________________________________________________
_ ONE week of authentic spring, one rare sweet week of May,
one tranquil moment between the blast of winter and the charge
of summer. Daily Carol walked from town into flashing
country hysteric with new life.
One enchanted hour when she returned to youth and a
belief in the possibility of beauty.
She had walked northward toward the upper shore of Plover
Lake, taking to the railroad track, whose directness and
dryness make it the natural highway for pedestrians on the
plains. She stepped from tie to tie, in long strides. At each
road-crossing she had to crawl over a cattle-guard of sharpened
timbers. She walked the rails, balancing with arms extended,
cautious heel before toe. As she lost balance her body bent
over, her arms revolved wildly, and when she toppled she
laughed aloud.
The thick grass beside the track, coarse and prickly with
many burnings, hid canary-yellow buttercups and the mauve
petals and woolly sage-green coats of the pasque flowers. The
branches of the kinnikinic brush were red and smooth as
lacquer on a saki bowl.
She ran down the gravelly embankment, smiled at children
gathering flowers in a little basket, thrust a handful of the
soft pasque flowers into the bosom of her white blouse. Fields
of springing wheat drew her from the straight propriety of the
railroad and she crawled through the rusty barbed-wire fence.
She followed a furrow between low wheat blades and a field of
rye which showed silver lights as it flowed before the wind.
She found a pasture by the lake. So sprinkled was the pasture
with rag-baby blossoms and the cottony herb of Indian tobacco
that it spread out like a rare old Persian carpet of cream
and rose and delicate green. Under her feet the rough grass
made a pleasant crunching. Sweet winds blew from the sunny
lake beside her, and small waves sputtered on the meadowy
shore. She leaped a tiny creek bowered in pussy-willow buds.
She was nearing a frivolous grove of birch and poplar and
wild plum trees.
The poplar foliage had the downiness of a Corot arbor;
the green and silver trunks were as candid as the birches, as
slender and lustrous as the limbs of a Pierrot. The cloudy
white blossoms of the plum trees filled the grove with a
springtime mistiness which gave an illusion of distance.
She ran into the wood, crying out for joy of freedom regained
after winter. Choke-cherry blossoms lured her from the outer
sun-warmed spaces to depths of green stillness, where a
submarine light came through the young leaves. She walked
pensively along an abandoned road. She found a moccasin-
flower beside a lichen-covered log. At the end of the road
she saw the open acres--dipping rolling fields bright with
wheat.
"I believe! The woodland gods still live! And out there,
the great land. It's beautiful as the mountains. What do
I care for Thanatopsises?"
She came out on the prairie, spacious under an arch of boldly
cut clouds. Small pools glittered. Above a marsh red-winged
blackbirds chased a crow in a swift melodrama of the air.
On a hill was silhouetted a man following a drag. His horse
bent its neck and plodded, content.
A path took her to the Corinth road, leading back to town.
Dandelions glowed in patches amidst the wild grass by the
way. A stream golloped through a concrete culvert beneath
the road. She trudged in healthy weariness.
A man in a bumping Ford rattled up beside her, hailed,
"Give you a lift, Mrs. Kennicott?"
"Thank you. It's awfully good of you, but I'm enjoying the
walk."
"Great day, by golly. I seen some wheat that must of
been five inches high. Well, so long."
She hadn't the dimmest notion who he was, but his greeting
warmed her. This countryman gave her a companionship
which she had never (whether by her fault or theirs or neither)
been able to find in the matrons and commercial lords of the
town.
Half a mile from town, in a hollow between hazelnut bushes
and a brook, she discovered a gipsy encampment: a covered
wagon, a tent, a bunch of pegged-out horses. A broad-
shouldered man was squatted on his heels, holding a frying-
pan over a camp-fire. He looked toward her. He was Miles
Bjornstam.
"Well, well, what you doing out here?" he roared. "Come
have a hunk o' bacon. Pete! Hey, Pete!"
A tousled person came from behind the covered wagon.
"Pete, here's the one honest-to-God lady in my bum town.
Come on, crawl in and set a couple minutes, Mrs. Kennicott.
