________________________________________________
_ CHAPTER X
THE house was haunted, long before evening. Shadows slipped
down the walls and waited behind every chair.
Did that door move?
No. She wouldn't go to the Jolly Seventeen. She hadn't
energy enough to caper before them, to smile blandly at
Juanita's rudeness. Not today. But she did want a party.
Now! If some one would come in this afternoon, some one
who liked her--Vida or Mrs. Sam Clark or old Mrs. Champ
Perry or gentle Mrs. Dr. Westlake. Or Guy Pollock! She'd
telephone----
No. That wouldn't be it. They must come of themselves.
Perhaps they would.
Why not?
She'd have tea ready, anyway. If they came--splendid.
If not--what did she care? She wasn't going to yield to the
village and let down; she was going to keep up a belief in the
rite of tea, to which she had always looked forward as the
symbol of a leisurely fine existence. And it would be just
as much fun, even if it was so babyish, to have tea by herself
and pretend that she was entertaining clever men. It
would!
She turned the shining thought into action. She bustled to
the kitchen, stoked the wood-range, sang Schumann while she
boiled the kettle, warmed up raisin cookies on a newspaper
spread on the rack in the oven. She scampered up-stairs to
bring down her filmiest tea-cloth. She arranged a silver tray.
She proudly carried it into the living-room and set it on the
long cherrywood table, pushing aside a hoop of embroidery,
a volume of Conrad from the library, copies of the Saturday
Evening Post, the Literary Digest, and Kennicott's National
Geographic Magazine.
She moved the tray back and forth and regarded the effect.
She shook her head. She busily unfolded the sewing-table
set it in the bay-window, patted the tea-cloth to smoothness,
moved the tray. "Some time I'll have a mahogany tea-table,"
she said happily.
She had brought in two cups, two plates. For herself, a
straight chair, but for the guest the big wing-chair, which she
pantingly tugged to the table.
She had finished all the preparations she could think of. She
sat and waited. She listened for the door-bell, the telephone.
Her eagerness was stilled. Her hands drooped.
Surely Vida Sherwin would hear the summons.
She glanced through the bay-window. Snow was sifting over
the ridge of the Howland house like sprays of water from a
hose. The wide yards across the street were gray with moving
eddies. The black trees shivered. The roadway was gashed
with ruts of ice.
She looked at the extra cup and plate. She looked at
the wing-chair. It was so empty.
The tea was cold in the pot. With wearily dipping fingertip
she tested it. Yes. Quite cold. She couldn't wait any
longer.
The cup across from her was icily clean, glisteningly empty.
Simply absurd to wait. She poured her own cup of tea. She
sat and stared at it. What was it she was going to do now?
Oh yes; how idiotic; take a lump of sugar.
She didn't want the beastly tea.
She was springing up. She was on the couch, sobbing.
II
She was thinking more sharply than she had for weeks.
She reverted to her resolution to change the town--awaken
it, prod it, "reform" it. What if they were wolves instead
of lambs? They'd eat her all the sooner if she was meek to
them. Fight or be eaten. It was easier to change the town
completely than to conciliate it! She could not take their point
of view; it was a negative thing; an intellectual squalor; a
swamp of prejudices and fears. She would have to make them
take hers. She was not a Vincent de Paul, to govern and
mold a people. What of that? The tiniest change in their
distrust of beauty would be the beginning of the end; a seed
to sprout and some day with thickening roots to crack their
wall of mediocrity. If she could not, as she desired, do a
great thing nobly and with laughter, yet she need not be con-
tent with village nothingness. She would plant one seed in the
blank wall.
Was she just? Was it merely a blank wall, this town which
to three thousand and more people was the center of the
universe? Hadn't she, returning from Lac-qui-Meurt, felt the
heartiness of their greetings? No. The ten thousand Gopher
Prairies had no monopoly of greetings and friendly hands. Sam
Clark was no more loyal than girl librarians she knew in St.
Paul, the people she had met in Chicago. And those others
had so much that Gopher Prairie complacently lacked--the
world of gaiety and adventure, of music and the integrity of
bronze, of remembered mists from tropic isles and Paris nights
and the walls of Bagdad, of industrial justice and a God who
spake not in doggerel hymns.
One seed. Which seed it was did not matter. All knowledge
and freedom were one. But she had delayed so long in
finding that seed. Could she do something with this Thanatopsis
Club? Or should she make her house so charming that
it would be an influence? She'd make Kennicott like poetry.
