Chapter: CHAPTER XXI


I

GRAY steel that seems unmoving because it spins so fast in the balanced
fly-wheel, gray snow in an avenue of elms, gray dawn with the sun behind
it--this was the gray of Vida Sherwin's life at thirty-six.

She was small and active and sallow; her yellow hair was faded, and
looked dry; her blue silk blouses and modest lace collars and high black
shoes and sailor hats were as literal and uncharming as a schoolroom
desk; but her eyes determined her appearance, revealed her as a
personage and a force, indicated her faith in the goodness and purpose
of everything. They were blue, and they were never still; they expressed
amusement, pity, enthusiasm. If she had been seen in sleep, with the
wrinkles beside her eyes stilled and the creased lids hiding the radiant
irises, she would have lost her potency.

She was born in a hill-smothered Wisconsin village where her father
was a prosy minister; she labored through a sanctimonious college; she
taught for two years in an iron-range town of blurry-faced Tatars and
Montenegrins, and wastes of ore, and when she came to Gopher Prairie,
its trees and the shining spaciousness of the wheat prairie made her
certain that she was in paradise.

She admitted to her fellow-teachers that the schoolbuilding was
slightly damp, but she insisted that the rooms were "arranged so
conveniently--and then that bust of President McKinley at the head of
the stairs, it's a lovely art-work, and isn't it an inspiration to have
the brave, honest, martyr president to think about!" She taught French,
English, and history, and the Sophomore Latin class, which dealt in
matters of a metaphysical nature called Indirect Discourse and the
Ablative Absolute. Each year she was reconvinced that the pupils were
beginning to learn more quickly. She spent four winters in building up
the Debating Society, and when the debate really was lively one Friday
afternoon, and the speakers of pieces did not forget their lines, she
felt rewarded.

She lived an engrossed useful life, and seemed as cool and simple as an
apple. But secretly she was creeping among fears, longing, and guilt.
She knew what it was, but she dared not name it. She hated even the
sound of the word "sex." When she dreamed of being a woman of the harem,
with great white warm limbs, she awoke to shudder, defenseless in
the dusk of her room. She prayed to Jesus, always to the Son of God,
offering him the terrible power of her adoration, addressing him as the
eternal lover, growing passionate, exalted, large, as she contemplated
his splendor. Thus she mounted to endurance and surcease.

By day, rattling about in many activities, she was able to ridicule her
blazing nights of darkness. With spurious cheerfulness she announced
everywhere, "I guess I'm a born spinster," and "No one will ever marry
a plain schoolma'am like me," and "You men, great big noisy bothersome
creatures, we women wouldn't have you round the place, dirtying up nice
clean rooms, if it wasn't that you have to be petted and guided. We just
ought to say 'Scat!' to all of you!"

But when a man held her close at a dance, even when "Professor"
George Edwin Mott patted her hand paternally as they considered the
naughtinesses of Cy Bogart, she quivered, and reflected how superior she
was to have kept her virginity.

In the autumn of 1911, a year before Dr. Will Kennicott was married,
Vida was his partner at a five-hundred tournament. She was thirty-four
then; Kennicott about thirty-six. To her he was a superb, boyish,
diverting creature; all the heroic qualities in a manly magnificent
body. They had been helping the hostess to serve the Waldorf salad and
coffee and gingerbread. They were in the kitchen, side by side on a
bench, while the others ponderously supped in the room beyond.

Kennicott was masculine and experimental. He stroked Vida's hand, he put
his arm carelessly about her shoulder.

"Don't!" she said sharply.

"You're a cunning thing," he offered, patting the back of her shoulder
in an exploratory manner.

While she strained away, she longed to move nearer to him. He bent over,
looked at her knowingly. She glanced down at his left hand as it touched
her knee. She sprang up, started noisily and needlessly to wash the
dishes. He helped her. He was too lazy to adventure further--and too
used to women in his profession. She was grateful for the impersonality
of his talk. It enabled her to gain control. She knew that she had
skirted wild thoughts.

A month after, on a sleighing-party, under the buffalo robes in the
bob-sled, he whispered, "You pretend to be a grown-up schoolteacher, but
you're nothing but a kiddie." His arm was about her. She resisted.

"Don't you like the poor lonely bachelor?" he yammered in a fatuous way.

"No, I don't! You don't care for me in the least. You're just practising
on me."

"You're so mean! I'm terribly fond of you."

"I'm not of you. And I'm not going to let myself be fond of you,
either."

He persistently drew her toward him. She clutched his arm. Then she
threw off the robe, climbed out of the sled, raced after it with Harry
Haydock. At the dance which followed the sleigh-ride Kennicott was
devoted to the watery prettiness of Maud Dyer, and Vida was noisily
interested in getting up a Virginia Reel. Without seeming to watch
Kennicott, she knew that he did not once look at her.

That was all of her first love-affair.

He gave no sign of remembering that he was "terribly fond." She waited
for him; she reveled in longing, and in a sense of guilt because she
longed. She told herself that she did not want part of him; unless he
gave her all his devotion she would never let him touch her; and when
she found that she was probably lying, she burned with scorn. She fought
it out in prayer. She knelt in a pink flannel nightgown, her thin hair
down her back, her forehead as full of horror as a mask of tragedy,
while she identified her love for the Son of God with her love for a
mortal, and wondered if any other woman had ever been so sacrilegious.
She wanted to be a nun and observe perpetual adoration. She bought a
rosary, but she had been so bitterly reared as a Protestant that she
could not bring herself to use it.

Yet none of her intimates in the school and in the boarding-house knew
of her abyss of passion. They said she was "so optimistic."

When she heard that Kennicott was to marry a girl, pretty, young, and
imposingly from the Cities, Vida despaired. She congratulated Kennicott;
carelessly ascertained from him the hour of marriage. At that hour,
sitting in her room, Vida pictured the wedding in St. Paul. Full of an
ecstasy which horrified her, she followed Kennicott and the girl who had
stolen her place, followed them to the train, through the evening, the
night.

She was relieved when she had worked out a belief that she wasn't really
shameful, that there was a mystical relation between herself and Carol,
so that she was vicariously yet veritably with Kennicott, and had the
right to be.

She saw Carol during the first five minutes in Gopher Prairie. She
stared at the passing motor, at Kennicott and the girl beside him. In
that fog world of transference of emotion Vida had no normal jealousy
but a conviction that, since through Carol she had received Kennicott's
love, then Carol was a part of her, an astral self, a heightened and
more beloved self. She was glad of the girl's charm, of the smooth black
hair, the airy head and young shoulders. But she was suddenly angry.
Carol glanced at her for a quarter-second, but looked past her, at an
old roadside barn. If she had made the great sacrifice, at least she
expected gratitude and recognition, Vida raged, while her conscious
schoolroom mind fussily begged her to control this insanity.

During her first call half of her wanted to welcome a fellow reader of
books; the other half itched to find out whether Carol knew anything
about Kennicott's former interest in herself. She discovered that Carol
was not aware that he had ever touched another woman's hand. Carol was
an amusing, naive, curiously learned child. While Vida was most actively
describing the glories of the Thanatopsis, and complimenting this
librarian on her training as a worker, she was fancying that this girl
was the child born of herself and Kennicott; and out of that symbolizing
she had a comfort she had not known for months.

When she came home, after supper with the Kennicotts and Guy Pollock,
she had a sudden and rather pleasant backsliding from devotion. She
bustled into her room, she slammed her hat on the bed, and chattered, "I
don't CARE! I'm a lot like her--except a few years older. I'm light and
quick, too, and I can talk just as well as she can, and I'm sure----Men
are such fools. I'd be ten times as sweet to make love to as that dreamy
baby. And I AM as good-looking!"

But as she sat on the bed and stared at her thin thighs, defiance oozed
away. She mourned:

"No. I'm not. Dear God, how we fool ourselves! I pretend I'm
'spiritual.' I pretend my legs are graceful. They aren't. They're
skinny. Old-maidish. I hate it! I hate that impertinent young woman! A
selfish cat, taking his love for granted. . . . No, she's adorable. . . .
I don't think she ought to be so friendly with Guy Pollock."

For a year Vida loved Carol, longed to and did not pry into the details
of her relations with Kennicott, enjoyed her spirit of play as expressed
in childish tea-parties, and, with the mystic bond between them
forgotten, was healthily vexed by Carol's assumption that she was a
sociological messiah come to save Gopher Prairie. This last facet of
Vida's thought was the one which, after a year, was most often turned to
the light. In a testy way she brooded, "These people that want to change
everything all of a sudden without doing any work, make me tired! Here I
have to go and work for four years, picking out the pupils for
debates, and drilling them, and nagging at them to get them to look up
references, and begging them to choose their own subjects--four years,
to get up a couple of good debates! And she comes rushing in, and
expects in one year to change the whole town into a lollypop paradise
with everybody stopping everything else to grow tulips and drink tea.
And it's a comfy homey old town, too!"

