Chapter: CHAPTER XI


I

SHE had often been invited to the weekly meetings of the Thanatopsis,
the women's study club, but she had put it off. The Thanatopsis was,
Vida Sherwin promised, "such a cozy group, and yet it puts you in touch
with all the intellectual thoughts that are going on everywhere."

Early in March Mrs. Westlake, wife of the veteran physician, marched
into Carol's living-room like an amiable old pussy and suggested, "My
dear, you really must come to the Thanatopsis this afternoon. Mrs.
Dawson is going to be leader and the poor soul is frightened to death.
She wanted me to get you to come. She says she's sure you will brighten
up the meeting with your knowledge of books and writings. (English
poetry is our topic today.) So shoo! Put on your coat!"

"English poetry? Really? I'd love to go. I didn't realize you were
reading poetry."

"Oh, we're not so slow!"

Mrs. Luke Dawson, wife of the richest man in town, gaped at them
piteously when they appeared. Her expensive frock of beaver-colored
satin with rows, plasters, and pendants of solemn brown beads was
intended for a woman twice her size. She stood wringing her hands in
front of nineteen folding chairs, in her front parlor with its faded
photograph of Minnehaha Falls in 1890, its "colored enlargement" of
Mr. Dawson, its bulbous lamp painted with sepia cows and mountains and
standing on a mortuary marble column.

She creaked, "O Mrs. Kennicott, I'm in such a fix. I'm supposed to lead
the discussion, and I wondered would you come and help?"

"What poet do you take up today?" demanded Carol, in her library tone of
"What book do you wish to take out?"

"Why, the English ones."

"Not all of them?"

"W-why yes. We're learning all of European Literature this year.
The club gets such a nice magazine, Culture Hints, and we follow its
programs. Last year our subject was Men and Women of the Bible, and next
year we'll probably take up Furnishings and China. My, it does make a
body hustle to keep up with all these new culture subjects, but it is
improving. So will you help us with the discussion today?"

On her way over Carol had decided to use the Thanatopsis as the tool
with which to liberalize the town. She had immediately conceived
enormous enthusiasm; she had chanted, "These are the real people. When
the housewives, who bear the burdens, are interested in poetry, it means
something. I'll work with them--for them--anything!"

Her enthusiasm had become watery even before thirteen women resolutely
removed their overshoes, sat down meatily, ate peppermints, dusted their
fingers, folded their hands, composed their lower thoughts, and invited
the naked muse of poetry to deliver her most improving message. They had
greeted Carol affectionately, and she tried to be a daughter to them.
But she felt insecure. Her chair was out in the open, exposed to their
gaze, and it was a hard-slatted, quivery, slippery church-parlor chair,
likely to collapse publicly and without warning. It was impossible to
sit on it without folding the hands and listening piously.

She wanted to kick the chair and run. It would make a magnificent
clatter.

She saw that Vida Sherwin was watching her. She pinched her wrist, as
though she were a noisy child in church, and when she was decent and
cramped again, she listened.

Mrs. Dawson opened the meeting by sighing, "I'm sure I'm glad to see you
all here today, and I understand that the ladies have prepared a number
of very interesting papers, this is such an interesting subject, the
poets, they have been an inspiration for higher thought, in fact wasn't
it Reverend Benlick who said that some of the poets have been as much an
inspiration as a good many of the ministers, and so we shall be glad to
hear----"

The poor lady smiled neuralgically, panted with fright, scrabbled about
the small oak table to find her eye-glasses, and continued, "We
will first have the pleasure of hearing Mrs. Jenson on the subject
'Shakespeare and Milton.'"

Mrs. Ole Jenson said that Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died 1616. He
lived in London, England, and in Stratford-on-Avon, which many American
tourists loved to visit, a lovely town with many curios and old houses
well worth examination. Many people believed that Shakespeare was the
greatest play-wright who ever lived, also a fine poet. Not much was
known about his life, but after all that did not really make so much
difference, because they loved to read his numerous plays, several of
the best known of which she would now criticize.

Perhaps the best known of his plays was "The Merchant of Venice," having
a beautiful love story and a fine appreciation of a woman's brains,
which a woman's club, even those who did not care to commit themselves
on the question of suffrage, ought to appreciate. (Laughter.) Mrs.
Jenson was sure that she, for one, would love to be like Portia. The
play was about a Jew named Shylock, and he didn't want his daughter to
marry a Venice gentleman named Antonio----

Mrs. Leonard Warren, a slender, gray, nervous woman, president of the
Thanatopsis and wife of the Congregational pastor, reported the birth
and death dates of Byron, Scott, Moore, Burns; and wound up:

"Burns was quite a poor boy and he did not enjoy the advantages we enjoy
today, except for the advantages of the fine old Scotch kirk where he
heard the Word of God preached more fearlessly than even in the finest
big brick churches in the big and so-called advanced cities of today,
but he did not have our educational advantages and Latin and the other
treasures of the mind so richly strewn before the, alas, too ofttimes
inattentive feet of our youth who do not always sufficiently appreciate
the privileges freely granted to every American boy rich or poor. Burns
had to work hard and was sometimes led by evil companionship into low
habits. But it is morally instructive to know that he was a good
student and educated himself, in striking contrast to the loose ways and
so-called aristocratic society-life of Lord Byron, on which I have just
spoken. And certainly though the lords and earls of his day may have
looked down upon Burns as a humble person, many of us have greatly
enjoyed his pieces about the mouse and other rustic subjects, with their
message of humble beauty--I am so sorry I have not got the time to quote
some of them."

Mrs. George Edwin Mott gave ten minutes to Tennyson and Browning.

Mrs. Nat Hicks, a wry-faced, curiously sweet woman, so awed by her
betters that Carol wanted to kiss her, completed the day's grim task by
a paper on "Other Poets." The other poets worthy of consideration were
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Gray, Mrs. Hemans, and Kipling.

Miss Ella Stowbody obliged with a recital of "The Recessional" and
extracts from "Lalla Rookh." By request, she gave "An Old Sweetheart of
Mine" as encore.

Gopher Prairie had finished the poets. It was ready for the next week's
labor: English Fiction and Essays.

Mrs. Dawson besought, "Now we will have a discussion of the papers, and
I am sure we shall all enjoy hearing from one who we hope to have as a
new member, Mrs. Kennicott, who with her splendid literary training and
all should be able to give us many pointers and--many helpful pointers."

Carol had warned herself not to be so "beastly supercilious." She had
insisted that in the belated quest of these work-stained women was
an aspiration which ought to stir her tears. "But they're so
self-satisfied. They think they're doing Burns a favor. They don't
believe they have a 'belated quest.' They're sure that they have culture
salted and hung up." It was out of this stupor of doubt that Mrs.
Dawson's summons roused her. She was in a panic. How could she speak
without hurting them?

Mrs. Champ Perry leaned over to stroke her hand and whisper, "You look
tired, dearie. Don't you talk unless you want to."

Affection flooded Carol; she was on her feet, searching for words and
courtesies:

"The only thing in the way of suggestion----I know you are following
a definite program, but I do wish that now you've had such a splendid
introduction, instead of going on with some other subject next year you
could return and take up the poets more in detail. Especially actual
quotations--even though their lives are so interesting and, as Mrs.
Warren said, so morally instructive. And perhaps there are several poets
not mentioned today whom it might be worth while considering--Keats, for
instance, and Matthew Arnold and Rossetti and Swinburne. Swinburne would
be such a--well, that is, such a contrast to life as we all enjoy it in
our beautiful Middle-west----"

She saw that Mrs. Leonard Warren was not with her. She captured her by
innocently continuing:

"Unless perhaps Swinburne tends to be, uh, more outspoken than you, than
we really like. What do you think, Mrs. Warren?"

