Chapter: CHAPTER XVII


I

THEY were driving down the lake to the cottages that moonlit January
night, twenty of them in the bob-sled. They sang "Toy Land" and "Seeing
Nelly Home"; they leaped from the low back of the sled to race over the
slippery snow ruts; and when they were tired they climbed on the runners
for a lift. The moon-tipped flakes kicked up by the horses settled over
the revelers and dripped down their necks, but they laughed, yelped,
beat their leather mittens against their chests. The harness rattled,
the sleigh-bells were frantic, Jack Elder's setter sprang beside the
horses, barking.

For a time Carol raced with them. The cold air gave fictive power. She
felt that she could run on all night, leap twenty feet at a stride. But
the excess of energy tired her, and she was glad to snuggle under the
comforters which covered the hay in the sled-box.

In the midst of the babel she found enchanted quietude.

Along the road the shadows from oak-branches were inked on the snow
like bars of music. Then the sled came out on the surface of Lake
Minniemashie. Across the thick ice was a veritable road, a short-cut
for farmers. On the glaring expanse of the lake-levels of hard crust,
flashes of green ice blown clear, chains of drifts ribbed like the
sea-beach--the moonlight was overwhelming. It stormed on the snow, it
turned the woods ashore into crystals of fire. The night was tropical
and voluptuous. In that drugged magic there was no difference between
heavy heat and insinuating cold.

Carol was dream-strayed. The turbulent voices, even Guy Pollock being
connotative beside her, were nothing. She repeated:

     Deep on the convent-roof the snows
     Are sparkling to the moon.

The words and the light blurred into one vast indefinite happiness, and
she believed that some great thing was coming to her. She withdrew from
the clamor into a worship of incomprehensible gods. The night expanded,
she was conscious of the universe, and all mysteries stooped down to
her.

She was jarred out of her ecstasy as the bob-sled bumped up the steep
road to the bluff where stood the cottages.

They dismounted at Jack Elder's shack. The interior walls of unpainted
boards, which had been grateful in August, were forbidding in the chill.
In fur coats and mufflers tied over caps they were a strange company,
bears and walruses talking. Jack Elder lighted the shavings waiting in
the belly of a cast-iron stove which was like an enlarged bean-pot.
They piled their wraps high on a rocker, and cheered the rocker as it
solemnly tipped over backward.

Mrs. Elder and Mrs. Sam Clark made coffee in an enormous blackened tin
pot; Vida Sherwin and Mrs. McGanum unpacked doughnuts and gingerbread;
Mrs. Dave Dyer warmed up "hot dogs"--frankfurters in rolls; Dr. Terry
Gould, after announcing, "Ladies and gents, prepare to be shocked; shock
line forms on the right," produced a bottle of bourbon whisky.

The others danced, muttering "Ouch!" as their frosted feet struck the
pine planks. Carol had lost her dream. Harry Haydock lifted her by the
waist and swung her. She laughed. The gravity of the people who stood
apart and talked made her the more impatient for frolic.

Kennicott, Sam Clark, Jackson Elder, young Dr. McGanum, and James
Madison Howland, teetering on their toes near the stove, conversed
with the sedate pomposity of the commercialist. In details the men were
unlike, yet they said the same things in the same hearty monotonous
voices. You had to look at them to see which was speaking.

"Well, we made pretty good time coming up," from one--any one.

"Yump, we hit it up after we struck the good going on the lake."

"Seems kind of slow though, after driving an auto."

"Yump, it does, at that. Say, how'd you make out with that Sphinx tire
you got?"

"Seems to hold out fine. Still, I don't know's I like it any better than
the Roadeater Cord."

"Yump, nothing better than a Roadeater. Especially the cord. The cord's
lots better than the fabric."

"Yump, you said something----Roadeater's a good tire."

"Say, how'd you come out with Pete Garsheim on his payments?"

"He's paying up pretty good. That's a nice piece of land he's got."

"Yump, that's a dandy farm."

"Yump, Pete's got a good place there."

They glided from these serious topics into the jocose insults which are
the wit of Main Street. Sam Clark was particularly apt at them. "What's
this wild-eyed sale of summer caps you think you're trying to pull
off?" he clamored at Harry Haydock. "Did you steal 'em, or are you just
overcharging us, as usual? . . . Oh say, speaking about caps, d'I ever
tell you the good one I've got on Will? The doc thinks he's a pretty
good driver, fact, he thinks he's almost got human intelligence, but one
time he had his machine out in the rain, and the poor fish, he hadn't
put on chains, and thinks I----"

Carol had heard the story rather often. She fled back to the dancers,
and at Dave Dyer's masterstroke of dropping an icicle down Mrs.
McGanum's back she applauded hysterically.

They sat on the floor, devouring the food. The men giggled amiably as
they passed the whisky bottle, and laughed, "There's a real sport!" when
Juanita Haydock took a sip. Carol tried to follow; she believed that she
desired to be drunk and riotous; but the whisky choked her and as she
saw Kennicott frown she handed the bottle on repentantly. Somewhat too
late she remembered that she had given up domesticity and repentance.

"Let's play charades!" said Raymie Wutherspoon.

"Oh yes, do let us," said Ella Stowbody.

"That's the caper," sanctioned Harry Haydock.

They interpreted the word "making" as May and King. The crown was a red
flannel mitten cocked on Sam Clark's broad pink bald head. They forgot
they were respectable. They made-believe. Carol was stimulated to cry:

"Let's form a dramatic club and give a play! Shall we? It's been so much
fun tonight!"

They looked affable.

"Sure," observed Sam Clark loyally.

"Oh, do let us! I think it would be lovely to present 'Romeo and
Juliet'!" yearned Ella Stowbody.

"Be a whale of a lot of fun," Dr. Terry Gould granted.

"But if we did," Carol cautioned, "it would be awfully silly to have
amateur theatricals. We ought to paint our own scenery and everything,
and really do something fine. There'd be a lot of hard work. Would
you--would we all be punctual at rehearsals, do you suppose?"

"You bet!" "Sure." "That's the idea." "Fellow ought to be prompt at
rehearsals," they all agreed.

"Then let's meet next week and form the Gopher Prairie Dramatic
Association!" Carol sang.

She drove home loving these friends who raced through moonlit snow,
had Bohemian parties, and were about to create beauty in the theater.
Everything was solved. She would be an authentic part of the town,
yet escape the coma of the Village Virus. . . . She would be free of
Kennicott again, without hurting him, without his knowing.

She had triumphed.

The moon was small and high now, and unheeding.


II


Though they had all been certain that they longed for the privilege of
attending committee meetings and rehearsals, the dramatic association as
definitely formed consisted only of Kennicott, Carol, Guy Pollock,
Vida Sherwin, Ella Stowbody, the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, Raymie
Wutherspoon, Dr. Terry Gould, and four new candidates: flirtatious Rita
Simons, Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon and Myrtle Cass, an uncomely but
intense girl of nineteen. Of these fifteen only seven came to the first
meeting. The rest telephoned their unparalleled regrets and engagements
and illnesses, and announced that they would be present at all other
meetings through eternity.

Carol was made president and director.

She had added the Dillons. Despite Kennicott's apprehension the dentist
and his wife had not been taken up by the Westlakes but had remained
as definitely outside really smart society as Willis Woodford, who was
teller, bookkeeper, and janitor in Stowbody's bank. Carol had noted Mrs.
Dillon dragging past the house during a bridge of the Jolly Seventeen,
looking in with pathetic lips at the splendor of the accepted. She
impulsively invited the Dillons to the dramatic association meeting, and
when Kennicott was brusque to them she was unusually cordial, and felt
virtuous.

That self-approval balanced her disappointment at the smallness of the
meeting, and her embarrassment during Raymie Wutherspoon's repetitions
of "The stage needs uplifting," and "I believe that there are great
lessons in some plays."

Ella Stowbody, who was a professional, having studied elocution in
Milwaukee, disapproved of Carol's enthusiasm for recent plays. Miss
Stowbody expressed the fundamental principle of the American drama: the
only way to be artistic is to present Shakespeare. As no one listened to
her she sat back and looked like Lady Macbeth.


III


The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to American drama three
or four years later, were only in embryo. But of this fast coming revolt
Carol had premonitions. She knew from some lost magazine article that
in Dublin were innovators called The Irish Players. She knew confusedly
that a man named Gordon Craig had painted scenery--or had he written
plays? She felt that in the turbulence of the drama she was discovering
a history more important than the commonplace chronicles which dealt
with senators and their pompous puerilities. She had a sensation of
familiarity; a dream of sitting in a Brussels cafe and going afterward
to a tiny gay theater under a cathedral wall.

