you can't tell; they might come in handy
some day."

She flushed. She wondered if he was thinking of the child they would
have when, as he put it, they were "sure they could afford one."

Mysteriously aching, nebulously sad, she slipped away, half-convinced
but only half-convinced that it was horrible and unnatural, this
postponement of release of mother-affection, this sacrifice to her
opinionation and to his cautious desire for prosperity.

"But it would be worse if he were like Sam Clark--insisted on having
children," she considered; then, "If Will were the Prince, wouldn't I
DEMAND his child?"

Kennicott's land-deals were both financial advancement and favorite
game. Driving through the country, he noticed which farms had good
crops; he heard the news about the restless farmer who was "thinking
about selling out here and pulling his freight for Alberta." He asked
the veterinarian about the value of different breeds of stock; he
inquired of Lyman Cass whether or not Einar Gyseldson really had had a
yield of forty bushels of wheat to the acre. He was always consulting
Julius Flickerbaugh, who handled more real estate than law, and more law
than justice. He studied township maps, and read notices of auctions.

Thus he was able to buy a quarter-section of land for one hundred and
fifty dollars an acre, and to sell it in a year or two, after installing
a cement floor in the barn and running water in the house, for one
hundred and eighty or even two hundred.

He spoke of these details to Sam Clark . . . rather often.

In all his games, cars and guns and land, he expected Carol to take an
interest. But he did not give her the facts which might have created
interest. He talked only of the obvious and tedious aspects; never of
his aspirations in finance, nor of the mechanical principles of motors.

This month of romance she was eager to understand his hobbies. She
shivered in the garage while he spent half an hour in deciding whether
to put alcohol or patent non-freezing liquid into the radiator, or to
drain out the water entirely. "Or no, then I wouldn't want to take
her out if it turned warm--still, of course, I could fill the
radiator again--wouldn't take so awful long--just take a few pails
of water--still, if it turned cold on me again before I drained
it----Course there's some people that put in kerosene, but they say it
rots the hose-connections and----Where did I put that lug-wrench?"

It was at this point that she gave up being a motorist and retired to
the house.

In their new intimacy he was more communicative about his practise;
he informed her, with the invariable warning not to tell, that Mrs.
Sunderquist had another baby coming, that the "hired girl at Howland's
was in trouble." But when she asked technical questions he did not know
how to answer; when she inquired, "Exactly what is the method of taking
out the tonsils?" he yawned, "Tonsilectomy? Why you just----If there's
pus, you operate. Just take 'em out. Seen the newspaper? What the devil
did Bea do with it?"

She did not try again.


III


They had gone to the "movies." The movies were almost as vital
to Kennicott and the other solid citizens of Gopher Prairie as
land-speculation and guns and automobiles.

The feature film portrayed a brave young Yankee who conquered a South
American republic. He turned the natives from their barbarous habits of
singing and laughing to the vigorous sanity, the Pep and Punch and
Go, of the North; he taught them to work in factories, to wear Klassy
Kollege Klothes, and to shout, "Oh, you baby doll, watch me gather
in the mazuma." He changed nature itself. A mountain which had borne
nothing but lilies and cedars and loafing clouds was by his Hustle so
inspirited that it broke out in long wooden sheds, and piles of iron
ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore to be converted into
steamers to carry iron ore.

The intellectual tension induced by the master film was relieved by a
livelier, more lyric and less philosophical drama: Mack Schnarken and
the Bathing Suit Babes in a comedy of manners entitled "Right on the
Coco." Mr. Schnarken was at various high moments a cook, a life-guard,
a burlesque actor, and a sculptor. There was a hotel hallway up which
policemen charged, only to be stunned by plaster busts hurled upon them
from the innumerous doors. If the plot lacked lucidity, the dual motif
of legs and pie was clear and sure. Bathing and modeling were equally
sound occasions for legs; the wedding-scene was but an approach to the
thunderous climax when Mr. Schnarken slipped a piece of custard pie into
the clergyman's rear pocket.

The audience in the Rosebud Movie Palace squealed and wiped their eyes;
they scrambled under the seats for overshoes, mittens, and mufflers,
while the screen announced that next week Mr. Schnarken might be seen
in a new, riproaring, extra-special superfeature of the Clean Comedy
Corporation entitled, "Under Mollie's Bed."

"I'm glad," said Carol to Kennicott as they stooped before the northwest
gale which was torturing the barren street, "that this is a moral
country. We don't allow any of these beastly frank novels."

"Yump. Vice Society and Postal Department won't stand for them. The
American people don't like filth."

