________________________________________________
_ SHE had lived in Washington for a year. She was tired of the
office. It was tolerable, far more tolerable than housework, but
it was not adventurous.
She was having tea and cinnamon toast, alone at a small
round table on the balcony of Rauscher's Confiserie. Four
debutantes clattered in. She had felt young and dissipated,
had thought rather well of her black and leaf-green suit, but
as she watched them, thin of ankle, soft under the chin,
seventeen or eighteen at most, smoking cigarettes with the correct
ennui and talking of "bedroom farces" and their desire to
"run up to New York and see something racy," she became
old and rustic and plain, and desirous of retreating from these
hard brilliant children to a life easier and more sympathetic.
When they flickered out and one child gave orders to a chauffeur,
Carol was not a defiant philosopher but a faded government
clerk from Gopher Prairie, Minnesota
She started dejectedly up Connecticut Avenue. She stopped,
her heart stopped. Coming toward her were Harry and Juanita
Haydock. She ran to them, she kissed Juanita, while Harry
confided, "Hadn't expected to come to Washington--had to
go to New York for some buying--didn't have your address
along--just got in this morning--wondered how in the world
we could get hold of you."
She was definitely sorry to hear that they were to leave at
nine that evening, and she clung to them as long as she could.
She took them to St. Mark's for dinner. Stooped, her elbows
on the table, she heard with excitement that "Cy Bogart had
the 'flu, but of course he was too gol-darn mean to die of it."
"Will wrote me that Mr. Blausser has gone away. How did
he get on?"
"Fine! Fine! Great loss to the town. There was a real
public-spirited fellow, all right!"
She discovered that she now had no opinions whatever about
Mr. Blausser, and she said sympathetically, "Will you keep
up the town-boosting campaign?"
Harry fumbled, "Well, we've dropped it just temporarily,
but--sure you bet! Say, did the doc write you about the
luck B. J. Gougerling had hunting ducks down in Texas?"
When the news had been told and their enthusiasm had
slackened she looked about and was proud to be able to point
out a senator, to explain the cleverness of the canopied garden.
She fancied that a man with dinner-coat and waxed mustache
glanced superciliously at Harry's highly form-fitting bright-
brown suit and Juanita's tan silk frock, which was doubtful at
the seams. She glared back, defending her own, daring the
world not to appreciate them.
Then, waving to them, she lost them down the long train
shed. She stood reading the list of stations: Harrisburg,
Pittsburg, Chicago. Beyond Chicago----? She saw the lakes
and stubble fields, heard the rhythm of insects and the creak
of a buggy, was greeted by Sam Clark's "Well, well, how's
the little lady?"
Nobody in Washington cared enough for her to fret about
her sins as Sam did.
But that night they had at the flat a man just back from
Finland.
II
She was on the Powhatan roof with the captain. At a table,
somewhat vociferously buying improbable "soft drinks" for
two fluffy girls, was a man with a large familiar back.
"Oh! I think I know him," she murmured.
"Who? There? Oh, Bresnahan, Percy Bresnahan."
"Yes. You've met him? What sort of a man is he?"
"He's a good-hearted idiot. I rather like him, and I believe
that as a salesman of motors he's a wonder. But he's a
nuisance in the aeronautic section. Tries so hard to be useful
but he doesn't know anything--he doesn't know anything.
Rather pathetic: rich man poking around and trying to be
useful. Do you want to speak to him?"
"No--no--I don't think so."
III
She was at a motion-picture show. The film was a highly
advertised and abysmal thing smacking of simpering hair-
dressers, cheap perfume, red-plush suites on the back streets
of tenderloins, and complacent fat women chewing gum. It
pretended to deal with the life of studios. The leading man did
a portrait which was a masterpiece. He also saw visions in
pipe-smoke, and was very brave and poor and pure. He had
ringlets, and his masterpiece was strangely like an enlarged
photograph.
Carol prepared to leave.
On the screen, in the role of a composer, appeared an actor
called Eric Valour.
She was startled, incredulous, then wretched. Looking
straight out at her, wearing a beret and a velvet jacket, was
Erik Valborg.
He had a pale part, which he played neither well nor badly.
She speculated, "I could have made so much of him----"
She did not finish her speculation.
She went home and read Kennicott's letters. They had
seemed stiff and undetailed, but now there strode from them
a personality, a personality unlike that of the languishing
young man in the velvet jacket playing a dummy piano in a
canvas room.
IV
Kennicott first came to see her in November, thirteen months
after her arrival in Washington. When he announced that
he was coming she was not at all sure that she wished to
see him. She was glad that he had made the decision himself.