That was it, for a beginning! She conceived so clear a picture
of their bending over large fair pages by the fire (in a non-
existent fireplace) that the spectral presences slipped away.
Doors no longer moved; curtains were not creeping shadows
but lovely dark masses in the dusk; and when Bea came home
Carol was singing at the piano which she had not touched for
many days.
Their supper was the feast of two girls. Carol was in the
dining-room, in a frock of black satin edged with gold, and
Bea, in blue gingham and an apron, dined in the kitchen; but
the door was open between, and Carol was inquiring, "Did
you see any ducks in Dahl's window?" and Bea chanting,
"No, ma'am. Say, ve have a svell time, dis afternoon. Tina
she have coffee and knackebrod, and her fella vos dere, and
ve yoost laughed and laughed, and her fella say he vos president
and he going to make me queen of Finland, and Ay stick a
fedder in may hair and say Ay bane going to go to var--oh,
ve vos so foolish and ve LAUGH so!"
When Carol sat at the piano again she did not think of
her husband but of the book-drugged hermit, Guy Pollock.
She wished that Pollock would come calling.
"If a girl really kissed him, he'd creep out of his den and
be human. If Will were as literate as Guy, or Guy were as
executive as Will, I think I could endure even Gopher Prairie.
"It's so hard to mother Will. I could be maternal with
Guy. Is that what I want, something to mother, a man or
a baby or a town? I WILL have a baby. Some day. But to
have him isolated here all his receptive years----
"And so to bed.
"Have I found my real level in Bea and kitchen-gossip?
"Oh, I do miss you, Will. But it will be pleasant to turn
over in bed as often as I want to, without worrying about
waking you up.
"Am I really this settled thing called a `married woman'?
I feel so unmarried tonight. So free. To think that there
was once a Mrs. Kennicott who let herself worry over a town
called Gopher Prairie when there was a whole world outside
it!
"Of course Will is going to like poetry."
III
A black February day. Clouds hewn of ponderous timber
weighing down on the earth; an irresolute dropping of snow
specks upon the trampled wastes. Gloom but no veiling of
angularity. The lines of roofs and sidewalks sharp and
inescapable.
The second day of Kennicott's absence.
She fled from the creepy house for a walk. It was thirty
below zero; too cold to exhilarate her. In the spaces between
houses the wind caught her. It stung, it gnawed at nose and
ears and aching cheeks, and she hastened from shelter to
shelter, catching her breath in the lee of a barn, grateful for
the protection of a billboard covered with ragged posters showing
layer under layer of paste-smeared green and streaky red.
The grove of oaks at the end of the street suggested Indians,
hunting, snow-shoes, and she struggled past the earth-banked
cottages to the open country, to a farm and a low hill
corrugated with hard snow. In her loose nutria coat, seal
toque, virginal cheeks unmarked by lines of village jealousies,
she was as out of place on this dreary hillside as a scarlet
tanager on an ice-floe. She looked down on Gopher Prairie.
The snow, stretching without break from streets to devouring
prairie beyond, wiped out the town's pretense of being a shelter.
The houses were black specks on a white sheet. Her heart
shivered with that still loneliness as her body shivered with
the wind.
She ran back into the huddle of streets, all the while
protesting that she wanted a city's yellow glare of shop-windows
and restaurants, or the primitive forest with hooded furs and
a rifle, or a barnyard warm and steamy, noisy with hens and
cattle, certainly not these dun houses, these yards choked with
winter ash-piles, these roads of dirty snow and clotted frozen
mud. The zest of winter was gone. Three months more, till
May, the cold might drag on, with the snow ever filthier, the
weakened body less resistent. She wondered why the good
citizens insisted on adding the chill of prejudice, why they
did not make the houses of their spirits more warm and frivolous,
like the wise chatterers of Stockholm and Moscow.
She circled the outskirts of the town and viewed the slum
of "Swede Hollow." Wherever as many as three houses are
gathered there will be a slum of at least one house. In
Gopher Prairie, the Sam Clarks boasted, "you don't get any of
this poverty that you find in cities--always plenty of work--
no need of charity--man got to be blame shiftless if he don't
get ahead." But now that the summer mask of leaves and
grass was gone, Carol discovered misery and dead hope. In
a shack of thin boards covered with tar-paper she saw the
washerwoman, Mrs. Steinhof, working in gray steam. Outside,
her six-year-old boy chopped wood. He had a torn jacket,
muffler of a blue like skimmed milk. His hands were covered
with red mittens through which protruded his chapped raw
knuckles. He halted to blow on them, to cry disinterestedly.