"Yes. It's fine. I'm glad we have such dainty romances as 'Right on the
Coco' instead."

"Say what in heck do you think you're trying to do? Kid me?"

He was silent. She awaited his anger. She meditated upon his gutter
patois, the Boeotian dialect characteristic of Gopher Prairie. He
laughed puzzlingly. When they came into the glow of the house he laughed
again. He condescended:

"I've got to hand it to you. You're consistent, all right. I'd of
thought that after getting this look-in at a lot of good decent farmers,
you'd get over this high-art stuff, but you hang right on."

"Well----" To herself: "He takes advantage of my trying to be good."

"Tell you, Carrie: There's just three classes of people: folks that
haven't got any ideas at all; and cranks that kick about everything; and
Regular Guys, the fellows with sticktuitiveness, that boost and get the
world's work done."

"Then I'm probably a crank." She smiled negligently.

"No. I won't admit it. You do like to talk, but at a show-down you'd
prefer Sam Clark to any damn long-haired artist."

"Oh--well----"

"Oh well!" mockingly. "My, we're just going to change everything, aren't
we! Going to tell fellows that have been making movies for ten years
how to direct 'em; and tell architects how to build towns; and make the
magazines publish nothing but a lot of highbrow stories about old maids,
and about wives that don't know what they want. Oh, we're a terror! . . .
Come on now, Carrie; come out of it; wake up! You've got a fine nerve,
kicking about a movie because it shows a few legs! Why, you're always
touting these Greek dancers, or whatever they are, that don't even wear
a shimmy!"

"But, dear, the trouble with that film--it wasn't that it got in so many
legs, but that it giggled coyly and promised to show more of them, and
then didn't keep the promise. It was Peeping Tom's idea of humor."

"I don't get you. Look here now----"

She lay awake, while he rumbled with sleep

"I must go on. My 'crank ideas;' he calls them. I thought that adoring
him, watching him operate, would be enough. It isn't. Not after the
first thrill.

"I don't want to hurt him. But I must go on.

"It isn't enough, to stand by while he fills an automobile radiator and
chucks me bits of information.

"If I stood by and admired him long enough, I would be content. I would
become a 'nice little woman.' The Village Virus. Already----I'm not
reading anything. I haven't touched the piano for a week. I'm letting
the days drown in worship of 'a good deal, ten plunks more per acre.' I
won't! I won't succumb!

"How? I've failed at everything: the Thanatopsis, parties, pioneers,
city hall, Guy and Vida. But----It doesn't MATTER! I'm not trying to
'reform the town' now. I'm not trying to organize Browning Clubs,
and sit in clean white kids yearning up at lecturers with ribbony
eyeglasses. I am trying to save my soul.

"Will Kennicott, asleep there, trusting me, thinking he holds me. And
I'm leaving him. All of me left him when he laughed at me. It wasn't
enough for him that I admired him; I must change myself and grow like
him. He takes advantage. No more. It's finished. I will go on."


IV


Her violin lay on top of the upright piano. She picked it up. Since she
had last touched it the dried strings had snapped, and upon it lay a
gold and crimson cigar-band.


V


She longed to see Guy Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in
the faith. But Kennicott's dominance was heavy upon her. She could not
determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia--by
dislike of the emotional labor of the "scenes" which would be involved
in asserting independence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty:
not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad
breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades.

The second evening after the movies she impulsively summoned Vida
Sherwin and Guy to the house for pop-corn and cider. In the living-room
Vida and Kennicott debated "the value of manual training in grades below
the eighth," while Carol sat beside Guy at the dining table, buttering
pop-corn. She was quickened by the speculation in his eyes. She
murmured:

"Guy, do you want to help me?"

"My dear! How?"

"I don't know!"

He waited.

"I think I want you to help me find out what has made the darkness of
the women. Gray darkness and shadowy trees. We're all in it, ten million
women, young married women with good prosperous husbands, and business
women in linen collars, and grandmothers that gad out to teas, and wives
of under-paid miners, and farmwives who really like to make butter and
go to church. What is it we want--and need? Will Kennicott there would
say that we need lots of children and hard work. But it isn't that.
There's the same discontent in women with eight children and one more
coming--always one more coming! And you find it in stenographers and
wives who scrub, just as much as in girl college-graduates who wonder
how they can escape their kind parents. What do we want?"

"Essentially, I think, you are like myself, Carol; you want to go back
to an age of tranquillity and charming manners. You want to enthrone
good taste again."

"Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh--no! I believe all of us want
the same things--we're all together, the industrial workers and the
women and the farmers and the negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and
even a few of the Respectables. It's all the same revolt, in all the
classes that have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a
more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying.
We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're
tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired
of hearing the politicians and priests and cautious reformers (and the
husbands!) coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a
Utopia already made; just give us a bit more time and we'll produce it;
trust us; we're wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said
that. We want our Utopia NOW--and we're going to try our hands at it.
All we want is--everything for all of us! For every housewife and every
longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want
everything. We shatn't get it. So we shatn't ever be content----"

She wondered why he was wincing. He broke in:

"See here, my dear, I certainly hope you don't class yourself with a lot
of trouble-making labor-leaders! Democracy is all right theoretically,
and I'll admit there are industrial injustices, but I'd rather have them
than see the world reduced to a dead level of mediocrity. I refuse to
believe that you have anything in common with a lot of laboring men
rowing for bigger wages so that they can buy wretched flivvers and
hideous player-pianos and----"

At this second, in Buenos Ayres, a newspaper editor broke his routine of
being bored by exchanges to assert, "Any injustice is better than seeing
the world reduced to a gray level of scientific dullness." At this
second a clerk standing at the bar of a New York saloon stopped milling
his secret fear of his nagging office-manager long enough to growl
at the chauffeur beside him, "Aw, you socialists make me sick! I'm an
individualist. I ain't going to be nagged by no bureaus and take orders
off labor-leaders. And mean to say a hobo's as good as you and me?"

At this second Carol realized that for all Guy's love of dead elegances
his timidity was as depressing to her as the bulkiness of Sam Clark. She
realized that he was not a mystery, as she had excitedly believed; not
a romantic messenger from the World Outside on whom she could count for
escape. He belonged to Gopher Prairie, absolutely. She was snatched back
from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.

He was completing his protest, "You don't want to be mixed up in all
this orgy of meaningless discontent?"

She soothed him. "No, I don't. I'm not heroic. I'm scared by all the
fighting that's going on in the world. I want nobility and adventure,
but perhaps I want still more to curl on the hearth with some one I
love."

"Would you----"

He did not finish it. He picked up a handful of pop-corn, let it run
through his fingers, looked at her wistfully.

With the loneliness of one who has put away a possible love Carol saw
that he was a stranger. She saw that he had never been anything but
a frame on which she had hung shining garments. If she had let him
diffidently make love to her, it was not because she cared, but because
she did not care, because it did not matter.

She smiled at him with the exasperating tactfulness of a woman checking
a flirtation; a smile like an airy pat on the arm. She sighed, "You're
a dear to let me tell you my imaginary troubles." She bounced up, and
trilled, "Shall we take the pop-corn in to them now?"

Guy looked after her desolately.

While she teased Vida and Kennicott she was repeating, "I must go on."


VI


Miles Bjornstam, the pariah "Red Swede," had brought his circular saw
and portable gasoline engine to the house, to cut the cords of poplar
for the kitchen range. Kennicott had given the order; Carol knew nothing
of it till she heard the ringing of the saw, and glanced out to see
Bjornstam, in black leather jacket and enormous ragged purple
mittens, pressing sticks against the whirling blade, and flinging
the stove-lengths to one side. The red irritable motor kept up a red
irritable "tip-tip-tip-tip-tip-tip." The whine of the saw rose till it
simulated the shriek of a fire-alarm whistle at night, but always at the
end it gave a lively metallic clang, and in the stillness she heard the
flump of the cut stick falling on the pile.

She threw a motor robe over her, ran out. Bjornstam welcomed her, "Well,
well, well! Here's old Miles, fresh as ever. Well say, that's all right;
he ain't even begun to be cheeky yet; next summer he's going to take you
out on his horse-trading trip, clear into Idaho."

"Yes, and I may go!"

"How's tricks? Crazy about the town yet?"

"No, but I probably shall be, some day."

"Don't let 'em get you. Kick 'em in the face!"

He shouted at her while he worked. The pile of stove-wood grew
astonishingly. The pale bark of the poplar sticks was mottled with
lichens of sage-green and dusty gray; the newly sawed ends were
fresh-colored, with the agreeable roughness of a woolen muffler. To the
sterile winter air the wood gave a scent of March sap.

Kennicott telephoned that he was going into the country. Bjornstam had
not finished his work at noon, and she invited him to have dinner with
Bea in the kitchen. She wished that she were independent enough to dine
with these her guests. She considered their friendliness, she sneered at
"social distinctions," she raged at her own taboos--and she continued
to regard them as retainers and herself as a lady. She sat in the
dining-room and listened through the door to Bjornstam's booming and
Bea's giggles. She was the more absurd to herself in that, after the
rite of dining alone, she could go out to the kitchen, lean against the
sink, and talk to them.

