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The chateau, a modern building in Italian style, with two projecting
wings and three flights of steps, lay at the foot of an immense
green-sward, on which some cows were grazing among groups of large trees
set out at regular intervals, while large beds of arbutus, rhododendron,
syringas, and guelder roses bulged out their irregular clusters of
green along the curve of the gravel path. A river flowed under a bridge;
through the mist one could distinguish buildings with thatched roofs
scattered over the field bordered by two gently sloping, well timbered
hillocks, and in the background amid the trees rose in two parallel
lines the coach houses and stables, all that was left of the ruined old
chateau.
Charles's dog-cart pulled up before the middle flight of steps; servants
appeared; the Marquis came forward, and, offering his arm to the
doctor's wife, conducted her to the vestibule.
It was paved with marble slabs, was very lofty, and the sound of
footsteps and that of voices re-echoed through it as in a church.
Opposite rose a straight staircase, and on the left a gallery
overlooking the garden led to the billiard room, through whose door one
could hear the click of the ivory balls. As she crossed it to go to the
drawing room, Emma saw standing round the table men with grave faces,
their chins resting on high cravats. They all wore orders, and smiled
silently as they made their strokes.
On the dark wainscoting of the walls large gold frames bore at
the bottom names written in black letters. She read: "Jean-Antoine
d'Andervilliers d'Yvervonbille, Count de la Vaubyessard and Baron de la
Fresnay, killed at the battle of Coutras on the 20th of October,
1587." And on another: "Jean-Antoine-Henry-Guy d'Andervilliers de
la Vaubyessard, Admiral of France and Chevalier of the Order of St.
Michael, wounded at the battle of the Hougue-Saint-Vaast on the 29th of
May, 1692; died at Vaubyessard on the 23rd of January 1693." One could
hardly make out those that followed, for the light of the lamps lowered
over the green cloth threw a dim shadow round the room. Burnishing the
horizontal pictures, it broke up against these in delicate lines where
there were cracks in the varnish, and from all these great black squares
framed in with gold stood out here and there some lighter portion of the
painting--a pale brow, two eyes that looked at you, perukes flowing over
and powdering red-coated shoulders, or the buckle of a garter above a
well-rounded calf.
The Marquis opened the drawing room door; one of the ladies (the
Marchioness herself) came to meet Emma. She made her sit down by her on
an ottoman, and began talking to her as amicably as if she had known her
a long time. She was a woman of about forty, with fine shoulders, a hook
nose, a drawling voice, and on this evening she wore over her brown hair
a simple guipure fichu that fell in a point at the back. A fair young
woman sat in a high-backed chair in a corner; and gentlemen with flowers
in their buttonholes were talking to ladies round the fire.
At seven dinner was served. The men, who were in the majority, sat down
at the first table in the vestibule; the ladies at the second in the
dining room with the Marquis and Marchioness.
Emma, on entering, felt herself wrapped round by the warm air, a
blending of the perfume of flowers and of the fine linen, of the fumes
of the viands, and the odour of the truffles. The silver dish covers
reflected the lighted wax candles in the candelabra, the cut crystal
covered with light steam reflected from one to the other pale rays;
bouquets were placed in a row the whole length of the table; and in
the large-bordered plates each napkin, arranged after the fashion of a
bishop's mitre, held between its two gaping folds a small oval shaped
roll. The red claws of lobsters hung over the dishes; rich fruit in open
baskets was piled up on moss; there were quails in their plumage; smoke
was rising; and in silk stockings, knee-breeches, white cravat, and
frilled shirt, the steward, grave as a judge, offering ready carved
dishes between the shoulders of the guests, with a touch of the spoon
gave you the piece chosen. On the large stove of porcelain inlaid
with copper baguettes the statue of a woman, draped to the chin, gazed
motionless on the room full of life.
Madame Bovary noticed that many ladies had not put their gloves in their
glasses.
But at the upper end of the table, alone amongst all these women, bent
over his full plate, and his napkin tied round his neck like a child, an
old man sat eating, letting drops of gravy drip from his mouth. His eyes
were bloodshot, and he wore a little queue tied with black ribbon. He
was the Marquis's father-in-law, the old Duke de Laverdiere, once on
a time favourite of the Count d'Artois, in the days of the Vaudreuil
hunting-parties at the Marquis de Conflans', and had been, it was said,
the lover of Queen Marie Antoinette, between Monsieur de Coigny and
Monsieur de Lauzun. He had lived a life of noisy debauch, full of duels,
bets, elopements; he had squandered his fortune and frightened all his
family. A servant behind his chair named aloud to him in his ear the
dishes that he pointed to stammering, and constantly Emma's eyes
turned involuntarily to this old man with hanging lips, as to something
extraordinary. He had lived at court and slept in the bed of queens!
Iced champagne was poured out. Emma shivered all over as she felt
it cold in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates nor tasted
pineapples. The powdered sugar even seemed to her whiter and finer than
elsewhere.
The ladies afterwards went to their rooms to prepare for the ball.
Emma made her toilet with the fastidious care of an actress on her
debut. She did her hair according to the directions of the hairdresser,
and put on the barege dress spread out upon the bed.
Charles's trousers were tight across the belly.
"My trouser-straps will be rather awkward for dancing," he said.
"Dancing?" repeated Emma.
"Yes!"
"Why, you must be mad! They would make fun of you; keep your place.
Besides, it is more becoming for a doctor," she added.
Charles was silent. He walked up and down waiting for Emma to finish
dressing.
He saw her from behind in the glass between two lights. Her black eyes
seemed blacker than ever. Her hair, undulating towards the ears, shone
with a blue lustre; a rose in her chignon trembled on its mobile stalk,
with artificial dewdrops on the tip of the leaves. She wore a gown of
pale saffron trimmed with three bouquets of pompon roses mixed with
green.
Charles came and kissed her on her shoulder.
"Let me alone!" she said; "you are tumbling me."
One could hear the flourish of the violin and the notes of a horn. She
went downstairs restraining herself from running.
Dancing had begun. Guests were arriving. There was some crushing.
She sat down on a form near the door.
The quadrille over, the floor was occupied by groups of men standing up
and talking and servants in livery bearing large trays. Along the line
of seated women painted fans were fluttering, bouquets half hid smiling
faces, and gold stoppered scent-bottles were turned in partly-closed
hands, whose white gloves outlined the nails and tightened on the flesh
at the wrists. Lace trimmings, diamond brooches, medallion bracelets
trembled on bodices, gleamed on breasts, clinked on bare arms.
The hair, well-smoothed over the temples and knotted at the nape,
bore crowns, or bunches, or sprays of mytosotis, jasmine, pomegranate
blossoms, ears of corn, and corn-flowers. Calmly seated in their places,
mothers with forbidding countenances were wearing red turbans.
Emma's heart beat rather faster when, her partner holding her by the
tips of the fingers, she took her place in a line with the dancers, and
waited for the first note to start. But her emotion soon vanished, and,
swaying to the rhythm of the orchestra, she glided forward with slight
movements of the neck. A smile rose to her lips at certain delicate
phrases of the violin, that sometimes played alone while the other
instruments were silent; one could hear the clear clink of the louis
d'or that were being thrown down upon the card tables in the next room;
then all struck again, the cornet-a-piston uttered its sonorous note,
feet marked time, skirts swelled and rustled, hands touched and parted;
the same eyes falling before you met yours again.
A few men (some fifteen or so), of twenty-five to forty, scattered here
and there among the dancers or talking at the doorways, distinguished
themselves from the crowd by a certain air of breeding, whatever their
differences in age, dress, or face.
Their clothes, better made, seemed of finer cloth, and their hair,
brought forward in curls towards the temples, glossy with more delicate
pomades. They had the complexion of wealth--that clear complexion that
is heightened by the pallor of porcelain, the shimmer of satin, the
veneer of old furniture, and that an ordered regimen of exquisite
nurture maintains at its best. Their necks moved easily in their low
cravats, their long whiskers fell over their turned-down collars, they
wiped their lips upon handkerchiefs with embroidered initials that gave
forth a subtle perfume. Those who were beginning to grow old had an air
of youth, while there was something mature in the faces of the young.
In their unconcerned looks was the calm of passions daily satiated, and
through all their gentleness of manner pierced that peculiar brutality,
the result of a command of half-easy things, in which force is exercised
and vanity amused--the management of thoroughbred horses and the society
of loose women.
A few steps from Emma a gentleman in a blue coat was talking of Italy
with a pale young woman wearing a parure of pearls.
They were praising the breadth of the columns of St. Peter's, Tivoly,
Vesuvius, Castellamare, and Cassines, the roses of Genoa, the Coliseum
by moonlight. With her other ear Emma was listening to a conversation
full of words she did not understand. A circle gathered round a very
young man who the week before had beaten "Miss Arabella" and "Romolus,"
and won two thousand louis jumping a ditch in England. One complained
that his racehorses were growing fat; another of the printers' errors
that had disfigured the name of his horse.
The atmosphere of the ball was heavy; the lamps were growing dim.
Guests were flocking to the billiard room. A servant got upon a chair
and broke the window-panes. At the crash of the glass Madame Bovary
turned her head and saw in the garden the faces of peasants pressed
against the window looking in at them. Then the memory of the Bertaux
came back to her. She saw the farm again, the muddy pond, her father in
a blouse under the apple trees, and she saw herself again as formerly,
skimming with her finger the cream off the milk-pans in the dairy. But
in the refulgence of the present hour her past life, so distinct until
then, faded away completely, and she almost doubted having lived it. She
was there; beyond the ball was only shadow overspreading all the rest.
She was just eating a maraschino ice that she held with her left hand
in a silver-gilt cup, her eyes half-closed, and the spoon between her
teeth.
A lady near her dropped her fan. A gentlemen was passing.
"Would you be so good," said the lady, "as to pick up my fan that has
fallen behind the sofa?"
The gentleman bowed, and as he moved to stretch out his arm, Emma saw
the hand of a young woman throw something white, folded in a triangle,
into his hat. The gentleman, picking up the fan, offered it to the lady
respectfully; she thanked him with an inclination of the head, and began
smelling her bouquet.
After supper, where were plenty of Spanish and Rhine wines, soups a la
bisque and au lait d'amandes*, puddings a la Trafalgar, and all sorts of
cold meats with jellies that trembled in the dishes, the carriages one
after the other began to drive off. Raising the corners of the muslin
curtain, one could see the light of their lanterns glimmering through
the darkness. The seats began to empty, some card-players were still
left; the musicians were cooling the tips of their fingers on their
tongues. Charles was half asleep, his back propped against a door.
*With almond milk
At three o'clock the cotillion began. Emma did not know how to waltz.
Everyone was waltzing, Mademoiselle d'Andervilliers herself and the
Marquis; only the guests staying at the castle were still there, about a
dozen persons.
One of the waltzers, however, who was familiarly called Viscount, and
whose low cut waistcoat seemed moulded to his chest, came a second time
to ask Madame Bovary to dance, assuring her that he would guide her, and
that she would get through it very well.
They began slowly, then went more rapidly. They turned; all around them
was turning--the lamps, the furniture, the wainscoting, the floor, like
a disc on a pivot. On passing near the doors the bottom of Emma's dress
caught against his trousers.
Their legs commingled; he looked down at her; she raised her eyes to
his. A torpor seized her; she stopped. They started again, and with a
more rapid movement; the Viscount, dragging her along disappeared with
her to the end of the gallery, where panting, she almost fell, and for
a moment rested her head upon his breast. And then, still turning, but
more slowly, he guided her back to her seat. She leaned back against the
wall and covered her eyes with her hands.
When she opened them again, in the middle of the drawing room three
waltzers were kneeling before a lady sitting on a stool.
She chose the Viscount, and the violin struck up once more.
Everyone looked at them. They passed and re-passed, she with rigid body,
her chin bent down, and he always in the same pose, his figure curved,
his elbow rounded, his chin thrown forward. That woman knew how to
waltz! They kept up a long time, and tired out all the others.
Then they talked a few moments longer, and after the goodnights, or
rather good mornings, the guests of the chateau retired to bed.
Charles dragged himself up by the balusters. His "knees were going
up into his body." He had spent five consecutive hours standing
bolt upright at the card tables, watching them play whist, without
understanding anything about it, and it was with a deep sigh of relief
that he pulled off his boots.
Emma threw a shawl over her shoulders, opened the window, and leant out.
The night was dark; some drops of rain were falling. She breathed in the
damp wind that refreshed her eyelids. The music of the ball was still
murmuring in her ears. And she tried to keep herself awake in order to
prolong the illusion of this luxurious life that she would soon have to
give up.
Day began to break. She looked long at the windows of the chateau,
trying to guess which were the rooms of all those she had noticed the
evening before. She would fain have known their lives, have penetrated,
blended with them. But she was shivering with cold. She undressed, and
cowered down between the sheets against Charles, who was asleep.
There were a great many people to luncheon. The repast lasted ten
minutes; no liqueurs were served, which astonished the doctor.
Next, Mademoiselle d'Andervilliers collected some pieces of roll in a
small basket to take them to the swans on the ornamental waters, and
they went to walk in the hot-houses, where strange plants, bristling
with hairs, rose in pyramids under hanging vases, whence, as from
over-filled nests of serpents, fell long green cords interlacing.
The orangery, which was at the other end, led by a covered way to the
outhouses of the chateau. The Marquis, to amuse the young woman, took
her to see the stables.
Above the basket-shaped racks porcelain slabs bore the names of the
horses in black letters. Each animal in its stall whisked its tail when
anyone went near and said "Tchk! tchk!" The boards of the harness room
shone like the flooring of a drawing room. The carriage harness was
piled up in the middle against two twisted columns, and the bits, the
whips, the spurs, the curbs, were ranged in a line all along the wall.
Charles, meanwhile, went to ask a groom to put his horse to. The
dog-cart was brought to the foot of the steps, and, all the parcels
being crammed in, the Bovarys paid their respects to the Marquis and
Marchioness and set out again for Tostes.
Emma watched the turning wheels in silence. Charles, on the extreme edge
of the seat, held the reins with his two arms wide apart, and the little
horse ambled along in the shafts that were too big for him. The loose
reins hanging over his crupper were wet with foam, and the box fastened
on behind the chaise gave great regular bumps against it.
They were on the heights of Thibourville when suddenly some horsemen
with cigars between their lips passed laughing. Emma thought she
recognized the Viscount, turned back, and caught on the horizon only the
movement of the heads rising or falling with the unequal cadence of the
trot or gallop.
A mile farther on they had to stop to mend with some string the traces
that had broken.
But Charles, giving a last look to the harness, saw something on the
ground between his horse's legs, and he picked up a cigar-case with
a green silk border and beblazoned in the centre like the door of a
carriage.
"There are even two cigars in it," said he; "they'll do for this evening
after dinner."
"Why, do you smoke?" she asked.
"Sometimes, when I get a chance."
He put his find in his pocket and whipped up the nag.
When they reached home the dinner was not ready. Madame lost her temper.
Nastasie answered rudely.
"Leave the room!" said Emma. "You are forgetting yourself. I give you
warning."
For dinner there was onion soup and a piece of veal with sorrel.
Charles, seated opposite Emma, rubbed his hands gleefully.
"How good it is to be at home again!"
Nastasie could be heard crying. He was rather fond of the poor girl.
She had formerly, during the wearisome time of his widowhood, kept him
company many an evening. She had been his first patient, his oldest
acquaintance in the place.
"Have you given her warning for good?" he asked at last.
"Yes. Who is to prevent me?" she replied.
Then they warmed themselves in the kitchen while their room was being
made ready. Charles began to smoke. He smoked with lips protruding,
spitting every moment, recoiling at every puff.
"You'll make yourself ill," she said scornfully.
He put down his cigar and ran to swallow a glass of cold water at the
pump. Emma seizing hold of the cigar case threw it quickly to the back
of the cupboard.
The next day was a long one. She walked about her little garden, up
and down the same walks, stopping before the beds, before the espalier,
before the plaster curate, looking with amazement at all these things
of once-on-a-time that she knew so well. How far off the ball seemed
already! What was it that thus set so far asunder the morning of the day
before yesterday and the evening of to-day? Her journey to Vaubyessard
had made a hole in her life, like one of those great crevices that
a storm will sometimes make in one night in mountains. Still she was
resigned. She devoutly put away in her drawers her beautiful dress, down
to the satin shoes whose soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of
the dancing floor. Her heart was like these. In its friction against
wealth something had come over it that could not be effaced.
The memory of this ball, then, became an occupation for Emma.
Whenever the Wednesday came round she said to herself as she awoke, "Ah!
I was there a week--a fortnight--three weeks ago."
And little by little the faces grew confused in her remembrance.
She forgot the tune of the quadrilles; she no longer saw the liveries
and appointments so distinctly; some details escaped her, but the regret
remained with her.
| At the marquis' new Italian-styled chateau the marquis leads Emma into the room where the marquise and some other ladies are sitting. The marquise talks to Emma easily and with kindness. The dinner is opulent and the service immaculate. The marquis' senile father-in-law sits at the head of the table. He is rumored to have been one of Marie-Antoinette's lovers. Despite the old man's grotesque appearance and poor manners Emma is thrilled to be in his presence. After dinner the ladies retire to prepare for the ball. Emma laughs at Charles when he informs her of his intention to dance and she dances several quadrilles with other partners. The men occupy themselves at the gaming tables but Charles is unable to make sense of the games. Scattered among them are the true blue-bloods who bear the marks of breeding - fine clothes, fine complexions and world weary countenances. Emma overhears a couple discussing the merits of travel in Italy. As the night progresses Emma is overcome by the glamour of the party but Charles is half asleep against a door. At 3am the band begins a waltz. Although she has never danced a waltz Emma accepts the invitation of a man whom everyone refers to as "vicomte". She is awkward on the floor and out of breath she leans her head against his chest. Later in their room Charles falls immediately asleep but Emma remains awake, leaning on the windowsill and pondering all she has experienced at the party. The next morning she and Charles dine with the remaining guests and then depart. On their way home they pass several groups of revelers and Charles finds a dropped cigar case bearing a crest still containing some cigars. At home Emma is enraged to discover that Nastasie does not have dinner ready and fires the old woman on the spot. After dinner Charles tries one of the cigars but the smoke makes him sick. Emma takes the cigar case and hides it in her closet. Though the specific details of the ball fade in Emma's memory the yearning for the glamour of that night does not abate | summary |
Often when Charles was out she took from the cupboard, between the
folds of the linen where she had left it, the green silk cigar case.
She looked at it, opened it, and even smelt the odour of the lining--a
mixture of verbena and tobacco. Whose was it? The Viscount's? Perhaps
it was a present from his mistress. It had been embroidered on some
rosewood frame, a pretty little thing, hidden from all eyes, that had
occupied many hours, and over which had fallen the soft curls of the
pensive worker. A breath of love had passed over the stitches on the
canvas; each prick of the needle had fixed there a hope or a memory, and
all those interwoven threads of silk were but the continuity of the same
silent passion. And then one morning the Viscount had taken it away
with him. Of what had they spoken when it lay upon the wide-mantelled
chimneys between flower-vases and Pompadour clocks? She was at Tostes;
he was at Paris now, far away! What was this Paris like? What a vague
name! She repeated it in a low voice, for the mere pleasure of it; it
rang in her ears like a great cathedral bell; it shone before her eyes,
even on the labels of her pomade-pots.
At night, when the carriers passed under her windows in their carts
singing the "Marjolaine," she awoke, and listened to the noise of the
iron-bound wheels, which, as they gained the country road, was soon
deadened by the soil. "They will be there to-morrow!" she said to
herself.
And she followed them in thought up and down the hills, traversing
villages, gliding along the highroads by the light of the stars. At the
end of some indefinite distance there was always a confused spot, into
which her dream died.
She bought a plan of Paris, and with the tip of her finger on the map
she walked about the capital. She went up the boulevards, stopping at
every turning, between the lines of the streets, in front of the white
squares that represented the houses. At last she would close the lids of
her weary eyes, and see in the darkness the gas jets flaring in the wind
and the steps of carriages lowered with much noise before the peristyles
of theatres.
She took in "La Corbeille," a lady's journal, and the "Sylphe des
Salons." She devoured, without skipping a word, all the accounts of
first nights, races, and soirees, took interest in the debut of a
singer, in the opening of a new shop. She knew the latest fashions, the
addresses of the best tailors, the days of the Bois and the Opera. In
Eugene Sue she studied descriptions of furniture; she read Balzac and
George Sand, seeking in them imaginary satisfaction for her own desires.
Even at table she had her book by her, and turned over the pages
while Charles ate and talked to her. The memory of the Viscount always
returned as she read. Between him and the imaginary personages she made
comparisons. But the circle of which he was the centre gradually widened
round him, and the aureole that he bore, fading from his form, broadened
out beyond, lighting up her other dreams.
Paris, more vague than the ocean, glimmered before Emma's eyes in an
atmosphere of vermilion. The many lives that stirred amid this tumult
were, however, divided into parts, classed as distinct pictures. Emma
perceived only two or three that hid from her all the rest, and in
themselves represented all humanity. The world of ambassadors moved over
polished floors in drawing rooms lined with mirrors, round oval tables
covered with velvet and gold-fringed cloths. There were dresses with
trains, deep mysteries, anguish hidden beneath smiles. Then came the
society of the duchesses; all were pale; all got up at four o'clock; the
women, poor angels, wore English point on their petticoats; and the men,
unappreciated geniuses under a frivolous outward seeming, rode horses to
death at pleasure parties, spent the summer season at Baden, and towards
the forties married heiresses. In the private rooms of restaurants,
where one sups after midnight by the light of wax candles, laughed the
motley crowd of men of letters and actresses. They were prodigal as
kings, full of ideal, ambitious, fantastic frenzy. This was an existence
outside that of all others, between heaven and earth, in the midst of
storms, having something of the sublime. For the rest of the world it
was lost, with no particular place and as if non-existent. The nearer
things were, moreover, the more her thoughts turned away from them.
All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-class
imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to her exceptional, a
peculiar chance that had caught hold of her, while beyond stretched, as
far as eye could see, an immense land of joys and passions. She confused
in her desire the sensualities of luxury with the delights of the heart,
elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment. Did not love, like
Indian plants, need a special soil, a particular temperature? Signs
by moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over yielded hands, all
the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness could not be
separated from the balconies of great castles full of indolence,
from boudoirs with silken curtains and thick carpets, well-filled
flower-stands, a bed on a raised dias, nor from the flashing of precious
stones and the shoulder-knots of liveries.
The lad from the posting house who came to groom the mare every morning
passed through the passage with his heavy wooden shoes; there were holes
in his blouse; his feet were bare in list slippers. And this was the
groom in knee-britches with whom she had to be content! His work done,
he did not come back again all day, for Charles on his return put up
his horse himself, unsaddled him and put on the halter, while the
servant-girl brought a bundle of straw and threw it as best she could
into the manger.
To replace Nastasie (who left Tostes shedding torrents of tears) Emma
took into her service a young girl of fourteen, an orphan with a sweet
face. She forbade her wearing cotton caps, taught her to address her in
the third person, to bring a glass of water on a plate, to knock before
coming into a room, to iron, starch, and to dress her--wanted to make a
lady's-maid of her. The new servant obeyed without a murmur, so as not
to be sent away; and as madame usually left the key in the sideboard,
Felicite every evening took a small supply of sugar that she ate alone
in her bed after she had said her prayers.
Sometimes in the afternoon she went to chat with the postilions.
Madame was in her room upstairs. She wore an open dressing gown that
showed between the shawl facings of her bodice a pleated chamisette with
three gold buttons. Her belt was a corded girdle with great tassels, and
her small garnet coloured slippers had a large knot of ribbon that fell
over her instep. She had bought herself a blotting book, writing case,
pen-holder, and envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she
dusted her what-not, looked at herself in the glass, picked up a book,
and then, dreaming between the lines, let it drop on her knees. She
longed to travel or to go back to her convent. She wished at the same
time to die and to live in Paris.
Charles in snow and rain trotted across country. He ate omelettes on
farmhouse tables, poked his arm into damp beds, received the tepid
spurt of blood-lettings in his face, listened to death-rattles, examined
basins, turned over a good deal of dirty linen; but every evening he
found a blazing fire, his dinner ready, easy-chairs, and a well-dressed
woman, charming with an odour of freshness, though no one could say
whence the perfume came, or if it were not her skin that made odorous
her chemise.
She charmed him by numerous attentions; now it was some new way of
arranging paper sconces for the candles, a flounce that she altered on
her gown, or an extraordinary name for some very simple dish that the
servant had spoilt, but that Charles swallowed with pleasure to the last
mouthful. At Rouen she saw some ladies who wore a bunch of charms on the
watch-chains; she bought some charms. She wanted for her mantelpiece two
large blue glass vases, and some time after an ivory necessaire with a
silver-gilt thimble. The less Charles understood these refinements
the more they seduced him. They added something to the pleasure of the
senses and to the comfort of his fireside. It was like a golden dust
sanding all along the narrow path of his life.
He was well, looked well; his reputation was firmly established.
The country-folk loved him because he was not proud. He petted the
children, never went to the public house, and, moreover, his morals
inspired confidence. He was specially successful with catarrhs and chest
complaints. Being much afraid of killing his patients, Charles, in fact
only prescribed sedatives, from time to time and emetic, a footbath,
or leeches. It was not that he was afraid of surgery; he bled people
copiously like horses, and for the taking out of teeth he had the
"devil's own wrist."
Finally, to keep up with the times, he took in "La Ruche Medicale,"
a new journal whose prospectus had been sent him. He read it a little
after dinner, but in about five minutes the warmth of the room added to
the effect of his dinner sent him to sleep; and he sat there, his chin
on his two hands and his hair spreading like a mane to the foot of the
lamp. Emma looked at him and shrugged her shoulders. Why, at least, was
not her husband one of those men of taciturn passions who work at their
books all night, and at last, when about sixty, the age of rheumatism
sets in, wear a string of orders on their ill-fitting black coat?
She could have wished this name of Bovary, which was hers, had been
illustrious, to see it displayed at the booksellers', repeated in the
newspapers, known to all France. But Charles had no ambition.
An Yvetot doctor whom he had lately met in consultation had somewhat
humiliated him at the very bedside of the patient, before the assembled
relatives. When, in the evening, Charles told her this anecdote, Emma
inveighed loudly against his colleague. Charles was much touched. He
kissed her forehead with a tear in his eyes. But she was angered with
shame; she felt a wild desire to strike him; she went to open the window
in the passage and breathed in the fresh air to calm herself.
"What a man! What a man!" she said in a low voice, biting her lips.
Besides, she was becoming more irritated with him. As he grew older his
manner grew heavier; at dessert he cut the corks of the empty bottles;
after eating he cleaned his teeth with his tongue; in taking soup
he made a gurgling noise with every spoonful; and, as he was getting
fatter, the puffed-out cheeks seemed to push the eyes, always small, up
to the temples.
Sometimes Emma tucked the red borders of his under-vest unto his
waistcoat, rearranged his cravat, and threw away the dirty gloves he was
going to put on; and this was not, as he fancied, for himself; it
was for herself, by a diffusion of egotism, of nervous irritation.
Sometimes, too, she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in
a novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the "upper ten" that she
had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was something, an
ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation. She confided many a thing to
her greyhound. She would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to
the pendulum of the clock.
At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to
happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the
solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of
the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would
bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a
shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the
portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that
day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that
it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for
the morrow.
Spring came round. With the first warm weather, when the pear trees
began to blossom, she suffered from dyspnoea.
From the beginning of July she counted how many weeks there were to
October, thinking that perhaps the Marquis d'Andervilliers would give
another ball at Vaubyessard. But all September passed without letters or
visits.
After the ennui of this disappointment her heart once more remained
empty, and then the same series of days recommenced. So now they would
thus follow one another, always the same, immovable, and bringing
nothing. Other lives, however flat, had at least the chance of some
event. One adventure sometimes brought with it infinite consequences and
the scene changed. But nothing happened to her; God had willed it so!
The future was a dark corridor, with its door at the end shut fast.
She gave up music. What was the good of playing? Who would hear her?
Since she could never, in a velvet gown with short sleeves, striking
with her light fingers the ivory keys of an Erard at a concert, feel
the murmur of ecstasy envelop her like a breeze, it was not worth while
boring herself with practicing. Her drawing cardboard and her embroidery
she left in the cupboard. What was the good? What was the good? Sewing
irritated her. "I have read everything," she said to herself. And she
sat there making the tongs red-hot, or looked at the rain falling.
How sad she was on Sundays when vespers sounded! She listened with dull
attention to each stroke of the cracked bell. A cat slowly walking over
some roof put up his back in the pale rays of the sun. The wind on the
highroad blew up clouds of dust. Afar off a dog sometimes howled; and
the bell, keeping time, continued its monotonous ringing that died away
over the fields.
But the people came out from church. The women in waxed clogs, the
peasants in new blouses, the little bare-headed children skipping along
in front of them, all were going home. And till nightfall, five or six
men, always the same, stayed playing at corks in front of the large door
of the inn.
The winter was severe. The windows every morning were covered with
rime, and the light shining through them, dim as through ground-glass,
sometimes did not change the whole day long. At four o'clock the lamp
had to be lighted.
On fine days she went down into the garden. The dew had left on the
cabbages a silver lace with long transparent threads spreading from one
to the other. No birds were to be heard; everything seemed asleep, the
espalier covered with straw, and the vine, like a great sick serpent
under the coping of the wall, along which, on drawing near, one saw the
many-footed woodlice crawling. Under the spruce by the hedgerow, the
curie in the three-cornered hat reading his breviary had lost his right
foot, and the very plaster, scaling off with the frost, had left white
scabs on his face.
Then she went up again, shut her door, put on coals, and fainting with
the heat of the hearth, felt her boredom weigh more heavily than ever.
She would have liked to go down and talk to the servant, but a sense of
shame restrained her.
Every day at the same time the schoolmaster in a black skullcap opened
the shutters of his house, and the rural policeman, wearing his sabre
over his blouse, passed by. Night and morning the post-horses, three by
three, crossed the street to water at the pond. From time to time the
bell of a public house door rang, and when it was windy one could hear
the little brass basins that served as signs for the hairdresser's shop
creaking on their two rods. This shop had as decoration an old engraving
of a fashion-plate stuck against a windowpane and the wax bust of a
woman with yellow hair. He, too, the hairdresser, lamented his wasted
calling, his hopeless future, and dreaming of some shop in a big
town--at Rouen, for example, overlooking the harbour, near the
theatre--he walked up and down all day from the mairie to the church,
sombre and waiting for customers. When Madame Bovary looked up, she
always saw him there, like a sentinel on duty, with his skullcap over
his ears and his vest of lasting.
Sometimes in the afternoon outside the window of her room, the head of a
man appeared, a swarthy head with black whiskers, smiling slowly, with
a broad, gentle smile that showed his white teeth. A waltz immediately
began and on the organ, in a little drawing room, dancers the size of
a finger, women in pink turbans, Tyrolians in jackets, monkeys in frock
coats, gentlemen in knee-breeches, turned and turned between the sofas,
the consoles, multiplied in the bits of looking glass held together
at their corners by a piece of gold paper. The man turned his handle,
looking to the right and left, and up at the windows. Now and again,
while he shot out a long squirt of brown saliva against the milestone,
with his knee raised his instrument, whose hard straps tired his
shoulder; and now, doleful and drawling, or gay and hurried, the music
escaped from the box, droning through a curtain of pink taffeta under
a brass claw in arabesque. They were airs played in other places at
the theatres, sung in drawing rooms, danced to at night under lighted
lustres, echoes of the world that reached even to Emma. Endless
sarabands ran through her head, and, like an Indian dancing girl on the
flowers of a carpet, her thoughts leapt with the notes, swung from dream
to dream, from sadness to sadness. When the man had caught some coppers
in his cap, he drew down an old cover of blue cloth, hitched his organ
on to his back, and went off with a heavy tread. She watched him going.
But it was above all the meal-times that were unbearable to her, in this
small room on the ground floor, with its smoking stove, its creaking
door, the walls that sweated, the damp flags; all the bitterness in life
seemed served up on her plate, and with smoke of the boiled beef there
rose from her secret soul whiffs of sickliness. Charles was a slow
eater; she played with a few nuts, or, leaning on her elbow, amused
herself with drawing lines along the oilcloth table cover with the point
of her knife.
She now let everything in her household take care of itself, and Madame
Bovary senior, when she came to spend part of Lent at Tostes, was much
surprised at the change. She who was formerly so careful, so dainty,
now passed whole days without dressing, wore grey cotton stockings, and
burnt tallow candles. She kept saying they must be economical since
they were not rich, adding that she was very contented, very happy, that
Tostes pleased her very much, with other speeches that closed the mouth
of her mother-in-law. Besides, Emma no longer seemed inclined to follow
her advice; once even, Madame Bovary having thought fit to maintain that
mistresses ought to keep an eye on the religion of their servants, she
had answered with so angry a look and so cold a smile that the good
woman did not interfere again.
Emma was growing difficult, capricious. She ordered dishes for herself,
then she did not touch them; one day drank only pure milk, the next
cups of tea by the dozen. Often she persisted in not going out, then,
stifling, threw open the windows and put on light dresses. After she had
well scolded her servant she gave her presents or sent her out to see
neighbours, just as she sometimes threw beggars all the silver in her
purse, although she was by no means tender-hearted or easily accessible
to the feelings of others, like most country-bred people, who always
retain in their souls something of the horny hardness of the paternal
hands.
Towards the end of February old Rouault, in memory of his cure, himself
brought his son-in-law a superb turkey, and stayed three days at Tostes.
Charles being with his patients, Emma kept him company. He smoked in the
room, spat on the firedogs, talked farming, calves, cows, poultry, and
municipal council, so that when he left she closed the door on him with
a feeling of satisfaction that surprised even herself. Moreover she no
longer concealed her contempt for anything or anybody, and at times she
set herself to express singular opinions, finding fault with that which
others approved, and approving things perverse and immoral, all of which
made her husband open his eyes widely.
Would this misery last for ever? Would she never issue from it? Yet
she was as good as all the women who were living happily. She had seen
duchesses at Vaubyessard with clumsier waists and commoner ways, and she
execrated the injustice of God. She leant her head against the walls
to weep; she envied lives of stir; longed for masked balls, for violent
pleasures, with all the wildness that she did not know, but that these
must surely yield.
She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart.
Charles prescribed valerian and camphor baths. Everything that was tried
only seemed to irritate her the more.
On certain days she chatted with feverish rapidity, and this
over-excitement was suddenly followed by a state of torpor, in which
she remained without speaking, without moving. What then revived her was
pouring a bottle of eau-de-cologne over her arms.
As she was constantly complaining about Tostes, Charles fancied that her
illness was no doubt due to some local cause, and fixing on this idea,
began to think seriously of setting up elsewhere.
From that moment she drank vinegar, contracted a sharp little cough, and
completely lost her appetite.
It cost Charles much to give up Tostes after living there four years and
"when he was beginning to get on there." Yet if it must be! He took her
to Rouen to see his old master. It was a nervous complaint: change of
air was needed.
After looking about him on this side and on that, Charles learnt that
in the Neufchatel arrondissement there was a considerable market town
called Yonville-l'Abbaye, whose doctor, a Polish refugee, had decamped a
week before. Then he wrote to the chemist of the place to ask the
number of the population, the distance from the nearest doctor, what
his predecessor had made a year, and so forth; and the answer being
satisfactory, he made up his mind to move towards the spring, if Emma's
health did not improve.
One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer,
something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding bouquet.
The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver bordered satin
ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared
up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was, like a red bush in the
cinders, slowly devoured. She watched it burn.
The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold
lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas, fluttering like black
butterflies at the back of the stove, at last flew up the chimney.
When they left Tostes at the month of March, Madame Bovary was pregnant.
Part II
| Emma ponders over the ornate cigar case. She imagines that it was made for the vicomte by one of his lovers and that he is now in Paris. She envies anyone going to Paris including the fishmongers who pass beneath her window every morning. She buys a map of Paris and memorizes every line. She subscribes to women's magazines and she fantasizes about the lives of the royal ladies. Everything immediately surrounding her," observes the narrator, "seemed to her the exception rather than the rule. She comes to believe that the only thing lacking in her life are the proper surroundings. She hires a fourteen-year-old country girl named Flicit to be her new maid and instructs the girl in the manner of serving royalty. Charles' practice prospers and though he spends countless days engaged in the dirty, mundane work of medicine he returns home to find a well-ordered house. Emma, however, is secretly aggravated that her husband seems to have no professional ambition save maintaining his current status. She finds that even his slightest mannerisms annoy her. She waits in vain for something exciting to happen. She becomes chronically depressed. Eventually she lets the details of the household lag and Charles' mother is surprised to find that her daughter-in-law has lapsed into lethargy and idleness. Charles, alarmed at his wife's fading vigor, resolves to relocate his practice. He secures a position in the market town of Yonville-l'Abbaye. While packing to leave Emma finds her wedding bouquet and throws it in the fire. When they depart for their new home she is pregnant. | summary |
Often when Charles was out she took from the cupboard, between the
folds of the linen where she had left it, the green silk cigar case.
She looked at it, opened it, and even smelt the odour of the lining--a
mixture of verbena and tobacco. Whose was it? The Viscount's? Perhaps
it was a present from his mistress. It had been embroidered on some
rosewood frame, a pretty little thing, hidden from all eyes, that had
occupied many hours, and over which had fallen the soft curls of the
pensive worker. A breath of love had passed over the stitches on the
canvas; each prick of the needle had fixed there a hope or a memory, and
all those interwoven threads of silk were but the continuity of the same
silent passion. And then one morning the Viscount had taken it away
with him. Of what had they spoken when it lay upon the wide-mantelled
chimneys between flower-vases and Pompadour clocks? She was at Tostes;
he was at Paris now, far away! What was this Paris like? What a vague
name! She repeated it in a low voice, for the mere pleasure of it; it
rang in her ears like a great cathedral bell; it shone before her eyes,
even on the labels of her pomade-pots.
At night, when the carriers passed under her windows in their carts
singing the "Marjolaine," she awoke, and listened to the noise of the
iron-bound wheels, which, as they gained the country road, was soon
deadened by the soil. "They will be there to-morrow!" she said to
herself.
And she followed them in thought up and down the hills, traversing
villages, gliding along the highroads by the light of the stars. At the
end of some indefinite distance there was always a confused spot, into
which her dream died.
She bought a plan of Paris, and with the tip of her finger on the map
she walked about the capital. She went up the boulevards, stopping at
every turning, between the lines of the streets, in front of the white
squares that represented the houses. At last she would close the lids of
her weary eyes, and see in the darkness the gas jets flaring in the wind
and the steps of carriages lowered with much noise before the peristyles
of theatres.
She took in "La Corbeille," a lady's journal, and the "Sylphe des
Salons." She devoured, without skipping a word, all the accounts of
first nights, races, and soirees, took interest in the debut of a
singer, in the opening of a new shop. She knew the latest fashions, the
addresses of the best tailors, the days of the Bois and the Opera. In
Eugene Sue she studied descriptions of furniture; she read Balzac and
George Sand, seeking in them imaginary satisfaction for her own desires.
Even at table she had her book by her, and turned over the pages
while Charles ate and talked to her. The memory of the Viscount always
returned as she read. Between him and the imaginary personages she made
comparisons. But the circle of which he was the centre gradually widened
round him, and the aureole that he bore, fading from his form, broadened
out beyond, lighting up her other dreams.
Paris, more vague than the ocean, glimmered before Emma's eyes in an
atmosphere of vermilion. The many lives that stirred amid this tumult
were, however, divided into parts, classed as distinct pictures. Emma
perceived only two or three that hid from her all the rest, and in
themselves represented all humanity. The world of ambassadors moved over
polished floors in drawing rooms lined with mirrors, round oval tables
covered with velvet and gold-fringed cloths. There were dresses with
trains, deep mysteries, anguish hidden beneath smiles. Then came the
society of the duchesses; all were pale; all got up at four o'clock; the
women, poor angels, wore English point on their petticoats; and the men,
unappreciated geniuses under a frivolous outward seeming, rode horses to
death at pleasure parties, spent the summer season at Baden, and towards
the forties married heiresses. In the private rooms of restaurants,
where one sups after midnight by the light of wax candles, laughed the
motley crowd of men of letters and actresses. They were prodigal as
kings, full of ideal, ambitious, fantastic frenzy. This was an existence
outside that of all others, between heaven and earth, in the midst of
storms, having something of the sublime. For the rest of the world it
was lost, with no particular place and as if non-existent. The nearer
things were, moreover, the more her thoughts turned away from them.
All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-class
imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to her exceptional, a
peculiar chance that had caught hold of her, while beyond stretched, as
far as eye could see, an immense land of joys and passions. She confused
in her desire the sensualities of luxury with the delights of the heart,
elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment. Did not love, like
Indian plants, need a special soil, a particular temperature? Signs
by moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over yielded hands, all
the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness could not be
separated from the balconies of great castles full of indolence,
from boudoirs with silken curtains and thick carpets, well-filled
flower-stands, a bed on a raised dias, nor from the flashing of precious
stones and the shoulder-knots of liveries.
The lad from the posting house who came to groom the mare every morning
passed through the passage with his heavy wooden shoes; there were holes
in his blouse; his feet were bare in list slippers. And this was the
groom in knee-britches with whom she had to be content! His work done,
he did not come back again all day, for Charles on his return put up
his horse himself, unsaddled him and put on the halter, while the
servant-girl brought a bundle of straw and threw it as best she could
into the manger.
To replace Nastasie (who left Tostes shedding torrents of tears) Emma
took into her service a young girl of fourteen, an orphan with a sweet
face. She forbade her wearing cotton caps, taught her to address her in
the third person, to bring a glass of water on a plate, to knock before
coming into a room, to iron, starch, and to dress her--wanted to make a
lady's-maid of her. The new servant obeyed without a murmur, so as not
to be sent away; and as madame usually left the key in the sideboard,
Felicite every evening took a small supply of sugar that she ate alone
in her bed after she had said her prayers.
Sometimes in the afternoon she went to chat with the postilions.
Madame was in her room upstairs. She wore an open dressing gown that
showed between the shawl facings of her bodice a pleated chamisette with
three gold buttons. Her belt was a corded girdle with great tassels, and
her small garnet coloured slippers had a large knot of ribbon that fell
over her instep. She had bought herself a blotting book, writing case,
pen-holder, and envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she
dusted her what-not, looked at herself in the glass, picked up a book,
and then, dreaming between the lines, let it drop on her knees. She
longed to travel or to go back to her convent. She wished at the same
time to die and to live in Paris.
Charles in snow and rain trotted across country. He ate omelettes on
farmhouse tables, poked his arm into damp beds, received the tepid
spurt of blood-lettings in his face, listened to death-rattles, examined
basins, turned over a good deal of dirty linen; but every evening he
found a blazing fire, his dinner ready, easy-chairs, and a well-dressed
woman, charming with an odour of freshness, though no one could say
whence the perfume came, or if it were not her skin that made odorous
her chemise.
She charmed him by numerous attentions; now it was some new way of
arranging paper sconces for the candles, a flounce that she altered on
her gown, or an extraordinary name for some very simple dish that the
servant had spoilt, but that Charles swallowed with pleasure to the last
mouthful. At Rouen she saw some ladies who wore a bunch of charms on the
watch-chains; she bought some charms. She wanted for her mantelpiece two
large blue glass vases, and some time after an ivory necessaire with a
silver-gilt thimble. The less Charles understood these refinements
the more they seduced him. They added something to the pleasure of the
senses and to the comfort of his fireside. It was like a golden dust
sanding all along the narrow path of his life.
He was well, looked well; his reputation was firmly established.
The country-folk loved him because he was not proud. He petted the
children, never went to the public house, and, moreover, his morals
inspired confidence. He was specially successful with catarrhs and chest
complaints. Being much afraid of killing his patients, Charles, in fact
only prescribed sedatives, from time to time and emetic, a footbath,
or leeches. It was not that he was afraid of surgery; he bled people
copiously like horses, and for the taking out of teeth he had the
"devil's own wrist."
Finally, to keep up with the times, he took in "La Ruche Medicale,"
a new journal whose prospectus had been sent him. He read it a little
after dinner, but in about five minutes the warmth of the room added to
the effect of his dinner sent him to sleep; and he sat there, his chin
on his two hands and his hair spreading like a mane to the foot of the
lamp. Emma looked at him and shrugged her shoulders. Why, at least, was
not her husband one of those men of taciturn passions who work at their
books all night, and at last, when about sixty, the age of rheumatism
sets in, wear a string of orders on their ill-fitting black coat?
She could have wished this name of Bovary, which was hers, had been
illustrious, to see it displayed at the booksellers', repeated in the
newspapers, known to all France. But Charles had no ambition.
An Yvetot doctor whom he had lately met in consultation had somewhat
humiliated him at the very bedside of the patient, before the assembled
relatives. When, in the evening, Charles told her this anecdote, Emma
inveighed loudly against his colleague. Charles was much touched. He
kissed her forehead with a tear in his eyes. But she was angered with
shame; she felt a wild desire to strike him; she went to open the window
in the passage and breathed in the fresh air to calm herself.
"What a man! What a man!" she said in a low voice, biting her lips.
Besides, she was becoming more irritated with him. As he grew older his
manner grew heavier; at dessert he cut the corks of the empty bottles;
after eating he cleaned his teeth with his tongue; in taking soup
he made a gurgling noise with every spoonful; and, as he was getting
fatter, the puffed-out cheeks seemed to push the eyes, always small, up
to the temples.
Sometimes Emma tucked the red borders of his under-vest unto his
waistcoat, rearranged his cravat, and threw away the dirty gloves he was
going to put on; and this was not, as he fancied, for himself; it
was for herself, by a diffusion of egotism, of nervous irritation.
Sometimes, too, she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in
a novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the "upper ten" that she
had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was something, an
ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation. She confided many a thing to
her greyhound. She would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to
the pendulum of the clock.
At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to
happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the
solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of
the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would
bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a
shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the
portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that
day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that
it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for
the morrow.
Spring came round. With the first warm weather, when the pear trees
began to blossom, she suffered from dyspnoea.
From the beginning of July she counted how many weeks there were to
October, thinking that perhaps the Marquis d'Andervilliers would give
another ball at Vaubyessard. But all September passed without letters or
visits.
After the ennui of this disappointment her heart once more remained
empty, and then the same series of days recommenced. So now they would
thus follow one another, always the same, immovable, and bringing
nothing. Other lives, however flat, had at least the chance of some
event. One adventure sometimes brought with it infinite consequences and
the scene changed. But nothing happened to her; God had willed it so!
The future was a dark corridor, with its door at the end shut fast.
She gave up music. What was the good of playing? Who would hear her?
Since she could never, in a velvet gown with short sleeves, striking
with her light fingers the ivory keys of an Erard at a concert, feel
the murmur of ecstasy envelop her like a breeze, it was not worth while
boring herself with practicing. Her drawing cardboard and her embroidery
she left in the cupboard. What was the good? What was the good? Sewing
irritated her. "I have read everything," she said to herself. And she
sat there making the tongs red-hot, or looked at the rain falling.
How sad she was on Sundays when vespers sounded! She listened with dull
attention to each stroke of the cracked bell. A cat slowly walking over
some roof put up his back in the pale rays of the sun. The wind on the
highroad blew up clouds of dust. Afar off a dog sometimes howled; and
the bell, keeping time, continued its monotonous ringing that died away
over the fields.
But the people came out from church. The women in waxed clogs, the
peasants in new blouses, the little bare-headed children skipping along
in front of them, all were going home. And till nightfall, five or six
men, always the same, stayed playing at corks in front of the large door
of the inn.
The winter was severe. The windows every morning were covered with
rime, and the light shining through them, dim as through ground-glass,
sometimes did not change the whole day long. At four o'clock the lamp
had to be lighted.
On fine days she went down into the garden. The dew had left on the
cabbages a silver lace with long transparent threads spreading from one
to the other. No birds were to be heard; everything seemed asleep, the
espalier covered with straw, and the vine, like a great sick serpent
under the coping of the wall, along which, on drawing near, one saw the
many-footed woodlice crawling. Under the spruce by the hedgerow, the
curie in the three-cornered hat reading his breviary had lost his right
foot, and the very plaster, scaling off with the frost, had left white
scabs on his face.
Then she went up again, shut her door, put on coals, and fainting with
the heat of the hearth, felt her boredom weigh more heavily than ever.
She would have liked to go down and talk to the servant, but a sense of
shame restrained her.
Every day at the same time the schoolmaster in a black skullcap opened
the shutters of his house, and the rural policeman, wearing his sabre
over his blouse, passed by. Night and morning the post-horses, three by
three, crossed the street to water at the pond. From time to time the
bell of a public house door rang, and when it was windy one could hear
the little brass basins that served as signs for the hairdresser's shop
creaking on their two rods. This shop had as decoration an old engraving
of a fashion-plate stuck against a windowpane and the wax bust of a
woman with yellow hair. He, too, the hairdresser, lamented his wasted
calling, his hopeless future, and dreaming of some shop in a big
town--at Rouen, for example, overlooking the harbour, near the
theatre--he walked up and down all day from the mairie to the church,
sombre and waiting for customers. When Madame Bovary looked up, she
always saw him there, like a sentinel on duty, with his skullcap over
his ears and his vest of lasting.
Sometimes in the afternoon outside the window of her room, the head of a
man appeared, a swarthy head with black whiskers, smiling slowly, with
a broad, gentle smile that showed his white teeth. A waltz immediately
began and on the organ, in a little drawing room, dancers the size of
a finger, women in pink turbans, Tyrolians in jackets, monkeys in frock
coats, gentlemen in knee-breeches, turned and turned between the sofas,
the consoles, multiplied in the bits of looking glass held together
at their corners by a piece of gold paper. The man turned his handle,
looking to the right and left, and up at the windows. Now and again,
while he shot out a long squirt of brown saliva against the milestone,
with his knee raised his instrument, whose hard straps tired his
shoulder; and now, doleful and drawling, or gay and hurried, the music
escaped from the box, droning through a curtain of pink taffeta under
a brass claw in arabesque. They were airs played in other places at
the theatres, sung in drawing rooms, danced to at night under lighted
lustres, echoes of the world that reached even to Emma. Endless
sarabands ran through her head, and, like an Indian dancing girl on the
flowers of a carpet, her thoughts leapt with the notes, swung from dream
to dream, from sadness to sadness. When the man had caught some coppers
in his cap, he drew down an old cover of blue cloth, hitched his organ
on to his back, and went off with a heavy tread. She watched him going.
But it was above all the meal-times that were unbearable to her, in this
small room on the ground floor, with its smoking stove, its creaking
door, the walls that sweated, the damp flags; all the bitterness in life
seemed served up on her plate, and with smoke of the boiled beef there
rose from her secret soul whiffs of sickliness. Charles was a slow
eater; she played with a few nuts, or, leaning on her elbow, amused
herself with drawing lines along the oilcloth table cover with the point
of her knife.
She now let everything in her household take care of itself, and Madame
Bovary senior, when she came to spend part of Lent at Tostes, was much
surprised at the change. She who was formerly so careful, so dainty,
now passed whole days without dressing, wore grey cotton stockings, and
burnt tallow candles. She kept saying they must be economical since
they were not rich, adding that she was very contented, very happy, that
Tostes pleased her very much, with other speeches that closed the mouth
of her mother-in-law. Besides, Emma no longer seemed inclined to follow
her advice; once even, Madame Bovary having thought fit to maintain that
mistresses ought to keep an eye on the religion of their servants, she
had answered with so angry a look and so cold a smile that the good
woman did not interfere again.
Emma was growing difficult, capricious. She ordered dishes for herself,
then she did not touch them; one day drank only pure milk, the next
cups of tea by the dozen. Often she persisted in not going out, then,
stifling, threw open the windows and put on light dresses. After she had
well scolded her servant she gave her presents or sent her out to see
neighbours, just as she sometimes threw beggars all the silver in her
purse, although she was by no means tender-hearted or easily accessible
to the feelings of others, like most country-bred people, who always
retain in their souls something of the horny hardness of the paternal
hands.
Towards the end of February old Rouault, in memory of his cure, himself
brought his son-in-law a superb turkey, and stayed three days at Tostes.
Charles being with his patients, Emma kept him company. He smoked in the
room, spat on the firedogs, talked farming, calves, cows, poultry, and
municipal council, so that when he left she closed the door on him with
a feeling of satisfaction that surprised even herself. Moreover she no
longer concealed her contempt for anything or anybody, and at times she
set herself to express singular opinions, finding fault with that which
others approved, and approving things perverse and immoral, all of which
made her husband open his eyes widely.
Would this misery last for ever? Would she never issue from it? Yet
she was as good as all the women who were living happily. She had seen
duchesses at Vaubyessard with clumsier waists and commoner ways, and she
execrated the injustice of God. She leant her head against the walls
to weep; she envied lives of stir; longed for masked balls, for violent
pleasures, with all the wildness that she did not know, but that these
must surely yield.
She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart.
Charles prescribed valerian and camphor baths. Everything that was tried
only seemed to irritate her the more.
On certain days she chatted with feverish rapidity, and this
over-excitement was suddenly followed by a state of torpor, in which
she remained without speaking, without moving. What then revived her was
pouring a bottle of eau-de-cologne over her arms.
As she was constantly complaining about Tostes, Charles fancied that her
illness was no doubt due to some local cause, and fixing on this idea,
began to think seriously of setting up elsewhere.
From that moment she drank vinegar, contracted a sharp little cough, and
completely lost her appetite.
It cost Charles much to give up Tostes after living there four years and
"when he was beginning to get on there." Yet if it must be! He took her
to Rouen to see his old master. It was a nervous complaint: change of
air was needed.
After looking about him on this side and on that, Charles learnt that
in the Neufchatel arrondissement there was a considerable market town
called Yonville-l'Abbaye, whose doctor, a Polish refugee, had decamped a
week before. Then he wrote to the chemist of the place to ask the
number of the population, the distance from the nearest doctor, what
his predecessor had made a year, and so forth; and the answer being
satisfactory, he made up his mind to move towards the spring, if Emma's
health did not improve.
One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer,
something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding bouquet.
The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver bordered satin
ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared
up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was, like a red bush in the
cinders, slowly devoured. She watched it burn.
The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold
lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas, fluttering like black
butterflies at the back of the stove, at last flew up the chimney.
When they left Tostes at the month of March, Madame Bovary was pregnant.
Part II
| The details of Emma's life in the convent and her attraction to novels mark her as a romantic whose outer life will never seem as full as her inner life. Her marriage to Charles is the first in a series of change for change's sake that she will make in her life. Though she tries, in her way, to make the best of her life in Tostes she is ultimately disappointed. Significantly she names her dog after Esmeralda's pet goat in Victor Hugo's great work of romanticism Notre Dame de Paris. Her outings with the dog are part of her search for a way out of her present predicament but, lacking any solution, she is left only with regret. This feeling is exacerbated by her experience at the ball where she is given a glimpse into the world of the aristocracy. Because she is blind to all but outward appearances she fails to consider that the inner life of the aristocrats might be as full of disappointment as her own. Thus, she is thrilled to be in the presence of the Marquis' disgusting father-in-law simply because he was rumored to have a colorful past. Similarly, she is enthralled by the conversation of the travelers and fails to comprehend that they are bored. Upon her return to Tostes she cannot escape the impression of the ball and, symbolized by the cigar case, she holds to it and imbues it with romantic hues. Her chronic unhappiness eventually affects her health. Charles correctly believes that his wife requires a change. When Emma throws her bouquet on the fire she is symbolically breaking ties with her dedication to her marriage and preparing herself for whatever opportunities to escape that arise | analysis |
Yonville-l'Abbaye (so called from an old Capuchin abbey of which not
even the ruins remain) is a market-town twenty-four miles from Rouen,
between the Abbeville and Beauvais roads, at the foot of a valley
watered by the Rieule, a little river that runs into the Andelle after
turning three water-mills near its mouth, where there are a few trout
that the lads amuse themselves by fishing for on Sundays.
We leave the highroad at La Boissiere and keep straight on to the top of
the Leux hill, whence the valley is seen. The river that runs through it
makes of it, as it were, two regions with distinct physiognomies--all on
the left is pasture land, all of the right arable. The meadow stretches
under a bulge of low hills to join at the back with the pasture land of
the Bray country, while on the eastern side, the plain, gently rising,
broadens out, showing as far as eye can follow its blond cornfields. The
water, flowing by the grass, divides with a white line the colour of the
roads and of the plains, and the country is like a great unfolded mantle
with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.
Before us, on the verge of the horizon, lie the oaks of the forest of
Argueil, with the steeps of the Saint-Jean hills scarred from top
to bottom with red irregular lines; they are rain tracks, and these
brick-tones standing out in narrow streaks against the grey colour of
the mountain are due to the quantity of iron springs that flow beyond in
the neighboring country.
Here we are on the confines of Normandy, Picardy, and the Ile-de-France,
a bastard land whose language is without accent and its landscape is
without character. It is there that they make the worst Neufchatel
cheeses of all the arrondissement; and, on the other hand, farming is
costly because so much manure is needed to enrich this friable soil full
of sand and flints.
Up to 1835 there was no practicable road for getting to Yonville, but
about this time a cross-road was made which joins that of Abbeville to
that of Amiens, and is occasionally used by the Rouen wagoners on their
way to Flanders. Yonville-l'Abbaye has remained stationary in spite of
its "new outlet." Instead of improving the soil, they persist in keeping
up the pasture lands, however depreciated they may be in value, and
the lazy borough, growing away from the plain, has naturally spread
riverwards. It is seem from afar sprawling along the banks like a
cowherd taking a siesta by the water-side.
At the foot of the hill beyond the bridge begins a roadway, planted with
young aspens, that leads in a straight line to the first houses in the
place. These, fenced in by hedges, are in the middle of courtyards
full of straggling buildings, wine-presses, cart-sheds and distilleries
scattered under thick trees, with ladders, poles, or scythes hung on to
the branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps drawn over eyes, reach
down over about a third of the low windows, whose coarse convex glasses
have knots in the middle like the bottoms of bottles. Against the
plaster wall diagonally crossed by black joists, a meagre pear-tree
sometimes leans and the ground-floors have at their door a small
swing-gate to keep out the chicks that come pilfering crumbs of bread
steeped in cider on the threshold. But the courtyards grow narrower,
the houses closer together, and the fences disappear; a bundle of
ferns swings under a window from the end of a broomstick; there is a
blacksmith's forge and then a wheelwright's, with two or three new carts
outside that partly block the way. Then across an open space appears a
white house beyond a grass mound ornamented by a Cupid, his finger
on his lips; two brass vases are at each end of a flight of steps;
scutcheons* blaze upon the door. It is the notary's house, and the
finest in the place.
*The panonceaux that have to be hung over the doors of
notaries.
The Church is on the other side of the street, twenty paces farther
down, at the entrance of the square. The little cemetery that surrounds
it, closed in by a wall breast high, is so full of graves that the old
stones, level with the ground, form a continuous pavement, on which the
grass of itself has marked out regular green squares. The church was
rebuilt during the last years of the reign of Charles X. The wooden roof
is beginning to rot from the top, and here and there has black hollows
in its blue colour. Over the door, where the organ should be, is a
loft for the men, with a spiral staircase that reverberates under their
wooden shoes.
The daylight coming through the plain glass windows falls obliquely upon
the pews ranged along the walls, which are adorned here and there with
a straw mat bearing beneath it the words in large letters, "Mr.
So-and-so's pew." Farther on, at a spot where the building narrows, the
confessional forms a pendant to a statuette of the Virgin, clothed in
a satin robe, coifed with a tulle veil sprinkled with silver stars, and
with red cheeks, like an idol of the Sandwich Islands; and, finally, a
copy of the "Holy Family, presented by the Minister of the Interior,"
overlooking the high altar, between four candlesticks, closes in the
perspective. The choir stalls, of deal wood, have been left unpainted.
The market, that is to say, a tiled roof supported by some twenty posts,
occupies of itself about half the public square of Yonville. The town
hall, constructed "from the designs of a Paris architect," is a sort of
Greek temple that forms the corner next to the chemist's shop. On
the ground-floor are three Ionic columns and on the first floor a
semicircular gallery, while the dome that crowns it is occupied by a
Gallic cock, resting one foot upon the "Charte" and holding in the other
the scales of Justice.
But that which most attracts the eye is opposite the Lion d'Or inn, the
chemist's shop of Monsieur Homais. In the evening especially its argand
lamp is lit up and the red and green jars that embellish his shop-front
throw far across the street their two streams of colour; then across
them as if in Bengal lights is seen the shadow of the chemist
leaning over his desk. His house from top to bottom is placarded with
inscriptions written in large hand, round hand, printed hand: "Vichy,
Seltzer, Barege waters, blood purifiers, Raspail patent medicine,
Arabian racahout, Darcet lozenges, Regnault paste, trusses, baths,
hygienic chocolate," etc. And the signboard, which takes up all the
breadth of the shop, bears in gold letters, "Homais, Chemist." Then at
the back of the shop, behind the great scales fixed to the counter, the
word "Laboratory" appears on a scroll above a glass door, which about
half-way up once more repeats "Homais" in gold letters on a black
ground.
Beyond this there is nothing to see at Yonville. The street (the only
one) a gunshot in length and flanked by a few shops on either side stops
short at the turn of the highroad. If it is left on the right hand and
the foot of the Saint-Jean hills followed the cemetery is soon reached.
At the time of the cholera, in order to enlarge this, a piece of wall
was pulled down, and three acres of land by its side purchased; but all
the new portion is almost tenantless; the tombs, as heretofore,
continue to crowd together towards the gate. The keeper, who is at once
gravedigger and church beadle (thus making a double profit out of the
parish corpses), has taken advantage of the unused plot of ground to
plant potatoes there. From year to year, however, his small field grows
smaller, and when there is an epidemic, he does not know whether to
rejoice at the deaths or regret the burials.
"You live on the dead, Lestiboudois!" the curie at last said to him one
day. This grim remark made him reflect; it checked him for some time;
but to this day he carries on the cultivation of his little tubers, and
even maintains stoutly that they grow naturally.
Since the events about to be narrated, nothing in fact has changed
at Yonville. The tin tricolour flag still swings at the top of the
church-steeple; the two chintz streamers still flutter in the wind from
the linen-draper's; the chemist's fetuses, like lumps of white amadou,
rot more and more in their turbid alcohol, and above the big door of
the inn the old golden lion, faded by rain, still shows passers-by its
poodle mane.
On the evening when the Bovarys were to arrive at Yonville, Widow
Lefrancois, the landlady of this inn, was so very busy that she sweated
great drops as she moved her saucepans. To-morrow was market-day. The
meat had to be cut beforehand, the fowls drawn, the soup and coffee
made. Moreover, she had the boarders' meal to see to, and that of the
doctor, his wife, and their servant; the billiard-room was echoing with
bursts of laughter; three millers in a small parlour were calling for
brandy; the wood was blazing, the brazen pan was hissing, and on the
long kitchen table, amid the quarters of raw mutton, rose piles of
plates that rattled with the shaking of the block on which spinach was
being chopped.
From the poultry-yard was heard the screaming of the fowls whom the
servant was chasing in order to wring their necks.
A man slightly marked with small-pox, in green leather slippers, and
wearing a velvet cap with a gold tassel, was warming his back at the
chimney. His face expressed nothing but self-satisfaction, and he
appeared to take life as calmly as the goldfinch suspended over his head
in its wicker cage: this was the chemist.