The advertisement in the Minneapolis paper leaped from the page to her
eyes:

     The Cosmos School of Music, Oratory, and
     Dramatic Art announces a program of four
     one-act plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats,
     and Lord Dunsany.

She had to be there! She begged Kennicott to "run down to the Cities"
with her.

"Well, I don't know. Be fun to take in a show, but why the deuce do you
want to see those darn foreign plays, given by a lot of amateurs? Why
don't you wait for a regular play, later on? There's going to be some
corkers coming: 'Lottie of Two-Gun Rancho,' and 'Cops and Crooks'--real
Broadway stuff, with the New York casts. What's this junk you want
to see? Hm. 'How He Lied to Her Husband.' That doesn't listen so bad.
Sounds racy. And, uh, well, I could go to the motor show, I suppose. I'd
like to see this new Hup roadster. Well----"

She never knew which attraction made him decide.

She had four days of delightful worry--over the hole in her one good
silk petticoat, the loss of a string of beads from her chiffon and brown
velvet frock, the catsup stain on her best georgette crepe blouse. She
wailed, "I haven't a single solitary thing that's fit to be seen in,"
and enjoyed herself very much indeed.

Kennicott went about casually letting people know that he was "going to
run down to the Cities and see some shows."

As the train plodded through the gray prairie, on a windless day with
the smoke from the engine clinging to the fields in giant cotton-rolls,
in a low and writhing wall which shut off the snowy fields, she did not
look out of the window. She closed her eyes and hummed, and did not know
that she was humming.

She was the young poet attacking fame and Paris.

In the Minneapolis station the crowd of lumberjacks, farmers, and
Swedish families with innumerous children and grandparents and paper
parcels, their foggy crowding and their clamor confused her. She felt
rustic in this once familiar city, after a year and a half of
Gopher Prairie. She was certain that Kennicott was taking the wrong
trolley-car. By dusk, the liquor warehouses, Hebraic clothing-shops,
and lodging-houses on lower Hennepin Avenue were smoky, hideous,
ill-tempered. She was battered by the noise and shuttling of the
rush-hour traffic. When a clerk in an overcoat too closely fitted at the
waist stared at her, she moved nearer to Kennicott's arm. The clerk was
flippant and urban. He was a superior person, used to this tumult. Was
he laughing at her?

For a moment she wanted the secure quiet of Gopher Prairie.

In the hotel-lobby she was self-conscious. She was not used to hotels;
she remembered with jealousy how often Juanita Haydock talked of the
famous hotels in Chicago. She could not face the traveling salesmen,
baronial in large leather chairs. She wanted people to believe that her
husband and she were accustomed to luxury and chill elegance; she was
faintly angry at him for the vulgar way in which, after signing the
register "Dr. W. P. Kennicott & wife," he bellowed at the clerk, "Got a
nice room with bath for us, old man?" She gazed about haughtily, but as
she discovered that no one was interested in her she felt foolish, and
ashamed of her irritation.

She asserted, "This silly lobby is too florid," and simultaneously she
admired it: the onyx columns with gilt capitals, the crown-embroidered
velvet curtains at the restaurant door, the silk-roped alcove where
pretty girls perpetually waited for mysterious men, the two-pound boxes
of candy and the variety of magazines at the news-stand. The hidden
orchestra was lively. She saw a man who looked like a European diplomat,
in a loose top-coat and a Homburg hat. A woman with a broadtail coat,
a heavy lace veil, pearl earrings, and a close black hat entered the
restaurant. "Heavens! That's the first really smart woman I've seen in a
year!" Carol exulted. She felt metropolitan.

But as she followed Kennicott to the elevator the coat-check girl, a
confident young woman, with cheeks powdered like lime, and a blouse
low and thin and furiously crimson, inspected her, and under that
supercilious glance Carol was shy again. She unconsciously waited
for the bellboy to precede her into the elevator. When he snorted "Go
ahead!" she was mortified. He thought she was a hayseed, she worried.

The moment she was in their room, with the bellboy safely out of the
way, she looked critically at Kennicott. For the first time in months
she really saw him.

His clothes were too heavy and provincial. His decent gray suit, made
by Nat Hicks of Gopher Prairie, might have been of sheet iron; it had
no distinction of cut, no easy grace like the diplomat's Burberry. His
black shoes were blunt and not well polished. His scarf was a stupid
brown. He needed a shave.

But she forgot her doubt as she realized the ingenuities of the room.
She ran about, turning on the taps of the bathtub, which gushed instead
of dribbling like the taps at home, snatching the new wash-rag out of
its envelope of oiled paper, trying the rose-shaded light between the
twin beds, pulling out the drawers of the kidney-shaped walnut desk to
examine the engraved stationery, planning to write on it to every one
she knew, admiring the claret-colored velvet armchair and the blue rug,
testing the ice-water tap, and squealing happily when the water really
did come out cold. She flung her arms about Kennicott, kissed him.

"Like it, old lady?"

"It's adorable. It's so amusing. I love you for bringing me. You really
are a dear!"

He looked blankly indulgent, and yawned, and condescended, "That's a
pretty slick arrangement on the radiator, so you can adjust it at any
temperature you want. Must take a big furnace to run this place. Gosh, I
hope Bea remembers to turn off the drafts tonight."

Under the glass cover of the dressing-table was a menu with the most
enchanting dishes: breast of guinea hen De Vitresse, pommes de terre a
la Russe, meringue Chantilly, gateaux Bruxelles.

"Oh, let's----I'm going to have a hot bath, and put on my new hat with
the wool flowers, and let's go down and eat for hours, and we'll have a
cocktail!" she chanted.

While Kennicott labored over ordering it was annoying to see him permit
the waiter to be impertinent, but as the cocktail elevated her to a
bridge among colored stars, as the oysters came in--not canned oysters
in the Gopher Prairie fashion, but on the half-shell--she cried, "If you
only knew how wonderful it is not to have had to plan this dinner, and
order it at the butcher's and fuss and think about it, and then
watch Bea cook it! I feel so free. And to have new kinds of food, and
different patterns of dishes and linen, and not worry about whether the
pudding is being spoiled! Oh, this is a great moment for me!"


IV


They had all the experiences of provincials in a metropolis. After
breakfast Carol bustled to a hair-dresser's, bought gloves and a blouse,
and importantly met Kennicott in front of an optician's, in accordance
with plans laid down, revised, and verified. They admired the diamonds
and furs and frosty silverware and mahogany chairs and polished morocco
sewing-boxes in shop-windows, and were abashed by the throngs in the
department-stores, and were bullied by a clerk into buying too many
shirts for Kennicott, and gaped at the "clever novelty perfumes--just
in from New York." Carol got three books on the theater, and spent
an exultant hour in warning herself that she could not afford this
rajah-silk frock, in thinking how envious it would make Juanita Haydock,
in closing her eyes, and buying it. Kennicott went from shop to shop,
earnestly hunting down a felt-covered device to keep the windshield of
his car clear of rain.

They dined extravagantly at their hotel at night, and next morning
sneaked round the corner to economize at a Childs' Restaurant. They were
tired by three in the afternoon, and dozed at the motion-pictures and
said they wished they were back in Gopher Prairie--and by eleven in the
evening they were again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant
that was frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days. They
sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and listened to a
brassy automatic piano, and were altogether cosmopolitan.

On the street they met people from home--the McGanums. They laughed,
shook hands repeatedly, and exclaimed, "Well, this is quite a
coincidence!" They asked when the McGanums had come down, and begged for
news of the town they had left two days before. Whatever the
McGanums were at home, here they stood out as so superior to all the
undistinguishable strangers absurdly hurrying past that the Kennicotts
held them as long as they could. The McGanums said good-by as though
they were going to Tibet instead of to the station to catch No. 7 north.

They explored Minneapolis. Kennicott was conversational and technical
regarding gluten and cockle-cylinders and No. I Hard, when they were
shown through the gray stone hulks and new cement elevators of the
largest flour-mills in the world. They looked across Loring Park and
the Parade to the towers of St. Mark's and the Procathedral, and the
red roofs of houses climbing Kenwood Hill. They drove about the chain of
garden-circled lakes, and viewed the houses of the millers and lumbermen
and real estate peers--the potentates of the expanding city. They
surveyed the small eccentric bungalows with pergolas, the houses of
pebbledash and tapestry brick with sleeping-porches above sun-parlors,
and one vast incredible chateau fronting the Lake of the Isles. They
tramped through a shining-new section of apartment-houses; not the tall
bleak apartments of Eastern cities but low structures of cheerful yellow
brick, in which each flat had its glass-enclosed porch with swinging
couch and scarlet cushions and Russian brass bowls. Between a waste of
tracks and a raw gouged hill they found poverty in staggering shanties.