She had such an outburst after each of Carol's campaigns--for better
Thanatopsis programs, for Shavian plays, for more human schools--but she
never betrayed herself, and always she was penitent.

Vida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal. She believed that
details could excitingly be altered, but that things-in-general were
comely and kind and immutable. Carol was, without understanding or
accepting it, a revolutionist, a radical, and therefore possessed of
"constructive ideas," which only the destroyer can have, since the
reformer believes that all the essential constructing has already been
done. After years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more
than the fancied loss of Kennicott's love which held Vida irritably
fascinated.

But the birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion. She was
indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in having borne
Kennicott's child. She admitted that Carol seemed to have affection and
immaculate care for the baby, but she began to identify herself now with
Kennicott, and in this phase to feel that she had endured quite too much
from Carol's instability.

She recalled certain other women who had come from the Outside and had
not appreciated Gopher Prairie. She remembered the rector's wife who had
been chilly to callers and who was rumored throughout the town to
have said, "Re-ah-ly I cawn't endure this bucolic heartiness in the
responses." The woman was positively known to have worn handkerchiefs in
her bodice as padding--oh, the town had simply roared at her. Of course
the rector and she were got rid of in a few months.

Then there was the mysterious woman with the dyed hair and penciled
eyebrows, who wore tight English dresses, like basques, who smelled of
stale musk, who flirted with the men and got them to advance money
for her expenses in a lawsuit, who laughed at Vida's reading at a
school-entertainment, and went off owing a hotel-bill and the three
hundred dollars she had borrowed.

Vida insisted that she loved Carol, but with some satisfaction she
compared her to these traducers of the town.


II


Vida had enjoyed Raymie Wutherspoon's singing in the Episcopal choir;
she had thoroughly reviewed the weather with him at Methodist sociables
and in the Bon Ton. But she did not really know him till she moved to
Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house. It was five years after her affair with
Kennicott. She was thirty-nine, Raymie perhaps a year younger.

She said to him, and sincerely, "My! You can do anything, with your
brains and tact and that heavenly voice. You were so good in 'The Girl
from Kankakee.' You made me feel terribly stupid. If you'd gone on the
stage, I believe you'd be just as good as anybody in Minneapolis. But
still, I'm not sorry you stuck to business. It's such a constructive
career."

"Do you really think so?" yearned Raymie, across the apple-sauce.

It was the first time that either of them had found a dependable
intellectual companionship. They looked down on Willis Woodford the
bank-clerk, and his anxious babycentric wife, the silent Lyman Casses,
the slangy traveling man, and the rest of Mrs. Gurrey's unenlightened
guests. They sat opposite, and they sat late. They were exhilarated to
find that they agreed in confession of faith:

"People like Sam Clark and Harry Haydock aren't earnest about music and
pictures and eloquent sermons and really refined movies, but then, on
the other hand, people like Carol Kennicott put too much stress on all
this art. Folks ought to appreciate lovely things, but just the same,
they got to be practical and--they got to look at things in a practical
way."

Smiling, passing each other the pressed-glass pickle-dish, seeing Mrs.
Gurrey's linty supper-cloth irradiated by the light of intimacy, Vida
and Raymie talked about Carol's rose-colored turban, Carol's sweetness,
Carol's new low shoes, Carol's erroneous theory that there was no need
of strict discipline in school, Carol's amiability in the Bon Ton,
Carol's flow of wild ideas, which, honestly, just simply made you
nervous trying to keep track of them.

About the lovely display of gents' shirts in the Bon Ton window as
dressed by Raymie, about Raymie's offertory last Sunday, the fact that
there weren't any of these new solos as nice as "Jerusalem the Golden,"
and the way Raymie stood up to Juanita Haydock when she came into the
store and tried to run things and he as much as told her that she was
so anxious to have folks think she was smart and bright that she
said things she didn't mean, and anyway, Raymie was running the
shoe-department, and if Juanita, or Harry either, didn't like the way he
ran things, they could go get another man.

About Vida's new jabot which made her look thirty-two (Vida's estimate)
or twenty-two (Raymie's estimate), Vida's plan to have the high-school
Debating Society give a playlet, and the difficulty of keeping the
younger boys well behaved on the playground when a big lubber like Cy
Bogart acted up so.

About the picture post-card which Mrs. Dawson had sent to Mrs. Cass from
Pasadena, showing roses growing right outdoors in February, the change
in time on No. 4, the reckless way Dr. Gould always drove his auto, the
reckless way almost all these people drove their autos, the fallacy of
supposing that these socialists could carry on a government for as much
as six months if they ever did have a chance to try out their theories,
and the crazy way in which Carol jumped from subject to subject.

Vida had once beheld Raymie as a thin man with spectacles, mournful
drawn-out face, and colorless stiff hair. Now she noted that his jaw was
square, that his long hands moved quickly and were bleached in a refined
manner, and that his trusting eyes indicated that he had "led a clean
life." She began to call him "Ray," and to bounce in defense of his
unselfishness and thoughtfulness every time Juanita Haydock or Rita
Gould giggled about him at the Jolly Seventeen.

On a Sunday afternoon of late autumn they walked down to Lake
Minniemashie. Ray said that he would like to see the ocean; it must be a
grand sight; it must be much grander than a lake, even a great big lake.
Vida had seen it, she stated modestly; she had seen it on a summer trip
to Cape Cod.

"Have you been clear to Cape Cod? Massachusetts? I knew you'd traveled,
but I never realized you'd been that far!"

Made taller and younger by his interest she poured out, "Oh my yes.
It was a wonderful trip. So many points of interest through
Massachusetts--historical. There's Lexington where we turned back
the redcoats, and Longfellow's home at Cambridge, and Cape Cod--just
everything--fishermen and whale-ships and sand-dunes and everything."

She wished that she had a little cane to carry. He broke off a willow
branch.

"My, you're strong!" she said.

"No, not very. I wish there was a Y. M. C. A. here, so I could take up
regular exercise. I used to think I could do pretty good acrobatics, if
I had a chance."

"I'm sure you could. You're unusually lithe, for a large man."

"Oh no, not so very. But I wish we had a Y. M. It would be dandy to have
lectures and everything, and I'd like to take a class in improving
the memory--I believe a fellow ought to go on educating himself and
improving his mind even if he is in business, don't you, Vida--I guess
I'm kind of fresh to call you 'Vida'!"

"I've been calling you 'Ray' for weeks!"

He wondered why she sounded tart.

He helped her down the bank to the edge of the lake but dropped her hand
abruptly, and as they sat on a willow log and he brushed her sleeve, he
delicately moved over and murmured, "Oh, excuse me--accident."

She stared at the mud-browned chilly water, the floating gray reeds.

"You look so thoughtful," he said.

She threw out her hands. "I am! Will you kindly tell me what's the use
of--anything! Oh, don't mind me. I'm a moody old hen. Tell me about your
plan for getting a partnership in the Bon Ton. I do think you're right:
Harry Haydock and that mean old Simons ought to give you one."

He hymned the old unhappy wars in which he had been Achilles and the
mellifluous Nestor, yet gone his righteous ways unheeded by the cruel
kings. . . . "Why, if I've told 'em once, I've told 'em a dozen times to
get in a side-line of light-weight pants for gents' summer wear, and of
course here they go and let a cheap kike like Rifkin beat them to it and
grab the trade right off 'em, and then Harry said--you know how Harry
is, maybe he don't mean to be grouchy, but he's such a sore-head----"

He gave her a hand to rise. "If you don't MIND. I think a fellow is
awful if a lady goes on a walk with him and she can't trust him and he
tries to flirt with her and all."

"I'm sure you're highly trustworthy!" she snapped, and she sprang up
without his aid. Then, smiling excessively, "Uh--don't you think Carol
sometimes fails to appreciate Dr. Will's ability?"


III


Ray habitually asked her about his window-trimming, the display of the
new shoes, the best music for the entertainment at the Eastern Star, and
(though he was recognized as a professional authority on what the town
called "gents' furnishings") about his own clothes. She persuaded him
not to wear the small bow ties which made him look like an elongated
Sunday School scholar. Once she burst out:

"Ray, I could shake you! Do you know you're too apologetic? You always
appreciate other people too much. You fuss over Carol Kennicott when she
has some crazy theory that we all ought to turn anarchists or live on
figs and nuts or something. And you listen when Harry Haydock tries to
show off and talk about turnovers and credits and things you know lots
better than he does. Look folks in the eye! Glare at 'em! Talk deep!
You're the smartest man in town, if you only knew it. You ARE!"