"Artemise!" shouted the landlady, "chop some wood, fill the water
bottles, bring some brandy, look sharp! If only I knew what dessert to
offer the guests you are expecting! Good heavens! Those furniture-movers
are beginning their racket in the billiard-room again; and their van has
been left before the front door! The 'Hirondelle' might run into it when
it draws up. Call Polyte and tell him to put it up. Only think, Monsieur
Homais, that since morning they have had about fifteen games, and drunk
eight jars of cider! Why, they'll tear my cloth for me," she went on,
looking at them from a distance, her strainer in her hand.
"That wouldn't be much of a loss," replied Monsieur Homais. "You would
buy another."
"Another billiard-table!" exclaimed the widow.
"Since that one is coming to pieces, Madame Lefrancois. I tell you again
you are doing yourself harm, much harm! And besides, players now want
narrow pockets and heavy cues. Hazards aren't played now; everything is
changed! One must keep pace with the times! Just look at Tellier!"
The hostess reddened with vexation. The chemist went on--
"You may say what you like; his table is better than yours; and if one
were to think, for example, of getting up a patriotic pool for Poland or
the sufferers from the Lyons floods--"
"It isn't beggars like him that'll frighten us," interrupted the
landlady, shrugging her fat shoulders. "Come, come, Monsieur Homais; as
long as the 'Lion d'Or' exists people will come to it. We've feathered
our nest; while one of these days you'll find the 'Cafe Francais' closed
with a big placard on the shutters. Change my billiard-table!" she went
on, speaking to herself, "the table that comes in so handy for folding
the washing, and on which, in the hunting season, I have slept six
visitors! But that dawdler, Hivert, doesn't come!"
"Are you waiting for him for your gentlemen's dinner?"
"Wait for him! And what about Monsieur Binet? As the clock strikes
six you'll see him come in, for he hasn't his equal under the sun for
punctuality. He must always have his seat in the small parlour. He'd
rather die than dine anywhere else. And so squeamish as he is, and so
particular about the cider! Not like Monsieur Leon; he sometimes comes
at seven, or even half-past, and he doesn't so much as look at what he
eats. Such a nice young man! Never speaks a rough word!"
"Well, you see, there's a great difference between an educated man and
an old carabineer who is now a tax-collector."
Six o'clock struck. Binet came in.
He wore a blue frock-coat falling in a straight line round his thin
body, and his leather cap, with its lappets knotted over the top of
his head with string, showed under the turned-up peak a bald forehead,
flattened by the constant wearing of a helmet. He wore a black cloth
waistcoat, a hair collar, grey trousers, and, all the year round,
well-blacked boots, that had two parallel swellings due to the sticking
out of his big-toes. Not a hair stood out from the regular line of fair
whiskers, which, encircling his jaws, framed, after the fashion of a
garden border, his long, wan face, whose eyes were small and the nose
hooked. Clever at all games of cards, a good hunter, and writing a
fine hand, he had at home a lathe, and amused himself by turning napkin
rings, with which he filled up his house, with the jealousy of an artist
and the egotism of a bourgeois.
He went to the small parlour, but the three millers had to be got out
first, and during the whole time necessary for laying the cloth, Binet
remained silent in his place near the stove. Then he shut the door and
took off his cap in his usual way.
"It isn't with saying civil things that he'll wear out his tongue," said
the chemist, as soon as he was along with the landlady.
"He never talks more," she replied. "Last week two travelers in the
cloth line were here--such clever chaps who told such jokes in the
evening, that I fairly cried with laughing; and he stood there like a
dab fish and never said a word."
"Yes," observed the chemist; "no imagination, no sallies, nothing that
makes the society-man."
"Yet they say he has parts," objected the landlady.
"Parts!" replied Monsieur Homais; "he, parts! In his own line it is
possible," he added in a calmer tone. And he went on--
"Ah! That a merchant, who has large connections, a jurisconsult, a
doctor, a chemist, should be thus absent-minded, that they should become
whimsical or even peevish, I can understand; such cases are cited in
history. But at least it is because they are thinking of something.
Myself, for example, how often has it happened to me to look on the
bureau for my pen to write a label, and to find, after all, that I had
put it behind my ear!"
Madame Lefrancois just then went to the door to see if the "Hirondelle"
were not coming. She started. A man dressed in black suddenly came into
the kitchen. By the last gleam of the twilight one could see that his
face was rubicund and his form athletic.
"What can I do for you, Monsieur le Curie?" asked the landlady, as she
reached down from the chimney one of the copper candlesticks placed
with their candles in a row. "Will you take something? A thimbleful of
Cassis*? A glass of wine?"
*Black currant liqueur.
The priest declined very politely. He had come for his umbrella, that
he had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent, and after
asking Madame Lefrancois to have it sent to him at the presbytery in the
evening, he left for the church, from which the Angelus was ringing.
When the chemist no longer heard the noise of his boots along the
square, he thought the priest's behaviour just now very unbecoming. This
refusal to take any refreshment seemed to him the most odious hypocrisy;
all priests tippled on the sly, and were trying to bring back the days
of the tithe.
The landlady took up the defence of her curie.
"Besides, he could double up four men like you over his knee. Last year
he helped our people to bring in the straw; he carried as many as six
trusses at once, he is so strong."
"Bravo!" said the chemist. "Now just send your daughters to confess to
fellows which such a temperament! I, if I were the Government, I'd have
the priests bled once a month. Yes, Madame Lefrancois, every month--a
good phlebotomy, in the interests of the police and morals."
"Be quiet, Monsieur Homais. You are an infidel; you've no religion."
The chemist answered: "I have a religion, my religion, and I even have
more than all these others with their mummeries and their juggling.
I adore God, on the contrary. I believe in the Supreme Being, in a
Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below
to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don't
need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my
pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one
can know Him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the
eternal vault like the ancients. My God! Mine is the God of Socrates, of
Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I am for the profession of faith
of the 'Savoyard Vicar,' and the immortal principles of '89! And I can't
admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a
cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies
uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd
in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws,
which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in
turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them."
He ceased, looking round for an audience, for in his bubbling over
the chemist had for a moment fancied himself in the midst of the town
council. But the landlady no longer heeded him; she was listening to a
distant rolling. One could distinguish the noise of a carriage mingled
with the clattering of loose horseshoes that beat against the ground,
and at last the "Hirondelle" stopped at the door.
It was a yellow box on two large wheels, that, reaching to the tilt,
prevented travelers from seeing the road and dirtied their shoulders.
The small panes of the narrow windows rattled in their sashes when the
coach was closed, and retained here and there patches of mud amid the
old layers of dust, that not even storms of rain had altogether washed
away. It was drawn by three horses, the first a leader, and when it came
down-hill its bottom jolted against the ground.
Some of the inhabitants of Yonville came out into the square; they all
spoke at once, asking for news, for explanations, for hampers. Hivert
did not know whom to answer. It was he who did the errands of the place
in town. He went to the shops and brought back rolls of leather for
the shoemaker, old iron for the farrier, a barrel of herrings for his
mistress, caps from the milliner's, locks from the hair-dresser's and
all along the road on his return journey he distributed his parcels,
which he threw, standing upright on his seat and shouting at the top of
his voice, over the enclosures of the yards.
An accident had delayed him. Madame Bovary's greyhound had run across
the field. They had whistled for him a quarter of an hour; Hivert had
even gone back a mile and a half expecting every moment to catch sight
of her; but it had been necessary to go on.
Emma had wept, grown angry; she had accused Charles of this misfortune.
Monsieur Lheureux, a draper, who happened to be in the coach with
her, had tried to console her by a number of examples of lost dogs
recognizing their masters at the end of long years. One, he said had
been told of, who had come back to Paris from Constantinople. Another
had gone one hundred and fifty miles in a straight line, and swum four
rivers; and his own father had possessed a poodle, which, after twelve
years of absence, had all of a sudden jumped on his back in the street
as he was going to dine in town.
| The chapter opens with a description of the agricultural market town of Yonville-L'Abbaye and the surrounding countryside. The narrator characterizes the area as a "mongrel region" composed of equal parts Normandy, Picardy and the Ile-de-France. It is a relatively impoverished area with poor soil, ignorant natives and limited access to the greater world. A covered market occupies half the square which is bounded by the town hall, the Lion d'Or Hotel and Monsieur Homais' pharmacy. The evening that the Bovary's are expected to arrive the mistress of the inn, Madame Lefranois, is busy preparing for market day as well as providing for her regular diners: the tax collecter Monsieur Binet who always arrives on time and has particular tastes and Monsieur Lon Dupuis the young clerk who arrives at any time and doesn't care what he eats. The pharmacist Monsieur Homais, wearing a velvet skullcap with a gold tassel, converses with the busy woman while they wait for the Bovary's to arrive. The brief appearance of the cur causes Homais to express his disgust with organized religion and reaffirm his pragmatic agnosticism to the otherwise uninterested inn keeper. Eventually the Hirondelle, the town's rattling three horse coach, arrives with its driver Hivert who begins distributing packages and news to the town folk. He apologizes for the coach's tardiness but explains that Madame Bovary's greyhound ran away during the journey and could not be found. Emma blames the dog's disappearance on her husband | summary |
Emma got out first, then Felicite, Monsieur Lheureux, and a nurse, and
they had to wake up Charles in his corner, where he had slept soundly
since night set in.
Homais introduced himself; he offered his homages to madame and his
respects to monsieur; said he was charmed to have been able to render
them some slight service, and added with a cordial air that he had
ventured to invite himself, his wife being away.
When Madame Bovary was in the kitchen she went up to the chimney.
With the tips of her fingers she caught her dress at the knee, and
having thus pulled it up to her ankle, held out her foot in its black
boot to the fire above the revolving leg of mutton. The flame lit up the
whole of her, penetrating with a crude light the woof of her gowns, the
fine pores of her fair skin, and even her eyelids, which she blinked now
and again. A great red glow passed over her with the blowing of the wind
through the half-open door.
On the other side of the chimney a young man with fair hair watched her
silently.
As he was a good deal bored at Yonville, where he was a clerk at the
notary's, Monsieur Guillaumin, Monsieur Leon Dupuis (it was he who
was the second habitue of the "Lion d'Or") frequently put back his
dinner-hour in hope that some traveler might come to the inn, with whom
he could chat in the evening. On the days when his work was done early,
he had, for want of something else to do, to come punctually, and endure
from soup to cheese a tete-a-tete with Binet. It was therefore with
delight that he accepted the landlady's suggestion that he should dine
in company with the newcomers, and they passed into the large parlour
where Madame Lefrancois, for the purpose of showing off, had had the
table laid for four.
Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his skull-cap, for fear of coryza;
then, turning to his neighbour--
"Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably in
our 'Hirondelle.'"
"That is true," replied Emma; "but moving about always amuses me. I like
change of place."
"It is so tedious," sighed the clerk, "to be always riveted to the same
places."
"If you were like me," said Charles, "constantly obliged to be in the
saddle"--
"But," Leon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, "nothing, it
seems to me, is more pleasant--when one can," he added.
"Moreover," said the druggist, "the practice of medicine is not very
hard work in our part of the world, for the state of our roads allows us
the use of gigs, and generally, as the farmers are prosperous, they pay
pretty well. We have, medically speaking, besides the ordinary cases
of enteritis, bronchitis, bilious affections, etc., now and then a
few intermittent fevers at harvest-time; but on the whole, little of a
serious nature, nothing special to note, unless it be a great deal of
scrofula, due, no doubt, to the deplorable hygienic conditions of our
peasant dwellings. Ah! you will find many prejudices to combat, Monsieur
Bovary, much obstinacy of routine, with which all the efforts of your
science will daily come into collision; for people still have recourse
to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the
doctor or the chemist. The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad,
and we even have a few nonagenarians in our parish. The thermometer (I
have made some observations) falls in winter to 4 degrees Centigrade
at the outside, which gives us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or
otherwise 54 degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And, as a
matter of fact, we are sheltered from the north winds by the forest of
Argueil on the one side, from the west winds by the St. Jean range on
the other; and this heat, moreover, which, on account of the aqueous
vapours given off by the river and the considerable number of cattle
in the fields, which, as you know, exhale much ammonia, that is to say,
nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and
which sucking up into itself the humus from the ground, mixing together
all those different emanations, unites them into a stack, so to say,
and combining with the electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when
there is any, might in the long run, as in tropical countries, engender
insalubrious miasmata--this heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered
on the side whence it comes, or rather whence it should come--that is to
say, the southern side--by the south-eastern winds, which, having cooled
themselves passing over the Seine, reach us sometimes all at once like
breezes from Russia."
"At any rate, you have some walks in the neighbourhood?" continued
Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man.
"Oh, very few," he answered. "There is a place they call La Pature, on
the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I
go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset."
"I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets," she resumed; "but
especially by the side of the sea."
"Oh, I adore the sea!" said Monsieur Leon.
"And then, does it not seem to you," continued Madame Bovary, "that the
mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of
which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal?"
"It is the same with mountainous landscapes," continued Leon. "A cousin
of mine who travelled in Switzerland last year told me that one could
not picture to oneself the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the
waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. One sees pines of
incredible size across torrents, cottages suspended over precipices,
and, a thousand feet below one, whole valleys when the clouds open. Such
spectacles must stir to enthusiasm, incline to prayer, to ecstasy; and I
no longer marvel at that celebrated musician who, the better to inspire
his imagination, was in the habit of playing the piano before some
imposing site."
"You play?" she asked.
"No, but I am very fond of music," he replied.
"Ah! don't you listen to him, Madame Bovary," interrupted Homais,
bending over his plate. "That's sheer modesty. Why, my dear fellow, the
other day in your room you were singing 'L'Ange Gardien' ravishingly. I
heard you from the laboratory. You gave it like an actor."
Leon, in fact, lodged at the chemist's where he had a small room on the
second floor, overlooking the Place. He blushed at the compliment of his
landlord, who had already turned to the doctor, and was enumerating to
him, one after the other, all the principal inhabitants of Yonville. He
was telling anecdotes, giving information; the fortune of the notary
was not known exactly, and "there was the Tuvache household," who made a
good deal of show.
Emma continued, "And what music do you prefer?"
"Oh, German music; that which makes you dream."
"Have you been to the opera?"
"Not yet; but I shall go next year, when I am living at Paris to finish
reading for the bar."
"As I had the honour of putting it to your husband," said the chemist,
"with regard to this poor Yanoda who has run away, you will find
yourself, thanks to his extravagance, in the possession of one of the
most comfortable houses of Yonville. Its greatest convenience for a
doctor is a door giving on the Walk, where one can go in and out unseen.
Moreover, it contains everything that is agreeable in a household--a
laundry, kitchen with offices, sitting-room, fruit-room, and so on. He
was a gay dog, who didn't care what he spent. At the end of the garden,
by the side of the water, he had an arbour built just for the purpose of
drinking beer in summer; and if madame is fond of gardening she will be
able--"
"My wife doesn't care about it," said Charles; "although she has
been advised to take exercise, she prefers always sitting in her room
reading."
"Like me," replied Leon. "And indeed, what is better than to sit by
one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against
the window and the lamp is burning?"
"What, indeed?" she said, fixing her large black eyes wide open upon
him.
"One thinks of nothing," he continued; "the hours slip by. Motionless we
traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with
the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the
adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were
yourself palpitating beneath their costumes."
"That is true! That is true?" she said.
"Has it ever happened to you," Leon went on, "to come across some vague
idea of one's own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from
afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?"
"I have experienced it," she replied.
"That is why," he said, "I especially love the poets. I think verse more
tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears."
"Still in the long run it is tiring," continued Emma. "Now I, on the
contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one.
I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are
in nature."
"In fact," observed the clerk, "these works, not touching the heart,
miss, it seems to me, the true end of art. It is so sweet, amid all
the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble
characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness. For myself,
living here far from the world, this is my one distraction; but Yonville
affords so few resources."
"Like Tostes, no doubt," replied Emma; "and so I always subscribed to a
lending library."
"If madame will do me the honour of making use of it", said the chemist,
who had just caught the last words, "I have at her disposal a library
composed of the best authors, Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter
Scott, the 'Echo des Feuilletons'; and in addition I receive various
periodicals, among them the 'Fanal de Rouen' daily, having the advantage
to be its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchatel,
Yonville, and vicinity."
For two hours and a half they had been at table; for the servant
Artemis, carelessly dragging her old list slippers over the flags,
brought one plate after the other, forgot everything, and constantly
left the door of the billiard-room half open, so that it beat against
the wall with its hooks.
Unconsciously, Leon, while talking, had placed his foot on one of the
bars of the chair on which Madame Bovary was sitting. She wore a small
blue silk necktie, that kept up like a ruff a gauffered cambric collar,
and with the movements of her head the lower part of her face gently
sunk into the linen or came out from it. Thus side by side, while
Charles and the chemist chatted, they entered into one of those vague
conversations where the hazard of all that is said brings you back to
the fixed centre of a common sympathy. The Paris theatres, titles of
novels, new quadrilles, and the world they did not know; Tostes, where
she had lived, and Yonville, where they were; they examined all, talked
of everything till to the end of dinner.
When coffee was served Felicite went away to get ready the room in the
new house, and the guests soon raised the siege. Madame Lefrancois was
asleep near the cinders, while the stable-boy, lantern in hand, was
waiting to show Monsieur and Madame Bovary the way home. Bits of straw
stuck in his red hair, and he limped with his left leg. When he had
taken in his other hand the cure's umbrella, they started.
The town was asleep; the pillars of the market threw great shadows; the
earth was all grey as on a summer's night. But as the doctor's house was
only some fifty paces from the inn, they had to say good-night almost
immediately, and the company dispersed.
As soon as she entered the passage, Emma felt the cold of the plaster
fall about her shoulders like damp linen. The walls were new and the
wooden stairs creaked. In their bedroom, on the first floor, a whitish
light passed through the curtainless windows.
She could catch glimpses of tree tops, and beyond, the fields,
half-drowned in the fog that lay reeking in the moonlight along
the course of the river. In the middle of the room, pell-mell, were
scattered drawers, bottles, curtain-rods, gilt poles, with mattresses
on the chairs and basins on the ground--the two men who had brought the
furniture had left everything about carelessly.
This was the fourth time that she had slept in a strange place.
The first was the day of her going to the convent; the second, of her
arrival at Tostes; the third, at Vaubyessard; and this was the fourth.
And each one had marked, as it were, the inauguration of a new phase in
her life. She did not believe that things could present themselves in
the same way in different places, and since the portion of her life
lived had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be
better.
| Homais greets the Bovary's and explains that he will be joining them for dinner. Monsieur Lon watches Emma warm herself by the fire and is delighted when the innkeeper suggests he join the new arrivals for dinner. While they eat the pharmacist explains the character of the region and its inhabitants to the Charles while Emma and Leon discover they have similar artistic tastes and sensibilities. Flicit leaves to prepare the Bovary's new home and Homais observes that the house benefits from a garden arbor on the river and a private entrance on the lane where they can come and go without being observed. Finally the lame stable boy comes with a lantern to lead them to their new home. Emma feels chilled by the house but she reasons that any change must be for the good and it must be better than what she has known before. | summary |
Emma got out first, then Felicite, Monsieur Lheureux, and a nurse, and
they had to wake up Charles in his corner, where he had slept soundly
since night set in.
Homais introduced himself; he offered his homages to madame and his
respects to monsieur; said he was charmed to have been able to render
them some slight service, and added with a cordial air that he had
ventured to invite himself, his wife being away.
When Madame Bovary was in the kitchen she went up to the chimney.
With the tips of her fingers she caught her dress at the knee, and
having thus pulled it up to her ankle, held out her foot in its black
boot to the fire above the revolving leg of mutton. The flame lit up the
whole of her, penetrating with a crude light the woof of her gowns, the
fine pores of her fair skin, and even her eyelids, which she blinked now
and again. A great red glow passed over her with the blowing of the wind
through the half-open door.
On the other side of the chimney a young man with fair hair watched her
silently.
As he was a good deal bored at Yonville, where he was a clerk at the
notary's, Monsieur Guillaumin, Monsieur Leon Dupuis (it was he who
was the second habitue of the "Lion d'Or") frequently put back his
dinner-hour in hope that some traveler might come to the inn, with whom
he could chat in the evening. On the days when his work was done early,
he had, for want of something else to do, to come punctually, and endure
from soup to cheese a tete-a-tete with Binet. It was therefore with
delight that he accepted the landlady's suggestion that he should dine
in company with the newcomers, and they passed into the large parlour
where Madame Lefrancois, for the purpose of showing off, had had the
table laid for four.
Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his skull-cap, for fear of coryza;
then, turning to his neighbour--
"Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably in
our 'Hirondelle.'"
"That is true," replied Emma; "but moving about always amuses me. I like
change of place."
"It is so tedious," sighed the clerk, "to be always riveted to the same
places."
"If you were like me," said Charles, "constantly obliged to be in the
saddle"--
"But," Leon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, "nothing, it
seems to me, is more pleasant--when one can," he added.
"Moreover," said the druggist, "the practice of medicine is not very
hard work in our part of the world, for the state of our roads allows us
the use of gigs, and generally, as the farmers are prosperous, they pay
pretty well. We have, medically speaking, besides the ordinary cases
of enteritis, bronchitis, bilious affections, etc., now and then a
few intermittent fevers at harvest-time; but on the whole, little of a
serious nature, nothing special to note, unless it be a great deal of
scrofula, due, no doubt, to the deplorable hygienic conditions of our
peasant dwellings. Ah! you will find many prejudices to combat, Monsieur
Bovary, much obstinacy of routine, with which all the efforts of your
science will daily come into collision; for people still have recourse
to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the
doctor or the chemist. The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad,
and we even have a few nonagenarians in our parish. The thermometer (I
have made some observations) falls in winter to 4 degrees Centigrade
at the outside, which gives us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or
otherwise 54 degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And, as a
matter of fact, we are sheltered from the north winds by the forest of
Argueil on the one side, from the west winds by the St. Jean range on
the other; and this heat, moreover, which, on account of the aqueous
vapours given off by the river and the considerable number of cattle
in the fields, which, as you know, exhale much ammonia, that is to say,
nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and
which sucking up into itself the humus from the ground, mixing together
all those different emanations, unites them into a stack, so to say,
and combining with the electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when
there is any, might in the long run, as in tropical countries, engender
insalubrious miasmata--this heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered
on the side whence it comes, or rather whence it should come--that is to
say, the southern side--by the south-eastern winds, which, having cooled
themselves passing over the Seine, reach us sometimes all at once like
breezes from Russia."
"At any rate, you have some walks in the neighbourhood?" continued
Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man.
"Oh, very few," he answered. "There is a place they call La Pature, on
the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I
go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset."
"I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets," she resumed; "but
especially by the side of the sea."
"Oh, I adore the sea!" said Monsieur Leon.
"And then, does it not seem to you," continued Madame Bovary, "that the
mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of
which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal?"
"It is the same with mountainous landscapes," continued Leon. "A cousin
of mine who travelled in Switzerland last year told me that one could
not picture to oneself the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the
waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. One sees pines of
incredible size across torrents, cottages suspended over precipices,
and, a thousand feet below one, whole valleys when the clouds open. Such
spectacles must stir to enthusiasm, incline to prayer, to ecstasy; and I
no longer marvel at that celebrated musician who, the better to inspire
his imagination, was in the habit of playing the piano before some
imposing site."
"You play?" she asked.
"No, but I am very fond of music," he replied.
"Ah! don't you listen to him, Madame Bovary," interrupted Homais,
bending over his plate. "That's sheer modesty. Why, my dear fellow, the
other day in your room you were singing 'L'Ange Gardien' ravishingly. I
heard you from the laboratory. You gave it like an actor."
Leon, in fact, lodged at the chemist's where he had a small room on the
second floor, overlooking the Place. He blushed at the compliment of his
landlord, who had already turned to the doctor, and was enumerating to
him, one after the other, all the principal inhabitants of Yonville. He
was telling anecdotes, giving information; the fortune of the notary
was not known exactly, and "there was the Tuvache household," who made a
good deal of show.
Emma continued, "And what music do you prefer?"
"Oh, German music; that which makes you dream."
"Have you been to the opera?"
"Not yet; but I shall go next year, when I am living at Paris to finish
reading for the bar."
"As I had the honour of putting it to your husband," said the chemist,
"with regard to this poor Yanoda who has run away, you will find
yourself, thanks to his extravagance, in the possession of one of the
most comfortable houses of Yonville. Its greatest convenience for a
doctor is a door giving on the Walk, where one can go in and out unseen.
Moreover, it contains everything that is agreeable in a household--a
laundry, kitchen with offices, sitting-room, fruit-room, and so on. He
was a gay dog, who didn't care what he spent. At the end of the garden,
by the side of the water, he had an arbour built just for the purpose of
drinking beer in summer; and if madame is fond of gardening she will be
able--"
"My wife doesn't care about it," said Charles; "although she has
been advised to take exercise, she prefers always sitting in her room
reading."
"Like me," replied Leon. "And indeed, what is better than to sit by
one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against
the window and the lamp is burning?"
"What, indeed?" she said, fixing her large black eyes wide open upon
him.
"One thinks of nothing," he continued; "the hours slip by. Motionless we
traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with
the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the
adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were
yourself palpitating beneath their costumes."
"That is true! That is true?" she said.
"Has it ever happened to you," Leon went on, "to come across some vague
idea of one's own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from
afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?"
"I have experienced it," she replied.
"That is why," he said, "I especially love the poets. I think verse more
tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears."
"Still in the long run it is tiring," continued Emma. "Now I, on the
contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one.
I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are
in nature."
"In fact," observed the clerk, "these works, not touching the heart,
miss, it seems to me, the true end of art. It is so sweet, amid all
the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble
characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness. For myself,
living here far from the world, this is my one distraction; but Yonville
affords so few resources."
"Like Tostes, no doubt," replied Emma; "and so I always subscribed to a
lending library."
"If madame will do me the honour of making use of it", said the chemist,
who had just caught the last words, "I have at her disposal a library
composed of the best authors, Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter
Scott, the 'Echo des Feuilletons'; and in addition I receive various
periodicals, among them the 'Fanal de Rouen' daily, having the advantage
to be its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchatel,
Yonville, and vicinity."
For two hours and a half they had been at table; for the servant
Artemis, carelessly dragging her old list slippers over the flags,
brought one plate after the other, forgot everything, and constantly
left the door of the billiard-room half open, so that it beat against
the wall with its hooks.
Unconsciously, Leon, while talking, had placed his foot on one of the
bars of the chair on which Madame Bovary was sitting. She wore a small
blue silk necktie, that kept up like a ruff a gauffered cambric collar,
and with the movements of her head the lower part of her face gently
sunk into the linen or came out from it. Thus side by side, while
Charles and the chemist chatted, they entered into one of those vague
conversations where the hazard of all that is said brings you back to
the fixed centre of a common sympathy. The Paris theatres, titles of
novels, new quadrilles, and the world they did not know; Tostes, where
she had lived, and Yonville, where they were; they examined all, talked
of everything till to the end of dinner.
When coffee was served Felicite went away to get ready the room in the
new house, and the guests soon raised the siege. Madame Lefrancois was
asleep near the cinders, while the stable-boy, lantern in hand, was
waiting to show Monsieur and Madame Bovary the way home. Bits of straw
stuck in his red hair, and he limped with his left leg. When he had
taken in his other hand the cure's umbrella, they started.
The town was asleep; the pillars of the market threw great shadows; the
earth was all grey as on a summer's night. But as the doctor's house was
only some fifty paces from the inn, they had to say good-night almost
immediately, and the company dispersed.
As soon as she entered the passage, Emma felt the cold of the plaster
fall about her shoulders like damp linen. The walls were new and the
wooden stairs creaked. In their bedroom, on the first floor, a whitish
light passed through the curtainless windows.
She could catch glimpses of tree tops, and beyond, the fields,
half-drowned in the fog that lay reeking in the moonlight along
the course of the river. In the middle of the room, pell-mell, were
scattered drawers, bottles, curtain-rods, gilt poles, with mattresses
on the chairs and basins on the ground--the two men who had brought the
furniture had left everything about carelessly.
This was the fourth time that she had slept in a strange place.
The first was the day of her going to the convent; the second, of her
arrival at Tostes; the third, at Vaubyessard; and this was the fourth.
And each one had marked, as it were, the inauguration of a new phase in
her life. She did not believe that things could present themselves in
the same way in different places, and since the portion of her life
lived had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be
better.
| Although we know very little of Tostes and its inhabitants, Flaubert provides thorough descriptions of Yonville and we get to know several of its principle inhabitants even before the Bovary's arrive. We learn that Djali has disappeared during the journey from Tostes and the dog's association with her romantic dreams renders its escape foreshadows the romantic disaster that will befall her in Yonville. Though Emma has moved from her father's farm, to the village of Tostes and now to the market town of Yonville, Flaubert's descriptions of the region leave little doubt that these surroundings will fail to satisfy her romantic vision. However, as she observes at the end of the second chapter, at the very least it is a change and therefore for the better in her mind. We meet Monsieur Homais in this section and his dialogue reveals him to be a pragmatist with an Enlightenment ideology - just the sort of person Flaubert, who believed passionately in art for art's sake, would have despised in life. Emma and Lon's conversation is the first occasion that we have to hear Emma speak aloud her views. Her trite observations reveal that her opinions are simply those that she has been given by novels and fashion magazines. Homais' allusions to the garden arbor and the private entrance are important because both will make Emma's adulterous affair possible | analysis |
The next day, as she was getting up, she saw the clerk on the Place. She
had on a dressing-gown. He looked up and bowed. She nodded quickly and
reclosed the window.
Leon waited all day for six o'clock in the evening to come, but on going
to the inn, he found no one but Monsieur Binet, already at table. The
dinner of the evening before had been a considerable event for him; he
had never till then talked for two hours consecutively to a "lady." How
then had he been able to explain, and in such language, the number of
things that he could not have said so well before? He was usually
shy, and maintained that reserve which partakes at once of modesty and
dissimulation.
At Yonville he was considered "well-bred." He listened to the arguments
of the older people, and did not seem hot about politics--a remarkable
thing for a young man. Then he had some accomplishments; he painted in
water-colours, could read the key of G, and readily talked literature
after dinner when he did not play cards. Monsieur Homais respected him
for his education; Madame Homais liked him for his good-nature, for
he often took the little Homais into the garden--little brats who were
always dirty, very much spoilt, and somewhat lymphatic, like their
mother. Besides the servant to look after them, they had Justin, the
chemist's apprentice, a second cousin of Monsieur Homais, who had been
taken into the house from charity, and who was useful at the same time
as a servant.
The druggist proved the best of neighbours. He gave Madame Bovary
information as to the trades-people, sent expressly for his own cider
merchant, tasted the drink himself, and saw that the casks were properly
placed in the cellar; he explained how to set about getting in a
supply of butter cheap, and made an arrangement with Lestiboudois, the
sacristan, who, besides his sacerdotal and funeral functions, looked
after the principal gardens at Yonville by the hour or the year,
according to the taste of the customers.
The need of looking after others was not the only thing that urged the
chemist to such obsequious cordiality; there was a plan underneath it
all.
He had infringed the law of the 19th Ventose, year xi., article I, which
forbade all persons not having a diploma to practise medicine; so that,
after certain anonymous denunciations, Homais had been summoned to Rouen
to see the procurer of the king in his own private room; the magistrate
receiving him standing up, ermine on shoulder and cap on head. It was
in the morning, before the court opened. In the corridors one heard
the heavy boots of the gendarmes walking past, and like a far-off noise
great locks that were shut. The druggist's ears tingled as if he were
about to have an apoplectic stroke; he saw the depths of dungeons,
his family in tears, his shop sold, all the jars dispersed; and he was
obliged to enter a cafe and take a glass of rum and seltzer to recover
his spirits.
Little by little the memory of this reprimand grew fainter, and
he continued, as heretofore, to give anodyne consultations in his
back-parlour. But the mayor resented it, his colleagues were jealous,
everything was to be feared; gaining over Monsieur Bovary by his
attentions was to earn his gratitude, and prevent his speaking out later
on, should he notice anything. So every morning Homais brought him "the
paper," and often in the afternoon left his shop for a few moments to
have a chat with the Doctor.
Charles was dull: patients did not come. He remained seated for hours
without speaking, went into his consulting room to sleep, or watched
his wife sewing. Then for diversion he employed himself at home as a
workman; he even tried to do up the attic with some paint which had been
left behind by the painters. But money matters worried him. He had
spent so much for repairs at Tostes, for madame's toilette, and for the
moving, that the whole dowry, over three thousand crowns, had slipped
away in two years.
Then how many things had been spoilt or lost during their carriage from
Tostes to Yonville, without counting the plaster cure, who falling out
of the coach at an over-severe jolt, had been dashed into a thousand
fragments on the pavements of Quincampoix! A pleasanter trouble came
to distract him, namely, the pregnancy of his wife. As the time of her
confinement approached he cherished her the more. It was another bond of
the flesh establishing itself, and, as it were, a continued sentiment
of a more complex union. When from afar he saw her languid walk, and
her figure without stays turning softly on her hips; when opposite one
another he looked at her at his ease, while she took tired poses in her
armchair, then his happiness knew no bounds; he got up, embraced her,
passed his hands over her face, called her little mamma, wanted to
make her dance, and half-laughing, half-crying, uttered all kinds of
caressing pleasantries that came into his head. The idea of having
begotten a child delighted him. Now he wanted nothing. He knew human
life from end to end, and he sat down to it with serenity.
Emma at first felt a great astonishment; then was anxious to be
delivered that she might know what it was to be a mother. But not
being able to spend as much as she would have liked, to have a
swing-bassinette with rose silk curtains, and embroidered caps, in a fit
of bitterness she gave up looking after the trousseau, and ordered the
whole of it from a village needlewoman, without choosing or discussing
anything. Thus she did not amuse herself with those preparations that
stimulate the tenderness of mothers, and so her affection was from the
very outset, perhaps, to some extent attenuated.
As Charles, however, spoke of the boy at every meal, she soon began to
think of him more consecutively.
She hoped for a son; he would be strong and dark; she would call him
George; and this idea of having a male child was like an expected
revenge for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free; he
may travel over passions and over countries, overcome obstacles, taste
of the most far-away pleasures. But a woman is always hampered. At once
inert and flexible, she has against her the weakness of the flesh and
legal dependence. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, held by a
string, flutters in every wind; there is always some desire that draws
her, some conventionality that restrains.
She was confined on a Sunday at about six o'clock, as the sun was
rising.
"It is a girl!" said Charles.
She turned her head away and fainted.
Madame Homais, as well as Madame Lefrancois of the Lion d'Or, almost
immediately came running in to embrace her. The chemist, as man of
discretion, only offered a few provincial felicitations through the
half-opened door. He wished to see the child and thought it well made.
Whilst she was getting well she occupied herself much in seeking a
name for her daughter. First she went over all those that have Italian
endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she liked Galsuinde
pretty well, and Yseult or Leocadie still better.
Charles wanted the child to be called after her mother; Emma opposed
this. They ran over the calendar from end to end, and then consulted
outsiders.
"Monsieur Leon," said the chemist, "with whom I was talking about it
the other day, wonders you do not chose Madeleine. It is very much in
fashion just now."
But Madame Bovary, senior, cried out loudly against this name of a
sinner. As to Monsieur Homais, he had a preference for all those that
recalled some great man, an illustrious fact, or a generous idea, and it
was on this system that he had baptized his four children. Thus Napoleon
represented glory and Franklin liberty; Irma was perhaps a concession to
romanticism, but Athalie was a homage to the greatest masterpiece of the
French stage. For his philosophical convictions did not interfere
with his artistic tastes; in him the thinker did not stifle the man of
sentiment; he could make distinctions, make allowances for imagination
and fanaticism. In this tragedy, for example, he found fault with the
ideas, but admired the style; he detested the conception, but applauded
all the details, and loathed the characters while he grew enthusiastic
over their dialogue. When he read the fine passages he was transported,
but when he thought that mummers would get something out of them for
their show, he was disconsolate; and in this confusion of sentiments in
which he was involved he would have liked at once to crown Racine with
both his hands and discuss with him for a good quarter of an hour.
At last Emma remembered that at the chateau of Vaubyessard she had heard
the Marchioness call a young lady Berthe; from that moment this name was
chosen; and as old Rouault could not come, Monsieur Homais was requested
to stand godfather. His gifts were all products from his establishment,
to wit: six boxes of jujubes, a whole jar of racahout, three cakes of
marshmallow paste, and six sticks of sugar-candy into the bargain that
he had come across in a cupboard. On the evening of the ceremony there
was a grand dinner; the cure was present; there was much excitement.
Monsieur Homais towards liqueur-time began singing "Le Dieu des bonnes
gens." Monsieur Leon sang a barcarolle, and Madame Bovary, senior, who
was godmother, a romance of the time of the Empire; finally, M. Bovary,
senior, insisted on having the child brought down, and began baptizing
it with a glass of champagne that he poured over its head. This mockery
of the first of the sacraments made the Abbe Bournisien angry; old
Bovary replied by a quotation from "La Guerre des Dieux"; the cure
wanted to leave; the ladies implored, Homais interfered; and they
succeeded in making the priest sit down again, and he quietly went on
with the half-finished coffee in his saucer.
Monsieur Bovary, senior, stayed at Yonville a month, dazzling the
natives by a superb policeman's cap with silver tassels that he wore
in the morning when he smoked his pipe in the square. Being also in the
habit of drinking a good deal of brandy, he often sent the servant
to the Lion d'Or to buy him a bottle, which was put down to his
son's account, and to perfume his handkerchiefs he used up his
daughter-in-law's whole supply of eau-de-cologne.
The latter did not at all dislike his company. He had knocked about the
world, he talked about Berlin, Vienna, and Strasbourg, of his soldier
times, of the mistresses he had had, the grand luncheons of which he had
partaken; then he was amiable, and sometimes even, either on the stairs,
or in the garden, would seize hold of her waist, crying, "Charles, look
out for yourself."
Then Madame Bovary, senior, became alarmed for her son's happiness, and
fearing that her husband might in the long-run have an immoral influence
upon the ideas of the young woman, took care to hurry their departure.
Perhaps she had more serious reasons for uneasiness. Monsieur Bovary was
not the man to respect anything.
One day Emma was suddenly seized with the desire to see her little
girl, who had been put to nurse with the carpenter's wife, and, without
looking at the calendar to see whether the six weeks of the Virgin were
yet passed, she set out for the Rollets' house, situated at the extreme
end of the village, between the highroad and the fields.
It was mid-day, the shutters of the houses were closed and the slate
roofs that glittered beneath the fierce light of the blue sky seemed to
strike sparks from the crest of the gables. A heavy wind was blowing;
Emma felt weak as she walked; the stones of the pavement hurt her; she
was doubtful whether she would not go home again, or go in somewhere to
rest.
At this moment Monsieur Leon came out from a neighbouring door with a
bundle of papers under his arm. He came to greet her, and stood in the
shade in front of the Lheureux's shop under the projecting grey awning.
Madame Bovary said she was going to see her baby, but that she was
beginning to grow tired.
"If--" said Leon, not daring to go on.
"Have you any business to attend to?" she asked.
And on the clerk's answer, she begged him to accompany her. That same
evening this was known in Yonville, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor's
wife, declared in the presence of her servant that "Madame Bovary was
compromising herself."
To get to the nurse's it was necessary to turn to the left on leaving
the street, as if making for the cemetery, and to follow between little
houses and yards a small path bordered with privet hedges. They were
in bloom, and so were the speedwells, eglantines, thistles, and the
sweetbriar that sprang up from the thickets. Through openings in
the hedges one could see into the huts, some pigs on a dung-heap, or
tethered cows rubbing their horns against the trunk of trees. The two,
side by side walked slowly, she leaning upon him, and he restraining
his pace, which he regulated by hers; in front of them a swarm of midges
fluttered, buzzing in the warm air.
They recognized the house by an old walnut-tree which shaded it.
Low and covered with brown tiles, there hung outside it, beneath the
dormer-window of the garret, a string of onions. Faggots upright
against a thorn fence surrounded a bed of lettuce, a few square feet of
lavender, and sweet peas strung on sticks. Dirty water was running here
and there on the grass, and all round were several indefinite rags,
knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet of coarse
linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate the nurse appeared
with a baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other hand she was
pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula,
the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their
business, left in the country.
"Go in," she said; "your little one is there asleep."
The room on the ground-floor, the only one in the dwelling, had at its
farther end, against the wall, a large bed without curtains, while a
kneading-trough took up the side by the window, one pane of which
was mended with a piece of blue paper. In the corner behind the door,
shining hob-nailed shoes stood in a row under the slab of the washstand,
near a bottle of oil with a feather stuck in its mouth; a Matthieu
Laensberg lay on the dusty mantelpiece amid gunflints, candle-ends, and
bits of amadou.
Finally, the last luxury in the apartment was a "Fame" blowing her
trumpets, a picture cut out, no doubt, from some perfumer's prospectus
and nailed to the wall with six wooden shoe-pegs.
Emma's child was asleep in a wicker-cradle. She took it up in the
wrapping that enveloped it and began singing softly as she rocked
herself to and fro.
Leon walked up and down the room; it seemed strange to him to see this
beautiful woman in her nankeen dress in the midst of all this poverty.
Madam Bovary reddened; he turned away, thinking perhaps there had been
an impertinent look in his eyes. Then she put back the little girl, who
had just been sick over her collar.
The nurse at once came to dry her, protesting that it wouldn't show.
"She gives me other doses," she said: "I am always a-washing of her. If
you would have the goodness to order Camus, the grocer, to let me have
a little soap, it would really be more convenient for you, as I needn't
trouble you then."
"Very well! very well!" said Emma. "Good morning, Madame Rollet," and
she went out, wiping her shoes at the door.
The good woman accompanied her to the end of the garden, talking all the
time of the trouble she had getting up of nights.
"I'm that worn out sometimes as I drop asleep on my chair. I'm sure you
might at least give me just a pound of ground coffee; that'd last me a
month, and I'd take it of a morning with some milk."
After having submitted to her thanks, Madam Bovary left. She had gone a
little way down the path when, at the sound of wooden shoes, she turned
round. It was the nurse.
"What is it?"
Then the peasant woman, taking her aside behind an elm tree, began
talking to her of her husband, who with his trade and six francs a year
that the captain--
"Oh, be quick!" said Emma.
"Well," the nurse went on, heaving sighs between each word, "I'm afraid
he'll be put out seeing me have coffee alone, you know men--"
"But you are to have some," Emma repeated; "I will give you some. You
bother me!"
"Oh, dear! my poor, dear lady! you see in consequence of his wounds he
has terrible cramps in the chest. He even says that cider weakens him."
"Do make haste, Mere Rollet!"
"Well," the latter continued, making a curtsey, "if it weren't asking
too much," and she curtsied once more, "if you would"--and her eyes
begged--"a jar of brandy," she said at last, "and I'd rub your little
one's feet with it; they're as tender as one's tongue."
Once rid of the nurse, Emma again took Monsieur Leon's arm. She walked
fast for some time, then more slowly, and looking straight in front of
her, her eyes rested on the shoulder of the young man, whose frock-coat
had a black-velvety collar. His brown hair fell over it, straight and
carefully arranged. She noticed his nails which were longer than one
wore them at Yonville. It was one of the clerk's chief occupations to
trim them, and for this purpose he kept a special knife in his writing
desk.
They returned to Yonville by the water-side. In the warm season the
bank, wider than at other times, showed to their foot the garden walls
whence a few steps led to the river. It flowed noiselessly, swift,
and cold to the eye; long, thin grasses huddled together in it as the
current drove them, and spread themselves upon the limpid water like
streaming hair; sometimes at the tip of the reeds or on the leaf of a
water-lily an insect with fine legs crawled or rested. The sun pierced
with a ray the small blue bubbles of the waves that, breaking, followed
each other; branchless old willows mirrored their grey backs in
the water; beyond, all around, the meadows seemed empty. It was the
dinner-hour at the farms, and the young woman and her companion heard
nothing as they walked but the fall of their steps on the earth of the
path, the words they spoke, and the sound of Emma's dress rustling round
her.
The walls of the gardens with pieces of bottle on their coping were
hot as the glass windows of a conservatory. Wallflowers had sprung up
between the bricks, and with the tip of her open sunshade Madame Bovary,
as she passed, made some of their faded flowers crumble into a yellow
dust, or a spray of overhanging honeysuckle and clematis caught in its
fringe and dangled for a moment over the silk.
They were talking of a troupe of Spanish dancers who were expected
shortly at the Rouen theatre.
"Are you going?" she asked.
"If I can," he answered.
Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their eyes were full
of more serious speech, and while they forced themselves to find trivial
phrases, they felt the same languor stealing over them both. It was the
whisper of the soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices.
Surprised with wonder at this strange sweetness, they did not think of
speaking of the sensation or of seeking its cause. Coming joys, like
tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn
softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication
without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.
In one place the ground had been trodden down by the cattle; they had to
step on large green stones put here and there in the mud.
She often stopped a moment to look where to place her foot, and
tottering on a stone that shook, her arms outspread, her form bent
forward with a look of indecision, she would laugh, afraid of falling
into the puddles of water.
When they arrived in front of her garden, Madame Bovary opened the
little gate, ran up the steps and disappeared.
Leon returned to his office. His chief was away; he just glanced at the
briefs, then cut himself a pen, and at last took up his hat and went
out.
He went to La Pature at the top of the Argueil hills at the beginning of
the forest; he threw himself upon the ground under the pines and watched
the sky through his fingers.
"How bored I am!" he said to himself, "how bored I am!"
He thought he was to be pitied for living in this village, with Homais
for a friend and Monsieru Guillaumin for master. The latter, entirely
absorbed by his business, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and red
whiskers over a white cravat, understood nothing of mental refinements,
although he affected a stiff English manner, which in the beginning had
impressed the clerk.
As to the chemist's spouse, she was the best wife in Normandy, gentle
as a sheep, loving her children, her father, her mother, her cousins,
weeping for other's woes, letting everything go in her household, and
detesting corsets; but so slow of movement, such a bore to listen to, so
common in appearance, and of such restricted conversation, that although
she was thirty, he only twenty, although they slept in rooms next each
other and he spoke to her daily, he never thought that she might be a
woman for another, or that she possessed anything else of her sex than
the gown.
And what else was there? Binet, a few shopkeepers, two or three
publicans, the cure, and finally, Monsieur Tuvache, the mayor, with his
two sons, rich, crabbed, obtuse persons, who farmed their own lands
and had feasts among themselves, bigoted to boot, and quite unbearable
companions.
But from the general background of all these human faces Emma's stood
out isolated and yet farthest off; for between her and him he seemed to
see a vague abyss.
In the beginning he had called on her several times along with the
druggist. Charles had not appeared particularly anxious to see him
again, and Leon did not know what to do between his fear of being
indiscreet and the desire for an intimacy that seemed almost impossible.
| Lon is deeply affected by his conversation with Emma. The pharmacist assists the Bovarys to become accustomed to life in Yonville. The narrator informs us that the apothecary's motives are not entirely based on kindness - Monsieur Homais had violated a law forbidding anyone without a diploma from practicing medicine and received a stern warning from the authorities in Rouen. He continued to practice medicine, however, and felt that by befriending Monsieur Bovary the latter would be more likely to ignore the indiscretion. At first Charles is bereft of patients and bored but he is overjoyed at the progress of Emma's pregnancy. Emma resigns herself to her condition but, because she cannot afford what she wants, she makes no preparations for the child. She hopes that it will be a boy so it can steer its own course in the world. The child, a girl, is born one Sunday morning at sunrise. Emma names the girl Berthe because she remembers hearing the marquise at La Vaubyessard use that name. Charles' parents come for the baptism and in the absence of Emma's father Monsieur Homais serves as the child's godfather. Charles' father spends a month in Yonville making drunken displays of mock chivalry which delight Emma but disgust the elder Madame Bovary. One day Emma decides to visit Berth at the wet nurses' house and Lon accompanies her on the walk. At the wet nurse's squalid country cottage Lon is amazed at the sight of such a refined lady as Emma surrounded by such poverty. Before they leave the midwife pesters Emma for more money and goods. The peaceful walk home touches both Emma and Lon deeply though they do not admit this to each other. Back in the village Emma returns to her house but Lon climbs to the pasture on the hilltop and muses on the dreariness of his existence in Yonville | summary |
When the first cold days set in Emma left her bedroom for the
sitting-room, a long apartment with a low ceiling, in which there was
on the mantelpiece a large bunch of coral spread out against the
looking-glass. Seated in her arm chair near the window, she could see
the villagers pass along the pavement.
Twice a day Leon went from his office to the Lion d'Or. Emma could hear
him coming from afar; she leant forward listening, and the young man
glided past the curtain, always dressed in the same way, and without
turning his head. But in the twilight, when, her chin resting on her
left hand, she let the embroidery she had begun fall on her knees, she
often shuddered at the apparition of this shadow suddenly gliding past.
She would get up and order the table to be laid.
Monsieur Homais called at dinner-time. Skull-cap in hand, he came in on
tiptoe, in order to disturb no one, always repeating the same phrase,
"Good evening, everybody." Then, when he had taken his seat at the table
between the pair, he asked the doctor about his patients, and the latter
consulted his as to the probability of their payment. Next they talked
of "what was in the paper."
Homais by this hour knew it almost by heart, and he repeated it from end
to end, with the reflections of the penny-a-liners, and all the stories
of individual catastrophes that had occurred in France or abroad. But
the subject becoming exhausted, he was not slow in throwing out some
remarks on the dishes before him.
Sometimes even, half-rising, he delicately pointed out to madame the
tenderest morsel, or turning to the servant, gave her some advice on the
manipulation of stews and the hygiene of seasoning.
He talked aroma, osmazome, juices, and gelatine in a bewildering manner.
Moreover, Homais, with his head fuller of recipes than his shop of jars,
excelled in making all kinds of preserves, vinegars, and sweet liqueurs;
he knew also all the latest inventions in economic stoves, together with
the art of preserving cheese and of curing sick wines.
At eight o'clock Justin came to fetch him to shut up the shop.
Then Monsieur Homais gave him a sly look, especially if Felicite was
there, for he half noticed that his apprentice was fond of the doctor's
house.
"The young dog," he said, "is beginning to have ideas, and the devil
take me if I don't believe he's in love with your servant!"
But a more serious fault with which he reproached Justin was his
constantly listening to conversation. On Sunday, for example, one could
not get him out of the drawing-room, whither Madame Homais had called
him to fetch the children, who were falling asleep in the arm-chairs,
and dragging down with their backs calico chair-covers that were too
large.
Not many people came to these soirees at the chemist's, his
scandal-mongering and political opinions having successfully alienated
various respectable persons from him. The clerk never failed to be
there. As soon as he heard the bell he ran to meet Madame Bovary, took
her shawl, and put away under the shop-counter the thick list shoes that
she wore over her boots when there was snow.
First they played some hands at trente-et-un; next Monsieur Homais
played ecarte with Emma; Leon behind her gave her advice.
Standing up with his hands on the back of her chair he saw the teeth of
her comb that bit into her chignon. With every movement that she made
to throw her cards the right side of her dress was drawn up. From her
turned-up hair a dark colour fell over her back, and growing gradually
paler, lost itself little by little in the shade. Then her dress fell
on both sides of her chair, puffing out full of folds, and reached the
ground. When Leon occasionally felt the sole of his boot resting on it,
he drew back as if he had trodden upon some one.
When the game of cards was over, the druggist and the Doctor played
dominoes, and Emma, changing her place, leant her elbow on the table,
turning over the leaves of "L'Illustration". She had brought her ladies'
journal with her. Leon sat down near her; they looked at the engravings
together, and waited for one another at the bottom of the pages. She
often begged him to read her the verses; Leon declaimed them in a
languid voice, to which he carefully gave a dying fall in the love
passages. But the noise of the dominoes annoyed him. Monsieur Homais
was strong at the game; he could beat Charles and give him a double-six.
Then the three hundred finished, they both stretched themselves out in
front of the fire, and were soon asleep. The fire was dying out in the
cinders; the teapot was empty, Leon was still reading.
Emma listened to him, mechanically turning around the lampshade, on the
gauze of which were painted clowns in carriages, and tight-rope dances
with their balancing-poles. Leon stopped, pointing with a gesture to his
sleeping audience; then they talked in low tones, and their conversation
seemed the more sweet to them because it was unheard.
Thus a kind of bond was established between them, a constant commerce
of books and of romances. Monsieur Bovary, little given to jealousy, did
not trouble himself about it.
On his birthday he received a beautiful phrenological head, all marked
with figures to the thorax and painted blue. This was an attention of
the clerk's. He showed him many others, even to doing errands for him
at Rouen; and the book of a novelist having made the mania for cactuses
fashionable, Leon bought some for Madame Bovary, bringing them back on
his knees in the "Hirondelle," pricking his fingers on their hard hairs.
She had a board with a balustrade fixed against her window to hold the
pots. The clerk, too, had his small hanging garden; they saw each other
tending their flowers at their windows.
Of the windows of the village there was one yet more often occupied; for
on Sundays from morning to night, and every morning when the weather was
bright, one could see at the dormer-window of the garret the profile of
Monsieur Binet bending over his lathe, whose monotonous humming could be
heard at the Lion d'Or.
One evening on coming home Leon found in his room a rug in velvet and
wool with leaves on a pale ground. He called Madame Homais, Monsieur
Homais, Justin, the children, the cook; he spoke of it to his chief;
every one wanted to see this rug. Why did the doctor's wife give the
clerk presents? It looked queer. They decided that she must be his
lover.
He made this seem likely, so ceaselessly did he talk of her charms and
of her wit; so much so, that Binet once roughly answered him--
"What does it matter to me since I'm not in her set?"
He tortured himself to find out how he could make his declaration to
her, and always halting between the fear of displeasing her and the
shame of being such a coward, he wept with discouragement and desire.
Then he took energetic resolutions, wrote letters that he tore up, put
it off to times that he again deferred.
Often he set out with the determination to dare all; but this resolution
soon deserted him in Emma's presence, and when Charles, dropping in,
invited him to jump into his chaise to go with him to see some patient
in the neighbourhood, he at once accepted, bowed to madame, and went
out. Her husband, was he not something belonging to her? As to Emma,
she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought, must come
suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings--a hurricane of the skies,
which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf,
and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that on
the terrace of houses it makes lakes when the pipes are choked, and she
would thus have remained in her security when she suddenly discovered a
rent in the wall of it.
| Winter arrives and most evenings Homais visits the Bovarys to tell them the news of the day. His wife's young cousin Justin, whom he keeps as an understudy but uses like a servant, usually comes for him at 8 o'clock. On Sunday evenings Charles and Emma attend the poorly attended gatherings at the Homais' house. Lon who boards with the Homais, is always in attendance. While Charles and Homais play dominos Emma and Lon look through fashion magazines and read poetry to each other. When the rest of the group has fallen asleep they have quiet conversations. Charles accepts their friendship as natural and does not question Lon's motives. Lon brings Emma various gifts including an exotic plant and he also gives Charles a phrenological head. Both Emma and Lon spend much time at their windows tending to their indoor gardens and every afternoon they can see each other as well as Monsieur Binet, the tax collector, bent over his lathe engaged in his hobby of making napkin rings. The monotonous tone of the lathe is clearly audible throughout the village. Lon is determined to declare his love to Emma but he is unable to work up the courage. Emma, who believes that falling in love is something that happens suddenly and violently does not consider her true feelings for the clerk. | summary |
When the first cold days set in Emma left her bedroom for the
sitting-room, a long apartment with a low ceiling, in which there was
on the mantelpiece a large bunch of coral spread out against the
looking-glass. Seated in her arm chair near the window, she could see
the villagers pass along the pavement.
Twice a day Leon went from his office to the Lion d'Or. Emma could hear
him coming from afar; she leant forward listening, and the young man
glided past the curtain, always dressed in the same way, and without
turning his head. But in the twilight, when, her chin resting on her
left hand, she let the embroidery she had begun fall on her knees, she
often shuddered at the apparition of this shadow suddenly gliding past.
She would get up and order the table to be laid.
Monsieur Homais called at dinner-time. Skull-cap in hand, he came in on
tiptoe, in order to disturb no one, always repeating the same phrase,
"Good evening, everybody." Then, when he had taken his seat at the table
between the pair, he asked the doctor about his patients, and the latter
consulted his as to the probability of their payment. Next they talked
of "what was in the paper."
Homais by this hour knew it almost by heart, and he repeated it from end
to end, with the reflections of the penny-a-liners, and all the stories
of individual catastrophes that had occurred in France or abroad. But
the subject becoming exhausted, he was not slow in throwing out some
remarks on the dishes before him.
Sometimes even, half-rising, he delicately pointed out to madame the
tenderest morsel, or turning to the servant, gave her some advice on the
manipulation of stews and the hygiene of seasoning.
He talked aroma, osmazome, juices, and gelatine in a bewildering manner.
Moreover, Homais, with his head fuller of recipes than his shop of jars,
excelled in making all kinds of preserves, vinegars, and sweet liqueurs;
he knew also all the latest inventions in economic stoves, together with
the art of preserving cheese and of curing sick wines.
At eight o'clock Justin came to fetch him to shut up the shop.
Then Monsieur Homais gave him a sly look, especially if Felicite was
there, for he half noticed that his apprentice was fond of the doctor's
house.
"The young dog," he said, "is beginning to have ideas, and the devil
take me if I don't believe he's in love with your servant!"
But a more serious fault with which he reproached Justin was his
constantly listening to conversation. On Sunday, for example, one could
not get him out of the drawing-room, whither Madame Homais had called
him to fetch the children, who were falling asleep in the arm-chairs,
and dragging down with their backs calico chair-covers that were too
large.
Not many people came to these soirees at the chemist's, his
scandal-mongering and political opinions having successfully alienated
various respectable persons from him. The clerk never failed to be
there. As soon as he heard the bell he ran to meet Madame Bovary, took
her shawl, and put away under the shop-counter the thick list shoes that
she wore over her boots when there was snow.
First they played some hands at trente-et-un; next Monsieur Homais
played ecarte with Emma; Leon behind her gave her advice.
Standing up with his hands on the back of her chair he saw the teeth of
her comb that bit into her chignon. With every movement that she made
to throw her cards the right side of her dress was drawn up. From her
turned-up hair a dark colour fell over her back, and growing gradually
paler, lost itself little by little in the shade. Then her dress fell
on both sides of her chair, puffing out full of folds, and reached the
ground. When Leon occasionally felt the sole of his boot resting on it,
he drew back as if he had trodden upon some one.
When the game of cards was over, the druggist and the Doctor played
dominoes, and Emma, changing her place, leant her elbow on the table,
turning over the leaves of "L'Illustration". She had brought her ladies'
journal with her. Leon sat down near her; they looked at the engravings
together, and waited for one another at the bottom of the pages. She
often begged him to read her the verses; Leon declaimed them in a
languid voice, to which he carefully gave a dying fall in the love
passages. But the noise of the dominoes annoyed him. Monsieur Homais
was strong at the game; he could beat Charles and give him a double-six.
Then the three hundred finished, they both stretched themselves out in
front of the fire, and were soon asleep. The fire was dying out in the
cinders; the teapot was empty, Leon was still reading.
Emma listened to him, mechanically turning around the lampshade, on the
gauze of which were painted clowns in carriages, and tight-rope dances
with their balancing-poles. Leon stopped, pointing with a gesture to his
sleeping audience; then they talked in low tones, and their conversation
seemed the more sweet to them because it was unheard.
Thus a kind of bond was established between them, a constant commerce
of books and of romances. Monsieur Bovary, little given to jealousy, did
not trouble himself about it.
On his birthday he received a beautiful phrenological head, all marked
with figures to the thorax and painted blue. This was an attention of
the clerk's. He showed him many others, even to doing errands for him
at Rouen; and the book of a novelist having made the mania for cactuses
fashionable, Leon bought some for Madame Bovary, bringing them back on
his knees in the "Hirondelle," pricking his fingers on their hard hairs.
She had a board with a balustrade fixed against her window to hold the
pots. The clerk, too, had his small hanging garden; they saw each other
tending their flowers at their windows.
Of the windows of the village there was one yet more often occupied; for
on Sundays from morning to night, and every morning when the weather was
bright, one could see at the dormer-window of the garret the profile of
Monsieur Binet bending over his lathe, whose monotonous humming could be
heard at the Lion d'Or.
One evening on coming home Leon found in his room a rug in velvet and
wool with leaves on a pale ground. He called Madame Homais, Monsieur
Homais, Justin, the children, the cook; he spoke of it to his chief;
every one wanted to see this rug. Why did the doctor's wife give the
clerk presents? It looked queer. They decided that she must be his
lover.
He made this seem likely, so ceaselessly did he talk of her charms and
of her wit; so much so, that Binet once roughly answered him--
"What does it matter to me since I'm not in her set?"
He tortured himself to find out how he could make his declaration to
her, and always halting between the fear of displeasing her and the
shame of being such a coward, he wept with discouragement and desire.
Then he took energetic resolutions, wrote letters that he tore up, put
it off to times that he again deferred.
Often he set out with the determination to dare all; but this resolution
soon deserted him in Emma's presence, and when Charles, dropping in,
invited him to jump into his chaise to go with him to see some patient
in the neighbourhood, he at once accepted, bowed to madame, and went
out. Her husband, was he not something belonging to her? As to Emma,
she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought, must come
suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings--a hurricane of the skies,
which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf,
and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that on
the terrace of houses it makes lakes when the pipes are choked, and she
would thus have remained in her security when she suddenly discovered a
rent in the wall of it.
| Here we learn that, appropriate to his progressive bourgeois character, Monsieur Homais' kindness stems from self-interest. We also learn that Lon's love for Emma is in earnest. Like her he feels trapped by the confines of the small town and until she arrived had no one who shared his outlook. He and Emma develop a relationship of friendly intimacy and though he would like to confess his love he is intimidated by her refinement and position. Ironically, Emma's own conceptions of love prevent her from seeing the passion evident in the young man. The birth of her daughter is an even that Emma seemingly regards as an imposition. Binet's lathe makes its first appearance in this section - its drone will come up at pivotal points in the novel | analysis |
It was a Sunday in February, an afternoon when the snow was falling.
They had all, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais, and Monsieur Leon,
gone to see a yarn-mill that was being built in the valley a mile and a
half from Yonville. The druggist had taken Napoleon and Athalie to give
them some exercise, and Justin accompanied them, carrying the umbrellas
on his shoulder.
Nothing, however, could be less curious than this curiosity. A great
piece of waste ground, on which pell-mell, amid a mass of sand and
stones, were a few break-wheels, already rusty, surrounded by a
quadrangular building pierced by a number of little windows. The
building was unfinished; the sky could be seen through the joists of the
roofing. Attached to the stop-plank of the gable a bunch of straw mixed
with corn-ears fluttered its tricoloured ribbons in the wind.
Homais was talking. He explained to the company the future importance
of this establishment, computed the strength of the floorings, the
thickness of the walls, and regretted extremely not having a yard-stick
such as Monsieur Binet possessed for his own special use.
Emma, who had taken his arm, bent lightly against his shoulder, and
she looked at the sun's disc shedding afar through the mist his pale
splendour. She turned. Charles was there. His cap was drawn down over
his eyebrows, and his two thick lips were trembling, which added a look
of stupidity to his face; his very back, his calm back, was irritating
to behold, and she saw written upon his coat all the platitude of the
bearer.
While she was considering him thus, tasting in her irritation a sort of
depraved pleasure, Leon made a step forward. The cold that made him pale
seemed to add a more gentle languor to his face; between his cravat and
his neck the somewhat loose collar of his shirt showed the skin; the
lobe of his ear looked out from beneath a lock of hair, and his large
blue eyes, raised to the clouds, seemed to Emma more limpid and more
beautiful than those mountain-lakes where the heavens are mirrored.