She had leave from the office for two days.
She watched him marching from the train, solid, assured,
carrying his heavy suit-case, and she was diffident--he was
such a bulky person to handle. They kissed each other
questioningly, and said at the same time, "You're looking fine;
how's the baby?" and "You're looking awfully well, dear;
how is everything?"
He grumbled, "I don't want to butt in on any plans you've
made or your friends or anything, but if you've got time for
it, I'd like to chase around Washington, and take in some
restaurants and shows and stuff, and forget work for a while."
She realized, in the taxicab, that he was wearing a soft
gray suit, a soft easy hat, a flippant tie.
"Like the new outfit? Got 'em in Chicago. Gosh, I hope
they're the kind you like."
They spent half an hour at the flat, with Hugh. She was
flustered, but he gave no sign of kissing her again.
As he moved about the small rooms she realized that he
had had his new tan shoes polished to a brassy luster. There
was a recent cut on his chin. He must have shaved on the
train just before coming into Washington.
It was pleasant to feel how important she was, how many
people she recognized, as she took him to the Capitol, as she
told him (he asked and she obligingly guessed) how many
feet it was to the top of the dome, as she pointed out Senator
LaFollette and the vice-president, and at lunch-time showed
herself an habitue by leading him through the catacombs to
the senate restaurant.
She realized that he was slightly more bald. The familiar
way in which his hair was parted on the left side agitated
her. She looked down at his hands, and the fact that his nails
were as ill-treated as ever touched her more than his pleading
shoe-shine.
"You'd like to motor down to Mount Vernon this afternoon,
wouldn't you?" she said.
It was the one thing he had planned. He was delighted that
it seemed to be a perfectly well bred and Washingtonian thing
to do.
He shyly held her hand on the way, and told her the news:
they were excavating the basement for the new schoolbuilding,
Vida "made him tired the way she always looked at the Maje,"
poor Chet Dashaway had been killed in a motor accident out
on the Coast. He did not coax her to like him. At Mount
Vernon he admired the paneled library and Washington's
dental tools.
She knew that he would want oysters, that he would have
heard of Harvey's apropos of Grant and Blaine, and she took
him there. At dinner his hearty voice, his holiday enjoyment
of everything, turned into nervousness in his desire to know
a number of interesting matters, such as whether they still were
married. But be did not ask questions, and be said nothing
about her returning. He cleared his throat and observed, "Oh
say, been trying out the old camera. Don't you think these
are pretty good?"
He tossed over to her thirty prints of Gopher Prairie and
the country about. Without defense, she was thrown into it.
She remembered that he had lured her with photographs in
courtship days; she made a note of his sameness, his satisfaction
with the tactics which had proved good before; but she
forgot it in the familiar places. She was seeing the sun-
speckled ferns among birches on the shore of Minniemashie,
wind-rippled miles of wheat, the porch of their own house where
Hugh had played, Main Street where she knew every window
and every face.
She handed them back, with praise for his photography, and
he talked of lenses and time-exposures.
Dinner was over and they were gossiping of her friends at
the flat, but an intruder was with them, sitting back, persistent,
inescapable. She could not endure it. She stammered:
"I had you check your bag at the station because I wasn't
quite sure where you'd stay. I'm dreadfully sorry we haven't
room to put you up at the flat. We ought to have seen about
a room for you before. Don't you think you better call up
the Willard or the Washington now?"
He peered at her cloudily. Without words he asked,
without speech she answered, whether she was also going to the
Willard or the Washington. But she tried to look as though
she did not know that they were debating anything of the
sort. She would have hated him had he been meek about it.
But he was neither meek nor angry. However impatient he
may have been with her blandness he said readily:
"Yes, guess I better do that. Excuse me a second. Then
how about grabbing a taxi (Gosh, isn't it the limit the way
these taxi shuffers skin around a corner? Got more nerve
driving than I have!) and going up to your flat for a while?
Like to meet your friends--must be fine women--and I might
take a look and see how Hugh sleeps. Like to know how he
breathes. Don't think he has adenoids, but I better make sure,
eh?" He patted her shoulder.
At the flat they found her two housemates and a girl who
had been to jail for suffrage. Kennicott fitted in surprisingly.
He laughed at the girl's story of the humors of a hunger-
strike; he told the secretary what to do when her eyes were
tired from typing; and the teacher asked him--not as the husband
of a friend but as a physician--whether there was "anything
to this inoculation for colds."
His colloquialisms seemed to Carol no more lax than their
habitual slang.
