________________________________________________
_ SHE tried to be content, which was a contradiction in terms.
She fanatically cleaned house all April. She knitted a sweater
for Hugh. She was diligent at Red Cross work. She was
silent when Vida raved that though America hated war as much
as ever, we must invade Germany and wipe out every man,
because it was now proven that there was no soldier in the
German army who was not crucifying prisoners and cutting off
babies' hands.
Carol was volunteer nurse when Mrs. Champ Perry suddenly
died of pneumonia.
In her funeral procession were the eleven people left out
of the Grand Army and the Territorial Pioneers, old men and
women, very old and weak, who a few decades ago had been
boys and girls of the frontier, riding broncos through the rank
windy grass of this prairie. They hobbled behind a band made
up of business men and high-school boys, who straggled along
without uniforms or ranks or leader, trying to play Chopin's
Funeral March--a shabby group of neighbors with grave eyes,
stumbling through the slush under a solemnity of faltering
music.
Champ was broken. His rheumatism was worse. The rooms
over the store were silent. He could not do his work as buyer
at the elevator. Farmers coming in with sled-loads of wheat
complained that Champ could not read the scale, that he
seemed always to be watching some one back in the darkness
of the bins. He was seen slipping through alleys, talking
to himself, trying to avoid observation, creeping at last to the
cemetery. Once Carol followed him and found the coarse,
tobacco-stained, unimaginative old man lying on the snow of
the grave, his thick arms spread out across the raw mound
as if to protect her from the cold, her whom he had carefully
covered up every night for sixty years, who was alone there
now, uncared for.
The elevator company, Ezra Stowbody president, let him go.
The company, Ezra explained to Carol, had no funds for
giving pensions.
She tried to have him appointed to the postmastership, which,
since all the work was done by assistants, was the one sinecure
in town, the one reward for political purity. But it proved
that Mr. Bert Tybee, the former bartender, desired the postmastership.
At her solicitation Lyman Cass gave Champ a warm berth
as night watchman. Small boys played a good many tricks
on Champ when he fell asleep at the mill.
II
She had vicarious happiness in the return of Major Raymond
Wutherspoon. He was well, but still weak from having been
gassed; he had been discharged and he came home as the
first of the war veterans. It was rumored that he surprised
Vida by coming unannounced, that Vida fainted when she saw
him, and for a night and day would not share him with the
town. When Carol saw them Vida was hazy about everything
except Raymie, and never went so far from him that she
could not slip her hand under his. Without understanding
why Carol was troubled by this intensity. And Raymie--
surely this was not Raymie, but a sterner brother of his, this
man with the tight blouse, the shoulder emblems, the trim legs
in boots. His face seemed different, his lips more tight. He
was not Raymie; he was Major Wutherspoon; and Kennicott
and Carol were grateful when he divulged that Paris wasn't half
as pretty as Minneapolis, that all of the American soldiers had
been distinguished by their morality when on leave. Kennicott
was respectful as he inquired whether the Germans had good
aeroplanes, and what a salient was, and a cootie, and Going
West.
In a week Major Wutherspoon was made full manager of the
Bon Ton. Harry Haydock was going to devote himself to the
half-dozen branch stores which he was establishing at crossroads
hamlets. Harry would be the town's rich man in the
coming generation, and Major Wutherspoon would rise with
him, and Vida was jubilant, though she was regretful at having
to give up most of her Red Cross work. Ray still needed
nursing, she explained.
When Carol saw him with his uniform off, in a pepper-and
salt suit and a new gray felt hat, she was disappointed. He
was not Major Wutherspoon; he was Raymie
For a month small boys followed him down the street, and
everybody called him Major, but that was presently shortened
to Maje, and the small boys did not look up from their marbles
as he went by.
III
The town was booming, as a result of the war price of wheat.
The wheat money did not remain in the pockets of the
farmers; the towns existed to take care of all that. Iowa
farmers were selling their land at four hundred dollars an acre
and coming into Minnesota. But whoever bought or sold
or mortgaged, the townsmen invited themselves to the feast--
millers, real-estate men, lawyers, merchants, and Dr. Will
Kennicott. They bought land at a hundred and fifty, sold it
next day at a hundred and seventy, and bought again. In
three months Kennicott made seven thousand dollars, which
was rather more than four times as much as society paid him
for healing the sick.