"Wretched boy!" suddenly cried the chemist.
And he ran to his son, who had just precipitated himself into a heap of
lime in order to whiten his boots. At the reproaches with which he was
being overwhelmed Napoleon began to roar, while Justin dried his shoes
with a wisp of straw. But a knife was wanted; Charles offered his.
"Ah!" she said to herself, "he carried a knife in his pocket like a
peasant."
The hoar-frost was falling, and they turned back to Yonville.
In the evening Madame Bovary did not go to her neighbour's, and when
Charles had left and she felt herself alone, the comparison re-began
with the clearness of a sensation almost actual, and with that
lengthening of perspective which memory gives to things. Looking from
her bed at the clean fire that was burning, she still saw, as she had
down there, Leon standing up with one hand behind his cane, and with
the other holding Athalie, who was quietly sucking a piece of ice. She
thought him charming; she could not tear herself away from him; she
recalled his other attitudes on other days, the words he had spoken, the
sound of his voice, his whole person; and she repeated, pouting out her
lips as if for a kiss--
"Yes, charming! charming! Is he not in love?" she asked herself; "but
with whom? With me?"
All the proofs arose before her at once; her heart leapt. The flame of
the fire threw a joyous light upon the ceiling; she turned on her back,
stretching out her arms.
Then began the eternal lamentation: "Oh, if Heaven had not willed it!
And why not? What prevented it?"
When Charles came home at midnight, she seemed to have just awakened,
and as he made a noise undressing, she complained of a headache, then
asked carelessly what had happened that evening.
"Monsieur Leon," he said, "went to his room early."
She could not help smiling, and she fell asleep, her soul filled with a
new delight.
The next day, at dusk, she received a visit from Monsieur Lherueux, the
draper. He was a man of ability, was this shopkeeper. Born a Gascon but
bred a Norman, he grafted upon his southern volubility the cunning of
the Cauchois. His fat, flabby, beardless face seemed dyed by a
decoction of liquorice, and his white hair made even more vivid the
keen brilliance of his small black eyes. No one knew what he had been
formerly; a pedlar said some, a banker at Routot according to others.
What was certain was that he made complex calculations in his head that
would have frightened Binet himself. Polite to obsequiousness, he always
held himself with his back bent in the position of one who bows or who
invites.
After leaving at the door his hat surrounded with crape, he put down
a green bandbox on the table, and began by complaining to madame, with
many civilities, that he should have remained till that day without
gaining her confidence. A poor shop like his was not made to attract
a "fashionable lady"; he emphasized the words; yet she had only to
command, and he would undertake to provide her with anything she might
wish, either in haberdashery or linen, millinery or fancy goods, for
he went to town regularly four times a month. He was connected with the
best houses. You could speak of him at the "Trois Freres," at the "Barbe
d'Or," or at the "Grand Sauvage"; all these gentlemen knew him as
well as the insides of their pockets. To-day, then he had come to show
madame, in passing, various articles he happened to have, thanks to
the most rare opportunity. And he pulled out half-a-dozen embroidered
collars from the box.
Madame Bovary examined them. "I do not require anything," she said.
Then Monsieur Lheureux delicately exhibited three Algerian scarves,
several packets of English needles, a pair of straw slippers, and
finally, four eggcups in cocoanut wood, carved in open work by convicts.
Then, with both hands on the table, his neck stretched out, his figure
bent forward, open-mouthed, he watched Emma's look, who was walking up
and down undecided amid these goods. From time to time, as if to remove
some dust, he filliped with his nail the silk of the scarves spread
out at full length, and they rustled with a little noise, making in the
green twilight the gold spangles of their tissue scintillate like little
stars.
"How much are they?"
"A mere nothing," he replied, "a mere nothing. But there's no hurry;
whenever it's convenient. We are not Jews."
She reflected for a few moments, and ended by again declining Monsieur
Lheureux's offer. He replied quite unconcernedly--
"Very well. We shall understand one another by and by. I have always got
on with ladies--if I didn't with my own!"
Emma smiled.
"I wanted to tell you," he went on good-naturedly, after his joke, "that
it isn't the money I should trouble about. Why, I could give you some,
if need be."
She made a gesture of surprise.
"Ah!" said he quickly and in a low voice, "I shouldn't have to go far to
find you some, rely on that."
And he began asking after Pere Tellier, the proprietor of the "Cafe
Francais," whom Monsieur Bovary was then attending.
"What's the matter with Pere Tellier? He coughs so that he shakes his
whole house, and I'm afraid he'll soon want a deal covering rather than
a flannel vest. He was such a rake as a young man! Those sort of people,
madame, have not the least regularity; he's burnt up with brandy. Still
it's sad, all the same, to see an acquaintance go off."
And while he fastened up his box he discoursed about the doctor's
patients.
"It's the weather, no doubt," he said, looking frowningly at the floor,
"that causes these illnesses. I, too, don't feel the thing. One of these
days I shall even have to consult the doctor for a pain I have in my
back. Well, good-bye, Madame Bovary. At your service; your very humble
servant." And he closed the door gently.
Emma had her dinner served in her bedroom on a tray by the fireside; she
was a long time over it; everything was well with her.
"How good I was!" she said to herself, thinking of the scarves.
She heard some steps on the stairs. It was Leon. She got up and took
from the chest of drawers the first pile of dusters to be hemmed. When
he came in she seemed very busy.
The conversation languished; Madame Bovary gave it up every few minutes,
whilst he himself seemed quite embarrassed. Seated on a low chair near
the fire, he turned round in his fingers the ivory thimble-case. She
stitched on, or from time to time turned down the hem of the cloth with
her nail. She did not speak; he was silent, captivated by her silence,
as he would have been by her speech.
"Poor fellow!" she thought.
"How have I displeased her?" he asked himself.
At last, however, Leon said that he should have, one of these days, to
go to Rouen on some office business.
"Your music subscription is out; am I to renew it?"
"No," she replied.
"Why?"
"Because--"
And pursing her lips she slowly drew a long stitch of grey thread.
This work irritated Leon. It seemed to roughen the ends of her fingers.
A gallant phrase came into his head, but he did not risk it.
"Then you are giving it up?" he went on.
"What?" she asked hurriedly. "Music? Ah! yes! Have I not my house to
look after, my husband to attend to, a thousand things, in fact, many
duties that must be considered first?"
She looked at the clock. Charles was late. Then, she affected anxiety.
Two or three times she even repeated, "He is so good!"
The clerk was fond of Monsieur Bovary. But this tenderness on his behalf
astonished him unpleasantly; nevertheless he took up on his praises,
which he said everyone was singing, especially the chemist.
"Ah! he is a good fellow," continued Emma.
"Certainly," replied the clerk.
And he began talking of Madame Homais, whose very untidy appearance
generally made them laugh.
"What does it matter?" interrupted Emma. "A good housewife does not
trouble about her appearance."
Then she relapsed into silence.
It was the same on the following days; her talks, her manners,
everything changed. She took interest in the housework, went to church
regularly, and looked after her servant with more severity.
She took Berthe from nurse. When visitors called, Felicite brought her
in, and Madame Bovary undressed her to show off her limbs. She declared
she adored children; this was her consolation, her joy, her passion,
and she accompanied her caresses with lyrical outburst which would have
reminded anyone but the Yonville people of Sachette in "Notre Dame de
Paris."
When Charles came home he found his slippers put to warm near the fire.
His waistcoat now never wanted lining, nor his shirt buttons, and it was
quite a pleasure to see in the cupboard the night-caps arranged in piles
of the same height. She no longer grumbled as formerly at taking a turn
in the garden; what he proposed was always done, although she did not
understand the wishes to which she submitted without a murmur; and when
Leon saw him by his fireside after dinner, his two hands on his stomach,
his two feet on the fender, his two cheeks red with feeding, his eyes
moist with happiness, the child crawling along the carpet, and this
woman with the slender waist who came behind his arm-chair to kiss his
forehead: "What madness!" he said to himself. "And how to reach her!"
And thus she seemed so virtuous and inaccessible to him that he lost all
hope, even the faintest. But by this renunciation he placed her on
an extraordinary pinnacle. To him she stood outside those fleshly
attributes from which he had nothing to obtain, and in his heart she
rose ever, and became farther removed from him after the magnificent
manner of an apotheosis that is taking wing. It was one of those pure
feelings that do not interfere with life, that are cultivated because
they are rare, and whose loss would afflict more than their passion
rejoices.
Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer. With her black
hair, her large eyes, her aquiline nose, her birdlike walk, and always
silent now, did she not seem to be passing through life scarcely
touching it, and to bear on her brow the vague impress of some divine
destiny? She was so sad and so calm, at once so gentle and so reserved,
that near her one felt oneself seized by an icy charm, as we shudder
in churches at the perfume of the flowers mingling with the cold of the
marble. The others even did not escape from this seduction. The chemist
said--
"She is a woman of great parts, who wouldn't be misplaced in a
sub-prefecture."
The housewives admired her economy, the patients her politeness, the
poor her charity.
But she was eaten up with desires, with rage, with hate. That dress with
the narrow folds hid a distracted fear, of whose torment those chaste
lips said nothing. She was in love with Leon, and sought solitude that
she might with the more ease delight in his image. The sight of his
form troubled the voluptuousness of this mediation. Emma thrilled at
the sound of his step; then in his presence the emotion subsided, and
afterwards there remained to her only an immense astonishment that ended
in sorrow.
Leon did not know that when he left her in despair she rose after he had
gone to see him in the street. She concerned herself about his comings
and goings; she watched his face; she invented quite a history to find
an excuse for going to his room. The chemist's wife seemed happy to her
to sleep under the same roof, and her thoughts constantly centered upon
this house, like the "Lion d'Or" pigeons, who came there to dip their
red feet and white wings in its gutters. But the more Emma recognised
her love, the more she crushed it down, that it might not be evident,
that she might make it less. She would have liked Leon to guess it, and
she imagined chances, catastrophes that should facilitate this.
What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness and fear, and a sense of
shame also. She thought she had repulsed him too much, that the time was
past, that all was lost. Then, pride, and joy of being able to say to
herself, "I am virtuous," and to look at herself in the glass taking
resigned poses, consoled her a little for the sacrifice she believed she
was making.
Then the lusts of the flesh, the longing for money, and the melancholy
of passion all blended themselves into one suffering, and instead of
turning her thoughts from it, she clave to it the more, urging herself
to pain, and seeking everywhere occasion for it. She was irritated by
an ill-served dish or by a half-open door; bewailed the velvets she had
not, the happiness she had missed, her too exalted dreams, her narrow
home.
What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her
anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an
imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude. For whose
sake, then was she virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all
felicity, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of
that complex strap that bucked her in on all sides.
On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various hatreds that
resulted from her boredom, and every effort to diminish only augmented
it; for this useless trouble was added to the other reasons for despair,
and contributed still more to the separation between them. Her own
gentleness to herself made her rebel against him. Domestic mediocrity
drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires.
She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she might have a better
right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him. She was surprised
sometimes at the atrocious conjectures that came into her thoughts, and
she had to go on smiling, to hear repeated to her at all hours that she
was happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it be believed.
Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She was seized with the
temptation to flee somewhere with Leon to try a new life; but at once a
vague chasm full of darkness opened within her soul.
"Besides, he no longer loves me," she thought. "What is to become of me?
What help is to be hoped for, what consolation, what solace?"
She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low voice, with
flowing tears.
"Why don't you tell master?" the servant asked her when she came in
during these crises.
"It is the nerves," said Emma. "Do not speak to him of it; it would
worry him."
"Ah! yes," Felicite went on, "you are just like La Guerine, Pere
Guerin's daughter, the fisherman at Pollet, that I used to know at
Dieppe before I came to you. She was so sad, so sad, to see her
standing upright on the threshold of her house, she seemed to you like a
winding-sheet spread out before the door. Her illness, it appears, was
a kind of fog that she had in her head, and the doctors could not do
anything, nor the priest either. When she was taken too bad she went
off quite alone to the sea-shore, so that the customs officer, going his
rounds, often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle.
Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say."
"But with me," replied Emma, "it was after marriage that it began."
| On a cold Sunday afternoon in February, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais and Lon, the Homais children and Justin go to view a flax mill being built outside of town. The sight is dull and Emma, watching her husband, is disgusted by his stupidity and dullness. She contrasts his appearance with Lon's much more desirable countenance and later that evening, alone in her home, comes to the sudden realization that the clerk is in love with her. This pleases her but she again laments that she is married to Charles. The next day Monsieur Lheureux, the owner of the dry-goods store, visits and tries to tempt her with the fine things he can procure for her on credit. She politely refuses and congratulates herself for her thrift. That evening Lon visits her but finds Madame Bovary distracted. To his chagrin she refers several times to the duties of home and hearth. In the following days she exerts herself to be a devoted mother and wife and Lon determines that she is inaccessible. Over the following weeks Emma grows thinner, more melancholy, sweet and subdued. Inside, however, she is torn by passionate love for Lon. Emma's suppressed feelings and unrealized dreams cause her torment and her husband's complete ignorance of her suffering exasperates her even more. Over time Charles becomes the object of her resentment. Only Flicit notices her mistress' sorrow but Emma blames it on nerves | summary |
One evening when the window was open, and she, sitting by it, had been
watching Lestiboudois, the beadle, trimming the box, she suddenly heard
the Angelus ringing.
It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are in bloom, and a
warm wind blows over the flower-beds newly turned, and the gardens, like
women, seem to be getting ready for the summer fetes. Through the bars
of the arbour and away beyond the river seen in the fields, meandering
through the grass in wandering curves. The evening vapours rose between
the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with a violet tint, paler
and more transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart their branches.
In the distance cattle moved about; neither their steps nor their lowing
could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through the air, kept up its
peaceful lamentation.
With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of the young woman lost
themselves in old memories of her youth and school-days. She remembered
the great candlesticks that rose above the vases full of flowers on the
altar, and the tabernacle with its small columns. She would have liked
to be once more lost in the long line of white veils, marked off here
and there by the stuff black hoods of the good sisters bending over
their prie-Dieu. At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the
gentle face of the Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense.
Then she was moved; she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the
down of a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she
went towards the church, included to no matter what devotions, so that
her soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it.
On the Place she met Lestivoudois on his way back, for, in order not
to shorten his day's labour, he preferred interrupting his work,
then beginning it again, so that he rang the Angelus to suit his own
convenience. Besides, the ringing over a little earlier warned the lads
of catechism hour.
Already a few who had arrived were playing marbles on the stones of the
cemetery. Others, astride the wall, swung their legs, kicking with their
clogs the large nettles growing between the little enclosure and the
newest graves. This was the only green spot. All the rest was but
stones, always covered with a fine powder, despite the vestry-broom.
The children in list shoes ran about there as if it were an enclosure
made for them. The shouts of their voices could be heard through the
humming of the bell. This grew less and less with the swinging of the
great rope that, hanging from the top of the belfry, dragged its end on
the ground. Swallows flitted to and fro uttering little cries, cut the
air with the edge of their wings, and swiftly returned to their yellow
nests under the tiles of the coping. At the end of the church a lamp was
burning, the wick of a night-light in a glass hung up. Its light from a
distance looked like a white stain trembling in the oil. A long ray of
the sun fell across the nave and seemed to darken the lower sides and
the corners.
"Where is the cure?" asked Madame Bovary of one of the lads, who was
amusing himself by shaking a swivel in a hole too large for it.
"He is just coming," he answered.
And in fact the door of the presbytery grated; Abbe Bournisien appeared;
the children, pell-mell, fled into the church.
"These young scamps!" murmured the priest, "always the same!"
Then, picking up a catechism all in rags that he had struck with is
foot, "They respect nothing!" But as soon as he caught sight of Madame
Bovary, "Excuse me," he said; "I did not recognise you."
He thrust the catechism into his pocket, and stopped short, balancing
the heavy vestry key between his two fingers.
The light of the setting sun that fell full upon his face paled the
lasting of his cassock, shiny at the elbows, unravelled at the hem.
Grease and tobacco stains followed along his broad chest the lines
of the buttons, and grew more numerous the farther they were from his
neckcloth, in which the massive folds of his red chin rested; this was
dotted with yellow spots, that disappeared beneath the coarse hair of
his greyish beard. He had just dined and was breathing noisily.
"How are you?" he added.
"Not well," replied Emma; "I am ill."
"Well, and so am I," answered the priest. "These first warm days weaken
one most remarkably, don't they? But, after all, we are born to suffer,
as St. Paul says. But what does Monsieur Bovary think of it?"
"He!" she said with a gesture of contempt.
"What!" replied the good fellow, quite astonished, "doesn't he prescribe
something for you?"
"Ah!" said Emma, "it is no earthly remedy I need."
But the cure from time to time looked into the church, where the
kneeling boys were shouldering one another, and tumbling over like packs
of cards.
"I should like to know--" she went on.
"You look out, Riboudet," cried the priest in an angry voice; "I'll warm
your ears, you imp!" Then turning to Emma, "He's Boudet the carpenter's
son; his parents are well off, and let him do just as he pleases. Yet he
could learn quickly if he would, for he is very sharp. And so sometimes
for a joke I call him Riboudet (like the road one takes to go to
Maromme) and I even say 'Mon Riboudet.' Ha! Ha! 'Mont Riboudet.' The
other day I repeated that just to Monsignor, and he laughed at it; he
condescended to laugh at it. And how is Monsieur Bovary?"
She seemed not to hear him. And he went on--
"Always very busy, no doubt; for he and I are certainly the busiest
people in the parish. But he is doctor of the body," he added with a
thick laugh, "and I of the soul."
She fixed her pleading eyes upon the priest. "Yes," she said, "you
solace all sorrows."
"Ah! don't talk to me of it, Madame Bovary. This morning I had to go to
Bas-Diauville for a cow that was ill; they thought it was under a spell.
All their cows, I don't know how it is--But pardon me! Longuemarre and
Boudet! Bless me! Will you leave off?"
And with a bound he ran into the church.
The boys were just then clustering round the large desk, climbing over
the precentor's footstool, opening the missal; and others on tiptoe were
just about to venture into the confessional. But the priest suddenly
distributed a shower of cuffs among them. Seizing them by the collars of
their coats, he lifted them from the ground, and deposited them on their
knees on the stones of the choir, firmly, as if he meant planting them
there.
"Yes," said he, when he returned to Emma, unfolding his large cotton
handkerchief, one corner of which he put between his teeth, "farmers are
much to be pitied."
"Others, too," she replied.
"Assuredly. Town-labourers, for example."
"It is not they--"
"Pardon! I've there known poor mothers of families, virtuous women, I
assure you, real saints, who wanted even bread."
"But those," replied Emma, and the corners of her mouth twitched as she
spoke, "those, Monsieur le Cure, who have bread and have no--"
"Fire in the winter," said the priest.
"Oh, what does that matter?"
"What! What does it matter? It seems to me that when one has firing and
food--for, after all--"
"My God! my God!" she sighed.
"It is indigestion, no doubt? You must get home, Madame Bovary; drink
a little tea, that will strengthen you, or else a glass of fresh water
with a little moist sugar."
"Why?" And she looked like one awaking from a dream.
"Well, you see, you were putting your hand to your forehead. I thought
you felt faint." Then, bethinking himself, "But you were asking me
something? What was it? I really don't remember."
"I? Nothing! nothing!" repeated Emma.
And the glance she cast round her slowly fell upon the old man in the
cassock. They looked at one another face to face without speaking.
"Then, Madame Bovary," he said at last, "excuse me, but duty first, you
know; I must look after my good-for-nothings. The first communion will
soon be upon us, and I fear we shall be behind after all. So after
Ascension Day I keep them recta* an extra hour every Wednesday. Poor
children! One cannot lead them too soon into the path of the Lord, as,
moreover, he has himself recommended us to do by the mouth of his Divine
Son. Good health to you, madame; my respects to your husband."
*On the straight and narrow path.
And he went into the church making a genuflexion as soon as he reached
the door.
Emma saw him disappear between the double row of forms, walking with a
heavy tread, his head a little bent over his shoulder, and with his two
hands half-open behind him.
Then she turned on her heel all of one piece, like a statue on a pivot,
and went homewards. But the loud voice of the priest, the clear voices
of the boys still reached her ears, and went on behind her.
"Are you a Christian?"
"Yes, I am a Christian."
"What is a Christian?"
"He who, being baptized-baptized-baptized--"
She went up the steps of the staircase holding on to the banisters, and
when she was in her room threw herself into an arm-chair.
The whitish light of the window-panes fell with soft undulations.
The furniture in its place seemed to have become more immobile, and to
lose itself in the shadow as in an ocean of darkness. The fire was out,
the clock went on ticking, and Emma vaguely marvelled at this calm of
all things while within herself was such tumult. But little Berthe was
there, between the window and the work-table, tottering on her knitted
shoes, and trying to come to her mother to catch hold of the ends of her
apron-strings.
"Leave me alone," said the latter, putting her from her with her hand.
The little girl soon came up closer against her knees, and leaning on
them with her arms, she looked up with her large blue eyes, while a
small thread of pure saliva dribbled from her lips on to the silk apron.
"Leave me alone," repeated the young woman quite irritably.
Her face frightened the child, who began to scream.
"Will you leave me alone?" she said, pushing her with her elbow.
Berthe fell at the foot of the drawers against the brass handle, cutting
her cheek, which began to bleed, against it. Madame Bovary sprang to
lift her up, broke the bell-rope, called for the servant with all her
might, and she was just going to curse herself when Charles appeared. It
was the dinner-hour; he had come home.
"Look, dear!" said Emma, in a calm voice, "the little one fell down
while she was playing, and has hurt herself."
Charles reassured her; the case was not a serious one, and he went for
some sticking plaster.
Madame Bovary did not go downstairs to the dining-room; she wished
to remain alone to look after the child. Then watching her sleep, the
little anxiety she felt gradually wore off, and she seemed very stupid
to herself, and very good to have been so worried just now at so little.
Berthe, in fact, no longer sobbed.
Her breathing now imperceptibly raised the cotton covering. Big tears
lay in the corner of the half-closed eyelids, through whose lashes one
could see two pale sunken pupils; the plaster stuck on her cheek drew
the skin obliquely.
"It is very strange," thought Emma, "how ugly this child is!"
When at eleven o'clock Charles came back from the chemist's shop,
whither he had gone after dinner to return the remainder of the
sticking-plaster, he found his wife standing by the cradle.
"I assure you it's nothing." he said, kissing her on the forehead.
"Don't worry, my poor darling; you will make yourself ill."
He had stayed a long time at the chemist's. Although he had not seemed
much moved, Homais, nevertheless, had exerted himself to buoy him up, to
"keep up his spirits." Then they had talked of the various dangers that
threaten childhood, of the carelessness of servants. Madame Homais knew
something of it, having still upon her chest the marks left by a basin
full of soup that a cook had formerly dropped on her pinafore, and
her good parents took no end of trouble for her. The knives were not
sharpened, nor the floors waxed; there were iron gratings to the windows
and strong bars across the fireplace; the little Homais, in spite of
their spirit, could not stir without someone watching them; at the
slightest cold their father stuffed them with pectorals; and until
they were turned four they all, without pity, had to wear wadded
head-protectors. This, it is true, was a fancy of Madame Homais'; her
husband was inwardly afflicted at it. Fearing the possible consequences
of such compression to the intellectual organs. He even went so far as
to say to her, "Do you want to make Caribs or Botocudos of them?"
Charles, however, had several times tried to interrupt the conversation.
"I should like to speak to you," he had whispered in the clerk's ear,
who went upstairs in front of him.
"Can he suspect anything?" Leon asked himself. His heart beat, and he
racked his brain with surmises.
At last, Charles, having shut the door, asked him to see himself
what would be the price at Rouen of a fine daguerreotypes. It was a
sentimental surprise he intended for his wife, a delicate attention--his
portrait in a frock-coat. But he wanted first to know "how much it would
be." The inquiries would not put Monsieur Leon out, since he went to
town almost every week.
Why? Monsieur Homais suspected some "young man's affair" at the bottom
of it, an intrigue. But he was mistaken. Leon was after no love-making.
He was sadder than ever, as Madame Lefrancois saw from the amount of
food he left on his plate. To find out more about it she questioned
the tax-collector. Binet answered roughly that he "wasn't paid by the
police."
All the same, his companion seemed very strange to him, for Leon often
threw himself back in his chair, and stretching out his arms, complained vaguely of life.
"It's because you don't take enough recreation," said the collector.
"What recreation?"
"If I were you I'd have a lathe."
"But I don't know how to turn," answered the clerk.
"Ah! that's true," said the other, rubbing his chin with an air of
mingled contempt and satisfaction.
Leon was weary of loving without any result; moreover he was beginning
to feel that depression caused by the repetition of the same kind of
life, when no interest inspires and no hope sustains it. He was so bored
with Yonville and its inhabitants, that the sight of certain persons,
of certain houses, irritated him beyond endurance; and the chemist, good
fellow though he was, was becoming absolutely unbearable to him. Yet
the prospect of a new condition of life frightened as much as it seduced
him.
This apprehension soon changed into impatience, and then Paris from afar
sounded its fanfare of masked balls with the laugh of grisettes. As he
was to finish reading there, why not set out at once? What prevented
him? And he began making home-preparations; he arranged his occupations
beforehand. He furnished in his head an apartment. He would lead an
artist's life there! He would take lessons on the guitar! He would have
a dressing-gown, a Basque cap, blue velvet slippers! He even already was
admiring two crossed foils over his chimney-piece, with a death's head
on the guitar above them.
The difficulty was the consent of his mother; nothing, however, seemed
more reasonable. Even his employer advised him to go to some other
chambers where he could advance more rapidly. Taking a middle course,
then, Leon looked for some place as second clerk at Rouen; found none,
and at last wrote his mother a long letter full of details, in which
he set forth the reasons for going to live at Paris immediately. She
consented.
He did not hurry. Every day for a month Hivert carried boxes, valises,
parcels for him from Yonville to Rouen and from Rouen to Yonville;
and when Leon had packed up his wardrobe, had his three arm-chairs
restuffed, bought a stock of neckties, in a word, had made more
preparations than for a voyage around the world, he put it off from week
to week, until he received a second letter from his mother urging him to
leave, since he wanted to pass his examination before the vacation.
When the moment for the farewells had come, Madame Homais wept, Justin
sobbed; Homais, as a man of nerve, concealed his emotion; he wished to
carry his friend's overcoat himself as far as the gate of the notary,
who was taking Leon to Rouen in his carriage.
The latter had just time to bid farewell to Monsieur Bovary.
When he reached the head of the stairs, he stopped, he was so out of
breath. As he came in, Madame Bovary arose hurriedly.
"It is I again!" said Leon.
"I was sure of it!"
She bit her lips, and a rush of blood flowing under her skin made her
red from the roots of her hair to the top of her collar. She remained
standing, leaning with her shoulder against the wainscot.
"The doctor is not here?" he went on.
"He is out." She repeated, "He is out."
Then there was silence. They looked at one another and their thoughts,
confounded in the same agony, clung close together like two throbbing
breasts.
"I should like to kiss Berthe," said Leon.
Emma went down a few steps and called Felicite.
He threw one long look around him that took in the walls, the
decorations, the fireplace, as if to penetrate everything, carry away
everything. But she returned, and the servant brought Berthe, who was
swinging a windmill roof downwards at the end of a string. Leon kissed
her several times on the neck.
"Good-bye, poor child! good-bye, dear little one! good-bye!" And he gave
her back to her mother.
"Take her away," she said.
They remained alone--Madame Bovary, her back turned, her face pressed
against a window-pane; Leon held his cap in his hand, knocking it softly
against his thigh.
"It is going to rain," said Emma.
"I have a cloak," he answered.
"Ah!"
She turned around, her chin lowered, her forehead bent forward.
The light fell on it as on a piece of marble, to the curve of the
eyebrows, without one's being able to guess what Emma was seeing on the
horizon or what she was thinking within herself.
"Well, good-bye," he sighed.
She raised her head with a quick movement.
"Yes, good-bye--go!"
They advanced towards each other; he held out his hand; she hesitated.
"In the English fashion, then," she said, giving her own hand wholly to
him, and forcing a laugh.
Leon felt it between his fingers, and the very essence of all his being
seemed to pass down into that moist palm. Then he opened his hand; their
eyes met again, and he disappeared.
When he reached the market-place, he stopped and hid behind a pillar to
look for the last time at this white house with the four green blinds.
He thought he saw a shadow behind the window in the room; but the
curtain, sliding along the pole as though no one were touching it,
slowly opened its long oblique folds that spread out with a single
movement, and thus hung straight and motionless as a plaster wall. Leon
set off running.
From afar he saw his employer's gig in the road, and by it a man in
a coarse apron holding the horse. Homais and Monsieur Guillaumin were
talking. They were waiting for him.
"Embrace me," said the druggist with tears in his eyes. "Here is your
coat, my good friend. Mind the cold; take care of yourself; look after
yourself."
"Come, Leon, jump in," said the notary.
Homais bent over the splash-board, and in a voice broken by sobs uttered
these three sad words--
"A pleasant journey!"
"Good-night," said Monsieur Guillaumin. "Give him his head." They set
out, and Homais went back.
Madame Bovary had opened her window overlooking the garden and watched
the clouds. They gathered around the sunset on the side of Rouen and
then swiftly rolled back their black columns, behind which the great
rays of the sun looked out like the golden arrows of a suspended trophy,
while the rest of the empty heavens was white as porcelain. But a gust
of wind bowed the poplars, and suddenly the rain fell; it pattered
against the green leaves.
Then the sun reappeared, the hens clucked, sparrows shook their wings in
the damp thickets, and the pools of water on the gravel as they flowed
away carried off the pink flowers of an acacia.
"Ah! how far off he must be already!" she thought.
Monsieur Homais, as usual, came at half-past six during dinner.
"Well," said he, "so we've sent off our young friend!"
"So it seems," replied the doctor. Then turning on his chair; "Any news
at home?"
"Nothing much. Only my wife was a little moved this afternoon. You know
women--a nothing upsets them, especially my wife. And we should be
wrong to object to that, since their nervous organization is much more
malleable than ours."
"Poor Leon!" said Charles. "How will he live at Paris? Will he get used
to it?"
Madame Bovary sighed.
"Get along!" said the chemist, smacking his lips. "The outings at
restaurants, the masked balls, the champagne--all that'll be jolly
enough, I assure you."
"I don't think he'll go wrong," objected Bovary.
"Nor do I," said Monsieur Homais quickly; "although he'll have to do
like the rest for fear of passing for a Jesuit. And you don't know what
a life those dogs lead in the Latin quarter with actresses. Besides,
students are thought a great deal of in Paris. Provided they have a few
accomplishments, they are received in the best society; there are even
ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who fall in love with them, which
subsequently furnishes them opportunities for making very good matches."
"But," said the doctor, "I fear for him that down there--"
"You are right," interrupted the chemist; "that is the reverse of the
medal. And one is constantly obliged to keep one's hand in one's pocket
there. Thus, we will suppose you are in a public garden. An individual
presents himself, well dressed, even wearing an order, and whom one
would take for a diplomatist. He approaches you, he insinuates himself;
offers you a pinch of snuff, or picks up your hat. Then you become more
intimate; he takes you to a cafe, invites you to his country-house,
introduces you, between two drinks, to all sorts of people; and
three-fourths of the time it's only to plunder your watch or lead you
into some pernicious step.
"That is true," said Charles; "but I was thinking especially of
illnesses--of typhoid fever, for example, that attacks students from the
provinces."
Emma shuddered.
"Because of the change of regimen," continued the chemist, "and of the
perturbation that results therefrom in the whole system. And then the
water at Paris, don't you know! The dishes at restaurants, all the
spiced food, end by heating the blood, and are not worth, whatever
people may say of them, a good soup. For my own part, I have always
preferred plain living; it is more healthy. So when I was studying
pharmacy at Rouen, I boarded in a boarding house; I dined with the
professors."
And thus he went on, expounding his opinions generally and his personal
likings, until Justin came to fetch him for a mulled egg that was
wanted.
"Not a moment's peace!" he cried; "always at it! I can't go out for a
minute! Like a plough-horse, I have always to be moiling and toiling.
What drudgery!" Then, when he was at the door, "By the way, do you know
the news?"
"What news?"
"That it is very likely," Homais went on, raising his eyebrows and
assuming one of his most serious expression, "that the agricultural
meeting of the Seine-Inferieure will be held this year at
Yonville-l'Abbaye. The rumour, at all events, is going the round. This
morning the paper alluded to it. It would be of the utmost importance
for our district. But we'll talk it over later on. I can see, thank you;
Justin has the lantern."
| One evening, while sitting at her window, Emma hears the church bell tolling and she is reminded of her girlhood in the convent. Seeking spiritual guidance she makes her way to the church where the boys from the village are gathering for catechism. She finds the abb, Monsieur Bournisien, in a distracted state of mind and despite her attempt to draw him into a conversation about her spiritual crises he does not glean the true reason for her visit and offers only banalities. He cannot fathom why anyone who is warm and fed would have troubles. At home she falls into a foul mood and when Berthe pesters her she pushes the child who falls and suffers a cut to her cheek. Emma immediately calls for help and Charles dresses the wound but that evening the mother watches the sleeping child closely. She notices with some surprise that her daughter is ugly. Lon becomes exceedingly morose and dissatisfied with life in Yonville and he finally resolves to move to Paris to complete his law studies. Lon and Emma part awkwardly and leaving much unsaid. Homais visits that night as usual and Emma suffers greatly as he and Charles discuss all the distractions and trappings of society that Lon will experience in Paris. Before he leaves, Homais mentions that there is a rumor that the region's annual Agricultural Show will be held in Yonville. | summary |
One evening when the window was open, and she, sitting by it, had been
watching Lestiboudois, the beadle, trimming the box, she suddenly heard
the Angelus ringing.
It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are in bloom, and a
warm wind blows over the flower-beds newly turned, and the gardens, like
women, seem to be getting ready for the summer fetes. Through the bars
of the arbour and away beyond the river seen in the fields, meandering
through the grass in wandering curves. The evening vapours rose between
the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with a violet tint, paler
and more transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart their branches.
In the distance cattle moved about; neither their steps nor their lowing
could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through the air, kept up its
peaceful lamentation.
With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of the young woman lost
themselves in old memories of her youth and school-days. She remembered
the great candlesticks that rose above the vases full of flowers on the
altar, and the tabernacle with its small columns. She would have liked
to be once more lost in the long line of white veils, marked off here
and there by the stuff black hoods of the good sisters bending over
their prie-Dieu. At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the
gentle face of the Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense.
Then she was moved; she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the
down of a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she
went towards the church, included to no matter what devotions, so that
her soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it.
On the Place she met Lestivoudois on his way back, for, in order not
to shorten his day's labour, he preferred interrupting his work,
then beginning it again, so that he rang the Angelus to suit his own
convenience. Besides, the ringing over a little earlier warned the lads
of catechism hour.
Already a few who had arrived were playing marbles on the stones of the
cemetery. Others, astride the wall, swung their legs, kicking with their
clogs the large nettles growing between the little enclosure and the
newest graves. This was the only green spot. All the rest was but
stones, always covered with a fine powder, despite the vestry-broom.
The children in list shoes ran about there as if it were an enclosure
made for them. The shouts of their voices could be heard through the
humming of the bell. This grew less and less with the swinging of the
great rope that, hanging from the top of the belfry, dragged its end on
the ground. Swallows flitted to and fro uttering little cries, cut the
air with the edge of their wings, and swiftly returned to their yellow
nests under the tiles of the coping. At the end of the church a lamp was
burning, the wick of a night-light in a glass hung up. Its light from a
distance looked like a white stain trembling in the oil. A long ray of
the sun fell across the nave and seemed to darken the lower sides and
the corners.
"Where is the cure?" asked Madame Bovary of one of the lads, who was
amusing himself by shaking a swivel in a hole too large for it.
"He is just coming," he answered.
And in fact the door of the presbytery grated; Abbe Bournisien appeared;
the children, pell-mell, fled into the church.
"These young scamps!" murmured the priest, "always the same!"
Then, picking up a catechism all in rags that he had struck with is
foot, "They respect nothing!" But as soon as he caught sight of Madame
Bovary, "Excuse me," he said; "I did not recognise you."
He thrust the catechism into his pocket, and stopped short, balancing
the heavy vestry key between his two fingers.
The light of the setting sun that fell full upon his face paled the
lasting of his cassock, shiny at the elbows, unravelled at the hem.
Grease and tobacco stains followed along his broad chest the lines
of the buttons, and grew more numerous the farther they were from his
neckcloth, in which the massive folds of his red chin rested; this was
dotted with yellow spots, that disappeared beneath the coarse hair of
his greyish beard. He had just dined and was breathing noisily.
"How are you?" he added.
"Not well," replied Emma; "I am ill."
"Well, and so am I," answered the priest. "These first warm days weaken
one most remarkably, don't they? But, after all, we are born to suffer,
as St. Paul says. But what does Monsieur Bovary think of it?"
"He!" she said with a gesture of contempt.
"What!" replied the good fellow, quite astonished, "doesn't he prescribe
something for you?"
"Ah!" said Emma, "it is no earthly remedy I need."
But the cure from time to time looked into the church, where the
kneeling boys were shouldering one another, and tumbling over like packs
of cards.
"I should like to know--" she went on.
"You look out, Riboudet," cried the priest in an angry voice; "I'll warm
your ears, you imp!" Then turning to Emma, "He's Boudet the carpenter's
son; his parents are well off, and let him do just as he pleases. Yet he
could learn quickly if he would, for he is very sharp. And so sometimes
for a joke I call him Riboudet (like the road one takes to go to
Maromme) and I even say 'Mon Riboudet.' Ha! Ha! 'Mont Riboudet.' The
other day I repeated that just to Monsignor, and he laughed at it; he
condescended to laugh at it. And how is Monsieur Bovary?"
She seemed not to hear him. And he went on--
"Always very busy, no doubt; for he and I are certainly the busiest
people in the parish. But he is doctor of the body," he added with a
thick laugh, "and I of the soul."
She fixed her pleading eyes upon the priest. "Yes," she said, "you
solace all sorrows."
"Ah! don't talk to me of it, Madame Bovary. This morning I had to go to
Bas-Diauville for a cow that was ill; they thought it was under a spell.
All their cows, I don't know how it is--But pardon me! Longuemarre and
Boudet! Bless me! Will you leave off?"
And with a bound he ran into the church.
The boys were just then clustering round the large desk, climbing over
the precentor's footstool, opening the missal; and others on tiptoe were
just about to venture into the confessional. But the priest suddenly
distributed a shower of cuffs among them. Seizing them by the collars of
their coats, he lifted them from the ground, and deposited them on their
knees on the stones of the choir, firmly, as if he meant planting them
there.
"Yes," said he, when he returned to Emma, unfolding his large cotton
handkerchief, one corner of which he put between his teeth, "farmers are
much to be pitied."
"Others, too," she replied.
"Assuredly. Town-labourers, for example."
"It is not they--"
"Pardon! I've there known poor mothers of families, virtuous women, I
assure you, real saints, who wanted even bread."
"But those," replied Emma, and the corners of her mouth twitched as she
spoke, "those, Monsieur le Cure, who have bread and have no--"
"Fire in the winter," said the priest.
"Oh, what does that matter?"
"What! What does it matter? It seems to me that when one has firing and
food--for, after all--"
"My God! my God!" she sighed.
"It is indigestion, no doubt? You must get home, Madame Bovary; drink
a little tea, that will strengthen you, or else a glass of fresh water
with a little moist sugar."
"Why?" And she looked like one awaking from a dream.
"Well, you see, you were putting your hand to your forehead. I thought
you felt faint." Then, bethinking himself, "But you were asking me
something? What was it? I really don't remember."
"I? Nothing! nothing!" repeated Emma.
And the glance she cast round her slowly fell upon the old man in the
cassock. They looked at one another face to face without speaking.
"Then, Madame Bovary," he said at last, "excuse me, but duty first, you
know; I must look after my good-for-nothings. The first communion will
soon be upon us, and I fear we shall be behind after all. So after
Ascension Day I keep them recta* an extra hour every Wednesday. Poor
children! One cannot lead them too soon into the path of the Lord, as,
moreover, he has himself recommended us to do by the mouth of his Divine
Son. Good health to you, madame; my respects to your husband."
*On the straight and narrow path.
And he went into the church making a genuflexion as soon as he reached
the door.
Emma saw him disappear between the double row of forms, walking with a
heavy tread, his head a little bent over his shoulder, and with his two
hands half-open behind him.
Then she turned on her heel all of one piece, like a statue on a pivot,
and went homewards. But the loud voice of the priest, the clear voices
of the boys still reached her ears, and went on behind her.
"Are you a Christian?"
"Yes, I am a Christian."
"What is a Christian?"
"He who, being baptized-baptized-baptized--"
She went up the steps of the staircase holding on to the banisters, and
when she was in her room threw herself into an arm-chair.
The whitish light of the window-panes fell with soft undulations.
The furniture in its place seemed to have become more immobile, and to
lose itself in the shadow as in an ocean of darkness. The fire was out,
the clock went on ticking, and Emma vaguely marvelled at this calm of
all things while within herself was such tumult. But little Berthe was
there, between the window and the work-table, tottering on her knitted
shoes, and trying to come to her mother to catch hold of the ends of her
apron-strings.
"Leave me alone," said the latter, putting her from her with her hand.
The little girl soon came up closer against her knees, and leaning on
them with her arms, she looked up with her large blue eyes, while a
small thread of pure saliva dribbled from her lips on to the silk apron.
"Leave me alone," repeated the young woman quite irritably.
Her face frightened the child, who began to scream.
"Will you leave me alone?" she said, pushing her with her elbow.
Berthe fell at the foot of the drawers against the brass handle, cutting
her cheek, which began to bleed, against it. Madame Bovary sprang to
lift her up, broke the bell-rope, called for the servant with all her
might, and she was just going to curse herself when Charles appeared. It
was the dinner-hour; he had come home.
"Look, dear!" said Emma, in a calm voice, "the little one fell down
while she was playing, and has hurt herself."
Charles reassured her; the case was not a serious one, and he went for
some sticking plaster.
Madame Bovary did not go downstairs to the dining-room; she wished
to remain alone to look after the child. Then watching her sleep, the
little anxiety she felt gradually wore off, and she seemed very stupid
to herself, and very good to have been so worried just now at so little.
Berthe, in fact, no longer sobbed.
Her breathing now imperceptibly raised the cotton covering. Big tears
lay in the corner of the half-closed eyelids, through whose lashes one
could see two pale sunken pupils; the plaster stuck on her cheek drew
the skin obliquely.
"It is very strange," thought Emma, "how ugly this child is!"
When at eleven o'clock Charles came back from the chemist's shop,
whither he had gone after dinner to return the remainder of the
sticking-plaster, he found his wife standing by the cradle.
"I assure you it's nothing." he said, kissing her on the forehead.
"Don't worry, my poor darling; you will make yourself ill."
He had stayed a long time at the chemist's. Although he had not seemed
much moved, Homais, nevertheless, had exerted himself to buoy him up, to
"keep up his spirits." Then they had talked of the various dangers that
threaten childhood, of the carelessness of servants. Madame Homais knew
something of it, having still upon her chest the marks left by a basin
full of soup that a cook had formerly dropped on her pinafore, and
her good parents took no end of trouble for her. The knives were not
sharpened, nor the floors waxed; there were iron gratings to the windows
and strong bars across the fireplace; the little Homais, in spite of
their spirit, could not stir without someone watching them; at the
slightest cold their father stuffed them with pectorals; and until
they were turned four they all, without pity, had to wear wadded
head-protectors. This, it is true, was a fancy of Madame Homais'; her
husband was inwardly afflicted at it. Fearing the possible consequences
of such compression to the intellectual organs. He even went so far as
to say to her, "Do you want to make Caribs or Botocudos of them?"
Charles, however, had several times tried to interrupt the conversation.
"I should like to speak to you," he had whispered in the clerk's ear,
who went upstairs in front of him.
"Can he suspect anything?" Leon asked himself. His heart beat, and he
racked his brain with surmises.
At last, Charles, having shut the door, asked him to see himself
what would be the price at Rouen of a fine daguerreotypes. It was a
sentimental surprise he intended for his wife, a delicate attention--his
portrait in a frock-coat. But he wanted first to know "how much it would
be." The inquiries would not put Monsieur Leon out, since he went to
town almost every week.
Why? Monsieur Homais suspected some "young man's affair" at the bottom
of it, an intrigue. But he was mistaken. Leon was after no love-making.
He was sadder than ever, as Madame Lefrancois saw from the amount of
food he left on his plate. To find out more about it she questioned
the tax-collector. Binet answered roughly that he "wasn't paid by the
police."
All the same, his companion seemed very strange to him, for Leon often
threw himself back in his chair, and stretching out his arms, complained vaguely of life.
"It's because you don't take enough recreation," said the collector.
"What recreation?"
"If I were you I'd have a lathe."
"But I don't know how to turn," answered the clerk.
"Ah! that's true," said the other, rubbing his chin with an air of
mingled contempt and satisfaction.
Leon was weary of loving without any result; moreover he was beginning
to feel that depression caused by the repetition of the same kind of
life, when no interest inspires and no hope sustains it. He was so bored
with Yonville and its inhabitants, that the sight of certain persons,
of certain houses, irritated him beyond endurance; and the chemist, good
fellow though he was, was becoming absolutely unbearable to him. Yet
the prospect of a new condition of life frightened as much as it seduced
him.
This apprehension soon changed into impatience, and then Paris from afar
sounded its fanfare of masked balls with the laugh of grisettes. As he
was to finish reading there, why not set out at once? What prevented
him? And he began making home-preparations; he arranged his occupations
beforehand. He furnished in his head an apartment. He would lead an
artist's life there! He would take lessons on the guitar! He would have
a dressing-gown, a Basque cap, blue velvet slippers! He even already was
admiring two crossed foils over his chimney-piece, with a death's head
on the guitar above them.
The difficulty was the consent of his mother; nothing, however, seemed
more reasonable. Even his employer advised him to go to some other
chambers where he could advance more rapidly. Taking a middle course,
then, Leon looked for some place as second clerk at Rouen; found none,
and at last wrote his mother a long letter full of details, in which
he set forth the reasons for going to live at Paris immediately. She
consented.
He did not hurry. Every day for a month Hivert carried boxes, valises,
parcels for him from Yonville to Rouen and from Rouen to Yonville;
and when Leon had packed up his wardrobe, had his three arm-chairs
restuffed, bought a stock of neckties, in a word, had made more
preparations than for a voyage around the world, he put it off from week
to week, until he received a second letter from his mother urging him to
leave, since he wanted to pass his examination before the vacation.
When the moment for the farewells had come, Madame Homais wept, Justin
sobbed; Homais, as a man of nerve, concealed his emotion; he wished to
carry his friend's overcoat himself as far as the gate of the notary,
who was taking Leon to Rouen in his carriage.
The latter had just time to bid farewell to Monsieur Bovary.
When he reached the head of the stairs, he stopped, he was so out of
breath. As he came in, Madame Bovary arose hurriedly.
"It is I again!" said Leon.
"I was sure of it!"
She bit her lips, and a rush of blood flowing under her skin made her
red from the roots of her hair to the top of her collar. She remained
standing, leaning with her shoulder against the wainscot.
"The doctor is not here?" he went on.
"He is out." She repeated, "He is out."
Then there was silence. They looked at one another and their thoughts,
confounded in the same agony, clung close together like two throbbing
breasts.
"I should like to kiss Berthe," said Leon.
Emma went down a few steps and called Felicite.
He threw one long look around him that took in the walls, the
decorations, the fireplace, as if to penetrate everything, carry away
everything. But she returned, and the servant brought Berthe, who was
swinging a windmill roof downwards at the end of a string. Leon kissed
her several times on the neck.
"Good-bye, poor child! good-bye, dear little one! good-bye!" And he gave
her back to her mother.
"Take her away," she said.
They remained alone--Madame Bovary, her back turned, her face pressed
against a window-pane; Leon held his cap in his hand, knocking it softly
against his thigh.
"It is going to rain," said Emma.
"I have a cloak," he answered.
"Ah!"
She turned around, her chin lowered, her forehead bent forward.
The light fell on it as on a piece of marble, to the curve of the
eyebrows, without one's being able to guess what Emma was seeing on the
horizon or what she was thinking within herself.
"Well, good-bye," he sighed.
She raised her head with a quick movement.
"Yes, good-bye--go!"
They advanced towards each other; he held out his hand; she hesitated.
"In the English fashion, then," she said, giving her own hand wholly to
him, and forcing a laugh.
Leon felt it between his fingers, and the very essence of all his being
seemed to pass down into that moist palm. Then he opened his hand; their
eyes met again, and he disappeared.
When he reached the market-place, he stopped and hid behind a pillar to
look for the last time at this white house with the four green blinds.
He thought he saw a shadow behind the window in the room; but the
curtain, sliding along the pole as though no one were touching it,
slowly opened its long oblique folds that spread out with a single
movement, and thus hung straight and motionless as a plaster wall. Leon
set off running.
From afar he saw his employer's gig in the road, and by it a man in
a coarse apron holding the horse. Homais and Monsieur Guillaumin were
talking. They were waiting for him.
"Embrace me," said the druggist with tears in his eyes. "Here is your
coat, my good friend. Mind the cold; take care of yourself; look after
yourself."
"Come, Leon, jump in," said the notary.
Homais bent over the splash-board, and in a voice broken by sobs uttered
these three sad words--
"A pleasant journey!"
"Good-night," said Monsieur Guillaumin. "Give him his head." They set
out, and Homais went back.
Madame Bovary had opened her window overlooking the garden and watched
the clouds. They gathered around the sunset on the side of Rouen and
then swiftly rolled back their black columns, behind which the great
rays of the sun looked out like the golden arrows of a suspended trophy,
while the rest of the empty heavens was white as porcelain. But a gust
of wind bowed the poplars, and suddenly the rain fell; it pattered
against the green leaves.
Then the sun reappeared, the hens clucked, sparrows shook their wings in
the damp thickets, and the pools of water on the gravel as they flowed
away carried off the pink flowers of an acacia.
"Ah! how far off he must be already!" she thought.
Monsieur Homais, as usual, came at half-past six during dinner.
"Well," said he, "so we've sent off our young friend!"
"So it seems," replied the doctor. Then turning on his chair; "Any news
at home?"
"Nothing much. Only my wife was a little moved this afternoon. You know
women--a nothing upsets them, especially my wife. And we should be
wrong to object to that, since their nervous organization is much more
malleable than ours."
"Poor Leon!" said Charles. "How will he live at Paris? Will he get used
to it?"
Madame Bovary sighed.
"Get along!" said the chemist, smacking his lips. "The outings at
restaurants, the masked balls, the champagne--all that'll be jolly
enough, I assure you."
"I don't think he'll go wrong," objected Bovary.
"Nor do I," said Monsieur Homais quickly; "although he'll have to do
like the rest for fear of passing for a Jesuit. And you don't know what
a life those dogs lead in the Latin quarter with actresses. Besides,
students are thought a great deal of in Paris. Provided they have a few
accomplishments, they are received in the best society; there are even
ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who fall in love with them, which
subsequently furnishes them opportunities for making very good matches."
"But," said the doctor, "I fear for him that down there--"
"You are right," interrupted the chemist; "that is the reverse of the
medal. And one is constantly obliged to keep one's hand in one's pocket
there. Thus, we will suppose you are in a public garden. An individual
presents himself, well dressed, even wearing an order, and whom one
would take for a diplomatist. He approaches you, he insinuates himself;
offers you a pinch of snuff, or picks up your hat. Then you become more
intimate; he takes you to a cafe, invites you to his country-house,
introduces you, between two drinks, to all sorts of people; and
three-fourths of the time it's only to plunder your watch or lead you
into some pernicious step.
"That is true," said Charles; "but I was thinking especially of
illnesses--of typhoid fever, for example, that attacks students from the
provinces."
Emma shuddered.
"Because of the change of regimen," continued the chemist, "and of the
perturbation that results therefrom in the whole system. And then the
water at Paris, don't you know! The dishes at restaurants, all the
spiced food, end by heating the blood, and are not worth, whatever
people may say of them, a good soup. For my own part, I have always
preferred plain living; it is more healthy. So when I was studying
pharmacy at Rouen, I boarded in a boarding house; I dined with the
professors."
And thus he went on, expounding his opinions generally and his personal
likings, until Justin came to fetch him for a mulled egg that was
wanted.
"Not a moment's peace!" he cried; "always at it! I can't go out for a
minute! Like a plough-horse, I have always to be moiling and toiling.
What drudgery!" Then, when he was at the door, "By the way, do you know
the news?"
"What news?"
"That it is very likely," Homais went on, raising his eyebrows and
assuming one of his most serious expression, "that the agricultural
meeting of the Seine-Inferieure will be held this year at
Yonville-l'Abbaye. The rumour, at all events, is going the round. This
morning the paper alluded to it. It would be of the utmost importance
for our district. But we'll talk it over later on. I can see, thank you;
Justin has the lantern."
| Emma's conviction that her happiness is dependent upon the proper surroundings leads her to associate her disgust with the dullness of the landscape and the flax mill with her disgust for Charles. In this manner she realizes that Lon, who stands apart from the drabness of Yonville, is in love with her. Shackled by propriety to her marriage she can only suffer as her love for the clerk mounts. Nevertheless she not only resists the urge to act on her love but she continues to be a responsible wife as evidenced of her refusal to purchase expensive goods from Lheureux. This is the first appearance of the merchant and his promise to her that he knows what ladies want indicates that he intends to make Emma a regular customer. Her attempt to find comfort in religion is deterred by the abbe's small-minded failure to appreciate the nature of her crises. This attitude is in keeping with the nineteenth century conception of women as mere recipients of a man's desires without their own sexual agenda or need for pleasure. Although Emma is trapped by her gender and marital status, Lon is a single man and he has the choice of escaping to Paris. This fact is particularly painful to Emma when she hears Homais and her husband, both of whom could have presumably exercised the same freedom at some point in their lives, discuss the clerk's future. Emma is revealed to be a caring mother when she worries over her daughter following her injury but her observation that her daughter is ugly reveals that she feels no great emotional identification with the child | analysis |
The next day was a dreary one for Emma. Everything seemed to her
enveloped in a black atmosphere floating confusedly over the exterior of
things, and sorrow was engulfed within her soul with soft shrieks such
as the winter wind makes in ruined castles. It was that reverie which we
give to things that will not return, the lassitude that seizes you after
everything was done; that pain, in fine, that the interruption of every
wonted movement, the sudden cessation of any prolonged vibration, brings
on.
As on the return from Vaubyessard, when the quadrilles were running in
her head, she was full of a gloomy melancholy, of a numb despair.
Leon reappeared, taller, handsomer, more charming, more vague. Though
separated from her, he had not left her; he was there, and the walls of
the house seemed to hold his shadow.
She could not detach her eyes from the carpet where he had walked, from
those empty chairs where he had sat. The river still flowed on, and
slowly drove its ripples along the slippery banks.
They had often walked there to the murmur of the waves over the
moss-covered pebbles. How bright the sun had been! What happy afternoons
they had seen alone in the shade at the end of the garden! He read
aloud, bareheaded, sitting on a footstool of dry sticks; the fresh wind
of the meadow set trembling the leaves of the book and the nasturtiums
of the arbour. Ah! he was gone, the only charm of her life, the only
possible hope of joy. Why had she not seized this happiness when it came
to her? Why not have kept hold of it with both hands, with both knees,
when it was about to flee from her? And she cursed herself for not
having loved Leon. She thirsted for his lips. The wish took possession
of her to run after and rejoin him, throw herself into his arms and
say to him, "It is I; I am yours." But Emma recoiled beforehand at the
difficulties of the enterprise, and her desires, increased by regret,
became only the more acute.
Henceforth the memory of Leon was the centre of her boredom; it burnt
there more brightly than the fire travellers have left on the snow of
a Russian steppe. She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she
stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything
that could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most
immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined,
her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness
that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her
lost hopes, the domestic tete-a-tete--she gathered it all up, took
everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.
The flames, however, subsided, either because the supply had exhausted
itself, or because it had been piled up too much. Love, little by
little, was quelled by absence; regret stifled beneath habit; and this
incendiary light that had empurpled her pale sky was overspread and
faded by degrees. In the supineness of her conscience she even took her
repugnance towards her husband for aspirations towards her lover, the
burning of hate for the warmth of tenderness; but as the tempest still
raged, and as passion burnt itself down to the very cinders, and no help
came, no sun rose, there was night on all sides, and she was lost in the
terrible cold that pierced her.
Then the evil days of Tostes began again. She thought herself now far
more unhappy; for she had the experience of grief, with the certainty
that it would not end.
A woman who had laid on herself such sacrifices could well allow herself
certain whims. She bought a Gothic prie-dieu, and in a month spent
fourteen francs on lemons for polishing her nails; she wrote to Rouen
for a blue cashmere gown; she chose one of Lheureux's finest scarves,
and wore it knotted around her waist over her dressing-gown; and, with
closed blinds and a book in her hand, she lay stretched out on a couch
in this garb.
She often changed her coiffure; she did her hair a la Chinoise, in
flowing curls, in plaited coils; she parted in on one side and rolled it
under like a man's.
She wanted to learn Italian; she bought dictionaries, a grammar, and
a supply of white paper. She tried serious reading, history, and
philosophy. Sometimes in the night Charles woke up with a start,
thinking he was being called to a patient. "I'm coming," he stammered;
and it was the noise of a match Emma had struck to relight the lamp. But
her reading fared like her piece of embroidery, all of which, only just
begun, filled her cupboard; she took it up, left it, passed on to other
books.
She had attacks in which she could easily have been driven to commit any
folly. She maintained one day, in opposition to her husband, that she
could drink off a large glass of brandy, and, as Charles was stupid
enough to dare her to, she swallowed the brandy to the last drop.
In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called
them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the
corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of
old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed. She was pale all
over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils,
her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on
her temples, she talked much of her old age.
She often fainted. One day she even spat blood, and, as Charles fussed
around her showing his anxiety--
"Bah!" she answered, "what does it matter?"
Charles fled to his study and wept there, both his elbows on the table,
sitting in an arm-chair at his bureau under the phrenological head.
Then he wrote to his mother begging her to come, and they had many long
consultations together on the subject of Emma.
What should they decide? What was to be done since she rejected all
medical treatment? "Do you know what your wife wants?" replied Madame
Bovary senior.
"She wants to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work. If she
were obliged, like so many others, to earn her living, she wouldn't have
these vapours, that come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her
head, and from the idleness in which she lives."
"Yet she is always busy," said Charles.
"Ah! always busy at what? Reading novels, bad books, works against
religion, and in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from
Voltaire. But all that leads you far astray, my poor child. Anyone who
has no religion always ends by turning out badly."
So it was decided to stop Emma reading novels. The enterprise did not
seem easy. The good lady undertook it. She was, when she passed through
Rouen, to go herself to the lending-library and represent that Emma had
discontinued her subscription. Would they not have a right to apply
to the police if the librarian persisted all the same in his poisonous
trade? The farewells of mother and daughter-in-law were cold. During
the three weeks that they had been together they had not exchanged
half-a-dozen words apart from the inquiries and phrases when they met at
table and in the evening before going to bed.
Madame Bovary left on a Wednesday, the market-day at Yonville.
The Place since morning had been blocked by a row of carts, which, on
end and their shafts in the air, spread all along the line of houses
from the church to the inn. On the other side there were canvas booths,
where cotton checks, blankets, and woollen stockings were sold,
together with harness for horses, and packets of blue ribbon, whose ends
fluttered in the wind. The coarse hardware was spread out on the ground
between pyramids of eggs and hampers of cheeses, from which sticky straw
stuck out.
Near the corn-machines clucking hens passed their necks through the bars
of flat cages. The people, crowding in the same place and unwilling
to move thence, sometimes threatened to smash the shop front of the
chemist. On Wednesdays his shop was never empty, and the people pushed
in less to buy drugs than for consultations. So great was Homais'
reputation in the neighbouring villages. His robust aplomb had
fascinated the rustics. They considered him a greater doctor than all
the doctors.
Emma was leaning out at the window; she was often there. The window in
the provinces replaces the theatre and the promenade, she was amusing
herself with watching the crowd of boors when she saw a gentleman in
a green velvet coat. He had on yellow gloves, although he wore heavy
gaiters; he was coming towards the doctor's house, followed by a peasant
walking with a bent head and quite a thoughtful air.
"Can I see the doctor?" he asked Justin, who was talking on the
doorsteps with Felicite, and, taking him for a servant of the
house--"Tell him that Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger of La Huchette is
here."
It was not from territorial vanity that the new arrival added "of La
Huchette" to his name, but to make himself the better known.
La Huchette, in fact, was an estate near Yonville, where he had just
bought the chateau and two farms that he cultivated himself, without,
however, troubling very much about them. He lived as a bachelor, and was
supposed to have "at least fifteen thousand francs a year."
Charles came into the room. Monsieur Boulanger introduced his man, who
wanted to be bled because he felt "a tingling all over."
"That'll purge me," he urged as an objection to all reasoning.
So Bovary ordered a bandage and a basin, and asked Justin to hold it.
Then addressing the peasant, who was already pale--
"Don't be afraid, my lad."
"No, no, sir," said the other; "get on."
And with an air of bravado he held out his great arm. At the prick of
the lancet the blood spurted out, splashing against the looking-glass.
"Hold the basin nearer," exclaimed Charles.
"Lor!" said the peasant, "one would swear it was a little fountain
flowing. How red my blood is! That's a good sign, isn't it?"
"Sometimes," answered the doctor, "one feels nothing at first, and then
syncope sets in, and more especially with people of strong constitution
like this man."
At these words the rustic let go the lancet-case he was twisting between
his fingers. A shudder of his shoulders made the chair-back creak. His
hat fell off.
"I thought as much," said Bovary, pressing his finger on the vein.
The basin was beginning to tremble in Justin's hands; his knees shook,
he turned pale.
"Emma! Emma!" called Charles.
With one bound she came down the staircase.
"Some vinegar," he cried. "O dear! two at once!"
And in his emotion he could hardly put on the compress.
"It is nothing," said Monsieur Boulanger quietly, taking Justin in his
arms. He seated him on the table with his back resting against the wall.
Madame Bovary began taking off his cravat. The strings of his shirt had
got into a knot, and she was for some minutes moving her light fingers
about the young fellow's neck. Then she poured some vinegar on her
cambric handkerchief; she moistened his temples with little dabs, and
then blew upon them softly. The ploughman revived, but Justin's syncope
still lasted, and his eyeballs disappeared in the pale sclerotics like
blue flowers in milk.
"We must hide this from him," said Charles.
Madame Bovary took the basin to put it under the table. With the
movement she made in bending down, her dress (it was a summer dress with
four flounces, yellow, long in the waist and wide in the skirt) spread
out around her on the flags of the room; and as Emma stooping, staggered
a little as she stretched out her arms.
The stuff here and there gave with the inflections of her bust.
Then she went to fetch a bottle of water, and she was melting some
pieces of sugar when the chemist arrived. The servant had been to
fetch him in the tumult. Seeing his pupil's eyes staring he drew a long
breath; then going around him he looked at him from head to foot.