The pastor's wife decided, "Why, you've caught my very thoughts, Mrs.
Kennicott. Of course I have never READ Swinburne, but years ago, when
he was in vogue, I remember Mr. Warren saying that Swinburne (or was
it Oscar Wilde? but anyway:) he said that though many so-called
intellectual people posed and pretended to find beauty in Swinburne,
there can never be genuine beauty without the message from the heart.
But at the same time I do think you have an excellent idea, and though
we have talked about Furnishings and China as the probable subject for
next year, I believe that it would be nice if the program committee
would try to work in another day entirely devoted to English poetry! In
fact, Madame Chairman, I so move you."

When Mrs. Dawson's coffee and angel's-food had helped them to recover
from the depression caused by thoughts of Shakespeare's death they all
told Carol that it was a pleasure to have her with them. The membership
committee retired to the sitting-room for three minutes and elected her
a member.

And she stopped being patronizing.

She wanted to be one of them. They were so loyal and kind. It was they
who would carry out her aspiration. Her campaign against village sloth
was actually begun! On what specific reform should she first loose
her army? During the gossip after the meeting Mrs. George Edwin Mott
remarked that the city hall seemed inadequate for the splendid modern
Gopher Prairie. Mrs. Nat Hicks timidly wished that the young people
could have free dances there--the lodge dances were so exclusive. The
city hall. That was it! Carol hurried home.

She had not realized that Gopher Prairie was a city. From Kennicott she
discovered that it was legally organized with a mayor and city-council
and wards. She was delighted by the simplicity of voting one's self a
metropolis. Why not?

She was a proud and patriotic citizen, all evening.



II


She examined the city hall, next morning. She had remembered it only as
a bleak inconspicuousness. She found it a liver-colored frame coop half
a block from Main Street. The front was an unrelieved wall of clapboards
and dirty windows. It had an unobstructed view of a vacant lot and Nat
Hicks's tailor shop. It was larger than the carpenter shop beside it,
but not so well built.

No one was about. She walked into the corridor. On one side was the
municipal court, like a country school; on the other, the room of the
volunteer fire company, with a Ford hose-cart and the ornamental helmets
used in parades, at the end of the hall, a filthy two-cell jail, now
empty but smelling of ammonia and ancient sweat. The whole second story
was a large unfinished room littered with piles of folding chairs, a
lime-crusted mortar-mixing box, and the skeletons of Fourth of July
floats covered with decomposing plaster shields and faded red, white,
and blue bunting. At the end was an abortive stage. The room was large
enough for the community dances which Mrs. Nat Hicks advocated. But
Carol was after something bigger than dances.

In the afternoon she scampered to the public library.

The library was open three afternoons and four evenings a week. It was
housed in an old dwelling, sufficient but unattractive. Carol caught
herself picturing pleasanter reading-rooms, chairs for children, an art
collection, a librarian young enough to experiment.

She berated herself, "Stop this fever of reforming everything! I WILL be
satisfied with the library! The city hall is enough for a beginning.
And it's really an excellent library. It's--it isn't so bad. . . . Is
it possible that I am to find dishonesties and stupidity in every
human activity I encounter? In schools and business and government and
everything? Is there never any contentment, never any rest?"

She shook her head as though she were shaking off water, and hastened
into the library, a young, light, amiable presence, modest in unbuttoned
fur coat, blue suit, fresh organdy collar, and tan boots roughened from
scuffling snow. Miss Villets stared at her, and Carol purred, "I was so
sorry not to see you at the Thanatopsis yesterday. Vida said you might
come."

"Oh. You went to the Thanatopsis. Did you enjoy it?"

"So much. Such good papers on the poets." Carol lied resolutely. "But I
did think they should have had you give one of the papers on poetry!"

"Well----Of course I'm not one of the bunch that seem to have the
time to take and run the club, and if they prefer to have papers on
literature by other ladies who have no literary training--after all, why
should I complain? What am I but a city employee!"

"You're not! You're the one person that does--that does--oh, you do so
much. Tell me, is there, uh----Who are the people who control the club?"

Miss Villets emphatically stamped a date in the front of "Frank on the
Lower Mississippi" for a small flaxen boy, glowered at him as though she
were stamping a warning on his brain, and sighed:

"I wouldn't put myself forward or criticize any one for the world, and
Vida is one of my best friends, and such a splendid teacher, and there
is no one in town more advanced and interested in all movements, but I
must say that no matter who the president or the committees are, Vida
Sherwin seems to be behind them all the time, and though she is always
telling me about what she is pleased to call my 'fine work in the
library,' I notice that I'm not often called on for papers, though Mrs.
Lyman Cass once volunteered and told me that she thought my paper on
'The Cathedrals of England' was the most interesting paper we had, the
year we took up English and French travel and architecture. But----And
of course Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Warren are very important in the club, as
you might expect of the wives of the superintendent of schools and
the Congregational pastor, and indeed they are both very cultured,
but----No, you may regard me as entirely unimportant. I'm sure what I
say doesn't matter a bit!"

"You're much too modest, and I'm going to tell Vida so, and, uh, I
wonder if you can give me just a teeny bit of your time and show me
where the magazine files are kept?"

She had won. She was profusely escorted to a room like a grandmother's
attic, where she discovered periodicals devoted to house-decoration and
town-planning, with a six-year file of the National Geographic. Miss
Villets blessedly left her alone. Humming, fluttering pages with
delighted fingers, Carol sat cross-legged on the floor, the magazines in
heaps about her.

She found pictures of New England streets: the dignity of Falmouth, the
charm of Concord, Stockbridge and Farmington and Hillhouse Avenue. The
fairy-book suburb of Forest Hills on Long Island. Devonshire cottages
and Essex manors and a Yorkshire High Street and Port Sunlight. The
Arab village of Djeddah--an intricately chased jewel-box. A town in
California which had changed itself from the barren brick fronts and
slatternly frame sheds of a Main Street to a way which led the eye down
a vista of arcades and gardens.

Assured that she was not quite mad in her belief that a small American
town might be lovely, as well as useful in buying wheat and selling
plows, she sat brooding, her thin fingers playing a tattoo on her
cheeks. She saw in Gopher Prairie a Georgian city hall: warm brick walls
with white shutters, a fanlight, a wide hall and curving stair. She
saw it the common home and inspiration not only of the town but of
the country about. It should contain the court-room (she couldn't get
herself to put in a jail), public library, a collection of excellent
prints, rest-room and model kitchen for farmwives, theater, lecture
room, free community ballroom, farm-bureau, gymnasium. Forming about it
and influenced by it, as mediaeval villages gathered about the castle,
she saw a new Georgian town as graceful and beloved as Annapolis or that
bowery Alexandria to which Washington rode.

All this the Thanatopsis Club was to accomplish with no difficulty
whatever, since its several husbands were the controllers of business
and politics. She was proud of herself for this practical view.

She had taken only half an hour to change a wire-fenced potato-plot into
a walled rose-garden. She hurried out to apprize Mrs. Leonard Warren, as
president of the Thanatopsis, of the miracle which had been worked.



III


At a quarter to three Carol had left home; at half-past four she had
created the Georgian town; at a quarter to five she was in the dignified
poverty of the Congregational parsonage, her enthusiasm pattering upon
Mrs. Leonard Warren like summer rain upon an old gray roof; at two
minutes to five a town of demure courtyards and welcoming dormer windows
had been erected, and at two minutes past five the entire town was as
flat as Babylon.

