Chapter: CHAPTER VIII



"DON'T I, in looking for things to do, show that I'm not attentive
enough to Will? Am I impressed enough by his work? I will be. Oh, I will
be. If I can't be one of the town, if I must be an outcast----"

When Kennicott came home she bustled, "Dear, you must tell me a lot more
about your cases. I want to know. I want to understand."

"Sure. You bet." And he went down to fix the furnace.

At supper she asked, "For instance, what did you do today?"

"Do today? How do you mean?"

"Medically. I want to understand----"

"Today? Oh, there wasn't much of anything: couple chumps with
bellyaches, and a sprained wrist, and a fool woman that thinks she wants
to kill herself because her husband doesn't like her and----Just routine
work."

"But the unhappy woman doesn't sound routine!"

"Her? Just case of nerves. You can't do much with these marriage
mix-ups."

"But dear, PLEASE, will you tell me about the next case that you do
think is interesting?"

"Sure. You bet. Tell you about anything that----Say that's pretty good
salmon. Get it at Howland's?"



II


Four days after the Jolly Seventeen debacle Vida Sherwin called and
casually blew Carol's world to pieces.

"May I come in and gossip a while?" she said, with such excess of bright
innocence that Carol was uneasy. Vida took off her furs with a bounce,
she sat down as though it were a gymnasium exercise, she flung out:

"Feel disgracefully good, this weather! Raymond Wutherspoon says if he
had my energy he'd be a grand opera singer. I always think this climate
is the finest in the world, and my friends are the dearest people in the
world, and my work is the most essential thing in the world. Probably
I fool myself. But I know one thing for certain: You're the pluckiest
little idiot in the world."

"And so you are about to flay me alive." Carol was cheerful about it.

"Am I? Perhaps. I've been wondering--I know that the third party to a
squabble is often the most to blame: the one who runs between A and B
having a beautiful time telling each of them what the other has said.
But I want you to take a big part in vitalizing Gopher Prairie and
so----Such a very unique opportunity and----Am I silly?"

"I know what you mean. I was too abrupt at the Jolly Seventeen."

"It isn't that. Matter of fact, I'm glad you told them some wholesome
truths about servants. (Though perhaps you were just a bit tactless.)
It's bigger than that. I wonder if you understand that in a secluded
community like this every newcomer is on test? People cordial to her
but watching her all the time. I remember when a Latin teacher came here
from Wellesley, they resented her broad A. Were sure it was affected. Of
course they have discussed you----"

"Have they talked about me much?"

"My dear!"

"I always feel as though I walked around in a cloud, looking out at
others but not being seen. I feel so inconspicuous and so normal--so
normal that there's nothing about me to discuss. I can't realize that
Mr. and Mrs. Haydock must gossip about me." Carol was working up a small
passion of distaste. "And I don't like it. It makes me crawly to think
of their daring to talk over all I do and say. Pawing me over! I resent
it. I hate----"

"Wait, child! Perhaps they resent some things in you. I want you to try
and be impersonal. They'd paw over anybody who came in new. Didn't you,
with newcomers in College?"

"Yes."

"Well then! Will you be impersonal? I'm paying you the compliment of
supposing that you can be. I want you to be big enough to help me make
this town worth while."

"I'll be as impersonal as cold boiled potatoes. (Not that I shall ever
be able to help you 'make the town worth while.') What do they say about
me? Really. I want to know."

"Of course the illiterate ones resent your references to anything
farther away than Minneapolis. They're so suspicious--that's it,
suspicious. And some think you dress too well."

"Oh, they do, do they! Shall I dress in gunny-sacking to suit them?"

"Please! Are you going to be a baby?"

"I'll be good," sulkily.

"You certainly will, or I won't tell you one single thing. You must
understand this: I'm not asking you to change yourself. Just want you
to know what they think. You must do that, no matter how absurd their
prejudices are, if you're going to handle them. Is it your ambition to
make this a better town, or isn't it?"

"I don't know whether it is or not!"

"Why--why----Tut, tut, now, of course it is! Why, I depend on you.
You're a born reformer."

"I am not--not any more!"

"Of course you are."

"Oh, if I really could help----So they think I'm affected?"

"My lamb, they do! Now don't say they're nervy. After all, Gopher
Prairie standards are as reasonable to Gopher Prairie as Lake Shore
Drive standards are to Chicago. And there's more Gopher Prairies than
there are Chicagos. Or Londons. And----I'll tell you the whole story:
They think you're showing off when you say 'American' instead of
'Ammurrican.' They think you're too frivolous. Life's so serious to them
that they can't imagine any kind of laughter except Juanita's snortling.
Ethel Villets was sure you were patronizing her when----"

"Oh, I was not!"

"----you talked about encouraging reading; and Mrs. Elder thought you
were patronizing when you said she had 'such a pretty little car.' She
thinks it's an enormous car! And some of the merchants say you're too
flip when you talk to them in the store and----"

"Poor me, when I was trying to be friendly!"

"----every housewife in town is doubtful about your being so chummy with
your Bea. All right to be kind, but they say you act as though she were
your cousin. (Wait now! There's plenty more.) And they think you were
eccentric in furnishing this room--they think the broad couch and that
Japanese dingus are absurd. (Wait! I know they're silly.) And I guess
I've heard a dozen criticize you because you don't go to church oftener
and----"

"I can't stand it--I can't bear to realize that they've been saying all
these things while I've been going about so happily and liking them. I
wonder if you ought to have told me? It will make me self-conscious."

"I wonder the same thing. Only answer I can get is the old saw about
knowledge being power. And some day you'll see how absorbing it is to
have power, even here; to control the town----Oh, I'm a crank. But I do
like to see things moving."

"It hurts. It makes these people seem so beastly and treacherous, when
I've been perfectly natural with them. But let's have it all. What did
they say about my Chinese house-warming party?"

"Why, uh----"

"Go on. Or I'll make up worse things than anything you can tell me."

"They did enjoy it. But I guess some of them felt you were showing
off--pretending that your husband is richer than he is."

"I can't----Their meanness of mind is beyond any horrors I could
imagine. They really thought that I----And you want to 'reform' people
like that when dynamite is so cheap? Who dared to say that? The rich or
the poor?"

"Fairly well assorted."

"Can't they at least understand me well enough to see that though I
might be affected and culturine, at least I simply couldn't commit that
other kind of vulgarity? If they must know, you may tell them, with my
compliments, that Will makes about four thousand a year, and the party
cost half of what they probably thought it did. Chinese things are not
very expensive, and I made my own costume----"

"Stop it! Stop beating me! I know all that. What they meant was: they
felt you were starting dangerous competition by giving a party such as
most people here can't afford. Four thousand is a pretty big income for
this town."

"I never thought of starting competition. Will you believe that it was
in all love and friendliness that I tried to give them the gayest party
I could? It was foolish; it was childish and noisy. But I did mean it so
well."

"I know, of course. And it certainly is unfair of them to make fun of
your having that Chinese food--chow men, was it?--and to laugh about
your wearing those pretty trousers----"

Carol sprang up, whimpering, "Oh, they didn't do that! They didn't poke
fun at my feast, that I ordered so carefully for them! And my little
Chinese costume that I was so happy making--I made it secretly, to
surprise them. And they've been ridiculing it, all this while!"