They saw miles of the city which they had never known in their days
of absorption in college. They were distinguished explorers, and they
remarked, in great mutual esteem, "I bet Harry Haydock's never seen the
City like this! Why, he'd never have sense enough to study the machinery
in the mills, or go through all these outlying districts. Wonder folks
in Gopher Prairie wouldn't use their legs and explore, the way we do!"

They had two meals with Carol's sister, and were bored, and felt that
intimacy which beatifies married people when they suddenly admit that
they equally dislike a relative of either of them.

So it was with affection but also with weariness that they approached
the evening on which Carol was to see the plays at the dramatic school.
Kennicott suggested not going. "So darn tired from all this walking;
don't know but what we better turn in early and get rested up." It was
only from duty that Carol dragged him and herself out of the warm
hotel, into a stinking trolley, up the brownstone steps of the converted
residence which lugubriously housed the dramatic school.


V


They were in a long whitewashed hall with a clumsy draw-curtain across
the front. The folding chairs were filled with people who looked washed
and ironed: parents of the pupils, girl students, dutiful teachers.

"Strikes me it's going to be punk. If the first play isn't good, let's
beat it," said Kennicott hopefully.

"All right," she yawned. With hazy eyes she tried to read the lists of
characters, which were hidden among lifeless advertisements of pianos,
music-dealers, restaurants, candy.

She regarded the Schnitzler play with no vast interest. The actors
moved and spoke stiffly. Just as its cynicism was beginning to rouse her
village-dulled frivolity, it was over.

"Don't think a whale of a lot of that. How about taking a sneak?"
petitioned Kennicott.

"Oh, let's try the next one, 'How He Lied to Her Husband.'"

The Shaw conceit amused her, and perplexed Kennicott:

"Strikes me it's darn fresh. Thought it would be racy. Don't know as I
think much of a play where a husband actually claims he wants a fellow
to make love to his wife. No husband ever did that! Shall we shake a
leg?"

"I want to see this Yeats thing, 'Land of Heart's Desire.' I used to
love it in college." She was awake now, and urgent. "I know you didn't
care so much for Yeats when I read him aloud to you, but you just see if
you don't adore him on the stage."

Most of the cast were as unwieldy as oak chairs marching, and the
setting was an arty arrangement of batik scarfs and heavy tables, but
Maire Bruin was slim as Carol, and larger-eyed, and her voice was
a morning bell. In her, Carol lived, and on her lifting voice was
transported from this sleepy small-town husband and all the rows of
polite parents to the stilly loft of a thatched cottage where in a green
dimness, beside a window caressed by linden branches, she bent over a
chronicle of twilight women and the ancient gods.

"Well--gosh--nice kid played that girl--good-looker," said Kennicott.
"Want to stay for the last piece? Heh?"

She shivered. She did not answer.

The curtain was again drawn aside. On the stage they saw nothing but
long green curtains and a leather chair. Two young men in brown robes
like furniture-covers were gesturing vacuously and droning cryptic
sentences full of repetitions.

It was Carol's first hearing of Dunsany. She sympathized with the
restless Kennicott as he felt in his pocket for a cigar and unhappily
put it back.

Without understanding when or how, without a tangible change in the
stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was conscious of another time
and place.

Stately and aloof among vainglorious tiring-maids, a queen in robes
that murmured on the marble floor, she trod the gallery of a crumbling
palace. In the courtyard, elephants trumpeted, and swart men with beards
dyed crimson stood with blood-stained hands folded upon their hilts,
guarding the caravan from El Sharnak, the camels with Tyrian stuffs
of topaz and cinnabar. Beyond the turrets of the outer wall the jungle
glared and shrieked, and the sun was furious above drenched orchids.
A youth came striding through the steel-bossed doors, the sword-bitten
doors that were higher than ten tall men. He was in flexible mail, and
under the rim of his planished morion were amorous curls. His hand was
out to her; before she touched it she could feel its warmth----

"Gosh all hemlock! What the dickens is all this stuff about, Carrie?"

She was no Syrian queen. She was Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. She fell with a
jolt into a whitewashed hall and sat looking at two scared girls and a
young man in wrinkled tights.

Kennicott fondly rambled as they left the hall:

"What the deuce did that last spiel mean? Couldn't make head or tail of
it. If that's highbrow drama, give me a cow-puncher movie, every time!
Thank God, that's over, and we can get to bed. Wonder if we wouldn't
make time by walking over to Nicollet to take a car? One thing I will
say for that dump: they had it warm enough. Must have a big hot-air
furnace, I guess. Wonder how much coal it takes to run 'em through the
winter?"

In the car he affectionately patted her knee, and he was for a second
the striding youth in armor; then he was Doc Kennicott of Gopher
Prairie, and she was recaptured by Main Street. Never, not all her life,
would she behold jungles and the tombs of kings. There were strange
things in the world, they really existed; but she would never see them.

She would recreate them in plays!

She would make the dramatic association understand her aspiration. They
would, surely they would----

She looked doubtfully at the impenetrable reality of yawning trolley
conductor and sleepy passengers and placards advertising soap and
underwear.




CHAPTER XVIII


I

SHE hurried to the first meeting of the play-reading committee. Her
jungle romance had faded, but she retained a religious fervor, a surge
of half-formed thought about the creation of beauty by suggestion.

A Dunsany play would be too difficult for the Gopher Prairie
association. She would let them compromise on Shaw--on "Androcles and
the Lion," which had just been published.

The committee was composed of Carol, Vida Sherwin, Guy Pollock, Raymie
Wutherspoon, and Juanita Haydock. They were exalted by the picture of
themselves as being simultaneously business-like and artistic. They
were entertained by Vida in the parlor of Mrs. Elisha Gurrey's
boarding-house, with its steel engraving of Grant at Appomattox, its
basket of stereoscopic views, and its mysterious stains on the gritty
carpet.

Vida was an advocate of culture-buying and efficiency-systems. She
hinted that they ought to have (as at the committee-meetings of the
Thanatopsis) a "regular order of business," and "the reading of the
minutes," but as there were no minutes to read, and as no one knew
exactly what was the regular order of the business of being literary,
they had to give up efficiency.

Carol, as chairman, said politely, "Have you any ideas about what play
we'd better give first?" She waited for them to look abashed and vacant,
so that she might suggest "Androcles."

Guy Pollock answered with disconcerting readiness, "I'll tell you: since
we're going to try to do something artistic, and not simply fool around,
I believe we ought to give something classic. How about 'The School for
Scandal'?"

"Why----Don't you think that has been done a good deal?"

"Yes, perhaps it has."

Carol was ready to say, "How about Bernard Shaw?" when he treacherously
went on, "How would it be then to give a Greek drama--say 'Oedipus
Tyrannus'?"

"Why, I don't believe----"

Vida Sherwin intruded, "I'm sure that would be too hard for us. Now I've
brought something that I think would be awfully jolly."

She held out, and Carol incredulously took, a thin gray pamphlet
entitled "McGinerty's Mother-in-law." It was the sort of farce which is
advertised in "school entertainment" catalogues as:


Riproaring knock-out, 5 m. 3 f., time 2 hrs., interior set, popular with
churches and all high-class occasions.


Carol glanced from the scabrous object to Vida, and realized that she
was not joking.

"But this is--this is--why, it's just a----Why, Vida, I thought you
appreciated--well--appreciated art."

Vida snorted, "Oh. Art. Oh yes. I do like art. It's very nice. But after
all, what does it matter what kind of play we give as long as we get the
association started? The thing that matters is something that none of
you have spoken of, that is: what are we going to do with the money, if
we make any? I think it would be awfully nice if we presented the high
school with a full set of Stoddard's travel-lectures!"

Carol moaned, "Oh, but Vida dear, do forgive me but this farce----Now
what I'd like us to give is something distinguished. Say Shaw's
'Androcles.' Have any of you read it?"

"Yes. Good play," said Guy Pollock.

Then Raymie Wutherspoon astoundingly spoke up:

"So have I. I read through all the plays in the public library, so's
to be ready for this meeting. And----But I don't believe you grasp
the irreligious ideas in this 'Androcles,' Mrs. Kennicott. I guess the
feminine mind is too innocent to understand all these immoral writers.
I'm sure I don't want to criticize Bernard Shaw; I understand he is very
popular with the highbrows in Minneapolis; but just the same----As far
as I can make out, he's downright improper! The things he SAYS----Well,
it would be a very risky thing for our young folks to see. It seems to
me that a play that doesn't leave a nice taste in the mouth and that
hasn't any message is nothing but--nothing but----Well, whatever it may
be, it isn't art. So----Now I've found a play that is clean, and there's
some awfully funny scenes in it, too. I laughed out loud, reading it.
It's called 'His Mother's Heart,' and it's about a young man in college
who gets in with a lot of free-thinkers and boozers and everything, but
in the end his mother's influence----"

Juanita Haydock broke in with a derisive, "Oh rats, Raymie! Can the
mother's influence! I say let's give something with some class to it.
I bet we could get the rights to 'The Girl from Kankakee,' and that's a
real show. It ran for eleven months in New York!"