In early summer began a "campaign of boosting." The
Commercial Club decided that Gopher Prairie was not only a
wheat-center but also the perfect site for factories, summer
cottages, and state institutions. In charge of the campaign was
Mr. James Blausser, who had recently come to town to
speculate in land. Mr. Blausser was known as a Hustler. He
liked to be called Honest Jim. He was a bulky, gauche, noisy,
humorous man, with narrow eyes, a rustic complexion, large
red hands, and brilliant clothes. He was attentive to all
women. He was the first man in town who had not been
sensitive enough to feel Carol's aloofness. He put his arm
about her shoulder while he condescended to Kennicott, "Nice
lil wifey, I'll say, doc," and when she answered, not warmly,
"Thank you very much for the imprimatur," he blew on her
neck, and did not know that he had been insulted.
He was a layer-on of hands. He never came to the house
without trying to paw her. He touched her arm, let his fist
brush her side. She hated the man, and she was afraid of
him. She wondered if he had heard of Erik, and was taking
advantage. She spoke ill of him at home and in public places,
but Kennicott and the other powers insisted, "Maybe he is
kind of a roughneck, but you got to hand it to him; he's got
more git-up-and-git than any fellow that ever hit this burg.
And he's pretty cute, too. Hear what he said to old Ezra?
Chucked him in the ribs and said, `Say, boy, what do you
want to go to Denver for? Wait 'll I get time and I'll move
the mountains here. Any mountain will be tickled to death
to locate here once we get the White Way in!' "
The town welcomed Mr. Blausser as fully as Carol snubbed
him. He was the guest of honor at the Commercial Club
Banquet at the Minniemashie House, an occasion for menus
printed in gold (but injudiciously proof-read), for free cigars,
soft damp slabs of Lake Superior whitefish served as fillet of
sole, drenched cigar-ashes gradually filling the saucers of coffee
cups, and oratorical references to Pep, Punch, Go, Vigor,
Enterprise, Red Blood, He-Men, Fair Women, God's Country, James
J. Hill, the Blue Sky, the Green Fields, the Bountiful Harvest,
Increasing Population, Fair Return on Investments, Alien
Agitators Who Threaten the Security of Our Institutions, the
Hearthstone the Foundation of the State, Senator Knute
Nelson, One Hundred Per Cent. Americanism, and Pointing
with Pride.
Harry Haydock, as chairman, introduced Honest Jim
Blausser. "And I am proud to say, my fellow citizens, that
in his brief stay here Mr. Blausser has become my warm
personal friend as well as my fellow booster, and I advise you
all to very carefully attend to the hints of a man who knows
how to achieve."
Mr. Blausser reared up like an elephant with a camel's neck
--red faced, red eyed, heavy fisted, slightly belching--a born
leader, divinely intended to be a congressman but deflected to
the more lucrative honors of real-estate. He smiled on his
warm personal friends and fellow boosters, and boomed:
"I certainly was astonished in the streets of our lovely little
city, the other day. I met the meanest kind of critter that
God ever made--meaner than the horned toad or the Texas
lallapaluza! (Laughter.) And do you know what the animile
was? He was a knocker! (Laughter and applause.)
"I want to tell you good people, and it's just as sure as
God made little apples, the thing that distinguishes our American
commonwealth from the pikers and tin-horns in other
countries is our Punch. You take a genuwine, honest-to-God
homo Americanibus and there ain't anything he's afraid to
tackle. Snap and speed are his middle name! He'll put her
across if he has to ride from hell to breakfast, and believe me,
I'm mighty good and sorry for the boob that's so unlucky as to
get in his way, because that poor slob is going to wonder where
he was at when Old Mr. Cyclone hit town! (Laughter.)
"Now, frien's, there's some folks so yellow and small and
so few in the pod that they go to work and claim that those--
of us that have the big vision are off our trolleys. They say
we can't make Gopher Prairie, God bless her! just as big as
Minneapolis or St. Paul or Duluth. But lemme tell you right
here and now that there ain't a town under the blue canopy
of heaven that's got a better chance to take a running jump
and go scooting right up into the two-hundred-thousand class
than little old G. P.! And if there's anybody that's got such
cold kismets that he's afraid to tag after Jim Blausser on the
Big Going Up, then we don't want him here! Way I figger it,
you folks are just patriotic enough so that you ain't going to
stand for any guy sneering and knocking his own town, no
matter how much of a smart Aleck he is--and just on the side
I want to add that this Farmers' Nonpartisan League and the
whole bunch of socialists are right in the same category, or,
as the fellow says, in the same scategory, meaning This Way
Out, Exit, Beat It While the Going's Good, This Means You,
for all knockers of prosperity and the rights of property!