She was huddled on the couch.

Vida was stroking her hair, muttering, "I shouldn't----"

Shrouded in shame, Carol did not know when Vida slipped away. The
clock's bell, at half past five, aroused her. "I must get hold of myself
before Will comes. I hope he never knows what a fool his wife is. . . .
Frozen, sneering, horrible hearts."

Like a very small, very lonely girl she trudged up-stairs, slow step by
step, her feet dragging, her hand on the rail. It was not her husband
to whom she wanted to run for protection--it was her father, her smiling
understanding father, dead these twelve years.



III


Kennicott was yawning, stretched in the largest chair, between the
radiator and a small kerosene stove.

Cautiously, "Will dear, I wonder if the people here don't criticize me
sometimes? They must. I mean: if they ever do, you mustn't let it bother
you."

"Criticize you? Lord, I should say not. They all keep telling me you're
the swellest girl they ever saw."

"Well, I've just fancied----The merchants probably think I'm too fussy
about shopping. I'm afraid I bore Mr. Dashaway and Mr. Howland and Mr.
Ludelmeyer."

"I can tell you how that is. I didn't want to speak of it but since
you've brought it up: Chet Dashaway probably resents the fact that you
got this new furniture down in the Cities instead of here. I didn't want
to raise any objection at the time but----After all, I make my money
here and they naturally expect me to spend it here."

"If Mr. Dashaway will kindly tell me how any civilized person can
furnish a room out of the mortuary pieces that he calls----" She
remembered. She said meekly, "But I understand."

"And Howland and Ludelmeyer----Oh, you've probably handed 'em a few
roasts for the bum stocks they carry, when you just meant to jolly 'em.
But rats, what do we care! This is an independent town, not like these
Eastern holes where you have to watch your step all the time, and live
up to fool demands and social customs, and a lot of old tabbies always
busy criticizing. Everybody's free here to do what he wants to." He said
it with a flourish, and Carol perceived that he believed it. She turned
her breath of fury into a yawn.

"By the way, Carrie, while we're talking of this: Of course I like
to keep independent, and I don't believe in this business of binding
yourself to trade with the man that trades with you unless you really
want to, but same time: I'd be just as glad if you dealt with Jenson or
Ludelmeyer as much as you ran, instead of Howland & Gould, who go to Dr.
Gould every last time, and the whole tribe of 'em the same way. I don't
see why I should be paying out my good money for groceries and having
them pass it on to Terry Gould!"

"I've gone to Howland & Gould because they're better, and cleaner."

"I know. I don't mean cut them out entirely. Course Jenson is
tricky--give you short weight--and Ludelmeyer is a shiftless old Dutch
hog. But same time, I mean let's keep the trade in the family whenever
it is convenient, see how I mean?"

"I see."

"Well, guess it's about time to turn in."

He yawned, went out to look at the thermometer, slammed the door, patted
her head, unbuttoned his waistcoat, yawned, wound the clock, went down
to look at the furnace, yawned, and clumped up-stairs to bed, casually
scratching his thick woolen undershirt.

Till he bawled, "Aren't you ever coming up to bed?" she sat unmoving.




CHAPTER IX



I

SHE had tripped into the meadow to teach the lambs a pretty educational
dance and found that the lambs were wolves. There was no way out between
their pressing gray shoulders. She was surrounded by fangs and sneering
eyes.

She could not go on enduring the hidden derision. She wanted to flee.
She wanted to hide in the generous indifference of cities. She practised
saying to Kennicott, "Think perhaps I'll run down to St. Paul for a few
days." But she could not trust herself to say it carelessly; could not
abide his certain questioning.

Reform the town? All she wanted was to be tolerated!

She could not look directly at people. She flushed and winced before
citizens who a week ago had been amusing objects of study, and in their
good-mornings she heard a cruel sniggering.

She encountered Juanita Haydock at Ole Jenson's grocery. She besought,
"Oh, how do you do! Heavens, what beautiful celery that is!"

"Yes, doesn't it look fresh. Harry simply has to have his celery on
Sunday, drat the man!"

Carol hastened out of the shop exulting, "She didn't make fun of me. . . .
Did she?"

In a week she had recovered from consciousness of insecurity, of shame
and whispering notoriety, but she kept her habit of avoiding people. She
walked the streets with her head down. When she spied Mrs. McGanum or
Mrs. Dyer ahead she crossed over with an elaborate pretense of looking
at a billboard. Always she was acting, for the benefit of every one she
saw--and for the benefit of the ambushed leering eyes which she did not
see.

She perceived that Vida Sherwin had told the truth. Whether she entered
a store, or swept the back porch, or stood at the bay-window in the
living-room, the village peeped at her. Once she had swung along the
street triumphant in making a home. Now she glanced at each house, and
felt, when she was safely home, that she had won past a thousand
enemies armed with ridicule. She told herself that her sensitiveness
was preposterous, but daily she was thrown into panic. She saw curtains
slide back into innocent smoothness. Old women who had been entering
their houses slipped out again to stare at her--in the wintry quiet she
could hear them tiptoeing on their porches. When she had for a blessed
hour forgotten the searchlight, when she was scampering through a chill
dusk, happy in yellow windows against gray night, her heart checked
as she realized that a head covered with a shawl was thrust up over a
snow-tipped bush to watch her.

She admitted that she was taking herself too seriously; that villagers
gape at every one. She became placid, and thought well of her
philosophy. But next morning she had a shock of shame as she entered
Ludelmeyer's. The grocer, his clerk, and neurotic Mrs. Dave Dyer had been
giggling about something. They halted, looked embarrassed, babbled about
onions. Carol felt guilty. That evening when Kennicott took her to call
on the crochety Lyman Casses, their hosts seemed flustered at their
arrival. Kennicott jovially hooted, "What makes you so hang-dog, Lym?"
The Casses tittered feebly.

Except Dave Dyer, Sam Clark, and Raymie Wutherspoon, there were no
merchants of whose welcome Carol was certain. She knew that she read
mockery into greetings but she could not control her suspicion, could
not rise from her psychic collapse. She alternately raged and flinched
at the superiority of the merchants. They did not know that they
were being rude, but they meant to have it understood that they were
prosperous and "not scared of no doctor's wife." They often said, "One
man's as good as another--and a darn sight better." This motto, however,
they did not commend to farmer customers who had had crop failures. The
Yankee merchants were crabbed; and Ole Jenson, Ludelmeyer, and Gus Dahl,
from the "Old Country," wished to be taken for Yankees. James Madison
Howland, born in New Hampshire, and Ole Jenson, born in Sweden, both
proved that they were free American citizens by grunting, "I don't
know whether I got any or not," or "Well, you can't expect me to get it
delivered by noon."

It was good form for the customers to fight back. Juanita Haydock
cheerfully jabbered, "You have it there by twelve or I'll snatch that
fresh delivery-boy bald-headed." But Carol had never been able to play
the game of friendly rudeness; and now she was certain that she never
would learn it. She formed the cowardly habit of going to Axel Egge's.