A family of recently arrived Finns were camped in an
abandoned stable. A man of eighty was picking up lumps of coal
along the railroad.
She did not know what to do about it. She felt that these
independent citizens, who had been taught that they belonged
to a democracy, would resent her trying to play Lady
Bountiful.
She lost her loneliness in the activity of the village
industries--the railroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the
wheat-elevator, oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks
on the snow, the creamery with the sleds of farmers and piles
of milk-cans, an unexplained stone hut labeled "Danger-.
Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard, where a
utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as he
hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's
small planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and
the burr of circular saws. Most important, the Gopher Prairie
Flour and Milling Company, Lyman, Cass president. Its windows
were blanketed with flour-dust, but it was the most
stirring spot in town. Workmen were wheeling barrels of flour
into a box-car; a farmer sitting on sacks of wheat in a bobsled
argued with the wheat-buyer; machinery within the mill
boomed and whined, water gurgled in the ice-freed mill-race.
The clatter was a relief to Carol after months of smug
houses. She wished that she could work in the mill; that
she did not belong to the caste of professional-man's-wife.
She started for home, through the small slum. Before a
tar-paper shack, at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown
dogskin coat and black plush cap with lappets was watching
her. His square face was confident, his foxy mustache was
picaresque. He stood erect, his hands in his side-pockets, his
pipe puffing slowly. He was forty-five or -six, perhaps.
"How do, Mrs. Kennicott," he drawled.
She recalled him--the town handyman, who had repaired
their furnace at the beginning of winter.
"Oh, how do you do," she fluttered.
"My name 's Bjornstam. `The Red Swede' they call me.
Remember? Always thought I'd kind of like to say howdy
to you again."
"Ye--yes---- I've been exploring the outskirts of town."
"Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and
the Lutheran minister and the priest represent the arts and
sciences. Well, thunder, we submerged tenth down here in
Swede Hollow are no worse off than you folks. Thank God,
we don't have to go and purr at Juanity Haydock at the
Jolly Old Seventeen."
The Carol who regarded herself as completely adaptable
was uncomfortable at being chosen as comrade by a pipe-
reeking odd-job man. Probably he was one of her husband's
patients. But she must keep her dignity.
"Yes, even the Jolly Seventeen isn't always so exciting.
It's very cold again today, isn't it. Well----"
Bjornstam was not respectfully valedictory. He showed no
signs of pulling a forelock. His eyebrows moved as though
they had a life of their own. With a subgrin he went on:
"Maybe I hadn't ought to talk about Mrs. Haydock and
her Solemcholy Seventeen in that fresh way. I suppose I'd
be tickled to death if I was invited to sit in with that gang.
I'm what they call a pariah, I guess. I'm the town badman,
Mrs. Kennicott: town atheist, and I suppose I must be an
anarchist, too. Everybody who doesn't love the bankers and
the Grand Old Republican Party is an anarchist."
Carol had unconsciously slipped from her attitude of
departure into an attitude of listening, her face full toward him,
her muff lowered. She fumbled:
"Yes, I suppose so." Her own grudges came in a flood. "I
don't see why you shouldn't criticize the Jolly Seventeen if
you want to. They aren't sacred."
"Oh yes, they are! The dollar-sign has chased the crucifix
clean off the map. But then, I've got no kick. I do what
I please, and I suppose I ought to let them do the same."
"What do you mean by saying you're a pariah?"
"I'm poor, and yet I don't decently envy the rich. I'm an
old bach. I make enough money for a stake, and then I sit
around by myself, and shake hands with myself, and have a
smoke, and read history, and I don't contribute to the wealth
of Brother Elder or Daddy Cass."
"You---- I fancy you read a good deal."
"Yep. In a hit-or-a-miss way. I'll tell you: I'm a lone
wolf. I trade horses, and saw wood, and work in lumber-camps
--I'm a first-rate swamper. Always wished I could go to
college. Though I s'pose I'd find it pretty slow, and they'd
probably kick me out."