He could not believe it. He kept coming back to her for confirmation. He
practised glaring and talking deep, but he circuitously hinted to Vida
that when he had tried to look Harry Haydock in the eye, Harry had
inquired, "What's the matter with you, Raymie? Got a pain?" But
afterward Harry had asked about Kantbeatum socks in a manner which, Ray
felt, was somehow different from his former condescension.

They were sitting on the squat yellow satin settee in the boarding-house
parlor. As Ray reannounced that he simply wouldn't stand it many more
years if Harry didn't give him a partnership, his gesticulating hand
touched Vida's shoulders.

"Oh, excuse me!" he pleaded.

"It's all right. Well, I think I must be running up to my room.
Headache," she said briefly.


IV


Ray and she had stopped in at Dyer's for a hot chocolate on their way
home from the movies, that March evening. Vida speculated, "Do you know
that I may not be here next year?"

"What do you mean?"

With her fragile narrow nails she smoothed the glass slab which formed
the top of the round table at which they sat. She peeped through the
glass at the perfume-boxes of black and gold and citron in the hollow
table. She looked about at shelves of red rubber water-bottles, pale
yellow sponges, wash-rags with blue borders, hair-brushes of polished
cherry backs. She shook her head like a nervous medium coming out of a
trance, stared at him unhappily, demanded:

"Why should I stay here? And I must make up my mind. Now. Time to renew
our teaching-contracts for next year. I think I'll go teach in some
other town. Everybody here is tired of me. I might as well go. Before
folks come out and SAY they're tired of me. I have to decide tonight. I
might as well----Oh, no matter. Come. Let's skip. It's late."

She sprang up, ignoring his wail of "Vida! Wait! Sit down! Gosh! I'm
flabbergasted! Gee! Vida!" She marched out. While he was paying his
check she got ahead. He ran after her, blubbering, "Vida! Wait!" In the
shade of the lilacs in front of the Gougerling house he came up with
her, stayed her flight by a hand on her shoulder.

"Oh, don't! Don't! What does it matter?" she begged. She was sobbing,
her soft wrinkly lids soaked with tears. "Who cares for my affection or
help? I might as well drift on, forgotten. O Ray, please don't hold
me. Let me go. I'll just decide not to renew my contract here, and--and
drift--way off----"

His hand was steady on her shoulder. She dropped her head, rubbed the
back of his hand with her cheek.

They were married in June.


V


They took the Ole Jenson house. "It's small," said Vida, "but it's got
the dearest vegetable garden, and I love having time to get near to
Nature for once."

Though she became Vida Wutherspoon technically, and though she certainly
had no ideals about the independence of keeping her name, she continued
to be known as Vida Sherwin.

She had resigned from the school, but she kept up one class in English.
She bustled about on every committee of the Thanatopsis; she was always
popping into the rest-room to make Mrs. Nodelquist sweep the floor;
she was appointed to the library-board to succeed Carol; she taught the
Senior Girls' Class in the Episcopal Sunday School, and tried to revive
the King's Daughters. She exploded into self-confidence and happiness;
her draining thoughts were by marriage turned into energy. She became
daily and visibly more plump, and though she chattered as eagerly, she
was less obviously admiring of marital bliss, less sentimental about
babies, sharper in demanding that the entire town share her reforms--the
purchase of a park, the compulsory cleaning of back-yards.

She penned Harry Haydock at his desk in the Bon Ton; she interrupted
his joking; she told him that it was Ray who had built up the
shoe-department and men's department; she demanded that he be made a
partner. Before Harry could answer she threatened that Ray and she would
start a rival shop. "I'll clerk behind the counter myself, and a Certain
Party is all ready to put up the money."

She rather wondered who the Certain Party was.

Ray was made a one-sixth partner.

He became a glorified floor-walker, greeting the men with new poise, no
longer coyly subservient to pretty women. When he was not affectionately
coercing people into buying things they did not need, he stood at the
back of the store, glowing, abstracted, feeling masculine as he recalled
the tempestuous surprises of love revealed by Vida.

The only remnant of Vida's identification of herself with Carol was a
jealousy when she saw Kennicott and Ray together, and reflected that
some people might suppose that Kennicott was his superior. She was sure
that Carol thought so, and she wanted to shriek, "You needn't try to
gloat! I wouldn't have your pokey old husband. He hasn't one single bit
of Ray's spiritual nobility."




CHAPTER XXII


I

THE greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or
praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours
a day. It is this which puzzles the long-shoreman about the clerk, the
Londoner about the bushman. It was this which puzzled Carol in regard
to the married Vida. Carol herself had the baby, a larger house to care
for, all the telephone calls for Kennicott when he was away; and she
read everything, while Vida was satisfied with newspaper headlines.

But after detached brown years in boarding-houses, Vida was hungry for
housework, for the most pottering detail of it. She had no maid, nor
wanted one. She cooked, baked, swept, washed supper-cloths, with
the triumph of a chemist in a new laboratory. To her the hearth was
veritably the altar. When she went shopping she hugged the cans of soup,
and she bought a mop or a side of bacon as though she were preparing for
a reception. She knelt beside a bean sprout and crooned, "I raised this
with my own hands--I brought this new life into the world."

"I love her for being so happy," Carol brooded. "I ought to be that way.
I worship the baby, but the housework----Oh, I suppose I'm fortunate; so
much better off than farm-women on a new clearing, or people in a slum."

It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very
large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is
better off than others.

In Carol's own twenty-four hours a day she got up, dressed the baby, had
breakfast, talked to Oscarina about the day's shopping, put the baby on
the porch to play, went to the butcher's to choose between steak and
pork chops, bathed the baby, nailed up a shelf, had dinner, put the baby
to bed for a nap, paid the iceman, read for an hour, took the baby out
for a walk, called on Vida, had supper, put the baby to bed, darned
socks, listened to Kennicott's yawning comment on what a fool Dr.
McGanum was to try to use that cheap X-ray outfit of his on an
epithelioma, repaired a frock, drowsily heard Kennicott stoke the
furnace, tried to read a page of Thorstein Veblen--and the day was gone.

Except when Hugh was vigorously naughty, or whiney, or laughing,
or saying "I like my chair" with thrilling maturity, she was always
enfeebled by loneliness. She no longer felt superior about that
misfortune. She would gladly have been converted to Vida's satisfaction
in Gopher Prairie and mopping the floor.


II


Carol drove through an astonishing number of books from the public
library and from city shops. Kennicott was at first uncomfortable over
her disconcerting habit of buying them. A book was a book, and if you
had several thousand of them right here in the library, free, why the
dickens should you spend your good money? After worrying about it for
two or three years, he decided that this was one of the Funny Ideas
which she had caught as a librarian and from which she would never
entirely recover.

The authors whom she read were most of them frightfully annoyed by the
Vida Sherwins. They were young American sociologists, young English
realists, Russian horrorists; Anatole France, Rolland, Nexo, Wells,
Shaw, Key, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Henry
Mencken, and all the other subversive philosophers and artists whom
women were consulting everywhere, in batik-curtained studios in New
York, in Kansas farmhouses, San Francisco drawing-rooms, Alabama schools
for negroes. From them she got the same confused desire which the
million other women felt; the same determination to be class-conscious
without discovering the class of which she was to be conscious.

Certainly her reading precipitated her observations of Main Street, of
Gopher Prairie and of the several adjacent Gopher Prairies which she had
seen on drives with Kennicott. In her fluid thought certain convictions
appeared, jaggedly, a fragment of an impression at a time, while she was
going to sleep, or manicuring her nails, or waiting for Kennicott.

These convictions she presented to Vida Sherwin--Vida
Wutherspoon--beside a radiator, over a bowl of not very good walnuts and
pecans from Uncle Whittier's grocery, on an evening when both Kennicott
and Raymie had gone out of town with the other officers of the Ancient
and Affiliated Order of Spartans, to inaugurate a new chapter at
Wakamin. Vida had come to the house for the night. She helped in putting
Hugh to bed, sputtering the while about his soft skin. Then they talked
till midnight.

What Carol said that evening, what she was passionately thinking, was
also emerging in the minds of women in ten thousand Gopher Prairies. Her
formulations were not pat solutions but visions of a tragic futility.
She did not utter them so compactly that they can be given in her words;
they were roughened with "Well, you see" and "if you get what I mean"
and "I don't know that I'm making myself clear." But they were definite
enough, and indignant enough.