I'm hiking off for all summer."
The Red Swede staggered up, rubbed his cramped knees,
lumbered to the wire fence, held the strands apart for her.
She unconsciously smiled at him as she went through. Her
skirt caught on a barb; he carefully freed it.
Beside this man in blue flannel shirt, baggy khaki trousers,
uneven suspenders, and vile felt hat, she was small and
exquisite.
The surly Pete set out an upturned bucket for her. She
lounged on it, her elbows on her knees. "Where are you
going?" she asked.
"Just starting off for the summer, horse-trading." Bjornstam
chuckled. His red mustache caught the sun. "Regular
hoboes and public benefactors we are. Take a hike like this
every once in a while. Sharks on horses. Buy 'em from
farmers and sell 'em to others. We're honest--frequently.
Great time. Camp along the road. I was wishing I had a
chance to say good-by to you before I ducked out but----
Say, you better come along with us."
"I'd like to."
"While you're playing mumblety-peg with Mrs. Lym Cass,
Pete and me will be rambling across Dakota, through the
Bad Lands, into the butte country, and when fall comes,
we'll be crossing over a pass of the Big Horn Mountains,
maybe, and camp in a snow-storm, quarter of a mile right
straight up above a lake. Then in the morning we'll lie snug
in our blankets and look up through the pines at an eagle.
How'd it strike you? Heh? Eagle soaring and soaring all
day--big wide sky----"
"Don't! Or I will go with you, and I'm afraid there might
be some slight scandal. Perhaps some day I'll do it. Good-by."
Her hand disappeared in his blackened leather glove. From
the turn in the road she waved at him. She walked on more
soberly now, and she was lonely.
But the wheat and grass were sleek velvet under the sun-
set; the prairie clouds were tawny gold; and she swung happily
into Main Street.
II
Through the first days of June she drove with Kennicott on
his calls. She identified him with the virile land; she admired
him as she saw with what respect the farmers obeyed him.
She was out in the early chill, after a hasty cup of coffee,
reaching open country as the fresh sun came up in that
unspoiled world. Meadow larks called from the tops of thin
split fence-posts. The wild roses smelled clean.
As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was a
solemnity of radial bands, like a heavenly fan of beaten gold;
the limitless circle of the grain was a green sea rimmed with
fog, and the willow wind-breaks were palmy isles.
Before July the close heat blanketed them. The tortured
earth cracked. Farmers panted through corn-fields behind
cultivators and the sweating flanks of horses. While she waited
for Kennicott in the car, before a farmhouse, the seat burned
her fingers and her head ached with the glare on fenders and
hood.
A black thunder-shower was followed by a dust storm which
turned the sky yellow with the hint of a coming tornado.
Impalpable black dust far-borne from Dakota covered the
inner sills of the closed windows.
The July heat was ever more stifling. They crawled along
Main Street by day; they found it hard to sleep at night. They
brought mattresses down to the living-room, and thrashed and
turned by the open window. Ten times a night they talked of
going out to soak themselves with the hose and wade through
the dew, but they were too listless to take the trouble. On
cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the gnats
appeared in swarms which peppered their faces and caught in
their throats.
She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but Kennicott
declared that it would be "kind of hard to get away, just NOW."
The Health and Improvement Committee of the Thanatopsis asked her
to take part in the anti-fly campaign, and she toiled about town
persuading householders to use the fly-traps furnished by the club,
or giving out money prizes to fly-swatting children. She was loyal
enough but not ardent, and without ever quite intending to,
she began to neglect the task as heat sucked at her strength.
Kennicott and she motored North and spent a week with
his mother--that is, Carol spent it with his mother, while he
fished for bass.
The great event was their purchase of a summer cottage,
down on Lake Minniemashie.
Perhaps the most amiable feature of life in Gopher Prairie
was the summer cottages. They were merely two-room
shanties, with a seepage of broken-down chairs, peeling veneered
tables, chromos pasted on wooden walls, and inefficient kerosene
stoves. They were so thin-walled and so close together that
you could--and did--hear a baby being spanked in the fifth
cottage off. But they were set among elms and lindens on a
bluff which looked across the lake to fields of ripened wheat
sloping up to green woods.
