________________________________________________
_ SHE tried, more from loyalty than from desire, to call upon
the Perrys on a November evening when Kennicott was away.
They were not at home.
Like a child who has no one to play with she loitered through
the dark hall. She saw a light under an office door. She
knocked. To the person who opened she murmured, "Do you
happen to know where the Perrys are?" She realized that
it was Guy Pollock.
"I'm awfully sorry, Mrs. Kennicott, but I don't know.
Won't you come in and wait for them?"
"W-why----" she observed, as she reflected that in Gopher
Prairie it is not decent to call on a man; as she decided that
no, really, she wouldn't go in; and as she went in.
"I didn't know your office was up here."
"Yes, office, town-house, and chateau in Picardy. But you
can't see the chateau and town-house (next to the Duke of
Sutherland's). They're beyond that inner door. They are a
cot and a wash-stand and my other suit and the blue crepe tie
you said you liked."
"You remember my saying that?"
"Of course. I always shall. Please try this chair."
She glanced about the rusty office--gaunt stove, shelves
of tan law-books, desk-chair filled with newspapers so long
sat upon that they were in holes and smudged to grayness.
There were only two things which suggested Guy Pollock. On
the green felt of the table-desk, between legal blanks and a
clotted inkwell, was a cloissone vase. On a swing shelf was a
row of books unfamiliar to Gopher Prairie: Mosher editions
of the poets, black and red German novels, a Charles Lamb in
crushed levant.
Guy did not sit down. He quartered the office, a grayhound
on the scent; a grayhound with glasses tilted forward on his
thin nose, and a silky indecisive brown mustache. He had a
golf jacket of jersey, worn through at the creases in the sleeves.
She noted that he did not apologize for it, as Kennicott would
have done.
He made conversation: "I didn't know you were a bosom
friend of the Perrys. Champ is the salt of the earth but somehow
I can't imagine him joining you in symbolic dancing, or
making improvements on the Diesel engine."
"No. He's a dear soul, bless him, but he belongs in the
National Museum, along with General Grant's sword, and
I'm---- Oh, I suppose I'm seeking for a gospel that will
evangelize Gopher Prairie."
"Really? Evangelize it to what?"
"To anything that's definite. Seriousness or frivolousness or
both. I wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival.
But it's merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the
matter with Gopher Prairie?"
"Is anything the matter with it? Isn't there perhaps
something the matter with you and me? (May I join you in the
honor of having something the matter?)"
"(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it's the town."
"Because they enjoy skating more than biology?"
"But I'm not only more interested in biology than the Jolly
Seventeen, but also in skating! I'll skate with them, or
slide, or throw snowballs, just as gladly as talk with you."
("Oh no!")
("Yes!) But they want to stay home and embroider."
"Perhaps. I'm not defending the town. It's merely----
I'm a confirmed doubter of myself. (Probably I'm conceited
about my lack of conceit!) Anyway, Gopher Prairie isn't
particularly bad. It's like all villages in all countries. Most
places that have lost the smell of earth but not yet acquired
the smell of patchouli--or of factory-smoke--are just as
suspicious and righteous. I wonder if the small town isn't, with
some lovely exceptions, a social appendix? Some day these
dull market-towns may be as obsolete as monasteries. I can
imagine the farmer and his local store-manager going by
monorail, at the end of the day, into a city more charming
than any William Morris Utopia--music, a university, clubs
for loafers like me. (Lord, how I'd like to have a real club!)"
She asked impulsively, "You, why do you stay here?"
"I have the Village Virus."
"It sounds dangerous."
"It is. More dangerous than the cancer that will certainly
get me at fifty unless I stop this smoking. The Village Virus
is the germ which--it's extraordinarily like the hook-worm--it
infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces.
You'll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers
and college-bred merchants--all these people who have had a
glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned
to their swamp. I'm a perfect example. But I sha'n't pester
you with my dolors."
"You won't. And do sit down, so I can see you."
He dropped into the shrieking desk-chair. He looked
squarely at her; she was conscious of the pupils of his eyes; of
the fact that he was a man, and lonely. They were embarrassed.
They elaborately glanced away, and were relieved as he went
on:
"The diagnosis of my Village Virus is simple enough. I
was born in an Ohio town about the same size as Gopher
Prairie, and much less friendly. It'd had more generations in
which to form an oligarchy of respectability. Here, a stranger
is taken in if he is correct, if he likes hunting and motoring and
God and our Senator. There, we didn't take in even our own
till we had contemptuously got used to them. It was a red-
brick Ohio town, and the trees made it damp, and it smelled of
rotten apples. The country wasn't like our lakes and prairie.