"You really are a curious person, Mr.----"
"Bjornstam. Miles Bjornstam. Half Yank and half Swede.
Usually known as `that damn lazy big-mouthed calamity-howler
that ain't satisfied with the way we run things.' No, I ain't
curious--whatever you mean by that! I'm just a bookworm.
Probably too much reading for the amount of digestion I've
got. Probably half-baked. I'm going to get in `half-baked'
first, and beat you to it, because it's dead sure to be handed
to a radical that wears jeans!"
They grinned together. She demanded:
"You say that the Jolly Seventeen is stupid. What makes
you think so?"
"Oh, trust us borers into the foundation to know about
your leisure class. Fact, Mrs. Kennicott, I'll say that far as
I can make out, the only people in this man's town that do
have any brains--I don't mean ledger-keeping brains or duck-
hunting brains or baby-spanking brains, but real imaginative
brains--are you and me and Guy Pollock and the foreman at
the flour-mill. He's a socialist, the foreman. (Don't tell
Lym Cass that! Lym would fire a socialist quicker than he
would a horse-thief!)"
"Indeed no, I sha'n't tell him."
"This foreman and I have some great set-to's. He's a
regular old-line party-member. Too dogmatic. Expects to
reform everything from deforestration to nosebleed by saying
phrases like `surplus value.' Like reading the prayer-book.
But same time, he's a Plato J. Aristotle compared with people
like Ezry Stowbody or Professor Mott or Julius Flickerbaugh."
"It's interesting to hear about him."
He dug his toe into a drift, like a schoolboy. "Rats. You
mean I talk too much. Well, I do, when I get hold of somebody
like you. You probably want to run along and keep
your nose from freezing."
"Yes, I must go, I suppose. But tell me: Why did you
leave Miss Sherwin, of the high school, out of your list of the
town intelligentsia?"
"I guess maybe she does belong in it. From all I can hear
she's in everything and behind everything that looks like a
reform--lot more than most folks realize. She lets Mrs.
Reverend Warren, the president of this-here Thanatopsis Club,
think she's running the works, but Miss Sherwin is the secret
boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing something.
But way I figure it out---- You see, I'm not interested in these
dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in
this barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing
out the water. And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry
to the crew! Me, I want to yank it up on the ways, and fire
the poor bum of a shoemaker that built it so it sails crooked,
and have it rebuilt right, from the keel up."
"Yes--that--that would be better. But I must run home.
My poor nose is nearly frozen."
"Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an
old bach's shack is like."
She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard
that was littered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless
wash-tub. She was disquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her
the opportunity to be delicate. He flung out his hand in a
welcoming gesture which assumed that she was her own
counselor, that she was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully
a human being. With a shaky, "Well, just a moment, to
warm my nose," she glanced down the street to make sure
that she was not spied on, and bolted toward the shanty.
She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more
considerate host than the Red Swede.
He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench,
wall bunk with amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-
stippled coffee-pot on the shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-
ball stove, backwoods chairs--one constructed from half a
barrel, one from a tilted plank-and a row of books incredibly
assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of
gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise
on "The Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry
and Cattle."
There was but one picture--a magazine color-plate of a
steep-roofed village in the Harz Mountains which suggested
kobolds and maidens with golden hair.
Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, "Might
throw open your coat and put your feet up on the box in front
of the stove." He tossed his dogskin coat into the bunk,
lowered himself into the barrel chair, and droned on:
"Yeh, I'm probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my
independence by doing odd jobs, and that's more 'n these polite
cusses like the clerks in the banks do. When I'm rude to some
slob, it may be partly because I don't know better (and God
knows I'm not no authority on trick forks and what pants you
wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it's because I mean
something. I'm about the only man in Johnson County that
remembers the joker in the Declaration of Independence about
Americans being supposed to have the right to `life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.'
"I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at
me like he wants me to remember he's a highmuckamuck and
worth two hundred thousand dollars, and he says, `Uh, Bjornquist----'
"`Bjornstam's my name, Ezra,' I says. HE knows my name, all rightee.
"`Well, whatever your name is,' he says, `I understand you
have a gasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw
up four cords of maple for me,' he says.
"`So you like my looks, eh?' I says, kind of innocent.
"`What difference does that make? Want you to saw that
wood before Saturday,' he says, real sharp. Common workman
going and getting fresh with a fifth of a million dollars
all walking around in a hand-me-down fur coat!
