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_ CHAPTER III
UNDER the rolling clouds of the prairie a moving mass of
steel. An irritable clank and rattle beneath a prolonged roar.
The sharp scent of oranges cutting the soggy smell of
unbathed people and ancient baggage.
Towns as planless as a scattering of pasteboard boxes on an
attic floor. The stretch of faded gold stubble broken only by
clumps of willows encircling white houses and red barns.
No. 7, the way train, grumbling through Minnesota,
imperceptibly climbing the giant tableland that slopes in a
thousand-mile rise from hot Mississippi bottoms to the Rockies.
It is September, hot, very dusty.
There is no smug Pullman attached to the train, and the
day coaches of the East are replaced by free chair cars, with
each seat cut into two adjustable plush chairs, the head-rests
covered with doubtful linen towels. Halfway down the car is
a semi-partition of carved oak columns, but the aisle is of
bare, splintery, grease-blackened wood. There is no porter,
no pillows, no provision for beds, but all today and all tonight
they will ride in this long steel box-farmers with perpetually
tired wives and children who seem all to be of the same age;
workmen going to new jobs; traveling salesmen with derbies
and freshly shined shoes.
They are parched and cramped, the lines of their hands filled
with grime; they go to sleep curled in distorted attitudes, heads
against the window-panes or propped on rolled coats on seat-
arms, and legs thrust into the aisle. They do not read;
apparently they do not think. They wait. An early-wrinkled,
young-old mother, moving as though her joints were dry, opens
a suit-case in which are seen creased blouses, a pair of slippers
worn through at the toes, a bottle of patent medicine, a tin
cup, a paper-covered book about dreams which the news-
butcher has coaxed her into buying. She brings out a graham
cracker which she feeds to a baby lying flat on a seat and
wailing hopelessly. Most of the crumbs drop on the red plush
of the seat, and the woman sighs and tries to brush them
away, but they leap up impishly and fall back on the plush.
A soiled man and woman munch sandwiches and throw the
crusts on the floor. A large brick-colored Norwegian takes off
his shoes, grunts in relief, and props his feet in their thick
gray socks against the seat in front of him.
An old woman whose toothless mouth shuts like a mud-
turtle's, and whose hair is not so much white as yellow like
moldy linen, with bands of pink skull apparent between the
tresses, anxiously lifts her bag, opens it, peers in, closes it, puts
it under the seat, and hastily picks it up and opens it and hides
it all over again. The bag is full of treasures and of memories:
a leather buckle, an ancient band-concert program, scraps
of ribbon, lace, satin. In the aisle beside her is an extremely
indignant parrakeet in a cage.
Two facing seats, overflowing with a Slovene iron-miner's
family, are littered with shoes, dolls, whisky bottles, bundles
wrapped in newspapers, a sewing bag. The oldest boy takes
a mouth-organ out of his coat pocket, wipes the tobacco
crumbs off, and plays "Marching through Georgia" till every
head in the car begins to ache.
The news-butcher comes through selling chocolate bars and
lemon drops. A girl-child ceaselessly trots down to the water-
cooler and back to her seat. The stiff paper envelope which
she uses for cup drips in the aisle as she goes, and on each trip
she stumbles over the feet of a carpenter, who grunts, "Ouch!
Look out!"
The dust-caked doors are open, and from the smoking-car
drifts back a visible blue line of stinging tobacco smoke, and
with it a crackle of laughter over the story which the young
man in the bright blue suit and lavender tie and light yellow
shoes has just told to the squat man in garage overalls.
The smell grows constantly thicker, more stale.
II
To each of the passengers his seat was his temporary home,
and most of the passengers were slatternly housekeepers. But
one seat looked clean and deceptively cool. In it were an
obviously prosperous man and a black-haired, fine-skinned girl
whose pumps rested on an immaculate horsehide bag.
They were Dr. Will Kennicott and his bride, Carol.
They had been married at the end of a year of conversational
courtship, and they were on their way to Gopher Prairie
after a wedding journey in the Colorado mountains.
The hordes of the way-train were not altogether new to
Carol. She had seen them on trips from St. Paul to Chicago.
But now that they had become her own people, to bathe and
encourage and adorn, she had an acute and uncomfortable
interest in them. They distressed her. They were so stolid.