"That would be lots of fun, if it wouldn't cost too much," reflected
Vida.

Carol's was the only vote cast against "The Girl from Kankakee."


II


She disliked "The Girl from Kankakee" even more than she had expected.
It narrated the success of a farm-lassie in clearing her brother of a
charge of forgery. She became secretary to a New York millionaire and
social counselor to his wife; and after a well-conceived speech on the
discomfort of having money, she married his son.

There was also a humorous office-boy.

Carol discerned that both Juanita Haydock and Ella Stowbody wanted the
lead. She let Juanita have it. Juanita kissed her and in the exuberant
manner of a new star presented to the executive committee her theory,
"What we want in a play is humor and pep. There's where American
playwrights put it all over these darn old European glooms."

As selected by Carol and confirmed by the committee, the persons of the
play were:

     John Grimm, a millionaire .  .   .  .  Guy Pollock
     His wife.   .  .   .  .   .  .   .  .  Miss Vida Sherwin
     His son .   .  .   .  .   .  .   .  .  Dr. Harvey Dillon
     His business rival.   .  .   .  .  . . Raymond T.  Wutherspoon
     Friend of Mrs. Grimm .  .   .  .   . . Miss Ella Stowbody
     The girl from Kankakee .   .  .   .  . Mrs. Harold C.  Haydock
     Her brother.  .   .  .   .  .   .  .   Dr. Terence Gould
     Her mother .  .   .  .   .  .   .  .   Mrs. David Dyer
     Stenographer .   .  .   .  .   .  .  . Miss Rita Simons
     Office-boy .  .   .  .   .  .   .  .   Miss Myrtle Cass
     Maid in the Grimms' home  .  .  .  .   Mrs. W.  P.  Kennicott
     Direction of Mrs. Kennicott

Among the minor lamentations was Maud Dyer's "Well of course I suppose I
look old enough to be Juanita's mother, even if Juanita is eight months
older than I am, but I don't know as I care to have everybody noticing
it and----"

Carol pleaded, "Oh, my DEAR! You two look exactly the same age. I chose
you because you have such a darling complexion, and you know with powder
and a white wig, anybody looks twice her age, and I want the mother to
be sweet, no matter who else is."

Ella Stowbody, the professional, perceiving that it was because of a
conspiracy of jealousy that she had been given a small part, alternated
between lofty amusement and Christian patience.

Carol hinted that the play would be improved by cutting, but as every
actor except Vida and Guy and herself wailed at the loss of a single
line, she was defeated. She told herself that, after all, a great deal
could be done with direction and settings.

Sam Clark had boastfully written about the dramatic association to his
schoolmate, Percy Bresnahan, president of the Velvet Motor Company
of Boston. Bresnahan sent a check for a hundred dollars; Sam added
twenty-five and brought the fund to Carol, fondly crying, "There!
That'll give you a start for putting the thing across swell!"

She rented the second floor of the city hall for two months. All through
the spring the association thrilled to its own talent in that dismal
room. They cleared out the bunting, ballot-boxes, handbills, legless
chairs. They attacked the stage. It was a simple-minded stage. It was
raised above the floor, and it did have a movable curtain, painted with
the advertisement of a druggist dead these ten years, but otherwise
it might not have been recognized as a stage. There were two
dressing-rooms, one for men, one for women, on either side. The
dressing-room doors were also the stage-entrances, opening from the
house, and many a citizen of Gopher Prairie had for his first glimpse of
romance the bare shoulders of the leading woman.

There were three sets of scenery: a woodland, a Poor Interior, and a
Rich Interior, the last also useful for railway stations, offices, and
as a background for the Swedish Quartette from Chicago. There were three
gradations of lighting: full on, half on, and entirely off.

This was the only theater in Gopher Prairie. It was known as the "op'ra
house." Once, strolling companies had used it for performances of "The
Two Orphans," and "Nellie the Beautiful Cloak Model," and "Othello" with
specialties between acts, but now the motion-pictures had ousted the
gipsy drama.

Carol intended to be furiously modern in constructing the office-set,
the drawing-room for Mr. Grimm, and the Humble Home near Kankakee.
It was the first time that any one in Gopher Prairie had been so
revolutionary as to use enclosed scenes with continuous side-walls. The
rooms in the op'ra house sets had separate wing-pieces for sides, which
simplified dramaturgy, as the villain could always get out of the hero's
way by walking out through the wall.

The inhabitants of the Humble Home were supposed to be amiable and
intelligent. Carol planned for them a simple set with warm color. She
could see the beginning of the play: all dark save the high settles and
the solid wooden table between them, which were to be illuminated by a
ray from offstage. The high light was a polished copper pot filled with
primroses. Less clearly she sketched the Grimm drawing-room as a series
of cool high white arches.

As to how she was to produce these effects she had no notion.

She discovered that, despite the enthusiastic young writers, the
drama was not half so native and close to the soil as motor cars and
telephones. She discovered that simple arts require sophisticated
training. She discovered that to produce one perfect stage-picture would
be as difficult as to turn all of Gopher Prairie into a Georgian garden.

She read all she could find regarding staging, she bought paint and
light wood; she borrowed furniture and drapes unscrupulously; she made
Kennicott turn carpenter. She collided with the problem of lighting.
Against the protest of Kennicott and Vida she mortgaged the association
by sending to Minneapolis for a baby spotlight, a strip light, a dimming
device, and blue and amber bulbs; and with the gloating rapture of
a born painter first turned loose among colors, she spent absorbed
evenings in grouping, dimming-painting with lights.

Only Kennicott, Guy, and Vida helped her. They speculated as to how
flats could be lashed together to form a wall; they hung crocus-yellow
curtains at the windows; they blacked the sheet-iron stove; they put on
aprons and swept. The rest of the association dropped into the theater
every evening, and were literary and superior. They had borrowed
Carol's manuals of play-production and had become extremely stagey in
vocabulary.

Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons, and Raymie Wutherspoon sat on a sawhorse,
watching Carol try to get the right position for a picture on the wall
in the first scene.

"I don't want to hand myself anything but I believe I'll give a swell
performance in this first act," confided Juanita. "I wish Carol wasn't
so bossy though. She doesn't understand clothes. I want to wear, oh,
a dandy dress I have--all scarlet--and I said to her, 'When I enter
wouldn't it knock their eyes out if I just stood there at the door in
this straight scarlet thing?' But she wouldn't let me."

Young Rita agreed, "She's so much taken up with her old details and
carpentering and everything that she can't see the picture as a whole.
Now I thought it would be lovely if we had an office-scene like the one
in 'Little, But Oh My!' Because I SAW that, in Duluth. But she simply
wouldn't listen at all."

Juanita sighed, "I wanted to give one speech like Ethel Barrymore would,
if she was in a play like this. (Harry and I heard her one time in
Minneapolis--we had dandy seats, in the orchestra--I just know I could
imitate her.) Carol didn't pay any attention to my suggestion. I don't
want to criticize but I guess Ethel knows more about acting than Carol
does!"

"Say, do you think Carol has the right dope about using a strip light
behind the fireplace in the second act? I told her I thought we ought to
use a bunch," offered Raymie. "And I suggested it would be lovely if we
used a cyclorama outside the window in the first act, and what do you
think she said? 'Yes, and it would be lovely to have Eleanora Duse play
the lead,' she said, 'and aside from the fact that it's evening in the
first act, you're a great technician,' she said. I must say I think she
was pretty sarcastic. I've been reading up, and I know I could build a
cyclorama, if she didn't want to run everything."

"Yes, and another thing, I think the entrance in the first act ought to
be L. U. E., not L. 3 E.," from Juanita.

"And why does she just use plain white tormenters?"

"What's a tormenter?" blurted Rita Simons.

The savants stared at her ignorance.


III


Carol did not resent their criticisms, she didn't very much resent
their sudden knowledge, so long as they let her make pictures. It was at
rehearsals that the quarrrels broke. No one understood that rehearsals
were as real engagements as bridge-games or sociables at the Episcopal
Church. They gaily came in half an hour late, or they vociferously came
in ten minutes early, and they were so hurt that they whispered about
resigning when Carol protested. They telephoned, "I don't think I'd
better come out; afraid the dampness might start my toothache," or
"Guess can't make it tonight; Dave wants me to sit in on a poker game."