III


In reading popular stories and seeing plays, asserted Carol, she
had found only two traditions of the American small town. The first
tradition, repeated in scores of magazines every month, is that the
American village remains the one sure abode of friendship, honesty,
and clean sweet marriageable girls. Therefore all men who succeed in
painting in Paris or in finance in New York at last become weary of
smart women, return to their native towns, assert that cities are
vicious, marry their childhood sweethearts and, presumably, joyously
abide in those towns until death.

The other tradition is that the significant features of all villages are
whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns, gold bricks, checkers, jars of gilded
cat-tails, and shrewd comic old men who are known as "hicks" and who
ejaculate "Waal I swan." This altogether admirable tradition rules
the vaudeville stage, facetious illustrators, and syndicated newspaper
humor, but out of actual life it passed forty years ago. Carol's small
town thinks not in hoss-swapping but in cheap motor cars,
telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa, kodaks, phonographs,
leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge-prizes, oil-stocks,
motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of Mark Twain, and a chaste
version of national politics.

With such a small-town life a Kennicott or a Champ Perry is content, but
there are also hundreds of thousands, particularly women and young men,
who are not at all content. The more intelligent young people (and the
fortunate widows!) flee to the cities with agility and, despite the
fictional tradition, resolutely stay there, seldom returning even for
holidays. The most protesting patriots of the towns leave them in old
age, if they can afford it, and go to live in California or in the
cities.

The reason, Carol insisted, is not a whiskered rusticity. It is nothing
so amusing!

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of
speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear
respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of the quiet
dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is
negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of
happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness
made God.

A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward,
coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane
decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things
about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the
greatest race in the world.


IV


She had inquired as to the effect of this dominating dullness upon
foreigners. She remembered the feeble exotic quality to be found in the
first-generation Scandinavians; she recalled the Norwegian Fair at the
Lutheran Church, to which Bea had taken her. There, in the bondestue,
the replica of a Norse farm kitchen, pale women in scarlet jackets
embroidered with gold thread and colored beads, in black skirts with a
line of blue, green-striped aprons, and ridged caps very pretty to set
off a fresh face, had served rommegrod og lefse--sweet cakes and sour
milk pudding spiced with cinnamon. For the first time in Gopher Prairie
Carol had found novelty. She had reveled in the mild foreignness of it.

But she saw these Scandinavian women zealously exchanging their spiced
puddings and red jackets for fried pork chops and congealed white
blouses, trading the ancient Christmas hymns of the fjords for "She's My
Jazzland Cutie," being Americanized into uniformity, and in less than
a generation losing in the grayness whatever pleasant new customs
they might have added to the life of the town. Their sons finished the
process. In ready-made clothes and ready-made high-school phrases they
sank into propriety, and the sound American customs had absorbed without
one trace of pollution another alien invasion.

And along with these foreigners, she felt herself being ironed into
glossy mediocrity, and she rebelled, in fear.

The respectability of the Gopher Prairies, said Carol, is reinforced by
vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of knowledge. Except for
half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement
of ignorance which it is so easy to come by. To be "intellectual" or
"artistic" or, in their own word, to be "highbrow," is to be priggish
and of dubious virtue.

Large experiments in politics and in co-operative distribution, ventures
requiring knowledge, courage, and imagination, do originate in the West
and Middlewest, but they are not of the towns, they are of the farmers.
If these heresies are supported by the townsmen it is only by occasional
teachers doctors, lawyers, the labor unions, and workmen like Miles
Bjornstam, who are punished by being mocked as "cranks," as "half-baked
parlor socialists." The editor and the rector preach at them. The cloud
of serene ignorance submerges them in unhappiness and futility.


V


Here Vida observed, "Yes--well----Do you know, I've always thought
that Ray would have made a wonderful rector. He has what I call an
essentially religious soul. My! He'd have read the service beautifully!
I suppose it's too late now, but as I tell him, he can also serve
the world by selling shoes and----I wonder if we oughtn't to have
family-prayers?"


VI


Doubtless all small towns, in all countries, in all ages, Carol
admitted, have a tendency to be not only dull but mean, bitter, infested
with curiosity. In France or Tibet quite as much as in Wyoming or
Indiana these timidities are inherent in isolation.

But a village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether
standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the
chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer
downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking
to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and sea of color, to set Dante
at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress the high gods in Klassy Kollege
Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling
salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks
advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicate to the
sayings of Confucius.

Such a society functions admirably in the large production of cheap
automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied
until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of
living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising-pictures of dollar
watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but
of the convenience of safety razors.

And such a society, such a nation, is determined by the Gopher Prairies.
The greatest manufacturer is but a busier Sam Clark, and all the rotund
senators and presidents are village lawyers and bankers grown nine feet
tall.

Though a Gopher Prairie regards itself as a part of the Great World,
compares itself to Rome and Vienna, it will not acquire the scientific
spirit, the international mind, which would make it great. It picks at
information which will visibly procure money or social distinction.
Its conception of a community ideal is not the grand manner, the noble
aspiration, the fine aristocratic pride, but cheap labor for the kitchen
and rapid increase in the price of land. It plays at cards on greasy
oil-cloth in a shanty, and does not know that prophets are walking and
talking on the terrace.

If all the provincials were as kindly as Champ Perry and Sam Clark there
would be no reason for desiring the town to seek great traditions. It is
the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, the Jackson Elders, small busy men
crushingly powerful in their common purpose, viewing themselves as men
of the world but keeping themselves men of the cash-register and the
comic film, who make the town a sterile oligarchy.


VII


She had sought to be definite in analyzing the surface ugliness of
the Gopher Prairies. She asserted that it is a matter of universal
similarity; of flimsiness of construction, so that the towns resemble
frontier camps; of neglect of natural advantages, so that the hills
are covered with brush, the lakes shut off by railroads, and the
creeks lined with dumping-grounds; of depressing sobriety of color;
rectangularity of buildings; and excessive breadth and straightness of
the gashed streets, so that there is no escape from gales and from sight
of the grim sweep of land, nor any windings to coax the loiterer along,
while the breadth which would be majestic in an avenue of palaces makes
the low shabby shops creeping down the typical Main Street the more mean
by comparison.

The universal similarity--that is the physical expression of the
philosophy of dull safety. Nine-tenths of the American towns are so
alike that it is the completest boredom to wander from one to another.
Always, west of Pittsburg, and often, east of it, there is the same
lumber yard, the same railroad station, the same Ford garage, the same
creamery, the same box-like houses and two-story shops. The new, more
conscious houses are alike in their very attempts at diversity: the same
bungalows, the same square houses of stucco or tapestry brick. The shops
show the same standardized, nationally advertised wares; the newspapers
of sections three thousand miles apart have the same "syndicated
features"; the boy in Arkansas displays just such a flamboyant
ready-made suit as is found on just such a boy in Delaware, both of them
iterate the same slang phrases from the same sporting-pages, and if
one of them is in college and the other is a barber, no one may surmise
which is which.

If Kennicott were snatched from Gopher Prairie and instantly conveyed
to a town leagues away, he would not realize it. He would go down
apparently the same Main Street (almost certainly it would be called
Main Street); in the same drug store he would see the same young man
serving the same ice-cream soda to the same young woman with the same
magazines and phonograph records under her arm. Not till he had climbed
to his office and found another sign on the door, another Dr. Kennicott
inside, would he understand that something curious had presumably
happened.

Finally, behind all her comments, Carol saw the fact that the prairie
towns no more exist to serve the farmers who are their reason of
existence than do the great capitals; they exist to fatten on the
farmers, to provide for the townsmen large motors and social preferment;
and, unlike the capitals, they do not give to the district in return for
usury a stately and permanent center, but only this ragged camp. It is a
"parasitic Greek civilization"--minus the civilization.

"There we are then," said Carol. "The remedy? Is there any? Criticism,
perhaps, for the beginning of the beginning. Oh, there's nothing that
attacks the Tribal God Mediocrity that doesn't help a little . . . and
probably there's nothing that helps very much. Perhaps some day the
farmers will build and own their market-towns. (Think of the club they
could have!) But I'm afraid I haven't any 'reform program.' Not any
more! The trouble is spiritual, and no League or Party can enact a
preference for gardens rather than dumping-grounds. . . . There's my
confession. WELL?"

"In other words, all you want is perfection?"

"Yes! Why not?"

"How you hate this place! How can you expect to do anything with it if
you haven't any sympathy?"

"But I have! And affection. Or else I wouldn't fume so. I've learned
that Gopher Prairie isn't just an eruption on the prairie, as I thought
first, but as large as New York. In New York I wouldn't know more than
forty or fifty people, and I know that many here. Go on! Say what you're
thinking."

"Well, my dear, if I DID take all your notions seriously, it would be
pretty discouraging. Imagine how a person would feel, after working hard
for years and helping to build up a nice town, to have you airily flit
in and simply say 'Rotten!' Think that's fair?"