Like an older brother he kissed her good-night in the midst
of the company.
"He's terribly nice," said her housemates, and waited for
confidences. They got none, nor did her own heart. She could
find nothing definite to agonize about. She felt that she was
no longer analyzing and controlling forces, but swept on by
them.
He came to the flat for breakfast, and washed the dishes.
That was her only occasion for spite. Back home he never
thought of washing dishes!
She took him to the obvious "sights"--the Treasury, the
Monument, the Corcoran Gallery, the Pan-American Building,
the Lincoln Memorial, with the Potomac beyond it and the
Arlington hills and the columns of the Lee Mansion. For all
his willingness to play there was over him a melancholy which
piqued her. His normally expressionless eyes had depths to
them now, and strangeness. As they walked through Lafayette
Square, looking past the Jackson statue at the lovely tranquil
facade of the White House, he sighed, "I wish I'd had a shot
at places like this. When I was in the U., I had to earn part
of my way, and when I wasn't doing that or studying, I guess
I was roughhousing. My gang were a great bunch for
bumming around and raising Cain. Maybe if I'd been caught
early and sent to concerts and all that---- Would I have
been what you call intelligent?"
"Oh, my dear, don't be humble! You are intelligent! For
instance, you're the most thorough doctor----"
He was edging about something he wished to say. He
pounced on it:
"You did like those pictures of G. P. pretty well, after all,
didn't you!"
"Yes, of course."
"Wouldn't be so bad to have a glimpse of the old town,
would it!"
"No, it wouldn't. Just as I was terribly glad to see the
Haydocks. But please understand me! That doesn't mean
that I withdraw all my criticisms. The fact that I might like
a glimpse of old friends hasn't any particular relation to the
question of whether Gopher Prairie oughtn't to have festivals
and lamb chops."
Hastily, "No, no! Sure not. I und'stand."
"But I know it must have been pretty tiresome to have to
live with anybody as perfect as I was."
He grinned. She liked his grin.
V
He was thrilled by old negro coachmen, admirals, aeroplanes,
the building to which his income tax would eventually go, a
Rolls-Royce, Lynnhaven oysters, the Supreme Court Room,
a New York theatrical manager down for the try-out of a play,
the house where Lincoln died, the cloaks of Italian officers, the
barrows at which clerks buy their box-lunches at noon, the
barges on the Chesapeake Canal, and the fact that District
of Columbia cars had both District and Maryland licenses.
She resolutely took him to her favorite white and green
cottages and Georgian houses. He admitted that fanlights, and
white shutters against rosy brick, were more homelike than a
painty wooden box. He volunteered, "I see how you mean.
They make me think of these pictures of an old-fashioned
Christmas. Oh, if you keep at it long enough you'll have Sam
and me reading poetry and everything. Oh say, d' I tell you
about this fierce green Jack Elder's had his machine painted?"
VI
They were at dinner.
He hinted, "Before you showed me those places today,
I'd already made up my mind that when I built the new house
we used to talk about, I'd fix it the way you wanted it. I'm
pretty practical about foundations and radiation and stuff like
that, but I guess I don't know a whole lot about architecture."
"My dear, it occurs to me with a sudden shock that I don't
either!"
"Well--anyway--you let me plan the garage and the plumbing,
and you do the rest, if you ever--I mean--if you ever
want to."
Doubtfully, "That's sweet of you."
"Look here, Carrie; you think I'm going to ask you to love
me. I'm not. And I'm not going to ask you to come back to
Gopher Prairie!"
She gaped.
"It's been a whale of a fight. But I guess I've got myself
to see that you won't ever stand G. P. unless you WANT to
come back to it. I needn't say I'm crazy to have you. But
I won't ask you. I just want you to know how I wait for you.
Every mail I look for a letter, and when I get one I'm kind of
scared to open it, I'm hoping so much that you're coming back.
Evenings---- You know I didn't open the cottage down at
the lake at all, this past summer. Simply couldn't stand all
the others laughing and swimming, and you not there. I used
to sit on the porch, in town, and I--I couldn't get over the
feeling that you'd simply run up to the drug store and would
be right back, and till after it got dark I'd catch myself
watching, looking up the street, and you never came, and the
house was so empty and still that I didn't like to go in.
And sometimes I fell asleep there, in my chair, and didn't
wake up till after midnight, and the house---- Oh, the devil!
Please get me, Carrie. I just want you to know how welcome
you'll be if you ever do come. But I'm not asking you to."