Erect in a black William and Mary chair against gray and speckly-brown
volumes of sermons and Biblical commentaries and Palestine geographies
upon long pine shelves, her neat black shoes firm on a rag-rug, herself
as correct and low-toned as her background, Mrs. Warren listened without
comment till Carol was quite through, then answered delicately:

"Yes, I think you draw a very nice picture of what might easily come to
pass--some day. I have no doubt that such villages will be found on the
prairie--some day. But if I might make just the least little criticism:
it seems to me that you are wrong in supposing either that the city hall
would be the proper start, or that the Thanatopsis would be the right
instrument. After all, it's the churches, isn't it, that are the
real heart of the community. As you may possibly know, my husband
is prominent in Congregational circles all through the state for
his advocacy of church-union. He hopes to see all the evangelical
denominations joined in one strong body, opposing Catholicism and
Christian Science, and properly guiding all movements that make for
morality and prohibition. Here, the combined churches could afford
a splendid club-house, maybe a stucco and half-timber building with
gargoyles and all sorts of pleasing decorations on it, which, it seems
to me, would be lots better to impress the ordinary class of people than
just a plain old-fashioned colonial house, such as you describe. And
that would be the proper center for all educational and pleasurable
activities, instead of letting them fall into the hands of the
politicians."

"I don't suppose it will take more than thirty or forty years for the
churches to get together?" Carol said innocently.

"Hardly that long even; things are moving so rapidly. So it would be a
mistake to make any other plans."

Carol did not recover her zeal till two days after, when she tried Mrs.
George Edwin Mott, wife of the superintendent of schools.

Mrs. Mott commented, "Personally, I am terribly busy with dressmaking
and having the seamstress in the house and all, but it would be splendid
to have the other members of the Thanatopsis take up the question.
Except for one thing: First and foremost, we must have a new
schoolbuilding. Mr. Mott says they are terribly cramped."

Carol went to view the old building. The grades and the high school were
combined in a damp yellow-brick structure with the narrow windows of an
antiquated jail--a hulk which expressed hatred and compulsory training.
She conceded Mrs. Mott's demand so violently that for two days she
dropped her own campaign. Then she built the school and city hall
together, as the center of the reborn town.

She ventured to the lead-colored dwelling of Mrs. Dave Dyer. Behind the
mask of winter-stripped vines and a wide porch only a foot above the
ground, the cottage was so impersonal that Carol could never visualize
it. Nor could she remember anything that was inside it. But Mrs. Dyer
was personal enough. With Carol, Mrs. Howland, Mrs. McGanum, and Vida
Sherwin she was a link between the Jolly Seventeen and the serious
Thanatopsis (in contrast to Juanita Haydock, who unnecessarily boasted
of being a "lowbrow" and publicly stated that she would "see herself
in jail before she'd write any darned old club papers"). Mrs. Dyer was
superfeminine in the kimono in which she received Carol. Her skin was
fine, pale, soft, suggesting a weak voluptuousness. At afternoon-coffees
she had been rude but now she addressed Carol as "dear," and insisted on
being called Maud. Carol did not quite know why she was uncomfortable
in this talcum-powder atmosphere, but she hastened to get into the fresh
air of her plans.

Maud Dyer granted that the city hall wasn't "so very nice," yet, as Dave
said, there was no use doing anything about it till they received
an appropriation from the state and combined a new city hall with
a national guard armory. Dave had given verdict, "What these mouthy
youngsters that hang around the pool-room need is universal military
training. Make men of 'em."

Mrs. Dyer removed the new schoolbuilding from the city hall:

"Oh, so Mrs. Mott has got you going on her school craze! She's been
dinging at that till everybody's sick and tired. What she really wants
is a big office for her dear bald-headed Gawge to sit around and look
important in. Of course I admire Mrs. Mott, and I'm very fond of
her, she's so brainy, even if she does try to butt in and run the
Thanatopsis, but I must say we're sick of her nagging. The old building
was good enough for us when we were kids! I hate these would-be women
politicians, don't you?"



IV


The first week of March had given promise of spring and stirred Carol
with a thousand desires for lakes and fields and roads. The snow was
gone except for filthy woolly patches under trees, the thermometer
leaped in a day from wind-bitten chill to itchy warmth. As soon as Carol
was convinced that even in this imprisoned North, spring could exist
again, the snow came down as abruptly as a paper storm in a theater; the
northwest gale flung it up in a half blizzard; and with her hope of a
glorified town went hope of summer meadows.

But a week later, though the snow was everywhere in slushy heaps, the
promise was unmistakable. By the invisible hints in air and sky and
earth which had aroused her every year through ten thousand generations
she knew that spring was coming. It was not a scorching, hard, dusty day
like the treacherous intruder of a week before, but soaked with languor,
softened with a milky light. Rivulets were hurrying in each alley; a
calling robin appeared by magic on the crab-apple tree in the Howlands'
yard. Everybody chuckled, "Looks like winter is going," and "This 'll
bring the frost out of the roads--have the autos out pretty soon
now--wonder what kind of bass-fishing we'll get this summer--ought to be
good crops this year."

Each evening Kennicott repeated, "We better not take off our Heavy
Underwear or the storm windows too soon--might be 'nother spell of
cold--got to be careful 'bout catching cold--wonder if the coal will
last through?"

The expanding forces of life within her choked the desire for reforming.
She trotted through the house, planning the spring cleaning with Bea.
When she attended her second meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing
about remaking the town. She listened respectably to statistics on
Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, De
Quincey, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed, constituted the writers
of English Fiction and Essays.

Not till she inspected the rest-room did she again become a fanatic.
She had often glanced at the store-building which had been turned into
a refuge in which farmwives could wait while their husbands transacted
business. She had heard Vida Sherwin and Mrs. Warren caress the virtue
of the Thanatopsis in establishing the rest-room and in sharing with the
city council the expense of maintaining it. But she had never entered it
till this March day.

She went in impulsively; nodded at the matron, a plump worthy widow
named Nodelquist, and at a couple of farm-women who were meekly rocking.
The rest-room resembled a second-hand store. It was furnished with
discarded patent rockers, lopsided reed chairs, a scratched pine table,
a gritty straw mat, old steel engravings of milkmaids being morally
amorous under willow-trees, faded chromos of roses and fish, and a
kerosene stove for warming lunches. The front window was darkened by
torn net curtains and by a mound of geraniums and rubber-plants.

While she was listening to Mrs. Nodelquist's account of how many
thousands of farmers' wives used the rest-room every year, and how much
they "appreciated the kindness of the ladies in providing them with
this lovely place, and all free," she thought, "Kindness nothing! The
kind-ladies' husbands get the farmers' trade. This is mere commercial
accommodation. And it's horrible. It ought to be the most charming room
in town, to comfort women sick of prairie kitchens. Certainly it ought
to have a clear window, so that they can see the metropolitan life go
by. Some day I'm going to make a better rest-room--a club-room. Why!
I've already planned that as part of my Georgian town hall!"