There were small stuffy corn-fields and brick-yards and greasy
oil-wells.
"I went to a denominational college and learned that since
dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to
explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try
to catch us disobeying it. From college I went to New York,
to the Columbia Law School. And for four years I lived.
Oh, I won't rhapsodize about New York. It was dirty and
noisy and breathless and ghastly expensive. But compared with
the moldy academy in which I had been smothered----! I
went to symphonies twice a week. I saw Irving and Terry
and Duse and Bernhardt, from the top gallery. I walked in
Gramercy Park. And I read, oh, everything.
"Through a cousin I learned that Julius Flickerbaugh was
sick and needed a partner. I came here. Julius got well.
He didn't like my way of loafing five hours and then doing
my work (really not so badly) in one. We parted.
"When I first came here I swore I'd `keep up my interests.'
Very lofty! I read Browning, and went to Minneapolis for the
theaters. I thought I was `keeping up.' But I guess the
Village Virus had me already. I was reading four copies of
cheap fiction-magazines to one poem. I'd put off the
Minneapolis trips till I simply had to go there on a lot of legal
matters.
"A few years ago I was talking to a patent lawyer from
Chicago, and I realized that---- I'd always felt so superior
to people like Julius Flickerbaugh, but I saw that I was as
provincial and behind-the-times as Julius. (Worse! Julius
plows through the Literary Digest and the Outlook faithfully,
while I'm turning over pages of a book by Charles Flandrau
that I already know by heart.)
"I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the
world. Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute:
I didn't want to face new streets and younger men--real
competition. It was too easy to go on making out conveyances
and arguing ditching cases. So---- That's all of the biography
of a living dead man, except the diverting last chapter, the lies
about my having been `a tower of strength and legal wisdom'
which some day a preacher will spin over my lean dry body."
He looked down at his table-desk, fingering the starry
enameled vase.
She could not comment. She pictured herself running across
the room to pat his hair. She saw that his lips were firm,
under his soft faded mustache. She sat still and maundered,
"I know. The Village Virus. Perhaps it will get me. Some
day I'm going---- Oh, no matter. At least, I am making you
talk! Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness, but
now I'm sitting at your feet."
"It would be rather nice to have you literally sitting at my
feet, by a fire."
"Would you have a fireplace for me?"
"Naturally! Please don't snub me now! Let the old man
rave. How old are you, Carol?"
"Twenty-six, Guy."
"Twenty-six! I was just leaving New York, at twenty-six.
I heard Patti sing, at twenty-six. And now I'm forty-seven. I
feel like a child, yet I'm old enough to be your father. So it's
decently paternal to imagine you curled at my feet. . . .
Of course I hope it isn't, but we'll reflect the morals of Gopher
Prairie by officially announcing that it is! . . . These
standards that you and I live up to! There's one thing that's the
matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class
(there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democ-
racy). And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our
subjects watch us every minute. We can't get wholesomely drunk
and relax. We have to be so correct about sex morals, and
inconspicuous clothes, and doing our commercial trickery only
in the traditional ways, that none of us can live up to it, and we
become horribly hypocritical. Unavoidably. The widow-robbing
deacon of fiction can't help being hypocritical. The
widows themselves demand it! They admire his unctuousness.
And look at me. Suppose I did dare to make love to--some
exquisite married woman. I wouldn't admit it to myself. I
giggle with the most revolting salaciousness over La Vie Parisienne,
when I get hold of one in Chicago, yet I shouldn't even
try to hold your hand. I'm broken. It's the historical Anglo-
Saxon way of making life miserable. . . . Oh, my dear, I haven't
talked to anybody about myself and all our selves for years."
"Guy! Can't we do something with the town? Really?"
"No, we can't!" He disposed of it like a judge ruling out
an improper objection; returned to matters less uncomfortably
energetic: "Curious. Most troubles are unnecessary. We
have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep
warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just
for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes. Here
in Gopher Prairie we've cleared the fields, and become soft,
so we make ourselves unhappy artificially, at great expense and
exertion: Methodists disliking Episcopalians, the man with
the Hudson laughing at the man with the flivver. The worst
is the commercial hatred--the grocer feeling that any man who
doesn't deal with him is robbing him. What hurts me is that
it applies to lawyers and doctors (and decidedly to their wives!)
as much as to grocers. The doctors--you know about that--
how your husband and Westlake and Gould dislike one
another."