Axel was not respectable and rude. He was still a foreigner, and he
expected to remain one. His manner was heavy and uninterrogative. His
establishment was more fantastic than any cross-roads store. No one save
Axel himself could find anything. A part of the assortment of children's
stockings was under a blanket on a shelf, a part in a tin ginger-snap
box, the rest heaped like a nest of black-cotton snakes upon a
flour-barrel which was surrounded by brooms, Norwegian Bibles, dried
cod for ludfisk, boxes of apricots, and a pair and a half of lumbermen's
rubber-footed boots. The place was crowded with Scandinavian farmwives,
standing aloof in shawls and ancient fawn-colored leg o' mutton jackets,
awaiting the return of their lords. They spoke Norwegian or Swedish, and
looked at Carol uncomprehendingly. They were a relief to her--they were
not whispering that she was a poseur.

But what she told herself was that Axel Egge's was "so picturesque and
romantic."

It was in the matter of clothes that she was most self-conscious.

When she dared to go shopping in her new checked suit with the
black-embroidered sulphur collar, she had as good as invited all of
Gopher Prairie (which interested itself in nothing so intimately as in
new clothes and the cost thereof) to investigate her. It was a smart
suit with lines unfamiliar to the dragging yellow and pink frocks of the
town. The Widow Bogart's stare, from her porch, indicated, "Well I
never saw anything like that before!" Mrs. McGanum stopped Carol at
the notions shop to hint, "My, that's a nice suit--wasn't it terribly
expensive?" The gang of boys in front of the drug store commented, "Hey,
Pudgie, play you a game of checkers on that dress." Carol could not
endure it. She drew her fur coat over the suit and hastily fastened the
buttons, while the boys snickered.



II


No group angered her quite so much as these staring young roues.

She had tried to convince herself that the village, with its fresh air,
its lakes for fishing and swimming, was healthier than the artificial
city. But she was sickened by glimpses of the gang of boys from fourteen
to twenty who loafed before Dyer's Drug Store, smoking cigarettes,
displaying "fancy" shoes and purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped
buttons, whistling the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, "Oh, you baby-doll"
at every passing girl.

She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind Del Snafflin's
barber shop, and shaking dice in "The Smoke House," and gathered in
a snickering knot to listen to the "juicy stories" of Bert Tybee, the
bartender of the Minniemashie House. She heard them smacking moist lips
over every love-scene at the Rosebud Movie Palace. At the counter of the
Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful messes of decayed
bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream, and gelatinous ice-cream, they
screamed to one another, "Hey, lemme 'lone," "Quit dog-gone you, looka
what you went and done, you almost spilled my glass swater," "Like hell
I did," "Hey, gol darn your hide, don't you go sticking your coffin
nail in my i-scream," "Oh you Batty, how juh like dancing with Tillie
McGuire, last night? Some squeezing, heh, kid?"

By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered that this
was the only virile and amusing manner in which boys could function;
that boys who were not compounded of the gutter and the mining-camp
were mollycoddles and unhappy. She had taken this for granted. She had
studied the boys pityingly, but impersonally. It had not occurred to her
that they might touch her.

Now she was aware that they knew all about her; that they were waiting
for some affectation over which they could guffaw. No schoolgirl passed
their observation-posts more flushingly than did Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. In
shame she knew that they glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes,
speculating about her legs. Theirs were not young eyes--there was no
youth in all the town, she agonized. They were born old, grim and old
and spying and censorious.

She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel on the day when
she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock.

Cyrus N. Bogart, son of the righteous widow who lived across the alley,
was at this time a boy of fourteen or fifteen. Carol had already seen
quite enough of Cy Bogart. On her first evening in Gopher Prairie Cy
had appeared at the head of a "charivari," banging immensely upon a
discarded automobile fender. His companions were yelping in imitation
of coyotes. Kennicott had felt rather complimented; had gone out and
distributed a dollar. But Cy was a capitalist in charivaris. He returned
with an entirely new group, and this time there were three automobile
fenders and a carnival rattle. When Kennicott again interrupted his
shaving, Cy piped, "Naw, you got to give us two dollars," and he got it.
A week later Cy rigged a tic-tac to a window of the living-room, and the
tattoo out of the darkness frightened Carol into screaming. Since
then, in four months, she had beheld Cy hanging a cat, stealing melons,
throwing tomatoes at the Kennicott house, and making ski-tracks across
the lawn, and had heard him explaining the mysteries of generation,
with great audibility and dismaying knowledge. He was, in fact, a museum
specimen of what a small town, a well-disciplined public school, a
tradition of hearty humor, and a pious mother could produce from the
material of a courageous and ingenious mind.

Carol was afraid of him. Far from protesting when he set his mongrel on
a kitten, she worked hard at not seeing him.

The Kennicott garage was a shed littered with paint-cans, tools, a
lawn-mower, and ancient wisps of hay. Above it was a loft which Cy
Bogart and Earl Haydock, young brother of Harry, used as a den, for
smoking, hiding from whippings, and planning secret societies. They
climbed to it by a ladder on the alley side of the shed.

This morning of late January, two or three weeks after Vida's
revelations, Carol had gone into the stable-garage to find a hammer.
Snow softened her step. She heard voices in the loft above her:

"Ah gee, lez--oh, lez go down the lake and swipe some mushrats out of
somebody's traps," Cy was yawning.

"And get our ears beat off!" grumbled Earl Haydock.

"Gosh, these cigarettes are dandy. 'Member when we were just kids, and
used to smoke corn-silk and hayseed?"

"Yup. Gosh!"

Spit. "Silence."

"Say Earl, ma says if you chew tobacco you get consumption."

"Aw rats, your old lady is a crank."

"Yuh, that's so." Pause. "But she says she knows a fella that did."

"Aw, gee whiz, didn't Doc Kennicott used to chew tobacco all the time
before he married this-here girl from the Cities? He used to spit---Gee!
Some shot! He could hit a tree ten feet off."

This was news to the girl from the Cities.

"Say, how is she?" continued Earl.

"Huh? How's who?"

"You know who I mean, smarty."

A tussle, a thumping of loose boards, silence, weary narration from Cy:

"Mrs. Kennicott? Oh, she's all right, I guess." Relief to Carol, below.
"She gimme a hunk o' cake, one time. But Ma says she's stuck-up as hell.
Ma's always talking about her. Ma says if Mrs. Kennicott thought as much
about the doc as she does about her clothes, the doc wouldn't look so
peaked."

Spit. Silence.

"Yuh. Juanita's always talking about her, too," from Earl. "She says
Mrs. Kennicott thinks she knows it all. Juanita says she has to laugh
till she almost busts every time she sees Mrs. Kennicott peerading along
the street with that 'take a look--I'm a swell skirt' way she's got. But
gosh, I don't pay no attention to Juanita. She's meaner 'n a crab."