"Why not? It must be just as discouraging for the Gopher Prairieite to
see Venice and make comparisons."

"It would not! I imagine gondolas are kind of nice to ride in, but we've
got better bath-rooms! But----My dear, you're not the only person in
this town who has done some thinking for herself, although (pardon my
rudeness) I'm afraid you think so. I'll admit we lack some things. Maybe
our theater isn't as good as shows in Paris. All right! I don't want
to see any foreign culture suddenly forced on us--whether it's
street-planning or table-manners or crazy communistic ideas."

Vida sketched what she termed "practical things that will make a happier
and prettier town, but that do belong to our life, that actually are
being done." Of the Thanatopsis Club she spoke; of the rest-room, the
fight against mosquitos, the campaign for more gardens and shade-trees
and sewers--matters not fantastic and nebulous and distant, but
immediate and sure.

Carol's answer was fantastic and nebulous enough:

"Yes. . . . Yes. . . . I know. They're good. But if I could put through
all those reforms at once, I'd still want startling, exotic things. Life
is comfortable and clean enough here already. And so secure. What it
needs is to be less secure, more eager. The civic improvements which
I'd like the Thanatopsis to advocate are Strindberg plays, and classic
dancers--exquisite legs beneath tulle--and (I can see him so clearly!)
a thick, black-bearded, cynical Frenchman who would sit about and drink
and sing opera and tell bawdy stories and laugh at our proprieties and
quote Rabelais and not be ashamed to kiss my hand!"

"Huh! Not sure about the rest of it but I guess that's what you and all
the other discontented young women really want: some stranger kissing
your hand!" At Carol's gasp, the old squirrel-like Vida darted out and
cried, "Oh, my dear, don't take that too seriously. I just meant----"

"I know. You just meant it. Go on. Be good for my soul. Isn't it funny:
here we all are--me trying to be good for Gopher Prairie's soul, and
Gopher Prairie trying to be good for my soul. What are my other sins?"

"Oh, there's plenty of them. Possibly some day we shall have your fat
cynical Frenchman (horrible, sneering, tobacco-stained object, ruining
his brains and his digestion with vile liquor!) but, thank heaven, for
a while we'll manage to keep busy with our lawns and pavements! You see,
these things really are coming! The Thanatopsis is getting somewhere.
And you----" Her tone italicized the words--"to my great disappointment,
are doing less, not more, than the people you laugh at! Sam Clark,
on the school-board, is working for better school ventilation. Ella
Stowbody (whose elocuting you always think is so absurd) has persuaded
the railroad to share the expense of a parked space at the station, to
do away with that vacant lot.

"You sneer so easily. I'm sorry, but I do think there's something
essentially cheap in your attitude. Especially about religion.

"If you must know, you're not a sound reformer at all. You're an
impossibilist. And you give up too easily. You gave up on the new
city hall, the anti-fly campaign, club papers, the library-board, the
dramatic association--just because we didn't graduate into Ibsen the
very first thing. You want perfection all at once. Do you know what the
finest thing you've done is--aside from bringing Hugh into the world?
It was the help you gave Dr. Will during baby-welfare week. You didn't
demand that each baby be a philosopher and artist before you weighed
him, as you do with the rest of us.

"And now I'm afraid perhaps I'll hurt you. We're going to have a new
schoolbuilding in this town--in just a few years--and we'll have it
without one bit of help or interest from you!

"Professor Mott and I and some others have been dinging away at the
moneyed men for years. We didn't call on you because you would never
stand the pound-pound-pounding year after year without one bit of
encouragement. And we've won! I've got the promise of everybody who
counts that just as soon as war-conditions permit, they'll vote the
bonds for the schoolhouse. And we'll have a wonderful building--lovely
brown brick, with big windows, and agricultural and manual-training
departments. When we get it, that'll be my answer to all your theories!"

"I'm glad. And I'm ashamed I haven't had any part in getting it.
But----Please don't think I'm unsympathetic if I ask one question: Will
the teachers in the hygienic new building go on informing the children
that Persia is a yellow spot on the map, and 'Caesar' the title of a
book of grammatical puzzles?"


VIII


Vida was indignant; Carol was apologetic; they talked for another hour,
the eternal Mary and Martha--an immoralist Mary and a reformist Martha.
It was Vida who conquered.

The fact that she had been left out of the campaign for the new
schoolbuilding disconcerted Carol. She laid her dreams of perfection
aside. When Vida asked her to take charge of a group of Camp Fire Girls,
she obeyed, and had definite pleasure out of the Indian dances and
ritual and costumes. She went more regularly to the Thanatopsis. With
Vida as lieutenant and unofficial commander she campaigned for a village
nurse to attend poor families, raised the fund herself, saw to it that
the nurse was young and strong and amiable and intelligent.

Yet all the while she beheld the burly cynical Frenchman and the
diaphanous dancers as clearly as the child sees its air-born playmates;
she relished the Camp Fire Girls not because, in Vida's words, "this
Scout training will help so much to make them Good Wives," but because
she hoped that the Sioux dances would bring subversive color into their
dinginess.

She helped Ella Stowbody to set out plants in the tiny triangular park
at the railroad station; she squatted in the dirt, with a small curved
trowel and the most decorous of gardening gauntlets; she talked to Ella
about the public-spiritedness of fuchsias and cannas; and she felt
that she was scrubbing a temple deserted by the gods and empty even of
incense and the sound of chanting. Passengers looking from trains saw
her as a village woman of fading prettiness, incorruptible virtue, and
no abnormalities; the baggageman heard her say, "Oh yes, I do think
it will be a good example for the children"; and all the while she saw
herself running garlanded through the streets of Babylon.

Planting led her to botanizing. She never got much farther than
recognizing the tiger lily and the wild rose, but she rediscovered
Hugh. "What does the buttercup say, mummy?" he cried, his hand full of
straggly grasses, his cheek gilded with pollen. She knelt to embrace
him; she affirmed that he made life more than full; she was altogether
reconciled . . . for an hour.

But she awoke at night to hovering death. She crept away from the hump
of bedding that was Kennicott; tiptoed into the bathroom and, by the
mirror in the door of the medicine-cabinet, examined her pallid face.

Wasn't she growing visibly older in ratio as Vida grew plumper and
younger? Wasn't her nose sharper? Wasn't her neck granulated? She
stared and choked. She was only thirty. But the five years since her
marriage--had they not gone by as hastily and stupidly as though she had
been under ether; would time not slink past till death? She pounded her
fist on the cool enameled rim of the bathtub and raged mutely against
the indifferent gods:

"I don't care! I won't endure it! They lie so--Vida and Will and Aunt
Bessie--they tell me I ought to be satisfied with Hugh and a good home
and planting seven nasturtiums in a station garden! I am I! When I die
the world will be annihilated, as far as I'm concerned. I am I! I'm not
content to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I want them for
me! Damn Vida! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe
that a display of potatoes at Howland & Gould's is enough beauty and
strangeness?"




CHAPTER XXIII


I

WHEN America entered the Great European War, Vida sent Raymie off to an
officers' training-camp--less than a year after her wedding. Raymie was
diligent and rather strong. He came out a first lieutenant of infantry,
and was one of the earliest sent abroad.

Carol grew definitely afraid of Vida as Vida transferred the passion
which had been released in marriage to the cause of the war; as she
lost all tolerance. When Carol was touched by the desire for heroism
in Raymie and tried tactfully to express it, Vida made her feel like an
impertinent child.

By enlistment and draft, the sons of Lyman Cass, Nat Hicks, Sam Clark
joined the army. But most of the soldiers were the sons of German and
Swedish farmers unknown to Carol. Dr. Terry Gould and Dr. McGanum became
captains in the medical corps, and were stationed at camps in Iowa and
Georgia. They were the only officers, besides Raymie, from the Gopher
Prairie district. Kennicott wanted to go with them, but the several
doctors of the town forgot medical rivalry and, meeting in council,
decided that he would do better to wait and keep the town well till he
should be needed. Kennicott was forty-two now; the only youngish doctor
left in a radius of eighteen miles. Old Dr. Westlake, who loved comfort
like a cat, protestingly rolled out at night for country calls, and
hunted through his collar-box for his G. A. R. button.

Carol did not quite know what she thought about Kennicott's going.
Certainly she was no Spartan wife. She knew that he wanted to go; she
knew that this longing was always in him, behind his unchanged
trudging and remarks about the weather. She felt for him an admiring
affection--and she was sorry that she had nothing more than affection.