"No! I won't admit it!"
He grinned.
"Oh, maybe once or twice, when Will has positively known
of a case where Doctor--where one of the others has continued
to call on patients longer than necessary, he has
laughed about it, but----"
He still grinned.
"No, REALLY! And when you say the wives of the doctors
share these jealousies---- Mrs. McGanum and I haven't any
particular crush on each other; she's so stolid. But her
mother, Mrs. Westlake--nobody could be sweeter."
"Yes, I'm sure she's very bland. But I wouldn't tell her my
heart's secrets if I were you, my dear. I insist that there's
only one professional-man's wife in this town who doesn't
plot, and that is you, you blessed, credulous outsider!"
"I won't be cajoled! I won't believe that medicine, the
priesthood of healing, can be turned into a penny-picking
business."
"See here: Hasn't Kennicott ever hinted to you that you'd
better be nice to some old woman because she tells her friends
which doctor to call in? But I oughtn't to----"
She remembered certain remarks which Kennicott had
offered regarding the Widow Bogart. She flinched, looked at
Guy beseechingly.
He sprang up, strode to her with a nervous step, smoothed
her hand. She wondered if she ought to be offended by his
caress. Then she wondered if he liked her hat, the new
Oriental turban of rose and silver brocade.
He dropped her hand. His elbow brushed her shoulder. He
flitted over to the desk-chair, his thin back stooped. He
picked up the cloisonne vase. Across it he peered at her
with such loneliness that she was startled. But his eyes faded
into impersonality as he talked of the jealousies of Gopher
Prairie. He stopped himself with a sharp, "Good Lord,
Carol, you're not a jury. You are within your legal rights
in refusing to be subjected to this summing-up. I'm a tedious
old fool analyzing the obvious, while you're the spirit of
rebellion. Tell me your side. What is Gopher Prairie to you?"
"A bore!"
"Can I help?"
"How could you?"
"I don't know. Perhaps by listening. I haven't done that
tonight. But normally---- Can't I be the confidant of
the old French plays, the tiring-maid with the mirror and the
loyal ears?"
"Oh, what is there to confide? The people are savorless
and proud of it. And even if I liked you tremendously, I
couldn't talk to you without twenty old hexes watching,
whispering."
"But you will come talk to me, once in a while?"
"I'm not sure that I shall. I'm trying to develop my own
large capacity for dullness and contentment. I've failed at
every positive thing I've tried. I'd better `settle down,' as
they call it, and be satisfied to be--nothing."
"Don't be cynical. It hurts me, in you. It's like blood on
the wing of a humming-bird."
"I'm not a humming-bird. I'm a hawk; a tiny leashed
hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy
hens. But I am grateful to you for confirming me in the faith.
And I'm going home!"
"Please stay and have some coffee with me."
"I'd like to. But they've succeeded in terrorizing me. I'm
afraid of what people might say."
"I'm not afraid of that. I'm only afraid of what you might
say!" He stalked to her; took her unresponsive hand.
"Carol! You have been happy here tonight? (Yes. I'm
begging!)"
She squeezed his hand quickly, then snatched hers away.
She had but little of the curiosity of the flirt, and none of the
intrigante's joy in furtiveness. If she was the naive girl, Guy
Pollock was the clumsy boy. He raced about the office; he
rammed his fists into his pockets. He stammered, "I--I--I
---- Oh, the devil! Why do I awaken from smooth dustiness
to this jagged rawness? I'll make I'm going to trot
down the hall and bring in the Dillons, and we'll all have coffee
or something."
"The Dillons?"
"Yes. Really quite a decent young pair--Harvey Dillon
and his wife. He's a dentist, just come to town. They live in a
room behind his office, same as I do here. They don't know
much of anybody----"
"I've heard of them. And I've never thought to call. I'm
horribly ashamed. Do bring them----"
She stopped, for no very clear reason, but his expression
said, her faltering admitted, that they wished they had never
mentioned the Dillons. With spurious enthusiasm he said,
"Splendid! I will." From the door he glanced at her, curled
in the peeled leather chair. He slipped out, came back with
Dr. and Mrs. Dillon.
The four of them drank rather bad coffee which Pollock
made on a kerosene burner. They laughed, and spoke of
Minneapolis, and were tremendously tactful; and Carol
started for home, through the November wind. _
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