When, after a month of labor, as many as nine-elevenths of the cast were
often present at a rehearsal; when most of them had learned their parts
and some of them spoke like human beings, Carol had a new shock in the
realization that Guy Pollock and herself were very bad actors, and that
Raymie Wutherspoon was a surprisingly good one. For all her visions
she could not control her voice, and she was bored by the fiftieth
repetition of her few lines as maid. Guy pulled his soft mustache,
looked self-conscious, and turned Mr. Grimm into a limp dummy. But
Raymie, as the villain, had no repressions. The tilt of his head was
full of character; his drawl was admirably vicious.

There was an evening when Carol hoped she was going to make a play; a
rehearsal during which Guy stopped looking abashed.

From that evening the play declined.

They were weary. "We know our parts well enough now; what's the use of
getting sick of them?" they complained. They began to skylark; to play
with the sacred lights; to giggle when Carol was trying to make the
sentimental Myrtle Cass into a humorous office-boy; to act everything
but "The Girl from Kankakee." After loafing through his proper part
Dr. Terry Gould had great applause for his burlesque of "Hamlet." Even
Raymie lost his simple faith, and tried to show that he could do a
vaudeville shuffle.

Carol turned on the company. "See here, I want this nonsense to stop.
We've simply got to get down to work."

Juanita Haydock led the mutiny: "Look here, Carol, don't be so bossy.
After all, we're doing this play principally for the fun of it, and if
we have fun out of a lot of monkey-shines, why then----"

"Ye-es," feebly.

"You said one time that folks in G. P. didn't get enough fun out of
life. And now we are having a circus, you want us to stop!"

Carol answered slowly: "I wonder if I can explain what I mean? It's the
difference between looking at the comic page and looking at Manet. I
want fun out of this, of course. Only----I don't think it would be
less fun, but more, to produce as perfect a play as we can." She was
curiously exalted; her voice was strained; she stared not at the company
but at the grotesques scrawled on the backs of wing-pieces by forgotten
stage-hands. "I wonder if you can understand the 'fun' of making a
beautiful thing, the pride and satisfaction of it, and the holiness!"

The company glanced doubtfully at one another. In Gopher Prairie it
is not good form to be holy except at a church, between ten-thirty and
twelve on Sunday.

"But if we want to do it, we've got to work; we must have
self-discipline."

They were at once amused and embarrassed. They did not want to affront
this mad woman. They backed off and tried to rehearse. Carol did not
hear Juanita, in front, protesting to Maud Dyer, "If she calls it fun
and holiness to sweat over her darned old play--well, I don't!"


IV


Carol attended the only professional play which came to Gopher Prairie
that spring. It was a "tent show, presenting snappy new dramas under
canvas." The hard-working actors doubled in brass, and took tickets;
and between acts sang about the moon in June, and sold Dr. Wintergreen's
Surefire Tonic for Ills of the Heart, Lungs, Kidneys, and Bowels. They
presented "Sunbonnet Nell: A Dramatic Comedy of the Ozarks," with J.
Witherbee Boothby wringing the soul by his resonant "Yuh ain't done
right by mah little gal, Mr. City Man, but yer a-goin' to find that back
in these-yere hills there's honest folks and good shots!"

The audience, on planks beneath the patched tent, admired Mr. Boothby's
beard and long rifle; stamped their feet in the dust at the spectacle
of his heroism; shouted when the comedian aped the City Lady's use of a
lorgnon by looking through a doughnut stuck on a fork; wept visibly over
Mr. Boothby's Little Gal Nell, who was also Mr. Boothby's legal wife
Pearl, and when the curtain went down, listened respectfully to Mr.
Boothby's lecture on Dr. Wintergreen's Tonic as a cure for tape-worms,
which he illustrated by horrible pallid objects curled in bottles of
yellowing alcohol.

Carol shook her head. "Juanita is right. I'm a fool. Holiness of the
drama! Bernard Shaw! The only trouble with 'The Girl from Kankakee' is
that it's too subtle for Gopher Prairie!"

She sought faith in spacious banal phrases, taken from books: "the
instinctive nobility of simple souls," "need only the opportunity, to
appreciate fine things," and "sturdy exponents of democracy." But these
optimisms did not sound so loud as the laughter of the audience at the
funny-man's line, "Yes, by heckelum, I'm a smart fella." She wanted to
give up the play, the dramatic association, the town. As she came out
of the tent and walked with Kennicott down the dusty spring street, she
peered at this straggling wooden village and felt that she could not
possibly stay here through all of tomorrow.

It was Miles Bjornstam who gave her strength--he and the fact that every
seat for "The Girl from Kankakee" had been sold.

Bjornstam was "keeping company" with Bea. Every night he was sitting on
the back steps. Once when Carol appeared he grumbled, "Hope you're going
to give this burg one good show. If you don't, reckon nobody ever will."


V


It was the great night; it was the night of the play. The two
dressing-rooms were swirling with actors, panting, twitchy pale. Del
Snafflin the barber, who was as much a professional as Ella, having once
gone on in a mob scene at a stock-company performance in Minneapolis,
was making them up, and showing his scorn for amateurs with, "Stand
still! For the love o' Mike, how do you expect me to get your eyelids
dark if you keep a-wigglin'?" The actors were beseeching, "Hey, Del, put
some red in my nostrils--you put some in Rita's--gee, you didn't hardly
do anything to my face."

They were enormously theatric. They examined Del's makeup box, they
sniffed the scent of grease-paint, every minute they ran out to peep
through the hole in the curtain, they came back to inspect their wigs
and costumes, they read on the whitewashed walls of the dressing-rooms
the pencil inscriptions: "The Flora Flanders Comedy Company," and "This
is a bum theater," and felt that they were companions of these vanished
troupers.

Carol, smart in maid's uniform, coaxed the temporary stage-hands to
finish setting the first act, wailed at Kennicott, the electrician, "Now
for heaven's sake remember the change in cue for the ambers in Act Two,"
slipped out to ask Dave Dyer, the ticket-taker, if he could get some
more chairs, warned the frightened Myrtle Cass to be sure to upset the
waste-basket when John Grimm called, "Here you, Reddy."

Del Snafflin's orchestra of piano, violin, and cornet began to tune up
and every one behind the magic line of the proscenic arch was frightened
into paralysis. Carol wavered to the hole in the curtain. There were so
many people out there, staring so hard----

In the second row she saw Miles Bjornstam, not with Bea but alone.
He really wanted to see the play! It was a good omen. Who could tell?
Perhaps this evening would convert Gopher Prairie to conscious beauty.

She darted into the women's dressing-room, roused Maud Dyer from her
fainting panic, pushed her to the wings, and ordered the curtain up.

It rose doubtfully, it staggered and trembled, but it did get up without
catching--this time. Then she realized that Kennicott had forgotten to
turn off the houselights. Some one out front was giggling.

She galloped round to the left wing, herself pulled the switch, looked
so ferociously at Kennicott that he quaked, and fled back.

Mrs. Dyer was creeping out on the half-darkened stage. The play was
begun.

And with that instant Carol realized that it was a bad play abominably
acted.

Encouraging them with lying smiles, she watched her work go to pieces.
The settings seemed flimsy, the lighting commonplace. She watched
Guy Pollock stammer and twist his mustache when he should have been a
bullying magnate; Vida Sherwin, as Grimm's timid wife, chatter at the
audience as though they were her class in high-school English; Juanita,
in the leading role, defy Mr. Grimm as though she were repeating a list
of things she had to buy at the grocery this morning; Ella Stowbody
remark "I'd like a cup of tea" as though she were reciting "Curfew Shall
Not Ring Tonight"; and Dr. Gould, making love to Rita Simons, squeak,
"My--my--you--are--a--won'erful--girl."

Myrtle Cass, as the office-boy, was so much pleased by the applause of
her relatives, then so much agitated by the remarks of Cy Bogart, in the
back row, in reference to her wearing trousers, that she could hardly
be got off the stage. Only Raymie was so unsociable as to devote himself
entirely to acting.

That she was right in her opinion of the play Carol was certain when
Miles Bjornstam went out after the first act, and did not come back.


VI


Between the second and third acts she called the company together,
and supplicated, "I want to know something, before we have a chance to
separate. Whether we're doing well or badly tonight, it is a beginning.
But will we take it as merely a beginning? How many of you will pledge
yourselves to start in with me, right away, tomorrow, and plan for
another play, to be given in September?"

They stared at her; they nodded at Juanita's protest: "I think
one's enough for a while. It's going elegant tonight, but another
play----Seems to me it'll be time enough to talk about that next fall.
Carol! I hope you don't mean to hint and suggest we're not doing fine
tonight? I'm sure the applause shows the audience think it's just
dandy!"

Then Carol knew how completely she had failed.

As the audience seeped out she heard B. J. Gougerling the banker say to
Howland the grocer, "Well, I think the folks did splendid; just as good
as professionals. But I don't care much for these plays. What I like is
a good movie, with auto accidents and hold-ups, and some git to it, and
not all this talky-talk."