"Fool!" he said, "really a little fool! A fool in four letters! A
phlebotomy's a big affair, isn't it! And a fellow who isn't afraid of
anything; a kind of squirrel, just as he is who climbs to vertiginous
heights to shake down nuts. Oh, yes! you just talk to me, boast about
yourself! Here's a fine fitness for practising pharmacy later on; for
under serious circumstances you may be called before the tribunals in
order to enlighten the minds of the magistrates, and you would have to
keep your head then, to reason, show yourself a man, or else pass for an
imbecile."
Justin did not answer. The chemist went on--
"Who asked you to come? You are always pestering the doctor and madame.
On Wednesday, moreover, your presence is indispensable to me. There are
now twenty people in the shop. I left everything because of the interest
I take in you. Come, get along! Sharp! Wait for me, and keep an eye on
the jars."
When Justin, who was rearranging his dress, had gone, they talked for a
little while about fainting-fits. Madame Bovary had never fainted.
"That is extraordinary for a lady," said Monsieur Boulanger; "but some
people are very susceptible. Thus in a duel, I have seen a second lose
consciousness at the mere sound of the loading of pistols."
"For my part," said the chemist, "the sight of other people's blood
doesn't affect me at all, but the mere thought of my own flowing would
make me faint if I reflected upon it too much."
Monsieur Boulanger, however, dismissed his servant, advising him to calm
himself, since his fancy was over.
"It procured me the advantage of making your acquaintance," he added,
and he looked at Emma as he said this. Then he put three francs on the
corner of the table, bowed negligently, and went out.
He was soon on the other side of the river (this was his way back to La
Huchette), and Emma saw him in the meadow, walking under the poplars,
slackening his pace now and then as one who reflects.
"She is very pretty," he said to himself; "she is very pretty, this
doctor's wife. Fine teeth, black eyes, a dainty foot, a figure like a
Parisienne's. Where the devil does she come from? Wherever did that fat
fellow pick her up?"
Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger was thirty-four; he was of brutal
temperament and intelligent perspicacity, having, moreover, had much to
do with women, and knowing them well. This one had seemed pretty to him;
so he was thinking about her and her husband.
"I think he is very stupid. She is tired of him, no doubt. He has dirty
nails, and hasn't shaved for three days. While he is trotting after his
patients, she sits there botching socks. And she gets bored! She would
like to live in town and dance polkas every evening. Poor little woman!
She is gaping after love like a carp after water on a kitchen-table.
With three words of gallantry she'd adore one, I'm sure of it. She'd be
tender, charming. Yes; but how to get rid of her afterwards?"
Then the difficulties of love-making seen in the distance made him by
contrast think of his mistress. She was an actress at Rouen, whom he
kept; and when he had pondered over this image, with which, even in
remembrance, he was satiated--
"Ah! Madame Bovary," he thought, "is much prettier, especially fresher.
Virginie is decidedly beginning to grow fat. She is so finiky about her
pleasures; and, besides, she has a mania for prawns."
The fields were empty, and around him Rodolphe only heard the regular
beating of the grass striking against his boots, with a cry of the
grasshopper hidden at a distance among the oats. He again saw Emma in
her room, dressed as he had seen her, and he undressed her.
"Oh, I will have her," he cried, striking a blow with his stick at a
clod in front of him. And he at once began to consider the political
part of the enterprise. He asked himself--
"Where shall we meet? By what means? We shall always be having the brat
on our hands, and the servant, the neighbours, and husband, all sorts of
worries. Pshaw! one would lose too much time over it."
Then he resumed, "She really has eyes that pierce one's heart like a
gimlet. And that pale complexion! I adore pale women!"
When he reached the top of the Arguiel hills he had made up his mind.
"It's only finding the opportunities. Well, I will call in now and then.
I'll send them venison, poultry; I'll have myself bled, if need be. We
shall become friends; I'll invite them to my place. By Jove!" added he,
"there's the agricultural show coming on. She'll be there. I shall see
her. We'll begin boldly, for that's the surest way."
| After Leon's departure, Emma is melancholy like she was during the days following the ball at La Vaubyessard. She regrets not making her love known to Leon. To compensate for what she perceives as her self-sacrifice by remaining faithful to Charles she begins ordering expensive items from Lheureux's shop. She becomes fatalistic and Charles, who notices only the outward signs of her decline, despairs for her health. Charles sends for his mother who advises him to prevent his wife from reading novels. The elder Madame Bovary departs on a market day and Emma leans out her window to watch the activity in the square. She sees a well-dressed man leading a peasant to her house and hears him instruct Justin to summon Monsieur Bovary. The man identifies himself as Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger a newcomer to the area who recently purchased a large estate called La Huchette near the village. Boulanger has brought his servant, who complains of feeling "prickly" all over, to be bled and Charles employs Justin to help him. Soon after the blood begins to flow, however, both the peasant and Justin fall into a dead faint and Emma comes running to assist her husband. Monsieur Boulanger notices that Bovary's wife is very pretty. On the way back to La Huchette, Boulanger resolves to have Emma as well. He decides upon a direct strategy of seduction to be implemented during the upcoming Agricultural Show | summary |
At last it came, the famous agricultural show. On the morning of the
solemnity all the inhabitants at their doors were chatting over the
preparations. The pediment of the town hall had been hung with garlands
of ivy; a tent had been erected in a meadow for the banquet; and in the
middle of the Place, in front of the church, a kind of bombarde was
to announce the arrival of the prefect and the names of the successful
farmers who had obtained prizes. The National Guard of Buchy (there was
none at Yonville) had come to join the corps of firemen, of whom Binet
was captain. On that day he wore a collar even higher than usual; and,
tightly buttoned in his tunic, his figure was so stiff and motionless
that the whole vital portion of his person seemed to have descended into
his legs, which rose in a cadence of set steps with a single movement.
As there was some rivalry between the tax-collector and the colonel,
both, to show off their talents, drilled their men separately. One
saw the red epaulettes and the black breastplates pass and re-pass
alternately; there was no end to it, and it constantly began again.
There had never been such a display of pomp. Several citizens had
scoured their houses the evening before; tri-coloured flags hung from
half-open windows; all the public-houses were full; and in the lovely
weather the starched caps, the golden crosses, and the coloured
neckerchiefs seemed whiter than snow, shone in the sun, and relieved
with the motley colours the sombre monotony of the frock-coats and blue
smocks. The neighbouring farmers' wives, when they got off their horses,
pulled out the long pins that fastened around them their dresses, turned
up for fear of mud; and the husbands, for their part, in order to save
their hats, kept their handkerchiefs around them, holding one corner
between their teeth.
The crowd came into the main street from both ends of the village.
People poured in from the lanes, the alleys, the houses; and from time
to time one heard knockers banging against doors closing behind women
with their gloves, who were going out to see the fete. What was most
admired were two long lamp-stands covered with lanterns, that flanked a
platform on which the authorities were to sit. Besides this there were
against the four columns of the town hall four kinds of poles,
each bearing a small standard of greenish cloth, embellished with
inscriptions in gold letters.
On one was written, "To Commerce"; on the other, "To Agriculture"; on
the third, "To Industry"; and on the fourth, "To the Fine Arts."
But the jubilation that brightened all faces seemed to darken that of
Madame Lefrancois, the innkeeper. Standing on her kitchen-steps she
muttered to herself, "What rubbish! what rubbish! With their canvas
booth! Do they think the prefect will be glad to dine down there under
a tent like a gipsy? They call all this fussing doing good to the place!
Then it wasn't worth while sending to Neufchatel for the keeper of a
cookshop! And for whom? For cowherds! tatterdemalions!"
The druggist was passing. He had on a frock-coat, nankeen trousers,
beaver shoes, and, for a wonder, a hat with a low crown.
"Your servant! Excuse me, I am in a hurry." And as the fat widow asked
where he was going--
"It seems odd to you, doesn't it, I who am always more cooped up in my
laboratory than the man's rat in his cheese."
"What cheese?" asked the landlady.
"Oh, nothing! nothing!" Homais continued. "I merely wished to convey
to you, Madame Lefrancois, that I usually live at home like a recluse.
To-day, however, considering the circumstances, it is necessary--"
"Oh, you're going down there!" she said contemptuously.
"Yes, I am going," replied the druggist, astonished. "Am I not a member
of the consulting commission?"
Mere Lefrancois looked at him for a few moments, and ended by saying
with a smile--
"That's another pair of shoes! But what does agriculture matter to you?
Do you understand anything about it?"
"Certainly I understand it, since I am a druggist--that is to say,
a chemist. And the object of chemistry, Madame Lefrancois, being the
knowledge of the reciprocal and molecular action of all natural bodies,
it follows that agriculture is comprised within its domain. And, in
fact, the composition of the manure, the fermentation of liquids, the
analyses of gases, and the influence of miasmata, what, I ask you, is
all this, if it isn't chemistry, pure and simple?"
The landlady did not answer. Homais went on--
"Do you think that to be an agriculturist it is necessary to have tilled
the earth or fattened fowls oneself? It is necessary rather to know the
composition of the substances in question--the geological strata, the
atmospheric actions, the quality of the soil, the minerals, the waters,
the density of the different bodies, their capillarity, and what not.
And one must be master of all the principles of hygiene in order to
direct, criticize the construction of buildings, the feeding of animals,
the diet of domestics. And, moreover, Madame Lefrancois, one must know
botany, be able to distinguish between plants, you understand, which are
the wholesome and those that are deleterious, which are unproductive
and which nutritive, if it is well to pull them up here and re-sow them
there, to propagate some, destroy others; in brief, one must keep pace
with science by means of pamphlets and public papers, be always on the
alert to find out improvements."
The landlady never took her eyes off the "Cafe Francois" and the chemist
went on--
"Would to God our agriculturists were chemists, or that at least they
would pay more attention to the counsels of science. Thus lately I
myself wrote a considerable tract, a memoir of over seventy-two pages,
entitled, 'Cider, its Manufacture and its Effects, together with some
New Reflections on the Subject,' that I sent to the Agricultural Society
of Rouen, and which even procured me the honour of being received among
its members--Section, Agriculture; Class, Pomological. Well, if my
work had been given to the public--" But the druggist stopped, Madame
Lefrancois seemed so preoccupied.
"Just look at them!" she said. "It's past comprehension! Such a cookshop
as that!" And with a shrug of the shoulders that stretched out over her
breast the stitches of her knitted bodice, she pointed with both hands
at her rival's inn, whence songs were heard issuing. "Well, it won't
last long," she added. "It'll be over before a week."
Homais drew back with stupefaction. She came down three steps and
whispered in his ear--
"What! you didn't know it? There is to be an execution in next week.
It's Lheureux who is selling him out; he has killed him with bills."
"What a terrible catastrophe!" cried the druggist, who always found
expressions in harmony with all imaginable circumstances.
Then the landlady began telling him the story that she had heard from
Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, and although she detested
Tellier, she blamed Lheureux. He was "a wheedler, a sneak."
"There!" she said. "Look at him! he is in the market; he is bowing to
Madame Bovary, who's got on a green bonnet. Why, she's taking Monsieur
Boulanger's arm."
"Madame Bovary!" exclaimed Homais. "I must go at once and pay her my
respects. Perhaps she'll be very glad to have a seat in the enclosure
under the peristyle." And, without heeding Madame Lefrancois, who was
calling him back to tell him more about it, the druggist walked off
rapidly with a smile on his lips, with straight knees, bowing copiously
to right and left, and taking up much room with the large tails of his
frock-coat that fluttered behind him in the wind.
Rodolphe, having caught sight of him from afar, hurried on, but Madame
Bovary lost her breath; so he walked more slowly, and, smiling at her,
said in a rough tone--
"It's only to get away from that fat fellow, you know, the druggist."
She pressed his elbow.
"What's the meaning of that?" he asked himself. And he looked at her out
of the corner of his eyes.
Her profile was so calm that one could guess nothing from it. It stood
out in the light from the oval of her bonnet, with pale ribbons on it
like the leaves of weeds. Her eyes with their long curved lashes looked
straight before her, and though wide open, they seemed slightly puckered
by the cheek-bones, because of the blood pulsing gently under the
delicate skin. A pink line ran along the partition between her nostrils.
Her head was bent upon her shoulder, and the pearl tips of her white
teeth were seen between her lips.
"Is she making fun of me?" thought Rodolphe.
Emma's gesture, however, had only been meant for a warning; for Monsieur
Lheureux was accompanying them, and spoke now and again as if to enter
into the conversation.
"What a superb day! Everybody is out! The wind is east!"
And neither Madame Bovary nor Rodolphe answered him, whilst at the
slightest movement made by them he drew near, saying, "I beg your
pardon!" and raised his hat.
When they reached the farrier's house, instead of following the road
up to the fence, Rodolphe suddenly turned down a path, drawing with him
Madame Bovary. He called out--
"Good evening, Monsieur Lheureux! See you again presently."
"How you got rid of him!" she said, laughing.
"Why," he went on, "allow oneself to be intruded upon by others? And as
to-day I have the happiness of being with you--"
Emma blushed. He did not finish his sentence. Then he talked of the fine
weather and of the pleasure of walking on the grass. A few daisies had
sprung up again.
"Here are some pretty Easter daisies," he said, "and enough of them to
furnish oracles to all the amorous maids in the place."
He added, "Shall I pick some? What do you think?"
"Are you in love?" she asked, coughing a little.
"H'm, h'm! who knows?" answered Rodolphe.
The meadow began to fill, and the housewives hustled you with their
great umbrellas, their baskets, and their babies. One had often to get
out of the way of a long file of country folk, servant-maids with blue
stockings, flat shoes, silver rings, and who smelt of milk, when one
passed close to them. They walked along holding one another by the hand,
and thus they spread over the whole field from the row of open trees to
the banquet tent.
But this was the examination time, and the farmers one after the other
entered a kind of enclosure formed by a long cord supported on sticks.
The beasts were there, their noses towards the cord, and making a
confused line with their unequal rumps. Drowsy pigs were burrowing in
the earth with their snouts, calves were bleating, lambs baaing; the
cows, on knees folded in, were stretching their bellies on the grass,
slowly chewing the cud, and blinking their heavy eyelids at the gnats
that buzzed round them. Plough-men with bare arms were holding by the
halter prancing stallions that neighed with dilated nostrils looking
towards the mares. These stood quietly, stretching out their heads and
flowing manes, while their foals rested in their shadow, or now and then
came and sucked them. And above the long undulation of these crowded
animals one saw some white mane rising in the wind like a wave, or some
sharp horns sticking out, and the heads of men running about. Apart,
outside the enclosure, a hundred paces off, was a large black bull,
muzzled, with an iron ring in its nostrils, and who moved no more than
if he had been in bronze. A child in rags was holding him by a rope.
Between the two lines the committee-men were walking with heavy steps,
examining each animal, then consulting one another in a low voice. One
who seemed of more importance now and then took notes in a book as he
walked along. This was the president of the jury, Monsieur Derozerays de
la Panville. As soon as he recognised Rodolphe he came forward quickly,
and smiling amiably, said--
"What! Monsieur Boulanger, you are deserting us?"
Rodolphe protested that he was just coming. But when the president had
disappeared--
"Ma foi!*" said he, "I shall not go. Your company is better than his."
*Upon my word!
And while poking fun at the show, Rodolphe, to move about more easily,
showed the gendarme his blue card, and even stopped now and then in
front of some fine beast, which Madame Bovary did not at all admire.
He noticed this, and began jeering at the Yonville ladies and their
dresses; then he apologised for the negligence of his own. He had that
incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think
they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations
of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for
social conventions, that seduces or exasperates them. Thus his cambric
shirt with plaited cuffs was blown out by the wind in the opening of his
waistcoat of grey ticking, and his broad-striped trousers disclosed at
the ankle nankeen boots with patent leather gaiters.
These were so polished that they reflected the grass. He trampled on
horses's dung with them, one hand in the pocket of his jacket and his
straw hat on one side.
"Besides," added he, "when one lives in the country--"
"It's waste of time," said Emma.
"That is true," replied Rodolphe. "To think that not one of these people
is capable of understanding even the cut of a coat!"
Then they talked about provincial mediocrity, of the lives it crushed,
the illusions lost there.
"And I too," said Rodolphe, "am drifting into depression."
"You!" she said in astonishment; "I thought you very light-hearted."
"Ah! yes. I seem so, because in the midst of the world I know how to
wear the mask of a scoffer upon my face; and yet, how many a time at the
sight of a cemetery by moonlight have I not asked myself whether it were
not better to join those sleeping there!"
"Oh! and your friends?" she said. "You do not think of them."
"My friends! What friends? Have I any? Who cares for me?" And he
accompanied the last words with a kind of whistling of the lips.
But they were obliged to separate from each other because of a great
pile of chairs that a man was carrying behind them. He was so overladen
with them that one could only see the tips of his wooden shoes and the
ends of his two outstretched arms. It was Lestiboudois, the gravedigger,
who was carrying the church chairs about amongst the people. Alive to
all that concerned his interests, he had hit upon this means of turning
the show to account; and his idea was succeeding, for he no longer knew
which way to turn. In fact, the villagers, who were hot, quarreled for
these seats, whose straw smelt of incense, and they leant against the
thick backs, stained with the wax of candles, with a certain veneration.
Madame Bovary again took Rodolphe's arm; he went on as if speaking to
himself--
"Yes, I have missed so many things. Always alone! Ah! if I had some aim
in life, if I had met some love, if I had found someone! Oh, how I would
have spent all the energy of which I am capable, surmounted everything,
overcome everything!"
"Yet it seems to me," said Emma, "that you are not to be pitied."
"Ah! you think so?" said Rodolphe.
"For, after all," she went on, "you are free--" she hesitated, "rich--"
"Do not mock me," he replied.
And she protested that she was not mocking him, when the report of a
cannon resounded. Immediately all began hustling one another pell-mell
towards the village.
It was a false alarm. The prefect seemed not to be coming, and the
members of the jury felt much embarrassed, not knowing if they ought to
begin the meeting or still wait.
At last at the end of the Place a large hired landau appeared, drawn by
two thin horses, which a coachman in a white hat was whipping lustily.
Binet had only just time to shout, "Present arms!" and the colonel to
imitate him. All ran towards the enclosure; everyone pushed forward. A
few even forgot their collars; but the equipage of the prefect seemed
to anticipate the crowd, and the two yoked jades, trapesing in their
harness, came up at a little trot in front of the peristyle of the town
hall at the very moment when the National Guard and firemen deployed,
beating drums and marking time.
"Present!" shouted Binet.
"Halt!" shouted the colonel. "Left about, march."
And after presenting arms, during which the clang of the band, letting
loose, rang out like a brass kettle rolling downstairs, all the guns
were lowered. Then was seen stepping down from the carriage a gentleman
in a short coat with silver braiding, with bald brow, and wearing a tuft
of hair at the back of his head, of a sallow complexion and the most
benign appearance. His eyes, very large and covered by heavy lids, were
half-closed to look at the crowd, while at the same time he raised his
sharp nose, and forced a smile upon his sunken mouth. He recognised the
mayor by his scarf, and explained to him that the prefect was not able
to come. He himself was a councillor at the prefecture; then he added
a few apologies. Monsieur Tuvache answered them with compliments; the
other confessed himself nervous; and they remained thus, face to face,
their foreheads almost touching, with the members of the jury all round,
the municipal council, the notable personages, the National Guard and
the crowd. The councillor pressing his little cocked hat to his
breast repeated his bows, while Tuvache, bent like a bow, also smiled,
stammered, tried to say something, protested his devotion to the
monarchy and the honour that was being done to Yonville.
Hippolyte, the groom from the inn, took the head of the horses from the
coachman, and, limping along with his club-foot, led them to the door
of the "Lion d'Or", where a number of peasants collected to look at the
carriage. The drum beat, the howitzer thundered, and the gentlemen one
by one mounted the platform, where they sat down in red utrecht velvet
arm-chairs that had been lent by Madame Tuvache.
All these people looked alike. Their fair flabby faces, somewhat tanned
by the sun, were the colour of sweet cider, and their puffy whiskers
emerged from stiff collars, kept up by white cravats with broad bows.
All the waist-coats were of velvet, double-breasted; all the watches
had, at the end of a long ribbon, an oval cornelian seal; everyone
rested his two hands on his thighs, carefully stretching the stride of
their trousers, whose unsponged glossy cloth shone more brilliantly than
the leather of their heavy boots.
The ladies of the company stood at the back under the vestibule between
the pillars while the common herd was opposite, standing up or sitting
on chairs. As a matter of fact, Lestiboudois had brought thither all
those that he had moved from the field, and he even kept running back
every minute to fetch others from the church. He caused such confusion
with this piece of business that one had great difficulty in getting to
the small steps of the platform.
"I think," said Monsieur Lheureux to the chemist, who was passing to his
place, "that they ought to have put up two Venetian masts with something
rather severe and rich for ornaments; it would have been a very pretty
effect."
"To be sure," replied Homais; "but what can you expect? The mayor took
everything on his own shoulders. He hasn't much taste. Poor Tuvache! and
he is even completely destitute of what is called the genius of art."
Rodolphe, meanwhile, with Madame Bovary, had gone up to the first
floor of the town hall, to the "council-room," and, as it was empty,
he declared that they could enjoy the sight there more comfortably. He
fetched three stools from the round table under the bust of the monarch,
and having carried them to one of the windows, they sat down by each
other.
There was commotion on the platform, long whisperings, much parleying.
At last the councillor got up. They knew now that his name was Lieuvain,
and in the crowd the name was passed from one to the other. After he had
collated a few pages, and bent over them to see better, he began--
"Gentlemen! May I be permitted first of all (before addressing you on
the object of our meeting to-day, and this sentiment will, I am sure, be
shared by you all), may I be permitted, I say, to pay a tribute to the
higher administration, to the government to the monarch, gentle men, our
sovereign, to that beloved king, to whom no branch of public or private
prosperity is a matter of indifference, and who directs with a hand at
once so firm and wise the chariot of the state amid the incessant perils
of a stormy sea, knowing, moreover, how to make peace respected as well
as war, industry, commerce, agriculture, and the fine arts?"
"I ought," said Rodolphe, "to get back a little further."
"Why?" said Emma.
But at this moment the voice of the councillor rose to an extraordinary
pitch. He declaimed--
"This is no longer the time, gentlemen, when civil discord ensanguined
our public places, when the landlord, the business-man, the working-man
himself, falling asleep at night, lying down to peaceful sleep, trembled
lest he should be awakened suddenly by the noise of incendiary tocsins,
when the most subversive doctrines audaciously sapped foundations."
"Well, someone down there might see me," Rodolphe resumed, "then
I should have to invent excuses for a fortnight; and with my bad
reputation--"
"Oh, you are slandering yourself," said Emma.
"No! It is dreadful, I assure you."
"But, gentlemen," continued the councillor, "if, banishing from my
memory the remembrance of these sad pictures, I carry my eyes back
to the actual situation of our dear country, what do I see there?
Everywhere commerce and the arts are flourishing; everywhere new means
of communication, like so many new arteries in the body of the state,
establish within it new relations. Our great industrial centres have
recovered all their activity; religion, more consolidated, smiles in
all hearts; our ports are full, confidence is born again, and France
breathes once more!"
"Besides," added Rodolphe, "perhaps from the world's point of view they
are right."
"How so?" she asked.
"What!" said he. "Do you not know that there are souls constantly
tormented? They need by turns to dream and to act, the purest passions
and the most turbulent joys, and thus they fling themselves into all
sorts of fantasies, of follies."
Then she looked at him as one looks at a traveller who has voyaged over
strange lands, and went on--
"We have not even this distraction, we poor women!"
"A sad distraction, for happiness isn't found in it."
"But is it ever found?" she asked.
"Yes; one day it comes," he answered.
"And this is what you have understood," said the councillor.
"You, farmers, agricultural labourers! you pacific pioneers of a work
that belongs wholly to civilization! you, men of progress and morality,
you have understood, I say, that political storms are even more
redoubtable than atmospheric disturbances!"
"It comes one day," repeated Rodolphe, "one day suddenly, and when
one is despairing of it. Then the horizon expands; it is as if a voice
cried, 'It is here!' You feel the need of confiding the whole of your
life, of giving everything, sacrificing everything to this being. There
is no need for explanations; they understand one another. They have seen
each other in dreams!"
(And he looked at her.) "In fine, here it is, this treasure so sought
after, here before you. It glitters, it flashes; yet one still doubts,
one does not believe it; one remains dazzled, as if one went out from
darkness into light."
And as he ended Rodolphe suited the action to the word. He passed his
hand over his face, like a man seized with giddiness. Then he let it
fall on Emma's. She took hers away.
"And who would be surprised at it, gentlemen? He only who is so blind,
so plunged (I do not fear to say it), so plunged in the prejudices
of another age as still to misunderstand the spirit of agricultural
populations. Where, indeed, is to be found more patriotism than in the
country, greater devotion to the public welfare, more intelligence, in a
word? And, gentlemen, I do not mean that superficial intelligence,
vain ornament of idle minds, but rather that profound and balanced
intelligence that applies itself above all else to useful objects, thus
contributing to the good of all, to the common amelioration and to
the support of the state, born of respect for law and the practice of
duty--"
"Ah! again!" said Rodolphe. "Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word.
They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with
foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty,
duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the
beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the
ignominy that it imposes upon us."
"Yet--yet--" objected Madame Bovary.
"No, no! Why cry out against the passions? Are they not the one
beautiful thing on the earth, the source of heroism, of enthusiasm, of
poetry, music, the arts, of everything, in a word?"
"But one must," said Emma, "to some extent bow to the opinion of the
world and accept its moral code."
"Ah! but there are two," he replied. "The small, the conventional, that
of men, that which constantly changes, that brays out so loudly, that
makes such a commotion here below, of the earth earthly, like the mass
of imbeciles you see down there. But the other, the eternal, that is
about us and above, like the landscape that surrounds us, and the blue
heavens that give us light."
Monsieur Lieuvain had just wiped his mouth with a pocket-handkerchief.
He continued--
"And what should I do here gentlemen, pointing out to you the uses
of agriculture? Who supplies our wants? Who provides our means of
subsistence? Is it not the agriculturist? The agriculturist, gentlemen,
who, sowing with laborious hand the fertile furrows of the country,
brings forth the corn, which, being ground, is made into a powder by
means of ingenious machinery, comes out thence under the name of flour,
and from there, transported to our cities, is soon delivered at the
baker's, who makes it into food for poor and rich alike. Again, is it
not the agriculturist who fattens, for our clothes, his abundant
flocks in the pastures? For how should we clothe ourselves, how nourish
ourselves, without the agriculturist? And, gentlemen, is it even
necessary to go so far for examples? Who has not frequently reflected
on all the momentous things that we get out of that modest animal, the
ornament of poultry-yards, that provides us at once with a soft pillow
for our bed, with succulent flesh for our tables, and eggs? But I should
never end if I were to enumerate one after the other all the different
products which the earth, well cultivated, like a generous mother,
lavishes upon her children. Here it is the vine, elsewhere the apple
tree for cider, there colza, farther on cheeses and flax. Gentlemen, let
us not forget flax, which has made such great strides of late years, and
to which I will more particularly call your attention."
He had no need to call it, for all the mouths of the multitude were wide
open, as if to drink in his words. Tuvache by his side listened to him
with staring eyes. Monsieur Derozerays from time to time softly closed
his eyelids, and farther on the chemist, with his son Napoleon between
his knees, put his hand behind his ear in order not to lose a syllable.
The chins of the other members of the jury went slowly up and down in
their waistcoats in sign of approval. The firemen at the foot of the
platform rested on their bayonets; and Binet, motionless, stood with
out-turned elbows, the point of his sabre in the air. Perhaps he could
hear, but certainly he could see nothing, because of the visor of his
helmet, that fell down on his nose. His lieutenant, the youngest son of
Monsieur Tuvache, had a bigger one, for his was enormous, and shook on
his head, and from it an end of his cotton scarf peeped out. He smiled
beneath it with a perfectly infantine sweetness, and his pale little
face, whence drops were running, wore an expression of enjoyment and
sleepiness.
The square as far as the houses was crowded with people. One saw folk
leaning on their elbows at all the windows, others standing at doors,
and Justin, in front of the chemist's shop, seemed quite transfixed by
the sight of what he was looking at. In spite of the silence Monsieur
Lieuvain's voice was lost in the air. It reached you in fragments of
phrases, and interrupted here and there by the creaking of chairs in the
crowd; then you suddenly heard the long bellowing of an ox, or else the
bleating of the lambs, who answered one another at street corners. In
fact, the cowherds and shepherds had driven their beasts thus far, and
these lowed from time to time, while with their tongues they tore down
some scrap of foliage that hung above their mouths.
Rodolphe had drawn nearer to Emma, and said to her in a low voice,
speaking rapidly--
"Does not this conspiracy of the world revolt you? Is there a single
sentiment it does not condemn? The noblest instincts, the purest
sympathies are persecuted, slandered; and if at length two poor souls do
meet, all is so organised that they cannot blend together. Yet they will
make the attempt; they will flutter their wings; they will call upon
each other. Oh! no matter. Sooner or later, in six months, ten years,
they will come together, will love; for fate has decreed it, and they
are born one for the other."
His arms were folded across his knees, and thus lifting his face towards
Emma, close by her, he looked fixedly at her. She noticed in his eyes
small golden lines radiating from black pupils; she even smelt the
perfume of the pomade that made his hair glossy.
Then a faintness came over her; she recalled the Viscount who had
waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this air an
odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes
the better to breathe it in. But in making this movement, as she leant
back in her chair, she saw in the distance, right on the line of the
horizon, the old diligence, the "Hirondelle," that was slowly descending
the hill of Leux, dragging after it a long trail of dust. It was in this
yellow carriage that Leon had so often come back to her, and by this
route down there that he had gone for ever. She fancied she saw him
opposite at his windows; then all grew confused; clouds gathered; it
seemed to her that she was again turning in the waltz under the light of
the lustres on the arm of the Viscount, and that Leon was not far away,
that he was coming; and yet all the time she was conscious of the scent
of Rodolphe's head by her side. This sweetness of sensation pierced
through her old desires, and these, like grains of sand under a gust
of wind, eddied to and fro in the subtle breath of the perfume which
suffused her soul. She opened wide her nostrils several times to drink
in the freshness of the ivy round the capitals. She took off her gloves,
she wiped her hands, then fanned her face with her handkerchief, while
athwart the throbbing of her temples she heard the murmur of the
crowd and the voice of the councillor intoning his phrases. He
said--"Continue, persevere; listen neither to the suggestions of
routine, nor to the over-hasty councils of a rash empiricism.
"Apply yourselves, above all, to the amelioration of the soil, to good
manures, to the development of the equine, bovine, ovine, and porcine
races. Let these shows be to you pacific arenas, where the victor in
leaving it will hold forth a hand to the vanquished, and will fraternise
with him in the hope of better success. And you, aged servants, humble
domestics, whose hard labour no Government up to this day has taken into
consideration, come hither to receive the reward of your silent virtues,
and be assured that the state henceforward has its eye upon you; that it
encourages you, protects you; that it will accede to your just
demands, and alleviate as much as in it lies the burden of your painful
sacrifices."
Monsieur Lieuvain then sat down; Monsieur Derozerays got up, beginning
another speech. His was not perhaps so florid as that of the councillor,
but it recommended itself by a more direct style, that is to say, by
more special knowledge and more elevated considerations. Thus the praise
of the Government took up less space in it; religion and agriculture
more. He showed in it the relations of these two, and how they had
always contributed to civilisation. Rodolphe with Madame Bovary was
talking dreams, presentiments, magnetism. Going back to the cradle of
society, the orator painted those fierce times when men lived on acorns
in the heart of woods. Then they had left off the skins of beasts, had
put on cloth, tilled the soil, planted the vine. Was this a good, and
in this discovery was there not more of injury than of gain? Monsieur
Derozerays set himself this problem. From magnetism little by little
Rodolphe had come to affinities, and while the president was citing
Cincinnatus and his plough, Diocletian, planting his cabbages, and the
Emperors of China inaugurating the year by the sowing of seed, the
young man was explaining to the young woman that these irresistible
attractions find their cause in some previous state of existence.
"Thus we," he said, "why did we come to know one another? What chance
willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that
flow but to unite; our special bents of mind had driven us towards each
other."
And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.
"For good farming generally!" cried the president.
"Just now, for example, when I went to your house."
"To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix."
"Did I know I should accompany you?"
"Seventy francs."
"A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you--I remained."
"Manures!"
"And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!"
"To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!"
"For I have never in the society of any other person found so complete a
charm."
"To Monsieur Bain of Givry-Saint-Martin."
"And I shall carry away with me the remembrance of you."
"For a merino ram!"
"But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow."
"To Monsieur Belot of Notre-Dame."
"Oh, no! I shall be something in your thought, in your life, shall I
not?"
"Porcine race; prizes--equal, to Messrs. Leherisse and Cullembourg,
sixty francs!"
Rodolphe was pressing her hand, and he felt it all warm and quivering
like a captive dove that wants to fly away; but, whether she was trying
to take it away or whether she was answering his pressure; she made a
movement with her fingers. He exclaimed--
"Oh, I thank you! You do not repulse me! You are good! You understand
that I am yours! Let me look at you; let me contemplate you!"
A gust of wind that blew in at the window ruffled the cloth on the
table, and in the square below all the great caps of the peasant women
were uplifted by it like the wings of white butterflies fluttering.
"Use of oil-cakes," continued the president. He was hurrying on:
"Flemish manure-flax-growing-drainage-long leases-domestic service."
Rodolphe was no longer speaking. They looked at one another. A supreme
desire made their dry lips tremble, and wearily, without an effort,
their fingers intertwined.
"Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-la-Guerriere, for
fifty-four years of service at the same farm, a silver medal--value,
twenty-five francs!"
"Where is Catherine Leroux?" repeated the councillor.
She did not present herself, and one could hear voices whispering--
"Go up!"
"Don't be afraid!"
"Oh, how stupid she is!"
"Well, is she there?" cried Tuvache.
"Yes; here she is."
"Then let her come up!"
Then there came forward on the platform a little old woman with timid
bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor clothes. On her feet she
wore heavy wooden clogs, and from her hips hung a large blue apron. Her
pale face framed in a borderless cap was more wrinkled than a withered
russet apple. And from the sleeves of her red jacket looked out two
large hands with knotty joints, the dust of barns, the potash of washing
the grease of wools had so encrusted, roughened, hardened these that
they seemed dirty, although they had been rinsed in clear water; and
by dint of long service they remained half open, as if to bear humble
witness for themselves of so much suffering endured. Something of
monastic rigidity dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion
weakened that pale look. In her constant living with animals she had
caught their dumbness and their calm. It was the first time that she
found herself in the midst of so large a company, and inwardly scared by
the flags, the drums, the gentlemen in frock-coats, and the order of the
councillor, she stood motionless, not knowing whether to advance or run
away, nor why the crowd was pushing her and the jury were smiling at
her.
Thus stood before these radiant bourgeois this half-century of
servitude.
"Approach, venerable Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux!" said the
councillor, who had taken the list of prize-winners from the president;
and, looking at the piece of paper and the old woman by turns, he
repeated in a fatherly tone--"Approach! approach!"
"Are you deaf?" said Tuvache, fidgeting in his armchair; and he began
shouting in her ear, "Fifty-four years of service. A silver medal!
Twenty-five francs! For you!"
Then, when she had her medal, she looked at it, and a smile of beatitude
spread over her face; and as she walked away they could hear her
muttering "I'll give it to our cure up home, to say some masses for me!"
"What fanaticism!" exclaimed the chemist, leaning across to the notary.
The meeting was over, the crowd dispersed, and now that the speeches had
been read, each one fell back into his place again, and everything into
the old grooves; the masters bullied the servants, and these struck the
animals, indolent victors, going back to the stalls, a green-crown on
their horns.
The National Guards, however, had gone up to the first floor of the
town hall with buns spitted on their bayonets, and the drummer of the
battalion carried a basket with bottles. Madame Bovary took Rodolphe's
arm; he saw her home; they separated at her door; then he walked about
alone in the meadow while he waited for the time of the banquet.
The feast was long, noisy, ill served; the guests were so crowded that
they could hardly move their elbows; and the narrow planks used for
forms almost broke down under their weight. They ate hugely. Each one
stuffed himself on his own account. Sweat stood on every brow, and a
whitish steam, like the vapour of a stream on an autumn morning, floated
above the table between the hanging lamps. Rodolphe, leaning against
the calico of the tent was thinking so earnestly of Emma that he heard
nothing. Behind him on the grass the servants were piling up the dirty
plates, his neighbours were talking; he did not answer them; they filled
his glass, and there was silence in his thoughts in spite of the growing
noise. He was dreaming of what she had said, of the line of her lips;
her face, as in a magic mirror, shone on the plates of the shakos, the
folds of her gown fell along the walls, and days of love unrolled to all
infinity before him in the vistas of the future.
He saw her again in the evening during the fireworks, but she was with
her husband, Madame Homais, and the druggist, who was worrying about the
danger of stray rockets, and every moment he left the company to go and
give some advice to Binet.
The pyrotechnic pieces sent to Monsieur Tuvache had, through an excess
of caution, been shut up in his cellar, and so the damp powder would
not light, and the principal set piece, that was to represent a dragon
biting his tail, failed completely. Now and then a meagre Roman-candle
went off; then the gaping crowd sent up a shout that mingled with the
cry of the women, whose waists were being squeezed in the darkness. Emma
silently nestled against Charles's shoulder; then, raising her chin, she
watched the luminous rays of the rockets against the dark sky. Rodolphe
gazed at her in the light of the burning lanterns.
They went out one by one. The stars shone out. A few crops of rain began
to fall. She knotted her fichu round her bare head.
At this moment the councillor's carriage came out from the inn.
His coachman, who was drunk, suddenly dozed off, and one could see from
the distance, above the hood, between the two lanterns, the mass of his
body, that swayed from right to left with the giving of the traces.
"Truly," said the druggist, "one ought to proceed most rigorously
against drunkenness! I should like to see written up weekly at the door
of the town hall on a board ad hoc* the names of all those who during
the week got intoxicated on alcohol. Besides, with regard to statistics,
one would thus have, as it were, public records that one could refer to
in case of need. But excuse me!"
*Specifically for that.
And he once more ran off to the captain. The latter was going back to
see his lathe again.
"Perhaps you would not do ill," Homais said to him, "to send one of your
men, or to go yourself--"
"Leave me alone!" answered the tax-collector. "It's all right!"
"Do not be uneasy," said the druggist, when he returned to his friends.
"Monsieur Binet has assured me that all precautions have been taken. No
sparks have fallen; the pumps are full. Let us go to rest."
"Ma foi! I want it," said Madame Homais, yawning at large. "But never
mind; we've had a beautiful day for our fete."
Rodolphe repeated in a low voice, and with a tender look, "Oh, yes! very
beautiful!"
And having bowed to one another, they separated.
Two days later, in the "Final de Rouen," there was a long article on the
show. Homais had composed it with verve the very next morning.
"Why these festoons, these flowers, these garlands? Whither hurries this
crowd like the waves of a furious sea under the torrents of a tropical
sun pouring its heat upon our heads?"
Then he spoke of the condition of the peasants. Certainly the Government
was doing much, but not enough. "Courage!" he cried to it; "a thousand
reforms are indispensable; let us accomplish them!" Then touching on
the entry of the councillor, he did not forget "the martial air of our
militia;" nor "our most merry village maidens;" nor the "bald-headed old
men like patriarchs who were there, and of whom some, the remnants of
our phalanxes, still felt their hearts beat at the manly sound of the
drums." He cited himself among the first of the members of the jury,
and he even called attention in a note to the fact that Monsieur Homais,
chemist, had sent a memoir on cider to the agricultural society.
When he came to the distribution of the prizes, he painted the joy of
the prize-winners in dithyrambic strophes. "The father embraced the son,
the brother the brother, the husband his consort. More than one showed
his humble medal with pride; and no doubt when he got home to his good
housewife, he hung it up weeping on the modest walls of his cot.
"About six o'clock a banquet prepared in the meadow of Monsieur Leigeard
brought together the principal personages of the fete. The greatest
cordiality reigned here. Divers toasts were proposed: Monsieur
Lieuvain, the King; Monsieur Tuvache, the Prefect; Monsieur Derozerays,
Agriculture; Monsieur Homais, Industry and the Fine Arts, those twin
sisters; Monsieur Leplichey, Progress. In the evening some brilliant
fireworks on a sudden illumined the air. One would have called it a
veritable kaleidoscope, a real operatic scene; and for a moment our
little locality might have thought itself transported into the midst of
a dream of the 'Thousand and One Nights.' Let us state that no untoward
event disturbed this family meeting." And he added "Only the absence
of the clergy was remarked. No doubt the priests understand progress in
another fashion. Just as you please, messieurs the followers of Loyola!"
| On the morning of the Agricultural Show the entire town is decorated full of anticipation. An antique fieldpiece will sound at the arrival of the King's prefect. Homais engages Madame Lefraneois in conversation on his way to serve on the show's advisory committee. Madame Lefraneois doesn't think much of the fair and even less of the activity at her competitor's cafe but she reserves her harshest judgment for Monsieur Lheureux whose loan notes will cause her competitor's cafe to close soon. Homais rushes off to greet Madame Bovary whom he sees walking on the arm of Rodolphe Boulanger. The pair manages to avoid not only Homais but Lheureux as well and Rodolphe steers Emma down a side lane. They make a cursory examination of the livestock exhibits and Rodolphe, noticing that Madame Bovary cares little for these things, begins to mock the show and the fashions of the Yonville ladies. They pass Lestiboudois, the gravedigger who keeps a potato patch in the cemetery, carrying chairs from the church to rent to the crowd. As they walk Rodolphe begins his seduction by explaining to Emma that despite his outward appearance of gaiety he spends much of his time feeling depressed and often wonders if he wouldn't be better off dead. The report of the canon interrupts his reverie and the crowd rushes to the square only to find that it was a false alarm. Soon, however, a stately carriage rushes into the square and a small benign-looking man emerges. He explains that the prefect is unable to attend but he, as prefectural councilor, has come in his place. Mayor Tuvache exchanges awkward greetings with the man. Rodolphe and Emma make their way to the empty second floor of the town hall in order to have a better view of the proceedings. While the prefectural councilor, whose name is Lieuvain, begins his official remarks with a lengthy discourse upon the worthiness of the King, Rodolphe continues his wooing of Emma. He tells her that though he is known for his excesses of pleasure he has never known true happiness but he asserts his belief that happiness will come suddenly one day. Lieuvain's makes several statements regarding duty which prompts Rodolphe to opine that real duty is to be true to ones own feelings. Emma protests that people must adhere to some of society's conventions but Rodolphe insists that the only true morality is the eternal one. As Lieuvain proceeds to explicate the advances in agriculture, Rodolphe moves closer to Emma and lowers his voice. He laments the manner in which society destroys noble sentiments and prevents worthy souls from mingling. Emma is overcome by the scent of Rodolphe's perfume and she imagines that she is back at the party at La Vaubyessard and then she sees the Hirondelle cresting the hill and she thinks of Leon. Lieuvain finishes his speech and other functionaries deliver orations. As the prizes for the show are announced Rodolphe states his belief that fate has brought he and Emma together and he enumerates the details of his passion for her. Emma is beguiled by his speech and grasps his hand in her own. The final prize is to an old peasant woman who scarcely understands what is happening to her. With the ceremonies over the crowd disperses and Rodolphe escorts Emma to her home. Later that evening he joins the Bovary's to watch the feeble fireworks display. | summary |
At last it came, the famous agricultural show. On the morning of the
solemnity all the inhabitants at their doors were chatting over the
preparations. The pediment of the town hall had been hung with garlands
of ivy; a tent had been erected in a meadow for the banquet; and in the
middle of the Place, in front of the church, a kind of bombarde was
to announce the arrival of the prefect and the names of the successful
farmers who had obtained prizes. The National Guard of Buchy (there was
none at Yonville) had come to join the corps of firemen, of whom Binet
was captain. On that day he wore a collar even higher than usual; and,
tightly buttoned in his tunic, his figure was so stiff and motionless
that the whole vital portion of his person seemed to have descended into
his legs, which rose in a cadence of set steps with a single movement.
As there was some rivalry between the tax-collector and the colonel,
both, to show off their talents, drilled their men separately. One
saw the red epaulettes and the black breastplates pass and re-pass
alternately; there was no end to it, and it constantly began again.
There had never been such a display of pomp. Several citizens had
scoured their houses the evening before; tri-coloured flags hung from
half-open windows; all the public-houses were full; and in the lovely
weather the starched caps, the golden crosses, and the coloured
neckerchiefs seemed whiter than snow, shone in the sun, and relieved
with the motley colours the sombre monotony of the frock-coats and blue
smocks. The neighbouring farmers' wives, when they got off their horses,
pulled out the long pins that fastened around them their dresses, turned
up for fear of mud; and the husbands, for their part, in order to save
their hats, kept their handkerchiefs around them, holding one corner
between their teeth.
The crowd came into the main street from both ends of the village.
People poured in from the lanes, the alleys, the houses; and from time
to time one heard knockers banging against doors closing behind women
with their gloves, who were going out to see the fete. What was most
admired were two long lamp-stands covered with lanterns, that flanked a
platform on which the authorities were to sit. Besides this there were
against the four columns of the town hall four kinds of poles,
each bearing a small standard of greenish cloth, embellished with
inscriptions in gold letters.
On one was written, "To Commerce"; on the other, "To Agriculture"; on
the third, "To Industry"; and on the fourth, "To the Fine Arts."
But the jubilation that brightened all faces seemed to darken that of
Madame Lefrancois, the innkeeper. Standing on her kitchen-steps she
muttered to herself, "What rubbish! what rubbish! With their canvas
booth! Do they think the prefect will be glad to dine down there under
a tent like a gipsy? They call all this fussing doing good to the place!
Then it wasn't worth while sending to Neufchatel for the keeper of a
cookshop! And for whom? For cowherds! tatterdemalions!"
The druggist was passing. He had on a frock-coat, nankeen trousers,
beaver shoes, and, for a wonder, a hat with a low crown.
"Your servant! Excuse me, I am in a hurry." And as the fat widow asked
where he was going--
"It seems odd to you, doesn't it, I who am always more cooped up in my
laboratory than the man's rat in his cheese."
"What cheese?" asked the landlady.
"Oh, nothing! nothing!" Homais continued. "I merely wished to convey
to you, Madame Lefrancois, that I usually live at home like a recluse.
To-day, however, considering the circumstances, it is necessary--"
"Oh, you're going down there!" she said contemptuously.
"Yes, I am going," replied the druggist, astonished. "Am I not a member
of the consulting commission?"
Mere Lefrancois looked at him for a few moments, and ended by saying
with a smile--
"That's another pair of shoes! But what does agriculture matter to you?
Do you understand anything about it?"
"Certainly I understand it, since I am a druggist--that is to say,
a chemist. And the object of chemistry, Madame Lefrancois, being the
knowledge of the reciprocal and molecular action of all natural bodies,
it follows that agriculture is comprised within its domain. And, in
fact, the composition of the manure, the fermentation of liquids, the
analyses of gases, and the influence of miasmata, what, I ask you, is
all this, if it isn't chemistry, pure and simple?"
The landlady did not answer. Homais went on--
"Do you think that to be an agriculturist it is necessary to have tilled
the earth or fattened fowls oneself? It is necessary rather to know the
composition of the substances in question--the geological strata, the
atmospheric actions, the quality of the soil, the minerals, the waters,
the density of the different bodies, their capillarity, and what not.
And one must be master of all the principles of hygiene in order to
direct, criticize the construction of buildings, the feeding of animals,
the diet of domestics. And, moreover, Madame Lefrancois, one must know
botany, be able to distinguish between plants, you understand, which are
the wholesome and those that are deleterious, which are unproductive
and which nutritive, if it is well to pull them up here and re-sow them
there, to propagate some, destroy others; in brief, one must keep pace
with science by means of pamphlets and public papers, be always on the
alert to find out improvements."
The landlady never took her eyes off the "Cafe Francois" and the chemist
went on--
"Would to God our agriculturists were chemists, or that at least they
would pay more attention to the counsels of science. Thus lately I
myself wrote a considerable tract, a memoir of over seventy-two pages,
entitled, 'Cider, its Manufacture and its Effects, together with some
New Reflections on the Subject,' that I sent to the Agricultural Society
of Rouen, and which even procured me the honour of being received among
its members--Section, Agriculture; Class, Pomological. Well, if my
work had been given to the public--" But the druggist stopped, Madame
Lefrancois seemed so preoccupied.
"Just look at them!" she said. "It's past comprehension! Such a cookshop
as that!" And with a shrug of the shoulders that stretched out over her
breast the stitches of her knitted bodice, she pointed with both hands
at her rival's inn, whence songs were heard issuing. "Well, it won't
last long," she added. "It'll be over before a week."
Homais drew back with stupefaction. She came down three steps and
whispered in his ear--
"What! you didn't know it? There is to be an execution in next week.
It's Lheureux who is selling him out; he has killed him with bills."
"What a terrible catastrophe!" cried the druggist, who always found
expressions in harmony with all imaginable circumstances.
Then the landlady began telling him the story that she had heard from
Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, and although she detested
Tellier, she blamed Lheureux. He was "a wheedler, a sneak."
"There!" she said. "Look at him! he is in the market; he is bowing to
Madame Bovary, who's got on a green bonnet. Why, she's taking Monsieur
Boulanger's arm."
"Madame Bovary!" exclaimed Homais. "I must go at once and pay her my
respects. Perhaps she'll be very glad to have a seat in the enclosure
under the peristyle." And, without heeding Madame Lefrancois, who was
calling him back to tell him more about it, the druggist walked off
rapidly with a smile on his lips, with straight knees, bowing copiously
to right and left, and taking up much room with the large tails of his
frock-coat that fluttered behind him in the wind.
Rodolphe, having caught sight of him from afar, hurried on, but Madame
Bovary lost her breath; so he walked more slowly, and, smiling at her,
said in a rough tone--
"It's only to get away from that fat fellow, you know, the druggist."
She pressed his elbow.
"What's the meaning of that?" he asked himself. And he looked at her out
of the corner of his eyes.
Her profile was so calm that one could guess nothing from it. It stood
out in the light from the oval of her bonnet, with pale ribbons on it
like the leaves of weeds. Her eyes with their long curved lashes looked
straight before her, and though wide open, they seemed slightly puckered
by the cheek-bones, because of the blood pulsing gently under the
delicate skin. A pink line ran along the partition between her nostrils.
Her head was bent upon her shoulder, and the pearl tips of her white
teeth were seen between her lips.
"Is she making fun of me?" thought Rodolphe.
Emma's gesture, however, had only been meant for a warning; for Monsieur
Lheureux was accompanying them, and spoke now and again as if to enter
into the conversation.
"What a superb day! Everybody is out! The wind is east!"
And neither Madame Bovary nor Rodolphe answered him, whilst at the
slightest movement made by them he drew near, saying, "I beg your
pardon!" and raised his hat.
When they reached the farrier's house, instead of following the road
up to the fence, Rodolphe suddenly turned down a path, drawing with him
Madame Bovary. He called out--
"Good evening, Monsieur Lheureux! See you again presently."
"How you got rid of him!" she said, laughing.
"Why," he went on, "allow oneself to be intruded upon by others? And as
to-day I have the happiness of being with you--"
Emma blushed. He did not finish his sentence. Then he talked of the fine
weather and of the pleasure of walking on the grass. A few daisies had
sprung up again.
"Here are some pretty Easter daisies," he said, "and enough of them to
furnish oracles to all the amorous maids in the place."
He added, "Shall I pick some? What do you think?"
"Are you in love?" she asked, coughing a little.
"H'm, h'm! who knows?" answered Rodolphe.
The meadow began to fill, and the housewives hustled you with their
great umbrellas, their baskets, and their babies. One had often to get
out of the way of a long file of country folk, servant-maids with blue
stockings, flat shoes, silver rings, and who smelt of milk, when one
passed close to them. They walked along holding one another by the hand,
and thus they spread over the whole field from the row of open trees to
the banquet tent.
But this was the examination time, and the farmers one after the other
entered a kind of enclosure formed by a long cord supported on sticks.
The beasts were there, their noses towards the cord, and making a
confused line with their unequal rumps. Drowsy pigs were burrowing in
the earth with their snouts, calves were bleating, lambs baaing; the
cows, on knees folded in, were stretching their bellies on the grass,
slowly chewing the cud, and blinking their heavy eyelids at the gnats
that buzzed round them. Plough-men with bare arms were holding by the
halter prancing stallions that neighed with dilated nostrils looking
towards the mares. These stood quietly, stretching out their heads and
flowing manes, while their foals rested in their shadow, or now and then
came and sucked them. And above the long undulation of these crowded
animals one saw some white mane rising in the wind like a wave, or some
sharp horns sticking out, and the heads of men running about. Apart,
outside the enclosure, a hundred paces off, was a large black bull,
muzzled, with an iron ring in its nostrils, and who moved no more than
if he had been in bronze. A child in rags was holding him by a rope.
Between the two lines the committee-men were walking with heavy steps,
examining each animal, then consulting one another in a low voice. One
who seemed of more importance now and then took notes in a book as he
walked along. This was the president of the jury, Monsieur Derozerays de
la Panville. As soon as he recognised Rodolphe he came forward quickly,
and smiling amiably, said--
"What! Monsieur Boulanger, you are deserting us?"
Rodolphe protested that he was just coming. But when the president had
disappeared--
"Ma foi!*" said he, "I shall not go. Your company is better than his."
*Upon my word!
And while poking fun at the show, Rodolphe, to move about more easily,
showed the gendarme his blue card, and even stopped now and then in
front of some fine beast, which Madame Bovary did not at all admire.
He noticed this, and began jeering at the Yonville ladies and their
dresses; then he apologised for the negligence of his own. He had that
incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think
they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations
of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for
social conventions, that seduces or exasperates them. Thus his cambric
shirt with plaited cuffs was blown out by the wind in the opening of his
waistcoat of grey ticking, and his broad-striped trousers disclosed at
the ankle nankeen boots with patent leather gaiters.
These were so polished that they reflected the grass. He trampled on
horses's dung with them, one hand in the pocket of his jacket and his
straw hat on one side.
"Besides," added he, "when one lives in the country--"
"It's waste of time," said Emma.
"That is true," replied Rodolphe. "To think that not one of these people
is capable of understanding even the cut of a coat!"
Then they talked about provincial mediocrity, of the lives it crushed,
the illusions lost there.
"And I too," said Rodolphe, "am drifting into depression."
"You!" she said in astonishment; "I thought you very light-hearted."
"Ah! yes. I seem so, because in the midst of the world I know how to
wear the mask of a scoffer upon my face; and yet, how many a time at the
sight of a cemetery by moonlight have I not asked myself whether it were
not better to join those sleeping there!"
"Oh! and your friends?" she said. "You do not think of them."
"My friends! What friends? Have I any? Who cares for me?" And he
accompanied the last words with a kind of whistling of the lips.
But they were obliged to separate from each other because of a great
pile of chairs that a man was carrying behind them. He was so overladen
with them that one could only see the tips of his wooden shoes and the
ends of his two outstretched arms. It was Lestiboudois, the gravedigger,
who was carrying the church chairs about amongst the people. Alive to
all that concerned his interests, he had hit upon this means of turning
the show to account; and his idea was succeeding, for he no longer knew
which way to turn. In fact, the villagers, who were hot, quarreled for
these seats, whose straw smelt of incense, and they leant against the
thick backs, stained with the wax of candles, with a certain veneration.
Madame Bovary again took Rodolphe's arm; he went on as if speaking to
himself--
"Yes, I have missed so many things. Always alone! Ah! if I had some aim
in life, if I had met some love, if I had found someone! Oh, how I would
have spent all the energy of which I am capable, surmounted everything,
overcome everything!"
"Yet it seems to me," said Emma, "that you are not to be pitied."
"Ah! you think so?" said Rodolphe.
"For, after all," she went on, "you are free--" she hesitated, "rich--"
"Do not mock me," he replied.
And she protested that she was not mocking him, when the report of a
cannon resounded. Immediately all began hustling one another pell-mell
towards the village.
It was a false alarm. The prefect seemed not to be coming, and the
members of the jury felt much embarrassed, not knowing if they ought to
begin the meeting or still wait.
At last at the end of the Place a large hired landau appeared, drawn by
two thin horses, which a coachman in a white hat was whipping lustily.
Binet had only just time to shout, "Present arms!" and the colonel to
imitate him. All ran towards the enclosure; everyone pushed forward. A
few even forgot their collars; but the equipage of the prefect seemed
to anticipate the crowd, and the two yoked jades, trapesing in their
harness, came up at a little trot in front of the peristyle of the town
hall at the very moment when the National Guard and firemen deployed,
beating drums and marking time.
"Present!" shouted Binet.
"Halt!" shouted the colonel. "Left about, march."
And after presenting arms, during which the clang of the band, letting
loose, rang out like a brass kettle rolling downstairs, all the guns
were lowered. Then was seen stepping down from the carriage a gentleman
in a short coat with silver braiding, with bald brow, and wearing a tuft
of hair at the back of his head, of a sallow complexion and the most
benign appearance. His eyes, very large and covered by heavy lids, were
half-closed to look at the crowd, while at the same time he raised his
sharp nose, and forced a smile upon his sunken mouth. He recognised the
mayor by his scarf, and explained to him that the prefect was not able
to come. He himself was a councillor at the prefecture; then he added
a few apologies. Monsieur Tuvache answered them with compliments; the
other confessed himself nervous; and they remained thus, face to face,
their foreheads almost touching, with the members of the jury all round,
the municipal council, the notable personages, the National Guard and
the crowd. The councillor pressing his little cocked hat to his
breast repeated his bows, while Tuvache, bent like a bow, also smiled,
stammered, tried to say something, protested his devotion to the
monarchy and the honour that was being done to Yonville.
Hippolyte, the groom from the inn, took the head of the horses from the
coachman, and, limping along with his club-foot, led them to the door
of the "Lion d'Or", where a number of peasants collected to look at the
carriage. The drum beat, the howitzer thundered, and the gentlemen one
by one mounted the platform, where they sat down in red utrecht velvet
arm-chairs that had been lent by Madame Tuvache.
All these people looked alike. Their fair flabby faces, somewhat tanned
by the sun, were the colour of sweet cider, and their puffy whiskers
emerged from stiff collars, kept up by white cravats with broad bows.
All the waist-coats were of velvet, double-breasted; all the watches
had, at the end of a long ribbon, an oval cornelian seal; everyone
rested his two hands on his thighs, carefully stretching the stride of
their trousers, whose unsponged glossy cloth shone more brilliantly than
the leather of their heavy boots.
The ladies of the company stood at the back under the vestibule between
the pillars while the common herd was opposite, standing up or sitting
on chairs. As a matter of fact, Lestiboudois had brought thither all
those that he had moved from the field, and he even kept running back
every minute to fetch others from the church. He caused such confusion
with this piece of business that one had great difficulty in getting to
the small steps of the platform.
"I think," said Monsieur Lheureux to the chemist, who was passing to his
place, "that they ought to have put up two Venetian masts with something
rather severe and rich for ornaments; it would have been a very pretty
effect."
"To be sure," replied Homais; "but what can you expect? The mayor took
everything on his own shoulders. He hasn't much taste. Poor Tuvache! and
he is even completely destitute of what is called the genius of art."
Rodolphe, meanwhile, with Madame Bovary, had gone up to the first
floor of the town hall, to the "council-room," and, as it was empty,
he declared that they could enjoy the sight there more comfortably. He
fetched three stools from the round table under the bust of the monarch,
and having carried them to one of the windows, they sat down by each
other.
There was commotion on the platform, long whisperings, much parleying.
At last the councillor got up. They knew now that his name was Lieuvain,
and in the crowd the name was passed from one to the other. After he had
collated a few pages, and bent over them to see better, he began--
"Gentlemen! May I be permitted first of all (before addressing you on
the object of our meeting to-day, and this sentiment will, I am sure, be
shared by you all), may I be permitted, I say, to pay a tribute to the
higher administration, to the government to the monarch, gentle men, our
sovereign, to that beloved king, to whom no branch of public or private
prosperity is a matter of indifference, and who directs with a hand at
once so firm and wise the chariot of the state amid the incessant perils
of a stormy sea, knowing, moreover, how to make peace respected as well
as war, industry, commerce, agriculture, and the fine arts?"
"I ought," said Rodolphe, "to get back a little further."
"Why?" said Emma.
But at this moment the voice of the councillor rose to an extraordinary
pitch. He declaimed--
"This is no longer the time, gentlemen, when civil discord ensanguined
our public places, when the landlord, the business-man, the working-man
himself, falling asleep at night, lying down to peaceful sleep, trembled
lest he should be awakened suddenly by the noise of incendiary tocsins,
when the most subversive doctrines audaciously sapped foundations."
"Well, someone down there might see me," Rodolphe resumed, "then
I should have to invent excuses for a fortnight; and with my bad
reputation--"
"Oh, you are slandering yourself," said Emma.
"No! It is dreadful, I assure you."
"But, gentlemen," continued the councillor, "if, banishing from my
memory the remembrance of these sad pictures, I carry my eyes back
to the actual situation of our dear country, what do I see there?
Everywhere commerce and the arts are flourishing; everywhere new means
of communication, like so many new arteries in the body of the state,
establish within it new relations. Our great industrial centres have
recovered all their activity; religion, more consolidated, smiles in
all hearts; our ports are full, confidence is born again, and France
breathes once more!"
"Besides," added Rodolphe, "perhaps from the world's point of view they
are right."
"How so?" she asked.
"What!" said he. "Do you not know that there are souls constantly
tormented? They need by turns to dream and to act, the purest passions
and the most turbulent joys, and thus they fling themselves into all
sorts of fantasies, of follies."
Then she looked at him as one looks at a traveller who has voyaged over
strange lands, and went on--
"We have not even this distraction, we poor women!"
"A sad distraction, for happiness isn't found in it."
"But is it ever found?" she asked.
"Yes; one day it comes," he answered.
"And this is what you have understood," said the councillor.
"You, farmers, agricultural labourers! you pacific pioneers of a work
that belongs wholly to civilization! you, men of progress and morality,
you have understood, I say, that political storms are even more
redoubtable than atmospheric disturbances!"
"It comes one day," repeated Rodolphe, "one day suddenly, and when
one is despairing of it. Then the horizon expands; it is as if a voice
cried, 'It is here!' You feel the need of confiding the whole of your
life, of giving everything, sacrificing everything to this being. There
is no need for explanations; they understand one another. They have seen
each other in dreams!"
(And he looked at her.) "In fine, here it is, this treasure so sought
after, here before you. It glitters, it flashes; yet one still doubts,
one does not believe it; one remains dazzled, as if one went out from
darkness into light."
And as he ended Rodolphe suited the action to the word. He passed his
hand over his face, like a man seized with giddiness. Then he let it
fall on Emma's. She took hers away.
"And who would be surprised at it, gentlemen? He only who is so blind,
so plunged (I do not fear to say it), so plunged in the prejudices
of another age as still to misunderstand the spirit of agricultural
populations. Where, indeed, is to be found more patriotism than in the
country, greater devotion to the public welfare, more intelligence, in a
word? And, gentlemen, I do not mean that superficial intelligence,
vain ornament of idle minds, but rather that profound and balanced
intelligence that applies itself above all else to useful objects, thus
contributing to the good of all, to the common amelioration and to
the support of the state, born of respect for law and the practice of
duty--"
"Ah! again!" said Rodolphe. "Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word.
They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with
foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty,
duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the
beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the
ignominy that it imposes upon us."
"Yet--yet--" objected Madame Bovary.