Cy Bogart was the spectacular warrior of the town. Cy was no longer the
weedy boy who had sat in the loft speculating about Carol's egotism and
the mysteries of generation. He was nineteen now, tall, broad, busy, the
"town sport," famous for his ability to drink beer, to shake dice, to
tell undesirable stories, and, from his post in front of Dyer's drug
store, to embarrass the girls by "jollying" them as they passed. His
face was at once peach-bloomed and pimply.

Cy was to be heard publishing it abroad that if he couldn't get the
Widow Bogart's permission to enlist, he'd run away and enlist without
it. He shouted that he "hated every dirty Hun; by gosh, if he could just
poke a bayonet into one big fat Heinie and learn him some decency and
democracy, he'd die happy." Cy got much reputation by whipping a farmboy
named Adolph Pochbauer for being a "damn hyphenated German." . . . This
was the younger Pochbauer, who was killed in the Argonne, while he was
trying to bring the body of his Yankee captain back to the lines. At
this time Cy Bogart was still dwelling in Gopher Prairie and planning to
go to war.


II


Everywhere Carol heard that the war was going to bring a basic change
in psychology, to purify and uplift everything from marital relations to
national politics, and she tried to exult in it. Only she did not find
it. She saw the women who made bandages for the Red Cross giving
up bridge, and laughing at having to do without sugar, but over the
surgical-dressings they did not speak of God and the souls of men, but
of Miles Bjornstam's impudence, of Terry Gould's scandalous carryings-on
with a farmer's daughter four years ago, of cooking cabbage, and of
altering blouses. Their references to the war touched atrocities only.
She herself was punctual, and efficient at making dressings, but she
could not, like Mrs. Lyman Cass and Mrs. Bogart, fill the dressings with
hate for enemies.

When she protested to Vida, "The young do the work while these old ones
sit around and interrupt us and gag with hate because they're too feeble
to do anything but hate," then Vida turned on her:

"If you can't be reverent, at least don't be so pert and opinionated,
now when men and women are dying. Some of us--we have given up so much,
and we're glad to. At least we expect that you others sha'n't try to be
witty at our expense."

There was weeping.

Carol did desire to see the Prussian autocracy defeated; she did
persuade herself that there were no autocracies save that of Prussia;
she did thrill to motion-pictures of troops embarking in New York; and
she was uncomfortable when she met Miles Bjornstam on the street and he
croaked:

"How's tricks? Things going fine with me; got two new cows. Well, have
you become a patriot? Eh? Sure, they'll bring democracy--the democracy
of death. Yes, sure, in every war since the Garden of Eden the workmen
have gone out to fight each other for perfectly good reasons--handed to
them by their bosses. Now me, I'm wise. I'm so wise that I know I don't
know anything about the war."

It was not a thought of the war that remained with her after Miles's
declamation but a perception that she and Vida and all of the
good-intentioners who wanted to "do something for the common people"
were insignificant, because the "common people" were able to do things
for themselves, and highly likely to, as soon as they learned the
fact. The conception of millions of workmen like Miles taking control
frightened her, and she scuttled rapidly away from the thought of a time
when she might no longer retain the position of Lady Bountiful to the
Bjornstams and Beas and Oscarinas whom she loved--and patronized.


III


It was in June, two months after America's entrance into the war, that
the momentous event happened--the visit of the great Percy Bresnahan,
the millionaire president of the Velvet Motor Car Company of Boston, the
one native son who was always to be mentioned to strangers.

For two weeks there were rumors. Sam Clark cried to Kennicott, "Say, I
hear Perce Bresnahan is coming! By golly it'll be great to see the old
scout, eh?" Finally the Dauntless printed, on the front page with a No. 1
head, a letter from Bresnahan to Jackson Elder:

DEAR JACK:

Well, Jack, I find I can make it. I'm to go to Washington as a dollar
a year man for the government, in the aviation motor section, and tell
them how much I don't know about carburetors. But before I start in
being a hero I want to shoot out and catch me a big black bass and cuss
out you and Sam Clark and Harry Haydock and Will Kennicott and the rest
of you pirates. I'll land in G. P. on June 7, on No. 7 from Mpls. Shake
a day-day. Tell Bert Tybee to save me a glass of beer.

Sincerely yours,

Perce.



All members of the social, financial, scientific, literary, and sporting
sets were at No. 7 to meet Bresnahan; Mrs. Lyman Cass was beside Del
Snafflin the barber, and Juanita Haydock almost cordial to Miss Villets
the librarian. Carol saw Bresnahan laughing down at them from the train
vestibule--big, immaculate, overjawed, with the eye of an executive. In
the voice of the professional Good Fellow he bellowed, "Howdy, folks!"
As she was introduced to him (not he to her) Bresnahan looked into her
eyes, and his hand-shake was warm, unhurried.

He declined the offers of motors; he walked off, his arm about the
shoulder of Nat Hicks the sporting tailor, with the elegant Harry
Haydock carrying one of his enormous pale leather bags, Del Snafflin
the other, Jack Elder bearing an overcoat, and Julius Flickerbaugh
the fishing-tackle. Carol noted that though Bresnahan wore spats and
a stick, no small boy jeered. She decided, "I must have Will get a
double-breasted blue coat and a wing collar and a dotted bow-tie like
his."

That evening, when Kennicott was trimming the grass along the walk
with sheep-shears, Bresnahan rolled up, alone. He was now in corduroy
trousers, khaki shirt open at the throat, a white boating hat, and
marvelous canvas-and-leather shoes "On the job there, old Will! Say, my
Lord, this is living, to come back and get into a regular man-sized pair
of pants. They can talk all they want to about the city, but my idea of
a good time is to loaf around and see you boys and catch a gamey bass!"

He hustled up the walk and blared at Carol, "Where's that little fellow?
I hear you've got one fine big he-boy that you're holding out on me!"

"He's gone to bed," rather briefly.

"I know. And rules are rules, these days. Kids get routed through the
shop like a motor. But look here, sister; I'm one great hand at busting
rules. Come on now, let Uncle Perce have a look at him. Please now,
sister?"

He put his arm about her waist; it was a large, strong, sophisticated
arm, and very agreeable; he grinned at her with a devastating
knowingness, while Kennicott glowed inanely. She flushed; she was
alarmed by the ease with which the big-city man invaded her guarded
personality. She was glad, in retreat, to scamper ahead of the two men
up-stairs to the hall-room in which Hugh slept. All the way Kennicott
muttered, "Well, well, say, gee whittakers but it's good to have you
back, certainly is good to see you!"

Hugh lay on his stomach, making an earnest business of sleeping. He
burrowed his eyes in the dwarf blue pillow to escape the electric light,
then sat up abruptly, small and frail in his woolly nightdrawers, his
floss of brown hair wild, the pillow clutched to his breast. He
wailed. He stared at the stranger, in a manner of patient dismissal.
He explained confidentially to Carol, "Daddy wouldn't let it be morning
yet. What does the pillow say?"

Bresnahan dropped his arm caressingly on Carol's shoulder; he
pronounced, "My Lord, you're a lucky girl to have a fine young husk like
that. I figure Will knew what he was doing when he persuaded you to take
a chance on an old bum like him! They tell me you come from St. Paul.
We're going to get you to come to Boston some day." He leaned over
the bed. "Young man, you're the slickest sight I've seen this side of
Boston. With your permission, may we present you with a slight token of
our regard and appreciation of your long service?"

He held out a red rubber Pierrot. Hugh remarked, "Gimme it," hid it
under the bedclothes, and stared at Bresnahan as though he had never
seen the man before.

For once Carol permitted herself the spiritual luxury of not asking
"Why, Hugh dear, what do you say when some one gives you a present?"
The great man was apparently waiting. They stood in inane suspense till
Bresnahan led them out, rumbling, "How about planning a fishing-trip,
Will?"

He remained for half an hour. Always he told Carol what a charming
person she was; always he looked at her knowingly.

"Yes. He probably would make a woman fall in love with him. But it
wouldn't last a week. I'd get tired of his confounded buoyancy.
His hypocrisy. He's a spiritual bully. He makes me rude to him in
self-defense. Oh yes, he is glad to be here. He does like us. He's so
good an actor that he convinces his own self. . . . I'd HATE him in
Boston. He'd have all the obvious big-city things. Limousines.
Discreet evening-clothes. Order a clever dinner at a smart restaurant.
Drawing-room decorated by the best firm--but the pictures giving him
away. I'd rather talk to Guy Pollock in his dusty office. . . . How I
lie! His arm coaxed my shoulder and his eyes dared me not to admire him.
I'd be afraid of him. I hate him! . . . Oh, the inconceivable egotistic
imagination of women! All this stew of analysis about a man, a good,
decent, friendly, efficient man, because he was kind to me, as Will's
wife!"