"Ma was telling somebody that she heard that Mrs. Kennicott claimed she
made forty dollars a week when she was on some job in the Cities, and
Ma says she knows posolutely that she never made but eighteen a week--Ma
says that when she's lived here a while she won't go round making a fool
of herself, pulling that bighead stuff on folks that know a whole lot
more than she does. They're all laughing up their sleeves at her."

"Say, jever notice how Mrs. Kennicott fusses around the house? Other
evening when I was coming over here, she'd forgot to pull down the
curtain, and I watched her for ten minutes. Jeeze, you'd 'a' died
laughing. She was there all alone, and she must 'a' spent five minutes
getting a picture straight. It was funny as hell the way she'd stick out
her finger to straighten the picture--deedle-dee, see my tunnin' 'ittle
finger, oh my, ain't I cute, what a fine long tail my cat's got!"

"But say, Earl, she's some good-looker, just the same, and O Ignatz! the
glad rags she must of bought for her wedding. Jever notice these low-cut
dresses and these thin shimmy-shirts she wears? I had a good squint at
'em when they were out on the line with the wash. And some ankles she's
got, heh?"

Then Carol fled.

In her innocence she had not known that the whole town could discuss
even her garments, her body. She felt that she was being dragged naked
down Main Street.

The moment it was dusk she pulled down the window-shades, all the shades
flush with the sill, but beyond them she felt moist fleering eyes.



III


She remembered, and tried to forget, and remembered more sharply the
vulgar detail of her husband's having observed the ancient customs
of the land by chewing tobacco. She would have preferred a prettier
vice--gambling or a mistress. For these she might have found a luxury
of forgiveness. She could not remember any fascinatingly wicked hero of
fiction who chewed tobacco. She asserted that it proved him to be a man
of the bold free West. She tried to align him with the hairy-chested
heroes of the motion-pictures. She curled on the couch a pallid softness
in the twilight, and fought herself, and lost the battle. Spitting did
not identify him with rangers riding the buttes; it merely bound him to
Gopher Prairie--to Nat Hicks the tailor and Bert Tybee the bartender.

"But he gave it up for me. Oh, what does it matter! We're all filthy in
some things. I think of myself as so superior, but I do eat and digest,
I do wash my dirty paws and scratch. I'm not a cool slim goddess on
a column. There aren't any! He gave it up for me. He stands by me,
believing that every one loves me. He's the Rock of Ages--in a storm of
meanness that's driving me mad . . . it will drive me mad."

All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when she noticed
that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled maternally at his
secret.

She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations
which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making
queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will
know hereafter), "Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying him?" She
quieted the doubt--without answering it.



IV


Kennicott had taken her north to Lac-qui-Meurt, in the Big Woods. It was
the entrance to a Chippewa Indian reservation, a sandy settlement among
Norway pines on the shore of a huge snow-glaring lake. She had her first
sight of his mother, except the glimpse at the wedding. Mrs. Kennicott
had a hushed and delicate breeding which dignified her woodeny
over-scrubbed cottage with its worn hard cushions in heavy rockers.
She had never lost the child's miraculous power of wonder. She asked
questions about books and cities. She murmured:

"Will is a dear hard-working boy but he's inclined to be too serious,
and you've taught him how to play. Last night I heard you both laughing
about the old Indian basket-seller, and I just lay in bed and enjoyed
your happiness."

Carol forgot her misery-hunting in this solidarity of family life.
She could depend upon them; she was not battling alone. Watching Mrs.
Kennicott flit about the kitchen she was better able to translate
Kennicott himself. He was matter-of-fact, yes, and incurably mature. He
didn't really play; he let Carol play with him. But he had his mother's
genius for trusting, her disdain for prying, her sure integrity.

From the two days at Lac-qui-Meurt Carol drew confidence in herself,
and she returned to Gopher Prairie in a throbbing calm like those golden
drugged seconds when, because he is for an instant free from pain, a
sick man revels in living.

A bright hard winter day, the wind shrill, black and silver clouds
booming across the sky, everything in panicky motion during the brief
light. They struggled against the surf of wind, through deep snow.
Kennicott was cheerful. He hailed Loren Wheeler, "Behave yourself while
I been away?" The editor bellowed, "B' gosh you stayed so long that
all your patients have got well!" and importantly took notes for the
Dauntless about their journey. Jackson Elder cried, "Hey, folks! How's
tricks up North?" Mrs. McGanum waved to them from her porch.

"They're glad to see us. We mean something here. These people are
satisfied. Why can't I be? But can I sit back all my life and be
satisfied with 'Hey, folks'? They want shouts on Main Street, and I want
violins in a paneled room. Why----?"



V


Vida Sherwin ran in after school a dozen times. She was tactful,
torrentially anecdotal. She had scuttled about town and plucked
compliments: Mrs. Dr. Westlake had pronounced Carol a "very sweet,
bright, cultured young woman," and Brad Bemis, the tinsmith at Clark's
Hardware Store, had declared that she was "easy to work for and awful
easy to look at."

But Carol could not yet take her in. She resented this outsider's
knowledge of her shame. Vida was not too long tolerant. She hinted,
"You're a great brooder, child. Buck up now. The town's quit criticizing
you, almost entirely. Come with me to the Thanatopsis Club. They
have some of the BEST papers, and current-events discussions--SO
interesting."

In Vida's demands Carol felt a compulsion, but she was too listless to
obey.

It was Bea Sorenson who was really her confidante.

However charitable toward the Lower Classes she may have thought
herself, Carol had been reared to assume that servants belong to
a distinct and inferior species. But she discovered that Bea was
extraordinarily like girls she had loved in college, and as a companion
altogether superior to the young matrons of the Jolly Seventeen. Daily
they became more frankly two girls playing at housework. Bea artlessly
considered Carol the most beautiful and accomplished lady in the
country; she was always shrieking, "My, dot's a swell hat!" or, "Ay
t'ink all dese ladies yoost die when dey see how elegant you do your
hair!" But it was not the humbleness of a servant, nor the hypocrisy of
a slave; it was the admiration of Freshman for Junior.

They made out the day's menus together. Though they began with
propriety, Carol sitting by the kitchen table and Bea at the sink or
blacking the stove, the conference was likely to end with both of them
by the table, while Bea gurgled over the ice-man's attempt to kiss her,
or Carol admitted, "Everybody knows that the doctor is lots more clever
than Dr. McGanum." When Carol came in from marketing, Bea plunged into
the hall to take off her coat, rub her frostied hands, and ask, "Vos
dere lots of folks up-town today?"

This was the welcome upon which Carol depended.



VI

Through her weeks of cowering there was no change in her surface life.
No one save Vida was aware of her agonizing. On her most despairing
days she chatted to women on the street, in stores. But without
the protection of Kennicott's presence she did not go to the Jolly
Seventeen; she delivered herself to the judgment of the town only when
she went shopping and on the ritualistic occasions of formal afternoon
calls, when Mrs. Lyman Cass or Mrs. George Edwin Mott, with clean gloves
and minute handkerchiefs and sealskin card-cases and countenances of
frozen approbation, sat on the edges of chairs and inquired, "Do you
find Gopher Prairie pleasing?" When they spent evenings of social
profit-and-loss at the Haydocks' or the Dyers' she hid behind Kennicott,
playing the simple bride.