"You're---- It's awfully----"
"'Nother thing. I'm going to be frank. I haven't always
been absolutely, uh, absolutely, proper. I've always loved you
more than anything else in the world, you and the kid. But
sometimes when you were chilly to me I'd get lonely and
sore, and pike out and---- Never intended----"
She rescued him with a pitying, "It's all right. Let's forget
it."
"But before we were married you said if your husband
ever did anything wrong, you'd want him to tell you."
"Did I? I can't remember. And I can't seem to think. Oh,
my dear, I do know how generously you're trying to make me
happy. The only thing is---- I can't think. I don't know
what I think."
"Then listen! Don't think! Here's what I want you to
do! Get a two-weeks leave from your office. Weather's
beginning to get chilly here. Let's run down to Charleston
and Savannah and maybe Florida.
"A second honeymoon?" indecisively.
"No. Don't even call it that. Call it a second wooing.
I won't ask anything. I just want the chance to chase around
with you. I guess I never appreciated how lucky I was to
have a girl with imagination and lively feet to play with.
So---- Could you maybe run away and see the South with
me? If you wanted to, you could just--you could just pretend
you were my sister and---- I'll get an extra nurse for Hugh!
I'll get the best dog-gone nurse in Washington!"
VII
It was in the Villa Margherita, by the palms of the
Charleston Battery and the metallic harbor, that her aloofness
melted.
When they sat on the upper balcony, enchanted by the
moon glitter, she cried, "Shall I go back to Gopher Prairie
with you? Decide for me. I'm tired of deciding and undeciding."
"No. You've got to do your own deciding. As a matter of
fact, in spite of this honeymoon, I don't think I want you to
come home. Not yet."
She could only stare.
"I want you to be satisfied when you get there. I'll do
everything I can to keep you happy, but I'll make lots of
breaks, so I want you to take time and think it over."
She was relieved. She still had a chance to seize splendid
indefinite freedoms. She might go--oh, she'd see Europe, somehow,
before she was recaptured. But she also had a firmer
respect for Kennicott. She had fancied that her life might
make a story. She knew that there was nothing heroic or
obviously dramatic in it, no magic of rare hours, nor valiant
challenge, but it seemed to her that she was of some
significance because she was commonplaceness, the ordinary life
of the age, made articulate and protesting. It had not occurred
to her that there was also a story of Will Kennicott, into which
she entered only so much as he entered into hers; that he
had bewilderments and concealments as intricate as her own,
and soft treacherous desires for sympathy.
Thus she brooded, looking at the amazing sea, holding his
hand.
VIII
She was in Washington; Kennicott was in Gopher Prairie,
writing as dryly as ever about water-pipes and goose-hunting
and Mrs. Fageros's mastoid.
She was talking at dinner to a generalissima of suffrage.
Should she return?
The leader spoke wearily:
"My dear, I'm perfectly selfish. I can't quite visualize the
needs of your husband, and it seems to me that your baby
will do quite as well in the schools here as in your barracks at
home."
"Then you think I'd better not go back?" Carol sounded
disappointed.
"It's more difficult than that. When I say that I'm selfish
I mean that the only thing I consider about women is whether
they're likely to prove useful in building up real political power
for women. And you? Shall I be frank? Remember when
I say `you' I don't mean you alone. I'm thinking of thousands
of women who come to Washington and New York and Chicago
every year, dissatisfied at home and seeking a sign in the
heavens--women of all sorts, from timid mothers of fifty in
cotton gloves, to girls just out of Vassar who organize strikes
in their own fathers' factories! All of you are more or less
useful to me, but only a few of you can take my place, because
I have one virtue (only one): I have given up father and
mother and children for the love of God.
"Here's the test for you: Do you come to `conquer the
East,' as people say, or do you come to conquer yourself?
"It's so much more complicated than any of you know--so
much more complicated than I knew when I put on Ground
Grippers and started out to reform the world. The final
complication in `conquering Washington' or `conquering New
York' is that the conquerors must beyond all things not
conquer! It must have been so easy in the good old days when
authors dreamed only of selling a hundred thousand volumes,
and sculptors of being feted in big houses, and even the
Uplifters like me had a simple-hearted ambition to be elected to
important offices and invited to go round lecturing. But we
meddlers have upset everything. Now the one thing that is
disgraceful to any of us is obvious success. The Uplifter who
is very popular with wealthy patrons can be pretty sure that
he has softened his philosophy to please them, and the author
who is making lots of money--poor things, I've heard 'em
apologizing for it to the shabby bitter-enders; I've seen 'em
ashamed of the sleek luggage they got from movie rights.