So it chanced that she was plotting against the peace of the Thanatopsis
at her third meeting (which covered Scandinavian, Russian, and Polish
Literature, with remarks by Mrs. Leonard Warren on the sinful paganism
of the Russian so-called church). Even before the entrance of the
coffee and hot rolls Carol seized on Mrs. Champ Perry, the kind and
ample-bosomed pioneer woman who gave historic dignity to the modern
matrons of the Thanatopsis. She poured out her plans. Mrs. Perry nodded
and stroked Carol's hand, but at the end she sighed:

"I wish I could agree with you, dearie. I'm sure you're one of the
Lord's anointed (even if we don't see you at the Baptist Church as often
as we'd like to)! But I'm afraid you're too tender-hearted. When Champ
and I came here we teamed-it with an ox-cart from Sauk Centre to Gopher
Prairie, and there was nothing here then but a stockade and a few
soldiers and some log cabins. When we wanted salt pork and gunpowder, we
sent out a man on horseback, and probably he was shot dead by the
Injuns before he got back. We ladies--of course we were all farmers
at first--we didn't expect any rest-room in those days. My, we'd have
thought the one they have now was simply elegant! My house was roofed
with hay and it leaked something terrible when it rained--only dry place
was under a shelf.

"And when the town grew up we thought the new city hall was real fine.
And I don't see any need for dance-halls. Dancing isn't what it was,
anyway. We used to dance modest, and we had just as much fun as all
these young folks do now with their terrible Turkey Trots and hugging
and all. But if they must neglect the Lord's injunction that young girls
ought to be modest, then I guess they manage pretty well at the K.
P. Hall and the Oddfellows', even if some of tie lodges don't always
welcome a lot of these foreigners and hired help to all their dances.
And I certainly don't see any need of a farm-bureau or this domestic
science demonstration you talk about. In my day the boys learned to farm
by honest sweating, and every gal could cook, or her ma learned her
how across her knee! Besides, ain't there a county agent at Wakamin? He
comes here once a fortnight, maybe. That's enough monkeying with this
scientific farming--Champ says there's nothing to it anyway.

"And as for a lecture hall--haven't we got the churches? Good deal
better to listen to a good old-fashioned sermon than a lot of geography
and books and things that nobody needs to know--more 'n enough heathen
learning right here in the Thanatopsis. And as for trying to make a
whole town in this Colonial architecture you talk about----I do love
nice things; to this day I run ribbons into my petticoats, even if
Champ Perry does laugh at me, the old villain! But just the same I don't
believe any of us old-timers would like to see the town that we worked
so hard to build being tore down to make a place that wouldn't look like
nothing but some Dutch story-book and not a bit like the place we loved.
And don't you think it's sweet now? All the trees and lawns? And such
comfy houses, and hot-water heat and electric lights and telephones
and cement walks and everything? Why, I thought everybody from the Twin
Cities always said it was such a beautiful town!"

Carol forswore herself; declared that Gopher Prairie had the color of
Algiers and the gaiety of Mardi Gras.

Yet the next afternoon she was pouncing on Mrs. Lyman Cass, the
hook-nosed consort of the owner of the flour-mill.

Mrs. Cass's parlor belonged to the crammed-Victorian school, as Mrs.
Luke Dawson's belonged to the bare-Victorian. It was furnished on two
principles: First, everything must resemble something else. A rocker had
a back like a lyre, a near-leather seat imitating tufted cloth, and
arms like Scotch Presbyterian lions; with knobs, scrolls, shields, and
spear-points on unexpected portions of the chair. The second principle
of the crammed-Victorian school was that every inch of the interior must
be filled with useless objects.

The walls of Mrs. Cass's parlor were plastered with "hand-painted"
pictures, "buckeye" pictures, of birch-trees, news-boys, puppies, and
church-steeples on Christmas Eve; with a plaque depicting the Exposition
Building in Minneapolis, burnt-wood portraits of Indian chiefs of no
tribe in particular, a pansy-decked poetic motto, a Yard of Roses, and
the banners of the educational institutions attended by the Casses' two
sons--Chicopee Falls Business College and McGillicuddy University. One
small square table contained a card-receiver of painted china with a rim
of wrought and gilded lead, a Family Bible, Grant's Memoirs, the latest
novel by Mrs. Gene Stratton Porter, a wooden model of a Swiss chalet
which was also a bank for dimes, a polished abalone shell holding one
black-headed pin and one empty spool, a velvet pin-cushion in a gilded
metal slipper with "Souvenir of Troy, N. Y." stamped on the toe, and an
unexplained red glass dish which had warts.

Mrs. Cass's first remark was, "I must show you all my pretty things and
art objects."

She piped, after Carol's appeal:

"I see. You think the New England villages and Colonial houses are so
much more cunning than these Middlewestern towns. I'm glad you feel that
way. You'll be interested to know I was born in Vermont."

"And don't you think we ought to try to make Gopher Prai----"

"My gracious no! We can't afford it. Taxes are much too high as it is.
We ought to retrench, and not let the city council spend another cent.
Uh----Don't you think that was a grand paper Mrs. Westlake read about
Tolstoy? I was so glad she pointed out how all his silly socialistic
ideas failed."

What Mrs. Cass said was what Kennicott said, that evening. Not in twenty
years would the council propose or Gopher Prairie vote the funds for a
new city hall.



V


Carol had avoided exposing her plans to Vida Sherwin. She was shy of the
big-sister manner; Vida would either laugh at her or snatch the idea and
change it to suit herself. But there was no other hope. When Vida came
in to tea Carol sketched her Utopia.

Vida was soothing but decisive:

"My dear, you're all off. I would like to see it: a real gardeny place
to shut out the gales. But it can't be done. What could the clubwomen
accomplish?"

"Their husbands are the most important men in town. They ARE the town!"

"But the town as a separate unit is not the husband of the Thanatopsis.
If you knew the trouble we had in getting the city council to spend the
money and cover the pumping-station with vines! Whatever you may think
of Gopher Prairie women, they're twice as progressive as the men."

"But can't the men see the ugliness?"

"They don't think it's ugly. And how can you prove it? Matter of taste.
Why should they like what a Boston architect likes?"

"What they like is to sell prunes!"

"Well, why not? Anyway, the point is that you have to work from the
inside, with what we have, rather than from the outside, with foreign
ideas. The shell ought not to be forced on the spirit. It can't be! The
bright shell has to grow out of the spirit, and express it. That means
waiting. If we keep after the city council for another ten years they
MAY vote the bonds for a new school."

"I refuse to believe that if they saw it the big men would be too
tight-fisted to spend a few dollars each for a building--think!--dancing
and lectures and plays, all done co-operatively!"

"You mention the word 'co-operative' to the merchants and they'll
lynch you! The one thing they fear more than mail-order houses is that
farmers' co-operative movements may get started."

"The secret trails that lead to scared pocket-books! Always, in
everything! And I don't have any of the fine melodrama of fiction: the
dictagraphs and speeches by torchlight. I'm merely blocked by stupidity.
Oh, I know I'm a fool. I dream of Venice, and I live in Archangel and
scold because the Northern seas aren't tender-colored. But at least they
sha'n't keep me from loving Venice, and sometime I'll run away----All
right. No more."

She flung out her hands in a gesture of renunciation.



VI


Early May; wheat springing up in blades like grass; corn and potatoes
being planted; the land humming. For two days there had been steady
rain. Even in town the roads were a furrowed welter of mud, hideous to
view and difficult to cross. Main Street was a black swamp from curb to
curb; on residence streets the grass parking beside the walks oozed gray
water. It was prickly hot, yet the town was barren under the bleak sky.
Softened neither by snow nor by waving boughs the houses squatted and
scowled, revealed in their unkempt harshness.