Now she was unprotected. Kennicott had taken a patient to Rochester
for an operation. He would be away for two or three days. She had not
minded; she would loosen the matrimonial tension and be a fanciful girl
for a time. But now that he was gone the house was listeningly empty.
Bea was out this afternoon--presumably drinking coffee and talking about
"fellows" with her cousin Tina. It was the day for the monthly supper
and evening-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, but Carol dared not go.

She sat alone.




CHAPTER X


THE house was haunted, long before evening. Shadows slipped down the
walls and waited behind every chair.

Did that door move?

No. She wouldn't go to the Jolly Seventeen. She hadn't energy enough to
caper before them, to smile blandly at Juanita's rudeness. Not today.
But she did want a party. Now! If some one would come in this afternoon,
some one who liked her--Vida or Mrs. Sam Clark or old Mrs. Champ Perry
or gentle Mrs. Dr. Westlake. Or Guy Pollock! She'd telephone----

No. That wouldn't be it. They must come of themselves.

Perhaps they would.

Why not?

She'd have tea ready, anyway. If they came--splendid. If not--what did
she care? She wasn't going to yield to the village and let down; she was
going to keep up a belief in the rite of tea, to which she had always
looked forward as the symbol of a leisurely fine existence. And it would
be just as much fun, even if it was so babyish, to have tea by herself
and pretend that she was entertaining clever men. It would!

She turned the shining thought into action. She bustled to the kitchen,
stoked the wood-range, sang Schumann while she boiled the kettle, warmed
up raisin cookies on a newspaper spread on the rack in the oven. She
scampered up-stairs to bring down her filmiest tea-cloth. She arranged
a silver tray. She proudly carried it into the living-room and set it on
the long cherrywood table, pushing aside a hoop of embroidery, a volume
of Conrad from the library, copies of the Saturday Evening Post, the
Literary Digest, and Kennicott's National Geographic Magazine.

She moved the tray back and forth and regarded the effect. She shook
her head. She busily unfolded the sewing-table set it in the bay-window,
patted the tea-cloth to smoothness, moved the tray. "Some time I'll have
a mahogany tea-table," she said happily.

She had brought in two cups, two plates. For herself, a straight chair,
but for the guest the big wing-chair, which she pantingly tugged to the
table.

She had finished all the preparations she could think of. She sat and
waited. She listened for the door-bell, the telephone. Her eagerness was
stilled. Her hands drooped.

Surely Vida Sherwin would hear the summons.

She glanced through the bay-window. Snow was sifting over the ridge
of the Howland house like sprays of water from a hose. The wide
yards across the street were gray with moving eddies. The black trees
shivered. The roadway was gashed with ruts of ice.

She looked at the extra cup and plate. She looked at the wing-chair. It
was so empty.

The tea was cold in the pot. With wearily dipping fingertip she tested
it. Yes. Quite cold. She couldn't wait any longer.

The cup across from her was icily clean, glisteningly empty.

Simply absurd to wait. She poured her own cup of tea. She sat and stared
at it. What was it she was going to do now? Oh yes; how idiotic; take a
lump of sugar.

She didn't want the beastly tea.

She was springing up. She was on the couch, sobbing.



II


She was thinking more sharply than she had for weeks.

She reverted to her resolution to change the town--awaken it, prod it,
"reform" it. What if they were wolves instead of lambs? They'd eat her
all the sooner if she was meek to them. Fight or be eaten. It was easier
to change the town completely than to conciliate it! She could not take
their point of view; it was a negative thing; an intellectual squalor;
a swamp of prejudices and fears. She would have to make them take hers.
She was not a Vincent de Paul, to govern and mold a people. What of
that? The tiniest change in their distrust of beauty would be the
beginning of the end; a seed to sprout and some day with thickening
roots to crack their wall of mediocrity. If she could not, as she
desired, do a great thing nobly and with laughter, yet she need not be
content with village nothingness. She would plant one seed in the blank
wall.

Was she just? Was it merely a blank wall, this town which to three
thousand and more people was the center of the universe? Hadn't she,
returning from Lac-qui-Meurt, felt the heartiness of their greetings?
No. The ten thousand Gopher Prairies had no monopoly of greetings and
friendly hands. Sam Clark was no more loyal than girl librarians she
knew in St. Paul, the people she had met in Chicago. And those others
had so much that Gopher Prairie complacently lacked--the world of gaiety
and adventure, of music and the integrity of bronze, of remembered
mists from tropic isles and Paris nights and the walls of Bagdad, of
industrial justice and a God who spake not in doggerel hymns.

One seed. Which seed it was did not matter. All knowledge and freedom
were one. But she had delayed so long in finding that seed. Could she
do something with this Thanatopsis Club? Or should she make her house
so charming that it would be an influence? She'd make Kennicott like
poetry. That was it, for a beginning! She conceived so clear a picture
of their bending over large fair pages by the fire (in a non-existent
fireplace) that the spectral presences slipped away. Doors no longer
moved; curtains were not creeping shadows but lovely dark masses in the
dusk; and when Bea came home Carol was singing at the piano which she
had not touched for many days.

Their supper was the feast of two girls. Carol was in the dining-room,
in a frock of black satin edged with gold, and Bea, in blue gingham and
an apron, dined in the kitchen; but the door was open between, and
Carol was inquiring, "Did you see any ducks in Dahl's window?" and Bea
chanting, "No, ma'am. Say, ve have a svell time, dis afternoon. Tina she
have coffee and knackebrod, and her fella vos dere, and ve yoost laughed
and laughed, and her fella say he vos president and he going to make
me queen of Finland, and Ay stick a fedder in may hair and say Ay bane
going to go to var--oh, ve vos so foolish and ve LAUGH so!"

When Carol sat at the piano again she did not think of her husband but
of the book-drugged hermit, Guy Pollock. She wished that Pollock would
come calling.

"If a girl really kissed him, he'd creep out of his den and be human. If
Will were as literate as Guy, or Guy were as executive as Will, I think
I could endure even Gopher Prairie. It's so hard to mother Will. I
could be maternal with Guy. Is that what I want, something to mother, a
man or a baby or a town? I WILL have a baby. Some day. But to have him
isolated here all his receptive years----

"And so to bed.

"Have I found my real level in Bea and kitchen-gossip?

"Oh, I do miss you, Will. But it will be pleasant to turn over in bed as
often as I want to, without worrying about waking you up.

"Am I really this settled thing called a 'married woman'? I feel
so unmarried tonight. So free. To think that there was once a Mrs.
Kennicott who let herself worry over a town called Gopher Prairie when
there was a whole world outside it!

"Of course Will is going to like poetry."



III


A black February day. Clouds hewn of ponderous timber weighing down
on the earth; an irresolute dropping of snow specks upon the trampled
wastes. Gloom but no veiling of angularity. The lines of roofs and
sidewalks sharp and inescapable.

The second day of Kennicott's absence.