"No, no! Why cry out against the passions? Are they not the one
beautiful thing on the earth, the source of heroism, of enthusiasm, of
poetry, music, the arts, of everything, in a word?"
"But one must," said Emma, "to some extent bow to the opinion of the
world and accept its moral code."
"Ah! but there are two," he replied. "The small, the conventional, that
of men, that which constantly changes, that brays out so loudly, that
makes such a commotion here below, of the earth earthly, like the mass
of imbeciles you see down there. But the other, the eternal, that is
about us and above, like the landscape that surrounds us, and the blue
heavens that give us light."
Monsieur Lieuvain had just wiped his mouth with a pocket-handkerchief.
He continued--
"And what should I do here gentlemen, pointing out to you the uses
of agriculture? Who supplies our wants? Who provides our means of
subsistence? Is it not the agriculturist? The agriculturist, gentlemen,
who, sowing with laborious hand the fertile furrows of the country,
brings forth the corn, which, being ground, is made into a powder by
means of ingenious machinery, comes out thence under the name of flour,
and from there, transported to our cities, is soon delivered at the
baker's, who makes it into food for poor and rich alike. Again, is it
not the agriculturist who fattens, for our clothes, his abundant
flocks in the pastures? For how should we clothe ourselves, how nourish
ourselves, without the agriculturist? And, gentlemen, is it even
necessary to go so far for examples? Who has not frequently reflected
on all the momentous things that we get out of that modest animal, the
ornament of poultry-yards, that provides us at once with a soft pillow
for our bed, with succulent flesh for our tables, and eggs? But I should
never end if I were to enumerate one after the other all the different
products which the earth, well cultivated, like a generous mother,
lavishes upon her children. Here it is the vine, elsewhere the apple
tree for cider, there colza, farther on cheeses and flax. Gentlemen, let
us not forget flax, which has made such great strides of late years, and
to which I will more particularly call your attention."
He had no need to call it, for all the mouths of the multitude were wide
open, as if to drink in his words. Tuvache by his side listened to him
with staring eyes. Monsieur Derozerays from time to time softly closed
his eyelids, and farther on the chemist, with his son Napoleon between
his knees, put his hand behind his ear in order not to lose a syllable.
The chins of the other members of the jury went slowly up and down in
their waistcoats in sign of approval. The firemen at the foot of the
platform rested on their bayonets; and Binet, motionless, stood with
out-turned elbows, the point of his sabre in the air. Perhaps he could
hear, but certainly he could see nothing, because of the visor of his
helmet, that fell down on his nose. His lieutenant, the youngest son of
Monsieur Tuvache, had a bigger one, for his was enormous, and shook on
his head, and from it an end of his cotton scarf peeped out. He smiled
beneath it with a perfectly infantine sweetness, and his pale little
face, whence drops were running, wore an expression of enjoyment and
sleepiness.
The square as far as the houses was crowded with people. One saw folk
leaning on their elbows at all the windows, others standing at doors,
and Justin, in front of the chemist's shop, seemed quite transfixed by
the sight of what he was looking at. In spite of the silence Monsieur
Lieuvain's voice was lost in the air. It reached you in fragments of
phrases, and interrupted here and there by the creaking of chairs in the
crowd; then you suddenly heard the long bellowing of an ox, or else the
bleating of the lambs, who answered one another at street corners. In
fact, the cowherds and shepherds had driven their beasts thus far, and
these lowed from time to time, while with their tongues they tore down
some scrap of foliage that hung above their mouths.
Rodolphe had drawn nearer to Emma, and said to her in a low voice,
speaking rapidly--
"Does not this conspiracy of the world revolt you? Is there a single
sentiment it does not condemn? The noblest instincts, the purest
sympathies are persecuted, slandered; and if at length two poor souls do
meet, all is so organised that they cannot blend together. Yet they will
make the attempt; they will flutter their wings; they will call upon
each other. Oh! no matter. Sooner or later, in six months, ten years,
they will come together, will love; for fate has decreed it, and they
are born one for the other."
His arms were folded across his knees, and thus lifting his face towards
Emma, close by her, he looked fixedly at her. She noticed in his eyes
small golden lines radiating from black pupils; she even smelt the
perfume of the pomade that made his hair glossy.
Then a faintness came over her; she recalled the Viscount who had
waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this air an
odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes
the better to breathe it in. But in making this movement, as she leant
back in her chair, she saw in the distance, right on the line of the
horizon, the old diligence, the "Hirondelle," that was slowly descending
the hill of Leux, dragging after it a long trail of dust. It was in this
yellow carriage that Leon had so often come back to her, and by this
route down there that he had gone for ever. She fancied she saw him
opposite at his windows; then all grew confused; clouds gathered; it
seemed to her that she was again turning in the waltz under the light of
the lustres on the arm of the Viscount, and that Leon was not far away,
that he was coming; and yet all the time she was conscious of the scent
of Rodolphe's head by her side. This sweetness of sensation pierced
through her old desires, and these, like grains of sand under a gust
of wind, eddied to and fro in the subtle breath of the perfume which
suffused her soul. She opened wide her nostrils several times to drink
in the freshness of the ivy round the capitals. She took off her gloves,
she wiped her hands, then fanned her face with her handkerchief, while
athwart the throbbing of her temples she heard the murmur of the
crowd and the voice of the councillor intoning his phrases. He
said--"Continue, persevere; listen neither to the suggestions of
routine, nor to the over-hasty councils of a rash empiricism.
"Apply yourselves, above all, to the amelioration of the soil, to good
manures, to the development of the equine, bovine, ovine, and porcine
races. Let these shows be to you pacific arenas, where the victor in
leaving it will hold forth a hand to the vanquished, and will fraternise
with him in the hope of better success. And you, aged servants, humble
domestics, whose hard labour no Government up to this day has taken into
consideration, come hither to receive the reward of your silent virtues,
and be assured that the state henceforward has its eye upon you; that it
encourages you, protects you; that it will accede to your just
demands, and alleviate as much as in it lies the burden of your painful
sacrifices."
Monsieur Lieuvain then sat down; Monsieur Derozerays got up, beginning
another speech. His was not perhaps so florid as that of the councillor,
but it recommended itself by a more direct style, that is to say, by
more special knowledge and more elevated considerations. Thus the praise
of the Government took up less space in it; religion and agriculture
more. He showed in it the relations of these two, and how they had
always contributed to civilisation. Rodolphe with Madame Bovary was
talking dreams, presentiments, magnetism. Going back to the cradle of
society, the orator painted those fierce times when men lived on acorns
in the heart of woods. Then they had left off the skins of beasts, had
put on cloth, tilled the soil, planted the vine. Was this a good, and
in this discovery was there not more of injury than of gain? Monsieur
Derozerays set himself this problem. From magnetism little by little
Rodolphe had come to affinities, and while the president was citing
Cincinnatus and his plough, Diocletian, planting his cabbages, and the
Emperors of China inaugurating the year by the sowing of seed, the
young man was explaining to the young woman that these irresistible
attractions find their cause in some previous state of existence.
"Thus we," he said, "why did we come to know one another? What chance
willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that
flow but to unite; our special bents of mind had driven us towards each
other."
And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.
"For good farming generally!" cried the president.
"Just now, for example, when I went to your house."
"To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix."
"Did I know I should accompany you?"
"Seventy francs."
"A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you--I remained."
"Manures!"
"And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!"
"To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!"
"For I have never in the society of any other person found so complete a
charm."
"To Monsieur Bain of Givry-Saint-Martin."
"And I shall carry away with me the remembrance of you."
"For a merino ram!"
"But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow."
"To Monsieur Belot of Notre-Dame."
"Oh, no! I shall be something in your thought, in your life, shall I
not?"
"Porcine race; prizes--equal, to Messrs. Leherisse and Cullembourg,
sixty francs!"
Rodolphe was pressing her hand, and he felt it all warm and quivering
like a captive dove that wants to fly away; but, whether she was trying
to take it away or whether she was answering his pressure; she made a
movement with her fingers. He exclaimed--
"Oh, I thank you! You do not repulse me! You are good! You understand
that I am yours! Let me look at you; let me contemplate you!"
A gust of wind that blew in at the window ruffled the cloth on the
table, and in the square below all the great caps of the peasant women
were uplifted by it like the wings of white butterflies fluttering.
"Use of oil-cakes," continued the president. He was hurrying on:
"Flemish manure-flax-growing-drainage-long leases-domestic service."
Rodolphe was no longer speaking. They looked at one another. A supreme
desire made their dry lips tremble, and wearily, without an effort,
their fingers intertwined.
"Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-la-Guerriere, for
fifty-four years of service at the same farm, a silver medal--value,
twenty-five francs!"
"Where is Catherine Leroux?" repeated the councillor.
She did not present herself, and one could hear voices whispering--
"Go up!"
"Don't be afraid!"
"Oh, how stupid she is!"
"Well, is she there?" cried Tuvache.
"Yes; here she is."
"Then let her come up!"
Then there came forward on the platform a little old woman with timid
bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor clothes. On her feet she
wore heavy wooden clogs, and from her hips hung a large blue apron. Her
pale face framed in a borderless cap was more wrinkled than a withered
russet apple. And from the sleeves of her red jacket looked out two
large hands with knotty joints, the dust of barns, the potash of washing
the grease of wools had so encrusted, roughened, hardened these that
they seemed dirty, although they had been rinsed in clear water; and
by dint of long service they remained half open, as if to bear humble
witness for themselves of so much suffering endured. Something of
monastic rigidity dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion
weakened that pale look. In her constant living with animals she had
caught their dumbness and their calm. It was the first time that she
found herself in the midst of so large a company, and inwardly scared by
the flags, the drums, the gentlemen in frock-coats, and the order of the
councillor, she stood motionless, not knowing whether to advance or run
away, nor why the crowd was pushing her and the jury were smiling at
her.
Thus stood before these radiant bourgeois this half-century of
servitude.
"Approach, venerable Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux!" said the
councillor, who had taken the list of prize-winners from the president;
and, looking at the piece of paper and the old woman by turns, he
repeated in a fatherly tone--"Approach! approach!"
"Are you deaf?" said Tuvache, fidgeting in his armchair; and he began
shouting in her ear, "Fifty-four years of service. A silver medal!
Twenty-five francs! For you!"
Then, when she had her medal, she looked at it, and a smile of beatitude
spread over her face; and as she walked away they could hear her
muttering "I'll give it to our cure up home, to say some masses for me!"
"What fanaticism!" exclaimed the chemist, leaning across to the notary.
The meeting was over, the crowd dispersed, and now that the speeches had
been read, each one fell back into his place again, and everything into
the old grooves; the masters bullied the servants, and these struck the
animals, indolent victors, going back to the stalls, a green-crown on
their horns.
The National Guards, however, had gone up to the first floor of the
town hall with buns spitted on their bayonets, and the drummer of the
battalion carried a basket with bottles. Madame Bovary took Rodolphe's
arm; he saw her home; they separated at her door; then he walked about
alone in the meadow while he waited for the time of the banquet.
The feast was long, noisy, ill served; the guests were so crowded that
they could hardly move their elbows; and the narrow planks used for
forms almost broke down under their weight. They ate hugely. Each one
stuffed himself on his own account. Sweat stood on every brow, and a
whitish steam, like the vapour of a stream on an autumn morning, floated
above the table between the hanging lamps. Rodolphe, leaning against
the calico of the tent was thinking so earnestly of Emma that he heard
nothing. Behind him on the grass the servants were piling up the dirty
plates, his neighbours were talking; he did not answer them; they filled
his glass, and there was silence in his thoughts in spite of the growing
noise. He was dreaming of what she had said, of the line of her lips;
her face, as in a magic mirror, shone on the plates of the shakos, the
folds of her gown fell along the walls, and days of love unrolled to all
infinity before him in the vistas of the future.
He saw her again in the evening during the fireworks, but she was with
her husband, Madame Homais, and the druggist, who was worrying about the
danger of stray rockets, and every moment he left the company to go and
give some advice to Binet.
The pyrotechnic pieces sent to Monsieur Tuvache had, through an excess
of caution, been shut up in his cellar, and so the damp powder would
not light, and the principal set piece, that was to represent a dragon
biting his tail, failed completely. Now and then a meagre Roman-candle
went off; then the gaping crowd sent up a shout that mingled with the
cry of the women, whose waists were being squeezed in the darkness. Emma
silently nestled against Charles's shoulder; then, raising her chin, she
watched the luminous rays of the rockets against the dark sky. Rodolphe
gazed at her in the light of the burning lanterns.
They went out one by one. The stars shone out. A few crops of rain began
to fall. She knotted her fichu round her bare head.
At this moment the councillor's carriage came out from the inn.
His coachman, who was drunk, suddenly dozed off, and one could see from
the distance, above the hood, between the two lanterns, the mass of his
body, that swayed from right to left with the giving of the traces.
"Truly," said the druggist, "one ought to proceed most rigorously
against drunkenness! I should like to see written up weekly at the door
of the town hall on a board ad hoc* the names of all those who during
the week got intoxicated on alcohol. Besides, with regard to statistics,
one would thus have, as it were, public records that one could refer to
in case of need. But excuse me!"
*Specifically for that.
And he once more ran off to the captain. The latter was going back to
see his lathe again.
"Perhaps you would not do ill," Homais said to him, "to send one of your
men, or to go yourself--"
"Leave me alone!" answered the tax-collector. "It's all right!"
"Do not be uneasy," said the druggist, when he returned to his friends.
"Monsieur Binet has assured me that all precautions have been taken. No
sparks have fallen; the pumps are full. Let us go to rest."
"Ma foi! I want it," said Madame Homais, yawning at large. "But never
mind; we've had a beautiful day for our fete."
Rodolphe repeated in a low voice, and with a tender look, "Oh, yes! very
beautiful!"
And having bowed to one another, they separated.
Two days later, in the "Final de Rouen," there was a long article on the
show. Homais had composed it with verve the very next morning.
"Why these festoons, these flowers, these garlands? Whither hurries this
crowd like the waves of a furious sea under the torrents of a tropical
sun pouring its heat upon our heads?"
Then he spoke of the condition of the peasants. Certainly the Government
was doing much, but not enough. "Courage!" he cried to it; "a thousand
reforms are indispensable; let us accomplish them!" Then touching on
the entry of the councillor, he did not forget "the martial air of our
militia;" nor "our most merry village maidens;" nor the "bald-headed old
men like patriarchs who were there, and of whom some, the remnants of
our phalanxes, still felt their hearts beat at the manly sound of the
drums." He cited himself among the first of the members of the jury,
and he even called attention in a note to the fact that Monsieur Homais,
chemist, had sent a memoir on cider to the agricultural society.
When he came to the distribution of the prizes, he painted the joy of
the prize-winners in dithyrambic strophes. "The father embraced the son,
the brother the brother, the husband his consort. More than one showed
his humble medal with pride; and no doubt when he got home to his good
housewife, he hung it up weeping on the modest walls of his cot.
"About six o'clock a banquet prepared in the meadow of Monsieur Leigeard
brought together the principal personages of the fete. The greatest
cordiality reigned here. Divers toasts were proposed: Monsieur
Lieuvain, the King; Monsieur Tuvache, the Prefect; Monsieur Derozerays,
Agriculture; Monsieur Homais, Industry and the Fine Arts, those twin
sisters; Monsieur Leplichey, Progress. In the evening some brilliant
fireworks on a sudden illumined the air. One would have called it a
veritable kaleidoscope, a real operatic scene; and for a moment our
little locality might have thought itself transported into the midst of
a dream of the 'Thousand and One Nights.' Let us state that no untoward
event disturbed this family meeting." And he added "Only the absence
of the clergy was remarked. No doubt the priests understand progress in
another fashion. Just as you please, messieurs the followers of Loyola!"
| Emma's renewed bout of depression and unfulfilled desires makes her ripe for a man like Rodolphe whom the reader learns is bent upon seduction. Flaubert masterfully juxtaposes the official's lugubrious speechifying with Rodolphe's seduction of Emma. This passage is considered one of the novel's best and amply demonstrates the advantages of the free indirect discourse style of composition. Positioning is important in this section as Emma first views Rodolphe from above while leaning out her window onto the market and then when he woos her while they sit looking down upon the market. Thus the man and woman are linked by their sense of superiority to the town and the petty business concerns of its inhabitants | analysis |
Six weeks passed. Rodolphe did not come again. At last one evening he
appeared.
The day after the show he had said to himself--"We mustn't go back too
soon; that would be a mistake."
And at the end of a week he had gone off hunting. After the hunting he
had thought it was too late, and then he reasoned thus--
"If from the first day she loved me, she must from impatience to see me
again love me more. Let's go on with it!"
And he knew that his calculation had been right when, on entering the
room, he saw Emma turn pale.
She was alone. The day was drawing in. The small muslin curtain along
the windows deepened the twilight, and the gilding of the barometer, on
which the rays of the sun fell, shone in the looking-glass between the
meshes of the coral.
Rodolphe remained standing, and Emma hardly answered his first
conventional phrases.
"I," he said, "have been busy. I have been ill."
"Seriously?" she cried.
"Well," said Rodolphe, sitting down at her side on a footstool, "no; it
was because I did not want to come back."
"Why?"
"Can you not guess?"
He looked at her again, but so hard that she lowered her head, blushing.
He went on--
"Emma!"
"Sir," she said, drawing back a little.
"Ah! you see," replied he in a melancholy voice, "that I was right not
to come back; for this name, this name that fills my whole soul, and
that escaped me, you forbid me to use! Madame Bovary! why all the
world calls you thus! Besides, it is not your name; it is the name of
another!"
He repeated, "of another!" And he hid his face in his hands.
"Yes, I think of you constantly. The memory of you drives me to despair.
Ah! forgive me! I will leave you! Farewell! I will go far away, so far
that you will never hear of me again; and yet--to-day--I know not what
force impelled me towards you. For one does not struggle against Heaven;
one cannot resist the smile of angels; one is carried away by that which
is beautiful, charming, adorable."
It was the first time that Emma had heard such words spoken to herself,
and her pride, like one who reposes bathed in warmth, expanded softly
and fully at this glowing language.
"But if I did not come," he continued, "if I could not see you, at least
I have gazed long on all that surrounds you. At night-every night-I
arose; I came hither; I watched your house, its glimmering in the moon,
the trees in the garden swaying before your window, and the little lamp,
a gleam shining through the window-panes in the darkness. Ah! you never
knew that there, so near you, so far from you, was a poor wretch!"
She turned towards him with a sob.
"Oh, you are good!" she said.
"No, I love you, that is all! You do not doubt that! Tell me--one
word--only one word!"
And Rodolphe imperceptibly glided from the footstool to the ground; but
a sound of wooden shoes was heard in the kitchen, and he noticed the
door of the room was not closed.
"How kind it would be of you," he went on, rising, "if you would humour
a whim of mine." It was to go over her house; he wanted to know it; and
Madame Bovary seeing no objection to this, they both rose, when Charles
came in.
"Good morning, doctor," Rodolphe said to him.
The doctor, flattered at this unexpected title, launched out into
obsequious phrases. Of this the other took advantage to pull himself
together a little.
"Madame was speaking to me," he then said, "about her health."
Charles interrupted him; he had indeed a thousand anxieties; his wife's
palpitations of the heart were beginning again. Then Rodolphe asked if
riding would not be good.
"Certainly! excellent! just the thing! There's an idea! You ought to
follow it up."
And as she objected that she had no horse, Monsieur Rodolphe offered
one. She refused his offer; he did not insist. Then to explain his visit
he said that his ploughman, the man of the blood-letting, still suffered
from giddiness.
"I'll call around," said Bovary.
"No, no! I'll send him to you; we'll come; that will be more convenient
for you."
"Ah! very good! I thank you."
And as soon as they were alone, "Why don't you accept Monsieur
Boulanger's kind offer?"
She assumed a sulky air, invented a thousand excuses, and finally
declared that perhaps it would look odd.
"Well, what the deuce do I care for that?" said Charles, making a
pirouette. "Health before everything! You are wrong."
"And how do you think I can ride when I haven't got a habit?"
"You must order one," he answered.
The riding-habit decided her.
When the habit was ready, Charles wrote to Monsieur Boulanger that his
wife was at his command, and that they counted on his good-nature.
The next day at noon Rodolphe appeared at Charles's door with two
saddle-horses. One had pink rosettes at his ears and a deerskin
side-saddle.
Rodolphe had put on high soft boots, saying to himself that no doubt she
had never seen anything like them. In fact, Emma was charmed with his
appearance as he stood on the landing in his great velvet coat and white
corduroy breeches. She was ready; she was waiting for him.
Justin escaped from the chemist's to see her start, and the chemist also
came out. He was giving Monsieur Boulanger a little good advice.
"An accident happens so easily. Be careful! Your horses perhaps are
mettlesome."
She heard a noise above her; it was Felicite drumming on the windowpanes
to amuse little Berthe. The child blew her a kiss; her mother answered
with a wave of her whip.
"A pleasant ride!" cried Monsieur Homais. "Prudence! above all,
prudence!" And he flourished his newspaper as he saw them disappear.
As soon as he felt the ground, Emma's horse set off at a gallop.
Rodolphe galloped by her side. Now and then they exchanged a word. Her
figure slightly bent, her hand well up, and her right arm stretched out,
she gave herself up to the cadence of the movement that rocked her in
her saddle. At the bottom of the hill Rodolphe gave his horse its head;
they started together at a bound, then at the top suddenly the horses
stopped, and her large blue veil fell about her.
It was early in October. There was fog over the land. Hazy clouds
hovered on the horizon between the outlines of the hills; others, rent
asunder, floated up and disappeared. Sometimes through a rift in the
clouds, beneath a ray of sunshine, gleamed from afar the roots of
Yonville, with the gardens at the water's edge, the yards, the walls and
the church steeple. Emma half closed her eyes to pick out her house, and
never had this poor village where she lived appeared so small. From the
height on which they were the whole valley seemed an immense pale lake
sending off its vapour into the air. Clumps of trees here and there
stood out like black rocks, and the tall lines of the poplars that rose
above the mist were like a beach stirred by the wind.
By the side, on the turf between the pines, a brown light shimmered
in the warm atmosphere. The earth, ruddy like the powder of tobacco,
deadened the noise of their steps, and with the edge of their shoes the
horses as they walked kicked the fallen fir cones in front of them.
Rodolphe and Emma thus went along the skirt of the wood. She turned
away from time to time to avoid his look, and then she saw only the pine
trunks in lines, whose monotonous succession made her a little giddy.
The horses were panting; the leather of the saddles creaked.
Just as they were entering the forest the sun shone out.
"God protects us!" said Rodolphe.
"Do you think so?" she said.
"Forward! forward!" he continued.
He "tchk'd" with his tongue. The two beasts set off at a trot.
Long ferns by the roadside caught in Emma's stirrup.
Rodolphe leant forward and removed them as they rode along. At other
times, to turn aside the branches, he passed close to her, and Emma felt
his knee brushing against her leg. The sky was now blue, the leaves no
longer stirred. There were spaces full of heather in flower, and plots
of violets alternated with the confused patches of the trees that were
grey, fawn, or golden coloured, according to the nature of their leaves.
Often in the thicket was heard the fluttering of wings, or else the
hoarse, soft cry of the ravens flying off amidst the oaks.
They dismounted. Rodolphe fastened up the horses. She walked on in
front on the moss between the paths. But her long habit got in her way,
although she held it up by the skirt; and Rodolphe, walking behind her,
saw between the black cloth and the black shoe the fineness of her white
stocking, that seemed to him as if it were a part of her nakedness.
She stopped. "I am tired," she said.
"Come, try again," he went on. "Courage!"
Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her
veil, that fell sideways from her man's hat over her hips, her face
appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure
waves.
"But where are we going?"
He did not answer. She was breathing irregularly. Rodolphe looked round
him biting his moustache. They came to a larger space where the coppice
had been cut. They sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, and Rodolphe
began speaking to her of his love. He did not begin by frightening her
with compliments. He was calm, serious, melancholy.
Emma listened to him with bowed head, and stirred the bits of wood on
the ground with the tip of her foot. But at the words, "Are not our
destinies now one?"
"Oh, no!" she replied. "You know that well. It is impossible!" She rose
to go. He seized her by the wrist. She stopped. Then, having gazed
at him for a few moments with an amorous and humid look, she said
hurriedly--
"Ah! do not speak of it again! Where are the horses? Let us go back."
He made a gesture of anger and annoyance. She repeated:
"Where are the horses? Where are the horses?"
Then smiling a strange smile, his pupil fixed, his teeth set, he
advanced with outstretched arms. She recoiled trembling. She stammered:
"Oh, you frighten me! You hurt me! Let me go!"
"If it must be," he went on, his face changing; and he again became
respectful, caressing, timid. She gave him her arm. They went back. He
said--
"What was the matter with you? Why? I do not understand. You were
mistaken, no doubt. In my soul you are as a Madonna on a pedestal, in
a place lofty, secure, immaculate. But I need you to live! I must have
your eyes, your voice, your thought! Be my friend, my sister, my angel!"
And he put out his arm round her waist. She feebly tried to disengage
herself. He supported her thus as they walked along.
But they heard the two horses browsing on the leaves.
"Oh! one moment!" said Rodolphe. "Do not let us go! Stay!"
He drew her farther on to a small pool where duckweeds made a greenness
on the water. Faded water lilies lay motionless between the reeds.
At the noise of their steps in the grass, frogs jumped away to hide
themselves.
"I am wrong! I am wrong!" she said. "I am mad to listen to you!"
"Why? Emma! Emma!"
"Oh, Rodolphe!" said the young woman slowly, leaning on his shoulder.
The cloth of her habit caught against the velvet of his coat. She threw
back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears, with
a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him--
The shades of night were falling; the horizontal sun passing between the
branches dazzled the eyes. Here and there around her, in the leaves
or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as it hummingbirds flying
about had scattered their feathers. Silence was everywhere; something
sweet seemed to come forth from the trees; she felt her heart, whose
beating had begun again, and the blood coursing through her flesh like a
stream of milk. Then far away, beyond the wood, on the other hills, she
heard a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence she
heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing
nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his lips, was mending with his
penknife one of the two broken bridles.
They returned to Yonville by the same road. On the mud they saw again
the traces of their horses side by side, the same thickets, the same
stones to the grass; nothing around them seemed changed; and yet for her
something had happened more stupendous than if the mountains had moved
in their places. Rodolphe now and again bent forward and took her hand
to kiss it.
She was charming on horseback--upright, with her slender waist, her knee
bent on the mane of her horse, her face somewhat flushed by the fresh
air in the red of the evening.
On entering Yonville she made her horse prance in the road. People
looked at her from the windows.
At dinner her husband thought she looked well, but she pretended not to
hear him when he inquired about her ride, and she remained sitting there
with her elbow at the side of her plate between the two lighted candles.
"Emma!" he said.
"What?"
"Well, I spent the afternoon at Monsieur Alexandre's. He has an old cob,
still very fine, only a little broken-kneed, and that could be bought; I
am sure, for a hundred crowns." He added, "And thinking it might please
you, I have bespoken it--bought it. Have I done right? Do tell me?"
She nodded her head in assent; then a quarter of an hour later--
"Are you going out to-night?" she asked.
"Yes. Why?"
"Oh, nothing, nothing, my dear!"
And as soon as she had got rid of Charles she went and shut herself up
in her room.
At first she felt stunned; she saw the trees, the paths, the ditches,
Rodolphe, and she again felt the pressure of his arm, while the leaves
rustled and the reeds whistled.
But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never
had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something
subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, "I have a lover!
a lover!" delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her.
So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness
of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all
would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed
her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary
existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through the
interspaces of these heights.
Then she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the
lyric legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with
the voice of sisters that charmed her. She became herself, as it were,
an actual part of these imaginings, and realised the love-dream of her
youth as she saw herself in this type of amorous women whom she had
so envied. Besides, Emma felt a satisfaction of revenge. Had she not
suffered enough? But now she triumphed, and the love so long pent up
burst forth in full joyous bubblings. She tasted it without remorse,
without anxiety, without trouble.
The day following passed with a new sweetness. They made vows to one
another She told him of her sorrows. Rodolphe interrupted her with
kisses; and she looking at him through half-closed eyes, asked him to
call her again by her name--to say that he loved her They were in the
forest, as yesterday, in the shed of some woodenshoe maker. The walls
were of straw, and the roof so low they had to stoop. They were seated
side by side on a bed of dry leaves.
From that day forth they wrote to one another regularly every evening.
Emma placed her letter at the end of the garden, by the river, in a
fissure of the wall. Rodolphe came to fetch it, and put another there,
that she always found fault with as too short.
One morning, when Charles had gone out before day break, she was seized
with the fancy to see Rodolphe at once. She would go quickly to La
Huchette, stay there an hour, and be back again at Yonville while
everyone was still asleep. This idea made her pant with desire, and she
soon found herself in the middle of the field, walking with rapid steps,
without looking behind her.
Day was just breaking. Emma from afar recognised her lover's house. Its
two dove-tailed weathercocks stood out black against the pale dawn.
Beyond the farmyard there was a detached building that she thought must
be the chateau She entered--it was if the doors at her approach had
opened wide of their own accord. A large straight staircase led up to
the corridor. Emma raised the latch of a door, and suddenly at the end
of the room she saw a man sleeping. It was Rodolphe. She uttered a cry.
"You here? You here?" he repeated. "How did you manage to come? Ah! your
dress is damp."
"I love you," she answered, throwing her arms about his neck.
This first piece of daring successful, now every time Charles went out
early Emma dressed quickly and slipped on tiptoe down the steps that led
to the waterside.
But when the plank for the cows was taken up, she had to go by the walls
alongside of the river; the bank was slippery; in order not to fall
she caught hold of the tufts of faded wallflowers. Then she went across
ploughed fields, in which she sank, stumbling; and clogging her thin
shoes. Her scarf, knotted round her head, fluttered to the wind in the
meadows. She was afraid of the oxen; she began to run; she arrived out
of breath, with rosy cheeks, and breathing out from her whole person a
fresh perfume of sap, of verdure, of the open air. At this hour Rodolphe
still slept. It was like a spring morning coming into his room.
The yellow curtains along the windows let a heavy, whitish light enter
softly. Emma felt about, opening and closing her eyes, while the drops
of dew hanging from her hair formed, as it were, a topaz aureole around
her face. Rodolphe, laughing, drew her to him, and pressed her to his
breast.
Then she examined the apartment, opened the drawers of the tables,
combed her hair with his comb, and looked at herself in his
shaving-glass. Often she even put between her teeth the big pipe that
lay on the table by the bed, amongst lemons and pieces of sugar near a
bottle of water.
It took them a good quarter of an hour to say goodbye. Then Emma cried.
She would have wished never to leave Rodolphe. Something stronger than
herself forced her to him; so much so, that one day, seeing her come
unexpectedly, he frowned as one put out.
"What is the matter with you?" she said. "Are you ill? Tell me!"
At last he declared with a serious air that her visits were becoming
imprudent--that she was compromising herself.
| Rodolphe resolves to wait awhile before seeing Emma again and then a hunting trip further delays him. Six weeks later he finally visits her. He plies her with romantic platitudes and she is overwhelmed by the force of his passion. Charles, who suspects nothing, interrupts them. Rodolphe greets the officier de saint as docteur which flatters Charles' pride. Rodolphe suggests that horseback riding would be good for Madame Bovary's health and Charles, who is worried about his wife, readily agrees. Rodolphe offers to lend her a horse but Emma refuses. After Rodolphe departs Charles convinces his wife to accept by offering to buy her a riding habit. When the habit arrives Charles writes to Monsieur Boulanger that his wife was at his disposal and the next day Rodolphe arrives with two horses. As they ride out of the village Homais yells to the pair, "Accidents happen so quickly," and "Your horses may be more spirited than you know. They ride to a wooded hill overlooking the town and Emma notices that the wretched village looks exceedingly small. They ride into the forest, dismount and continue on foot. Emma pleads exhaustion but Rodolphe urges her onward. They come to an area recently cleared of saplings and while they sit on a log Rodolphe gently woos her. She resists and insists that what he asks for is impossible. She asks to return to the horses and he reluctantly acquiesces but before they reach the animals he convinces her to walk to the edge of a nearby pond where, weeping and filled with emotion, she surrenders and gives herself to him. Afterward they ride back to the village and Emma notices that though the outside world has not changed she feels very different. She is distracted at dinner and hardly notices when Charles tells her that he has bought her a horse. After dinner he leaves to see patients and Emma goes to her room and thinks of Rodolphe. She repeats joyfully "I have a lover. She sees herself as a heroine in a novel. Rodolphe and Emma meet the next day and spend the afternoon in a rude hut in the forest. They write to each other every day and one morning when Charles has left before daybreak she runs to La Huchette to spend the early morning with her lover. From then on, whenever Charles leaves early, she dares the journey to the estate. One morning, however, Rodolphe tells her that her visits are foolhardy and she is risking her reputation | summary |
Gradually Rodolphe's fears took possession of her. At first, love had
intoxicated her; and she had thought of nothing beyond. But now that he
was indispensable to her life, she feared to lose anything of this, or
even that it should be disturbed. When she came back from his house she
looked all about her, anxiously watching every form that passed in the
horizon, and every village window from which she could be seen. She
listened for steps, cries, the noise of the ploughs, and she stopped
short, white, and trembling more than the aspen leaves swaying overhead.
One morning as she was thus returning, she suddenly thought she saw the
long barrel of a carbine that seemed to be aimed at her. It stuck out
sideways from the end of a small tub half-buried in the grass on the
edge of a ditch. Emma, half-fainting with terror, nevertheless walked
on, and a man stepped out of the tub like a Jack-in-the-box. He had
gaiters buckled up to the knees, his cap pulled down over his eyes,
trembling lips, and a red nose. It was Captain Binet lying in ambush for
wild ducks.
"You ought to have called out long ago!" he exclaimed; "When one sees a
gun, one should always give warning."
The tax-collector was thus trying to hide the fright he had had, for
a prefectorial order having prohibited duckhunting except in boats,
Monsieur Binet, despite his respect for the laws, was infringing them,
and so he every moment expected to see the rural guard turn up. But
this anxiety whetted his pleasure, and, all alone in his tub, he
congratulated himself on his luck and on his cuteness. At sight of
Emma he seemed relieved from a great weight, and at once entered upon a
conversation.
"It isn't warm; it's nipping."
Emma answered nothing. He went on--
"And you're out so early?"
"Yes," she said stammering; "I am just coming from the nurse where my
child is."
"Ah! very good! very good! For myself, I am here, just as you see me,
since break of day; but the weather is so muggy, that unless one had the
bird at the mouth of the gun--"
"Good evening, Monsieur Binet," she interrupted him, turning on her
heel.
"Your servant, madame," he replied drily; and he went back into his tub.
Emma regretted having left the tax-collector so abruptly. No doubt he
would form unfavourable conjectures. The story about the nurse was the
worst possible excuse, everyone at Yonville knowing that the little
Bovary had been at home with her parents for a year. Besides, no one
was living in this direction; this path led only to La Huchette. Binet,
then, would guess whence she came, and he would not keep silence; he
would talk, that was certain. She remained until evening racking her
brain with every conceivable lying project, and had constantly before
her eyes that imbecile with the game-bag.
Charles after dinner, seeing her gloomy, proposed, by way of
distraction, to take her to the chemist's, and the first person she
caught sight of in the shop was the taxcollector again. He was standing
in front of the counter, lit up by the gleams of the red bottle, and was
saying--
"Please give me half an ounce of vitriol."
"Justin," cried the druggist, "bring us the sulphuric acid." Then to
Emma, who was going up to Madame Homais' room, "No, stay here; it isn't
worth while going up; she is just coming down. Warm yourself at the
stove in the meantime. Excuse me. Good-day, doctor," (for the chemist
much enjoyed pronouncing the word "doctor," as if addressing another by
it reflected on himself some of the grandeur that he found in it). "Now,
take care not to upset the mortars! You'd better fetch some chairs from
the little room; you know very well that the arm-chairs are not to be
taken out of the drawing-room."
And to put his arm-chair back in its place he was darting away from the
counter, when Binet asked him for half an ounce of sugar acid.
"Sugar acid!" said the chemist contemptuously, "don't know it; I'm
ignorant of it! But perhaps you want oxalic acid. It is oxalic acid,
isn't it?"
Binet explained that he wanted a corrosive to make himself some
copperwater with which to remove rust from his hunting things.
Emma shuddered. The chemist began saying--
"Indeed the weather is not propitious on account of the damp."
"Nevertheless," replied the tax-collector, with a sly look, "there are
people who like it."
She was stifling.
"And give me--"
"Will he never go?" thought she.
"Half an ounce of resin and turpentine, four ounces of yellow wax,
and three half ounces of animal charcoal, if you please, to clean the
varnished leather of my togs."
The druggist was beginning to cut the wax when Madame Homais appeared,
Irma in her arms, Napoleon by her side, and Athalie following. She sat
down on the velvet seat by the window, and the lad squatted down on a
footstool, while his eldest sister hovered round the jujube box near
her papa. The latter was filling funnels and corking phials, sticking on
labels, making up parcels. Around him all were silent; only from time
to time, were heard the weights jingling in the balance, and a few low
words from the chemist giving directions to his pupil.
"And how's the little woman?" suddenly asked Madame Homais.
"Silence!" exclaimed her husband, who was writing down some figures in
his waste-book.
"Why didn't you bring her?" she went on in a low voice.
"Hush! hush!" said Emma, pointing with her finger to the druggist.
But Binet, quite absorbed in looking over his bill, had probably heard
nothing. At last he went out. Then Emma, relieved, uttered a deep sigh.
"How hard you are breathing!" said Madame Homais.
"Well, you see, it's rather warm," she replied.
So the next day they talked over how to arrange their rendezvous. Emma
wanted to bribe her servant with a present, but it would be better to
find some safe house at Yonville. Rodolphe promised to look for one.
All through the winter, three or four times a week, in the dead of night
he came to the garden. Emma had on purpose taken away the key of the
gate, which Charles thought lost.
To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of sand at the shutters. She
jumped up with a start; but sometimes he had to wait, for Charles had a
mania for chatting by the fireside, and he would not stop. She was wild
with impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she would have hurled
him out at the window. At last she would begin to undress, then take up
a book, and go on reading very quietly as if the book amused her. But
Charles, who was in bed, called to her to come too.
"Come, now, Emma," he said, "it is time."
"Yes, I am coming," she answered.
Then, as the candles dazzled him; he turned to the wall and fell asleep.
She escaped, smiling, palpitating, undressed. Rodolphe had a large
cloak; he wrapped her in it, and putting his arm round her waist, he
drew her without a word to the end of the garden.
It was in the arbour, on the same seat of old sticks where formerly Leon
had looked at her so amorously on the summer evenings. She never thought
of him now.
The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they
heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling
of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the
darkness, and sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and
swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The
cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips
seemed to them deeper; their eyes that they could hardly see, larger;
and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on
their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied
vibrations.
When the night was rainy, they took refuge in the consulting-room
between the cart-shed and the stable. She lighted one of the kitchen
candles that she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe settled down
there as if at home. The sight of the library, of the bureau, of the
whole apartment, in fine, excited his merriment, and he could not
refrain from making jokes about Charles, which rather embarrassed Emma.
She would have liked to see him more serious, and even on occasions
more dramatic; as, for example, when she thought she heard a noise of
approaching steps in the alley.
"Someone is coming!" she said.
He blew out the light.
"Have you your pistols?"
"Why?"
"Why, to defend yourself," replied Emma.
"From your husband? Oh, poor devil!" And Rodolphe finished his sentence
with a gesture that said, "I could crush him with a flip of my finger."
She was wonder-stricken at his bravery, although she felt in it a sort
of indecency and a naive coarseness that scandalised her.
Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the affair of the pistols. If she had
spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous, he thought, even odious; for
he had no reason to hate the good Charles, not being what is called
devoured by jealousy; and on this subject Emma had taken a great vow
that he did not think in the best of taste.
Besides, she was growing very sentimental. She had insisted on
exchanging miniatures; they had cut off handfuls of hair, and now she
was asking for a ring--a real wedding-ring, in sign of an eternal union.
She often spoke to him of the evening chimes, of the voices of nature.
Then she talked to him of her mother--hers! and of his mother--his!
Rodolphe had lost his twenty years ago. Emma none the less consoled
him with caressing words as one would have done a lost child, and she
sometimes even said to him, gazing at the moon--
"I am sure that above there together they approve of our love."
But she was so pretty. He had possessed so few women of such
ingenuousness. This love without debauchery was a new experience for
him, and, drawing him out of his lazy habits, caressed at once his pride
and his sensuality. Emma's enthusiasm, which his bourgeois good sense
disdained, seemed to him in his heart of hearts charming, since it
was lavished on him. Then, sure of being loved, he no longer kept up
appearances, and insensibly his ways changed.
He had no longer, as formerly, words so gentle that they made her cry,
nor passionate caresses that made her mad, so that their great love,
which engrossed her life, seemed to lessen beneath her like the water of
a stream absorbed into its channel, and she could see the bed of it.
She would not believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and Rodolphe
concealed his indifference less and less.
She did not know if she regretted having yielded to him, or whether she
did not wish, on the contrary, to enjoy him the more. The humiliation
of feeling herself weak was turning to rancour, tempered by their
voluptuous pleasures. It was not affection; it was like a continual
seduction. He subjugated her; she almost feared him.
Appearances, nevertheless, were calmer than ever, Rodolphe having
succeeded in carrying out the adultery after his own fancy; and at the
end of six months, when the spring-time came, they were to one another
like a married couple, tranquilly keeping up a domestic flame.
It was the time of year when old Rouault sent his turkey in remembrance
of the setting of his leg. The present always arrived with a letter.
Emma cut the string that tied it to the basket, and read the following
lines:--
"My Dear Children--I hope this will find you well, and that this one
will be as good as the others. For it seems to me a little more tender,
if I may venture to say so, and heavier. But next time, for a change,
I'll give you a turkeycock, unless you have a preference for some dabs;
and send me back the hamper, if you please, with the two old ones. I
have had an accident with my cart-sheds, whose covering flew off one
windy night among the trees. The harvest has not been overgood either.
Finally, I don't know when I shall come to see you. It is so difficult
now to leave the house since I am alone, my poor Emma."
Here there was a break in the lines, as if the old fellow had dropped
his pen to dream a little while.
"For myself, I am very well, except for a cold I caught the other day at
the fair at Yvetot, where I had gone to hire a shepherd, having turned
away mine because he was too dainty. How we are to be pitied with such
a lot of thieves! Besides, he was also rude. I heard from a pedlar, who,
travelling through your part of the country this winter, had a tooth
drawn, that Bovary was as usual working hard. That doesn't surprise me;
and he showed me his tooth; we had some coffee together. I asked him if
he had seen you, and he said not, but that he had seen two horses in the
stables, from which I conclude that business is looking up. So much
the better, my dear children, and may God send you every imaginable
happiness! It grieves me not yet to have seen my dear little
grand-daughter, Berthe Bovary. I have planted an Orleans plum-tree for
her in the garden under your room, and I won't have it touched unless it
is to have jam made for her by and bye, that I will keep in the cupboard
for her when she comes.
"Good-bye, my dear children. I kiss you, my girl, you too, my
son-in-law, and the little one on both cheeks. I am, with best
compliments, your loving father.
"Theodore Rouault."
She held the coarse paper in her fingers for some minutes. The spelling
mistakes were interwoven one with the other, and Emma followed the
kindly thought that cackled right through it like a hen half hidden
in the hedge of thorns. The writing had been dried with ashes from
the hearth, for a little grey powder slipped from the letter on to her
dress, and she almost thought she saw her father bending over the hearth
to take up the tongs. How long since she had been with him, sitting on
the footstool in the chimney-corner, where she used to burn the end of
a bit of wood in the great flame of the sea-sedges! She remembered the
summer evenings all full of sunshine. The colts neighed when anyone
passed by, and galloped, galloped. Under her window there was a beehive,
and sometimes the bees wheeling round in the light struck against her
window like rebounding balls of gold. What happiness there had been
at that time, what freedom, what hope! What an abundance of illusions!
Nothing was left of them now. She had got rid of them all in her soul's
life, in all her successive conditions of life, maidenhood, her marriage,
and her love--thus constantly losing them all her life through, like
a traveller who leaves something of his wealth at every inn along his
road.
But what then, made her so unhappy? What was the extraordinary
catastrophe that had transformed her? And she raised her head, looking
round as if to seek the cause of that which made her suffer.
An April ray was dancing on the china of the whatnot; the fire burned;
beneath her slippers she felt the softness of the carpet; the day was
bright, the air warm, and she heard her child shouting with laughter.
In fact, the little girl was just then rolling on the lawn in the midst
of the grass that was being turned. She was lying flat on her stomach
at the top of a rick. The servant was holding her by her skirt.
Lestiboudois was raking by her side, and every time he came near she
lent forward, beating the air with both her arms.
"Bring her to me," said her mother, rushing to embrace her. "How I love
you, my poor child! How I love you!"
Then noticing that the tips of her ears were rather dirty, she rang at
once for warm water, and washed her, changed her linen, her stockings,
her shoes, asked a thousand questions about her health, as if on the
return from a long journey, and finally, kissing her again and crying
a little, she gave her back to the servant, who stood quite
thunderstricken at this excess of tenderness.
That evening Rodolphe found her more serious than usual.
"That will pass over," he concluded; "it's a whim:"
And he missed three rendezvous running. When he did come, she showed
herself cold and almost contemptuous.
"Ah! you're losing your time, my lady!"
And he pretended not to notice her melancholy sighs, nor the
handkerchief she took out.
Then Emma repented. She even asked herself why she detested Charles; if
it had not been better to have been able to love him? But he gave her
no opportunities for such a revival of sentiment, so that she was much
embarrassed by her desire for sacrifice, when the druggist came just in
time to provide her with an opportunity.
| Though Emma practices greater caution in her trips to La Huchette one morning she inadvertently surprises Monsieur Binet duck hunting. Although Emma does not know it Binet is hunting illegally so he is content to let the encounter be forgotten but Emma is nervous that he will see through her weak lies. That evening she and Charles go to the pharmacy and Emma is horrified to see Binet at the counter. After the close call Emma and Rodolphe change their meeting place to the arbor in the garden behind the Bovary's house. Over time Rodolphe begins to be annoyed by the intensity of Emma's devotion to him and her constant demands to reaffirm his love. One night, as they lay concealed in the small consulting room they hear someone approaching and Emma asks, in all seriousness, if Rodolphe has his pistols with which to defend her. Afterward he muses that he has nothing against the physician and observes that he is certainly not jealous or frightened of the man. Eventually, certain of her love, he stops making an effort to win her and she gleans that his passion is fading. Nevertheless she realizes that he holds complete power over her. After six months of liaisons their relationship becomes cold and formalized. When Emma's father sends a letter to the Bovary's with his annual turkey Emma is reminded of her lost youth and the romantic illusions that used to be dear to her. She reflects that she no longer has any illusions. She runs to her daughter and smothers her with affection. In her subsequent meetings with Rodolphe she is sullen and distant. Touched with remorse she begins to wonder why she doesn't love Charles. She is at a loss, however, to find something noble in her husband until one day the pharmacist provides an opportunity. | summary |
Gradually Rodolphe's fears took possession of her. At first, love had
intoxicated her; and she had thought of nothing beyond. But now that he
was indispensable to her life, she feared to lose anything of this, or
even that it should be disturbed. When she came back from his house she
looked all about her, anxiously watching every form that passed in the
horizon, and every village window from which she could be seen. She
listened for steps, cries, the noise of the ploughs, and she stopped
short, white, and trembling more than the aspen leaves swaying overhead.
One morning as she was thus returning, she suddenly thought she saw the
long barrel of a carbine that seemed to be aimed at her. It stuck out
sideways from the end of a small tub half-buried in the grass on the
edge of a ditch. Emma, half-fainting with terror, nevertheless walked
on, and a man stepped out of the tub like a Jack-in-the-box. He had
gaiters buckled up to the knees, his cap pulled down over his eyes,
trembling lips, and a red nose. It was Captain Binet lying in ambush for
wild ducks.
"You ought to have called out long ago!" he exclaimed; "When one sees a
gun, one should always give warning."
The tax-collector was thus trying to hide the fright he had had, for
a prefectorial order having prohibited duckhunting except in boats,
Monsieur Binet, despite his respect for the laws, was infringing them,
and so he every moment expected to see the rural guard turn up. But
this anxiety whetted his pleasure, and, all alone in his tub, he
congratulated himself on his luck and on his cuteness. At sight of
Emma he seemed relieved from a great weight, and at once entered upon a
conversation.
"It isn't warm; it's nipping."
Emma answered nothing. He went on--
"And you're out so early?"
"Yes," she said stammering; "I am just coming from the nurse where my
child is."
"Ah! very good! very good! For myself, I am here, just as you see me,
since break of day; but the weather is so muggy, that unless one had the
bird at the mouth of the gun--"
"Good evening, Monsieur Binet," she interrupted him, turning on her
heel.
"Your servant, madame," he replied drily; and he went back into his tub.
Emma regretted having left the tax-collector so abruptly. No doubt he
would form unfavourable conjectures. The story about the nurse was the
worst possible excuse, everyone at Yonville knowing that the little
Bovary had been at home with her parents for a year. Besides, no one
was living in this direction; this path led only to La Huchette. Binet,
then, would guess whence she came, and he would not keep silence; he
would talk, that was certain. She remained until evening racking her
brain with every conceivable lying project, and had constantly before
her eyes that imbecile with the game-bag.
Charles after dinner, seeing her gloomy, proposed, by way of
distraction, to take her to the chemist's, and the first person she
caught sight of in the shop was the taxcollector again. He was standing
in front of the counter, lit up by the gleams of the red bottle, and was
saying--
"Please give me half an ounce of vitriol."
"Justin," cried the druggist, "bring us the sulphuric acid." Then to
Emma, who was going up to Madame Homais' room, "No, stay here; it isn't
worth while going up; she is just coming down. Warm yourself at the
stove in the meantime. Excuse me. Good-day, doctor," (for the chemist
much enjoyed pronouncing the word "doctor," as if addressing another by
it reflected on himself some of the grandeur that he found in it). "Now,
take care not to upset the mortars! You'd better fetch some chairs from
the little room; you know very well that the arm-chairs are not to be
taken out of the drawing-room."
And to put his arm-chair back in its place he was darting away from the
counter, when Binet asked him for half an ounce of sugar acid.
"Sugar acid!" said the chemist contemptuously, "don't know it; I'm
ignorant of it! But perhaps you want oxalic acid. It is oxalic acid,
isn't it?"
Binet explained that he wanted a corrosive to make himself some
copperwater with which to remove rust from his hunting things.
Emma shuddered. The chemist began saying--
"Indeed the weather is not propitious on account of the damp."
"Nevertheless," replied the tax-collector, with a sly look, "there are
people who like it."
She was stifling.
"And give me--"
"Will he never go?" thought she.
"Half an ounce of resin and turpentine, four ounces of yellow wax,
and three half ounces of animal charcoal, if you please, to clean the
varnished leather of my togs."
The druggist was beginning to cut the wax when Madame Homais appeared,
Irma in her arms, Napoleon by her side, and Athalie following. She sat
down on the velvet seat by the window, and the lad squatted down on a
footstool, while his eldest sister hovered round the jujube box near
her papa. The latter was filling funnels and corking phials, sticking on
labels, making up parcels. Around him all were silent; only from time
to time, were heard the weights jingling in the balance, and a few low
words from the chemist giving directions to his pupil.
"And how's the little woman?" suddenly asked Madame Homais.
"Silence!" exclaimed her husband, who was writing down some figures in
his waste-book.
"Why didn't you bring her?" she went on in a low voice.
"Hush! hush!" said Emma, pointing with her finger to the druggist.
But Binet, quite absorbed in looking over his bill, had probably heard
nothing. At last he went out. Then Emma, relieved, uttered a deep sigh.
"How hard you are breathing!" said Madame Homais.
"Well, you see, it's rather warm," she replied.
So the next day they talked over how to arrange their rendezvous. Emma
wanted to bribe her servant with a present, but it would be better to
find some safe house at Yonville. Rodolphe promised to look for one.
All through the winter, three or four times a week, in the dead of night
he came to the garden. Emma had on purpose taken away the key of the
gate, which Charles thought lost.
To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of sand at the shutters. She
jumped up with a start; but sometimes he had to wait, for Charles had a
mania for chatting by the fireside, and he would not stop. She was wild
with impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she would have hurled
him out at the window. At last she would begin to undress, then take up
a book, and go on reading very quietly as if the book amused her. But
Charles, who was in bed, called to her to come too.
"Come, now, Emma," he said, "it is time."
"Yes, I am coming," she answered.
Then, as the candles dazzled him; he turned to the wall and fell asleep.
She escaped, smiling, palpitating, undressed. Rodolphe had a large
cloak; he wrapped her in it, and putting his arm round her waist, he
drew her without a word to the end of the garden.
It was in the arbour, on the same seat of old sticks where formerly Leon
had looked at her so amorously on the summer evenings. She never thought
of him now.
The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they
heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling
of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the
darkness, and sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and
swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The
cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips
seemed to them deeper; their eyes that they could hardly see, larger;
and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on
their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied
vibrations.
When the night was rainy, they took refuge in the consulting-room
between the cart-shed and the stable. She lighted one of the kitchen
candles that she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe settled down
there as if at home. The sight of the library, of the bureau, of the
whole apartment, in fine, excited his merriment, and he could not
refrain from making jokes about Charles, which rather embarrassed Emma.
She would have liked to see him more serious, and even on occasions
more dramatic; as, for example, when she thought she heard a noise of
approaching steps in the alley.
"Someone is coming!" she said.
He blew out the light.
"Have you your pistols?"
"Why?"
"Why, to defend yourself," replied Emma.
"From your husband? Oh, poor devil!" And Rodolphe finished his sentence
with a gesture that said, "I could crush him with a flip of my finger."
She was wonder-stricken at his bravery, although she felt in it a sort
of indecency and a naive coarseness that scandalised her.
Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the affair of the pistols. If she had
spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous, he thought, even odious; for
he had no reason to hate the good Charles, not being what is called
devoured by jealousy; and on this subject Emma had taken a great vow
that he did not think in the best of taste.
Besides, she was growing very sentimental. She had insisted on
exchanging miniatures; they had cut off handfuls of hair, and now she
was asking for a ring--a real wedding-ring, in sign of an eternal union.
She often spoke to him of the evening chimes, of the voices of nature.
Then she talked to him of her mother--hers! and of his mother--his!
Rodolphe had lost his twenty years ago. Emma none the less consoled
him with caressing words as one would have done a lost child, and she
sometimes even said to him, gazing at the moon--
"I am sure that above there together they approve of our love."
But she was so pretty. He had possessed so few women of such
ingenuousness. This love without debauchery was a new experience for
him, and, drawing him out of his lazy habits, caressed at once his pride
and his sensuality. Emma's enthusiasm, which his bourgeois good sense
disdained, seemed to him in his heart of hearts charming, since it
was lavished on him. Then, sure of being loved, he no longer kept up
appearances, and insensibly his ways changed.
He had no longer, as formerly, words so gentle that they made her cry,
nor passionate caresses that made her mad, so that their great love,
which engrossed her life, seemed to lessen beneath her like the water of
a stream absorbed into its channel, and she could see the bed of it.
She would not believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and Rodolphe
concealed his indifference less and less.
She did not know if she regretted having yielded to him, or whether she
did not wish, on the contrary, to enjoy him the more. The humiliation
of feeling herself weak was turning to rancour, tempered by their
voluptuous pleasures. It was not affection; it was like a continual
seduction. He subjugated her; she almost feared him.
Appearances, nevertheless, were calmer than ever, Rodolphe having
succeeded in carrying out the adultery after his own fancy; and at the
end of six months, when the spring-time came, they were to one another
like a married couple, tranquilly keeping up a domestic flame.
It was the time of year when old Rouault sent his turkey in remembrance
of the setting of his leg. The present always arrived with a letter.
Emma cut the string that tied it to the basket, and read the following
lines:--
"My Dear Children--I hope this will find you well, and that this one
will be as good as the others. For it seems to me a little more tender,
if I may venture to say so, and heavier. But next time, for a change,
I'll give you a turkeycock, unless you have a preference for some dabs;
and send me back the hamper, if you please, with the two old ones. I
have had an accident with my cart-sheds, whose covering flew off one
windy night among the trees. The harvest has not been overgood either.
Finally, I don't know when I shall come to see you. It is so difficult
now to leave the house since I am alone, my poor Emma."
Here there was a break in the lines, as if the old fellow had dropped
his pen to dream a little while.
"For myself, I am very well, except for a cold I caught the other day at
the fair at Yvetot, where I had gone to hire a shepherd, having turned
away mine because he was too dainty. How we are to be pitied with such
a lot of thieves! Besides, he was also rude. I heard from a pedlar, who,
travelling through your part of the country this winter, had a tooth
drawn, that Bovary was as usual working hard. That doesn't surprise me;
and he showed me his tooth; we had some coffee together. I asked him if
he had seen you, and he said not, but that he had seen two horses in the
stables, from which I conclude that business is looking up. So much
the better, my dear children, and may God send you every imaginable
happiness! It grieves me not yet to have seen my dear little
grand-daughter, Berthe Bovary. I have planted an Orleans plum-tree for
her in the garden under your room, and I won't have it touched unless it
is to have jam made for her by and bye, that I will keep in the cupboard
for her when she comes.
"Good-bye, my dear children. I kiss you, my girl, you too, my
son-in-law, and the little one on both cheeks. I am, with best
compliments, your loving father.
"Theodore Rouault."
She held the coarse paper in her fingers for some minutes. The spelling
mistakes were interwoven one with the other, and Emma followed the
kindly thought that cackled right through it like a hen half hidden
in the hedge of thorns. The writing had been dried with ashes from
the hearth, for a little grey powder slipped from the letter on to her
dress, and she almost thought she saw her father bending over the hearth
to take up the tongs. How long since she had been with him, sitting on
the footstool in the chimney-corner, where she used to burn the end of
a bit of wood in the great flame of the sea-sedges! She remembered the
summer evenings all full of sunshine. The colts neighed when anyone
passed by, and galloped, galloped. Under her window there was a beehive,
and sometimes the bees wheeling round in the light struck against her
window like rebounding balls of gold. What happiness there had been
at that time, what freedom, what hope! What an abundance of illusions!
Nothing was left of them now. She had got rid of them all in her soul's
life, in all her successive conditions of life, maidenhood, her marriage,
and her love--thus constantly losing them all her life through, like
a traveller who leaves something of his wealth at every inn along his
road.
But what then, made her so unhappy? What was the extraordinary
catastrophe that had transformed her? And she raised her head, looking
round as if to seek the cause of that which made her suffer.
An April ray was dancing on the china of the whatnot; the fire burned;
beneath her slippers she felt the softness of the carpet; the day was
bright, the air warm, and she heard her child shouting with laughter.
In fact, the little girl was just then rolling on the lawn in the midst
of the grass that was being turned. She was lying flat on her stomach
at the top of a rick. The servant was holding her by her skirt.
Lestiboudois was raking by her side, and every time he came near she
lent forward, beating the air with both her arms.
"Bring her to me," said her mother, rushing to embrace her. "How I love
you, my poor child! How I love you!"
Then noticing that the tips of her ears were rather dirty, she rang at
once for warm water, and washed her, changed her linen, her stockings,
her shoes, asked a thousand questions about her health, as if on the
return from a long journey, and finally, kissing her again and crying
a little, she gave her back to the servant, who stood quite
thunderstricken at this excess of tenderness.
That evening Rodolphe found her more serious than usual.
"That will pass over," he concluded; "it's a whim:"
And he missed three rendezvous running. When he did come, she showed
herself cold and almost contemptuous.
"Ah! you're losing your time, my lady!"
And he pretended not to notice her melancholy sighs, nor the
handkerchief she took out.
Then Emma repented. She even asked herself why she detested Charles; if
it had not been better to have been able to love him? But he gave her
no opportunities for such a revival of sentiment, so that she was much
embarrassed by her desire for sacrifice, when the druggist came just in
time to provide her with an opportunity.
| Emma realizes that she will be tempted to succumb to Rodolphe's advances so she resists the suggestion that they should be riding partners. Significantly, she agrees to ride with him after Charles agrees to buy her a riding outfit. Thus, her love of expensive goods coupled with her desire for a lover overcomes her reticence. Homais' warnings - such as "accidents happen so quickly" - as they leave town on their horses presages Emma's fall into adultery. Irnonically, it is Charles who makes this possible by insisting that she ride with Rodolphe and then writing to him that his wife is at his disposal. The simple observation that the area in the woods has recently been cleared of saplings leads the reader to suppose that he has planned the moment with great care. Unlike her wedding night, Emma feels different after her sexual encounter with Rodolphe. Charles unwittingly becomes complicit in the affair when he buys her a horse. Emma feels like a character in a novel and Rodolphe's lies easily conform to the expectations of a lover in a story. Her idealized emotional love coupled with a newly aroused passion for physical love renders Emma dependent upon Rodolphe's favors. As such, she cannot perceive the risks she is taking by visiting him at his estate and he, with a more realistic perspective on the affair, must point out the risks to her. As his passion fades she comes to realize that the real world does not offer the same romantic permanence of the novels | analysis |
He had recently read a eulogy on a new method for curing club-foot, and
as he was a partisan of progress, he conceived the patriotic idea that
Yonville, in order to keep to the fore, ought to have some operations
for strephopody or club-foot.
"For," said he to Emma, "what risk is there? See--" (and he enumerated
on his fingers the advantages of the attempt), "success, almost certain
relief and beautifying of the patient, celebrity acquired by the
operator. Why, for example, should not your husband relieve poor
Hippolyte of the 'Lion d'Or'? Note that he would not fail to tell about
his cure to all the travellers, and then" (Homais lowered his voice and
looked round him) "who is to prevent me from sending a short paragraph
on the subject to the paper? Eh! goodness me! an article gets about; it
is talked of; it ends by making a snowball! And who knows? who knows?"
In fact, Bovary might succeed. Nothing proved to Emma that he was not
clever; and what a satisfaction for her to have urged him to a step by
which his reputation and fortune would be increased! She only wished to
lean on something more solid than love.
Charles, urged by the druggist and by her, allowed himself to be
persuaded. He sent to Rouen for Dr. Duval's volume, and every evening,
holding his head between both hands, plunged into the reading of it.
While he was studying equinus, varus, and valgus, that is to say,
katastrephopody, endostrephopody, and exostrephopody (or better, the
various turnings of the foot downwards, inwards, and outwards, with the
hypostrephopody and anastrephopody), otherwise torsion downwards and
upwards, Monsier Homais, with all sorts of arguments, was exhorting the
lad at the inn to submit to the operation.
"You will scarcely feel, probably, a slight pain; it is a simple prick,
like a little blood-letting, less than the extraction of certain corns."
Hippolyte, reflecting, rolled his stupid eyes.
"However," continued the chemist, "it doesn't concern me. It's for your
sake, for pure humanity! I should like to see you, my friend, rid of
your hideous caudication, together with that waddling of the lumbar
regions which, whatever you say, must considerably interfere with you in
the exercise of your calling."
Then Homais represented to him how much jollier and brisker he would
feel afterwards, and even gave him to understand that he would be more
likely to please the women; and the stable-boy began to smile heavily.
Then he attacked him through his vanity:
"Aren't you a man? Hang it! what would you have done if you had had to
go into the army, to go and fight beneath the standard? Ah! Hippolyte!"
And Homais retired, declaring that he could not understand this
obstinacy, this blindness in refusing the benefactions of science.