As she dragged homeward Carol looked with distaste at her clay-loaded
rubbers, the smeared hem of her skirt. She passed Lyman Cass's
pinnacled, dark-red, hulking house. She waded a streaky yellow pool.
This morass was not her home, she insisted. Her home, and her beautiful
town, existed in her mind. They had already been created. The task was
done. What she really had been questing was some one to share them with
her. Vida would not; Kennicott could not.

Some one to share her refuge.

Suddenly she was thinking of Guy Pollock.

She dismissed him. He was too cautious. She needed a spirit as young and
unreasonable as her own. And she would never find it. Youth would never
come singing. She was beaten.

Yet that same evening she had an idea which solved the rebuilding of
Gopher Prairie.

Within ten minutes she was jerking the old-fashioned bell-pull of Luke
Dawson. Mrs. Dawson opened the door and peered doubtfully about the
edge of it. Carol kissed her cheek, and frisked into the lugubrious
sitting-room.

"Well, well, you're a sight for sore eyes!" chuckled Mr. Dawson,
dropping his newspaper, pushing his spectacles back on his forehead.

"You seem so excited," sighed Mrs. Dawson.

"I am! Mr. Dawson, aren't you a millionaire?"

He cocked his head, and purred, "Well, I guess if I cashed in on all my
securities and farm-holdings and my interests in iron on the Mesaba and
in Northern timber and cut-over lands, I could push two million dollars
pretty close, and I've made every cent of it by hard work and having the
sense to not go out and spend every----"

"I think I want most of it from you!"

The Dawsons glanced at each other in appreciation of the jest; and
he chirped, "You're worse than Reverend Benlick! He don't hardly ever
strike me for more than ten dollars--at a time!"

"I'm not joking. I mean it! Your children in the Cities are grown-up and
well-to-do. You don't want to die and leave your name unknown. Why not
do a big, original thing? Why not rebuild the whole town? Get a great
architect, and have him plan a town that would be suitable to the
prairie. Perhaps he'd create some entirely new form of architecture.
Then tear down all these shambling buildings----"

Mr. Dawson had decided that she really did mean it. He wailed, "Why,
that would cost at least three or four million dollars!"

"But you alone, just one man, have two of those millions!"

"Me? Spend all my hard-earned cash on building houses for a lot of
shiftless beggars that never had the sense to save their money? Not
that I've ever been mean. Mama could always have a hired girl to do the
work--when we could find one. But her and I have worked our fingers to
the bone and--spend it on a lot of these rascals----?"

"Please! Don't be angry! I just mean--I mean----Oh, not spend all of it,
of course, but if you led off the list, and the others came in, and if
they heard you talk about a more attractive town----"

"Why now, child, you've got a lot of notions. Besides what's the matter
with the town? Looks good to me. I've had people that have traveled
all over the world tell me time and again that Gopher Prairie is the
prettiest place in the Middlewest. Good enough for anybody. Certainly
good enough for Mama and me. Besides! Mama and me are planning to go
out to Pasadena and buy a bungalow and live there."



VII


She had met Miles Bjornstam on the street. For the second of welcome
encounter this workman with the bandit mustache and the muddy overalls
seemed nearer than any one else to the credulous youth which she was
seeking to fight beside her, and she told him, as a cheerful anecdote, a
little of her story.

He grunted, "I never thought I'd be agreeing with Old Man Dawson, the
penny-pinching old land-thief--and a fine briber he is, too. But you
got the wrong slant. You aren't one of the people--yet. You want to do
something for the town. I don't! I want the town to do something for
itself. We don't want old Dawson's money--not if it's a gift, with a
string. We'll take it away from him, because it belongs to us. You got
to get more iron and cussedness into you. Come join us cheerful bums,
and some day--when we educate ourselves and quit being bums--we'll take
things and run 'em straight."

He had changed from her friend to a cynical man in overalls. She could
not relish the autocracy of "cheerful bums."

She forgot him as she tramped the outskirts of town.

She had replaced the city hall project by an entirely new and highly
exhilarating thought of how little was done for these unpicturesque
poor.



VIII


The spring of the plains is not a reluctant virgin but brazen and soon
away. The mud roads of a few days ago are powdery dust and the puddles
beside them have hardened into lozenges of black sleek earth like
cracked patent leather.

Carol was panting as she crept to the meeting of the Thanatopsis program
committee which was to decide the subject for next fall and winter.

Madam Chairman (Miss Ella Stowbody in an oyster-colored blouse) asked if
there was any new business.

Carol rose. She suggested that the Thanatopsis ought to help the poor
of the town. She was ever so correct and modern. She did not, she said,
want charity for them, but a chance of self-help; an employment bureau,
direction in washing babies and making pleasing stews, possibly a
municipal fund for home-building. "What do you think of my plans, Mrs.
Warren?" she concluded.

Speaking judiciously, as one related to the church by marriage, Mrs.
Warren gave verdict:

"I'm sure we're all heartily in accord with Mrs. Kennicott in feeling
that wherever genuine poverty is encountered, it is not only noblesse
oblige but a joy to fulfil our duty to the less fortunate ones. But I
must say it seems to me we should lose the whole point of the thing by
not regarding it as charity. Why, that's the chief adornment of the true
Christian and the church! The Bible has laid it down for our guidance.
'Faith, Hope, and CHARITY,' it says, and, 'The poor ye have with ye
always,' which indicates that there never can be anything to these
so-called scientific schemes for abolishing charity, never! And isn't it
better so? I should hate to think of a world in which we were deprived
of all the pleasure of giving. Besides, if these shiftless folks realize
they're getting charity, and not something to which they have a right,
they're so much more grateful."

"Besides," snorted Miss Ella Stowbody, "they've been fooling you, Mrs.
Kennicott. There isn't any real poverty here. Take that Mrs. Steinhof
you speak of: I send her our washing whenever there's too much for our
hired girl--I must have sent her ten dollars' worth the past year alone!
I'm sure Papa would never approve of a city home-building fund. Papa
says these folks are fakers. Especially all these tenant farmers that
pretend they have so much trouble getting seed and machinery. Papa
says they simply won't pay their debts. He says he's sure he hates to
foreclose mortgages, but it's the only way to make them respect the
law."

"And then think of all the clothes we give these people!" said Mrs.
Jackson Elder.

Carol intruded again. "Oh yes. The clothes. I was going to speak of
that. Don't you think that when we give clothes to the poor, if we
do give them old ones, we ought to mend them first and make them as
presentable as we can? Next Christmas when the Thanatopsis makes its
distribution, wouldn't it be jolly if we got together and sewed on the
clothes, and trimmed hats, and made them----"

"Heavens and earth, they have more time than we have! They ought to be
mighty good and grateful to get anything, no matter what shape it's in.
I know I'm not going to sit and sew for that lazy Mrs. Vopni, with all
I've got to do!" snapped Ella Stowbody.

They were glaring at Carol. She reflected that Mrs. Vopni, whose husband
had been killed by a train, had ten children.

But Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks was smiling. Mrs. Wilks was the proprietor of
Ye Art Shoppe and Magazine and Book Store, and the reader of the small
Christian Science church. She made it all clear:

"If this class of people had an understanding of Science and that we are
the children of God and nothing can harm us, they wouldn't be in error
and poverty."

Mrs. Jackson Elder confirmed, "Besides, it strikes me the club is
already doing enough, with tree-planting and the anti-fly campaign and
the responsibility for the rest-room--to say nothing of the fact that
we've talked of trying to get the railroad to put in a park at the
station!"

"I think so too!" said Madam Chairman. She glanced uneasily at Miss
Sherwin. "But what do you think, Vida?"