"`Here's the difference it makes,' I says, just to devil him.
`How do you know I like YOUR looks?' Maybe he didn't look
sore! Nope,' I says, `thinking it all over, I don't like your
application for a loan. Take it to another bank, only there
ain't any,' I says, and I walks off on him.
"Sure. Probably I was surly--and foolish. But I figured there
had to be ONE man in town independent enough to sass the banker!"
He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a
cup, and talked on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful
for friendliness and half amused by her surprise at the
discovery that there was a proletarian philosophy.
At the door, she hinted:
"Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when
people thought you were affected?"
"Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull,
and all over silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals
thought about my flying?"
It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of
Bjornstam's scorn which carried her through town. She faced
Juanita Haydock, cocked her head at Maud Dyer's brief nod,
and came home to Bea radiant. She telephoned Vida Sherwin
to "run over this evening." She lustily played Tschaikowsky--
the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopher of
the tar-paper shack.
(When she hinted to Vida, "Isn't there a man here who
amuses himself by being irreverent to the village gods--Bjornstam,
some such a name?" the reform-leader said "Bjornstam?
Oh yes. Fixes things. He's awfully impertinent.")
IV
Kennicott had returned at midnight. At breakfast he said
four several times that he had missed her every moment.
On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, "The top o' the
mornin' to yez! Going to stop and pass the time of day mit
Sam'l? Warmer, eh? What'd the doc's thermometer say it
was? Say, you folks better come round and visit with us,
one of these evenings. Don't be so dog-gone proud, staying by
yourselves."
Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator,
stopped her in the post-office, held her hand in his withered
paws, peered at her with faded eyes, and chuckled, "You are
so fresh and blooming, my dear. Mother was saying t'other day
that a sight of you was better 'n a dose of medicine."
In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively
buying a modest gray scarf. "We haven't seen you for so
long," she said. "Wouldn't you like to come in and play cribbage,
some evening?" As though he meant it, Pollock begged,
"May I, really?"
While she was purchasing two yards of malines the vocal
Raymie Wutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long sallow face
bobbing, and he besought, "You've just got to come back to
my department and see a pair of patent leather slippers I set
aside for you."
In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced
her boots, tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid on the
slippers. She took them.
"You're a good salesman," she said.
"I'm not a salesman at all! I just like elegant things. All
this is so inartistic." He indicated with a forlornly waving
hand the shelves of shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood
perforated in rosettes, the display of shoe-trees and tin boxes of
blacking, the lithograph of a smirking young woman with cherry
cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry of advertising,
"My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection was till
I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes."
"But sometimes," Raymie sighed, "there is a pair of dainty
little shoes like these, and I set them aside for some one who
will appreciate. When I saw these I said right away, `Wouldn't
it be nice if they fitted Mrs. Kennicott,' and I meant to speak
to you first chance I had. I haven't forgotten our jolly talks
at Mrs. Gurrey's!"
That evening Guy Pollock came in and, though Kennicott
instantly impressed him into a cribbage game, Carol was
happy again.
V
She did not, in recovering something of her buoyancy, forget
her determination to begin the liberalizing of Gopher Prairie
by the easy and agreeable propaganda of teaching Kennicott to
enjoy reading poetry in the lamplight. The campaign was
delayed. Twice he suggested that they call on neighbors;
once he was in the country. The fourth evening he yawned
pleasantly, stretched, and inquired, "Well, what'll we do
tonight? Shall we go to the movies?"
"I know exactly what we're going to do. Now don't ask
questions! Come and sit down by the table. There, are
you comfy? Lean back and forget you're a practical man,
and listen to me."
It may be that she had been influenced by the managerial
Vida Sherwin; certainly she sounded as though she was selling
culture. But she dropped it when she sat on the couch, her
chin in her hands, a volume of Yeats on her knees, and read
aloud.
Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a
prairie town. She was in the world of lonely things--the flutter
of twilight linnets, the aching call of gulls along a shore
to which the netted foam crept out of darkness, the island
of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal glories that
never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold,
the woful incessant chanting and the----
"Heh-cha-cha!" coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She
remembered that he was the sort of person who chewed tobacco.
She glared, while he uneasily petitioned, "That's great stuff.