Then Carol knew how certain she was to fail again.

She wearily did not blame them, company nor audience. Herself she blamed
for trying to carve intaglios in good wholesome jack-pine.

"It's the worst defeat of all. I'm beaten. By Main Street. 'I must go
on.' But I can't!"

She was not vastly encouraged by the Gopher Prairie Dauntless:

. . . would be impossible to distinguish among the actors when all gave
such fine account of themselves in difficult roles of this well-known
New York stage play. Guy Pollock as the old millionaire could not have
been bettered for his fine impersonation of the gruff old millionaire;
Mrs. Harry Haydock as the young lady from the West who so easily showed
the New York four-flushers where they got off was a vision of loveliness
and with fine stage presence. Miss Vida Sherwin the ever popular teacher
in our high school pleased as Mrs. Grimm, Dr. Gould was well suited in
the role of young lover--girls you better look out, remember the doc is a
bachelor. The local Four Hundred also report that he is a great hand at
shaking the light fantastic tootsies in the dance. As the stenographer
Rita Simons was pretty as a picture, and Miss Ella Stowbody's long and
intensive study of the drama and kindred arts in Eastern schools was
seen in the fine finish of her part.

. . . to no one is greater credit to be given than to Mrs. Will Kennicott
on whose capable shoulders fell the burden of directing.


"So kindly," Carol mused, "so well meant, so neighborly--and so
confoundedly untrue. Is it really my failure, or theirs?"

She sought to be sensible; she elaborately explained to herself that it
was hysterical to condemn Gopher Prairie because it did not foam over
the drama. Its justification was in its service as a market-town for
farmers. How bravely and generously it did its work, forwarding the
bread of the world, feeding and healing the farmers!

Then, on the corner below her husband's office, she heard a farmer
holding forth:

"Sure. Course I was beaten. The shipper and the grocers here wouldn't
pay us a decent price for our potatoes, even though folks in the cities
were howling for 'em. So we says, well, we'll get a truck and ship 'em
right down to Minneapolis. But the commission merchants there were in
cahoots with the local shipper here; they said they wouldn't pay us
a cent more than he would, not even if they was nearer to the market.
Well, we found we could get higher prices in Chicago, but when we tried
to get freight cars to ship there, the railroads wouldn't let us have
'em--even though they had cars standing empty right here in the yards.
There you got it--good market, and these towns keeping us from it. Gus,
that's the way these towns work all the time. They pay what they want
to for our wheat, but we pay what they want us to for their clothes.
Stowbody and Dawson foreclose every mortgage they can, and put in tenant
farmers. The Dauntless lies to us about the Nonpartisan League, the
lawyers sting us, the machinery-dealers hate to carry us over bad years,
and then their daughters put on swell dresses and look at us as if we
were a bunch of hoboes. Man, I'd like to burn this town!"

Kennicott observed, "There's that old crank Wes Brannigan shooting off
his mouth again. Gosh, but he loves to hear himself talk! They ought to
run that fellow out of town!"


VII


She felt old and detached through high-school commencement week, which
is the fete of youth in Gopher Prairie; through baccalaureate sermon,
senior Parade, junior entertainment, commencement address by an Iowa
clergyman who asserted that he believed in the virtue of virtuousness,
and the procession of Decoration Day, when the few Civil War veterans
followed Champ Perry, in his rusty forage-cap, along the spring-powdered
road to the cemetery. She met Guy; she found that she had nothing to
say to him. Her head ached in an aimless way. When Kennicott rejoiced,
"We'll have a great time this summer; move down to the lake early and
wear old clothes and act natural," she smiled, but her smile creaked.

In the prairie heat she trudged along unchanging ways, talked about
nothing to tepid people, and reflected that she might never escape from
them.

She was startled to find that she was using the word "escape."

Then, for three years which passed like one curt paragraph, she ceased
to find anything interesting save the Bjornstams and her baby.




CHAPTER XIX


I

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


II


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


III


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


IV


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

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


V


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

One scene had a persistent witchery:

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

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

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

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


VI


Trains!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


VII


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


VIII


Two weeks later the Great War smote Europe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XX


I

THE baby was coming. Each morning she was nauseated, chilly, bedraggled,
and certain that she would never again be attractive; each twilight
she was afraid. She did not feel exalted, but unkempt and furious. The
period of daily sickness crawled into an endless time of boredom. It
became difficult for her to move about, and she raged that she, who
had been slim and light-footed, should have to lean on a stick, and be
heartily commented upon by street gossips. She was encircled by greasy
eyes. Every matron hinted, "Now that you're going to be a mother,
dearie, you'll get over all these ideas of yours and settle down."
She felt that willy-nilly she was being initiated into the assembly
of housekeepers; with the baby for hostage, she would never escape;
presently she would be drinking coffee and rocking and talking about
diapers.

"I could stand fighting them. I'm used to that. But this being taken in,
being taken as a matter of course, I can't stand it--and I must stand
it!"

She alternately detested herself for not appreciating the kindly women,
and detested them for their advice: lugubrious hints as to how much she
would suffer in labor, details of baby-hygiene based on long experience
and total misunderstanding, superstitious cautions about the things she
must eat and read and look at in prenatal care for the baby's soul, and
always a pest of simpering baby-talk. Mrs. Champ Perry bustled in to
lend "Ben Hur," as a preventive of future infant immorality. The Widow
Bogart appeared trailing pinkish exclamations, "And how is our lovely
'ittle muzzy today! My, ain't it just like they always say: being in
a Family Way does make the girlie so lovely, just like a Madonna. Tell
me--" Her whisper was tinged with salaciousness--"does oo feel the dear
itsy one stirring, the pledge of love? I remember with Cy, of course he
was so big----"

"I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogart. My complexion is rotten, and my hair
is coming out, and I look like a potato-bag, and I think my arches are
falling, and he isn't a pledge of love, and I'm afraid he WILL look like
us, and I don't believe in mother-devotion, and the whole business is a
confounded nuisance of a biological process," remarked Carol.

Then the baby was born, without unusual difficulty: a boy with straight
back and strong legs. The first day she hated him for the tides of pain
and hopeless fear he had caused; she resented his raw ugliness. After
that she loved him with all the devotion and instinct at which she
had scoffed. She marveled at the perfection of the miniature hands as
noisily as did Kennicott, she was overwhelmed by the trust with
which the baby turned to her; passion for him grew with each unpoetic
irritating thing she had to do for him.

He was named Hugh, for her father.

Hugh developed into a thin healthy child with a large head and straight
delicate hair of a faint brown. He was thoughtful and casual--a
Kennicott.

For two years nothing else existed. She did not, as the cynical matrons
had prophesied, "give up worrying about the world and other folks'
babies soon as she got one of her own to fight for." The barbarity of
that willingness to sacrifice other children so that one child might
have too much was impossible to her. But she would sacrifice herself.
She understood consecration--she who answered Kennicott's hints about
having Hugh christened: "I refuse to insult my baby and myself by asking
an ignorant young man in a frock coat to sanction him, to permit me
to have him! I refuse to subject him to any devil-chasing rites! If I
didn't give my baby--MY BABY--enough sanctification in those nine hours
of hell, then he can't get any more out of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel!"

"Well, Baptists hardly ever christen kids. I was kind of thinking more
about Reverend Warren," said Kennicott.

Hugh was her reason for living, promise of accomplishment in the future,
shrine of adoration--and a diverting toy. "I thought I'd be a dilettante
mother, but I'm as dismayingly natural as Mrs. Bogart," she boasted.

For two--years Carol was a part of the town; as much one of Our Young
Mothers as Mrs. McGanum. Her opinionation seemed dead; she had no
apparent desire for escape; her brooding centered on Hugh. While she
wondered at the pearl texture of his ear she exulted, "I feel like an
old woman, with a skin like sandpaper, beside him, and I'm glad of it!
He is perfect. He shall have everything. He sha'n't always stay here in
Gopher Prairie. . . . I wonder which is really the best, Harvard or Yale
or Oxford?"


II


The people who hemmed her in had been brilliantly reinforced by Mr. and
Mrs. Whittier N. Smail--Kennicott's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie.

The true Main Streetite defines a relative as a person to whose house
you go uninvited, to stay as long as you like. If you hear that Lym Cass
on his journey East has spent all his time "visiting" in Oyster Center,
it does not mean that he prefers that village to the rest of New
England, but that he has relatives there. It does not mean that he has
written to the relatives these many years, nor that they have ever given
signs of a desire to look upon him. But "you wouldn't expect a man to
go and spend good money at a hotel in Boston, when his own third cousins
live right in the same state, would you?"