She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry,
and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination
and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a
traveling man working over his order-blanks. But the older
people, Yankees as well as Norwegians, Germans, Finns,
Canucks, had settled into submission to poverty. They were
peasants, she groaned.
"Isn't there any way of waking them up? What would
happen if they understood scientific agriculture?" she begged
of Kennicott, her hand groping for his.
It had been a transforming honeymoon. She had been
frightened to discover how tumultuous a feeling could be
roused in her. Will had been lordly--stalwart, jolly, impressively
competent in making camp, tender and understanding
through the hours when they had lain side by side in a tent
pitched among pines high up on a lonely mountain spur.
His hand swallowed hers as he started from thoughts of
the practise to which he was returning. "These people? Wake
'em up? What for? They're happy."
"But they're so provincial. No, that isn't what I mean.
They're--oh, so sunk in the mud."
"Look here, Carrie. You want to get over your city idea
that because a man's pants aren't pressed, he's a fool. These
farmers are mighty keen and up-and-coming."
"I know! That's what hurts. Life seems so hard for them
--these lonely farms and this gritty train."
"Oh, they don't mind it. Besides, things are changing.
The auto, the telephone, rural free delivery; they're bringing
the farmers in closer touch with the town. Takes time, you
know, to change a wilderness like this was fifty years ago.
But already, why, they can hop into the Ford or the Overland
and get in to the movies on Saturday evening quicker than you
could get down to 'em by trolley in St. Paul."
"But if it's these towns we've been passing that the farmers
run to for relief from their bleakness Can't you understand?
Just LOOK at them!"
Kennicott was amazed. Ever since childhood he had seen
these towns from trains on this same line. He grumbled,
"Why, what's the matter with 'em? Good hustling burgs. It
would astonish you to know how much wheat and rye and
corn and potatoes they ship in a year."
"But they're so ugly."
"I'll admit they aren't comfy like Gopher Prairie. But
give 'em time."
"What's the use of giving them time unless some one has
desire and training enough to plan them? Hundreds of factories
trying to make attractive motor cars, but these towns--
left to chance. No! That can't be true. It must have taken
genius to make them so scrawny!"
"Oh, they're not so bad," was all he answered. He
pretended that his hand was the cat and hers the mouse. For
the first time she tolerated him rather than encouraged him.
She was staring out at Schoenstrom, a hamlet of perhaps a
hundred and fifty inhabitants, at which the train was stopping.
A bearded German and his pucker-mouthed wife tugged their
enormous imitation-leather satchel from under a seat and
waddled out. The station agent hoisted a dead calf aboard the
baggage-car. There were no other visible activities in
Schoenstrom. In the quiet of the halt, Carol could hear a horse
kicking his stall, a carpenter shingling a roof.
The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one
block, facing the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops
covered with galvanized iron, or with clapboards painted red
and bilious yellow. The buildings were as ill-assorted, as
temporary-looking, as a mining-camp street in the motion-pictures.
The railroad station was a one-room frame box, a mirey cattle-
pen on one side and a crimson wheat-elevator on the other.
The elevator, with its cupola on the ridge of a shingled roof,
resembled a broad-shouldered man with a small, vicious,
pointed head. The only habitable structures to be seen were
the florid red-brick Catholic church and rectory at the end of
Main Street.
Carol picked at Kennicott's sleeve. "You wouldn't call this
a not-so-bad town, would you?"
"These Dutch burgs ARE kind of slow. Still, at that----
See that fellow coming out of the general store there, getting
into the big car? I met him once. He owns about half the
town, besides the store. Rauskukle, his name is. He owns a
lot of mortgages, and he gambles in farm-lands. Good nut on
him, that fellow. Why, they say he's worth three or four
hundred thousand dollars! Got a dandy great big yellow
brick house with tiled walks and a garden and everything, other
end of town--can't see it from here--I've gone past it when
I've driven through here. Yes sir!"
"Then, if he has all that, there's no excuse whatever for this
place! If his three hundred thousand went back into the town,
where it belongs, they could burn up these shacks, and build
a dream-village, a jewel! Why do the farmers and the town-
people let the Baron keep it?"
"I must say I don't quite get you sometimes, Carrie. Let
him? They can't help themselves! He's a dumm old Dutchman,
and probably the priest can twist him around his finger,
but when it comes to picking good farming land, he's a regular
wiz!"