She fled from the creepy house for a walk. It was thirty below zero;
too cold to exhilarate her. In the spaces between houses the wind caught
her. It stung, it gnawed at nose and ears and aching cheeks, and she
hastened from shelter to shelter, catching her breath in the lee of a
barn, grateful for the protection of a billboard covered with ragged
posters showing layer under layer of paste-smeared green and streaky
red.

The grove of oaks at the end of the street suggested Indians, hunting,
snow-shoes, and she struggled past the earth-banked cottages to the
open country, to a farm and a low hill corrugated with hard snow. In
her loose nutria coat, seal toque, virginal cheeks unmarked by lines of
village jealousies, she was as out of place on this dreary hillside as
a scarlet tanager on an ice-floe. She looked down on Gopher Prairie. The
snow, stretching without break from streets to devouring prairie beyond,
wiped out the town's pretense of being a shelter. The houses were black
specks on a white sheet. Her heart shivered with that still loneliness
as her body shivered with the wind.

She ran back into the huddle of streets, all the while protesting that
she wanted a city's yellow glare of shop-windows and restaurants, or the
primitive forest with hooded furs and a rifle, or a barnyard warm and
steamy, noisy with hens and cattle, certainly not these dun houses,
these yards choked with winter ash-piles, these roads of dirty snow and
clotted frozen mud. The zest of winter was gone. Three months more, till
May, the cold might drag on, with the snow ever filthier, the weakened
body less resistent. She wondered why the good citizens insisted on
adding the chill of prejudice, why they did not make the houses of their
spirits more warm and frivolous, like the wise chatterers of Stockholm
and Moscow.

She circled the outskirts of the town and viewed the slum of "Swede
Hollow." Wherever as many as three houses are gathered there will be a
slum of at least one house. In Gopher Prairie, the Sam Clarks boasted,
"you don't get any of this poverty that you find in cities--always
plenty of work--no need of charity--man got to be blame shiftless if he
don't get ahead." But now that the summer mask of leaves and grass was
gone, Carol discovered misery and dead hope. In a shack of thin boards
covered with tar-paper she saw the washerwoman, Mrs. Steinhof, working
in gray steam. Outside, her six-year-old boy chopped wood. He had a torn
jacket, muffler of a blue like skimmed milk. His hands were covered with
red mittens through which protruded his chapped raw knuckles. He halted
to blow on them, to cry disinterestedly.

A family of recently arrived Finns were camped in an abandoned stable. A
man of eighty was picking up lumps of coal along the railroad.

She did not know what to do about it. She felt that these independent
citizens, who had been taught that they belonged to a democracy, would
resent her trying to play Lady Bountiful.

She lost her loneliness in the activity of the village industries--the
railroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the wheat-elevator,
oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks on the snow, the creamery
with the sleds of farmers and piles of milk-cans, an unexplained stone
hut labeled "Danger--Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard,
where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as
he hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's small
planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and the burr of
circular saws. Most important, the Gopher Prairie Flour and Milling
Company, Lyman Cass president. Its windows were blanketed with
flour-dust, but it was the most stirring spot in town. Workmen were
wheeling barrels of flour into a box-car; a farmer sitting on sacks of
wheat in a bobsled argued with the wheat-buyer; machinery within the
mill boomed and whined, water gurgled in the ice-freed mill-race.

The clatter was a relief to Carol after months of smug houses. She
wished that she could work in the mill; that she did not belong to the
caste of professional-man's-wife.

She started for home, through the small slum. Before a tar-paper shack,
at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown dogskin coat and black plush
cap with lappets was watching her. His square face was confident,
his foxy mustache was picaresque. He stood erect, his hands in his
side-pockets, his pipe puffing slowly. He was forty-five or -six,
perhaps.

"How do, Mrs. Kennicott," he drawled.

She recalled him--the town handyman, who had repaired their furnace at
the beginning of winter.

"Oh, how do you do," she fluttered.

"My name 's Bjornstam. 'The Red Swede' they call me. Remember? Always
thought I'd kind of like to say howdy to you again."

"Ye--yes----I've been exploring the outskirts of town."

"Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and the Lutheran
minister and the priest represent the arts and sciences. Well, thunder,
we submerged tenth down here in Swede Hollow are no worse off than you
folks. Thank God, we don't have to go and purr at Juanity Haydock at the
Jolly Old Seventeen."

The Carol who regarded herself as completely adaptable was uncomfortable
at being chosen as comrade by a pipe-reeking odd-job man. Probably he
was one of her husband's patients. But she must keep her dignity.

"Yes, even the Jolly Seventeen isn't always so exciting. It's very cold
again today, isn't it. Well----"

Bjornstam was not respectfully valedictory. He showed no signs of
pulling a forelock. His eyebrows moved as though they had a life of
their own. With a subgrin he went on:

"Maybe I hadn't ought to talk about Mrs. Haydock and her Solemcholy
Seventeen in that fresh way. I suppose I'd be tickled to death if I was
invited to sit in with that gang. I'm what they call a pariah, I guess.
I'm the town badman, Mrs. Kennicott: town atheist, and I suppose I must
be an anarchist, too. Everybody who doesn't love the bankers and the
Grand Old Republican Party is an anarchist."

Carol had unconsciously slipped from her attitude of departure into an
attitude of listening, her face full toward him, her muff lowered. She
fumbled:

"Yes, I suppose so." Her own grudges came in a flood. "I don't see why
you shouldn't criticize the Jolly Seventeen if you want to. They aren't
sacred."

"Oh yes, they are! The dollar-sign has chased the crucifix clean off
the map. But then, I've got no kick. I do what I please, and I suppose I
ought to let them do the same."

"What do you mean by saying you're a pariah?"

"I'm poor, and yet I don't decently envy the rich. I'm an old bach.
I make enough money for a stake, and then I sit around by myself, and
shake hands with myself, and have a smoke, and read history, and I don't
contribute to the wealth of Brother Elder or Daddy Cass."

"You----I fancy you read a good deal."

"Yep. In a hit-or-a-miss way. I'll tell you: I'm a lone wolf. I trade
horses, and saw wood, and work in lumber-camps--I'm a first-rate
swamper. Always wished I could go to college. Though I s'pose I'd find
it pretty slow, and they'd probably kick me out."

"You really are a curious person, Mr.----"

"Bjornstam. Miles Bjornstam. Half Yank and half Swede. Usually known as
'that damn lazy big-mouthed calamity-howler that ain't satisfied with
the way we run things.' No, I ain't curious--whatever you mean by
that! I'm just a bookworm. Probably too much reading for the amount
of digestion I've got. Probably half-baked. I'm going to get in
'half-baked' first, and beat you to it, because it's dead sure to be
handed to a radical that wears jeans!"

They grinned together. She demanded:

"You say that the Jolly Seventeen is stupid. What makes you think so?"

"Oh, trust us borers into the foundation to know about your leisure
class. Fact, Mrs. Kennicott, I'll say that far as I can make out, the
only people in this man's town that do have any brains--I don't mean
ledger-keeping brains or duck-hunting brains or baby-spanking brains,
but real imaginative brains--are you and me and Guy Pollock and the
foreman at the flour-mill. He's a socialist, the foreman. (Don't tell
Lym Cass that! Lym would fire a socialist quicker than he would a
horse-thief!)"

