Chapter: 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.

 Carol takes a walk along the railroad track up to the lake and the Prairie beyond to enjoy the beauty of the spring. As she trudges along a man in a Ford car offers a lift. Carol feels the warmth of companionship in that offer which she never finds in any of her acquaintances in Gopher Prairie. She comes across Bjornstam in gypsy encampment. He offers her a hunk of bacon. He is on his way to the annual horse-trading. He buys horses from the farmers and sells them to others and claims that he makes some honest profit. He invites her to join him and she says there would be a scandal if she did. It is pleasant in the month of June and Carol goes along with Kennicott on his visits. She finds the July heat stifling. They find it impossible to sleep. On cool evenings the gnats plague them when they go for a walk. The Thanatopsis club starts its anti-fly campaign. Carol distributes flytraps and gives money to the fly swatting children. But the heat drains all her energy for social work. They visit Kennicotts mother for a week. They purchase a summer cottage. The whole social circle of the Kennicotts has cottages and Carol enjoys the outdoor life. They make picnic suppers and also have dances. But with the arrival of September they move back to their town homes and life goes back to the usual routine. Carol invites Vida and Guy Pollock for the party on her first wedding anniversary. The conversation does not go beyond the discussion of Raymie Wutherspoons dreams. Carol finds Guy Pollock to be the perfect gentleman and he talks to her with ease about any topic that is interesting. But he does not call on the Kennicotts again. Her meeting Champ Perry makes her think of the pioneering days of the American Middlewest and desires to know more about it. From the records she learns about the hardships they had faced. She reads about the grasshoppers that destroyed the crops and their gardens and about the rattlesnakes they had to kill. Carol feels that for the hardships, life was more buoyant in those days. She also feels that if Gopher Prairie could go back to those pioneer days, she would be able to like it better. Carol calls on the Perrys much to their delight. The Perrys had lost their money and were compelled to live in a flat. They feel sorry that they have to entertain Carol in their cramped flat. They feel thrilled to know that Carol wants their suggestions as to how Gopher Prairie can be taken to its pioneering days. According to them, the Baptist church is the standard in music, oratory, philanthropy and ethics. They do not need science and socialism. To earn more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred is wicked. They consider the Europeans to be wickeder. People do not need wine or ice cream. They should work as hard as Champ Perry did when he was young. Carol who had come with enthusiasm to listen to their ideas ends up with a headache. On her way back she meets Bjornstam who is back from the horse- trading trip.