Vida smiled tactfully at each of the committee, and announced, "Well, I
don't believe we'd better start anything more right now. But it's been
a privilege to hear Carol's dear generous ideas, hasn't it! Oh! There is
one thing we must decide on at once. We must get together and oppose
any move on the part of the Minneapolis clubs to elect another State
Federation president from the Twin Cities. And this Mrs. Edgar Potbury
they're putting forward--I know there are people who think she's a
bright interesting speaker, but I regard her as very shallow. What do
you say to my writing to the Lake Ojibawasha Club, telling them that if
their district will support Mrs. Warren for second vice-president, we'll
support their Mrs. Hagelton (and such a dear, lovely, cultivated woman,
too) for president."

"Yes! We ought to show up those Minneapolis folks!" Ella Stowbody
said acidly. "And oh, by the way, we must oppose this movement of Mrs.
Potbury's to have the state clubs come out definitely in favor of woman
suffrage. Women haven't any place in politics. They would lose all their
daintiness and charm if they became involved in these horried plots
and log-rolling and all this awful political stuff about scandal and
personalities and so on."

All--save one--nodded. They interrupted the formal business-meeting
to discuss Mrs. Edgar Potbury's husband, Mrs. Potbury's income, Mrs.
Potbury's sedan, Mrs. Potbury's residence, Mrs. Potbury's oratorical
style, Mrs. Potbury's mandarin evening coat, Mrs. Potbury's coiffure,
and Mrs. Potbury's altogether reprehensible influence on the State
Federation of Women's Clubs.

Before the program committee adjourned they took three minutes to
decide which of the subjects suggested by the magazine Culture Hints,
Furnishings and China, or The Bible as Literature, would be better for
the coming year. There was one annoying incident. Mrs. Dr. Kennicott
interfered and showed off again. She commented, "Don't you think that we
already get enough of the Bible in our churches and Sunday Schools?"

Mrs. Leonard Warren, somewhat out of order but much more out of temper,
cried, "Well upon my word! I didn't suppose there was any one who felt
that we could get enough of the Bible! I guess if the Grand Old Book
has withstood the attacks of infidels for these two thousand years it is
worth our SLIGHT consideration!"

"Oh, I didn't mean----" Carol begged. Inasmuch as she did mean, it was
hard to be extremely lucid. "But I wish, instead of limiting ourselves
either to the Bible, or to anecdotes about the Brothers Adam's wigs,
which Culture Hints seems to regard as the significant point about
furniture, we could study some of the really stirring ideas that are
springing up today--whether it's chemistry or anthropology or labor
problems--the things that are going to mean so terribly much."

Everybody cleared her polite throat.

Madam Chairman inquired, "Is there any other discussion? Will some
one make a motion to adopt the suggestion of Vida Sherwin--to take up
Furnishings and China?"

It was adopted, unanimously.

"Checkmate!" murmured Carol, as she held up her hand.

Had she actually believed that she could plant a seed of liberalism
in the blank wall of mediocrity? How had she fallen into the folly of
trying to plant anything whatever in a wall so smooth and sun-glazed,
and so satisfying to the happy sleepers within?




CHAPTER XII


ONE week of authentic spring, one rare sweet week of May, one tranquil
moment between the blast of winter and the charge of summer. Daily Carol
walked from town into flashing country hysteric with new life.

One enchanted hour when she returned to youth and a belief in the
possibility of beauty.

She had walked northward toward the upper shore of Plover Lake, taking
to the railroad track, whose directness and dryness make it the natural
highway for pedestrians on the plains. She stepped from tie to tie, in
long strides. At each road-crossing she had to crawl over a cattle-guard
of sharpened timbers. She walked the rails, balancing with arms
extended, cautious heel before toe. As she lost balance her body bent
over, her arms revolved wildly, and when she toppled she laughed aloud.

The thick grass beside the track, coarse and prickly with many burnings,
hid canary-yellow buttercups and the mauve petals and woolly sage-green
coats of the pasque flowers. The branches of the kinnikinic brush were
red and smooth as lacquer on a saki bowl.

She ran down the gravelly embankment, smiled at children gathering
flowers in a little basket, thrust a handful of the soft pasque flowers
into the bosom of her white blouse. Fields of springing wheat drew her
from the straight propriety of the railroad and she crawled through the
rusty barbed-wire fence. She followed a furrow between low wheat blades
and a field of rye which showed silver lights as it flowed before the
wind. She found a pasture by the lake. So sprinkled was the pasture with
rag-baby blossoms and the cottony herb of Indian tobacco that it spread
out like a rare old Persian carpet of cream and rose and delicate green.
Under her feet the rough grass made a pleasant crunching. Sweet winds
blew from the sunny lake beside her, and small waves sputtered on the
meadowy shore. She leaped a tiny creek bowered in pussy-willow buds. She
was nearing a frivolous grove of birch and poplar and wild plum trees.

The poplar foliage had the downiness of a Corot arbor; the green and
silver trunks were as candid as the birches, as slender and lustrous
as the limbs of a Pierrot. The cloudy white blossoms of the plum trees
filled the grove with a springtime mistiness which gave an illusion of
distance.

She ran into the wood, crying out for joy of freedom regained after
winter. Choke-cherry blossoms lured her from the outer sun-warmed spaces
to depths of green stillness, where a submarine light came through the
young leaves. She walked pensively along an abandoned road. She found a
moccasin-flower beside a lichen-covered log. At the end of the road she
saw the open acres--dipping rolling fields bright with wheat.

"I believe! The woodland gods still live! And out there, the great land.
It's beautiful as the mountains. What do I care for Thanatopsises?"

She came out on the prairie, spacious under an arch of boldly cut
clouds. Small pools glittered. Above a marsh red-winged blackbirds
chased a crow in a swift melodrama of the air. On a hill was silhouetted
a man following a drag. His horse bent its neck and plodded, content.

A path took her to the Corinth road, leading back to town. Dandelions
glowed in patches amidst the wild grass by the way. A stream golloped
through a concrete culvert beneath the road. She trudged in healthy
weariness.

A man in a bumping Ford rattled up beside her, hailed, "Give you a lift,
Mrs. Kennicott?"

"Thank you. It's awfully good of you, but I'm enjoying the walk."

"Great day, by golly. I seen some wheat that must of been five inches
high. Well, so long."

She hadn't the dimmest notion who he was, but his greeting warmed her.
This countryman gave her a companionship which she had never (whether
by her fault or theirs or neither) been able to find in the matrons and
commercial lords of the town.

Half a mile from town, in a hollow between hazelnut bushes and a brook,
she discovered a gipsy encampment: a covered wagon, a tent, a bunch of
pegged-out horses. A broad-shouldered man was squatted on his heels,
holding a frying-pan over a camp-fire. He looked toward her. He was
Miles Bjornstam.

"Well, well, what you doing out here?" he roared. "Come have a hunk o'
bacon. Pete! Hey, Pete!"

A tousled person came from behind the covered wagon.

"Pete, here's the one honest-to-God lady in my bum town. Come on, crawl
in and set a couple minutes, Mrs. Kennicott. I'm hiking off for all
summer."

The Red Swede staggered up, rubbed his cramped knees, lumbered to the
wire fence, held the strands apart for her. She unconsciously smiled at
him as she went through. Her skirt caught on a barb; he carefully freed
it.

Beside this man in blue flannel shirt, baggy khaki trousers, uneven
suspenders, and vile felt hat, she was small and exquisite.

The surly Pete set out an upturned bucket for her. She lounged on it,
her elbows on her knees. "Where are you going?" she asked.