"Do you want to sacrifice yourself in such a topsy-turvy
world, where popularity makes you unpopular with the people
you love, and the only failure is cheap success, and the only
individualist is the person who gives up all his individualism
to serve a jolly ungrateful proletariat which thumbs its nose at
him?"
Carol smiled ingratiatingly, to indicate that she was indeed
one who desired to sacrifice, but she sighed, "I don't know;
I'm afraid I'm not heroic. I certainly wasn't out home. Why
didn't I do big effective----"
"Not a matter of heroism. Matter of endurance. Your
Middlewest is double-Puritan--prairie Puritan on top of New
England Puritan; bluff frontiersman on the surface, but in its
heart it still has the ideal of Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm.
There's one attack you can make on it, perhaps the only kind
that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on looking
at one thing after another in your home and church and bank,
and ask why it is, and who first laid down the law that it had
to be that way. If enough of us do this impolitely enough,
then we'll become civilized in merely twenty thousand years
or so, instead of having to wait the two hundred thousand
years that my cynical anthropologist friends allow. . . .
Easy, pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives: asking people
to define their jobs. That's the most dangerous doctrine I
know!"
Carol was mediating, "I will go back! I will go on asking
questions. I've always done it, and always failed at it, and it's
all I can do. I'm going to ask Ezra Stowbody why he's
opposed to the nationalization of railroads, and ask Dave Dyer
why a druggist always is pleased when he's called `doctor,'
and maybe ask Mrs. Bogart why she wears a widow's veil that
looks like a dead crow."
The woman leader straightened. "And you have one thing.
You have a baby to hug. That's my temptation. I dream of
babies--of a baby--and I sneak around parks to see them
playing. (The children in Dupont Circle are like a poppy-
garden.) And the antis call me `unsexed'!"
Carol was thinking, in panic, "Oughtn't Hugh to have
country air? I won't let him become a yokel. I can guide
him away from street-corner loafing. . . . I think I can."
On her way home: "Now that I've made a precedent, joined
the union and gone out on one strike and learned personal
solidarity, I won't be so afraid. Will won't always be resisting
my running away. Some day I really will go to Europe with
him. . .or without him.
"I've lived with people who are not afraid to go to jail.
I could invite a Miles Bjornstam to dinner without being
afraid of the Haydocks. . .I think I could.
"I'll take back the sound of Yvette Guilbert's songs and
Elman's violin. They'll be only the lovelier against the thrumming
of crickets in the stubble on an autumn day.
"I can laugh now and be serene. . .I think I can."
Though she should return, she said, she would not be utterly
defeated. She was glad of her rebellion. The prairie was no
longer empty land in the sun-glare; it was the living tawny
beast which she had fought and made beautiful by fighting;
and in the village streets were shadows of her desires and the
sound of her marching and the seeds of mystery and greatness.
IX
Her active hatred of Gopher Prairie had run out. She saw
it now as a toiling new settlement. With sympathy she
remembered Kennicott's defense of its citizens as "a lot of
pretty good folks, working hard and trying to bring up their
families the best they can." She recalled tenderly the young
awkwardness of Main Street and the makeshifts of the little
brown cottages; she pitied their shabbiness and isolation; had
compassion for their assertion of culture, even as expressed in
Thanatopsis papers, for their pretense of greatness, even as
trumpeted in "boosting." She saw Main Street in the dusty
prairie sunset, a line of frontier shanties with solemn lonely
people waiting for her, solemn and lonely as an old man who
has outlived his friends. She remembered that Kennicott and
Sam Clark had listened to her songs, and she wanted to run
to them and sing.
"At last," she rejoiced, "I've come to a fairer attitude
toward the town. I can love it, now."
She was, perhaps, rather proud of herself for having acquired
so much tolerance.
She awoke at three in the morning, after a dream of being
tortured by Ella Stowbody and the Widow Bogart.
"I've been making the town a myth. This is how people
keep up the tradition of the perfect home-town, the happy
boyhood, the brilliant college friends. We forget so. I've
been forgetting that Main Street doesn't think it's in the least
lonely and pitiful. It thinks it's God's Own Country. It isn't
waiting for me. It doesn't care."
But the next evening she again saw Gopher Prairie as her
home, waiting for her in the sunset, rimmed round with
splendor.
She did not return for five months more; five months
crammed with greedy accumulation of sounds and colors to
take back for the long still days.
She had spent nearly two years in Washington.
When she departed for Gopher Prairie, in June, her second
baby was stirring within her. _
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