________________________________________________
_ SHE found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance.
Though the armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks
after her coming to Washington, the work of the bureau continued.
She filed correspondence all day; then she dictated
answers to letters of inquiry. It was an endurance of
monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found "real work."
Disillusions she did have. She discovered that in the
afternoon, office routine stretches to the grave. She discovered that
an office is as full of cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie
She discovered that most of the women in the government
bureaus lived unhealthfully, dining on snatches in their
crammed apartments. But she also discovered that business
women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men
and may revel in a bliss which no housewife attains--a free
Sunday. It did not appear that the Great World needed her
inspiration, but she felt that her letters, her contact with
the anxieties of men and women all over the country, were
a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main Street and a kitchen
but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid.
She perceived that she could do office work without losing
any of the putative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cooking
and cleaning, when divested of the fussing of an Aunt
Bessie, take but a tenth of the time which, in a Gopher
Prairie, it is but decent to devote to them.
Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly
Seventeen, not to have to report to Kennicott at the end of the
day all that she had done or might do, was a relief which made
up for the office weariness. She felt that she was no longer
one-half of a marriage but the whole of a human being.
II
Washington gave her all the graciousness in which she had
had faith: white columns seen across leafy parks, spacious
avenues, twisty alleys. Daily she passed a dark square house
with a hint of magnolias and a courtyard behind it, and a tall
curtained second-story window through which a woman was
always peering. The woman was mystery, romance, a story
which told itself differently every day; now she was a
murderess, now the neglected wife of an ambassador. It was
mystery which Carol had most lacked in Gopher Prairie, where
every house was open to view, where every person was but
too easy to meet, where there were no secret gates opening
upon moors over which one might walk by moss-deadened
paths to strange high adventures in an ancient garden.
As she flitted up Sixteenth Street after a Kreisler recital,
given late in the afternoon for the government clerks, as the
lamps kindled in spheres of soft fire, as the breeze flowed into
the street, fresh as prairie winds and kindlier, as she glanced
up the elm alley of Massachusetts Avenue, as she was rested
by the integrity of the Scottish Rite Temple, she loved the
city as she loved no one save Hugh. She encountered negro
shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains and pots of
mignonette; marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue, with
butlers and limousines; and men who looked like fictional
explorers and aviators. Her days were swift, and she knew that
in her folly of running away she had found the courage to
be wise.
She had a dispiriting first month of hunting lodgings in the
crowded city. She had to roost in a hall-room in a moldy
mansion conducted by an indignant decayed gentlewoman,
and leave Hugh to the care of a doubtful nurse. But later
she made a home.
III
Her first acquaintances were the members of the Tincomb
Methodist Church, a vast red-brick tabernacle. Vida Sherwin
had given her a letter to an earnest woman with eye-glasses,
plaid silk waist, and a belief in Bible Classes, who introduced
her to the Pastor and the Nicer Members of Tincomb. Carol
recognized in Washington as she had in California a transplanted
and guarded Main Street. Two-thirds of the church-
members had come from Gopher Prairies. The church was
their society and their standard; they went to Sunday service,
Sunday School, Christian Endeavor, missionary lectures, church
suppers, precisely as they had at home; they agreed that
ambassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidel scientists of
the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; and by
cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ideals from all
contamination.
They welcomed Carol, asked about her husband, gave her
advice regarding colic in babies, passed her the gingerbread
and scalloped potatoes at church suppers, and in general made
her very unhappy and lonely, so that she wondered if she
might not enlist in the militant suffrage organization and be
allowed to go to jail.
Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she
would have perceived in New York or London) a thick streak
of Main Street. The cautious dullness of a Gopher Prairie
appeared in boarding-houses where ladylike bureau-clerks
gossiped to polite young army officers about the movies; a
thousand Sam Clarks and a few Widow Bogarts were to be
identified in the Sunday motor procession, in theater parties, and
at the dinners of State Societies, to which the emigres from
Texas or Michigan surged that they might confirm themselves
in the faith that their several Gopher Prairies were notoriously
"a whole lot peppier and chummier than this stuck-up East."
But she found a Washington which did not cleave to Main
Street.
Guy Pollock wrote to a cousin, a temporary army captain, a
confiding and buoyant lad who took Carol to tea-dances, and
laughed, as she had always wanted some one to laugh, about
nothing in particular. The captain introduced her to the
secretary of a congressman, a cynical young widow with many
acquaintances in the navy. Through her Carol met commanders
and majors, newspapermen, chemists and geographers and fiscal
experts from the bureaus, and a teacher who was a familiar
of the militant suffrage headquarters. The teacher took her
to headquarters. Carol never became a prominent suffragist.
Indeed her only recognized position was as an able addresser
of envelopes. But she was casually adopted by this family
of friendly women who, when they were not being mobbed or
arrested, took dancing lessons or went picnicking up the
Chesapeake Canal or talked about the politics of the American
Federation of Labor.
