________________________________________________
_ 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, par-
ticularly 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?" _
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