"I see. He's their symbol of beauty. The town erects him,
instead of erecting buildings."
"Honestly, don't know what you're driving at. You're kind
of played out, after this long trip. You'll feel better when you
get home and have a good bath, and put on the blue negligee.
That's some vampire costume, you witch!"
He squeezed her arm, looked at her knowingly.
They moved on from the desert stillness of the Schoenstrom
station. The train creaked, banged, swayed. The air was
nauseatingly thick. Kennicott turned her face from the window,
rested her head on his shoulder. She was coaxed from
her unhappy mood. But she came out of it unwillingly, and
when Kennicott was satisfied that he had corrected all her
worries and had opened a magazine of saffron detective stories,
she sat upright.
Here--she meditated--is the newest empire of the world;
the Northern Middlewest; a land of dairy herds and exquisite
lakes, of new automobiles and tar-paper shanties and silos likes
red towers, of clumsy speech and a hope that is boundless. An
empire which feeds a quarter of the world--yet its work is
merely begun. They are pioneers, these sweaty wayfarers, for
all their telephones and bank-accounts and automatic pianos
and co-operative leagues. And for all its fat richness, theirs
is a pioneer land. What is its future? she wondered. A
future of cities and factory smut where now are loping empty
fields? Homes universal and secure? Or placid chateaux
ringed with sullen huts? Youth free to find knowledge and
laughter? Willingness to sift the sanctified lies? Or creamy-
skinned fat women, smeared with grease and chalk, gorgeous in
the skins of beasts and the bloody feathers of slain birds,
playing bridge with puffy pink-nailed jeweled fingers, women who
after much expenditure of labor and bad temper still grotesquely
resemble their own flatulent lap-dogs? The ancient stale
inequalities, or something different in history, unlike the
tedious maturity of other empires? What future and what
hope?
Carol's head ached with the riddle.
She saw the prairie, flat in giant patches or rolling in long
hummocks. The width and bigness of it, which had expanded
her spirit an hour ago, began to frighten her. It spread out
so; it went on so uncontrollably; she could never know it.
Kennicott was closeted in his detective story. With the loneliness
which comes most depressingly in the midst of many
people she tried to forget problems, to look at the prairie
objectively.
The grass beside the railroad had been burnt over; it was
a smudge prickly with charred stalks of weeds. Beyond the
undeviating barbed-wire fences were clumps of golden rod.
Only this thin hedge shut them off from the plains-shorn
wheat-lands of autumn, a hundred acres to a field, prickly and
gray near-by but in the blurred distance like tawny velvet
stretched over dipping hillocks. The long rows of wheat-
shocks marched like soldiers in worn yellow tabards. The
newly plowed fields were black banners fallen on the distant
slope. It was a martial immensity, vigorous, a little harsh,
unsoftened by kindly gardens.
The expanse was relieved by clumps of oaks with patches
of short wild grass; and every mile or two was a chain of
cobalt slews, with the flicker of blackbirds' wings across
them.
All this working land was turned into exuberance by the
light. The sunshine was dizzy on open stubble; shadows from
immense cumulus clouds were forever sliding across low
mounds; and the sky was wider and loftier and more resolutely
blue than the sky of cities. . .she declared.
"It's a glorious country; a land to be big in," she crooned.
Then Kennicott startled her by chuckling, "D' you realize
the town after the next is Gopher Prairie? Home!"
III
That one word--home--it terrified her. Had she really
bound herself to live, inescapably, in this town called Gopher
Prairie? And this thick man beside her, who dared to define
her future, he was a stranger! She turned in her seat, stared
at him. Who was he? Why was he sitting with her? He
wasn't of her kind! His neck was heavy; his speech was
heavy; he was twelve or thirteen years older than she; and
about him was none of the magic of shared adventures and
eagerness. She could not believe that she had ever slept
in his arms. That was one of the dreams which you had but
did not officially admit.
She told herself how good he was, how dependable and
understanding. She touched his ear, smoothed the plane of his
solid jaw, and, turning away again, concentrated upon liking
his town. It wouldn't be like these barren settlements. It
couldn't be! Why, it had three thousand population. That
was a great many people. There would be six hundred houses
or more. And---- The lakes near it would be so lovely.