"Just starting off for the summer, horse-trading." Bjornstam chuckled.
His red mustache caught the sun. "Regular hoboes and public benefactors
we are. Take a hike like this every once in a while. Sharks on horses.
Buy 'em from farmers and sell 'em to others. We're honest--frequently.
Great time. Camp along the road. I was wishing I had a chance to say
good-by to you before I ducked out but----Say, you better come along
with us."

"I'd like to."

"While you're playing mumblety-peg with Mrs. Lym Cass, Pete and me
will be rambling across Dakota, through the Bad Lands, into the butte
country, and when fall comes, we'll be crossing over a pass of the Big
Horn Mountains, maybe, and camp in a snow-storm, quarter of a mile right
straight up above a lake. Then in the morning we'll lie snug in our
blankets and look up through the pines at an eagle. How'd it strike you?
Heh? Eagle soaring and soaring all day--big wide sky----"

"Don't! Or I will go with you, and I'm afraid there might be some slight
scandal. Perhaps some day I'll do it. Good-by."

Her hand disappeared in his blackened leather glove. From the turn in
the road she waved at him. She walked on more soberly now, and she was
lonely.

But the wheat and grass were sleek velvet under the sunset; the prairie
clouds were tawny gold; and she swung happily into Main Street.



II


Through the first days of June she drove with Kennicott on his calls.
She identified him with the virile land; she admired him as she saw with
what respect the farmers obeyed him. She was out in the early chill,
after a hasty cup of coffee, reaching open country as the fresh sun came
up in that unspoiled world. Meadow larks called from the tops of thin
split fence-posts. The wild roses smelled clean.

As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was a solemnity of radial
bands, like a heavenly fan of beaten gold; the limitless circle of the
grain was a green sea rimmed with fog, and the willow wind-breaks were
palmy isles.

Before July the close heat blanketed them. The tortured earth cracked.
Farmers panted through corn-fields behind cultivators and the sweating
flanks of horses. While she waited for Kennicott in the car, before a
farmhouse, the seat burned her fingers and her head ached with the glare
on fenders and hood.

A black thunder-shower was followed by a dust storm which turned the
sky yellow with the hint of a coming tornado. Impalpable black dust
far-borne from Dakota covered the inner sills of the closed windows.

The July heat was ever more stifling. They crawled along Main Street by
day; they found it hard to sleep at night. They brought mattresses down
to the living-room, and thrashed and turned by the open window. Ten
times a night they talked of going out to soak themselves with the
hose and wade through the dew, but they were too listless to take the
trouble. On cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the gnats
appeared in swarms which peppered their faces and caught in their
throats.

She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but Kennicott declared
that it would be "kind of hard to get away, just NOW." The Health and
Improvement Committee of the Thanatopsis asked her to take part in the
anti-fly campaign, and she toiled about town persuading householders to
use the fly-traps furnished by the club, or giving out money prizes to
fly-swatting children. She was loyal enough but not ardent, and without
ever quite intending to, she began to neglect the task as heat sucked at
her strength.

Kennicott and she motored North and spent a week with his mother--that
is, Carol spent it with his mother, while he fished for bass.

The great event was their purchase of a summer cottage, down on Lake
Minniemashie.

Perhaps the most amiable feature of life in Gopher Prairie was the
summer cottages. They were merely two-room shanties, with a seepage of
broken-down chairs, peeling veneered tables, chromos pasted on wooden
walls, and inefficient kerosene stoves. They were so thin-walled and so
close together that you could--and did--hear a baby being spanked in the
fifth cottage off. But they were set among elms and lindens on a bluff
which looked across the lake to fields of ripened wheat sloping up to
green woods.

Here the matrons forgot social jealousies, and sat gossiping in gingham;
or, in old bathing-suits, surrounded by hysterical children, they
paddled for hours. Carol joined them; she ducked shrieking small boys,
and helped babies construct sand-basins for unfortunate minnows.
She liked Juanita Haydock and Maud Dyer when she helped them make
picnic-supper for the men, who came motoring out from town each evening.
She was easier and more natural with them. In the debate as to whether
there should be veal loaf or poached egg on hash, she had no chance to
be heretical and oversensitive.

They danced sometimes, in the evening; they had a minstrel show, with
Kennicott surprisingly good as end-man; always they were encircled by
children wise in the lore of woodchucks and gophers and rafts and willow
whistles.

If they could have continued this normal barbaric life Carol would have
been the most enthusiastic citizen of Gopher Prairie. She was relieved
to be assured that she did not want bookish conversation alone; that she
did not expect the town to become a Bohemia. She was content now. She
did not criticize.

But in September, when the year was at its richest, custom dictated that
it was time to return to town; to remove the children from the waste
occupation of learning the earth, and send them back to lessons about
the number of potatoes which (in a delightful world untroubled by
commission-houses or shortages in freight-cars) William sold to John.
The women who had cheerfully gone bathing all summer looked doubtful
when Carol begged, "Let's keep up an outdoor life this winter, let's
slide and skate." Their hearts shut again till spring, and the nine
months of cliques and radiators and dainty refreshments began all over.



III


Carol had started a salon.

Since Kennicott, Vida Sherwin, and Guy Pollock were her only lions,
and since Kennicott would have preferred Sam Clark to all the poets and
radicals in the entire world, her private and self-defensive clique did
not get beyond one evening dinner for Vida and Guy, on her first wedding
anniversary; and that dinner did not get beyond a controversy regarding
Raymie Wutherspoon's yearnings.

Guy Pollock was the gentlest person she had found here. He spoke of her
new jade and cream frock naturally, not jocosely; he held her chair
for her as they sat down to dinner; and he did not, like Kennicott,
interrupt her to shout, "Oh say, speaking of that, I heard a good story
today." But Guy was incurably hermit. He sat late and talked hard, and
did not come again.

Then she met Champ Perry in the post-office--and decided that in the
history of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher Prairie, for all
of America. We have lost their sturdiness, she told herself. We must
restore the last of the veterans to power and follow them on the
backward path to the integrity of Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlers
dancing in a saw-mill.

She read in the records of the Minnesota Territorial Pioneers that only
sixty years ago, not so far back as the birth of her own father, four
cabins had composed Gopher Prairie. The log stockade which Mrs. Champ
Perry was to find when she trekked in was built afterward by the
soldiers as a defense against the Sioux. The four cabins were inhabited
by Maine Yankees who had come up the Mississippi to St. Paul and driven
north over virgin prairie into virgin woods. They ground their own
corn; the men-folks shot ducks and pigeons and prairie chickens; the
new breakings yielded the turnip-like rutabagas, which they ate raw
and boiled and baked and raw again. For treat they had wild plums and
crab-apples and tiny wild strawberries.

Grasshoppers came darkening the sky, and in an hour ate the farmwife's
garden and the farmer's coat. Precious horses painfully brought from
Illinois, were drowned in bogs or stampeded by the fear of blizzards.
Snow blew through the chinks of new-made cabins, and Eastern children,
with flowery muslin dresses, shivered all winter and in summer were red
and black with mosquito bites. Indians were everywhere; they camped in
dooryards, stalked into kitchens to demand doughnuts, came with rifles
across their backs into schoolhouses and begged to see the pictures
in the geographies. Packs of timber-wolves treed the children; and the
settlers found dens of rattle-snakes, killed fifty, a hundred, in a day.