Study it in college? I like poetry fine--James Whitcomb
Riley and some of Longfellow--this `Hiawatha.' Gosh, I wish
I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But I guess I'm
too old a dog to learn new tricks."
With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to
giggle, she consoled him, "Then let's try some Tennyson.
You've read him?"
"Tennyson? You bet. Read him in school. There's that:
And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell
When I put out to sea,
But let the----
Well, I don't remember all of it but---- Oh, sure! And
there's that `I met a little country boy who----' I don't
remember exactly how it goes, but the chorus ends up, `We
are seven.' "
"Yes. Well---- Shall we try `The Idylls of the King?'
They're so full of color."
"Go to it. Shoot." But he hastened to shelter himself
behind a cigar.
She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an
eye cocked on him, and when she saw how much he was
suffering she ran to him, kissed his forehead, cried, "You poor
forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent turnip!"
"Look here now, that ain't----"
"Anyway, I sha'n't torture you any longer."
She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great
deal of emphasis:
There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the
GRAND Trunk ROAD.
He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and
reassured. But when he complimented her, "That was fine.
I don't know but what you can elocute just as good as Ella
Stowbody," she banged the book and suggested that they were
not too late for the nine o'clock show at the movies.
That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach
divine unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the
lilies of Avalon and the sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at
Ole Jenson's Grocery.
But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered
herself laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an
actor who stuffed spaghetti down a woman's evening frock.
For a second she loathed her laughter; mourned for the day
when on her hill by the Mississippi she had walked the battlements
with queens. But the celebrated cinema jester's conceit
of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into unwilling
tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled
through darkness.
VI
She went to the Jolly Seventeen's afternoon bridge. She
had learned the elements of the game from the Sam Clarks.
She played quietly and reasonably badly. She had no opinions
on anything more polemic than woolen union-suits, a topic on
which Mrs. Howland discoursed for five minutes. She smiled
frequently, and was the complete canary-bird in her manner
of thanking the hostess, Mrs. Dave Dyer.
Her only anxious period was during the conference on husbands.
The young matrons discussed the intimacies of domesticity
with a frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol.
Juanita Haydock communicated Harry's method of shaving,
and his interest in deer-shooting. Mrs. Gougerling reported
fully, and with some irritation, her husband's inappreciation
of liver and bacon. Maud Dyer chronicled Dave's digestive
disorders; quoted a recent bedtime controversy with him in
regard to Christian Science, socks and the sewing of buttons
upon vests; announced that she "simply wasn't going to stand
his always pawing girls when he went and got crazy-jealous if
a man just danced with her"; and rather more than sketched
Dave's varieties of kisses.
So meekly did Carol give attention, so obviously was she at
last desirous of being one of them, that they looked on her
fondly, and encouraged her to give such details of her honeymoon
as might be of interest. She was embarrassed rather
than resentful. She deliberately misunderstood. She talked of
Kennicott's overshoes and medical ideals till they were
thoroughly bored. They regarded her as agreeable but green.
Till the end she labored to satisfy the inquisition. She
bubbled at Juanita, the president of the club, that she wanted
to entertain them. "Only," she said, "I don't know that I
can give you any refreshments as nice as Mrs. Dyer's salad,
or that simply delicious angel's-food we had at your house,
dear."
"Fine! We need a hostess for the seventeenth of March.
Wouldn't it be awfully original if you made it a St. Patrick's
Day bridge! I'll be tickled to death to help you with it.
I'm glad you've learned to play bridge. At first I didn't hardly
know if you were going to like Gopher Prairie. Isn't it dandy
that you've settled down to being homey with us! Maybe
we aren't as highbrow as the Cities, but we do have the daisiest
times and--oh, we go swimming in summer, and dances and--
oh, lots of good times. If folks will just take us as we are,
I think we're a pretty good bunch!"
"I'm sure of it. Thank you so much for the idea about
having a St. Patrick's Day bridge."
"Oh, that's nothing. I always think the Jolly Seventeen
are so good at original ideas. If you knew these other towns
Wakamin and Joralemon and all, you'd find out and realize
that G. P. is the liveliest, smartest town in the state. Did
you know that Percy Bresnahan, the famous auto manufacturer,
came from here and---- Yes, I think that a St. Patrick's
Day party would be awfully cunning and original, and yet not
too queer or freaky or anything."
__________
CHAPTER X - Novel: Main Street - Author: Sinclair Lewis _
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