The poor fellow gave way, for it was like a conspiracy. Binet, who never
interfered with other people's business, Madame Lefrancois, Artemise,
the neighbours, even the mayor, Monsieur Tuvache--everyone persuaded
him, lectured him, shamed him; but what finally decided him was that it
would cost him nothing. Bovary even undertook to provide the machine
for the operation. This generosity was an idea of Emma's, and Charles
consented to it, thinking in his heart of hearts that his wife was an
angel.
So by the advice of the chemist, and after three fresh starts, he had a
kind of box made by the carpenter, with the aid of the locksmith,
that weighed about eight pounds, and in which iron, wood, sheer-iron,
leather, screws, and nuts had not been spared.
But to know which of Hippolyte's tendons to cut, it was necessary first
of all to find out what kind of club-foot he had.
He had a foot forming almost a straight line with the leg, which,
however, did not prevent it from being turned in, so that it was an
equinus together with something of a varus, or else a slight varus with
a strong tendency to equinus. But with this equinus, wide in foot like
a horse's hoof, with rugose skin, dry tendons, and large toes, on which
the black nails looked as if made of iron, the clubfoot ran about like
a deer from morn till night. He was constantly to be seen on the Place,
jumping round the carts, thrusting his limping foot forwards. He seemed
even stronger on that leg than the other. By dint of hard service it had
acquired, as it were, moral qualities of patience and energy; and
when he was given some heavy work, he stood on it in preference to its
fellow.
Now, as it was an equinus, it was necessary to cut the tendon of
Achilles, and, if need were, the anterior tibial muscle could be seen to
afterwards for getting rid of the varus; for the doctor did not dare to
risk both operations at once; he was even trembling already for fear of
injuring some important region that he did not know.
Neither Ambrose Pare, applying for the first time since Celsus, after an
interval of fifteen centuries, a ligature to an artery, nor Dupuytren,
about to open an abscess in the brain, nor Gensoul when he first took
away the superior maxilla, had hearts that trembled, hands that shook,
minds so strained as Monsieur Bovary when he approached Hippolyte, his
tenotome between his fingers. And as at hospitals, near by on a table
lay a heap of lint, with waxed thread, many bandages--a pyramid of
bandages--every bandage to be found at the druggist's. It was Monsieur
Homais who since morning had been organising all these preparations,
as much to dazzle the multitude as to keep up his illusions. Charles
pierced the skin; a dry crackling was heard. The tendon was cut, the
operation over. Hippolyte could not get over his surprise, but bent over
Bovary's hands to cover them with kisses.
"Come, be calm," said the druggist; "later on you will show your
gratitude to your benefactor."
And he went down to tell the result to five or six inquirers who were
waiting in the yard, and who fancied that Hippolyte would reappear
walking properly. Then Charles, having buckled his patient into the
machine, went home, where Emma, all anxiety, awaited him at the door.
She threw herself on his neck; they sat down to table; he ate much,
and at dessert he even wanted to take a cup of coffee, a luxury he only
permitted himself on Sundays when there was company.
The evening was charming, full of prattle, of dreams together. They
talked about their future fortune, of the improvements to be made in
their house; he saw people's estimation of him growing, his comforts
increasing, his wife always loving him; and she was happy to refresh
herself with a new sentiment, healthier, better, to feel at last some
tenderness for this poor fellow who adored her. The thought of Rodolphe
for one moment passed through her mind, but her eyes turned again to
Charles; she even noticed with surprise that he had not bad teeth.
They were in bed when Monsieur Homais, in spite of the servant, suddenly
entered the room, holding in his hand a sheet of paper just written. It
was the paragraph he intended for the "Fanal de Rouen." He brought it
for them to read.
"Read it yourself," said Bovary.
He read--
"'Despite the prejudices that still invest a part of the face of Europe
like a net, the light nevertheless begins to penetrate our country
places. Thus on Tuesday our little town of Yonville found itself the
scene of a surgical operation which is at the same time an act of
loftiest philanthropy. Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished
practitioners--'"
"Oh, that is too much! too much!" said Charles, choking with emotion.
"No, no! not at all! What next!"
"'--Performed an operation on a club-footed man.' I have not used the
scientific term, because you know in a newspaper everyone would not
perhaps understand. The masses must--'"
"No doubt," said Bovary; "go on!"
"I proceed," said the chemist. "'Monsieur Bovary, one of our most
distinguished practitioners, performed an operation on a club-footed man
called Hippolyte Tautain, stableman for the last twenty-five years at
the hotel of the "Lion d'Or," kept by Widow Lefrancois, at the Place
d'Armes. The novelty of the attempt, and the interest incident to the
subject, had attracted such a concourse of persons that there was
a veritable obstruction on the threshold of the establishment. The
operation, moreover, was performed as if by magic, and barely a
few drops of blood appeared on the skin, as though to say that the
rebellious tendon had at last given way beneath the efforts of art. The
patient, strangely enough--we affirm it as an eye-witness--complained
of no pain. His condition up to the present time leaves nothing to be
desired. Everything tends to show that his convelescence will be brief;
and who knows even if at our next village festivity we shall not see our
good Hippolyte figuring in the bacchic dance in the midst of a chorus
of joyous boon-companions, and thus proving to all eyes by his verve
and his capers his complete cure? Honour, then, to the generous savants!
Honour to those indefatigable spirits who consecrate their vigils to the
amelioration or to the alleviation of their kind! Honour, thrice honour!
Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame
walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science
now accomplishes for all men. We shall keep our readers informed as to
the successive phases of this remarkable cure.'"
This did not prevent Mere Lefrancois, from coming five days after,
scared, and crying out--
"Help! he is dying! I am going crazy!"
Charles rushed to the "Lion d'Or," and the chemist, who caught sight
of him passing along the Place hatless, abandoned his shop. He appeared
himself breathless, red, anxious, and asking everyone who was going up
the stairs--
"Why, what's the matter with our interesting strephopode?"
The strephopode was writhing in hideous convulsions, so that the machine
in which his leg was enclosed was knocked against the wall enough to
break it.
With many precautions, in order not to disturb the position of the limb,
the box was removed, and an awful sight presented itself. The outlines
of the foot disappeared in such a swelling that the entire skin seemed
about to burst, and it was covered with ecchymosis, caused by the famous
machine. Hippolyte had already complained of suffering from it. No
attention had been paid to him; they had to acknowledge that he had not
been altogether wrong, and he was freed for a few hours. But, hardly had
the oedema gone down to some extent, than the two savants thought fit
to put back the limb in the apparatus, strapping it tighter to hasten
matters. At last, three days after, Hippolyte being unable to endure it
any longer, they once more removed the machine, and were much surprised
at the result they saw. The livid tumefaction spread over the leg, with
blisters here and there, whence there oozed a black liquid. Matters
were taking a serious turn. Hippolyte began to worry himself, and Mere
Lefrancois, had him installed in the little room near the kitchen, so
that he might at least have some distraction.
But the tax-collector, who dined there every day, complained bitterly of
such companionship. Then Hippolyte was removed to the billiard-room.
He lay there moaning under his heavy coverings, pale with long beard,
sunken eyes, and from time to time turning his perspiring head on the
dirty pillow, where the flies alighted. Madame Bovary went to see him.
She brought him linen for his poultices; she comforted, and encouraged
him. Besides, he did not want for company, especially on market-days,
when the peasants were knocking about the billiard-balls round him,
fenced with the cues, smoked, drank, sang, and brawled.
"How are you?" they said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Ah! you're not
up to much, it seems, but it's your own fault. You should do this! do
that!" And then they told him stories of people who had all been cured
by other remedies than his. Then by way of consolation they added--
"You give way too much! Get up! You coddle yourself like a king! All the
same, old chap, you don't smell nice!"
Gangrene, in fact, was spreading more and more. Bovary himself turned
sick at it. He came every hour, every moment. Hippolyte looked at him
with eyes full of terror, sobbing--
"When shall I get well? Oh, save me! How unfortunate I am! How
unfortunate I am!"
And the doctor left, always recommending him to diet himself.
"Don't listen to him, my lad," said Mere Lefrancois, "Haven't they
tortured you enough already? You'll grow still weaker. Here! swallow
this."
And she gave him some good beef-tea, a slice of mutton, a piece of
bacon, and sometimes small glasses of brandy, that he had not the
strength to put to his lips.
Abbe Bournisien, hearing that he was growing worse, asked to see him.
He began by pitying his sufferings, declaring at the same time that he
ought to rejoice at them since it was the will of the Lord, and take
advantage of the occasion to reconcile himself to Heaven.
"For," said the ecclesiastic in a paternal tone, "you rather neglected
your duties; you were rarely seen at divine worship. How many years is
it since you approached the holy table? I understand that your work,
that the whirl of the world may have kept you from care for your
salvation. But now is the time to reflect. Yet don't despair. I have
known great sinners, who, about to appear before God (you are not yet
at this point I know), had implored His mercy, and who certainly died in
the best frame of mind. Let us hope that, like them, you will set us a
good example. Thus, as a precaution, what is to prevent you from saying
morning and evening a 'Hail Mary, full of grace,' and 'Our Father which
art in heaven'? Yes, do that, for my sake, to oblige me. That won't cost
you anything. Will you promise me?"
The poor devil promised. The cure came back day after day. He chatted
with the landlady; and even told anecdotes interspersed with jokes and
puns that Hippolyte did not understand. Then, as soon as he could, he
fell back upon matters of religion, putting on an appropriate expression
of face.
His zeal seemed successful, for the club-foot soon manifested a desire
to go on a pilgrimage to Bon-Secours if he were cured; to which Monsieur
Bournisien replied that he saw no objection; two precautions were better
than one; it was no risk anyhow.
The druggist was indignant at what he called the manoeuvres of the
priest; they were prejudicial, he said, to Hippolyte's convalescence,
and he kept repeating to Madame Lefrancois, "Leave him alone! leave him
alone! You perturb his morals with your mysticism." But the good woman
would no longer listen to him; he was the cause of it all. From a spirit
of contradiction she hung up near the bedside of the patient a basin
filled with holy-water and a branch of box.
Religion, however, seemed no more able to succour him than surgery, and
the invincible gangrene still spread from the extremities towards
the stomach. It was all very well to vary the potions and change the
poultices; the muscles each day rotted more and more; and at last
Charles replied by an affirmative nod of the head when Mere Lefrancois,
asked him if she could not, as a forlorn hope, send for Monsieur Canivet
of Neufchatel, who was a celebrity.
A doctor of medicine, fifty years of age, enjoying a good position
and self-possessed, Charles's colleague did not refrain from laughing
disdainfully when he had uncovered the leg, mortified to the knee. Then
having flatly declared that it must be amputated, he went off to the
chemist's to rail at the asses who could have reduced a poor man to such
a state. Shaking Monsieur Homais by the button of his coat, he shouted
out in the shop--
"These are the inventions of Paris! These are the ideas of those gentry
of the capital! It is like strabismus, chloroform, lithotrity, a heap of
monstrosities that the Government ought to prohibit. But they want to do
the clever, and they cram you with remedies without, troubling about
the consequences. We are not so clever, not we! We are not savants,
coxcombs, fops! We are practitioners; we cure people, and we should
not dream of operating on anyone who is in perfect health. Straighten
club-feet! As if one could straighten club-feet! It is as if one wished,
for example, to make a hunchback straight!"
Homais suffered as he listened to this discourse, and he concealed his
discomfort beneath a courtier's smile; for he needed to humour Monsier
Canivet, whose prescriptions sometimes came as far as Yonville. So he
did not take up the defence of Bovary; he did not even make a single
remark, and, renouncing his principles, he sacrificed his dignity to the
more serious interests of his business.
This amputation of the thigh by Doctor Canivet was a great event in the
village. On that day all the inhabitants got up earlier, and the Grande
Rue, although full of people, had something lugubrious about it, as
if an execution had been expected. At the grocer's they discussed
Hippolyte's illness; the shops did no business, and Madame Tuvache, the
mayor's wife, did not stir from her window, such was her impatience to
see the operator arrive.
He came in his gig, which he drove himself. But the springs of the right
side having at length given way beneath the weight of his corpulence, it
happened that the carriage as it rolled along leaned over a little, and
on the other cushion near him could be seen a large box covered in red
sheep-leather, whose three brass clasps shone grandly.
After he had entered like a whirlwind the porch of the "Lion d'Or," the
doctor, shouting very loud, ordered them to unharness his horse. Then he
went into the stable to see that she was eating her oats all right; for
on arriving at a patient's he first of all looked after his mare and his
gig. People even said about this--
"Ah! Monsieur Canivet's a character!"
And he was the more esteemed for this imperturbable coolness. The
universe to the last man might have died, and he would not have missed
the smallest of his habits.
Homais presented himself.
"I count on you," said the doctor. "Are we ready? Come along!"
But the druggist, turning red, confessed that he was too sensitive to
assist at such an operation.
"When one is a simple spectator," he said, "the imagination, you know,
is impressed. And then I have such a nervous system!"
"Pshaw!" interrupted Canivet; "on the contrary, you seem to me inclined
to apoplexy. Besides, that doesn't astonish me, for you chemist fellows
are always poking about your kitchens, which must end by spoiling your
constitutions. Now just look at me. I get up every day at four o'clock;
I shave with cold water (and am never cold). I don't wear flannels, and
I never catch cold; my carcass is good enough! I live now in one way,
now in another, like a philosopher, taking pot-luck; that is why I
am not squeamish like you, and it is as indifferent to me to carve a
Christian as the first fowl that turns up. Then, perhaps, you will say,
habit! habit!"
Then, without any consideration for Hippolyte, who was sweating with
agony between his sheets, these gentlemen entered into a conversation,
in which the druggist compared the coolness of a surgeon to that of a
general; and this comparison was pleasing to Canivet, who launched out
on the exigencies of his art. He looked upon, it as a sacred office,
although the ordinary practitioners dishonoured it. At last, coming back
to the patient, he examined the bandages brought by Homais, the same
that had appeared for the club-foot, and asked for someone to hold the
limb for him. Lestiboudois was sent for, and Monsieur Canivet having
turned up his sleeves, passed into the billiard-room, while the druggist
stayed with Artemise and the landlady, both whiter than their aprons,
and with ears strained towards the door.
Bovary during this time did not dare to stir from his house.
He kept downstairs in the sitting-room by the side of the fireless
chimney, his chin on his breast, his hands clasped, his eyes staring.
"What a mishap!" he thought, "what a mishap!" Perhaps, after all, he had
made some slip. He thought it over, but could hit upon nothing. But the
most famous surgeons also made mistakes; and that is what no one would
ever believe! People, on the contrary, would laugh, jeer! It would
spread as far as Forges, as Neufchatel, as Rouen, everywhere! Who could
say if his colleagues would not write against him. Polemics would ensue;
he would have to answer in the papers. Hippolyte might even prosecute
him. He saw himself dishonoured, ruined, lost; and his imagination,
assailed by a world of hypotheses, tossed amongst them like an empty
cask borne by the sea and floating upon the waves.
Emma, opposite, watched him; she did not share his humiliation; she felt
another--that of having supposed such a man was worth anything. As if
twenty times already she had not sufficiently perceived his mediocrity.
Charles was walking up and down the room; his boots creaked on the
floor.
"Sit down," she said; "you fidget me."
He sat down again.
How was it that she--she, who was so intelligent--could have allowed
herself to be deceived again? and through what deplorable madness had
she thus ruined her life by continual sacrifices? She recalled all her
instincts of luxury, all the privations of her soul, the sordidness of
marriage, of the household, her dream sinking into the mire like wounded
swallows; all that she had longed for, all that she had denied herself,
all that she might have had! And for what? for what?
In the midst of the silence that hung over the village a heart-rending
cry rose on the air. Bovary turned white to fainting. She knit her
brows with a nervous gesture, then went on. And it was for him, for this
creature, for this man, who understood nothing, who felt nothing! For he
was there quite quiet, not even suspecting that the ridicule of his name
would henceforth sully hers as well as his. She had made efforts to love
him, and she had repented with tears for having yielded to another!
"But it was perhaps a valgus!" suddenly exclaimed Bovary, who was
meditating.
At the unexpected shock of this phrase falling on her thought like a
leaden bullet on a silver plate, Emma, shuddering, raised her head in
order to find out what he meant to say; and they looked at the other in
silence, almost amazed to see each other, so far sundered were they
by their inner thoughts. Charles gazed at her with the dull look of
a drunken man, while he listened motionless to the last cries of the
sufferer, that followed each other in long-drawn modulations, broken by
sharp spasms like the far-off howling of some beast being slaughtered.
Emma bit her wan lips, and rolling between her fingers a piece of coral
that she had broken, fixed on Charles the burning glance of her eyes
like two arrows of fire about to dart forth. Everything in him irritated
her now; his face, his dress, what he did not say, his whole person, his
existence, in fine. She repented of her past virtue as of a crime, and
what still remained of it rumbled away beneath the furious blows of her
pride. She revelled in all the evil ironies of triumphant adultery.
The memory of her lover came back to her with dazzling attractions; she
threw her whole soul into it, borne away towards this image with a fresh
enthusiasm; and Charles seemed to her as much removed from her life, as
absent forever, as impossible and annihilated, as if he had been about
to die and were passing under her eyes.
There was a sound of steps on the pavement. Charles looked up, and
through the lowered blinds he saw at the corner of the market in
the broad sunshine Dr. Canivet, who was wiping his brow with his
handkerchief. Homais, behind him, was carrying a large red box in his
hand, and both were going towards the chemist's.
Then with a feeling of sudden tenderness and discouragement Charles
turned to his wife saying to her--
"Oh, kiss me, my own!"
"Leave me!" she said, red with anger.
"What is the matter?" he asked, stupefied. "Be calm; compose yourself.
You know well enough that I love you. Come!"
"Enough!" she cried with a terrible look.
And escaping from the room, Emma closed the door so violently that the
barometer fell from the wall and smashed on the floor.
Charles sank back into his arm-chair overwhelmed, trying to discover
what could be wrong with her, fancying some nervous illness, weeping,
and vaguely feeling something fatal and incomprehensible whirling round
him.
When Rodolphe came to the garden that evening, he found his mistress
waiting for him at the foot of the steps on the lowest stair. They threw
their arms round one another, and all their rancour melted like snow
beneath the warmth of that kiss.
| Homais reads an article about an experimental surgical procedure to cure club foot. He convinces Emma and the rest of the village that it would bring them all prestige if Charles were to perform the surgery on Hippolyte, the stable boy. Hippolyte initially resists the idea but he eventually agrees to undergo the procedure. Charles instructs the blacksmith and the cabinet maker to construct the complicated box device to be fitted upon the leg after the operation. On the morning of the surgery Charles is very nervous but successfully cuts the Achilles tendon - according to the instructions in the article - and the operation is deemed a success. That evening, while Charles and Emma are basking in the glow of the success Homais arrives with an article he has written about the operation that flatters Charles. Five days later, however, Hippolyte is writhing in pain and when Homais and Bovary remove the wooden box they find that the skin is swollen and covered with bruises. They remove the box for a few hours but then determine to reapply it. Three days later the leg has turned gangrenous. Emma brings food for the suffering boy who is convalescing in the inn's billiard room where everyone from the travelers to the priest offers him advice. Finally Charles agrees that Monsieur Canivet, the celebrated surgeon in Neufachtel, should be called. Cavinet arrives and declares that the leg will need to be amputated. He upbraids and lectures Homais who suffers under the criticism but fails to defend Bovary. On the day of the amputation the whole town waits to hear the outcome. Charles, however, remains inside his dark house despondent and fearful of what effects the botched operation will have on his career. Emma sits with him and silently renews her conviction that he is worthless. She pities herself for being married to such a weak man. Charles asks his wife for a kiss and she vehemently refuses and rushes from the room leaving him baffled. That night Rodolphe finds Emma waiting for him, her passion renewed | summary |
They began to love one another again. Often, even in the middle of the
day, Emma suddenly wrote to him, then from the window made a sign to
Justin, who, taking his apron off, quickly ran to La Huchette. Rodolphe
would come; she had sent for him to tell him that she was bored, that
her husband was odious, her life frightful.
"But what can I do?" he cried one day impatiently.
"Ah! if you would--"
She was sitting on the floor between his knees, her hair loose, her look
lost.
"Why, what?" said Rodolphe.
She sighed.
"We would go and live elsewhere--somewhere!"
"You are really mad!" he said laughing. "How could that be possible?"
She returned to the subject; he pretended not to understand, and turned
the conversation.
What he did not understand was all this worry about so simple an affair
as love. She had a motive, a reason, and, as it were, a pendant to her
affection.
Her tenderness, in fact, grew each day with her repulsion to her
husband. The more she gave up herself to the one, the more she loathed
the other. Never had Charles seemed to her so disagreeable, to have
such stodgy fingers, such vulgar ways, to be so dull as when they found
themselves together after her meeting with Rodolphe. Then, while playing
the spouse and virtue, she was burning at the thought of that head whose
black hair fell in a curl over the sunburnt brow, of that form at once
so strong and elegant, of that man, in a word, who had such experience
in his reasoning, such passion in his desires. It was for him that she
filed her nails with the care of a chaser, and that there was never
enough cold-cream for her skin, nor of patchouli for her handkerchiefs.
She loaded herself with bracelets, rings, and necklaces. When he
was coming she filled the two large blue glass vases with roses, and
prepared her room and her person like a courtesan expecting a prince.
The servant had to be constantly washing linen, and all day Felicite
did not stir from the kitchen, where little Justin, who often kept her
company, watched her at work.
With his elbows on the long board on which she was ironing, he
greedily watched all these women's clothes spread about him, the dimity
petticoats, the fichus, the collars, and the drawers with running
strings, wide at the hips and growing narrower below.
"What is that for?" asked the young fellow, passing his hand over the
crinoline or the hooks and eyes.
"Why, haven't you ever seen anything?" Felicite answered laughing. "As
if your mistress, Madame Homais, didn't wear the same."
"Oh, I daresay! Madame Homais!" And he added with a meditative air, "As
if she were a lady like madame!"
But Felicite grew impatient of seeing him hanging round her. She was six
years older than he, and Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, was
beginning to pay court to her.
"Let me alone," she said, moving her pot of starch. "You'd better be
off and pound almonds; you are always dangling about women. Before you
meddle with such things, bad boy, wait till you've got a beard to your
chin."
"Oh, don't be cross! I'll go and clean her boots."
And he at once took down from the shelf Emma's boots, all coated with
mud, the mud of the rendezvous, that crumbled into powder beneath his
fingers, and that he watched as it gently rose in a ray of sunlight.
"How afraid you are of spoiling them!" said the servant, who wasn't so
particular when she cleaned them herself, because as soon as the stuff
of the boots was no longer fresh madame handed them over to her.
Emma had a number in her cupboard that she squandered one after the
other, without Charles allowing himself the slightest observation. So
also he disbursed three hundred francs for a wooden leg that she thought
proper to make a present of to Hippolyte. Its top was covered with cork,
and it had spring joints, a complicated mechanism, covered over by black
trousers ending in a patent-leather boot. But Hippolyte, not daring
to use such a handsome leg every day, begged Madame Bovary to get him
another more convenient one. The doctor, of course, had again to defray
the expense of this purchase.
So little by little the stable-man took up his work again. One saw him
running about the village as before, and when Charles heard from afar
the sharp noise of the wooden leg, he at once went in another direction.
It was Monsieur Lheureux, the shopkeeper, who had undertaken the order;
this provided him with an excuse for visiting Emma. He chatted with her
about the new goods from Paris, about a thousand feminine trifles, made
himself very obliging, and never asked for his money. Emma yielded to
this lazy mode of satisfying all her caprices. Thus she wanted to have
a very handsome ridding-whip that was at an umbrella-maker's at Rouen
to give to Rodolphe. The week after Monsieur Lheureux placed it on her
table.
But the next day he called on her with a bill for two hundred and
seventy francs, not counting the centimes. Emma was much embarrassed;
all the drawers of the writing-table were empty; they owed over a
fortnight's wages to Lestiboudois, two quarters to the servant, for any
quantity of other things, and Bovary was impatiently expecting Monsieur
Derozeray's account, which he was in the habit of paying every year
about Midsummer.
She succeeded at first in putting off Lheureux. At last he lost
patience; he was being sued; his capital was out, and unless he got some
in he should be forced to take back all the goods she had received.
"Oh, very well, take them!" said Emma.
"I was only joking," he replied; "the only thing I regret is the whip.
My word! I'll ask monsieur to return it to me."
"No, no!" she said.
"Ah! I've got you!" thought Lheureux.
And, certain of his discovery, he went out repeating to himself in an
undertone, and with his usual low whistle--
"Good! we shall see! we shall see!"
She was thinking how to get out of this when the servant coming in
put on the mantelpiece a small roll of blue paper "from Monsieur
Derozeray's." Emma pounced upon and opened it. It contained fifteen
napoleons; it was the account. She heard Charles on the stairs; threw
the gold to the back of her drawer, and took out the key.
Three days after Lheureux reappeared.
"I have an arrangement to suggest to you," he said. "If, instead of the
sum agreed on, you would take--"
"Here it is," she said placing fourteen napoleons in his hand.
The tradesman was dumfounded. Then, to conceal his disappointment, he
was profuse in apologies and proffers of service, all of which Emma
declined; then she remained a few moments fingering in the pocket of
her apron the two five-franc pieces that he had given her in change.
She promised herself she would economise in order to pay back later on.
"Pshaw!" she thought, "he won't think about it again."
Besides the riding-whip with its silver-gilt handle, Rodolphe had
received a seal with the motto Amor nel cor* furthermore, a scarf for
a muffler, and, finally, a cigar-case exactly like the Viscount's, that
Charles had formerly picked up in the road, and that Emma had kept.
These presents, however, humiliated him; he refused several; she
insisted, and he ended by obeying, thinking her tyrannical and
overexacting.
*A loving heart.
Then she had strange ideas.
"When midnight strikes," she said, "you must think of me."
And if he confessed that he had not thought of her, there were floods of
reproaches that always ended with the eternal question--
"Do you love me?"
"Why, of course I love you," he answered.
"A great deal?"
"Certainly!"
"You haven't loved any others?"
"Did you think you'd got a virgin?" he exclaimed laughing.
Emma cried, and he tried to console her, adorning his protestations with
puns.
"Oh," she went on, "I love you! I love you so that I could not live
without you, do you see? There are times when I long to see you again,
when I am torn by all the anger of love. I ask myself, Where is
he? Perhaps he is talking to other women. They smile upon him; he
approaches. Oh no; no one else pleases you. There are some more
beautiful, but I love you best. I know how to love best. I am your
servant, your concubine! You are my king, my idol! You are good, you are
beautiful, you are clever, you are strong!"
He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike him as
original. Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty,
gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony
of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He
did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of
sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine
and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the
candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be
discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in
the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of
his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human
speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to
make bears dance when we long to move the stars.
But with that superior critical judgment that belongs to him who, in no
matter what circumstance, holds back, Rodolphe saw other delights to be
got out of this love. He thought all modesty in the way. He treated her
quite sans facon.* He made of her something supple and corrupt. Hers
was an idiotic sort of attachment, full of admiration for him, of
voluptuousness for her, a beatitude that benumbed her; her soul sank
into this drunkenness, shrivelled up, drowned in it, like Clarence in
his butt of Malmsey.
*Off-handedly.
By the mere effect of her love Madame Bovary's manners changed.
Her looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she even committed the
impropriety of walking out with Monsieur Rodolphe, a cigarette in her
mouth, "as if to defy the people." At last, those who still doubted
doubted no longer when one day they saw her getting out of the
"Hirondelle," her waist squeezed into a waistcoat like a man; and Madame
Bovary senior, who, after a fearful scene with her husband, had taken
refuge at her son's, was not the least scandalised of the women-folk.
Many other things displeased her. First, Charles had not attended to
her advice about the forbidding of novels; then the "ways of the house"
annoyed her; she allowed herself to make some remarks, and there were
quarrels, especially one on account of Felicite.
Madame Bovary senior, the evening before, passing along the passage,
had surprised her in company of a man--a man with a brown collar, about
forty years old, who, at the sound of her step, had quickly escaped
through the kitchen. Then Emma began to laugh, but the good lady grew
angry, declaring that unless morals were to be laughed at one ought to
look after those of one's servants.
"Where were you brought up?" asked the daughter-in-law, with so
impertinent a look that Madame Bovary asked her if she were not perhaps
defending her own case.
"Leave the room!" said the young woman, springing up with a bound.
"Emma! Mamma!" cried Charles, trying to reconcile them.
But both had fled in their exasperation. Emma was stamping her feet as
she repeated--
"Oh! what manners! What a peasant!"
He ran to his mother; she was beside herself. She stammered
"She is an insolent, giddy-headed thing, or perhaps worse!"
And she was for leaving at once if the other did not apologise. So
Charles went back again to his wife and implored her to give way; he
knelt to her; she ended by saying--
"Very well! I'll go to her."
And in fact she held out her hand to her mother-in-law with the dignity
of a marchioness as she said--
"Excuse me, madame."
Then, having gone up again to her room, she threw herself flat on her
bed and cried there like a child, her face buried in the pillow.
She and Rodolphe had agreed that in the event of anything extraordinary
occurring, she should fasten a small piece of white paper to the blind,
so that if by chance he happened to be in Yonville, he could hurry to
the lane behind the house. Emma made the signal; she had been waiting
three-quarters of an hour when she suddenly caught sight of Rodolphe at
the corner of the market. She felt tempted to open the window and call
him, but he had already disappeared. She fell back in despair.
Soon, however, it seemed to her that someone was walking on the
pavement. It was he, no doubt. She went downstairs, crossed the yard. He
was there outside. She threw herself into his arms.
"Do take care!" he said.
"Ah! if you knew!" she replied.
And she began telling him everything, hurriedly, disjointedly,
exaggerating the facts, inventing many, and so prodigal of parentheses
that he understood nothing of it.
"Come, my poor angel, courage! Be comforted! be patient!"
"But I have been patient; I have suffered for four years. A love like
ours ought to show itself in the face of heaven. They torture me! I can
bear it no longer! Save me!"
She clung to Rodolphe. Her eyes, full of tears, flashed like flames
beneath a wave; her breast heaved; he had never loved her so much, so
that he lost his head and said "What is, it? What do you wish?"
"Take me away," she cried, "carry me off! Oh, I pray you!"
And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if to seize there the
unexpected consent if breathed forth in a kiss.
"But--" Rodolphe resumed.
"What?"
"Your little girl!"
She reflected a few moments, then replied--
"We will take her! It can't be helped!"
"What a woman!" he said to himself, watching her as she went. For she
had run into the garden. Someone was calling her.
On the following days Madame Bovary senior was much surprised at the
change in her daughter-in-law. Emma, in fact, was showing herself more
docile, and even carried her deference so far as to ask for a recipe for
pickling gherkins.
Was it the better to deceive them both? Or did she wish by a sort of
voluptuous stoicism to feel the more profoundly the bitterness of the
things she was about to leave?
But she paid no heed to them; on the contrary, she lived as lost in the
anticipated delight of her coming happiness.
It was an eternal subject for conversation with Rodolphe. She leant on
his shoulder murmuring--
"Ah! when we are in the mail-coach! Do you think about it? Can it be? It
seems to me that the moment I feel the carriage start, it will be as if
we were rising in a balloon, as if we were setting out for the clouds.
Do you know that I count the hours? And you?"
Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this period; she had
that indefinable beauty that results from joy, from enthusiasm, from
success, and that is only the harmony of temperament with circumstances.
Her desires, her sorrows, the experience of pleasure, and her ever-young
illusions, that had, as soil and rain and winds and the sun make flowers
grow, gradually developed her, and she at length blossomed forth in all
the plenitude of her nature. Her eyelids seemed chiselled expressly for
her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong
inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner
of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down. One would have
thought that an artist apt in conception had arranged the curls of hair
upon her neck; they fell in a thick mass, negligently, and with the
changing chances of their adultery, that unbound them every day. Her
voice now took more mellow infections, her figure also; something subtle
and penetrating escaped even from the folds of her gown and from the
line of her foot. Charles, as when they were first married, thought her
delicious and quite irresistible.
When he came home in the middle of the night, he did not dare to wake
her. The porcelain night-light threw a round trembling gleam upon the
ceiling, and the drawn curtains of the little cot formed as it were a
white hut standing out in the shade, and by the bedside Charles looked
at them. He seemed to hear the light breathing of his child. She would
grow big now; every season would bring rapid progress. He already saw
her coming from school as the day drew in, laughing, with ink-stains on
her jacket, and carrying her basket on her arm. Then she would have to
be sent to the boarding-school; that would cost much; how was it to
be done? Then he reflected. He thought of hiring a small farm in the
neighbourhood, that he would superintend every morning on his way to his
patients. He would save up what he brought in; he would put it in the
savings-bank. Then he would buy shares somewhere, no matter where;
besides, his practice would increase; he counted upon that, for he
wanted Berthe to be well-educated, to be accomplished, to learn to play
the piano. Ah! how pretty she would be later on when she was fifteen,
when, resembling her mother, she would, like her, wear large straw hats
in the summer-time; from a distance they would be taken for two sisters.
He pictured her to himself working in the evening by their side beneath
the light of the lamp; she would embroider him slippers; she would look
after the house; she would fill all the home with her charm and her
gaiety. At last, they would think of her marriage; they would find her
some good young fellow with a steady business; he would make her happy;
this would last for ever.
Emma was not asleep; she pretended to be; and while he dozed off by her
side she awakened to other dreams.
To the gallop of four horses she was carried away for a week towards a
new land, whence they would return no more. They went on and on, their
arms entwined, without a word. Often from the top of a mountain there
suddenly glimpsed some splendid city with domes, and bridges, and
ships, forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of white marble, on whose
pointed steeples were storks' nests. They went at a walking-pace because
of the great flag-stones, and on the ground there were bouquets of
flowers, offered you by women dressed in red bodices. They heard the
chiming of bells, the neighing of mules, together with the murmur of
guitars and the noise of fountains, whose rising spray refreshed heaps
of fruit arranged like a pyramid at the foot of pale statues that smiled
beneath playing waters. And then, one night they came to a fishing
village, where brown nets were drying in the wind along the cliffs and
in front of the huts. It was there that they would stay; they would live
in a low, flat-roofed house, shaded by a palm-tree, in the heart of a
gulf, by the sea. They would row in gondolas, swing in hammocks, and
their existence would be easy and large as their silk gowns, warm and
star-spangled as the nights they would contemplate. However, in the
immensity of this future that she conjured up, nothing special stood
forth; the days, all magnificent, resembled each other like waves; and
it swayed in the horizon, infinite, harmonised, azure, and bathed in
sunshine. But the child began to cough in her cot or Bovary snored
more loudly, and Emma did not fall asleep till morning, when the dawn
whitened the windows, and when little Justin was already in the square
taking down the shutters of the chemist's shop.
She had sent for Monsieur Lheureux, and had said to him--
"I want a cloak--a large lined cloak with a deep collar."
"You are going on a journey?" he asked.
"No; but--never mind. I may count on you, may I not, and quickly?"
He bowed.
"Besides, I shall want," she went on, "a trunk--not too heavy--handy."
"Yes, yes, I understand. About three feet by a foot and a half, as they
are being made just now."
"And a travelling bag."
"Decidedly," thought Lheureux, "there's a row on here."
"And," said Madame Bovary, taking her watch from her belt, "take this;
you can pay yourself out of it."
But the tradesman cried out that she was wrong; they knew one another;
did he doubt her? What childishness!
She insisted, however, on his taking at least the chain, and Lheureux
had already put it in his pocket and was going, when she called him
back.
"You will leave everything at your place. As to the cloak"--she seemed
to be reflecting--"do not bring it either; you can give me the maker's
address, and tell him to have it ready for me."
It was the next month that they were to run away. She was to leave
Yonville as if she was going on some business to Rouen. Rodolphe would
have booked the seats, procured the passports, and even have written to
Paris in order to have the whole mail-coach reserved for them as far as
Marseilles, where they would buy a carriage, and go on thence without
stopping to Genoa. She would take care to send her luggage to Lheureux
whence it would be taken direct to the "Hirondelle," so that no one
would have any suspicion. And in all this there never was any allusion
to the child. Rodolphe avoided speaking of her; perhaps he no longer
thought about it.
He wished to have two more weeks before him to arrange some affairs;
then at the end of a week he wanted two more; then he said he was ill;
next he went on a journey. The month of August passed, and, after all
these delays, they decided that it was to be irrevocably fixed for the
4th September--a Monday.
At length the Saturday before arrived.
Rodolphe came in the evening earlier than usual.
"Everything is ready?" she asked him.
"Yes."
Then they walked round a garden-bed, and went to sit down near the
terrace on the kerb-stone of the wall.
"You are sad," said Emma.
"No; why?"
And yet he looked at her strangely in a tender fashion.
"It is because you are going away?" she went on; "because you are
leaving what is dear to you--your life? Ah! I understand. I have nothing
in the world! you are all to me; so shall I be to you. I will be your
people, your country; I will tend, I will love you!"
"How sweet you are!" he said, seizing her in his arms.
"Really!" she said with a voluptuous laugh. "Do you love me? Swear it
then!"
"Do I love you--love you? I adore you, my love."
The moon, full and purple-coloured, was rising right out of the earth
at the end of the meadow. She rose quickly between the branches of the
poplars, that hid her here and there like a black curtain pierced with
holes. Then she appeared dazzling with whiteness in the empty heavens
that she lit up, and now sailing more slowly along, let fall upon the
river a great stain that broke up into an infinity of stars; and the
silver sheen seemed to writhe through the very depths like a heedless
serpent covered with luminous scales; it also resembled some monster
candelabra all along which sparkled drops of diamonds running together.
The soft night was about them; masses of shadow filled the branches.
Emma, her eyes half closed, breathed in with deep sighs the fresh wind
that was blowing. They did not speak, lost as they were in the rush of
their reverie. The tenderness of the old days came back to their hearts,
full and silent as the flowing river, with the softness of the perfume
of the syringas, and threw across their memories shadows more immense
and more sombre than those of the still willows that lengthened out over
the grass. Often some night-animal, hedgehog or weasel, setting out on
the hunt, disturbed the lovers, or sometimes they heard a ripe peach
falling all alone from the espalier.
"Ah! what a lovely night!" said Rodolphe.
"We shall have others," replied Emma; and, as if speaking to herself:
"Yet, it will be good to travel. And yet, why should my heart be
so heavy? Is it dread of the unknown? The effect of habits left? Or
rather--? No; it is the excess of happiness. How weak I am, am I not?
Forgive me!"
"There is still time!" he cried. "Reflect! perhaps you may repent!"
"Never!" she cried impetuously. And coming closer to him: "What ill
could come to me? There is no desert, no precipice, no ocean I would not
traverse with you. The longer we live together the more it will be like
an embrace, every day closer, more heart to heart. There will be
nothing to trouble us, no cares, no obstacle. We shall be alone, all to
ourselves eternally. Oh, speak! Answer me!"
At regular intervals he answered, "Yes--Yes--" She had passed her hands
through his hair, and she repeated in a childlike voice, despite the big
tears which were falling, "Rodolphe! Rodolphe! Ah! Rodolphe! dear little
Rodolphe!"
Midnight struck.
"Midnight!" said she. "Come, it is to-morrow. One day more!"
He rose to go; and as if the movement he made had been the signal for
their flight, Emma said, suddenly assuming a gay air--
"You have the passports?"
"Yes."
"You are forgetting nothing?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Certainly."
"It is at the Hotel de Provence, is it not, that you will wait for me at
midday?"
He nodded.
"Till to-morrow then!" said Emma in a last caress; and she watched him
go.
He did not turn round. She ran after him, and, leaning over the water's
edge between the bulrushes--
"To-morrow!" she cried.
He was already on the other side of the river and walking fast across
the meadow.
After a few moments Rodolphe stopped; and when he saw her with her white
gown gradually fade away in the shade like a ghost, he was seized with
such a beating of the heart that he leant against a tree lest he should
fall.
"What an imbecile I am!" he said with a fearful oath. "No matter! She
was a pretty mistress!"
And immediately Emma's beauty, with all the pleasures of their love,
came back to him. For a moment he softened; then he rebelled against
her.
"For, after all," he exclaimed, gesticulating, "I can't exile
myself--have a child on my hands."
He was saying these things to give himself firmness.
"And besides, the worry, the expense! Ah! no, no, no, no! a thousand
times no! That would be too stupid."
| Emma's hatred of Charles fuels her love for Rodolphe. She asks Rodolphe to take her away from her present life but he discounts her request as ridiculous and impossible. Emma works Flicit hard to keep the house and her clothes immaculate and Justin takes particular pleasure in spending time at the Bovary's while Flicit cleans Madame Bovary's things. Emma convinces Charles to purchase an expensive wooden leg for Hippolyte that proves too ornate for everyday use so Bovary purchases a modest one for him as well. The stable boy's clacking leg can be heard all over town. Emma establishes a regular relationship with Monsieur Lheureux and begins to order anything that strikes her fancy, including expensive gifts such as a silver-gilt riding crop for Rodolphe. When the bill comes due Emma is at a loss for money and Lheureux learns her secret when he gleans that the riding crop was not for Charles. Emma uses a large payment from one of Charles' patients to pay the merchant who seems disappointed to find that Emma has the funds. Rodolphe begins to tire of Emma and her constant demands for affection. He treats her as a sexual plaything. Over time Emma's passion for Rodolphe eclipses her sense of propriety and the village matrons begin to talk of her scandalous behavior. She is seen smoking a cigarette and wearing a man's tight fitting vest. Charles' mother, who comes for a visit at this time, is particularly alarmed by her daughter-in-law's behavior and the two quarrel violently. Charles begs Emma to apologize and she reluctantly agrees. After the apology she begs Rodolphe to rescue her from her life as a Bovary. He reluctantly consents to take her and Berthe away with him. Emma becomes exceedingly happy and everyone is astonished by the sudden change in her temperament. Charles begins to have hope for the future and imagines the happy life of his child. Emma, however, dreams of the impossibly romantic life she and Rodolphe will lead in some faraway land. She orders a cloak, trunk and overnight bag from Lheureux who surmises that she must be going on a trip. Rodolphe and Emma agree to elope in a month and they make plans for their departure. Rodolphe notices that she does not mention her daughter in the plans. When the time comes Rodolphe stalls for several weeks and finally settles on the fourth of September, a Monday, as the date. The Saturday before he visits her and they reaffirms their love for each other. Shortly after midnight he leaves with the words "Till tomorrow" but on his trip home he reminds himself that it would be too burdensome to follow through with the plan and consoles himself with the thought that she has been a pretty mistress | summary |
No sooner was Rodolphe at home than he sat down quickly at his bureau
under the stag's head that hung as a trophy on the wall. But when he had
the pen between his fingers, he could think of nothing, so that, resting
on his elbows, he began to reflect. Emma seemed to him to have receded
into a far-off past, as if the resolution he had taken had suddenly
placed a distance between them.
To get back something of her, he fetched from the cupboard at the
bedside an old Rheims biscuit-box, in which he usually kept his letters
from women, and from it came an odour of dry dust and withered
roses. First he saw a handkerchief with pale little spots. It was a
handkerchief of hers. Once when they were walking her nose had bled; he
had forgotten it. Near it, chipped at all the corners, was a miniature
given him by Emma: her toilette seemed to him pretentious, and her
languishing look in the worst possible taste. Then, from looking at this
image and recalling the memory of its original, Emma's features little
by little grew confused in his remembrance, as if the living and the
painted face, rubbing one against the other, had effaced each other.
Finally, he read some of her letters; they were full of explanations
relating to their journey, short, technical, and urgent, like business
notes. He wanted to see the long ones again, those of old times. In
order to find them at the bottom of the box, Rodolphe disturbed all the
others, and mechanically began rummaging amidst this mass of papers and
things, finding pell-mell bouquets, garters, a black mask, pins, and
hair--hair! dark and fair, some even, catching in the hinges of the box,
broke when it was opened.
Thus dallying with his souvenirs, he examined the writing and the style
of the letters, as varied as their orthography. They were tender or
jovial, facetious, melancholy; there were some that asked for love,
others that asked for money. A word recalled faces to him, certain
gestures, the sound of a voice; sometimes, however, he remembered
nothing at all.
In fact, these women, rushing at once into his thoughts, cramped each
other and lessened, as reduced to a uniform level of love that equalised
them all. So taking handfuls of the mixed-up letters, he amused himself
for some moments with letting them fall in cascades from his right into
his left hand. At last, bored and weary, Rodolphe took back the box to
the cupboard, saying to himself, "What a lot of rubbish!" Which summed
up his opinion; for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard,
had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that
which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like
them, leave a name carved upon the wall.
"Come," said he, "let's begin."
He wrote--
"Courage, Emma! courage! I would not bring misery into your life."
"After all, that's true," thought Rodolphe. "I am acting in her
interest; I am honest."
"Have you carefully weighed your resolution? Do you know to what an
abyss I was dragging you, poor angel? No, you do not, do you? You were
coming confident and fearless, believing in happiness in the future. Ah!
unhappy that we are--insensate!"
Rodolphe stopped here to think of some good excuse.
"If I told her all my fortune is lost? No! Besides, that would stop
nothing. It would all have to be begun over again later on. As if one
could make women like that listen to reason!" He reflected, then went
on--
"I shall not forget you, oh believe it; and I shall ever have a profound
devotion for you; but some day, sooner or later, this ardour (such is
the fate of human things) would have grown less, no doubt. Lassitude
would have come to us, and who knows if I should not even have had the
atrocious pain of witnessing your remorse, of sharing it myself, since
I should have been its cause? The mere idea of the grief that would come
to you tortures me, Emma. Forget me! Why did I ever know you? Why were
you so beautiful? Is it my fault? O my God! No, no! Accuse only fate."
"That's a word that always tells," he said to himself.
"Ah, if you had been one of those frivolous women that one sees,
certainly I might, through egotism, have tried an experiment, in that
case without danger for you. But that delicious exaltation, at once your
charm and your torment, has prevented you from understanding, adorable
woman that you are, the falseness of our future position. Nor had I
reflected upon this at first, and I rested in the shade of that ideal
happiness as beneath that of the manchineel tree, without foreseeing the
consequences."
"Perhaps she'll think I'm giving it up from avarice. Ah, well! so much
the worse; it must be stopped!"
"The world is cruel, Emma. Wherever we might have gone, it would have
persecuted us. You would have had to put up with indiscreet questions,
calumny, contempt, insult perhaps. Insult to you! Oh! And I, who would
place you on a throne! I who bear with me your memory as a talisman! For
I am going to punish myself by exile for all the ill I have done you.
I am going away. Whither I know not. I am mad. Adieu! Be good always.
Preserve the memory of the unfortunate who has lost you. Teach my name
to your child; let her repeat it in her prayers."
The wicks of the candles flickered. Rodolphe got up to, shut the window,
and when he had sat down again--
"I think it's all right. Ah! and this for fear she should come and hunt
me up."
"I shall be far away when you read these sad lines, for I have wished to
flee as quickly as possible to shun the temptation of seeing you again.
No weakness! I shall return, and perhaps later on we shall talk together
very coldly of our old love. Adieu!"
And there was a last "adieu" divided into two words! "A Dieu!" which he
thought in very excellent taste.
"Now how am I to sign?" he said to himself. "'Yours devotedly?' No!
'Your friend?' Yes, that's it."
"Your friend."
He re-read his letter. He considered it very good.
"Poor little woman!" he thought with emotion. "She'll think me harder
than a rock. There ought to have been some tears on this; but I can't
cry; it isn't my fault." Then, having emptied some water into a glass,
Rodolphe dipped his finger into it, and let a big drop fall on the
paper, that made a pale stain on the ink. Then looking for a seal, he
came upon the one "Amor nel cor."
"That doesn't at all fit in with the circumstances. Pshaw! never mind!"
After which he smoked three pipes and went to bed.
The next day when he was up (at about two o'clock--he had slept late),
Rodolphe had a basket of apricots picked. He put his letter at
the bottom under some vine leaves, and at once ordered Girard, his
ploughman, to take it with care to Madame Bovary. He made use of this
means for corresponding with her, sending according to the season fruits
or game.
"If she asks after me," he said, "you will tell her that I have gone on
a journey. You must give the basket to her herself, into her own hands.
Get along and take care!"
Girard put on his new blouse, knotted his handkerchief round the
apricots, and walking with great heavy steps in his thick iron-bound
galoshes, made his way to Yonville.
Madame Bovary, when he got to her house, was arranging a bundle of linen
on the kitchen-table with Felicite.
"Here," said the ploughboy, "is something for you--from the master."
She was seized with apprehension, and as she sought in her pocket for
some coppers, she looked at the peasant with haggard eyes, while he
himself looked at her with amazement, not understanding how such a
present could so move anyone. At last he went out. Felicite remained.
She could bear it no longer; she ran into the sitting room as if to take
the apricots there, overturned the basket, tore away the leaves, found
the letter, opened it, and, as if some fearful fire were behind her,
Emma flew to her room terrified.
Charles was there; she saw him; he spoke to her; she heard nothing, and
she went on quickly up the stairs, breathless, distraught, dumb, and
ever holding this horrible piece of paper, that crackled between her
fingers like a plate of sheet-iron. On the second floor she stopped
before the attic door, which was closed.
Then she tried to calm herself; she recalled the letter; she must finish
it; she did not dare to. And where? How? She would be seen! "Ah, no!
here," she thought, "I shall be all right."
Emma pushed open the door and went in.
The slates threw straight down a heavy heat that gripped her temples,
stifled her; she dragged herself to the closed garret-window. She drew
back the bolt, and the dazzling light burst in with a leap.
Opposite, beyond the roofs, stretched the open country till it was lost
to sight. Down below, underneath her, the village square was empty; the
stones of the pavement glittered, the weathercocks on the houses were
motionless. At the corner of the street, from a lower storey, rose a
kind of humming with strident modulations. It was Binet turning.
She leant against the embrasure of the window, and reread the letter
with angry sneers. But the more she fixed her attention upon it, the
more confused were her ideas. She saw him again, heard him, encircled
him with her arms, and throbs of her heart, that beat against her breast
like blows of a sledge-hammer, grew faster and faster, with uneven
intervals. She looked about her with the wish that the earth might
crumble into pieces. Why not end it all? What restrained her? She was
free. She advanced, looking at the paving-stones, saying to herself,
"Come! come!"
The luminous ray that came straight up from below drew the weight of
her body towards the abyss. It seemed to her that the ground of the
oscillating square went up the walls and that the floor dipped on
end like a tossing boat. She was right at the edge, almost hanging,
surrounded by vast space. The blue of the heavens suffused her, the air
was whirling in her hollow head; she had but to yield, to let herself
be taken; and the humming of the lathe never ceased, like an angry voice
calling her.
"Emma! Emma!" cried Charles.
She stopped.
"Wherever are you? Come!"
The thought that she had just escaped from death almost made her faint
with terror. She closed her eyes; then she shivered at the touch of a
hand on her sleeve; it was Felicite.
"Master is waiting for you, madame; the soup is on the table."
And she had to go down to sit at table.
She tried to eat. The food choked her. Then she unfolded her napkin as
if to examine the darns, and she really thought of applying herself to
this work, counting the threads in the linen. Suddenly the remembrance
of the letter returned to her. How had she lost it? Where could she find
it? But she felt such weariness of spirit that she could not even invent
a pretext for leaving the table. Then she became a coward; she was
afraid of Charles; he knew all, that was certain! Indeed he pronounced
these words in a strange manner:
"We are not likely to see Monsieur Rodolphe soon again, it seems."
"Who told you?" she said, shuddering.
"Who told me!" he replied, rather astonished at her abrupt tone. "Why,
Girard, whom I met just now at the door of the Cafe Francais. He has
gone on a journey, or is to go."
She gave a sob.
"What surprises you in that? He absents himself like that from time
to time for a change, and, ma foi, I think he's right, when one has a
fortune and is a bachelor. Besides, he has jolly times, has our friend.
He's a bit of a rake. Monsieur Langlois told me--"
He stopped for propriety's sake because the servant came in. She put
back into the basket the apricots scattered on the sideboard. Charles,
without noticing his wife's colour, had them brought to him, took one,
and bit into it.
"Ah! perfect!" said he; "just taste!"
And he handed her the basket, which she put away from her gently.
"Do just smell! What an odour!" he remarked, passing it under her nose
several times.
"I am choking," she cried, leaping up. But by an effort of will the
spasm passed; then--
"It is nothing," she said, "it is nothing! It is nervousness. Sit down
and go on eating." For she dreaded lest he should begin questioning her,
attending to her, that she should not be left alone.
Charles, to obey her, sat down again, and he spat the stones of the
apricots into his hands, afterwards putting them on his plate.
Suddenly a blue tilbury passed across the square at a rapid trot. Emma
uttered a cry and fell back rigid to the ground.
In fact, Rodolphe, after many reflections, had decided to set out for
Rouen. Now, as from La Huchette to Buchy there is no other way than by
Yonville, he had to go through the village, and Emma had recognised him
by the rays of the lanterns, which like lightning flashed through the
twilight.
The chemist, at the tumult which broke out in the house ran thither. The
table with all the plates was upset; sauce, meat, knives, the salt, and
cruet-stand were strewn over the room; Charles was calling for help;
Berthe, scared, was crying; and Felicite, whose hands trembled, was
unlacing her mistress, whose whole body shivered convulsively.
"I'll run to my laboratory for some aromatic vinegar," said the
druggist.
Then as she opened her eyes on smelling the bottle--
"I was sure of it," he remarked; "that would wake any dead person for
you!"
"Speak to us," said Charles; "collect yourself; it is your Charles, who
loves you. Do you know me? See! here is your little girl! Oh, kiss her!"
The child stretched out her arms to her mother to cling to her neck. But
turning away her head, Emma said in a broken voice "No, no! no one!"
She fainted again. They carried her to her bed. She lay there stretched
at full length, her lips apart, her eyelids closed, her hands open,
motionless, and white as a waxen image. Two streams of tears flowed from
her eyes and fell slowly upon the pillow.
Charles, standing up, was at the back of the alcove, and the chemist,
near him, maintained that meditative silence that is becoming on the
serious occasions of life.
"Do not be uneasy," he said, touching his elbow; "I think the paroxysm
is past."
"Yes, she is resting a little now," answered Charles, watching her
sleep. "Poor girl! poor girl! She had gone off now!"
Then Homais asked how the accident had come about. Charles answered that
she had been taken ill suddenly while she was eating some apricots.
"Extraordinary!" continued the chemist. "But it might be that the
apricots had brought on the syncope. Some natures are so sensitive to
certain smells; and it would even be a very fine question to study both
in its pathological and physiological relation. The priests know the
importance of it, they who have introduced aromatics into all their
ceremonies. It is to stupefy the senses and to bring on ecstasies--a
thing, moreover, very easy in persons of the weaker sex, who are more
delicate than the other. Some are cited who faint at the smell of burnt
hartshorn, of new bread--"
"Take care; you'll wake her!" said Bovary in a low voice.
"And not only," the druggist went on, "are human beings subject to such
anomalies, but animals also. Thus you are not ignorant of the singularly
aphrodisiac effect produced by the Nepeta cataria, vulgarly called
catmint, on the feline race; and, on the other hand, to quote an example
whose authenticity I can answer for. Bridaux (one of my old comrades, at
present established in the Rue Malpalu) possesses a dog that falls into
convulsions as soon as you hold out a snuff-box to him. He often even
makes the experiment before his friends at his summer-house at Guillaume
Wood. Would anyone believe that a simple sternutation could produce such
ravages on a quadrupedal organism? It is extremely curious, is it not?"
"Yes," said Charles, who was not listening to him.
"This shows us," went on the other, smiling with benign
self-sufficiency, "the innumerable irregularities of the nervous system.
With regard to madame, she has always seemed to me, I confess, very
susceptible. And so I should by no means recommend to you, my dear
friend, any of those so-called remedies that, under the pretence
of attacking the symptoms, attack the constitution. No; no useless
physicking! Diet, that is all; sedatives, emollients, dulcification.
Then, don't you think that perhaps her imagination should be worked
upon?"
"In what way? How?" said Bovary.
"Ah! that is it. Such is indeed the question. 'That is the question,' as
I lately read in a newspaper."
But Emma, awaking, cried out--
"The letter! the letter!"
They thought she was delirious; and she was by midnight. Brain-fever had
set in.
For forty-three days Charles did not leave her. He gave up all his
patients; he no longer went to bed; he was constantly feeling her pulse,
putting on sinapisms and cold-water compresses. He sent Justin as far as
Neufchatel for ice; the ice melted on the way; he sent him back again.
He called Monsieur Canivet into consultation; he sent for Dr. Lariviere,
his old master, from Rouen; he was in despair. What alarmed him most was
Emma's prostration, for she did not speak, did not listen, did not even
seem to suffer, as if her body and soul were both resting together after
all their troubles.
About the middle of October she could sit up in bed supported by
pillows. Charles wept when he saw her eat her first bread-and-jelly. Her
strength returned to her; she got up for a few hours of an afternoon,
and one day, when she felt better, he tried to take her, leaning on his
arm, for a walk round the garden. The sand of the paths was disappearing
beneath the dead leaves; she walked slowly, dragging along her slippers,
and leaning against Charles's shoulder. She smiled all the time.
They went thus to the bottom of the garden near the terrace. She drew
herself up slowly, shading her eyes with her hand to look. She looked
far off, as far as she could, but on the horizon were only great
bonfires of grass smoking on the hills.
"You will tire yourself, my darling!" said Bovary. And, pushing her
gently to make her go into the arbour, "Sit down on this seat; you'll be
comfortable."
"Oh! no; not there!" she said in a faltering voice.
She was seized with giddiness, and from that evening her illness
recommenced, with a more uncertain character, it is true, and more
complex symptoms. Now she suffered in her heart, then in the chest, the
head, the limbs; she had vomitings, in which Charles thought he saw the
first signs of cancer.
And besides this, the poor fellow was worried about money matters.
| Back at his estate Rodolphe wants to write Emma a letter and for inspiration he begins to search through the box in which he keeps remembrances from his lovers. The copious articles serve only to confuse him and he becomes disgusted with the task. He writes her a letter in which he claims to be breaking off their relationship because their passion would have cooled with time and the shame of her situation would have eventually affected her. He blames fate for and explains that he will be going into exile. He signs the letter "Your Friend" and drops some water on it to substitute for tears. The next day his servant delivers the letter disguised in a fruit basket. Emma immediately senses that something horrible has happened and she ignores Charles who arrives home at that moment. She runs to the hot stuffy attic to read the letter. She opens the window and sunlight fills the room. She looks over the rooftops of the village and hears the monotonous grinding of Binet's lathe. She reads the letter and the world seems to collapse around her. She staggers to the open window and dares herself to throw her body from it and end her miserable life. As she stands there in a swoon she hears Charles calling for her and Flicit, touching her mistress' arm, tells her that the meal is ready. She joins her husband at the table and realizes that she has lost the letter. Charles tells her that he has heard that Monsieur Rodolphe is leaving on a trip and to her horror she sees her lover's carriage pass outside the door. She falls backward onto the floor and is unable to rise. With Homais' help the distraught Charles is able to resuscitate her and they carry her delirious to her bed. For forty-three days Charles remains by the side of his prostrate and silent wife. Finally her strength returns and one day in October he is able to take her for a walk in the garden. She complains of aches and pains. On top of these worries Charles begins to realize he is in financial trouble. | summary |
No sooner was Rodolphe at home than he sat down quickly at his bureau
under the stag's head that hung as a trophy on the wall. But when he had
the pen between his fingers, he could think of nothing, so that, resting
on his elbows, he began to reflect. Emma seemed to him to have receded
into a far-off past, as if the resolution he had taken had suddenly
placed a distance between them.
To get back something of her, he fetched from the cupboard at the
bedside an old Rheims biscuit-box, in which he usually kept his letters
from women, and from it came an odour of dry dust and withered
roses. First he saw a handkerchief with pale little spots. It was a
handkerchief of hers. Once when they were walking her nose had bled; he
had forgotten it. Near it, chipped at all the corners, was a miniature
given him by Emma: her toilette seemed to him pretentious, and her
languishing look in the worst possible taste. Then, from looking at this
image and recalling the memory of its original, Emma's features little
by little grew confused in his remembrance, as if the living and the
painted face, rubbing one against the other, had effaced each other.
Finally, he read some of her letters; they were full of explanations
relating to their journey, short, technical, and urgent, like business
notes. He wanted to see the long ones again, those of old times. In
order to find them at the bottom of the box, Rodolphe disturbed all the
others, and mechanically began rummaging amidst this mass of papers and
things, finding pell-mell bouquets, garters, a black mask, pins, and
hair--hair! dark and fair, some even, catching in the hinges of the box,
broke when it was opened.
Thus dallying with his souvenirs, he examined the writing and the style
of the letters, as varied as their orthography. They were tender or
jovial, facetious, melancholy; there were some that asked for love,
others that asked for money. A word recalled faces to him, certain
gestures, the sound of a voice; sometimes, however, he remembered
nothing at all.
In fact, these women, rushing at once into his thoughts, cramped each
other and lessened, as reduced to a uniform level of love that equalised
them all. So taking handfuls of the mixed-up letters, he amused himself
for some moments with letting them fall in cascades from his right into
his left hand. At last, bored and weary, Rodolphe took back the box to
the cupboard, saying to himself, "What a lot of rubbish!" Which summed
up his opinion; for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard,
had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that
which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like
them, leave a name carved upon the wall.
"Come," said he, "let's begin."
He wrote--
"Courage, Emma! courage! I would not bring misery into your life."
"After all, that's true," thought Rodolphe. "I am acting in her
interest; I am honest."
"Have you carefully weighed your resolution? Do you know to what an
abyss I was dragging you, poor angel? No, you do not, do you? You were
coming confident and fearless, believing in happiness in the future. Ah!
unhappy that we are--insensate!"
Rodolphe stopped here to think of some good excuse.
"If I told her all my fortune is lost? No! Besides, that would stop
nothing. It would all have to be begun over again later on. As if one
could make women like that listen to reason!" He reflected, then went
on--
"I shall not forget you, oh believe it; and I shall ever have a profound
devotion for you; but some day, sooner or later, this ardour (such is
the fate of human things) would have grown less, no doubt. Lassitude
would have come to us, and who knows if I should not even have had the
atrocious pain of witnessing your remorse, of sharing it myself, since
I should have been its cause? The mere idea of the grief that would come
to you tortures me, Emma. Forget me! Why did I ever know you? Why were
you so beautiful? Is it my fault? O my God! No, no! Accuse only fate."
"That's a word that always tells," he said to himself.
"Ah, if you had been one of those frivolous women that one sees,
certainly I might, through egotism, have tried an experiment, in that
case without danger for you. But that delicious exaltation, at once your
charm and your torment, has prevented you from understanding, adorable
woman that you are, the falseness of our future position. Nor had I
reflected upon this at first, and I rested in the shade of that ideal
happiness as beneath that of the manchineel tree, without foreseeing the
consequences."
"Perhaps she'll think I'm giving it up from avarice. Ah, well! so much
the worse; it must be stopped!"
"The world is cruel, Emma. Wherever we might have gone, it would have
persecuted us. You would have had to put up with indiscreet questions,
calumny, contempt, insult perhaps. Insult to you! Oh! And I, who would
place you on a throne! I who bear with me your memory as a talisman! For
I am going to punish myself by exile for all the ill I have done you.
I am going away. Whither I know not. I am mad. Adieu! Be good always.
Preserve the memory of the unfortunate who has lost you. Teach my name
to your child; let her repeat it in her prayers."