Yet it was a buoyant life. Carol read enviously in the admirable
Minnesota chronicles called "Old Rail Fence Corners" the reminiscence of
Mrs. Mahlon Black, who settled in Stillwater in 1848:

"There was nothing to parade over in those days. We took it as it came
and had happy lives. . . . We would all gather together and in about two
minutes would be having a good time--playing cards or dancing. . . . We
used to waltz and dance contra dances. None of these new jigs and not
wear any clothes to speak of. We covered our hides in those days; no
tight skirts like now. You could take three or four steps inside our
skirts and then not reach the edge. One of the boys would fiddle a while
and then some one would spell him and he could get a dance. Sometimes
they would dance and fiddle too."

She reflected that if she could not have ballrooms of gray and rose
and crystal, she wanted to be swinging across a puncheon-floor with a
dancing fiddler. This smug in-between town, which had exchanged "Money
Musk" for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic
old nor the sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet unimagined
how, turn it back to simplicity?

She herself knew two of the pioneers: the Perrys. Champ Perry was the
buyer at the grain-elevator. He weighed wagons of wheat on a rough
platform-scale, in the cracks of which the kernels sprouted every
spring. Between times he napped in the dusty peace of his office.

She called on the Perrys at their rooms above Howland & Gould's grocery.

When they were already old they had lost the money, which they had
invested in an elevator. They had given up their beloved yellow brick
house and moved into these rooms over a store, which were the Gopher
Prairie equivalent of a flat. A broad stairway led from the street
to the upper hall, along which were the doors of a lawyer's office, a
dentist's, a photographer's "studio," the lodge-rooms of the Affiliated
Order of Spartans and, at the back, the Perrys' apartment.

They received her (their first caller in a month) with aged fluttering
tenderness. Mrs. Perry confided, "My, it's a shame we got to entertain
you in such a cramped place. And there ain't any water except that ole
iron sink outside in the hall, but still, as I say to Champ, beggars
can't be choosers. 'Sides, the brick house was too big for me to sweep,
and it was way out, and it's nice to be living down here among folks.
Yes, we're glad to be here. But----Some day, maybe we can have a house
of our own again. We're saving up----Oh, dear, if we could have our own
home! But these rooms are real nice, ain't they!"

As old people will, the world over, they had moved as much as possible
of their familiar furniture into this small space. Carol had none of the
superiority she felt toward Mrs. Lyman Cass's plutocratic parlor. She
was at home here. She noted with tenderness all the makeshifts: the
darned chair-arms, the patent rocker covered with sleazy cretonne, the
pasted strips of paper mending the birch-bark napkin-rings labeled "Papa"
and "Mama."

She hinted of her new enthusiasm. To find one of the "young folks" who
took them seriously, heartened the Perrys, and she easily drew from
them the principles by which Gopher Prairie should be born again--should
again become amusing to live in.

This was their philosophy complete . . . in the era of aeroplanes and
syndicalism:

The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational,
and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordained
standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. "We don't need
all this new-fangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that's
ruining our young men in colleges. What we need is to get back to the
true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have
it preached to us."

The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the
agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs.

All socialists ought to be hanged.

"Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals
in his novels, and folks say he's made prett' near a million dollars out
of 'em."

People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred
are wicked.

Europeans are still wickeder.

It doesn't hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody
who touches wine is headed straight for hell.

Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be.

Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody.

The farmers want too much for their wheat.

The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the salaries they
pay.

There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybody
worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm.



IV


Carol's hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the nodding
dwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home with a headache.

Next day she saw Miles Bjornstam on the street.

"Just back from Montana. Great summer. Pumped my lungs chuck-full of
Rocky Mountain air. Now for another whirl at sassing the bosses of
Gopher Prairie." She smiled at him, and the Perrys faded, the pioneers
faded, till they were but daguerreotypes in a black walnut cupboard.




CHAPTER XIII


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

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

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

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

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

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

"You remember my saying that?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Really? Evangelize it to what?"

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

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

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

"Because they enjoy skating more than biology?"

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

("Oh no!")

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

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

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

"I have the Village Virus."

"It sounds dangerous."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Would you have a fireplace for me?"

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

"Twenty-six, Guy."

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

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

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

"No! I won't admit it!"

He grinned.

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

He still grinned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A bore!"

"Can I help?"

"How could you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Please stay and have some coffee with me."

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

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

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

"The Dillons?"

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

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

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

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

 In March, Carol attends a meeting of the Thanatopsis Club, the women's study group. She is disappointed, however, when the ladies decide to discuss the whole subject of English poetry in one session. The ladies read dull, biographical statistics about English poets rather than reading or discussing actual poetry. The minister's wife reads a paper on Burns and Byron that criticizes the loose morals of the poets. Careful to avoid offending the ladies, Carol suggests that they should discuss more poetry during the next meeting. The ladies then elect Carol as a new member. Carol decides to start reforming the town by rebuilding the small city hall. Visiting the town library, she looks through architectural magazines and dreams about turning ugly Gopher Prairie into a beautiful New England village. Carol approaches several people about how ideas, but the townspeople do not express any interest in a new city hall. The minister's wife tells Carol that the town really needs a united church. Then, the school superintendent's wife tells her that the town needs a new school instead. During the next meeting of the Thanatopsis Club, the ladies discuss the whole history of English literature in one session. Carol feels thwarted in her attempts to rebuild the town. She decides to concentrate on smaller projects, such as refurnishing the rest room for farmers' wives, but again meets no success. At another Thanatopsis meeting, Carol proposes that the club provide self-help programs for the poor, like creating an employment office and providing housing loans, so that the poor do not need to depend so much on charity. The ladies once again shoot Carol's ideas down. When the ladies decide to choose topics of conversation for their next meetings, Carol suggests that they discuss relevant social issues like the labor movement. The ladies ignore her idea and choose to discuss the subject of "Furnishings and China." Disheartened, Carol decides to give up her dreams of transforming the town. Most of the townspeople object to her reforms because they possess a deep-rooted aversion to change and are loathe to spend any money. One beautiful day in May, Carol walks out into the country and meets Bjornstam in a gypsy camp. He tells her that he is going to leave town for the summer, and Carol envies his freedom. Summer arrives, and she finds the heat and flies stifling. Kennicott purchases a summer cottage by a lake. The whole social circle of the Kennicotts owns cottages, and Carol enjoys the outdoor life, making picnics and having dances and going swimming. In September, they all move back to their homes in town and return to their usual routines. On her first wedding anniversary, Carol invites Vida Sherwin and Guy Pollock to dinner. After meeting the Perrys, Gopher Prairie's first settlers, Carol begins taking an interest in the pioneer days of the Midwest. Carol calls on the Perrys frequently, much to their delight. When Carol suggests that Gopher Prairie should return to the spirit of its pioneer days, the Perrys agree. They suggest that everyone in town should be Baptists and Republicans. They also say that people need to work hard and do not need science and socialism. Carol's admiration of the Perrys dwindles when she hears their opinions, but she continues to visit them out of respect. One November evening, Carol goes walking and happens to find herself at Guy Pollock's law office. Although she remembers that decent women do not pay social calls to men in Gopher Prairie, she decides to enter anyway. As they talk about the town, she realizes that Guy does not find anything wrong with the fact that she has visited. Guy tells Carol that the townspeople are like people everywhere else. He relates his personal past to her, telling her that he has the "Village Virus," as he is comfortable in a small town and does not desire change. When Guy reveals to Carol how lonely and miserable he is, she feels his desire for her. When he invites her to stay for coffee, she points out that people will gossip if she stays much longer. Guy therefore invites his neighbors for coffee so that people will not gossip. Carol returns home.