IV


The Kennicotts, the Elders, the Clarks, and Bresnahan went fishing
at Red Squaw Lake. They drove forty miles to the lake in Elder's new
Cadillac. There was much laughter and bustle at the start, much storing
of lunch-baskets and jointed poles, much inquiry as to whether it would
really bother Carol to sit with her feet up on a roll of shawls.
When they were ready to go Mrs. Clark lamented, "Oh, Sam, I forgot
my magazine," and Bresnahan bullied, "Come on now, if you women think
you're going to be literary, you can't go with us tough guys!" Every
one laughed a great deal, and as they drove on Mrs. Clark explained that
though probably she would not have read it, still, she might have wanted
to, while the other girls had a nap in the afternoon, and she was right
in the middle of a serial--it was an awfully exciting story--it seems
that this girl was a Turkish dancer (only she was really the daughter of
an American lady and a Russian prince) and men kept running after her,
just disgustingly, but she remained pure, and there was a scene----

While the men floated on the lake, casting for black bass, the women
prepared lunch and yawned. Carol was a little resentful of the manner in
which the men assumed that they did not care to fish. "I don't want to
go with them, but I would like the privilege of refusing."

The lunch was long and pleasant. It was a background for the talk of the
great man come home, hints of cities and large imperative affairs and
famous people, jocosely modest admissions that, yes, their friend Perce
was doing about as well as most of these "Boston swells that think so
much of themselves because they come from rich old families and went to
college and everything. Believe me, it's us new business men that are
running Beantown today, and not a lot of fussy old bucks snoozing in
their clubs!"

Carol realized that he was not one of the sons of Gopher Prairie who,
if they do not actually starve in the East, are invariably spoken of as
"highly successful"; and she found behind his too incessant flattery a
genuine affection for his mates. It was in the matter of the war that
he most favored and thrilled them. Dropping his voice while they bent
nearer (there was no one within two miles to overhear), he disclosed
the fact that in both Boston and Washington he'd been getting a lot of
inside stuff on the war--right straight from headquarters--he was in
touch with some men--couldn't name them but they were darn high up in
both the War and State Departments--and he would say--only for Pete's
sake they mustn't breathe one word of this; it was strictly on the
Q.T. and not generally known outside of Washington--but just between
ourselves--and they could take this for gospel--Spain had finally
decided to join the Entente allies in the Grand Scrap. Yes, sir, there'd
be two million fully equipped Spanish soldiers fighting with us in
France in one month now. Some surprise for Germany, all right!

"How about the prospects for revolution in Germany?" reverently asked
Kennicott.

The authority grunted, "Nothing to it. The one thing you can bet on is
that no matter what happens to the German people, win or lose, they'll
stick by the Kaiser till hell freezes over. I got that absolutely
straight, from a fellow who's on the inside of the inside in Washington.
No, sir! I don't pretend to know much about international affairs
but one thing you can put down as settled is that Germany will be a
Hohenzollern empire for the next forty years. At that, I don't know as
it's so bad. The Kaiser and the Junkers keep a firm hand on a lot
of these red agitators who'd be worse than a king if they could get
control."

"I'm terribly interested in this uprising that overthrew the Czar in
Russia," suggested Carol. She had finally been conquered by the man's
wizard knowledge of affairs.

Kennicott apologized for her: "Carrie's nuts about this Russian
revolution. Is there much to it, Perce?"

"There is not!" Bresnahan said flatly. "I can speak by the book there.
Carol, honey, I'm surprised to find you talking like a New York Russian
Jew, or one of these long-hairs! I can tell you, only you don't need to
let every one in on it, this is confidential, I got it from a man who's
close to the State Department, but as a matter of fact the Czar will
be back in power before the end of the year. You read a lot about his
retiring and about his being killed, but I know he's got a big army back
of him, and he'll show these damn agitators, lazy beggars hunting for
a soft berth bossing the poor goats that fall for 'em, he'll show 'em
where they get off!"

Carol was sorry to hear that the Czar was coming back, but she said
nothing. The others had looked vacant at the mention of a country so far
away as Russia. Now they edged in and asked Bresnahan what he thought
about the Packard car, investments in Texas oil-wells, the comparative
merits of young men born in Minnesota and in Massachusetts, the question
of prohibition, the future cost of motor tires, and wasn't it true that
American aviators put it all over these Frenchmen?

They were glad to find that he agreed with them on every point.

As she heard Bresnahan announce, "We're perfectly willing to talk to
any committee the men may choose, but we're not going to stand for some
outside agitator butting in and telling us how we're going to run our
plant!" Carol remembered that Jackson Elder (now meekly receiving New
Ideas) had said the same thing in the same words.

While Sam Clark was digging up from his memory a long and immensely
detailed story of the crushing things he had said to a Pullman porter,
named George, Bresnahan hugged his knees and rocked and watched Carol.
She wondered if he did not understand the laboriousness of the smile
with which she listened to Kennicott's account of the "good one he had
on Carrie," that marital, coyly improper, ten-times-told tale of how she
had forgotten to attend to Hugh because she was "all het up pounding the
box"--which may be translated as "eagerly playing the piano." She was
certain that Bresnahan saw through her when she pretended not to hear
Kennicott's invitation to join a game of cribbage. She feared the
comments he might make; she was irritated by her fear.

She was equally irritated, when the motor returned through Gopher
Prairie, to find that she was proud of sharing in Bresnahan's kudos
as people waved, and Juanita Haydock leaned from a window. She said to
herself, "As though I cared whether I'm seen with this fat phonograph!"
and simultaneously, "Everybody has noticed how much Will and I are
playing with Mr. Bresnahan."

The town was full of his stories, his friendliness, his memory for
names, his clothes, his trout-flies, his generosity. He had given
a hundred dollars to Father Klubok the priest, and a hundred to the
Reverend Mr. Zitterel the Baptist minister, for Americanization work.

At the Bon Ton, Carol heard Nat Hicks the tailor exulting:

"Old Perce certainly pulled a good one on this fellow Bjornstam that
always is shooting off his mouth. He's supposed to of settled down since
he got married, but Lord, those fellows that think they know it all,
they never change. Well, the Red Swede got the grand razz handed to him,
all right. He had the nerve to breeze up to Perce, at Dave Dyer's, and
he said, he said to Perce, 'I've always wanted to look at a man that was
so useful that folks would pay him a million dollars for existing,' and
Perce gave him the once-over and come right back, 'Have, eh?' he says.
'Well,' he says, 'I've been looking for a man so useful sweeping floors
that I could pay him four dollars a day. Want the job, my friend?' Ha,
ha, ha! Say, you know how lippy Bjornstam is? Well for once he didn't
have a thing to say. He tried to get fresh, and tell what a rotten
town this is, and Perce come right back at him, 'If you don't like this
country, you better get out of it and go back to Germany, where you
belong!' Say, maybe us fellows didn't give Bjornstam the horse-laugh
though! Oh, Perce is the white-haired boy in this burg, all rightee!"


V


Bresnahan had borrowed Jackson Elder's motor; he stopped at the
Kennicotts'; he bawled at Carol, rocking with Hugh on the porch, "Better
come for a ride."

She wanted to snub him. "Thanks so much, but I'm being maternal."

"Bring him along! Bring him along!" Bresnahan was out of the seat,
stalking up the sidewalk, and the rest of her protests and dignities
were feeble.

She did not bring Hugh along.

Bresnahan was silent for a mile, in words, But he looked at her as
though he meant her to know that he understood everything she thought.

She observed how deep was his chest.

"Lovely fields over there," he said.

"You really like them? There's no profit in them."

He chuckled. "Sister, you can't get away with it. I'm onto you. You
consider me a big bluff. Well, maybe I am. But so are you, my dear--and
pretty enough so that I'd try to make love to you, if I weren't afraid
you'd slap me."

"Mr. Bresnahan, do you talk that way to your wife's friends? And do you
call them 'sister'?"

"As a matter of fact, I do! And I make 'em like it. Score two!" But his
chuckle was not so rotund, and he was very attentive to the ammeter.

In a moment he was cautiously attacking: "That's a wonderful boy, Will
Kennicott. Great work these country practitioners are doing. The other
day, in Washington, I was talking to a big scientific shark, a professor
in Johns Hopkins medical school, and he was saying that no one has ever
sufficiently appreciated the general practitioner and the sympathy
and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the young scientific
fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories
that they miss the human element. Except in the case of a few freak
diseases that no respectable human being would waste his time having,
it's the old doc that keeps a community well, mind and body. And
strikes me that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed counter
practitioners I've ever met. Eh?"

"I'm sure he is. He's a servant of reality."

"Come again? Um. Yes. All of that, whatever that is. . . . Say, child,
you don't care a whole lot for Gopher Prairie, if I'm not mistaken."