Here the matrons forgot social jealousies, and sat gossiping
in gingham; or, in old bathing-suits, surrounded by hysterical
children, they paddled for hours. Carol joined them; she
ducked shrieking small boys, and helped babies construct sand-
basins for unfortunate minnows. She liked Juanita Haydock
and Maud Dyer when she helped them make picnic-supper
for the men, who came motoring out from town each evening.
She was easier and more natural with them. In the debate
as to whether there should be veal loaf or poached egg on hash,
she had no chance to be heretical and oversensitive.
They danced sometimes, in the evening; they had a minstrel
show, with Kennicott surprisingly good as end-man; always
they were encircled by children wise in the lore of woodchucks
and gophers and rafts and willow whistles.
If they could have continued this normal barbaric life Carol
would have been the most enthusiastic citizen of Gopher
Prairie. She was relieved to be assured that she did not want
bookish conversation alone; that she did not expect the town
to become a Bohemia. She was content now. She did not
criticize.
But in September, when the year was at its richest, custom
dictated that it was time to return to town; to remove the
children from the waste occupation of learning the earth, and
send them back to lessons about the number of potatoes which
(in a delightful world untroubled by commission-houses or
shortages in freight-cars) William sold to John. The women
who had cheerfully gone bathing all summer looked doubtful
when Carol begged, "Let's keep up an outdoor life this winter,
let's slide and skate." Their hearts shut again till spring, and
the nine months of cliques and radiators and dainty refreshments
began all over.
III
Carol had started a salon.
Since Kennicott, Vida Sherwin, and Guy Pollock were her
only lions, and since Kennicott would have preferred Sam
Clark to all the poets and radicals in the entire world, her
private and self-defensive clique did not get beyond one
evening dinner for Vida and Guy, on her first wedding
anniversary; and that dinner did not get beyond a controversy
regarding Raymie Wutherspoon's yearnings.
Guy Pollock was the gentlest person she had found here.
He spoke of her new jade and cream frock naturally, not
jocosely; he held her chair for her as they sat down to dinner;
and he did not, like Kennicott, interrupt her to shout, "Oh
say, speaking of that, I heard a good story today." But Guy
was incurably hermit. He sat late and talked hard, and did
not come again.
Then she met Champ Perry in the post-office--and decided
that in the history of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher
Prairie, for all of America. We have lost their sturdiness, she
told herself. We must restore the last of the veterans to power
and follow them on the backward path to the integrity of
Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlers dancing in a saw-mill.
She read in the records of the Minnesota Territorial
Pioneers that only sixty years ago, not so far back as the birth
of her own father, four cabins had composed Gopher Prairie.
The log stockade which Mrs. Champ Perry was to find when
she trekked in was built afterward by the soldiers as a defense
against the Sioux. The four cabins were inhabited by Maine
Yankees who had come up the Mississippi to St. Paul and
driven north over virgin prairie into virgin woods. They
ground their own corn; the men-folks shot ducks and pigeons
and prairie chickens; the new breakings yielded the turnip-
like rutabagas, which they ate raw and boiled and baked and
raw again. For treat they had wild plums and crab-apples and
tiny wild strawberries.
Grasshoppers came darkening the sky, and in an hour ate
the farmwife's garden and the farmer's coat. Precious horses
painfully brought from Illinois, were drowned in bogs or
stampeded by the fear of blizzards. Snow blew through the
chinks of new-made cabins, and Eastern children, with flowery
muslin dresses, shivered all winter and in summer were red
and black with mosquito bites. Indians were everywhere; they
camped in dooryards, stalked into kitchens to demand doughnuts,
came with rifles across their backs into schoolhouses and
begged to see the pictures in the geographies. Packs of timber-
wolves treed the children; and the settlers found dens of rattle-
snakes, killed fifty, a hundred, in a day.