With the congressman's secretary and the teacher Carol
leased a small flat. Here she found home, her own place and
her own people. She had, though it absorbed most of her
salary, an excellent nurse for Hugh. She herself put him to
bed and played with him on holidays. There were walks with
him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chiefly
Washington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting
about the flat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but
always excitedly. It was not at all the "artist's studio" of
which, because of its persistence in fiction, she had dreamed.
Most of them were in offices all day, and thought more in
card-catalogues or statistics than in mass and color. But they
played, very simply, and they saw no reason why anything
which exists cannot also be acknowledged.
She was sometimes shocked quite as she had shocked Gopher
Prairie by these girls with their cigarettes and elfish knowledge.
When they were most eager about soviets or canoeing, she
listened, longed to have some special learning which would
distinguish her, and sighed that her adventure had come so
late. Kennicott and Main Street had drained her self-reliance;
the presence of Hugh made her feel temporary. Some day--
oh, she'd have to take him back to open fields and the right
to climb about hay-lofts.
But the fact that she could never be eminent among these
scoffing enthusiasts did not keep her from being proud of
them, from defending them in imaginary conversations with
Kennicott, who grunted (she could hear his voice), "They're
simply a bunch of wild impractical theorists sittin' round
chewing the rag," and "I haven't got the time to chase after
a lot of these fool fads; I'm too busy putting aside a stake for
our old age."
Most of the men who came to the flat, whether they were
army officers or radicals who hated the army, had the easy
gentleness, the acceptance of women without embarrassed
banter, for which she had longed in Gopher Prairie. Yet they
seemed to be as efficient as the Sam Clarks. She concluded
that it was because they were of secure reputation, not hemmed
in by the fire of provincial jealousies. Kennicott had asserted
that the villager's lack of courtesy is due to his poverty.
"We're no millionaire dudes," he boasted. Yet these army
and navy men, these bureau experts, and organizers of
multitudinous leagues, were cheerful on three or four thousand a
year, while Kennicott had, outside of his land speculations,
six thousand or more, and Sam had eight.
Nor could she upon inquiry learn that many of this reckless
race died in the poorhouse. That institution is reserved for
men like Kennicott who, after devoting fifty years to "putting
aside a stake," incontinently invest the stake in spurious oil-
stocks.
IV
She was encouraged to believe that she had not been
abnormal in viewing Gopher Prairie as unduly tedious and
slatternly. She found the same faith not only in girls escaped
from domesticity but also in demure old ladies who, tragically
deprived of esteemed husbands and huge old houses, yet
managed to make a very comfortable thing of it by living in
small flats and having time to read.
But she also learned that by comparison Gopher Prairie
was a model of daring color, clever planning, and frenzied
intellectuality. From her teacher-housemate she had a sardonic
description of a Middlewestern railroad-division town, of the
same size as Gopher Prairie but devoid of lawns and trees, a
town where the tracks sprawled along the cinder-scabbed
Main Street, and the railroad shops, dripping soot from eaves
and doorway, rolled out smoke in greasy coils.
Other towns she came to know by anecdote: a prairie village
where the wind blew all day long, and the mud was two feet
thick in spring, and in summer the flying sand scarred new-
painted houses and dust covered the few flowers set out in
pots. New England mill-towns with the hands living in rows
of cottages like blocks of lava. A rich farming-center in New
Jersey, off the railroad, furiously pious, ruled by old men,
unbelievably ignorant old men, sitting about the grocery talking
of James G. Blaine. A Southern town, full of the magnolias
and white columns which Carol had accepted as proof of
romance, but hating the negroes, obsequious to the Old
Families. A Western mining-settlement like a tumor. A booming
semi-city with parks and clever architects, visited by
famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from a
struggle between union labor and the manufacturers' association,
so that in even the gayest of the new houses there was a
ceaseless and intimidating heresy-hunt.
V
The chart which plots Carol's progress is not easy to read.
The lines are broken and uncertain of direction; often instead
of rising they sink in wavering scrawls; and the colors are
watery blue and pink and the dim gray of rubbed pencil
marks. A few lines are traceable.
Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness
by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought
religions, or by a fog of vagueness. Carol had hidden in none
of these refuges from reality, but she, who was tender and
merry, had been made timorous by Gopher Prairie. Even her
flight had been but the temporary courage of panic. The
thing she gained in Washington was not information about
office-systems and labor unions but renewed courage, that
amiable contempt called poise. Her glimpse of tasks involving
millions of people and a score of nations reduced Main Street
from bloated importance to its actual pettiness. She could
never again be quite so awed by the power with which she
herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers and Bogarts.
From her work and from her association with women who
had organized suffrage associations in hostile cities, or had
defended political prisoners, she caught something of an
impersonal attitude; saw that she had been as touchily personal
as Maud Dyer.
And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals? Not
individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most
afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They
insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous
names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound
Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race;
and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is
unembittered laughter. _
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