"Fellow citizens, there's a lot of folks, even right here in this
fair state, fairest and richest of all the glorious union, that
stand up on their hind legs and claim that the East and Europe
put it all over the golden Northwestland. Now let me nail
that lie right here and now. `Ah-ha,' says they, `so Jim
Blausser is claiming that Gopher Prairie is as good a place
to live in as London and Rome and--and all the rest of the Big
Burgs, is he? How does the poor fish know?' says they. Well
I'll tell you how I know! I've seen 'em! I've done Europe
from soup to nuts! They can't spring that stuff on Jim
Blausser and get away with it! And let me tell you that the
only live thing in Europe is our boys that are fighting there
now! London--I spent three days, sixteen straight hours a
day, giving London the once-over, and let me tell you that it's
nothing but a bunch of fog and out-of-date buildings that no
live American burg would stand for one minute. You may
not believe it, but there ain't one first-class skyscraper in the
whole works. And the same thing goes for that crowd of crabs
and snobs Down East, and next time you hear some zob
from Yahooville-on-the-Hudson chewing the rag and bulling
and trying to get your goat, you tell him that no two-fisted
enterprising Westerner would have New York for a gift!
"Now the point of this is: I'm not only insisting that Gopher
Prairie is going to be Minnesota's pride, the brightest ray in the
glory of the North Star State, but also and furthermore that
it is right now, and still more shall be, as good a place to live
in, and love in, and bring up the Little Ones in, and it's got
as much refinement and culture, as any burg on the whole
bloomin' expanse of God's Green Footstool, and that goes, get
me, that goes!"
Half an hour later Chairman Haydock moved a vote of
thanks to Mr. Blausser.
The boosters' campaign was on.
The town sought that efficient and modern variety of fame
which is known as "publicity." The band was reorganized,
and provided by the Commercial Club with uniforms of purple
and gold. The amateur baseball-team hired a semi-professional
pitcher from Des Moines, and made a schedule of games with
every town for fifty miles about. The citizens accompanied
it as "rooters," in a special car, with banners lettered "Watch
Gopher Prairie Grow," and with the band playing "Smile,
Smile, Smile." Whether the team won or lost the Dauntless
loyally shrieked, "Boost, Boys, and Boost Together--Put
Gopher Prairie on the Map--Brilliant Record of Our Matchless
Team."
Then, glory of glories, the town put in a White Way. White
Ways were in fashion in the Middlewest. They were composed
of ornamented posts with clusters of high-powered electric
lights along two or three blocks on Main Street. The Dauntless
confessed: "White Way Is Installed--Town Lit Up Like
Broadway--Speech by Hon. James Blausser--Come On You
Twin Cities--Our Hat Is In the Ring."
The Commercial Club issued a booklet prepared by a great
and expensive literary person from a Minneapolis advertising
agency, a red-headed young man who smoked cigarettes in a
long amber holder. Carol read the booklet with a certain
wonder. She learned that Plover and Minniemashie Lakes
were world-famed for their beauteous wooded shores and gamey
pike and bass not to be equalled elsewhere in the entire
country; that the residences of Gopher Prairie were models of
dignity, comfort, and culture, with lawns and gardens known
far and wide; that the Gopher Prairie schools and public
library, in its neat and commodious building, were celebrated
throughout the state; that the Gopher Prairie mills made the
best flour in the country; that the surrounding farm lands were
renowned, where'er men ate bread and butter, for their
incomparable No. 1 Hard Wheat and Holstein-Friesian cattle;
and that the stores in Gopher Prairie compared favorably with
Minneapolis and Chicago in their abundance of luxuries and
necessities and the ever-courteous attention of the skilled
clerks. She learned, in brief, that this was the one Logical
Location for factories and wholesale houses.
"THERE'S where I want to go; to that model town Gopher
Prairie," said Carol.
Kennicott was triumphant when the Commercial Club did
capture one small shy factory which planned to make wooden
automobile-wheels, but when Carol saw the promoter she could
not feel that his coming much mattered--and a year after,
when he failed, she could not be very sorrowful.
Retired farmers were moving into town. The price of lots
had increased a third. But Carol could discover no more
pictures nor interesting food nor gracious voices nor amusing
conversation nor questing minds. She could, she asserted,
endure a shabby but modest town; the town shabby and
egomaniac she could not endure. She could nurse Champ
Perry, and warm to the neighborliness of Sam Clark, but she
could not sit applauding Honest Jim Blausser. Kennicott had
begged her, in courtship days, to convert the town to beauty.
If it was now as beautiful as Mr. Blausser and the Dauntless
said, then her work was over, and she could go. _
Read next: CHAPTER 36
Read previous: CHAPTER 34
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