They were attracted to each other; a Swedish Othello and Desdemona, more
useful and amiable than their prototypes. Bjornstam told his scapes:
selling horses in a Montana mining-camp, breaking a log-jam, being
impertinent to a "two-fisted" millionaire lumberman. Bea gurgled "Oh
my!" and kept his coffee cup filled.

He took a long time to finish the wood. He had frequently to go into the
kitchen to get warm. Carol heard him confiding to Bea, "You're a darn
nice Swede girl. I guess if I had a woman like you I wouldn't be such
a sorehead. Gosh, your kitchen is clean; makes an old bach feel sloppy.
Say, that's nice hair you got. Huh? Me fresh? Saaaay, girl, if I ever do
get fresh, you'll know it. Why, I could pick you up with one finger,
and hold you in the air long enough to read Robert J. Ingersoll clean
through. Ingersoll? Oh, he's a religious writer. Sure. You'd like him
fine."

When he drove off he waved to Bea; and Carol, lonely at the window
above, was envious of their pastoral.

"And I----But I will go on."

 One night, Carol and Kennicott have their first argument as a married couple. When she questions him about the other doctors in town, Kennicott tells her that they are not entirely honest and skillful practitioners. However, when Carol asks him if there is any professional jealousy between him and the other doctors, he feels very offended. While she tries to pacify her husband, he begins accusing her of not understanding him or the townspeople. Furthermore, Kennicott complains that Carol acts as if she feels superior to everyone else and expects everyone to do whatever she wants. He then accuses her of spending too much money, but she points out that she needs a regular allowance to prepare a budget. Kennicott agrees to give her a personal checking account, but he continues to list his grievances. Kennicott tells Carol that she makes his friends feel uncomfortable whenever they visit, as she adopt what he feels is a highbrow attitude, refusing to allow them to smoke or put their legs up on a chair. Telling her that he plans to build a new house, he asserts that she will drive away all his friends and patients before he can build it. Insulted, Carol remarks that Kennicott can have a divorce if he wants. He tries pacifying her, saying that she just does not see the hidden virtues in his friends. He also remarks that he has ambitions, just as she does, because he wants to build her a new house and works hard to provide her with a comfortable income. Carol feels very repentant. After the argument, Carol begins romanticizing about her husband as a heroic doctor. She watches him as he gets up in the middle of a December night to perform an appendectomy on a farmer's wife. Wanting to surprise her husband, she takes coffee and snacks to his office one day. When she notices his plain- looking office and waiting room, she decides to refurnish the rooms. At Kennicott's suggestion, Carol even decides visit her neighbor Mrs. Bogart. Mrs. Bogart gossips thoroughly about everyone in town and suggests that Bea, Carol's maid, acts too friendly with the grocer boy. Mrs. Bogart proclaims that everyone in town would be better if they followed the Bible rather than dancing and socializing with members of the opposite sex. Unable to endure any more opinions from her neighbors, Carol manages to escape after half an hour. Kennicott takes Carol along to visit his patients in the country. Suddenly, Kennicott learns that a farmer has just had an accident, leaving him with a crushed arm that has to be amputated. As Kennicott examines the man, he instructs Carol to give the anesthesia. As the farmer lies on the kitchen table and the farmer's wife holds a lamp for light, Kennicott skillfully operates on the arm. On the way home, Carol expresses her admiration for her husband's strength and courage. On Christmas Day, Carol and Kennicott attend a neighbor's party to play cards. Feeling nostalgic about her childhood Christmas parties, Carol cries in private for all the fun she now misses in her adult life. Kennicott spends time engaged in his five hobbies: his work as a doctor, his wife Carol, his car, hunting, and investing in real estate. Carol, however, cannot bring herself to share her husband's enthusiasm for his hobbies. Carol continues to feel frustrated that she cannot reform the town. One evening, she invites Guy Pollock and Vida Sherwin to her house to discuss her ideas. When Carol tries to discuss her idea of utopia to Guy, he fails to understand her dreams. Guy assumes that Carol wants to return to the past, to an age of tranquility and charming manners. Carol is disappointed that Guy does not really understand her and that she must reform the town by herself. Miles Bjornstam arrives at Carol's house to cut wood. She goes outside to talk to him and invites him to have lunch inside. While Bea and Miles have lunch in the kitchen, Carol eats alone but later decides to join them. After lunch, she joins them and discovers that Bea and Miles are quite attracted to one another.