"Indeed no, I sha'n't tell him."

"This foreman and I have some great set-to's. He's a regular old-line
party-member. Too dogmatic. Expects to reform everything from
deforestration to nosebleed by saying phrases like 'surplus value.'
Like reading the prayer-book. But same time, he's a Plato J. Aristotle
compared with people like Ezry Stowbody or Professor Mott or Julius
Flickerbaugh."

"It's interesting to hear about him."

He dug his toe into a drift, like a schoolboy. "Rats. You mean I talk
too much. Well, I do, when I get hold of somebody like you. You probably
want to run along and keep your nose from freezing."

"Yes, I must go, I suppose. But tell me: Why did you leave Miss Sherwin,
of the high school, out of your list of the town intelligentsia?"

"I guess maybe she does belong in it. From all I can hear she's in
everything and behind everything that looks like a reform--lot more
than most folks realize. She lets Mrs. Reverend Warren, the president
of this-here Thanatopsis Club, think she's running the works, but Miss
Sherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing
something. But way I figure it out----You see, I'm not interested in
these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this
barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water.
And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want
to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that
built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keel
up."

"Yes--that--that would be better. But I must run home. My poor nose is
nearly frozen."

"Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an old bach's shack
is like."

She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard that was
littered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless wash-tub. She was
disquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her the opportunity to be
delicate. He flung out his hand in a welcoming gesture which assumed
that she was her own counselor, that she was not a Respectable Married
Woman but fully a human being. With a shaky, "Well, just a moment, to
warm my nose," she glanced down the street to make sure that she was not
spied on, and bolted toward the shanty.

She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more considerate
host than the Red Swede.

He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with
amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the
shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs--one
constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank--and a row of
books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of
gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on "The
Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle."

There was but one picture--a magazine color-plate of a steep-roofed
village in the Harz Mountains which suggested kobolds and maidens with
golden hair.

Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, "Might throw open your
coat and put your feet up on the box in front of the stove." He tossed
his dogskin coat into the bunk, lowered himself into the barrel chair,
and droned on:

"Yeh, I'm probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my independence by
doing odd jobs, and that's more 'n these polite cusses like the clerks
in the banks do. When I'm rude to some slob, it may be partly because I
don't know better (and God knows I'm not no authority on trick forks
and what pants you wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it's because I
mean something. I'm about the only man in Johnson County that remembers
the joker in the Declaration of Independence about Americans being
supposed to have the right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.'

"I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at me like he wants me
to remember he's a highmuckamuck and worth two hundred thousand dollars,
and he says, 'Uh, Bjornquist----'

"'Bjornstam's my name, Ezra,' I says. HE knows my name, all rightee.

"'Well, whatever your name is,' he says, 'I understand you have a
gasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw up four cords of maple
for me,' he says.

"'So you like my looks, eh?' I says, kind of innocent.

"'What difference does that make? Want you to saw that wood before
Saturday,' he says, real sharp. Common workman going and getting fresh
with a fifth of a million dollars all walking around in a hand-me-down
fur coat!

"'Here's the difference it makes,' I says, just to devil him. 'How do
you know I like YOUR looks?' Maybe he didn't look sore! 'Nope,' I says,
thinking it all over, 'I don't like your application for a loan. Take it
to another bank, only there ain't any,' I says, and I walks off on him.

"Sure. Probably I was surly--and foolish. But I figured there had to be
ONE man in town independent enough to sass the banker!"

He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talked
on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendliness
and half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was a
proletarian philosophy.

At the door, she hinted:

"Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought you
were affected?"

"Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over
silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals thought about my
flying?"

It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of Bjornstam's scorn
which carried her through town. She faced Juanita Haydock, cocked
her head at Maud Dyer's brief nod, and came home to Bea radiant. She
telephoned Vida Sherwin to "run over this evening." She lustily played
Tschaikowsky--the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopher
of the tar-paper shack.

(When she hinted to Vida, "Isn't there a man here who amuses himself by
being irreverent to the village gods--Bjornstam, some such a name?"
the reform-leader said "Bjornstam? Oh yes. Fixes things. He's awfully
impertinent.")



IV


Kennicott had returned at midnight. At breakfast he said four several
times that he had missed her every moment.

On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, "The top o' the mornin'
to yez! Going to stop and pass the time of day mit Sam'l? Warmer, eh?
What'd the doc's thermometer say it was? Say, you folks better come
round and visit with us, one of these evenings. Don't be so dog-gone
proud, staying by yourselves."

Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator, stopped her in
the post-office, held her hand in his withered paws, peered at her
with faded eyes, and chuckled, "You are so fresh and blooming, my dear.
Mother was saying t'other day that a sight of you was better 'n a dose
of medicine."

In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively buying a modest
gray scarf. "We haven't seen you for so long," she said. "Wouldn't you
like to come in and play cribbage, some evening?" As though he meant it,
Pollock begged, "May I, really?"

While she was purchasing two yards of malines the vocal Raymie
Wutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long sallow face bobbing, and he
besought, "You've just got to come back to my department and see a pair
of patent leather slippers I set aside for you."

In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced her boots,
tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid on the slippers. She took them.

"You're a good salesman," she said.

"I'm not a salesman at all! I just like elegant things. All this is so
inartistic." He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves of
shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in rosettes, the display of
shoe-trees and tin boxes of blacking, the lithograph of a smirking
young woman with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry of
advertising, "My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection was
till I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes."

"But sometimes," Raymie sighed, "there is a pair of dainty little shoes
like these, and I set them aside for some one who will appreciate. When
I saw these I said right away, 'Wouldn't it be nice if they fitted Mrs.
Kennicott,' and I meant to speak to you first chance I had. I haven't
forgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey's!"

That evening Guy Pollock came in and, though Kennicott instantly
impressed him into a cribbage game, Carol was happy again.



V


She did not, in recovering something of her buoyancy, forget her
determination to begin the liberalizing of Gopher Prairie by the easy
and agreeable propaganda of teaching Kennicott to enjoy reading poetry
in the lamplight. The campaign was delayed. Twice he suggested that they
call on neighbors; once he was in the country. The fourth evening
he yawned pleasantly, stretched, and inquired, "Well, what'll we do
tonight? Shall we go to the movies?"

"I know exactly what we're going to do. Now don't ask questions! Come
and sit down by the table. There, are you comfy? Lean back and forget
you're a practical man, and listen to me."

It may be that she had been influenced by the managerial Vida Sherwin;
certainly she sounded as though she was selling culture. But she dropped
it when she sat on the couch, her chin in her hands, a volume of Yeats
on her knees, and read aloud.

Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town.
She was in the world of lonely things--the flutter of twilight linnets,
the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept
out of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal
glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold,
the woful incessant chanting and the----

"Heh-cha-cha!" coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She remembered that
he was the sort of person who chewed tobacco. She glared, while he
uneasily petitioned, "That's great stuff. Study it in college? I
like poetry fine--James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow--this
'Hiawatha.' Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But
I guess I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks."