Yet it was a buoyant life. Carol read enviously in the
admirable Minnesota chronicles called "Old Rail Fence Corners"
the reminiscence of Mrs. Mahlon Black, who settled in
Stillwater in 1848:
"There was nothing to parade over in those days. We took
it as it came and had happy lives. . . . We would all
gather together and in about two minutes would be having
a good time--playing cards or dancing. . . . We used to
waltz and dance contra dances. None of these new jigs and
not wear any clothes to speak of. We covered our hides in
those days; no tight skirts like now. You could take three or
four steps inside our skirts and then not reach the edge. One
of the boys would fiddle a while and then some one would
spell him and he could get a dance. Sometimes they would
dance and fiddle too."
She reflected that if she could not have ballrooms of gray
and rose and crystal, she wanted to be swinging across a
puncheon-floor with a dancing fiddler. This smug in-between
town, which had exchanged "Money Musk" for phonographs
grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic old nor the
sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet
unimagined how, turn it back to simplicity?
She herself knew two of the pioneers: the Perrys. Champ
Perry was the buyer at the grain-elevator. He weighed wagons
of wheat on a rough platform-scale, in the cracks of which the
kernels sprouted every spring. Between times he napped in
the dusty peace of his office.
She called on the Perrys at their rooms above Howland &
Gould's grocery.
When they were already old they had lost the money,
which they had invested in an elevator. They had given up
their beloved yellow brick house and moved into these rooms
over a store, which were the Gopher Prairie equivalent of a
flat. A broad stairway led from the street to the upper hall,
along which were the doors of a lawyer's office, a dentist's,
a photographer's "studio," the lodge-rooms of the Affiliated
Order of Spartans and, at the back, the Perrys' apartment.
They received her (their first caller in a month) with aged
fluttering tenderness. Mrs. Perry confided, "My, it's a shame
we got to entertain you in such a cramped place. And there
ain't any water except that ole iron sink outside in the hall,
but still, as I say to Champ, beggars can't be choosers. 'Sides,
the brick house was too big for me to sweep, and it was way
out, and it's nice to be living down here among folks. Yes,
we're glad to be here. But---- Some day, maybe we can
have a house of our own again. We're saving up---- Oh,
dear, if we could have our own home! But these rooms are
real nice, ain't they!"
As old people will, the world over, they had moved as much
as possible of their familiar furniture into this small space.
Carol had none of the superiority she felt toward Mrs. Lyman
Cass's plutocratic parlor. She was at home here. She noted
with tenderness all the makeshifts: the darned chair-arms, the
patent rocker covered with sleazy cretonne, the pasted strips
of paper mending the birch-bark napkin-rings labeled "Papa "
and "Mama."
She hinted of her new enthusiasm. To find one of the
"young folks" who took them seriously, heartened the Perrys,
and she easily drew from them the principles by which Gopher
Prairie should be born again--should again become amusing
to live in.
This was their philosophy complete. . .in the era of
aeroplanes and syndicalism:
The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist,
Congregational, and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the
divinely ordained standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and
ethics. "We don't need all this new-fangled science, or this
terrible Higher Criticism that's ruining our young men in
colleges. What we need is to get back to the true Word of
God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have
it preached to us."
The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and
McKinley, is the agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church
in temporal affairs.
All socialists ought to be hanged.
"Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such
good morals in his novels, and folks say he's made prett' near
a million dollars out of 'em."
People who make more than ten thousand a year or less
than eight hundred are wicked.
Europeans are still wickeder.
It doesn't hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day,
but anybody who touches wine is headed straight for hell.
Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be
Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for
anybody.
The farmers want too much for their wheat.
The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the
salaries they pay.
There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world
if everybody worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our
first farm.
IV
Carol's hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the
nodding dwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home
with a headache.
Next day she saw Miles Bjornstam on the street.
"Just back from Montana. Great summer. Pumped my
lungs chuck-full of Rocky Mountain air. Now for another
whirl at sassing the bosses of Gopher Prairie." She smiled at
him, and the Perrys faded, the pioneers faded, till they were
but daguerreotypes in a black walnut cupboard. _
Read next: CHAPTER 13
Read previous: CHAPTER 11
Table of content of Main Street
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