When the Smails sold their creamery in North Dakota they visited Mr.
Smail's sister, Kennicott's mother, at Lac-qui-Meurt, then plodded on
to Gopher Prairie to stay with their nephew. They appeared unannounced,
before the baby was born, took their welcome for granted, and
immediately began to complain of the fact that their room faced north.

Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie assumed that it was their privilege as
relatives to laugh at Carol, and their duty as Christians to let her
know how absurd her "notions" were. They objected to the food, to
Oscarina's lack of friendliness, to the wind, the rain, and the
immodesty of Carol's maternity gowns. They were strong and enduring; for
an hour at a time they could go on heaving questions about her father's
income, about her theology, and about the reason why she had not put on
her rubbers when she had gone across the street. For fussy discussion
they had a rich, full genius, and their example developed in Kennicott a
tendency to the same form of affectionate flaying.

If Carol was so indiscreet as to murmur that she had a small headache,
instantly the two Smails and Kennicott were at it. Every five minutes,
every time she sat down or rose or spoke to Oscarina, they twanged, "Is
your head better now? Where does it hurt? Don't you keep hartshorn in
the house? Didn't you walk too far today? Have you tried hartshorn?
Don't you keep some in the house so it will be handy? Does it feel
better now? How does it feel? Do your eyes hurt, too? What time do you
usually get to bed? As late as THAT? Well! How does it feel now?"

In her presence Uncle Whittier snorted at Kennicott, "Carol get these
headaches often? Huh? Be better for her if she didn't go gadding around
to all these bridge-whist parties, and took some care of herself once in
a while!"

They kept it up, commenting, questioning, commenting, questioning,
till her determination broke and she bleated, "For heaven's SAKE, don't
dis-CUSS it! My head 's all RIGHT!"

She listened to the Smails and Kennicott trying to determine by
dialectics whether the copy of the Dauntless, which Aunt Bessie wanted
to send to her sister in Alberta, ought to have two or four cents
postage on it. Carol would have taken it to the drug store and weighed
it, but then she was a dreamer, while they were practical people (as
they frequently admitted). So they sought to evolve the postal rate from
their inner consciousnesses, which, combined with entire frankness in
thinking aloud, was their method of settling all problems.

The Smails did not "believe in all this nonsense" about privacy and
reticence. When Carol left a letter from her sister on the table, she
was astounded to hear from Uncle Whittier, "I see your sister says her
husband is doing fine. You ought to go see her oftener. I asked Will
and he says you don't go see her very often. My! You ought to go see her
oftener!"

If Carol was writing a letter to a classmate, or planning the week's
menus, she could be certain that Aunt Bessie would pop in and titter,
"Now don't let me disturb you, I just wanted to see where you were,
don't stop, I'm not going to stay only a second. I just wondered if
you could possibly have thought that I didn't eat the onions this noon
because I didn't think they were properly cooked, but that wasn't the
reason at all, it wasn't because I didn't think they were well cooked,
I'm sure that everything in your house is always very dainty and nice,
though I do think that Oscarina is careless about some things, she
doesn't appreciate the big wages you pay her, and she is so cranky, all
these Swedes are so cranky, I don't really see why you have a Swede,
but----But that wasn't it, I didn't eat them not because I didn't think
they weren't cooked proper, it was just--I find that onions don't agree
with me, it's very strange, ever since I had an attack of biliousness
one time, I have found that onions, either fried onions or raw ones, and
Whittier does love raw onions with vinegar and sugar on them----"

It was pure affection.

Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more disconcerting
than intelligent hatred is demanding love.

She supposed that she was being gracefully dull and standardized in
the Smails' presence, but they scented the heretic, and with
forward-stooping delight they sat and tried to drag out her ludicrous
concepts for their amusement. They were like the Sunday-afternoon mob
starting at monkeys in the Zoo, poking fingers and making faces and
giggling at the resentment of the more dignified race.

With a loose-lipped, superior, village smile Uncle Whittier hinted,
"What's this I hear about your thinking Gopher Prairie ought to be
all tore down and rebuilt, Carrie? I don't know where folks get these
new-fangled ideas. Lots of farmers in Dakota getting 'em these days.
About co-operation. Think they can run stores better 'n storekeepers!
Huh!"

"Whit and I didn't need no co-operation as long as we was farming!"
triumphed Aunt Bessie. "Carrie, tell your old auntie now: don't you ever
go to church on Sunday? You do go sometimes? But you ought to go every
Sunday! When you're as old as I am, you'll learn that no matter how
smart folks think they are, God knows a whole lot more than they do, and
then you'll realize and be glad to go and listen to your pastor!"

In the manner of one who has just beheld a two-headed calf they repeated
that they had "never HEARD such funny ideas!" They were staggered to
learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married
to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that
divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not
bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical
authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet
not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and
the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden; that
mushrooms are as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word "dude" is
no longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel
who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence and
business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight; that
it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy flannels next the skin
in winter; that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel
organ; that some poets do not have long hair; and that Jews are not
always pedlers or pants-makers.

"Where does she get all them the'ries?" marveled Uncle Whittier Smail;
while Aunt Bessie inquired, "Do you suppose there's many folks got
notions like hers? My! If there are," and her tone settled the fact that
there were not, "I just don't know what the world's coming to!"

Patiently--more or less--Carol awaited the exquisite day when they would
announce departure. After three weeks Uncle Whittier remarked, "We kinda
like Gopher Prairie. Guess maybe we'll stay here. We'd been wondering
what we'd do, now we've sold the creamery and my farms. So I had a talk
with Ole Jenson about his grocery, and I guess I'll buy him out and
storekeep for a while."

He did.

Carol rebelled. Kennicott soothed her: "Oh, we won't see much of them.
They'll have their own house."

She resolved to be so chilly that they would stay away. But she had no
talent for conscious insolence. They found a house, but Carol was never
safe from their appearance with a hearty, "Thought we'd drop in this
evening and keep you from being lonely. Why, you ain't had them curtains
washed yet!" Invariably, whenever she was touched by the realization
that it was they who were lonely, they wrecked her pitying affection by
comments--questions--comments--advice.

They immediately became friendly with all of their own race, with the
Luke Dawsons, the Deacon Piersons, and Mrs. Bogart; and brought them
along in the evening. Aunt Bessie was a bridge over whom the older
women, bearing gifts of counsel and the ignorance of experience, poured
into Carol's island of reserve. Aunt Bessie urged the good Widow Bogart,
"Drop in and see Carrie real often. Young folks today don't understand
housekeeping like we do."

Mrs. Bogart showed herself perfectly willing to be an associate
relative.

Carol was thinking up protective insults when Kennicott's mother came
down to stay with Brother Whittier for two months. Carol was fond of
Mrs. Kennicott. She could not carry out her insults.

She felt trapped.

She had been kidnaped by the town. She was Aunt Bessie's niece, and she
was to be a mother. She was expected, she almost expected herself, to
sit forever talking of babies, cooks, embroidery stitches, the price of
potatoes, and the tastes of husbands in the matter of spinach.

She found a refuge in the Jolly Seventeen. She suddenly understood that
they could be depended upon to laugh with her at Mrs. Bogart, and she
now saw Juanita Haydock's gossip not as vulgarity but as gaiety and
remarkable analysis.

Her life had changed, even before Hugh appeared. She looked forward to
the next bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, and the security of whispering
with her dear friends Maud Dyer and Juanita and Mrs. McGanum.

She was part of the town. Its philosophy and its feuds dominated her.


III


She was no longer irritated by the cooing of the matrons, nor by their
opinion that diet didn't matter so long as the Little Ones had plenty of
lace and moist kisses, but she concluded that in the care of babies as
in politics, intelligence was superior to quotations about pansies. She
liked best to talk about Hugh to Kennicott, Vida, and the Bjornstams.
She was happily domestic when Kennicott sat by her on the floor, to
watch baby make faces. She was delighted when Miles, speaking as one man
to another, admonished Hugh, "I wouldn't stand them skirts if I was you.
Come on. Join the union and strike. Make 'em give you pants."

As a parent, Kennicott was moved to establish the first child-welfare
week held in Gopher Prairie. Carol helped him weigh babies and
examine their throats, and she wrote out the diets for mute German and
Scandinavian mothers.

The aristocracy of Gopher Prairie, even the wives of the rival doctors,
took part, and for several days there was community spirit and much
uplift. But this reign of love was overthrown when the prize for Best
Baby was awarded not to decent parents but to Bea and Miles Bjornstam!
The good matrons glared at Olaf Bjornstam, with his blue eyes, his
honey-colored hair, and magnificent back, and they remarked, "Well, Mrs.
Kennicott, maybe that Swede brat is as healthy as your husband says he
is, but let me tell you I hate to think of the future that awaits any
boy with a hired girl for a mother and an awful irreligious socialist
for a pa!"