She'd seen them in the photographs. They had looked
charming. . .hadn't they?
As the train left Wahkeenyan she began nervously to watch
for the lakes--the entrance to all her future life. But when
she discovered them, to the left of the track, her only
impression of them was that they resembled the photographs.
A mile from Gopher Prairie the track mounts a curving low
ridge, and she could see the town as a whole. With a passionate
jerk she pushed up the window, looked out, the arched fingers
of her left hand trembling on the sill, her right hand at her
breast.
And she saw that Gopher Prairie was merely an enlargement
of all the hamlets which they had been passing. Only to the
eyes of a Kennicott was it exceptional. The huddled low
wooden houses broke the plains scarcely more than would a
hazel thicket. The fields swept up to it, past it. It was
unprotected and unprotecting; there was no dignity in it nor
any hope of greatness. Only the tall red grain-elevator and a
few tinny church-steeples rose from the mass. It was a
frontier camp. It was not a place to live in, not possibly,
not conceivably.
The people--they'd be as drab as their houses, as flat as
their fields. She couldn't stay here. She would have to
wrench loose from this man, and flee.
She peeped at him. She was at once helpless before his
mature fixity, and touched by his excitement as he sent his
magazine skittering along the aisle, stooped for their bags, came
up with flushed face, and gloated, "Here we are!"
She smiled loyally, and looked away. The train was entering
town. The houses on the outskirts were dusky old red
mansions with wooden frills, or gaunt frame shelters like grocery
boxes, or new bungalows with concrete foundations imitating
stone.
Now the train was passing the elevator, the grim storage-
tanks for oil, a creamery, a lumber-yard, a stock-yard muddy
and trampled and stinking. Now they were stopping at a
squat red frame station, the platform crowded with unshaven
farmers and with loafers--unadventurous people with dead
eyes. She was here. She could not go on. It was the end--
the end of the world. She sat with closed eyes, longing to
push past Kennicott, hide somewhere in the train, flee on
toward the Pacific.
Something large arose in her soul and commanded, "Stop
it! Stop being a whining baby!" She stood up quickly; she
said, "Isn't it wonderful to be here at last!"
He trusted her so. She would make herself like the place.
And she was going to do tremendous things----
She followed Kennicott and the bobbing ends of the two bags
which he carried. They were held back by the slow line of
disembarking passengers. She reminded herself that she was
actually at the dramatic moment of the bride's home-coming.
She ought to feel exalted. She felt nothing at all except
irritation at their slow progress toward the door.
Kennicott stooped to peer through the windows. He shyly
exulted:
"Look! Look! There's a bunch come down to welcome us!
Sam Clark and the missus and Dave Dyer and Jack Elder,
and, yes sir, Harry Haydock and Juanita, and a whole crowd!
I guess they see us now. Yuh, yuh sure, they see us! See 'em
waving!"
She obediently bent her head to look out at them. She had
hold of herself. She was ready to love them. But she was
embarrassed by the heartiness of the cheering group. From
the vestibule she waved to them, but she clung a second to the
sleeve of the brakeman who helped her down before she had
the courage to dive into the cataract of hand-shaking people,
people whom she could not tell apart. She had the impression
that all the men had coarse voices, large damp hands, tooth-
brush mustaches, bald spots, and Masonic watch-charms.
She knew that they were welcoming her. Their hands, their
smiles, their shouts, their affectionate eyes overcame her. She
stammered, "Thank you, oh, thank you!"
One of the men was clamoring at Kennicott, "I brought my
machine down to take you home, doc."
"Fine business, Sam!" cried Kennicott; and, to Carol,
"Let's jump in. That big Paige over there. Some boat, too,
believe me! Sam can show speed to any of these Marmons
from Minneapolis!"
Only when she was in the motor car did she distinguish the
three people who were to accompany them. The owner, now
at the wheel, was the essence of decent self-satisfaction; a
baldish, largish, level-eyed man, rugged of neck but sleek and
round of face--face like the back of a spoon bowl. He was
chuckling at her, "Have you got us all straight yet?"
"Course she has! Trust Carrie to get things straight and
get 'em darn quick! I bet she could tell you every date in
history!" boasted her husband.
But the man looked at her reassuringly and with a certainty
that he was a person whom she could trust she confessed,
"As a matter of fact I haven't got anybody straight."