The wicks of the candles flickered. Rodolphe got up to, shut the window,
and when he had sat down again--
"I think it's all right. Ah! and this for fear she should come and hunt
me up."
"I shall be far away when you read these sad lines, for I have wished to
flee as quickly as possible to shun the temptation of seeing you again.
No weakness! I shall return, and perhaps later on we shall talk together
very coldly of our old love. Adieu!"
And there was a last "adieu" divided into two words! "A Dieu!" which he
thought in very excellent taste.
"Now how am I to sign?" he said to himself. "'Yours devotedly?' No!
'Your friend?' Yes, that's it."
"Your friend."
He re-read his letter. He considered it very good.
"Poor little woman!" he thought with emotion. "She'll think me harder
than a rock. There ought to have been some tears on this; but I can't
cry; it isn't my fault." Then, having emptied some water into a glass,
Rodolphe dipped his finger into it, and let a big drop fall on the
paper, that made a pale stain on the ink. Then looking for a seal, he
came upon the one "Amor nel cor."
"That doesn't at all fit in with the circumstances. Pshaw! never mind!"
After which he smoked three pipes and went to bed.
The next day when he was up (at about two o'clock--he had slept late),
Rodolphe had a basket of apricots picked. He put his letter at
the bottom under some vine leaves, and at once ordered Girard, his
ploughman, to take it with care to Madame Bovary. He made use of this
means for corresponding with her, sending according to the season fruits
or game.
"If she asks after me," he said, "you will tell her that I have gone on
a journey. You must give the basket to her herself, into her own hands.
Get along and take care!"
Girard put on his new blouse, knotted his handkerchief round the
apricots, and walking with great heavy steps in his thick iron-bound
galoshes, made his way to Yonville.
Madame Bovary, when he got to her house, was arranging a bundle of linen
on the kitchen-table with Felicite.
"Here," said the ploughboy, "is something for you--from the master."
She was seized with apprehension, and as she sought in her pocket for
some coppers, she looked at the peasant with haggard eyes, while he
himself looked at her with amazement, not understanding how such a
present could so move anyone. At last he went out. Felicite remained.
She could bear it no longer; she ran into the sitting room as if to take
the apricots there, overturned the basket, tore away the leaves, found
the letter, opened it, and, as if some fearful fire were behind her,
Emma flew to her room terrified.
Charles was there; she saw him; he spoke to her; she heard nothing, and
she went on quickly up the stairs, breathless, distraught, dumb, and
ever holding this horrible piece of paper, that crackled between her
fingers like a plate of sheet-iron. On the second floor she stopped
before the attic door, which was closed.
Then she tried to calm herself; she recalled the letter; she must finish
it; she did not dare to. And where? How? She would be seen! "Ah, no!
here," she thought, "I shall be all right."
Emma pushed open the door and went in.
The slates threw straight down a heavy heat that gripped her temples,
stifled her; she dragged herself to the closed garret-window. She drew
back the bolt, and the dazzling light burst in with a leap.
Opposite, beyond the roofs, stretched the open country till it was lost
to sight. Down below, underneath her, the village square was empty; the
stones of the pavement glittered, the weathercocks on the houses were
motionless. At the corner of the street, from a lower storey, rose a
kind of humming with strident modulations. It was Binet turning.
She leant against the embrasure of the window, and reread the letter
with angry sneers. But the more she fixed her attention upon it, the
more confused were her ideas. She saw him again, heard him, encircled
him with her arms, and throbs of her heart, that beat against her breast
like blows of a sledge-hammer, grew faster and faster, with uneven
intervals. She looked about her with the wish that the earth might
crumble into pieces. Why not end it all? What restrained her? She was
free. She advanced, looking at the paving-stones, saying to herself,
"Come! come!"
The luminous ray that came straight up from below drew the weight of
her body towards the abyss. It seemed to her that the ground of the
oscillating square went up the walls and that the floor dipped on
end like a tossing boat. She was right at the edge, almost hanging,
surrounded by vast space. The blue of the heavens suffused her, the air
was whirling in her hollow head; she had but to yield, to let herself
be taken; and the humming of the lathe never ceased, like an angry voice
calling her.
"Emma! Emma!" cried Charles.
She stopped.
"Wherever are you? Come!"
The thought that she had just escaped from death almost made her faint
with terror. She closed her eyes; then she shivered at the touch of a
hand on her sleeve; it was Felicite.
"Master is waiting for you, madame; the soup is on the table."
And she had to go down to sit at table.
She tried to eat. The food choked her. Then she unfolded her napkin as
if to examine the darns, and she really thought of applying herself to
this work, counting the threads in the linen. Suddenly the remembrance
of the letter returned to her. How had she lost it? Where could she find
it? But she felt such weariness of spirit that she could not even invent
a pretext for leaving the table. Then she became a coward; she was
afraid of Charles; he knew all, that was certain! Indeed he pronounced
these words in a strange manner:
"We are not likely to see Monsieur Rodolphe soon again, it seems."
"Who told you?" she said, shuddering.
"Who told me!" he replied, rather astonished at her abrupt tone. "Why,
Girard, whom I met just now at the door of the Cafe Francais. He has
gone on a journey, or is to go."
She gave a sob.
"What surprises you in that? He absents himself like that from time
to time for a change, and, ma foi, I think he's right, when one has a
fortune and is a bachelor. Besides, he has jolly times, has our friend.
He's a bit of a rake. Monsieur Langlois told me--"
He stopped for propriety's sake because the servant came in. She put
back into the basket the apricots scattered on the sideboard. Charles,
without noticing his wife's colour, had them brought to him, took one,
and bit into it.
"Ah! perfect!" said he; "just taste!"
And he handed her the basket, which she put away from her gently.
"Do just smell! What an odour!" he remarked, passing it under her nose
several times.
"I am choking," she cried, leaping up. But by an effort of will the
spasm passed; then--
"It is nothing," she said, "it is nothing! It is nervousness. Sit down
and go on eating." For she dreaded lest he should begin questioning her,
attending to her, that she should not be left alone.
Charles, to obey her, sat down again, and he spat the stones of the
apricots into his hands, afterwards putting them on his plate.
Suddenly a blue tilbury passed across the square at a rapid trot. Emma
uttered a cry and fell back rigid to the ground.
In fact, Rodolphe, after many reflections, had decided to set out for
Rouen. Now, as from La Huchette to Buchy there is no other way than by
Yonville, he had to go through the village, and Emma had recognised him
by the rays of the lanterns, which like lightning flashed through the
twilight.
The chemist, at the tumult which broke out in the house ran thither. The
table with all the plates was upset; sauce, meat, knives, the salt, and
cruet-stand were strewn over the room; Charles was calling for help;
Berthe, scared, was crying; and Felicite, whose hands trembled, was
unlacing her mistress, whose whole body shivered convulsively.
"I'll run to my laboratory for some aromatic vinegar," said the
druggist.
Then as she opened her eyes on smelling the bottle--
"I was sure of it," he remarked; "that would wake any dead person for
you!"
"Speak to us," said Charles; "collect yourself; it is your Charles, who
loves you. Do you know me? See! here is your little girl! Oh, kiss her!"
The child stretched out her arms to her mother to cling to her neck. But
turning away her head, Emma said in a broken voice "No, no! no one!"
She fainted again. They carried her to her bed. She lay there stretched
at full length, her lips apart, her eyelids closed, her hands open,
motionless, and white as a waxen image. Two streams of tears flowed from
her eyes and fell slowly upon the pillow.
Charles, standing up, was at the back of the alcove, and the chemist,
near him, maintained that meditative silence that is becoming on the
serious occasions of life.
"Do not be uneasy," he said, touching his elbow; "I think the paroxysm
is past."
"Yes, she is resting a little now," answered Charles, watching her
sleep. "Poor girl! poor girl! She had gone off now!"
Then Homais asked how the accident had come about. Charles answered that
she had been taken ill suddenly while she was eating some apricots.
"Extraordinary!" continued the chemist. "But it might be that the
apricots had brought on the syncope. Some natures are so sensitive to
certain smells; and it would even be a very fine question to study both
in its pathological and physiological relation. The priests know the
importance of it, they who have introduced aromatics into all their
ceremonies. It is to stupefy the senses and to bring on ecstasies--a
thing, moreover, very easy in persons of the weaker sex, who are more
delicate than the other. Some are cited who faint at the smell of burnt
hartshorn, of new bread--"
"Take care; you'll wake her!" said Bovary in a low voice.
"And not only," the druggist went on, "are human beings subject to such
anomalies, but animals also. Thus you are not ignorant of the singularly
aphrodisiac effect produced by the Nepeta cataria, vulgarly called
catmint, on the feline race; and, on the other hand, to quote an example
whose authenticity I can answer for. Bridaux (one of my old comrades, at
present established in the Rue Malpalu) possesses a dog that falls into
convulsions as soon as you hold out a snuff-box to him. He often even
makes the experiment before his friends at his summer-house at Guillaume
Wood. Would anyone believe that a simple sternutation could produce such
ravages on a quadrupedal organism? It is extremely curious, is it not?"
"Yes," said Charles, who was not listening to him.
"This shows us," went on the other, smiling with benign
self-sufficiency, "the innumerable irregularities of the nervous system.
With regard to madame, she has always seemed to me, I confess, very
susceptible. And so I should by no means recommend to you, my dear
friend, any of those so-called remedies that, under the pretence
of attacking the symptoms, attack the constitution. No; no useless
physicking! Diet, that is all; sedatives, emollients, dulcification.
Then, don't you think that perhaps her imagination should be worked
upon?"
"In what way? How?" said Bovary.
"Ah! that is it. Such is indeed the question. 'That is the question,' as
I lately read in a newspaper."
But Emma, awaking, cried out--
"The letter! the letter!"
They thought she was delirious; and she was by midnight. Brain-fever had
set in.
For forty-three days Charles did not leave her. He gave up all his
patients; he no longer went to bed; he was constantly feeling her pulse,
putting on sinapisms and cold-water compresses. He sent Justin as far as
Neufchatel for ice; the ice melted on the way; he sent him back again.
He called Monsieur Canivet into consultation; he sent for Dr. Lariviere,
his old master, from Rouen; he was in despair. What alarmed him most was
Emma's prostration, for she did not speak, did not listen, did not even
seem to suffer, as if her body and soul were both resting together after
all their troubles.
About the middle of October she could sit up in bed supported by
pillows. Charles wept when he saw her eat her first bread-and-jelly. Her
strength returned to her; she got up for a few hours of an afternoon,
and one day, when she felt better, he tried to take her, leaning on his
arm, for a walk round the garden. The sand of the paths was disappearing
beneath the dead leaves; she walked slowly, dragging along her slippers,
and leaning against Charles's shoulder. She smiled all the time.
They went thus to the bottom of the garden near the terrace. She drew
herself up slowly, shading her eyes with her hand to look. She looked
far off, as far as she could, but on the horizon were only great
bonfires of grass smoking on the hills.
"You will tire yourself, my darling!" said Bovary. And, pushing her
gently to make her go into the arbour, "Sit down on this seat; you'll be
comfortable."
"Oh! no; not there!" she said in a faltering voice.
She was seized with giddiness, and from that evening her illness
recommenced, with a more uncertain character, it is true, and more
complex symptoms. Now she suffered in her heart, then in the chest, the
head, the limbs; she had vomitings, in which Charles thought he saw the
first signs of cancer.
And besides this, the poor fellow was worried about money matters.
| Emma loses all respect for Charles after the operation on Hippolyte's leg fails. Curiously, Charles performs the operation correctly but the procedure itself is flawed and those who were in favor of performing it - namely Homais and Emma - do not suffer as much as Charles. Rather, Emma's renewed hatred of Charles fuels her passion for Rodolphe and causes her to spend increasingly large amounts of her husband's money. As her passion increases Rodolphe's wanes. Although he has played the part of a romantic in order to seduce Emma, Rodolphe is ultimately a bourgeois realist and will not be burdened by the necessity of fleeing with his mistress and her child. The force of his power over her becomes evident when she is tempted to take her own life following his betrayal. The sound of Binet's lathe permeates this scene and though Emma is called back from the brink by the rather mundane domestic demand to dine her body cannot withstand the force of her emotions and she becomes physically ill and catatonic. Emma is unable to appreciate the depth of her husband's love, evidenced by his devotion during her illness, because it does not cohere with the violent and spontaneous emotions found in her novels | analysis |
To begin with, he did not know how he could pay Monsieur Homais for all
the physic supplied by him, and though, as a medical man, he was not
obliged to pay for it, he nevertheless blushed a little at such an
obligation. Then the expenses of the household, now that the servant was
mistress, became terrible. Bills rained in upon the house; the tradesmen
grumbled; Monsieur Lheureux especially harassed him. In fact, at
the height of Emma's illness, the latter, taking advantage of the
circumstances to make his bill larger, had hurriedly brought the cloak,
the travelling-bag, two trunks instead of one, and a number of other
things. It was very well for Charles to say he did not want them. The
tradesman answered arrogantly that these articles had been ordered, and
that he would not take them back; besides, it would vex madame in her
convalescence; the doctor had better think it over; in short, he was
resolved to sue him rather than give up his rights and take back his
goods. Charles subsequently ordered them to be sent back to the shop.
Felicite forgot; he had other things to attend to; then thought no more
about them. Monsieur Lheureux returned to the charge, and, by turns
threatening and whining, so managed that Bovary ended by signing a
bill at six months. But hardly had he signed this bill than a bold idea
occurred to him: it was to borrow a thousand francs from Lheureux.
So, with an embarrassed air, he asked if it were possible to get them,
adding that it would be for a year, at any interest he wished. Lheureux
ran off to his shop, brought back the money, and dictated another bill,
by which Bovary undertook to pay to his order on the 1st of September
next the sum of one thousand and seventy francs, which, with the hundred
and eighty already agreed to, made just twelve hundred and fifty, thus
lending at six per cent in addition to one-fourth for commission: and
the things bringing him in a good third at the least, this ought in
twelve months to give him a profit of a hundred and thirty francs. He
hoped that the business would not stop there; that the bills would not
be paid; that they would be renewed; and that his poor little money,
having thriven at the doctor's as at a hospital, would come back to him
one day considerably more plump, and fat enough to burst his bag.
Everything, moreover, succeeded with him. He was adjudicator for a
supply of cider to the hospital at Neufchatel; Monsieur Guillaumin
promised him some shares in the turf-pits of Gaumesnil, and he dreamt of
establishing a new diligence service between Arcueil and Rouen, which
no doubt would not be long in ruining the ramshackle van of the "Lion
d'Or," and that, travelling faster, at a cheaper rate, and carrying more
luggage, would thus put into his hands the whole commerce of Yonville.
Charles several times asked himself by what means he should next year be
able to pay back so much money. He reflected, imagined expedients, such
as applying to his father or selling something. But his father would be
deaf, and he--he had nothing to sell. Then he foresaw such worries that
he quickly dismissed so disagreeable a subject of meditation from
his mind. He reproached himself with forgetting Emma, as if, all his
thoughts belonging to this woman, it was robbing her of something not to
be constantly thinking of her.
The winter was severe, Madame Bovary's convalescence slow. When it
was fine they wheeled her arm-chair to the window that overlooked the
square, for she now had an antipathy to the garden, and the blinds on
that side were always down. She wished the horse to be sold; what she
formerly liked now displeased her. All her ideas seemed to be limited to
the care of herself. She stayed in bed taking little meals, rang for the
servant to inquire about her gruel or to chat with her. The snow on
the market-roof threw a white, still light into the room; then the rain
began to fall; and Emma waited daily with a mind full of eagerness for
the inevitable return of some trifling events which nevertheless had no
relation to her. The most important was the arrival of the "Hirondelle"
in the evening. Then the landlady shouted out, and other voices
answered, while Hippolyte's lantern, as he fetched the boxes from the
boot, was like a star in the darkness. At mid-day Charles came in;
then he went out again; next she took some beef-tea, and towards five
o'clock, as the day drew in, the children coming back from school,
dragging their wooden shoes along the pavement, knocked the clapper of
the shutters with their rulers one after the other.
It was at this hour that Monsieur Bournisien came to see her. He
inquired after her health, gave her news, exhorted her to religion, in a
coaxing little prattle that was not without its charm. The mere thought
of his cassock comforted her.
One day, when at the height of her illness, she had thought herself
dying, and had asked for the communion; and, while they were making the
preparations in her room for the sacrament, while they were turning the
night table covered with syrups into an altar, and while Felicite was
strewing dahlia flowers on the floor, Emma felt some power passing
over her that freed her from her pains, from all perception, from
all feeling. Her body, relieved, no longer thought; another life was
beginning; it seemed to her that her being, mounting toward God, would
be annihilated in that love like a burning incense that melts into
vapour. The bed-clothes were sprinkled with holy water, the priest drew
from the holy pyx the white wafer; and it was fainting with a celestial
joy that she put out her lips to accept the body of the Saviour
presented to her. The curtains of the alcove floated gently round her
like clouds, and the rays of the two tapers burning on the night-table
seemed to shine like dazzling halos. Then she let her head fall back,
fancying she heard in space the music of seraphic harps, and perceived
in an azure sky, on a golden throne in the midst of saints holding green
palms, God the Father, resplendent with majesty, who with a sign sent to
earth angels with wings of fire to carry her away in their arms.
This splendid vision dwelt in her memory as the most beautiful thing
that it was possible to dream, so that now she strove to recall her
sensation. That still lasted, however, but in a less exclusive fashion
and with a deeper sweetness. Her soul, tortured by pride, at length
found rest in Christian humility, and, tasting the joy of weakness, she
saw within herself the destruction of her will, that must have left a
wide entrance for the inroads of heavenly grace. There existed, then,
in the place of happiness, still greater joys--another love beyond all
loves, without pause and without end, one that would grow eternally! She
saw amid the illusions of her hope a state of purity floating above the
earth mingling with heaven, to which she aspired. She wanted to become
a saint. She bought chaplets and wore amulets; she wished to have in her
room, by the side of her bed, a reliquary set in emeralds that she might
kiss it every evening.
The cure marvelled at this humour, although Emma's religion, he thought,
might, from its fervour, end by touching on heresy, extravagance. But
not being much versed in these matters, as soon as they went beyond a
certain limit he wrote to Monsieur Boulard, bookseller to Monsignor,
to send him "something good for a lady who was very clever." The
bookseller, with as much indifference as if he had been sending off
hardware to niggers, packed up, pellmell, everything that was then the
fashion in the pious book trade. There were little manuals in questions
and answers, pamphlets of aggressive tone after the manner of Monsieur
de Maistre, and certain novels in rose-coloured bindings and with
a honied style, manufactured by troubadour seminarists or penitent
blue-stockings. There were the "Think of it; the Man of the World at
Mary's Feet, by Monsieur de ***, decorated with many Orders"; "The
Errors of Voltaire, for the Use of the Young," etc.
Madame Bovary's mind was not yet sufficiently clear to apply herself
seriously to anything; moreover, she began this reading in too much
hurry. She grew provoked at the doctrines of religion; the arrogance
of the polemic writings displeased her by their inveteracy in attacking
people she did not know; and the secular stories, relieved with
religion, seemed to her written in such ignorance of the world, that
they insensibly estranged her from the truths for whose proof she was
looking. Nevertheless, she persevered; and when the volume slipped
from her hands, she fancied herself seized with the finest Catholic
melancholy that an ethereal soul could conceive.
As for the memory of Rodolphe, she had thrust it back to the bottom of
her heart, and it remained there more solemn and more motionless than
a king's mummy in a catacomb. An exhalation escaped from this embalmed
love, that, penetrating through everything, perfumed with tenderness the
immaculate atmosphere in which she longed to live. When she knelt on her
Gothic prie-Dieu, she addressed to the Lord the same suave words that
she had murmured formerly to her lover in the outpourings of adultery.
It was to make faith come; but no delights descended from the heavens,
and she arose with tired limbs and with a vague feeling of a gigantic
dupery.
This searching after faith, she thought, was only one merit the more,
and in the pride of her devoutness Emma compared herself to those grand
ladies of long ago whose glory she had dreamed of over a portrait of La
Valliere, and who, trailing with so much majesty the lace-trimmed trains
of their long gowns, retired into solitudes to shed at the feet of
Christ all the tears of hearts that life had wounded.
Then she gave herself up to excessive charity. She sewed clothes for the
poor, she sent wood to women in childbed; and Charles one day, on coming
home, found three good-for-nothings in the kitchen seated at the table
eating soup. She had her little girl, whom during her illness her
husband had sent back to the nurse, brought home. She wanted to teach
her to read; even when Berthe cried, she was not vexed. She had made
up her mind to resignation, to universal indulgence. Her language about
everything was full of ideal expressions. She said to her child, "Is
your stomach-ache better, my angel?"
Madame Bovary senior found nothing to censure except perhaps this mania
of knitting jackets for orphans instead of mending her own house-linen;
but, harassed with domestic quarrels, the good woman took pleasure in
this quiet house, and she even stayed there till after Easter, to escape
the sarcasms of old Bovary, who never failed on Good Friday to order
chitterlings.
Besides the companionship of her mother-in-law, who strengthened her a
little by the rectitude of her judgment and her grave ways, Emma almost
every day had other visitors. These were Madame Langlois, Madame Caron,
Madame Dubreuil, Madame Tuvache, and regularly from two to five o'clock
the excellent Madame Homais, who, for her part, had never believed any
of the tittle-tattle about her neighbour. The little Homais also came to
see her; Justin accompanied them. He went up with them to her bedroom,
and remained standing near the door, motionless and mute. Often even
Madame Bovary; taking no heed of him, began her toilette. She began by
taking out her comb, shaking her head with a quick movement, and when
he for the first time saw all this mass of hair that fell to her knees
unrolling in black ringlets, it was to him, poor child! like a sudden
entrance into something new and strange, whose splendour terrified him.
Emma, no doubt, did not notice his silent attentions or his timidity.
She had no suspicion that the love vanished from her life was there,
palpitating by her side, beneath that coarse holland shirt, in that
youthful heart open to the emanations of her beauty. Besides, she
now enveloped all things with such indifference, she had words so
affectionate with looks so haughty, such contradictory ways, that one
could no longer distinguish egotism from charity, or corruption from
virtue. One evening, for example, she was angry with the servant, who
had asked to go out, and stammered as she tried to find some pretext.
Then suddenly--
"So you love him?" she said.
And without waiting for any answer from Felicite, who was blushing, she
added, "There! run along; enjoy yourself!"
In the beginning of spring she had the garden turned up from end to end,
despite Bovary's remonstrances. However, he was glad to see her at last
manifest a wish of any kind. As she grew stronger she displayed more
wilfulness. First, she found occasion to expel Mere Rollet, the nurse,
who during her convalescence had contracted the habit of coming too
often to the kitchen with her two nurslings and her boarder, better
off for teeth than a cannibal. Then she got rid of the Homais family,
successively dismissed all the other visitors, and even frequented
church less assiduously, to the great approval of the druggist, who said
to her in a friendly way--
"You were going in a bit for the cassock!"
As formerly, Monsieur Bournisien dropped in every day when he came out
after catechism class. He preferred staying out of doors to taking the
air "in the grove," as he called the arbour. This was the time when
Charles came home. They were hot; some sweet cider was brought out, and
they drank together to madame's complete restoration.
Binet was there; that is to say, a little lower down against the terrace
wall, fishing for crayfish. Bovary invited him to have a drink, and he
thoroughly understood the uncorking of the stone bottles.
"You must," he said, throwing a satisfied glance all round him, even to
the very extremity of the landscape, "hold the bottle perpendicularly on
the table, and after the strings are cut, press up the cork with
little thrusts, gently, gently, as indeed they do seltzer-water at
restaurants."
But during his demonstration the cider often spurted right into their
faces, and then the ecclesiastic, with a thick laugh, never missed this
joke--
"Its goodness strikes the eye!"
He was, in fact, a good fellow and one day he was not even scandalised
at the chemist, who advised Charles to give madame some distraction
by taking her to the theatre at Rouen to hear the illustrious tenor,
Lagardy. Homais, surprised at this silence, wanted to know his opinion,
and the priest declared that he considered music less dangerous for
morals than literature.
But the chemist took up the defence of letters. The theatre, he
contended, served for railing at prejudices, and, beneath a mask of
pleasure, taught virtue.
"'Castigat ridendo mores,'* Monsieur Bournisien! Thus consider the
greater part of Voltaire's tragedies; they are cleverly strewn with
philosophical reflections, that made them a vast school of morals and
diplomacy for the people."
*It corrects customs through laughter.
"I," said Binet, "once saw a piece called the 'Gamin de Paris,' in which
there was the character of an old general that is really hit off to a
T. He sets down a young swell who had seduced a working girl, who at the
ending--"
"Certainly," continued Homais, "there is bad literature as there is bad
pharmacy, but to condemn in a lump the most important of the fine arts
seems to me a stupidity, a Gothic idea, worthy of the abominable times
that imprisoned Galileo."
"I know very well," objected the cure, "that there are good works,
good authors. However, if it were only those persons of different sexes
united in a bewitching apartment, decorated rouge, those lights, those
effeminate voices, all this must, in the long-run, engender a
certain mental libertinage, give rise to immodest thoughts and impure
temptations. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of all the Fathers.
Finally," he added, suddenly assuming a mystic tone of voice while
he rolled a pinch of snuff between his fingers, "if the Church has
condemned the theatre, she must be right; we must submit to her
decrees."
"Why," asked the druggist, "should she excommunicate actors? For
formerly they openly took part in religious ceremonies. Yes, in the
middle of the chancel they acted; they performed a kind of farce called
'Mysteries,' which often offended against the laws of decency."
The ecclesiastic contented himself with uttering a groan, and the
chemist went on--
"It's like it is in the Bible; there there are, you know, more than one
piquant detail, matters really libidinous!"
And on a gesture of irritation from Monsieur Bournisien--
"Ah! you'll admit that it is not a book to place in the hands of a young
girl, and I should be sorry if Athalie--"
"But it is the Protestants, and not we," cried the other impatiently,
"who recommend the Bible."
"No matter," said Homais. "I am surprised that in our days, in this
century of enlightenment, anyone should still persist in proscribing an
intellectual relaxation that is inoffensive, moralising, and sometimes
even hygienic; is it not, doctor?"
"No doubt," replied the doctor carelessly, either because, sharing the
same ideas, he wished to offend no one, or else because he had not any
ideas.
The conversation seemed at an end when the chemist thought fit to shoot
a Parthian arrow.
"I've known priests who put on ordinary clothes to go and see dancers
kicking about."
"Come, come!" said the cure.
"Ah! I've known some!" And separating the words of his sentence, Homais
repeated, "I--have--known--some!"
"Well, they were wrong," said Bournisien, resigned to anything.
"By Jove! they go in for more than that," exclaimed the druggist.
"Sir!" replied the ecclesiastic, with such angry eyes that the druggist
was intimidated by them.
"I only mean to say," he replied in less brutal a tone, "that toleration
is the surest way to draw people to religion."
"That is true! that is true!" agreed the good fellow, sitting down again
on his chair. But he stayed only a few moments.
Then, as soon as he had gone, Monsieur Homais said to the doctor--
"That's what I call a cock-fight. I beat him, did you see, in a
way!--Now take my advice. Take madame to the theatre, if it were only
for once in your life, to enrage one of these ravens, hang it! If anyone
could take my place, I would accompany you myself. Be quick about it.
Lagardy is only going to give one performance; he's engaged to go to
England at a high salary. From what I hear, he's a regular dog; he's
rolling in money; he's taking three mistresses and a cook along with
him. All these great artists burn the candle at both ends; they require
a dissolute life, that suits the imagination to some extent. But they
die at the hospital, because they haven't the sense when young to lay
by. Well, a pleasant dinner! Goodbye till to-morrow."
The idea of the theatre quickly germinated in Bovary's head, for he at
once communicated it to his wife, who at first refused, alleging the
fatigue, the worry, the expense; but, for a wonder, Charles did not give
in, so sure was he that this recreation would be good for her. He saw
nothing to prevent it: his mother had sent them three hundred francs
which he had no longer expected; the current debts were not very large,
and the falling in of Lheureux's bills was still so far off that
there was no need to think about them. Besides, imagining that she
was refusing from delicacy, he insisted the more; so that by dint of
worrying her she at last made up her mind, and the next day at eight
o'clock they set out in the "Hirondelle."
The druggist, whom nothing whatever kept at Yonville, but who thought
himself bound not to budge from it, sighed as he saw them go.
"Well, a pleasant journey!" he said to them; "happy mortals that you
are!"
Then addressing himself to Emma, who was wearing a blue silk gown with
four flounces--
"You are as lovely as a Venus. You'll cut a figure at Rouen."
The diligence stopped at the "Croix-Rouge" in the Place Beauvoisine. It
was the inn that is in every provincial faubourg, with large stables
and small bedrooms, where one sees in the middle of the court chickens
pilfering the oats under the muddy gigs of the commercial travellers--a
good old house, with worm-eaten balconies that creak in the wind on
winter nights, always full of people, noise, and feeding, whose black
tables are sticky with coffee and brandy, the thick windows made yellow
by the flies, the damp napkins stained with cheap wine, and that always
smells of the village, like ploughboys dressed in Sundayclothes, has
a cafe on the street, and towards the countryside a kitchen-garden.
Charles at once set out. He muddled up the stage-boxes with the gallery,
the pit with the boxes; asked for explanations, did not understand them;
was sent from the box-office to the acting-manager; came back to the
inn, returned to the theatre, and thus several times traversed the whole
length of the town from the theatre to the boulevard.
Madame Bovary bought a bonnet, gloves, and a bouquet. The doctor was
much afraid of missing the beginning, and, without having had time to
swallow a plate of soup, they presented themselves at the doors of the
theatre, which were still closed.
| Not only has Charles been neglecting his practice but he is deeply in debt to Monsieur Homais for Emma's medicine. Also, Flicit in the role of mistress of the house has been overspending. Monsieur Lheureux is especially insistent upon being paid and at the height of Emma's illness delivers the cloak and bags she ordered. Eventually he convinces Charles to sign a six-month promissory note which he compounds by loaning him one thousand francs at six percent interest due in one year. Lheureux's fortunes are on the rise during this period and he looks forward to sapping the Bovary's for every franc he can. Although Charles despairs of raising so large a sum in one year's time he spends the severe winter doting on his sick wife. Emma's recovers slowly and settles into a monotonous routine. During the peak of her illness she sent for the priest for Communion and experienced a splendid vision of God. She became enchanted with religious symbols and wished for an emerald-studded reliquary. The abb Bournisien is pleased by her new religiosity but fears the extent of her passion borders on heresy. He sends for an assortment of books including some religious novels which Emma reads but finds lacking in any connection to the passions of the real world. She comes away convinced that "hers was the most exquisite Catholic melancholy that had ever entered an ethereal soul. She buries Rodolphe's memory deep inside her though it affects everything she does particularly her religious ardor. She becomes extravagantly charitable. Charles' mother arrives for an extended visit and is pleased at the changes in her daughter-in-law. Emma has many other visitors including the Homais children and Justin who, watching her comb her hair one day is overcome by new and marvelous feelings. That spring the abb stops by every afternoon for cider with Charles and sometimes Binet in the arbor. One day Homais proposes that Charles take Emma to the opera in Rouen to hear the famous singer Lagardy. To the pharmacist's surprise the abb does not object and this sparks a heated debate as to whether music or drama is considered more sinful by the church. Bovary is taken with the idea of the opera and convinces Emma that they should go. So on the appointed day they go to Rouen where Charles has arranged for a cheap hotel. He immediately sets out to procure the tickets, becomes confused by the arrangement of the seats and finally is so nervous about missing the beginning that when they arrive the theater doors are not yet open | summary |
The crowd was waiting against the wall, symmetrically enclosed between
the balustrades. At the corner of the neighbouring streets huge bills
repeated in quaint letters "Lucie de Lammermoor-Lagardy-Opera-etc." The
weather was fine, the people were hot, perspiration trickled amid the
curls, and handkerchiefs taken from pockets were mopping red foreheads;
and now and then a warm wind that blew from the river gently stirred the
border of the tick awnings hanging from the doors of the public-houses.
A little lower down, however, one was refreshed by a current of icy air
that smelt of tallow, leather, and oil. This was an exhalation from
the Rue des Charrettes, full of large black warehouses where they made
casks.
For fear of seeming ridiculous, Emma before going in wished to have a
little stroll in the harbour, and Bovary prudently kept his tickets in
his hand, in the pocket of his trousers, which he pressed against his
stomach.
Her heart began to beat as soon as she reached the vestibule. She
involuntarily smiled with vanity on seeing the crowd rushing to the
right by the other corridor while she went up the staircase to the
reserved seats. She was as pleased as a child to push with her finger
the large tapestried door. She breathed in with all her might the
dusty smell of the lobbies, and when she was seated in her box she bent
forward with the air of a duchess.
The theatre was beginning to fill; opera-glasses were taken from their
cases, and the subscribers, catching sight of one another, were bowing.
They came to seek relaxation in the fine arts after the anxieties of
business; but "business" was not forgotten; they still talked cottons,
spirits of wine, or indigo. The heads of old men were to be seen,
inexpressive and peaceful, with their hair and complexions looking like
silver medals tarnished by steam of lead. The young beaux were strutting
about in the pit, showing in the opening of their waistcoats their pink
or applegreen cravats, and Madame Bovary from above admired them leaning
on their canes with golden knobs in the open palm of their yellow
gloves.
Now the lights of the orchestra were lit, the lustre, let down from the
ceiling, throwing by the glimmering of its facets a sudden gaiety over
the theatre; then the musicians came in one after the other; and
first there was the protracted hubbub of the basses grumbling, violins
squeaking, cornets trumpeting, flutes and flageolets fifing. But three
knocks were heard on the stage, a rolling of drums began, the brass
instruments played some chords, and the curtain rising, discovered a
country-scene.
It was the cross-roads of a wood, with a fountain shaded by an oak to
the left. Peasants and lords with plaids on their shoulders were singing
a hunting-song together; then a captain suddenly came on, who evoked
the spirit of evil by lifting both his arms to heaven. Another appeared;
they went away, and the hunters started afresh. She felt herself
transported to the reading of her youth, into the midst of Walter Scott.
She seemed to hear through the mist the sound of the Scotch bagpipes
re-echoing over the heather. Then her remembrance of the novel helping
her to understand the libretto, she followed the story phrase by phrase,
while vague thoughts that came back to her dispersed at once again with
the bursts of music. She gave herself up to the lullaby of the melodies,
and felt all her being vibrate as if the violin bows were drawn over her
nerves. She had not eyes enough to look at the costumes, the scenery,
the actors, the painted trees that shook when anyone walked, and the
velvet caps, cloaks, swords--all those imaginary things that floated
amid the harmony as in the atmosphere of another world. But a young
woman stepped forward, throwing a purse to a squire in green. She was
left alone, and the flute was heard like the murmur of a fountain or the
warbling of birds. Lucie attacked her cavatina in G major bravely. She
plained of love; she longed for wings. Emma, too, fleeing from life,
would have liked to fly away in an embrace. Suddenly Edgar-Lagardy
appeared.
He had that splendid pallor that gives something of the majesty of
marble to the ardent races of the South. His vigorous form was tightly
clad in a brown-coloured doublet; a small chiselled poniard hung against
his left thigh, and he cast round laughing looks showing his white
teeth. They said that a Polish princess having heard him sing one night
on the beach at Biarritz, where he mended boats, had fallen in love
with him. She had ruined herself for him. He had deserted her for
other women, and this sentimental celebrity did not fail to enhance his
artistic reputation. The diplomatic mummer took care always to slip into
his advertisements some poetic phrase on the fascination of his
person and the susceptibility of his soul. A fine organ, imperturbable
coolness, more temperament than intelligence, more power of emphasis
than of real singing, made up the charm of this admirable charlatan
nature, in which there was something of the hairdresser and the
toreador.
From the first scene he evoked enthusiasm. He pressed Lucy in his arms,
he left her, he came back, he seemed desperate; he had outbursts of
rage, then elegiac gurglings of infinite sweetness, and the notes
escaped from his bare neck full of sobs and kisses. Emma leant forward
to see him, clutching the velvet of the box with her nails. She was
filling her heart with these melodious lamentations that were drawn
out to the accompaniment of the double-basses, like the cries of the
drowning in the tumult of a tempest. She recognised all the intoxication
and the anguish that had almost killed her. The voice of a prima donna
seemed to her to be but echoes of her conscience, and this illusion that
charmed her as some very thing of her own life. But no one on earth had
loved her with such love. He had not wept like Edgar that last moonlit
night when they said, "To-morrow! to-morrow!" The theatre rang with
cheers; they recommenced the entire movement; the lovers spoke of
the flowers on their tomb, of vows, exile, fate, hopes; and when they
uttered the final adieu, Emma gave a sharp cry that mingled with the
vibrations of the last chords.
"But why," asked Bovary, "does that gentleman persecute her?"
"No, no!" she answered; "he is her lover!"
"Yet he vows vengeance on her family, while the other one who came on
before said, 'I love Lucie and she loves me!' Besides, he went off with
her father arm in arm. For he certainly is her father, isn't he--the
ugly little man with a cock's feather in his hat?"
Despite Emma's explanations, as soon as the recitative duet began
in which Gilbert lays bare his abominable machinations to his master
Ashton, Charles, seeing the false troth-ring that is to deceive Lucie,
thought it was a love-gift sent by Edgar. He confessed, moreover, that
he did not understand the story because of the music, which interfered
very much with the words.
"What does it matter?" said Emma. "Do be quiet!"
"Yes, but you know," he went on, leaning against her shoulder, "I like
to understand things."
"Be quiet! be quiet!" she cried impatiently.
Lucie advanced, half supported by her women, a wreath of orange blossoms
in her hair, and paler than the white satin of her gown. Emma dreamed
of her marriage day; she saw herself at home again amid the corn in the
little path as they walked to the church. Oh, why had not she, like
this woman, resisted, implored? She, on the contrary, had been joyous,
without seeing the abyss into which she was throwing herself. Ah! if
in the freshness of her beauty, before the soiling of marriage and the
disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon some
great, strong heart, then virtue, tenderness, voluptuousness, and duty
blending, she would never have fallen from so high a happiness. But that
happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire.
She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated. So,
striving to divert her thoughts, Emma determined now to see in this
reproduction of her sorrows only a plastic fantasy, well enough to
please the eye, and she even smiled internally with disdainful pity when
at the back of the stage under the velvet hangings a man appeared in a
black cloak.
His large Spanish hat fell at a gesture he made, and immediately the
instruments and the singers began the sextet. Edgar, flashing with fury,
dominated all the others with his clearer voice; Ashton hurled homicidal
provocations at him in deep notes; Lucie uttered her shrill plaint,
Arthur at one side, his modulated tones in the middle register, and the
bass of the minister pealed forth like an organ, while the voices of the
women repeating his words took them up in chorus delightfully. They were
all in a row gesticulating, and anger, vengeance, jealousy, terror, and
stupefaction breathed forth at once from their half-opened mouths. The
outraged lover brandished his naked sword; his guipure ruffle rose with
jerks to the movements of his chest, and he walked from right to left
with long strides, clanking against the boards the silver-gilt spurs of
his soft boots, widening out at the ankles. He, she thought must have an
inexhaustible love to lavish it upon the crowd with such effusion.
All her small fault-findings faded before the poetry of the part
that absorbed her; and, drawn towards this man by the illusion of the
character, she tried to imagine to herself his life--that life resonant,
extraordinary, splendid, and that might have been hers if fate had
willed it. They would have known one another, loved one another. With
him, through all the kingdoms of Europe she would have travelled from
capital to capital, sharing his fatigues and his pride, picking up the
flowers thrown to him, herself embroidering his costumes. Then each
evening, at the back of a box, behind the golden trellis-work she would
have drunk in eagerly the expansions of this soul that would have sung
for her alone; from the stage, even as he acted, he would have looked
at her. But the mad idea seized her that he was looking at her; it was
certain. She longed to run to his arms, to take refuge in his strength,
as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry out,
"Take me away! carry me with you! let us go! Thine, thine! all my ardour
and all my dreams!"
The curtain fell.
The smell of the gas mingled with that of the breaths, the waving of the
fans, made the air more suffocating. Emma wanted to go out; the
crowd filled the corridors, and she fell back in her arm-chair with
palpitations that choked her. Charles, fearing that she would faint, ran
to the refreshment-room to get a glass of barley-water.
He had great difficulty in getting back to his seat, for his elbows were
jerked at every step because of the glass he held in his hands, and
he even spilt three-fourths on the shoulders of a Rouen lady in short
sleeves, who feeling the cold liquid running down to her loins, uttered
cries like a peacock, as if she were being assassinated. Her husband,
who was a millowner, railed at the clumsy fellow, and while she was with
her handkerchief wiping up the stains from her handsome cherry-coloured
taffeta gown, he angrily muttered about indemnity, costs, reimbursement.
At last Charles reached his wife, saying to her, quite out of breath--
"Ma foi! I thought I should have had to stay there. There is such a
crowd--SUCH a crowd!"
He added--
"Just guess whom I met up there! Monsieur Leon!"
"Leon?"
"Himself! He's coming along to pay his respects." And as he finished
these words the ex-clerk of Yonville entered the box.
He held out his hand with the ease of a gentleman; and Madame Bovary
extended hers, without doubt obeying the attraction of a stronger will.
She had not felt it since that spring evening when the rain fell upon
the green leaves, and they had said good-bye standing at the window.
But soon recalling herself to the necessities of the situation, with an
effort she shook off the torpor of her memories, and began stammering a
few hurried words.
"Ah, good-day! What! you here?"
"Silence!" cried a voice from the pit, for the third act was beginning.
"So you are at Rouen?"
"Yes."
"And since when?"
"Turn them out! turn them out!" People were looking at them. They were
silent.
But from that moment she listened no more; and the chorus of the guests,
the scene between Ashton and his servant, the grand duet in D major, all
were for her as far off as if the instruments had grown less sonorous
and the characters more remote. She remembered the games at cards at the
druggist's, and the walk to the nurse's, the reading in the arbour,
the tete-a-tete by the fireside--all that poor love, so calm and so
protracted, so discreet, so tender, and that she had nevertheless
forgotten. And why had he come back? What combination of circumstances
had brought him back into her life? He was standing behind her, leaning
with his shoulder against the wall of the box; now and again she felt
herself shuddering beneath the hot breath from his nostrils falling upon
her hair.
"Does this amuse you?" said he, bending over her so closely that the end
of his moustache brushed her cheek. She replied carelessly--
"Oh, dear me, no, not much."
Then he proposed that they should leave the theatre and go and take an
ice somewhere.
"Oh, not yet; let us stay," said Bovary. "Her hair's undone; this is
going to be tragic."
But the mad scene did not at all interest Emma, and the acting of the
singer seemed to her exaggerated.
"She screams too loud," said she, turning to Charles, who was listening.
"Yes--a little," he replied, undecided between the frankness of his
pleasure and his respect for his wife's opinion.
Then with a sigh Leon said--
"The heat is--"
"Unbearable! Yes!"
"Do you feel unwell?" asked Bovary.
"Yes, I am stifling; let us go."
Monsieur Leon put her long lace shawl carefully about her shoulders, and
all three went off to sit down in the harbour, in the open air, outside
the windows of a cafe.
First they spoke of her illness, although Emma interrupted Charles
from time to time, for fear, she said, of boring Monsieur Leon; and the
latter told them that he had come to spend two years at Rouen in a large
office, in order to get practice in his profession, which was different
in Normandy and Paris. Then he inquired after Berthe, the Homais, Mere
Lefrancois, and as they had, in the husband's presence, nothing more to
say to one another, the conversation soon came to an end.
People coming out of the theatre passed along the pavement, humming or
shouting at the top of their voices, "O bel ange, ma Lucie!*" Then Leon,
playing the dilettante, began to talk music. He had seen Tambourini,
Rubini, Persiani, Grisi, and, compared with them, Lagardy, despite his
grand outbursts, was nowhere.
*Oh beautiful angel, my Lucie.
"Yet," interrupted Charles, who was slowly sipping his rum-sherbet,
"they say that he is quite admirable in the last act. I regret leaving
before the end, because it was beginning to amuse me."
"Why," said the clerk, "he will soon give another performance."
But Charles replied that they were going back next day. "Unless," he
added, turning to his wife, "you would like to stay alone, kitten?"
And changing his tactics at this unexpected opportunity that presented
itself to his hopes, the young man sang the praises of Lagardy in the
last number. It was really superb, sublime. Then Charles insisted--
"You would get back on Sunday. Come, make up your mind. You are wrong if
you feel that this is doing you the least good."
The tables round them, however, were emptying; a waiter came and stood
discreetly near them. Charles, who understood, took out his purse; the
clerk held back his arm, and did not forget to leave two more pieces of
silver that he made chink on the marble.
"I am really sorry," said Bovary, "about the money which you are--"
The other made a careless gesture full of cordiality, and taking his hat
said--
"It is settled, isn't it? To-morrow at six o'clock?"
Charles explained once more that he could not absent himself longer, but
that nothing prevented Emma--
"But," she stammered, with a strange smile, "I am not sure--"
"Well, you must think it over. We'll see. Night brings counsel." Then to
Leon, who was walking along with them, "Now that you are in our part of
the world, I hope you'll come and ask us for some dinner now and then."
The clerk declared he would not fail to do so, being obliged, moreover,
to go to Yonville on some business for his office. And they parted
before the Saint-Herbland Passage just as the clock in the cathedral
struck half-past eleven.
Part III
| When they finally enter the theater Emma is delighted to find they have box seats. She looks down upon the crowd of older men discussing business and younger men dressed in the height of fashion. The opera begins with a musical flourish and the curtain rises on a country scene. Emma is instantly transported back to the novels she read as a girl. The star, Edgar Lagardy, comes onto the stage and immediately captures the hearts of the audience who are unaware that he was something of a charlatan and self-promoter. The crowd obviously enjoys his bombastic performance. Charles cannot follow the story and Emma, to her annoyance, must continually explain the plot. Emma finds herself relating her own life to the story on the stage but reminds herself that real life passions are different from those portrayed in art. Toward the end of the first half, however, she is carried away by Edgar's performance and longs to be with him. When the curtain falls the odors of the theater and the stifling atmosphere suffocate her. Charles rushes to find some beverages. When he returns, after spilling half the drink on a woman's dress, he tells her that he has seen Monsieur Lon. Soon the young man joins them and Emma is immediately reminded of her former passion for the clerk. During the second half of the play she can only think of Lon and when he suggests that they leave the theater for some fresh air she readily assents. At an outdoor caf they sit and talk but soon run out of subjects that can be discussed in front of Charles. Charles insists that Emma stay in Rouen an extra day to see the end of the play. Lon quickly encourages her to do so but she does not commit. Lon pays for their drinks and promises to see them soon in Yonville. | summary |
The crowd was waiting against the wall, symmetrically enclosed between
the balustrades. At the corner of the neighbouring streets huge bills
repeated in quaint letters "Lucie de Lammermoor-Lagardy-Opera-etc." The
weather was fine, the people were hot, perspiration trickled amid the
curls, and handkerchiefs taken from pockets were mopping red foreheads;
and now and then a warm wind that blew from the river gently stirred the
border of the tick awnings hanging from the doors of the public-houses.
A little lower down, however, one was refreshed by a current of icy air
that smelt of tallow, leather, and oil. This was an exhalation from
the Rue des Charrettes, full of large black warehouses where they made
casks.
For fear of seeming ridiculous, Emma before going in wished to have a
little stroll in the harbour, and Bovary prudently kept his tickets in
his hand, in the pocket of his trousers, which he pressed against his
stomach.
Her heart began to beat as soon as she reached the vestibule. She
involuntarily smiled with vanity on seeing the crowd rushing to the
right by the other corridor while she went up the staircase to the
reserved seats. She was as pleased as a child to push with her finger
the large tapestried door. She breathed in with all her might the
dusty smell of the lobbies, and when she was seated in her box she bent
forward with the air of a duchess.
The theatre was beginning to fill; opera-glasses were taken from their
cases, and the subscribers, catching sight of one another, were bowing.
They came to seek relaxation in the fine arts after the anxieties of
business; but "business" was not forgotten; they still talked cottons,
spirits of wine, or indigo. The heads of old men were to be seen,
inexpressive and peaceful, with their hair and complexions looking like
silver medals tarnished by steam of lead. The young beaux were strutting
about in the pit, showing in the opening of their waistcoats their pink
or applegreen cravats, and Madame Bovary from above admired them leaning
on their canes with golden knobs in the open palm of their yellow
gloves.
Now the lights of the orchestra were lit, the lustre, let down from the
ceiling, throwing by the glimmering of its facets a sudden gaiety over
the theatre; then the musicians came in one after the other; and
first there was the protracted hubbub of the basses grumbling, violins
squeaking, cornets trumpeting, flutes and flageolets fifing. But three
knocks were heard on the stage, a rolling of drums began, the brass
instruments played some chords, and the curtain rising, discovered a
country-scene.
It was the cross-roads of a wood, with a fountain shaded by an oak to
the left. Peasants and lords with plaids on their shoulders were singing
a hunting-song together; then a captain suddenly came on, who evoked
the spirit of evil by lifting both his arms to heaven. Another appeared;
they went away, and the hunters started afresh. She felt herself
transported to the reading of her youth, into the midst of Walter Scott.
She seemed to hear through the mist the sound of the Scotch bagpipes
re-echoing over the heather. Then her remembrance of the novel helping
her to understand the libretto, she followed the story phrase by phrase,
while vague thoughts that came back to her dispersed at once again with
the bursts of music. She gave herself up to the lullaby of the melodies,
and felt all her being vibrate as if the violin bows were drawn over her
nerves. She had not eyes enough to look at the costumes, the scenery,
the actors, the painted trees that shook when anyone walked, and the
velvet caps, cloaks, swords--all those imaginary things that floated
amid the harmony as in the atmosphere of another world. But a young
woman stepped forward, throwing a purse to a squire in green. She was
left alone, and the flute was heard like the murmur of a fountain or the
warbling of birds. Lucie attacked her cavatina in G major bravely. She
plained of love; she longed for wings. Emma, too, fleeing from life,
would have liked to fly away in an embrace. Suddenly Edgar-Lagardy
appeared.
He had that splendid pallor that gives something of the majesty of
marble to the ardent races of the South. His vigorous form was tightly
clad in a brown-coloured doublet; a small chiselled poniard hung against
his left thigh, and he cast round laughing looks showing his white
teeth. They said that a Polish princess having heard him sing one night
on the beach at Biarritz, where he mended boats, had fallen in love
with him. She had ruined herself for him. He had deserted her for
other women, and this sentimental celebrity did not fail to enhance his
artistic reputation. The diplomatic mummer took care always to slip into
his advertisements some poetic phrase on the fascination of his
person and the susceptibility of his soul. A fine organ, imperturbable
coolness, more temperament than intelligence, more power of emphasis
than of real singing, made up the charm of this admirable charlatan
nature, in which there was something of the hairdresser and the
toreador.
From the first scene he evoked enthusiasm. He pressed Lucy in his arms,
he left her, he came back, he seemed desperate; he had outbursts of
rage, then elegiac gurglings of infinite sweetness, and the notes
escaped from his bare neck full of sobs and kisses. Emma leant forward
to see him, clutching the velvet of the box with her nails. She was
filling her heart with these melodious lamentations that were drawn
out to the accompaniment of the double-basses, like the cries of the
drowning in the tumult of a tempest. She recognised all the intoxication
and the anguish that had almost killed her. The voice of a prima donna
seemed to her to be but echoes of her conscience, and this illusion that
charmed her as some very thing of her own life. But no one on earth had
loved her with such love. He had not wept like Edgar that last moonlit
night when they said, "To-morrow! to-morrow!" The theatre rang with
cheers; they recommenced the entire movement; the lovers spoke of
the flowers on their tomb, of vows, exile, fate, hopes; and when they
uttered the final adieu, Emma gave a sharp cry that mingled with the
vibrations of the last chords.
"But why," asked Bovary, "does that gentleman persecute her?"
"No, no!" she answered; "he is her lover!"
"Yet he vows vengeance on her family, while the other one who came on
before said, 'I love Lucie and she loves me!' Besides, he went off with
her father arm in arm. For he certainly is her father, isn't he--the
ugly little man with a cock's feather in his hat?"
Despite Emma's explanations, as soon as the recitative duet began
in which Gilbert lays bare his abominable machinations to his master
Ashton, Charles, seeing the false troth-ring that is to deceive Lucie,
thought it was a love-gift sent by Edgar. He confessed, moreover, that
he did not understand the story because of the music, which interfered
very much with the words.
"What does it matter?" said Emma. "Do be quiet!"
"Yes, but you know," he went on, leaning against her shoulder, "I like
to understand things."
"Be quiet! be quiet!" she cried impatiently.
Lucie advanced, half supported by her women, a wreath of orange blossoms
in her hair, and paler than the white satin of her gown. Emma dreamed
of her marriage day; she saw herself at home again amid the corn in the
little path as they walked to the church. Oh, why had not she, like
this woman, resisted, implored? She, on the contrary, had been joyous,
without seeing the abyss into which she was throwing herself. Ah! if
in the freshness of her beauty, before the soiling of marriage and the
disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon some
great, strong heart, then virtue, tenderness, voluptuousness, and duty
blending, she would never have fallen from so high a happiness. But that
happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire.
She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated. So,
striving to divert her thoughts, Emma determined now to see in this
reproduction of her sorrows only a plastic fantasy, well enough to
please the eye, and she even smiled internally with disdainful pity when
at the back of the stage under the velvet hangings a man appeared in a
black cloak.
His large Spanish hat fell at a gesture he made, and immediately the
instruments and the singers began the sextet. Edgar, flashing with fury,
dominated all the others with his clearer voice; Ashton hurled homicidal
provocations at him in deep notes; Lucie uttered her shrill plaint,
Arthur at one side, his modulated tones in the middle register, and the
bass of the minister pealed forth like an organ, while the voices of the
women repeating his words took them up in chorus delightfully. They were
all in a row gesticulating, and anger, vengeance, jealousy, terror, and
stupefaction breathed forth at once from their half-opened mouths. The
outraged lover brandished his naked sword; his guipure ruffle rose with
jerks to the movements of his chest, and he walked from right to left
with long strides, clanking against the boards the silver-gilt spurs of
his soft boots, widening out at the ankles. He, she thought must have an
inexhaustible love to lavish it upon the crowd with such effusion.
All her small fault-findings faded before the poetry of the part
that absorbed her; and, drawn towards this man by the illusion of the
character, she tried to imagine to herself his life--that life resonant,
extraordinary, splendid, and that might have been hers if fate had
willed it. They would have known one another, loved one another. With
him, through all the kingdoms of Europe she would have travelled from
capital to capital, sharing his fatigues and his pride, picking up the
flowers thrown to him, herself embroidering his costumes. Then each
evening, at the back of a box, behind the golden trellis-work she would
have drunk in eagerly the expansions of this soul that would have sung
for her alone; from the stage, even as he acted, he would have looked
at her. But the mad idea seized her that he was looking at her; it was
certain. She longed to run to his arms, to take refuge in his strength,
as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry out,
"Take me away! carry me with you! let us go! Thine, thine! all my ardour
and all my dreams!"
The curtain fell.
The smell of the gas mingled with that of the breaths, the waving of the
fans, made the air more suffocating. Emma wanted to go out; the
crowd filled the corridors, and she fell back in her arm-chair with
palpitations that choked her. Charles, fearing that she would faint, ran
to the refreshment-room to get a glass of barley-water.
He had great difficulty in getting back to his seat, for his elbows were
jerked at every step because of the glass he held in his hands, and
he even spilt three-fourths on the shoulders of a Rouen lady in short
sleeves, who feeling the cold liquid running down to her loins, uttered
cries like a peacock, as if she were being assassinated. Her husband,
who was a millowner, railed at the clumsy fellow, and while she was with
her handkerchief wiping up the stains from her handsome cherry-coloured
taffeta gown, he angrily muttered about indemnity, costs, reimbursement.
At last Charles reached his wife, saying to her, quite out of breath--
"Ma foi! I thought I should have had to stay there. There is such a
crowd--SUCH a crowd!"
He added--
"Just guess whom I met up there! Monsieur Leon!"
"Leon?"
"Himself! He's coming along to pay his respects." And as he finished
these words the ex-clerk of Yonville entered the box.
He held out his hand with the ease of a gentleman; and Madame Bovary
extended hers, without doubt obeying the attraction of a stronger will.
She had not felt it since that spring evening when the rain fell upon
the green leaves, and they had said good-bye standing at the window.
But soon recalling herself to the necessities of the situation, with an
effort she shook off the torpor of her memories, and began stammering a
few hurried words.
"Ah, good-day! What! you here?"
"Silence!" cried a voice from the pit, for the third act was beginning.
"So you are at Rouen?"
"Yes."
"And since when?"
"Turn them out! turn them out!" People were looking at them. They were
silent.
But from that moment she listened no more; and the chorus of the guests,
the scene between Ashton and his servant, the grand duet in D major, all
were for her as far off as if the instruments had grown less sonorous
and the characters more remote. She remembered the games at cards at the
druggist's, and the walk to the nurse's, the reading in the arbour,
the tete-a-tete by the fireside--all that poor love, so calm and so
protracted, so discreet, so tender, and that she had nevertheless
forgotten. And why had he come back? What combination of circumstances
had brought him back into her life? He was standing behind her, leaning
with his shoulder against the wall of the box; now and again she felt
herself shuddering beneath the hot breath from his nostrils falling upon
her hair.
"Does this amuse you?" said he, bending over her so closely that the end
of his moustache brushed her cheek. She replied carelessly--
"Oh, dear me, no, not much."
Then he proposed that they should leave the theatre and go and take an
ice somewhere.
"Oh, not yet; let us stay," said Bovary. "Her hair's undone; this is
going to be tragic."
But the mad scene did not at all interest Emma, and the acting of the
singer seemed to her exaggerated.
"She screams too loud," said she, turning to Charles, who was listening.
"Yes--a little," he replied, undecided between the frankness of his
pleasure and his respect for his wife's opinion.
Then with a sigh Leon said--
"The heat is--"
"Unbearable! Yes!"
"Do you feel unwell?" asked Bovary.
"Yes, I am stifling; let us go."
Monsieur Leon put her long lace shawl carefully about her shoulders, and
all three went off to sit down in the harbour, in the open air, outside
the windows of a cafe.
First they spoke of her illness, although Emma interrupted Charles
from time to time, for fear, she said, of boring Monsieur Leon; and the
latter told them that he had come to spend two years at Rouen in a large
office, in order to get practice in his profession, which was different
in Normandy and Paris. Then he inquired after Berthe, the Homais, Mere
Lefrancois, and as they had, in the husband's presence, nothing more to
say to one another, the conversation soon came to an end.
People coming out of the theatre passed along the pavement, humming or
shouting at the top of their voices, "O bel ange, ma Lucie!*" Then Leon,
playing the dilettante, began to talk music. He had seen Tambourini,
Rubini, Persiani, Grisi, and, compared with them, Lagardy, despite his
grand outbursts, was nowhere.
*Oh beautiful angel, my Lucie.
"Yet," interrupted Charles, who was slowly sipping his rum-sherbet,
"they say that he is quite admirable in the last act. I regret leaving
before the end, because it was beginning to amuse me."
"Why," said the clerk, "he will soon give another performance."
But Charles replied that they were going back next day. "Unless," he
added, turning to his wife, "you would like to stay alone, kitten?"
And changing his tactics at this unexpected opportunity that presented
itself to his hopes, the young man sang the praises of Lagardy in the
last number. It was really superb, sublime. Then Charles insisted--
"You would get back on Sunday. Come, make up your mind. You are wrong if
you feel that this is doing you the least good."
The tables round them, however, were emptying; a waiter came and stood
discreetly near them. Charles, who understood, took out his purse; the
clerk held back his arm, and did not forget to leave two more pieces of
silver that he made chink on the marble.
"I am really sorry," said Bovary, "about the money which you are--"
The other made a careless gesture full of cordiality, and taking his hat
said--
"It is settled, isn't it? To-morrow at six o'clock?"
Charles explained once more that he could not absent himself longer, but
that nothing prevented Emma--
"But," she stammered, with a strange smile, "I am not sure--"
"Well, you must think it over. We'll see. Night brings counsel." Then to
Leon, who was walking along with them, "Now that you are in our part of
the world, I hope you'll come and ask us for some dinner now and then."
The clerk declared he would not fail to do so, being obliged, moreover,
to go to Yonville on some business for his office. And they parted
before the Saint-Herbland Passage just as the clock in the cathedral
struck half-past eleven.
Part III
| In these chapters we learn that Monsieur Lheureux is bent upon squeezing every possible franc from the Bovary's through subtle manipulation and pretended favors. His greed knows no bounds. As before, the abb proves incapable of dealing with Emma's intense emotions and cannot fathom a conception of religion that stems from passion rather than principle. Emma's reaction to the theater proves that her experience with Rodolphe has taught her to temper her romanticism with some elements of realism - as when she reminds herself that art does not accurately convey the real world - but she is eventually swept away by the force of the performance. This momentary realization, which assault everything that she has spent her life believing - is her first step toward death. Immediately following the singer's powerful close to the first half the lights come on and she is left deflated by her real surroundings but Lon returns to her life and the theater and the play seems unimportant by comparison | analysis |
Monsieur Leon, while studying law, had gone pretty often to the
dancing-rooms, where he was even a great success amongst the grisettes,
who thought he had a distinguished air. He was the best-mannered of the
students; he wore his hair neither too long nor too short, didn't spend
all his quarter's money on the first day of the month, and kept on good
terms with his professors. As for excesses, he had always abstained from
them, as much from cowardice as from refinement.
Often when he stayed in his room to read, or else when sitting of an
evening under the lime-trees of the Luxembourg, he let his Code fall to
the ground, and the memory of Emma came back to him. But gradually this
feeling grew weaker, and other desires gathered over it, although it
still persisted through them all. For Leon did not lose all hope; there
was for him, as it were, a vague promise floating in the future, like a
golden fruit suspended from some fantastic tree.
Then, seeing her again after three years of absence his passion
reawakened. He must, he thought, at last make up his mind to possess
her. Moreover, his timidity had worn off by contact with his gay
companions, and he returned to the provinces despising everyone who had
not with varnished shoes trodden the asphalt of the boulevards. By
the side of a Parisienne in her laces, in the drawing-room of some
illustrious physician, a person driving his carriage and wearing many
orders, the poor clerk would no doubt have trembled like a child; but
here, at Rouen, on the harbour, with the wife of this small doctor
he felt at his ease, sure beforehand he would shine. Self-possession
depends on its environment. We don't speak on the first floor as on the
fourth; and the wealthy woman seems to have, about her, to guard her
virtue, all her banknotes, like a cuirass in the lining of her corset.
On leaving the Bovarys the night before, Leon had followed them
through the streets at a distance; then having seen them stop at the
"Croix-Rouge," he turned on his heel, and spent the night meditating a
plan.
So the next day about five o'clock he walked into the kitchen of the
inn, with a choking sensation in his throat, pale cheeks, and that
resolution of cowards that stops at nothing.
"The gentleman isn't in," answered a servant.
This seemed to him a good omen. He went upstairs.
She was not disturbed at his approach; on the contrary, she apologised
for having neglected to tell him where they were staying.
"Oh, I divined it!" said Leon.
He pretended he had been guided towards her by chance, by, instinct. She
began to smile; and at once, to repair his folly, Leon told her that he
had spent his morning in looking for her in all the hotels in the town
one after the other.