"Nope."

"There's where you're missing a big chance. There's nothing to these
cities. Believe me, I KNOW! This is a good town, as they go. You're
lucky to be here. I wish I could shy on!"

"Very well, why don't you?"

"Huh? Why--Lord--can't get away fr----"

"You don't have to stay. I do! So I want to change it. Do you know that
men like you, prominent men, do quite a reasonable amount of harm by
insisting that your native towns and native states are perfect? It's
you who encourage the denizens not to change. They quote you, and go on
believing that they live in paradise, and----" She clenched her fist.
"The incredible dullness of it!"

"Suppose you were right. Even so, don't you think you waste a lot of
thundering on one poor scared little town? Kind of mean!"

"I tell you it's dull. DULL!"

"The folks don't find it dull. These couples like the Haydocks have a
high old time; dances and cards----"

"They don't. They're bored. Almost every one here is. Vacuousness and
bad manners and spiteful gossip--that's what I hate."

"Those things--course they're here. So are they in Boston! And every
place else! Why, the faults you find in this town are simply human
nature, and never will be changed."

"Perhaps. But in a Boston all the good Carols (I'll admit I have no
faults) can find one another and play. But here--I'm alone, in a stale
pool--except as it's stirred by the great Mr. Bresnahan!"

"My Lord, to hear you tell it, a fellow 'd think that all the denizens,
as you impolitely call 'em, are so confoundedly unhappy that it's a
wonder they don't all up and commit suicide. But they seem to struggle
along somehow!"

"They don't know what they miss. And anybody can endure anything. Look
at men in mines and in prisons."

He drew up on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. He glanced across
the reeds reflected on the water, the quiver of wavelets like crumpled
tinfoil, the distant shores patched with dark woods, silvery oats and
deep yellow wheat. He patted her hand. "Sis----Carol, you're a darling
girl, but you're difficult. Know what I think?"

"Yes."

"Humph. Maybe you do, but----My humble (not too humble!) opinion is that
you like to be different. You like to think you're peculiar. Why, if you
knew how many tens of thousands of women, especially in New York, say
just what you do, you'd lose all the fun of thinking you're a lone
genius and you'd be on the band-wagon whooping it up for Gopher Prairie
and a good decent family life. There's always about a million young
women just out of college who want to teach their grandmothers how to
suck eggs."

"How proud you are of that homely rustic metaphor! You use it at
'banquets' and directors' meetings, and boast of your climb from a
humble homestead."

"Huh! You may have my number. I'm not telling. But look here: You're
so prejudiced against Gopher Prairie that you overshoot the mark;
you antagonize those who might be inclined to agree with you in some
particulars but----Great guns, the town can't be all wrong!"

"No, it isn't. But it could be. Let me tell you a fable. Imagine a
cavewoman complaining to her mate. She doesn't like one single thing;
she hates the damp cave, the rats running over her bare legs, the stiff
skin garments, the eating of half-raw meat, her husband's bushy face,
the constant battles, and the worship of the spirits who will hoodoo her
unless she gives the priests her best claw necklace. Her man protests,
'But it can't all be wrong!' and he thinks he has reduced her to
absurdity. Now you assume that a world which produces a Percy Bresnahan
and a Velvet Motor Company must be civilized. It is? Aren't we only
about half-way along in barbarism? I suggest Mrs. Bogart as a test. And
we'll continue in barbarism just as long as people as nearly intelligent
as you continue to defend things as they are because they are."

"You're a fair spieler, child. But, by golly, I'd like to see you try
to design a new manifold, or run a factory and keep a lot of your fellow
reds from Czech-slovenski-magyar-godknowswheria on the job! You'd drop
your theories so darn quick! I'm not any defender of things as they are.
Sure. They're rotten. Only I'm sensible."

He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty
to friends. She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside
of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when
an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing
statistics.

He was so much the man, the worker, the friend, that she liked him when
she most tried to stand out against him; he was so much the successful
executive that she did not want him to despise her. His manner of
sneering at what he called "parlor socialists" (though the phrase was
not overwhelmingly new) had a power which made her wish to placate his
company of well-fed, speed-loving administrators. When he demanded,
"Would you like to associate with nothing but a lot of turkey-necked,
horn-spectacled nuts that have adenoids and need a hair-cut, and that
spend all their time kicking about 'conditions' and never do a lick of
work?" she said, "No, but just the same----" When he asserted, "Even
if your cavewoman was right in knocking the whole works, I bet some
red-blooded Regular Fellow, some real He-man, found her a nice dry cave,
and not any whining criticizing radical," she wriggled her head feebly,
between a nod and a shake.

His large hands, sensual lips, easy voice supported his self-confidence.
He made her feel young and soft--as Kennicott had once made her feel.
She had nothing to say when he bent his powerful head and experimented,
"My dear, I'm sorry I'm going away from this town. You'd be a darling
child to play with. You ARE pretty! Some day in Boston I'll show you how
we buy a lunch. Well, hang it, got to be starting back."

The only answer to his gospel of beef which she could find, when she was
home, was a wail of "But just the same----"

She did not see him again before he departed for Washington.

His eyes remained. His glances at her lips and hair and shoulders had
revealed to her that she was not a wife-and-mother alone, but a girl;
that there still were men in the world, as there had been in college
days.

That admiration led her to study Kennicott, to tear at the shroud of
intimacy, to perceive the strangeness of the most familiar.

 This is Vida Sherwin's chapter. In a flashback, the reader glimpses Vida's early life in a "hill-smothered Wisconsin village," her high-school teaching career, and her relation to Kennicott before his marriage. Although she had not encouraged Kennicott's few attempts at lovemaking five years before, she feels now that he is a rejected suitor. From the first she takes an intense interest in Carol. Vida discovers, at Mrs. Gurrey's boarding house, that Raymie Wutherspoon is a superior individual, and the two fall in love. She is thirty-nine and he a year younger. Vida advises her admirer about his clothes and his job. When he is about to dodge the issue, she encourages him into a proposal and they are married in June. She resigns from the high-school faculty except for one class in English. Household chores delight her. Soon she pushes her husband into a one-sixth partnership in the Haydock store, and he becomes a "glorified floorwalker." Vida no longer envies Carol. Carol is puzzled by Vida's reaction to married life. Carol's disconcerting habit of buying books is in turn an enigma to her husband. As a result of reading stories and seeing modern plays, Carol is more disgusted than ever with the traditions of the American small town. She considers the image of the American village as an abode of friendship and integrity forty years out of date. Even foreigners are affected by small-town dullness, in one generation casting aside their colorful native customs and dress and becoming conformists. Vida thinks that Ray would have made a wonderful rector, but that it is too late now. Small towns are not only dull, but they are also infested with curiosity. Such a society produces cheap automobiles, dollar watches and safety razors, and "small busy men" of "the cash register and the comic film." Always west of Pittsburgh and sometimes east of it are "the same railroad station, the same Ford garage . . . the same box-like houses and two-story shops." Carol is a perfectionist who hates mediocrity. Vida has won more by patient persistence, however, than has Carol with her spurts of sudden reform. The school is promised a better ventilation system, and a small park is promised near the railroad station. A new school is to be built as soon as war conditions permit. Vida considers the participation in baby welfare week Carol's best accomplishment in Gopher Prairie. The two campaign for a village nurse to attend poor families. Carol, however, wants results now and is not content with Vida's slower methods of bringing ideas to fruition. Less than a year after his marriage to Vida, Raymie Wutherspoon is in officers' training camp, coming out as a first lieutenant in the infantry and early being sent abroad. Some members of prominent families are drafted, but most draftees are sons of German and Swedish immigrants. Cy Bogart, now nineteen and a big bully, has not gone to war. Kennicott wants to go when other doctors join the medical corps, but he is encouraged to wait because of the shortage of medical men at home. Carol and her friends exchange bridge for rolling bandages, but there is no great psychological change. Miles Bjornstam takes a cynical attitude toward the war and its losses. The great and fabulous Percy Bresnahan returns to Gopher Prairie for a brief visit before becoming a dollar-a-year man in Washington. He calls on the Kennicotts, bringing a toy for the child. Carol is vaguely afraid of his overwhelming vitality and buoyant familiarity. The Kennicotts join the Elders and the Clarks in entertaining Bresnahan with a fishing party at Red Squaw Lake. The "great man come home" claims to have inside information about every phase of the war, though most of his opinions are disproved later. Bresnahan borrows Jackson Elder's Cadillac and invites Carol to ride with him. He realizes that she considers him a big bluff and that she does not care for Gopher Prairie. She admits a longing for people of her own kind, mostly found in cities. Though she does not admire Bresnahan, her contact with him leads her to study her husband more closely.