"Course you haven't, child. Well, I'm Sam Clark, dealer
in hardware, sporting goods, cream separators, and almost any
kind of heavy junk you can think of. You can call me Sam--
anyway, I'm going to call you Carrie, seein' 's you've been
and gone and married this poor fish of a bum medic that we
keep round here." Carol smiled lavishly, and wished that she
called people by their given names more easily. "The fat
cranky lady back there beside you, who is pretending that she
can't hear me giving her away, is Mrs. Sam'l Clark; and this
hungry-looking squirt up here beside me is Dave Dyer, who
keeps his drug store running by not filling your hubby's
prescriptions right--fact you might say he's the guy that put the
`shun' in `prescription.' So! Well, leave us take the bonny
bride home. Say, doc, I'll sell you the Candersen place for
three thousand plunks. Better be thinking about building a
new home for Carrie. Prettiest Frau in G. P., if you asks me!"
Contentedly Sam Clark drove off, in the heavy traffic of
three Fords and the Mirmiemashie House Free 'Bus.
"I shall like Mr. Clark. . .I CAN'T call him `Sam'!
They're all so friendly." She glanced at the houses; tried
not to see what she saw; gave way in: "Why do these stories
lie so? They always make the bride's home-coming a bower
of roses. Complete trust in noble spouse. Lies about
marriage. I'm NOT changed. And this town--O my God! I
can't go through with it. This junk-heap!"
Her husband bent over her. "You look like you were in
a brown study. Scared? I don't expect you to think Gopher
Prairie is a paradise, after St. Paul. I don't expect you to be
crazy about it, at first. But you'll come to like it so much--
life's so free here and best people on earth."
She whispered to him (while Mrs. Clark considerately
turned away), "I love you for understanding. I'm just--I'm
beastly over-sensitive. Too many books. It's my lack of
shoulder-muscles and sense. Give me time, dear."
"You bet! All the time you want!"
She laid the back of his hand against her cheek, snuggled
near him. She was ready for her new home.
Kennicott had told her that, with his widowed mother as
housekeeper, he had occupied an old house, "but nice and
roomy, and well-heated, best furnace I could find on the
market." His mother had left Carol her love, and gone back
to Lac-qui-Meurt.
It would be wonderful, she exulted, not to have to live in
Other People's Houses, but to make her own shrine. She
held his hand tightly and stared ahead as the car swung
round a corner and stopped in the street before a prosaic
frame house in a small parched lawn.
IV
A concrete sidewalk with a "parking" of grass and mud.
A square smug brown house, rather damp. A narrow concrete
walk up to it. Sickly yellow leaves in a windrow with dried
wings of box-elder seeds and snags of wool from the cotton-
woods. A screened porch with pillars of thin painted pine
surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed
wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze. A lugubrious
bay-window to the right of the porch. Window curtains
of starched cheap lace revealing a pink marble table with a
conch shell and a Family Bible.
"You'll find it old-fashioned--what do you call it?--Mid-
Victorian. I left it as is, so you could make any changes you
felt were necessary." Kennicott sounded doubtful for the
first time since he had come back to his own.
"It's a real home!" She was moved by his humility. She
gaily motioned good-by to the Clarks. He unlocked the door--
he was leaving the choice of a maid to her, and there was
no one in the house. She jiggled while he turned the key,
and scampered in. . . . It was next day before either
of them remembered that in their honeymoon camp they had
planned that he should carry her over the sill.
In hallway and front parlor she was conscious of dinginess
and lugubriousness and airlessness, but she insisted, "I'll make
it all jolly." As she followed Kennicott and the bags up to
their bedroom she quavered to herself the song of the fat
little-gods of the hearth:
I have my own home,
To do what I please with,
To do what I please with,
My den for me and my mate and my cubs,
My own!
She was close in her husband's arms; she clung to him;
whatever of strangeness and slowness and insularity she might
find in him, none of that mattered so long as she could slip
her hands beneath his coat, run her fingers over the warm
smoothness of the satin back of his waistcoat, seem almost to
creep into his body, find in him strength, find in the courage
and kindness of her man a shelter from the perplexing world.
"Sweet, so sweet," she whispered.
CHAPTER III - Novel: Main Street - Author: Sinclair Lewis
_
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