She raged, but so violent was the current of their respectability, so
persistent was Aunt Bessie in running to her with their blabber, that
she was embarrassed when she took Hugh to play with Olaf. She hated
herself for it, but she hoped that no one saw her go into the Bjornstam
shanty. She hated herself and the town's indifferent cruelty when she
saw Bea's radiant devotion to both babies alike; when she saw Miles
staring at them wistfully.

He had saved money, had quit Elder's planing-mill and started a dairy
on a vacant lot near his shack. He was proud of his three cows and sixty
chickens, and got up nights to nurse them.

"I'll be a big farmer before you can bat an eye! I tell you that young
fellow Olaf is going to go East to college along with the Haydock kids.
Uh----Lots of folks dropping in to chin with Bea and me now. Say! Ma
Bogart come in one day! She was----I liked the old lady fine. And the
mill foreman comes in right along. Oh, we got lots of friends. You bet!"


IV


Though the town seemed to Carol to change no more than the surrounding
fields, there was a constant shifting, these three years. The citizen of
the prairie drifts always westward. It may be because he is the heir of
ancient migrations--and it may be because he finds within his own
spirit so little adventure that he is driven to seek it by changing his
horizon. The towns remain unvaried, yet the individual faces alter
like classes in college. The Gopher Prairie jeweler sells out, for no
discernible reason, and moves on to Alberta or the state of Washington,
to open a shop precisely like his former one, in a town precisely like
the one he has left. There is, except among professional men and the
wealthy, small permanence either of residence or occupation. A man
becomes farmer, grocer, town policeman, garageman, restaurant-owner,
postmaster, insurance-agent, and farmer all over again, and the
community more or less patiently suffers from his lack of knowledge in
each of his experiments.

Ole Jenson the grocer and Dahl the butcher moved on to South Dakota
and Idaho. Luke and Mrs. Dawson picked up ten thousand acres of prairie
soil, in the magic portable form of a small check book, and went to
Pasadena, to a bungalow and sunshine and cafeterias. Chet Dashaway sold
his furniture and undertaking business and wandered to Los Angeles,
where, the Dauntless reported, "Our good friend Chester has accepted a
fine position with a real-estate firm, and his wife has in the charming
social circles of the Queen City of the Southwestland that same
popularity which she enjoyed in our own society sets."

Rita Simons was married to Terry Gould, and rivaled Juanita Haydock as
the gayest of the Young Married Set. But Juanita also acquired merit.
Harry's father died, Harry became senior partner in the Bon Ton Store,
and Juanita was more acidulous and shrewd and cackling than ever. She
bought an evening frock, and exposed her collar-bone to the wonder of
the Jolly Seventeen, and talked of moving to Minneapolis.

To defend her position against the new Mrs. Terry Gould she sought to
attach Carol to her faction by giggling that "SOME folks might call Rita
innocent, but I've got a hunch that she isn't half as ignorant of things
as brides are supposed to be--and of course Terry isn't one-two-three as
a doctor alongside of your husband."

Carol herself would gladly have followed Mr. Ole Jenson, and migrated
even to another Main Street; flight from familiar tedium to new tedium
would have for a time the outer look and promise of adventure. She
hinted to Kennicott of the probable medical advantages of Montana and
Oregon. She knew that he was satisfied with Gopher Prairie, but it gave
her vicarious hope to think of going, to ask for railroad folders at the
station, to trace the maps with a restless forefinger.

Yet to the casual eye she was not discontented, she was not an abnormal
and distressing traitor to the faith of Main Street.

The settled citizen believes that the rebel is constantly in a stew of
complaining and, hearing of a Carol Kennicott, he gasps, "What an
awful person! She must be a Holy Terror to live with! Glad MY folks are
satisfied with things way they are!" Actually, it was not so much as
five minutes a day that Carol devoted to lonely desires. It is
probable that the agitated citizen has within his circle at least one
inarticulate rebel with aspirations as wayward as Carol's.

The presence of the baby had made her take Gopher Prairie and the brown
house seriously, as natural places of residence. She pleased Kennicott
by being friendly with the complacent maturity of Mrs. Clark and Mrs.
Elder, and when she had often enough been in conference upon the Elders'
new Cadillac car, or the job which the oldest Clark boy had taken in
the office of the flour-mill, these topics became important, things to
follow up day by day.

With nine-tenths of her emotion concentrated upon Hugh, she did not
criticize shops, streets, acquaintances . . . this year or two. She
hurried to Uncle Whittier's store for a package of corn-flakes, she
abstractedly listened to Uncle Whittier's denunciation of Martin
Mahoney for asserting that the wind last Tuesday had been south and not
southwest, she came back along streets that held no surprises nor the
startling faces of strangers. Thinking of Hugh's teething all the way,
she did not reflect that this store, these drab blocks, made up all her
background. She did her work, and she triumphed over winning from the
Clarks at five hundred.

The most considerable event of the two years after the birth of Hugh
occurred when Vida Sherwin resigned from the high school and was
married. Carol was her attendant, and as the wedding was at the
Episcopal Church, all the women wore new kid slippers and long white kid
gloves, and looked refined.

For years Carol had been little sister to Vida, and had never in the
least known to what degree Vida loved her and hated her and in curious
strained ways was bound to her.

 In January, the Kennicotts and a group of friends bobsled to their lake cottages. As the others dance and play games, Carol enjoys herself thoroughly. Inspired, Carol proposes that they form a dramatic club. In order to get ideas for staging a play, she asks Kennicott to take her to Minneapolis so she can watch four modern one-act plays. He reluctantly agrees. Having lived in Gopher Prairie for two years, Carol now feels out of place in the big city. Once in Minneapolis, she also observes how much her unsophisticated husband clashes with the city. Nevertheless, she enjoys staying in their luxurious hotel, eating out, and shopping. Although Kennicott tries to coax Carol to skip the plays, she drags him to see the performances. Carol feels transported by the plays, but Kennicott says he prefers cowboy movies. The members of the dramatic club--Carol, Vida Sherwin, Guy Pollock, Raymond Wutherspoon, and Juanita Haydock--meet and elect Carol president. Although Carol wants to perform a modern play by Bernard Shaw, the others reject staging a "highbrow" play and instead chose to perform a farce called "The Girl from Kakakee." Carol directs the play and chooses the cast. While Vida and Guy help Carol prepare the stage props, the other members of the troupe complain about Carol's bossiness. Carol knows from the beginning that the play is not going to be a success. The actors do not attend rehearsals regularly, and Raymond Wutherspoon is the only one who can act convincingly. After a while, everyone feels tired of rehearsing. Wanting to give up, Carol holds the play anyway because all the tickets are sold. On the day of the performance, everything goes wrong. The lights do not work, and the actors feel nervous and act badly and refuse to stage another play next year. However, the Gopher Prairie newspaper praises the play, which only makes Carol feel worse, as she is discouraged by the town's poor taste. In June, Bjornstam marries Bea Sorenson, Carol's maid. Although Carol seemingly persuades all her female friends from the Jolly Seventeen to attend the wedding, none of them show up. Bjornstam aims to give his new wife a higher social status. Carol manages to find another maid named Oscarina, who loves Carol as her own daughter. The new mayor appoints Carol to the library board. Carol expects to take charge of the board, but feels humbled when she discovers how learned all the board members are. After a few meetings, however, Carol realizes that the board has no clue how to make the library more useful to the town. The library lacks books and funds, but the board resists Carol's proposals to buy more books. Carol gives up hope of improving the library, and the mayor does not reappoint her to the board. When Kennicott hints to Carol about having a baby, she dreams of escape, becoming fascinated by the trains that pass through town, considering them a means to run away. Meanwhile, a traveling lecture series known as the Chautauqua arrives in Gopher Prairie. Excited at first, Carol finds the lectures disappointing because they are not very educational. World War I erupts in Europe around this time, but the isolationist townspeople of Gopher Prairie do not take it seriously. Kennicott's Uncle Whittier Smail and Aunt Bessie decide to move to Gopher Prairie and stay with Carol and Kennicott for three weeks. They prove a constant source of vexation to Carol. They laugh at her liberal ideas, question her constantly, read her private mail, and relentlessly offer their opinions. Carol finds escape by attending the Jolly Seventeen Club. Carol becomes pregnant and finds the pregnancy disagreeable. When she gives birth to a son, she initially dislikes the infant for causing her a difficult labor. Soon, however, she feels overwhelming love for him and makes him the center of her universe. She names her son Hugh after her dead father. Carol and Kennicott enjoy playing with their son together. Carl also enjoys taking Hugh to play with Olaf, the Bjornstams' son, although Carol's friends make her feel ashamed for visiting the poor Bjornstams.