With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to giggle, she
consoled him, "Then let's try some Tennyson. You've read him?"

"Tennyson? You bet. Read him in school. There's that:

     And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell
     When I put out to sea,
     But let the----

Well, I don't remember all of it but----Oh, sure! And there's that 'I
met a little country boy who----' I don't remember exactly how it goes,
but the chorus ends up, 'We are seven.'"

"Yes. Well----Shall we try 'The Idylls of the King?' They're so full of
color."

"Go to it. Shoot." But he hastened to shelter himself behind a cigar.

She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an eye cocked on him,
and when she saw how much he was suffering she ran to him, kissed his
forehead, cried, "You poor forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent
turnip!"

"Look here now, that ain't----"

"Anyway, I sha'n't torture you any longer."

She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great deal of
emphasis:


There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the GRAND Trunk ROAD.


He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. But
when he complimented her, "That was fine. I don't know but what you
can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody," she banged the book and
suggested that they were not too late for the nine o'clock show at the
movies.

That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine
unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon and
the sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at Ole Jenson's Grocery.

But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered herself
laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an actor who stuffed
spaghetti down a woman's evening frock. For a second she loathed her
laughter; mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippi
she had walked the battlements with queens. But the celebrated cinema
jester's conceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into
unwilling tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled
through darkness.



VI


She went to the Jolly Seventeen's afternoon bridge. She had learned
the elements of the game from the Sam Clarks. She played quietly and
reasonably badly. She had no opinions on anything more polemic than
woolen union-suits, a topic on which Mrs. Howland discoursed for five
minutes. She smiled frequently, and was the complete canary-bird in her
manner of thanking the hostess, Mrs. Dave Dyer.

Her only anxious period was during the conference on husbands.

The young matrons discussed the intimacies of domesticity with a
frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol. Juanita Haydock
communicated Harry's method of shaving, and his interest in
deer-shooting. Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation,
her husband's inappreciation of liver and bacon. Maud Dyer chronicled
Dave's digestive disorders; quoted a recent bedtime controversy with
him in regard to Christian Science, socks and the sewing of buttons
upon vests; announced that she "simply wasn't going to stand his always
pawing girls when he went and got crazy-jealous if a man just danced
with her"; and rather more than sketched Dave's varieties of kisses.

So meekly did Carol give attention, so obviously was she at last
desirous of being one of them, that they looked on her fondly, and
encouraged her to give such details of her honeymoon as might be of
interest. She was embarrassed rather than resentful. She deliberately
misunderstood. She talked of Kennicott's overshoes and medical ideals
till they were thoroughly bored. They regarded her as agreeable but
green.

Till the end she labored to satisfy the inquisition. She bubbled at
Juanita, the president of the club, that she wanted to entertain them.
"Only," she said, "I don't know that I can give you any refreshments as
nice as Mrs. Dyer's salad, or that simply delicious angel's-food we had
at your house, dear."

"Fine! We need a hostess for the seventeenth of March. Wouldn't it be
awfully original if you made it a St. Patrick's Day bridge! I'll be
tickled to death to help you with it. I'm glad you've learned to play
bridge. At first I didn't hardly know if you were going to like Gopher
Prairie. Isn't it dandy that you've settled down to being homey with us!
Maybe we aren't as highbrow as the Cities, but we do have the daisiest
times and--oh, we go swimming in summer, and dances and--oh, lots of
good times. If folks will just take us as we are, I think we're a pretty
good bunch!"

"I'm sure of it. Thank you so much for the idea about having a St.
Patrick's Day bridge."

"Oh, that's nothing. I always think the Jolly Seventeen are so good at
original ideas. If you knew these other towns Wakamin and Joralemon and
all, you'd find out and realize that G. P. is the liveliest, smartest
town in the state. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan, the famous auto
manufacturer, came from here and----Yes, I think that a St. Patrick's
Day party would be awfully cunning and original, and yet not too queer
or freaky or anything."

 Without much success, Carol tries to get her husband to discuss his cases with her. Then Vida Sherwin calls and blows Carol's world to pieces. Vida says that her friend is the "pluckiest little idiot in the world," but a bit tactless. Carol dresses too well, is too frivolous, too chummy with her servant, and too irregular in church attendance for Gopher Prairie standards. The guests had also criticized the housewarming party, including the Chinese food and costumes. That evening Dr. Kennicott adds to his wife's misery by asking her to trade more with the firms that patronize him rather than those that favor Dr. Gould. He also asks her to do as much buying as possible from local merchants instead of from the large stores in Twin Cities. Realizing that the lambs which she wishes to teach to dance have turned out to be wolves, Carol forms the habit of avoiding people. She perceives that all of what Vida Sherwin has told her is true. She finds some relief in the Scandinavian farm wives, who at least are not whispering about her. Since her checked suit looks too smart, she covers it with her coat, though not before a gang of loafers, aged from fourteen to twenty, had snickered and made remarks about it. Two of these boys, her neighbor, Cy Bogart, and Harry Haydock's young brother, Earl, she afterwards overhears analyzing her in intimate detail, much to her confusion. From the same conversation she learns that her husband has given up chewing tobacco for her sake. More and more she appreciates his sterling qualities and resolves to be more considerate of him. On a visit to Lac-qui-meurt, in the Big Woods, Carol meets her mother-in-law and is favorably impressed. On their return to Gopher Prairie, the Kennicotts are welcomed by their friends. Vida volunteers the information that the town has quit criticizing Carol and invites Carol to attend the next meeting of the Thanatopsis Club. Carol, however, still crushed, refuses to go to the monthly supper and evening bridge game of the Jolly Seventeen. Dr. Kennicott has taken a patient to Rochester for an operation, and Carol, except for Bea, is quite alone. Though no longer interested in the Jolly Seventeen, Carol wants a party and prepares an elaborate tea. When no guests come of their own accord, she is disappointed and weeps. Then she realizes that with wolves it is fight or be eaten and that Gopher Prairie with its three thousand people is not the center of the universe. She resolves that when her husband returns she will teach him to like poetry. On the second day of Kennicott's absence, Carol takes a walk in thirty-below-zero weather. Near the slum of "Swede Hollow" on the outskirts of town, she encounters the town handyman, Miles Bjornstam, who had once repaired the furnace in her home. Miles considers himself a pariah because of his free thinking. He makes fun of the Jolly Seventeen and tells Carol that the two of them, Guy Pollock, and the socialist foreman of the flour mill have all the imaginative brains in town. Her talk with Miles gives Carol courage and lifts her spirits. When Dr. Kennicott returns at midnight, he finds Carol more cheerful. She buys a dainty pair of shoes the next day from Raymie Wutherspoon, and that evening Guy Pollock comes in for a game of cribbage. Happy again, Carol tries in a few days to interest her husband in poetry, with dubious success. At the next meeting of the Jolly Seventeen, she is present, playing bad bridge and enduring the conference on husbands and their foibles. "Isn't it dandy that you have settled down to being homey with us!" gushes Juanita Haydock, who suggests that Carol be the next hostess on St. Patrick's Day.