"So you have made up your mind to stay?" he added.
"Yes," she said, "and I am wrong. One ought not to accustom oneself to
impossible pleasures when there are a thousand demands upon one."
"Oh, I can imagine!"
"Ah! no; for you, you are a man!"
But men too had had their trials, and the conversation went off into
certain philosophical reflections. Emma expatiated much on the misery of
earthly affections, and the eternal isolation in which the heart remains
entombed.
To show off, or from a naive imitation of this melancholy which called
forth his, the young man declared that he had been awfully bored during
the whole course of his studies. The law irritated him, other vocations
attracted him, and his mother never ceased worrying him in every one
of her letters. As they talked they explained more and more fully the
motives of their sadness, working themselves up in their progressive
confidence. But they sometimes stopped short of the complete exposition
of their thought, and then sought to invent a phrase that might express
it all the same. She did not confess her passion for another; he did not
say that he had forgotten her.
Perhaps he no longer remembered his suppers with girls after masked
balls; and no doubt she did not recollect the rendezvous of old when she
ran across the fields in the morning to her lover's house. The noises
of the town hardly reached them, and the room seemed small, as if
on purpose to hem in their solitude more closely. Emma, in a dimity
dressing-gown, leant her head against the back of the old arm-chair; the
yellow wall-paper formed, as it were, a golden background behind her,
and her bare head was mirrored in the glass with the white parting in
the middle, and the tip of her ears peeping out from the folds of her
hair.
"But pardon me!" she said. "It is wrong of me. I weary you with my
eternal complaints."
"No, never, never!"
"If you knew," she went on, raising to the ceiling her beautiful eyes,
in which a tear was trembling, "all that I had dreamed!"
"And I! Oh, I too have suffered! Often I went out; I went away. I
dragged myself along the quays, seeking distraction amid the din of the
crowd without being able to banish the heaviness that weighed upon me.
In an engraver's shop on the boulevard there is an Italian print of one
of the Muses. She is draped in a tunic, and she is looking at the
moon, with forget-me-nots in her flowing hair. Something drove me there
continually; I stayed there hours together." Then in a trembling voice,
"She resembled you a little."
Madame Bovary turned away her head that he might not see the
irrepressible smile she felt rising to her lips.
"Often," he went on, "I wrote you letters that I tore up."
She did not answer. He continued--
"I sometimes fancied that some chance would bring you. I thought I
recognised you at street-corners, and I ran after all the carriages
through whose windows I saw a shawl fluttering, a veil like yours."
She seemed resolved to let him go on speaking without interruption.
Crossing her arms and bending down her face, she looked at the rosettes
on her slippers, and at intervals made little movements inside the satin
of them with her toes.
At last she sighed.
"But the most wretched thing, is it not--is to drag out, as I do, a
useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we
should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice."
He started off in praise of virtue, duty, and silent immolation, having
himself an incredible longing for self-sacrifice that he could not
satisfy.
"I should much like," she said, "to be a nurse at a hospital."
"Alas! men have none of these holy missions, and I see nowhere any
calling--unless perhaps that of a doctor."
With a slight shrug of her shoulders, Emma interrupted him to speak of
her illness, which had almost killed her. What a pity! She should not be
suffering now! Leon at once envied the calm of the tomb, and one evening
he had even made his will, asking to be buried in that beautiful rug
with velvet stripes he had received from her. For this was how they
would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now
adapting their past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always
thins out the sentiment.
But at this invention of the rug she asked, "But why?"
"Why?" He hesitated. "Because I loved you so!" And congratulating
himself at having surmounted the difficulty, Leon watched her face out
of the corner of his eyes.
It was like the sky when a gust of wind drives the clouds across. The
mass of sad thoughts that darkened them seemed to be lifted from her
blue eyes; her whole face shone. He waited. At last she replied--
"I always suspected it."
Then they went over all the trifling events of that far-off existence,
whose joys and sorrows they had just summed up in one word. They
recalled the arbour with clematis, the dresses she had worn, the
furniture of her room, the whole of her house.
"And our poor cactuses, where are they?"
"The cold killed them this winter."
"Ah! how I have thought of them, do you know? I often saw them again as
of yore, when on the summer mornings the sun beat down upon your blinds,
and I saw your two bare arms passing out amongst the flowers."
"Poor friend!" she said, holding out her hand to him.
Leon swiftly pressed his lips to it. Then, when he had taken a deep
breath--
"At that time you were to me I know not what incomprehensible force that
took captive my life. Once, for instance, I went to see you; but you, no
doubt, do not remember it."
"I do," she said; "go on."
"You were downstairs in the ante-room, ready to go out, standing on
the last stair; you were wearing a bonnet with small blue flowers; and
without any invitation from you, in spite of myself, I went with you.
Every moment, however, I grew more and more conscious of my folly, and
I went on walking by you, not daring to follow you completely, and
unwilling to leave you. When you went into a shop, I waited in the
street, and I watched you through the window taking off your gloves and
counting the change on the counter. Then you rang at Madame Tuvache's;
you were let in, and I stood like an idiot in front of the great heavy
door that had closed after you."
Madame Bovary, as she listened to him, wondered that she was so old. All
these things reappearing before her seemed to widen out her life; it was
like some sentimental immensity to which she returned; and from time to
time she said in a low voice, her eyes half closed--
"Yes, it is true--true--true!"
They heard eight strike on the different clocks of the Beauvoisine
quarter, which is full of schools, churches, and large empty hotels.
They no longer spoke, but they felt as they looked upon each other a
buzzing in their heads, as if something sonorous had escaped from the
fixed eyes of each of them. They were hand in hand now, and the past,
the future, reminiscences and dreams, all were confounded in the
sweetness of this ecstasy. Night was darkening over the walls, on which
still shone, half hidden in the shade, the coarse colours of four bills
representing four scenes from the "Tour de Nesle," with a motto in
Spanish and French at the bottom. Through the sash-window a patch of
dark sky was seen between the pointed roofs.
She rose to light two wax-candles on the drawers, then she sat down
again.
"Well!" said Leon.
"Well!" she replied.
He was thinking how to resume the interrupted conversation, when she
said to him--
"How is it that no one until now has ever expressed such sentiments to
me?"
The clerk said that ideal natures were difficult to understand. He from
the first moment had loved her, and he despaired when he thought of the
happiness that would have been theirs, if thanks to fortune, meeting her
earlier, they had been indissolubly bound to one another.
"I have sometimes thought of it," she went on.
"What a dream!" murmured Leon. And fingering gently the blue binding of
her long white sash, he added, "And who prevents us from beginning now?"
"No, my friend," she replied; "I am too old; you are too young. Forget
me! Others will love you; you will love them."
"Not as you!" he cried.
"What a child you are! Come, let us be sensible. I wish it."
She showed him the impossibility of their love, and that they must
remain, as formerly, on the simple terms of a fraternal friendship.
Was she speaking thus seriously? No doubt Emma did not herself know,
quite absorbed as she was by the charm of the seduction, and the
necessity of defending herself from it; and contemplating the young
man with a moved look, she gently repulsed the timid caresses that his
trembling hands attempted.
"Ah! forgive me!" he cried, drawing back.
Emma was seized with a vague fear at this shyness, more dangerous to her
than the boldness of Rodolphe when he advanced to her open-armed. No man
had ever seemed to her so beautiful. An exquisite candour emanated from
his being. He lowered his long fine eyelashes, that curled upwards.
His cheek, with the soft skin reddened, she thought, with desire of her
person, and Emma felt an invincible longing to press her lips to it.
Then, leaning towards the clock as if to see the time--
"Ah! how late it is!" she said; "how we do chatter!"
He understood the hint and took up his hat.
"It has even made me forget the theatre. And poor Bovary has left me
here especially for that. Monsieur Lormeaux, of the Rue Grand-Pont, was
to take me and his wife."
And the opportunity was lost, as she was to leave the next day.
"Really!" said Leon.
"Yes."
"But I must see you again," he went on. "I wanted to tell you--"
"What?"
"Something--important--serious. Oh, no! Besides, you will not go; it is
impossible. If you should--listen to me. Then you have not understood
me; you have not guessed--"
"Yet you speak plainly," said Emma.
"Ah! you can jest. Enough! enough! Oh, for pity's sake, let me see you
once--only once!"
"Well--" She stopped; then, as if thinking better of it, "Oh, not here!"
"Where you will."
"Will you--" She seemed to reflect; then abruptly, "To-morrow at eleven
o'clock in the cathedral."
"I shall be there," he cried, seizing her hands, which she disengaged.
And as they were both standing up, he behind her, and Emma with her head
bent, he stooped over her and pressed long kisses on her neck.
"You are mad! Ah! you are mad!" she said, with sounding little laughs,
while the kisses multiplied.
Then bending his head over her shoulder, he seemed to beg the consent of
her eyes. They fell upon him full of an icy dignity.
Leon stepped back to go out. He stopped on the threshold; then he
whispered with a trembling voice, "Tomorrow!"
She answered with a nod, and disappeared like a bird into the next room.
In the evening Emma wrote the clerk an interminable letter, in which she
cancelled the rendezvous; all was over; they must not, for the sake of
their happiness, meet again. But when the letter was finished, as she
did not know Leon's address, she was puzzled.
"I'll give it to him myself," she said; "he will come."
The next morning, at the open window, and humming on his balcony, Leon
himself varnished his pumps with several coatings. He put on white
trousers, fine socks, a green coat, emptied all the scent he had into
his handkerchief, then having had his hair curled, he uncurled it again,
in order to give it a more natural elegance.
"It is still too early," he thought, looking at the hairdresser's
cuckoo-clock, that pointed to the hour of nine. He read an old fashion
journal, went out, smoked a cigar, walked up three streets, thought it
was time, and went slowly towards the porch of Notre Dame.
It was a beautiful summer morning. Silver plate sparkled in the
jeweller's windows, and the light falling obliquely on the cathedral
made mirrors of the corners of the grey stones; a flock of birds
fluttered in the grey sky round the trefoil bell-turrets; the square,
resounding with cries, was fragrant with the flowers that bordered its
pavement, roses, jasmines, pinks, narcissi, and tube-roses, unevenly
spaced out between moist grasses, catmint, and chickweed for the birds;
the fountains gurgled in the centre, and under large umbrellas, amidst
melons, piled up in heaps, flower-women, bare-headed, were twisting
paper round bunches of violets.
The young man took one. It was the first time that he had bought flowers
for a woman, and his breast, as he smelt them, swelled with pride, as if
this homage that he meant for another had recoiled upon himself.
But he was afraid of being seen; he resolutely entered the church. The
beadle, who was just then standing on the threshold in the middle of the
left doorway, under the "Dancing Marianne," with feather cap, and rapier
dangling against his calves, came in, more majestic than a cardinal, and
as shining as a saint on a holy pyx.
He came towards Leon, and, with that smile of wheedling benignity
assumed by ecclesiastics when they question children--
"The gentleman, no doubt, does not belong to these parts? The gentleman
would like to see the curiosities of the church?"
"No!" said the other.
And he first went round the lower aisles. Then he went out to look at
the Place. Emma was not coming yet. He went up again to the choir.
The nave was reflected in the full fonts with the beginning of the
arches and some portions of the glass windows. But the reflections of
the paintings, broken by the marble rim, were continued farther on upon
the flag-stones, like a many-coloured carpet. The broad daylight from
without streamed into the church in three enormous rays from the three
opened portals. From time to time at the upper end a sacristan passed,
making the oblique genuflexion of devout persons in a hurry. The crystal
lustres hung motionless. In the choir a silver lamp was burning, and
from the side chapels and dark places of the church sometimes rose
sounds like sighs, with the clang of a closing grating, its echo
reverberating under the lofty vault.
Leon with solemn steps walked along by the walls. Life had never seemed
so good to him. She would come directly, charming, agitated, looking
back at the glances that followed her, and with her flounced dress, her
gold eyeglass, her thin shoes, with all sorts of elegant trifles that he
had never enjoyed, and with the ineffable seduction of yielding virtue.
The church like a huge boudoir spread around her; the arches bent down
to gather in the shade the confession of her love; the windows shone
resplendent to illumine her face, and the censers would burn that she
might appear like an angel amid the fumes of the sweet-smelling odours.
But she did not come. He sat down on a chair, and his eyes fell upon a
blue stained window representing boatmen carrying baskets. He looked at
it long, attentively, and he counted the scales of the fishes and the
button-holes of the doublets, while his thoughts wandered off towards
Emma.
The beadle, standing aloof, was inwardly angry at this individual who
took the liberty of admiring the cathedral by himself. He seemed to him
to be conducting himself in a monstrous fashion, to be robbing him in a
sort, and almost committing sacrilege.
But a rustle of silk on the flags, the tip of a bonnet, a lined
cloak--it was she! Leon rose and ran to meet her.
Emma was pale. She walked fast.
"Read!" she said, holding out a paper to him. "Oh, no!"
And she abruptly withdrew her hand to enter the chapel of the Virgin,
where, kneeling on a chair, she began to pray.
The young man was irritated at this bigot fancy; then he nevertheless
experienced a certain charm in seeing her, in the middle of a
rendezvous, thus lost in her devotions, like an Andalusian marchioness;
then he grew bored, for she seemed never coming to an end.
Emma prayed, or rather strove to pray, hoping that some sudden
resolution might descend to her from heaven; and to draw down divine
aid she filled full her eyes with the splendours of the tabernacle. She
breathed in the perfumes of the full-blown flowers in the large vases,
and listened to the stillness of the church, that only heightened the
tumult of her heart.
She rose, and they were about to leave, when the beadle came forward,
hurriedly saying--
"Madame, no doubt, does not belong to these parts? Madame would like to
see the curiosities of the church?"
"Oh, no!" cried the clerk.
"Why not?" said she. For she clung with her expiring virtue to the
Virgin, the sculptures, the tombs--anything.
Then, in order to proceed "by rule," the beadle conducted them right to
the entrance near the square, where, pointing out with his cane a large
circle of block-stones without inscription or carving--
"This," he said majestically, "is the circumference of the beautiful
bell of Ambroise. It weighed forty thousand pounds. There was not its
equal in all Europe. The workman who cast it died of the joy--"
"Let us go on," said Leon.
The old fellow started off again; then, having got back to the chapel of
the Virgin, he stretched forth his arm with an all-embracing gesture
of demonstration, and, prouder than a country squire showing you his
espaliers, went on--
"This simple stone covers Pierre de Breze, lord of Varenne and of
Brissac, grand marshal of Poitou, and governor of Normandy, who died at
the battle of Montlhery on the 16th of July, 1465."
Leon bit his lips, fuming.
"And on the right, this gentleman all encased in iron, on the
prancing horse, is his grandson, Louis de Breze, lord of Breval and of
Montchauvet, Count de Maulevrier, Baron de Mauny, chamberlain to the
king, Knight of the Order, and also governor of Normandy; died on the
23rd of July, 1531--a Sunday, as the inscription specifies; and below,
this figure, about to descend into the tomb, portrays the same person.
It is not possible, is it, to see a more perfect representation of
annihilation?"
Madame Bovary put up her eyeglasses. Leon, motionless, looked at her,
no longer even attempting to speak a single word, to make a gesture,
so discouraged was he at this two-fold obstinacy of gossip and
indifference.
The everlasting guide went on--
"Near him, this kneeling woman who weeps is his spouse, Diane de
Poitiers, Countess de Breze, Duchess de Valentinois, born in 1499, died
in 1566, and to the left, the one with the child is the Holy Virgin. Now
turn to this side; here are the tombs of the Ambroise. They were both
cardinals and archbishops of Rouen. That one was minister under Louis
thousand gold crowns for the poor."
And without stopping, still talking, he pushed them into a chapel
full of balustrades, some put away, and disclosed a kind of block that
certainly might once have been an ill-made statue.
"Truly," he said with a groan, "it adorned the tomb of Richard Coeur de
Lion, King of England and Duke of Normandy. It was the Calvinists, sir,
who reduced it to this condition. They had buried it for spite in the
earth, under the episcopal seat of Monsignor. See! this is the door by
which Monsignor passes to his house. Let us pass on quickly to see the
gargoyle windows."
But Leon hastily took some silver from his pocket and seized Emma's
arm. The beadle stood dumfounded, not able to understand this untimely
munificence when there were still so many things for the stranger to
see. So calling him back, he cried--
"Sir! sir! The steeple! the steeple!"
"No, thank you!" said Leon.
"You are wrong, sir! It is four hundred and forty feet high, nine less
than the great pyramid of Egypt. It is all cast; it--"
Leon was fleeing, for it seemed to him that his love, that for nearly
two hours now had become petrified in the church like the stones, would
vanish like a vapour through that sort of truncated funnel, of oblong
cage, of open chimney that rises so grotesquely from the cathedral like
the extravagant attempt of some fantastic brazier.
"But where are we going?" she said.
Making no answer, he walked on with a rapid step; and Madame Bovary
was already, dipping her finger in the holy water when behind them they
heard a panting breath interrupted by the regular sound of a cane. Leon
turned back.
"Sir!"
"What is it?"
And he recognised the beadle, holding under his arms and balancing
against his stomach some twenty large sewn volumes. They were works
"which treated of the cathedral."
"Idiot!" growled Leon, rushing out of the church.
A lad was playing about the close.
"Go and get me a cab!"
The child bounded off like a ball by the Rue Quatre-Vents; then they
were alone a few minutes, face to face, and a little embarrassed.
"Ah! Leon! Really--I don't know--if I ought," she whispered. Then with a
more serious air, "Do you know, it is very improper--"
"How so?" replied the clerk. "It is done at Paris."
And that, as an irresistible argument, decided her.
Still the cab did not come. Leon was afraid she might go back into the
church. At last the cab appeared.
"At all events, go out by the north porch," cried the beadle, who was
left alone on the threshold, "so as to see the Resurrection, the Last
Judgment, Paradise, King David, and the Condemned in Hell-flames."
"Where to, sir?" asked the coachman.
"Where you like," said Leon, forcing Emma into the cab.
And the lumbering machine set out. It went down the Rue Grand-Pont,
crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoleon, the Pont Neuf, and
stopped short before the statue of Pierre Corneille.
"Go on," cried a voice that came from within.
The cab went on again, and as soon as it reached the Carrefour
Lafayette, set off down-hill, and entered the station at a gallop.
"No, straight on!" cried the same voice.
The cab came out by the gate, and soon having reached the Cours, trotted
quietly beneath the elm-trees. The coachman wiped his brow, put his
leather hat between his knees, and drove his carriage beyond the side
alley by the meadow to the margin of the waters.
It went along by the river, along the towing-path paved with sharp
pebbles, and for a long while in the direction of Oyssel, beyond the
isles.
But suddenly it turned with a dash across Quatremares, Sotteville, La
Grande-Chaussee, the Rue d'Elbeuf, and made its third halt in front of
the Jardin des Plantes.
"Get on, will you?" cried the voice more furiously.
And at once resuming its course, it passed by Saint-Sever, by the
Quai'des Curandiers, the Quai aux Meules, once more over the bridge, by
the Place du Champ de Mars, and behind the hospital gardens, where old
men in black coats were walking in the sun along the terrace all green
with ivy. It went up the Boulevard Bouvreuil, along the Boulevard
Cauchoise, then the whole of Mont-Riboudet to the Deville hills.
It came back; and then, without any fixed plan or direction, wandered
about at hazard. The cab was seen at Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont
Gargan, at La Rougue-Marc and Place du Gaillardbois; in the Rue
Maladrerie, Rue Dinanderie, before Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien,
Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise--in front of the Customs, at the "Vieille
Tour," the "Trois Pipes," and the Monumental Cemetery. From time to time
the coachman, on his box cast despairing eyes at the public-houses.
He could not understand what furious desire for locomotion urged these
individuals never to wish to stop. He tried to now and then, and at
once exclamations of anger burst forth behind him. Then he lashed his
perspiring jades afresh, but indifferent to their jolting, running up
against things here and there, not caring if he did, demoralised, and
almost weeping with thirst, fatigue, and depression.
And on the harbour, in the midst of the drays and casks, and in the
streets, at the corners, the good folk opened large wonder-stricken
eyes at this sight, so extraordinary in the provinces, a cab with blinds
drawn, and which appeared thus constantly shut more closely than a tomb,
and tossing about like a vessel.
Once in the middle of the day, in the open country, just as the sun
beat most fiercely against the old plated lanterns, a bared hand passed
beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps
of paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off lighted like white
butterflies on a field of red clover all in bloom.
At about six o'clock the carriage stopped in a back street of the
Beauvoisine Quarter, and a woman got out, who walked with her veil down,
and without turning her head.
| While in Paris, Lon had been popular with the working girls and had enjoyed going to the theater but he had also been a responsible student. He never forgot Emma, however, and seeing her in Rouen had convinced him that he must seduce her. Accordingly he follows Emma and Charles to their hotel and returns the next day. He is pleased to find that Emma has decided to stay for another night. After a long conversation about their problems and dreams Lon finally works up the courage to tell Emma that he loved her during their time in Yonville. She is pleased but claims that he is too young and she too old. The hour grows late and Lon rises to leave but he makes her promise to meet him the following day. She finally agrees and tells him that she will be at the cathedral at 11am. When he departs he says "Till tomorrow. Emma immediately writes a long letter to explain why they cannot be lovers but, not knowing how to send it, she elects to give it to him the following day. Lon arrives early the next day and to the verger's suppressed anger Lon walks about the cathedral unguided. Finally Emma arrives, shoves the letter into Lon's hand and immediately falls to her knees in the chapel of the Virgin and begins to pray for strength of will. Lon impatiently waits for her to finish and is further exasperated when, upon rising, she accepts the verger's offer of a tour. As the verger drones on about the details of the church Lon's impatience grows to the breaking point. Finally he shoves a silver piece into the man's hand, grabs Emma by the arm and pulls her from the church and into a cab. Lon orders the driver to go anywhere and all afternoon, despite several attempts by the weary driver to slow or come to a stop, the cab is seen repeating a circuitous course about the town and countryside. At one point a bare hand emerges from the window and throws bits of torn paper into the wind. At 6pm the carriage finally stops and Emma, covered in a veil emerges and walks quickly away | summary |
On reaching the inn, Madame Bovary was surprised not to see the
diligence. Hivert, who had waited for her fifty-three minutes, had at
last started.
Yet nothing forced her to go; but she had given her word that she would
return that same evening. Moreover, Charles expected her, and in her
heart she felt already that cowardly docility that is for some women at
once the chastisement and atonement of adultery.
She packed her box quickly, paid her bill, took a cab in the yard,
hurrying on the driver, urging him on, every moment inquiring about
the time and the miles traversed. He succeeded in catching up the
"Hirondelle" as it neared the first houses of Quincampoix.
Hardly was she seated in her corner than she closed her eyes, and opened
them at the foot of the hill, when from afar she recognised Felicite,
who was on the lookout in front of the farrier's shop. Hivert pulled
in his horses and, the servant, climbing up to the window, said
mysteriously--
"Madame, you must go at once to Monsieur Homais. It's for something
important."
The village was silent as usual. At the corner of the streets were small
pink heaps that smoked in the air, for this was the time for jam-making,
and everyone at Yonville prepared his supply on the same day. But in
front of the chemist's shop one might admire a far larger heap, and that
surpassed the others with the superiority that a laboratory must have
over ordinary stores, a general need over individual fancy.
She went in. The large arm-chair was upset, and even the "Fanal de
Rouen" lay on the ground, outspread between two pestles. She pushed open
the lobby door, and in the middle of the kitchen, amid brown jars full
of picked currants, of powdered sugar and lump sugar, of the scales on
the table, and of the pans on the fire, she saw all the Homais, small
and large, with aprons reaching to their chins, and with forks in their
hands. Justin was standing up with bowed head, and the chemist was
screaming--
"Who told you to go and fetch it in the Capharnaum."
"What is it? What is the matter?"
"What is it?" replied the druggist. "We are making preserves; they are
simmering; but they were about to boil over, because there is too
much juice, and I ordered another pan. Then he, from indolence, from
laziness, went and took, hanging on its nail in my laboratory, the key
of the Capharnaum."
It was thus the druggist called a small room under the leads, full of
the utensils and the goods of his trade. He often spent long hours there
alone, labelling, decanting, and doing up again; and he looked upon
it not as a simple store, but as a veritable sanctuary, whence there
afterwards issued, elaborated by his hands, all sorts of pills, boluses,
infusions, lotions, and potions, that would bear far and wide his
celebrity. No one in the world set foot there, and he respected it so,
that he swept it himself. Finally, if the pharmacy, open to all comers,
was the spot where he displayed his pride, the Capharnaum was the refuge
where, egoistically concentrating himself, Homais delighted in the
exercise of his predilections, so that Justin's thoughtlessness seemed
to him a monstrous piece of irreverence, and, redder than the currants,
he repeated--
"Yes, from the Capharnaum! The key that locks up the acids and caustic
alkalies! To go and get a spare pan! a pan with a lid! and that I
shall perhaps never use! Everything is of importance in the delicate
operations of our art! But, devil take it! one must make distinctions,
and not employ for almost domestic purposes that which is meant for
pharmaceutical! It is as if one were to carve a fowl with a scalpel; as
if a magistrate--"
"Now be calm," said Madame Homais.
And Athalie, pulling at his coat, cried "Papa! papa!"
"No, let me alone," went on the druggist "let me alone, hang it! My
word! One might as well set up for a grocer. That's it! go it! respect
nothing! break, smash, let loose the leeches, burn the mallow-paste,
pickle the gherkins in the window jars, tear up the bandages!"
"I thought you had--" said Emma.
"Presently! Do you know to what you exposed yourself? Didn't you see
anything in the corner, on the left, on the third shelf? Speak, answer,
articulate something."
"I--don't--know," stammered the young fellow.
"Ah! you don't know! Well, then, I do know! You saw a bottle of blue
glass, sealed with yellow wax, that contains a white powder, on which I
have even written 'Dangerous!' And do you know what is in it? Arsenic!
And you go and touch it! You take a pan that was next to it!"
"Next to it!" cried Madame Homais, clasping her hands. "Arsenic! You
might have poisoned us all."
And the children began howling as if they already had frightful pains in
their entrails.
"Or poison a patient!" continued the druggist. "Do you want to see me
in the prisoner's dock with criminals, in a court of justice? To see
me dragged to the scaffold? Don't you know what care I take in managing
things, although I am so thoroughly used to it? Often I am horrified
myself when I think of my responsibility; for the Government persecutes
us, and the absurd legislation that rules us is a veritable Damocles'
sword over our heads."
Emma no longer dreamed of asking what they wanted her for, and the
druggist went on in breathless phrases--
"That is your return for all the kindness we have shown you! That is how
you recompense me for the really paternal care that I lavish on you! For
without me where would you be? What would you be doing? Who provides
you with food, education, clothes, and all the means of figuring one day
with honour in the ranks of society? But you must pull hard at the oar
if you're to do that, and get, as, people say, callosities upon your
hands. Fabricando fit faber, age quod agis.*"
* The worker lives by working, do what he will.
He was so exasperated he quoted Latin. He would have quoted Chinese
or Greenlandish had he known those two languages, for he was in one
of those crises in which the whole soul shows indistinctly what it
contains, like the ocean, which, in the storm, opens itself from the
seaweeds on its shores down to the sands of its abysses.
And he went on--
"I am beginning to repent terribly of having taken you up! I should
certainly have done better to have left you to rot in your poverty and
the dirt in which you were born. Oh, you'll never be fit for anything
but to herd animals with horns! You have no aptitude for science! You
hardly know how to stick on a label! And there you are, dwelling with me
snug as a parson, living in clover, taking your ease!"
But Emma, turning to Madame Homais, "I was told to come here--"
"Oh, dear me!" interrupted the good woman, with a sad air, "how am I to
tell you? It is a misfortune!"
She could not finish, the druggist was thundering--"Empty it! Clean it!
Take it back! Be quick!"
And seizing Justin by the collar of his blouse, he shook a book out of
his pocket. The lad stooped, but Homais was the quicker, and, having
picked up the volume, contemplated it with staring eyes and open mouth.
"CONJUGAL--LOVE!" he said, slowly separating the two words. "Ah! very
good! very good! very pretty! And illustrations! Oh, this is too much!"
Madame Homais came forward.
"No, do not touch it!"
The children wanted to look at the pictures.
"Leave the room," he said imperiously; and they went out.
First he walked up and down with the open volume in his hand, rolling
his eyes, choking, tumid, apoplectic. Then he came straight to his
pupil, and, planting himself in front of him with crossed arms--
"Have you every vice, then, little wretch? Take care! you are on a
downward path. Did not you reflect that this infamous book might fall
in the hands of my children, kindle a spark in their minds, tarnish the
purity of Athalie, corrupt Napoleon. He is already formed like a man.
Are you quite sure, anyhow, that they have not read it? Can you certify
to me--"
"But really, sir," said Emma, "you wished to tell me--"
"Ah, yes! madame. Your father-in-law is dead."
In fact, Monsieur Bovary senior had expired the evening before suddenly
from an attack of apoplexy as he got up from table, and by way of
greater precaution, on account of Emma's sensibility, Charles had begged
Homais to break the horrible news to her gradually. Homais had thought
over his speech; he had rounded, polished it, made it rhythmical; it was
a masterpiece of prudence and transitions, of subtle turns and delicacy;
but anger had got the better of rhetoric.
Emma, giving up all chance of hearing any details, left the pharmacy;
for Monsieur Homais had taken up the thread of his vituperations.
However, he was growing calmer, and was now grumbling in a paternal tone
whilst he fanned himself with his skull-cap.
"It is not that I entirely disapprove of the work. Its author was a
doctor! There are certain scientific points in it that it is not ill a
man should know, and I would even venture to say that a man must know.
But later--later! At any rate, not till you are man yourself and your
temperament is formed."
When Emma knocked at the door. Charles, who was waiting for her, came
forward with open arms and said to her with tears in his voice--
"Ah! my dear!"
And he bent over her gently to kiss her. But at the contact of his lips
the memory of the other seized her, and she passed her hand over her
face shuddering.
But she made answer, "Yes, I know, I know!"
He showed her the letter in which his mother told the event without any
sentimental hypocrisy. She only regretted her husband had not received
the consolations of religion, as he had died at Daudeville, in the
street, at the door of a cafe after a patriotic dinner with some
ex-officers.
Emma gave him back the letter; then at dinner, for appearance's sake,
she affected a certain repugnance. But as he urged her to try, she
resolutely began eating, while Charles opposite her sat motionless in a
dejected attitude.
Now and then he raised his head and gave her a long look full of
distress. Once he sighed, "I should have liked to see him again!"
She was silent. At last, understanding that she must say something, "How
old was your father?" she asked.
"Fifty-eight."
"Ah!"
And that was all.
A quarter of an hour after he added, "My poor mother! what will become
of her now?"
She made a gesture that signified she did not know. Seeing her so
taciturn, Charles imagined her much affected, and forced himself to say
nothing, not to reawaken this sorrow which moved him. And, shaking off
his own--
"Did you enjoy yourself yesterday?" he asked.
"Yes."
When the cloth was removed, Bovary did not rise, nor did Emma; and as
she looked at him, the monotony of the spectacle drove little by little
all pity from her heart. He seemed to her paltry, weak, a cipher--in
a word, a poor thing in every way. How to get rid of him? What an
interminable evening! Something stupefying like the fumes of opium
seized her.
They heard in the passage the sharp noise of a wooden leg on the boards.
It was Hippolyte bringing back Emma's luggage. In order to put it down
he described painfully a quarter of a circle with his stump.
"He doesn't even remember any more about it," she thought, looking at
the poor devil, whose coarse red hair was wet with perspiration.
Bovary was searching at the bottom of his purse for a centime, and
without appearing to understand all there was of humiliation for him
in the mere presence of this man, who stood there like a personified
reproach to his incurable incapacity.
"Hallo! you've a pretty bouquet," he said, noticing Leon's violets on
the chimney.
"Yes," she replied indifferently; "it's a bouquet I bought just now from
a beggar."
Charles picked up the flowers, and freshening his eyes, red with tears,
against them, smelt them delicately.
She took them quickly from his hand and put them in a glass of water.
The next day Madame Bovary senior arrived. She and her son wept much.
Emma, on the pretext of giving orders, disappeared. The following day
they had a talk over the mourning. They went and sat down with their
workboxes by the waterside under the arbour.
Charles was thinking of his father, and was surprised to feel so much
affection for this man, whom till then he had thought he cared little
about. Madame Bovary senior was thinking of her husband. The worst
days of the past seemed enviable to her. All was forgotten beneath the
instinctive regret of such a long habit, and from time to time whilst
she sewed, a big tear rolled along her nose and hung suspended there a
moment. Emma was thinking that it was scarcely forty-eight hours since
they had been together, far from the world, all in a frenzy of joy, and
not having eyes enough to gaze upon each other. She tried to recall the
slightest details of that past day. But the presence of her husband and
mother-in-law worried her. She would have liked to hear nothing, to see
nothing, so as not to disturb the meditation on her love, that, do what
she would, became lost in external sensations.
She was unpicking the lining of a dress, and the strips were scattered
around her. Madame Bovary senior was plying her scissor without looking
up, and Charles, in his list slippers and his old brown surtout that he
used as a dressing-gown, sat with both hands in his pockets, and did not
speak either; near them Berthe, in a little white pinafore, was raking
sand in the walks with her spade. Suddenly she saw Monsieur Lheureux,
the linendraper, come in through the gate.
He came to offer his services "under the sad circumstances." Emma
answered that she thought she could do without. The shopkeeper was not
to be beaten.
"I beg your pardon," he said, "but I should like to have a private talk
with you." Then in a low voice, "It's about that affair--you know."
Charles crimsoned to his ears. "Oh, yes! certainly." And in his
confusion, turning to his wife, "Couldn't you, my darling?"
She seemed to understand him, for she rose; and Charles said to his
mother, "It is nothing particular. No doubt, some household trifle." He
did not want her to know the story of the bill, fearing her reproaches.
As soon as they were alone, Monsieur Lheureux in sufficiently clear
terms began to congratulate Emma on the inheritance, then to talk of
indifferent matters, of the espaliers, of the harvest, and of his own
health, which was always so-so, always having ups and downs. In fact, he
had to work devilish hard, although he didn't make enough, in spite of
all people said, to find butter for his bread.
Emma let him talk on. She had bored herself so prodigiously the last two
days.
"And so you're quite well again?" he went on. "Ma foi! I saw your
husband in a sad state. He's a good fellow, though we did have a little
misunderstanding."
She asked what misunderstanding, for Charles had said nothing of the
dispute about the goods supplied to her.
"Why, you know well enough," cried Lheureux. "It was about your little
fancies--the travelling trunks."
He had drawn his hat over his eyes, and, with his hands behind his
back, smiling and whistling, he looked straight at her in an unbearable
manner. Did he suspect anything?
She was lost in all kinds of apprehensions. At last, however, he went
on--
"We made it up, all the same, and I've come again to propose another
arrangement."
This was to renew the bill Bovary had signed. The doctor, of course,
would do as he pleased; he was not to trouble himself, especially just
now, when he would have a lot of worry. "And he would do better to give
it over to someone else--to you, for example. With a power of attorney
it could be easily managed, and then we (you and I) would have our
little business transactions together."
She did not understand. He was silent. Then, passing to his trade,
Lheureux declared that madame must require something. He would send her
a black barege, twelve yards, just enough to make a gown.
"The one you've on is good enough for the house, but you want another
for calls. I saw that the very moment that I came in. I've the eye of an
American!"
He did not send the stuff; he brought it. Then he came again to measure
it; he came again on other pretexts, always trying to make himself
agreeable, useful, "enfeoffing himself," as Homais would have said, and
always dropping some hint to Emma about the power of attorney. He never
mentioned the bill; she did not think of it. Charles, at the beginning
of her convalescence, had certainly said something about it to her,
but so many emotions had passed through her head that she no longer
remembered it. Besides, she took care not to talk of any money
questions. Madame Bovary seemed surprised at this, and attributed the
change in her ways to the religious sentiments she had contracted during
her illness.
But as soon as she was gone, Emma greatly astounded Bovary by her
practical good sense. It would be necessary to make inquiries, to look
into mortgages, and see if there were any occasion for a sale by auction
or a liquidation. She quoted technical terms casually, pronounced the
grand words of order, the future, foresight, and constantly exaggerated
the difficulties of settling his father's affairs so much, that at last
one day she showed him the rough draft of a power of attorney to manage
and administer his business, arrange all loans, sign and endorse all
bills, pay all sums, etc. She had profited by Lheureux's lessons.
Charles naively asked her where this paper came from.
"Monsieur Guillaumin"; and with the utmost coolness she added, "I don't
trust him overmuch. Notaries have such a bad reputation. Perhaps we
ought to consult--we only know--no one."
"Unless Leon--" replied Charles, who was reflecting. But it was
difficult to explain matters by letter. Then she offered to make the
journey, but he thanked her. She insisted. It was quite a contest of
mutual consideration. At last she cried with affected waywardness--
"No, I will go!"
"How good you are!" he said, kissing her forehead.
The next morning she set out in the "Hirondelle" to go to Rouen to
consult Monsieur Leon, and she stayed there three days.
| When Emma returns to Yonville she is told to go at once to the pharmacy where she finds the entire Homais family engaged in making jelly. She enters as Monsieur Homais is berating Justin for having taken a pan from his laboratory that was sitting next to a jar of arsenic. Although Emma senses that the apothecary has dire news for her she cannot get his attention. In his anger Homais shakes Justin and dislodges a tawdry book, Conjugal Love from the poor boy's clothing. Homais orders the kitchen cleared. As he lectures Justin, Emma interrupts and Homais quickly informs her that her father-in-law has died. She returns home to find Charles distraught and feigns compassion though she is disgusted by her husband and her life in Yonville. The elder Madame Bovary arrives and spends a great deal of time weeping with her son. Emma manages to see as little of both of them as possible and clings to the memory of her happy hours with Lon. Monsieur Lheureux arrives and Emma confers with him privately. He suggests that Monsieur Bovary should extend his promissory note with another and hints that it would be much easier if she had power of attorney. Over the following days he returns several times and drops comments about the complications of her father-in-law's inheritance and the importance of power of attorney. When Emma confronts Charles she already has a formal document giving her power of attorney for him to sign but admits that the local notary might have botched the job. Charles suggests that they consult Monsieur Lon and she volunteers to make the journey. She stays in Rouen for three days | summary |
They were three full, exquisite days--a true honeymoon. They were at
the Hotel-de-Boulogne, on the harbour; and they lived there, with drawn
blinds and closed doors, with flowers on the floor, and iced syrups were
brought them early in the morning.
Towards evening they took a covered boat and went to dine on one of the
islands. It was the time when one hears by the side of the dockyard the
caulking-mallets sounding against the hull of vessels. The smoke of
the tar rose up between the trees; there were large fatty drops on the
water, undulating in the purple colour of the sun, like floating plaques
of Florentine bronze.
They rowed down in the midst of moored boats, whose long oblique cables
grazed lightly against the bottom of the boat. The din of the town
gradually grew distant; the rolling of carriages, the tumult of voices,
the yelping of dogs on the decks of vessels. She took off her bonnet,
and they landed on their island.
They sat down in the low-ceilinged room of a tavern, at whose door hung
black nets. They ate fried smelts, cream and cherries. They lay down
upon the grass; they kissed behind the poplars; and they would fain,
like two Robinsons, have lived for ever in this little place, which
seemed to them in their beatitude the most magnificent on earth. It was
not the first time that they had seen trees, a blue sky, meadows; that
they had heard the water flowing and the wind blowing in the leaves;
but, no doubt, they had never admired all this, as if Nature had
not existed before, or had only begun to be beautiful since the
gratification of their desires.
At night they returned. The boat glided along the shores of the islands.
They sat at the bottom, both hidden by the shade, in silence. The square
oars rang in the iron thwarts, and, in the stillness, seemed to mark
time, like the beating of a metronome, while at the stern the rudder
that trailed behind never ceased its gentle splash against the water.
Once the moon rose; they did not fail to make fine phrases, finding the
orb melancholy and full of poetry. She even began to sing--
"One night, do you remember, we were sailing," etc.
Her musical but weak voice died away along the waves, and the winds
carried off the trills that Leon heard pass like the flapping of wings
about him.
She was opposite him, leaning against the partition of the shallop,
through one of whose raised blinds the moon streamed in. Her black
dress, whose drapery spread out like a fan, made her seem more slender,
taller. Her head was raised, her hands clasped, her eyes turned towards
heaven. At times the shadow of the willows hid her completely; then she
reappeared suddenly, like a vision in the moonlight.
Leon, on the floor by her side, found under his hand a ribbon of scarlet
silk. The boatman looked at it, and at last said--
"Perhaps it belongs to the party I took out the other day. A lot
of jolly folk, gentlemen and ladies, with cakes, champagne,
cornets--everything in style! There was one especially, a tall handsome
man with small moustaches, who was that funny! And they all kept saying,
'Now tell us something, Adolphe--Dolpe,' I think."
She shivered.
"You are in pain?" asked Leon, coming closer to her.
"Oh, it's nothing! No doubt, it is only the night air."
"And who doesn't want for women, either," softly added the sailor,
thinking he was paying the stranger a compliment.
Then, spitting on his hands, he took the oars again.
Yet they had to part. The adieux were sad. He was to send his letters to
Mere Rollet, and she gave him such precise instructions about a double
envelope that he admired greatly her amorous astuteness.
"So you can assure me it is all right?" she said with her last kiss.
"Yes, certainly."
"But why," he thought afterwards as he came back through the streets
alone, "is she so very anxious to get this power of attorney?"
| Emma and Lon enjoy an idyllic three days together. They stay at the Hotel Boulogne on the river in Rouen and they go boating and spend the afternoon on an island. Their return journey is suffused by moonlight and they are both carried away by the beauty of the evening and their love for one another. Lon finds a discarded red ribbon on the floor of the boat and the oarsmen remarks that it was probably left by a previous party of jolly men and women headed by a man he identifies as "Adolphe" or "Dodolphe". Emma knows he is speaking of Rodolphe and she shivers. When they part she gives Lon instructions to write to her care of the wet nurse Madame Rollet. After Emma has left Lon wonders why she is so set on having power of attorney | summary |
Leon soon put on an air of superiority before his comrades, avoided
their company, and completely neglected his work.
He waited for her letters; he re-read them; he wrote to her. He called
her to mind with all the strength of his desires and of his memories.
Instead of lessening with absence, this longing to see her again grew,
so that at last on Saturday morning he escaped from his office.
When, from the summit of the hill, he saw in the valley below the
church-spire with its tin flag swinging in the wind, he felt that
delight mingled with triumphant vanity and egoistic tenderness that
millionaires must experience when they come back to their native
village.
He went rambling round her house. A light was burning in the kitchen. He
watched for her shadow behind the curtains, but nothing appeared.
Mere Lefrancois, when she saw him, uttered many exclamations. She
thought he "had grown and was thinner," while Artemise, on the contrary,
thought him stouter and darker.
He dined in the little room as of yore, but alone, without the
tax-gatherer; for Binet, tired of waiting for the "Hirondelle," had
definitely put forward his meal one hour, and now he dined punctually at
five, and yet he declared usually the rickety old concern "was late."
Leon, however, made up his mind, and knocked at the doctor's door.
Madame was in her room, and did not come down for a quarter of an hour.
The doctor seemed delighted to see him, but he never stirred out that
evening, nor all the next day.
He saw her alone in the evening, very late, behind the garden in the
lane; in the lane, as she had the other one! It was a stormy night, and
they talked under an umbrella by lightning flashes.
Their separation was becoming intolerable. "I would rather die!" said
Emma. She was writhing in his arms, weeping. "Adieu! adieu! When shall I
see you again?"
They came back again to embrace once more, and it was then that
she promised him to find soon, by no matter what means, a regular
opportunity for seeing one another in freedom at least once a week. Emma
never doubted she should be able to do this. Besides, she was full of
hope. Some money was coming to her.
On the strength of it she bought a pair of yellow curtains with large
stripes for her room, whose cheapness Monsieur Lheureux had commended;
she dreamed of getting a carpet, and Lheureux, declaring that it wasn't
"drinking the sea," politely undertook to supply her with one. She could
no longer do without his services. Twenty times a day she sent for him,
and he at once put by his business without a murmur. People could not
understand either why Mere Rollet breakfasted with her every day, and
even paid her private visits.
It was about this time, that is to say, the beginning of winter, that
she seemed seized with great musical fervour.
One evening when Charles was listening to her, she began the same piece
four times over, each time with much vexation, while he, not noticing
any difference, cried--
"Bravo! very goodl You are wrong to stop. Go on!"
"Oh, no; it is execrable! My fingers are quite rusty."
The next day he begged her to play him something again.
"Very well; to please you!"
And Charles confessed she had gone off a little. She played wrong notes
and blundered; then, stopping short--
"Ah! it is no use. I ought to take some lessons; but--" She bit her lips
and added, "Twenty francs a lesson, that's too dear!"
"Yes, so it is--rather," said Charles, giggling stupidly. "But it seems
to me that one might be able to do it for less; for there are artists of
no reputation, and who are often better than the celebrities."
"Find them!" said Emma.
The next day when he came home he looked at her shyly, and at last could
no longer keep back the words.
"How obstinate you are sometimes! I went to Barfucheres to-day. Well,
Madame Liegard assured me that her three young ladies who are at
La Misericorde have lessons at fifty sous apiece, and that from an
excellent mistress!"
She shrugged her shoulders and did not open her piano again. But when
she passed by it (if Bovary were there), she sighed--
"Ah! my poor piano!"
And when anyone came to see her, she did not fail to inform them she
had given up music, and could not begin again now for important reasons.
Then people commiserated her--
"What a pity! she had so much talent!"
They even spoke to Bovary about it. They put him to shame, and
especially the chemist.
"You are wrong. One should never let any of the faculties of nature lie
fallow. Besides, just think, my good friend, that by inducing madame to
study; you are economising on the subsequent musical education of
your child. For my own part, I think that mothers ought themselves to
instruct their children. That is an idea of Rousseau's, still rather
new perhaps, but that will end by triumphing, I am certain of it, like
mothers nursing their own children and vaccination."
So Charles returned once more to this question of the piano. Emma
replied bitterly that it would be better to sell it. This poor piano,
that had given her vanity so much satisfaction--to see it go was to
Bovary like the indefinable suicide of a part of herself.
"If you liked," he said, "a lesson from time to time, that wouldn't
after all be very ruinous."
"But lessons," she replied, "are only of use when followed up."
And thus it was she set about obtaining her husband's permission to go
to town once a week to see her lover. At the end of a month she was even
considered to have made considerable progress.
| Early one Saturday morning Lon travels to Yonville. As in the old days, he dines at the inn and afterward calls on the Bovary's but does not see Emma. Finally, late Sunday evening they meet in the lane and she promises to arrange things so that she can see him regularly. She is confident and hopeful for the future. On the strength of the imminent inheritance money she purchases more items from Lheureux and comes to increasingly rely on his services. She begins to take an interest in music again but pretends that she is rusty on the piano and needs expensive lessons. Charles eventually concedes that she should take weekly lessons in Rouen. | summary |
Leon soon put on an air of superiority before his comrades, avoided
their company, and completely neglected his work.
He waited for her letters; he re-read them; he wrote to her. He called
her to mind with all the strength of his desires and of his memories.
Instead of lessening with absence, this longing to see her again grew,
so that at last on Saturday morning he escaped from his office.
When, from the summit of the hill, he saw in the valley below the
church-spire with its tin flag swinging in the wind, he felt that
delight mingled with triumphant vanity and egoistic tenderness that
millionaires must experience when they come back to their native
village.
He went rambling round her house. A light was burning in the kitchen. He
watched for her shadow behind the curtains, but nothing appeared.
Mere Lefrancois, when she saw him, uttered many exclamations. She
thought he "had grown and was thinner," while Artemise, on the contrary,
thought him stouter and darker.
He dined in the little room as of yore, but alone, without the
tax-gatherer; for Binet, tired of waiting for the "Hirondelle," had
definitely put forward his meal one hour, and now he dined punctually at
five, and yet he declared usually the rickety old concern "was late."
Leon, however, made up his mind, and knocked at the doctor's door.
Madame was in her room, and did not come down for a quarter of an hour.
The doctor seemed delighted to see him, but he never stirred out that
evening, nor all the next day.
He saw her alone in the evening, very late, behind the garden in the
lane; in the lane, as she had the other one! It was a stormy night, and
they talked under an umbrella by lightning flashes.
Their separation was becoming intolerable. "I would rather die!" said
Emma. She was writhing in his arms, weeping. "Adieu! adieu! When shall I
see you again?"
They came back again to embrace once more, and it was then that
she promised him to find soon, by no matter what means, a regular
opportunity for seeing one another in freedom at least once a week. Emma
never doubted she should be able to do this. Besides, she was full of
hope. Some money was coming to her.
On the strength of it she bought a pair of yellow curtains with large
stripes for her room, whose cheapness Monsieur Lheureux had commended;
she dreamed of getting a carpet, and Lheureux, declaring that it wasn't
"drinking the sea," politely undertook to supply her with one. She could
no longer do without his services. Twenty times a day she sent for him,
and he at once put by his business without a murmur. People could not
understand either why Mere Rollet breakfasted with her every day, and
even paid her private visits.
It was about this time, that is to say, the beginning of winter, that
she seemed seized with great musical fervour.
One evening when Charles was listening to her, she began the same piece
four times over, each time with much vexation, while he, not noticing
any difference, cried--
"Bravo! very goodl You are wrong to stop. Go on!"
"Oh, no; it is execrable! My fingers are quite rusty."
The next day he begged her to play him something again.
"Very well; to please you!"
And Charles confessed she had gone off a little. She played wrong notes
and blundered; then, stopping short--
"Ah! it is no use. I ought to take some lessons; but--" She bit her lips
and added, "Twenty francs a lesson, that's too dear!"
"Yes, so it is--rather," said Charles, giggling stupidly. "But it seems
to me that one might be able to do it for less; for there are artists of
no reputation, and who are often better than the celebrities."
"Find them!" said Emma.
The next day when he came home he looked at her shyly, and at last could
no longer keep back the words.
"How obstinate you are sometimes! I went to Barfucheres to-day. Well,
Madame Liegard assured me that her three young ladies who are at
La Misericorde have lessons at fifty sous apiece, and that from an
excellent mistress!"
She shrugged her shoulders and did not open her piano again. But when
she passed by it (if Bovary were there), she sighed--
"Ah! my poor piano!"
And when anyone came to see her, she did not fail to inform them she
had given up music, and could not begin again now for important reasons.
Then people commiserated her--
"What a pity! she had so much talent!"
They even spoke to Bovary about it. They put him to shame, and
especially the chemist.
"You are wrong. One should never let any of the faculties of nature lie
fallow. Besides, just think, my good friend, that by inducing madame to
study; you are economising on the subsequent musical education of
your child. For my own part, I think that mothers ought themselves to
instruct their children. That is an idea of Rousseau's, still rather
new perhaps, but that will end by triumphing, I am certain of it, like
mothers nursing their own children and vaccination."
So Charles returned once more to this question of the piano. Emma
replied bitterly that it would be better to sell it. This poor piano,
that had given her vanity so much satisfaction--to see it go was to
Bovary like the indefinable suicide of a part of herself.
"If you liked," he said, "a lesson from time to time, that wouldn't
after all be very ruinous."
"But lessons," she replied, "are only of use when followed up."
And thus it was she set about obtaining her husband's permission to go
to town once a week to see her lover. At the end of a month she was even
considered to have made considerable progress.
| Leon's time in Paris has given him the confidence to pursue Emma. In this he is like Rodolphe whose experience had given him the ability to seduce Emma by strategy. In one of the many recurring phrases and images in the novel, Lon's parting " Till tomorrow" mirrors the final words that Rodolphe and Emma speak before he betrays her. The carriage-ride in which Emma and Lon consummate their love is one of the more famous passages in the book. Flaubert's indirect description of this event, which is not witnessed by the reader, is coupled to the coachman's exhaustion and the sexual connotations inherent to this description. Though Emma is determined to resist Lon's advances she succumbs to the force of his conviction and then, displaying her own experience at conducting an affair, orchestrates the details of their liaisons with cunning and skill. These chapters mark the zenith of her mental prowess. Not only does Emma succeed in conducting an affair with Lon she uses the occasion of her father-in-law's death to procure power-of-attorney over her husband's affairs. This is more of a victory for Lheureux, however, who now has unfettered access to a woman whose lifestyle he knows to be compromised by reckless spending and extra-marital affairs | analysis |
She went on Thursdays. She got up and dressed silently, in order not to
awaken Charles, who would have made remarks about her getting ready too
early. Next she walked up and down, went to the windows, and looked out
at the Place. The early dawn was broadening between the pillars of the
market, and the chemist's shop, with the shutters still up, showed in
the pale light of the dawn the large letters of his signboard.
When the clock pointed to a quarter past seven, she went off to the
"Lion d'Or," whose door Artemise opened yawning. The girl then made
up the coals covered by the cinders, and Emma remained alone in the
kitchen. Now and again she went out. Hivert was leisurely harnessing his
horses, listening, moreover, to Mere Lefrancois, who, passing her head
and nightcap through a grating, was charging him with commissions and
giving him explanations that would have confused anyone else. Emma kept
beating the soles of her boots against the pavement of the yard.
At last, when he had eaten his soup, put on his cloak, lighted his pipe,
and grasped his whip, he calmly installed himself on his seat.
The "Hirondelle" started at a slow trot, and for about a mile stopped
here and there to pick up passengers who waited for it, standing at the
border of the road, in front of their yard gates.
Those who had secured seats the evening before kept it waiting; some
even were still in bed in their houses. Hivert called, shouted, swore;
then he got down from his seat and went and knocked loudly at the doors.
The wind blew through the cracked windows.
The four seats, however, filled up. The carriage rolled off; rows of
apple-trees followed one upon another, and the road between its two long
ditches, full of yellow water, rose, constantly narrowing towards the
horizon.
Emma knew it from end to end; she knew that after a meadow there was
a sign-post, next an elm, a barn, or the hut of a lime-kiln tender.
Sometimes even, in the hope of getting some surprise, she shut her eyes,
but she never lost the clear perception of the distance to be traversed.
At last the brick houses began to follow one another more closely, the
earth resounded beneath the wheels, the "Hirondelle" glided between the
gardens, where through an opening one saw statues, a periwinkle plant,
clipped yews, and a swing. Then on a sudden the town appeared. Sloping
down like an amphitheatre, and drowned in the fog, it widened out
beyond the bridges confusedly. Then the open country spread away with
a monotonous movement till it touched in the distance the vague line of
the pale sky. Seen thus from above, the whole landscape looked immovable
as a picture; the anchored ships were massed in one corner, the river
curved round the foot of the green hills, and the isles, oblique in
shape, lay on the water, like large, motionless, black fishes. The
factory chimneys belched forth immense brown fumes that were blown away
at the top. One heard the rumbling of the foundries, together with the
clear chimes of the churches that stood out in the mist. The leafless
trees on the boulevards made violet thickets in the midst of the
houses, and the roofs, all shining with the rain, threw back unequal
reflections, according to the height of the quarters in which they were.
Sometimes a gust of wind drove the clouds towards the Saint Catherine
hills, like aerial waves that broke silently against a cliff.
A giddiness seemed to her to detach itself from this mass of existence,
and her heart swelled as if the hundred and twenty thousand souls that
palpitated there had all at once sent into it the vapour of the passions
she fancied theirs. Her love grew in the presence of this vastness, and
expanded with tumult to the vague murmurings that rose towards her. She
poured it out upon the square, on the walks, on the streets, and the
old Norman city outspread before her eyes as an enormous capital, as a
Babylon into which she was entering. She leant with both hands against
the window, drinking in the breeze; the three horses galloped, the
stones grated in the mud, the diligence rocked, and Hivert, from afar,
hailed the carts on the road, while the bourgeois who had spent the
night at the Guillaume woods came quietly down the hill in their little
family carriages.
They stopped at the barrier; Emma undid her overshoes, put on other
gloves, rearranged her shawl, and some twenty paces farther she got down
from the "Hirondelle."
The town was then awakening. Shop-boys in caps were cleaning up the
shop-fronts, and women with baskets against their hips, at intervals
uttered sonorous cries at the corners of streets. She walked with
downcast eyes, close to the walls, and smiling with pleasure under her
lowered black veil.
For fear of being seen, she did not usually take the most direct road.
She plunged into dark alleys, and, all perspiring, reached the bottom
of the Rue Nationale, near the fountain that stands there. It is the
quarter for theatres, public-houses, and whores. Often a cart would
pass near her, bearing some shaking scenery. Waiters in aprons were
sprinkling sand on the flagstones between green shrubs. It all smelt of
absinthe, cigars, and oysters.
She turned down a street; she recognised him by his curling hair that
escaped from beneath his hat.
Leon walked along the pavement. She followed him to the hotel. He went
up, opened the door, entered--What an embrace!
Then, after the kisses, the words gushed forth. They told each other the
sorrows of the week, the presentiments, the anxiety for the letters; but
now everything was forgotten; they gazed into each other's faces with
voluptuous laughs, and tender names.
The bed was large, of mahogany, in the shape of a boat. The curtains
were in red levantine, that hung from the ceiling and bulged out too
much towards the bell-shaped bedside; and nothing in the world was so
lovely as her brown head and white skin standing out against this purple
colour, when, with a movement of shame, she crossed her bare arms,
hiding her face in her hands.
The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its gay ornaments, and its
calm light, seemed made for the intimacies of passion. The curtain-rods,
ending in arrows, their brass pegs, and the great balls of the fire-dogs
shone suddenly when the sun came in. On the chimney between the
candelabra there were two of those pink shells in which one hears the
murmur of the sea if one holds them to the ear.
How they loved that dear room, so full of gaiety, despite its rather
faded splendour! They always found the furniture in the same place, and
sometimes hairpins, that she had forgotten the Thursday before, under
the pedestal of the clock. They lunched by the fireside on a little
round table, inlaid with rosewood. Emma carved, put bits on his plate
with all sorts of coquettish ways, and she laughed with a sonorous and
libertine laugh when the froth of the champagne ran over from the
glass to the rings on her fingers. They were so completely lost in
the possession of each other that they thought themselves in their
own house, and that they would live there till death, like two spouses
eternally young. They said "our room," "our carpet," she even said "my
slippers," a gift of Leon's, a whim she had had. They were pink satin,
bordered with swansdown. When she sat on his knees, her leg, then too
short, hung in the air, and the dainty shoe, that had no back to it, was
held only by the toes to her bare foot.
He for the first time enjoyed the inexpressible delicacy of feminine
refinements. He had never met this grace of language, this reserve of
clothing, these poses of the weary dove. He admired the exaltation of
her soul and the lace on her petticoat. Besides, was she not "a lady"
and a married woman--a real mistress, in fine?
By the diversity of her humour, in turn mystical or mirthful, talkative,
taciturn, passionate, careless, she awakened in him a thousand desires,
called up instincts or memories. She was the mistress of all the novels,
the heroine of all the dramas, the vague "she" of all the volumes
of verse. He found again on her shoulder the amber colouring of the
"Odalisque Bathing"; she had the long waist of feudal chatelaines, and
she resembled the "Pale Woman of Barcelona." But above all she was the
Angel!
Often looking at her, it seemed to him that his soul, escaping towards
her, spread like a wave about the outline of her head, and descended
drawn down into the whiteness of her breast. He knelt on the ground
before her, and with both elbows on her knees looked at her with a
smile, his face upturned.
She bent over him, and murmured, as if choking with intoxication--
"Oh, do not move! do not speak! look at me! Something so sweet comes
from your eyes that helps me so much!"
She called him "child." "Child, do you love me?"
And she did not listen for his answer in the haste of her lips that
fastened to his mouth.
On the clock there was a bronze cupid, who smirked as he bent his arm
beneath a golden garland. They had laughed at it many a time, but when
they had to part everything seemed serious to them.
Motionless in front of each other, they kept repeating, "Till Thursday,
till Thursday."
Suddenly she seized his head between her hands, kissed him hurriedly on
the forehead, crying, "Adieu!" and rushed down the stairs.
She went to a hairdresser's in the Rue de la Comedie to have her hair
arranged. Night fell; the gas was lighted in the shop. She heard the
bell at the theatre calling the mummers to the performance, and she saw,
passing opposite, men with white faces and women in faded gowns going in
at the stage-door.
It was hot in the room, small, and too low where the stove was hissing
in the midst of wigs and pomades. The smell of the tongs, together with
the greasy hands that handled her head, soon stunned her, and she dozed
a little in her wrapper. Often, as he did her hair, the man offered her
tickets for a masked ball.
Then she went away. She went up the streets; reached the Croix-Rouge,
put on her overshoes, that she had hidden in the morning under the seat,
and sank into her place among the impatient passengers. Some got out
at the foot of the hill. She remained alone in the carriage. At every
turning all the lights of the town were seen more and more completely,
making a great luminous vapour about the dim houses. Emma knelt on the
cushions and her eyes wandered over the dazzling light. She sobbed;
called on Leon, sent him tender words and kisses lost in the wind.
On the hillside a poor devil wandered about with his stick in the midst
of the diligences. A mass of rags covered his shoulders, and an old
staved-in beaver, turned out like a basin, hid his face; but when he
took it off he discovered in the place of eyelids empty and bloody
orbits. The flesh hung in red shreds, and there flowed from it liquids
that congealed into green scale down to the nose, whose black nostrils
sniffed convulsively. To speak to you he threw back his head with an
idiotic laugh; then his bluish eyeballs, rolling constantly, at the
temples beat against the edge of the open wound. He sang a little song
as he followed the carriages--
"Maids an the warmth of a summer day Dream of love, and of love always"
And all the rest was about birds and sunshine and green leaves.
Sometimes he appeared suddenly behind Emma, bareheaded, and she drew
back with a cry. Hivert made fun of him. He would advise him to get a
booth at the Saint Romain fair, or else ask him, laughing, how his young
woman was.
Often they had started when, with a sudden movement, his hat entered the
diligence through the small window, while he clung with his other arm
to the footboard, between the wheels splashing mud. His voice, feeble
at first and quavering, grew sharp; it resounded in the night like the
indistinct moan of a vague distress; and through the ringing of the
bells, the murmur of the trees, and the rumbling of the empty vehicle,
it had a far-off sound that disturbed Emma. It went to the bottom of
her soul, like a whirlwind in an abyss, and carried her away into the
distances of a boundless melancholy. But Hivert, noticing a weight
behind, gave the blind man sharp cuts with his whip. The thong lashed
his wounds, and he fell back into the mud with a yell. Then the
passengers in the "Hirondelle" ended by falling asleep, some with open
mouths, others with lowered chins, leaning against their neighbour's
shoulder, or with their arm passed through the strap, oscillating
regularly with the jolting of the carriage; and the reflection of the
lantern swinging without, on the crupper of the wheeler; penetrating
into the interior through the chocolate calico curtains, threw
sanguineous shadows over all these motionless people. Emma, drunk with
grief, shivered in her clothes, feeling her feet grow colder and colder,
and death in her soul.
Charles at home was waiting for her; the "Hirondelle" was always late
on Thursdays. Madame arrived at last, and scarcely kissed the child. The
dinner was not ready. No matter! She excused the servant. This girl now
seemed allowed to do just as she liked.
Often her husband, noting her pallor, asked if she were unwell.
"No," said Emma.
"But," he replied, "you seem so strange this evening."
"Oh, it's nothing! nothing!"
There were even days when she had no sooner come in than she went up to
her room; and Justin, happening to be there, moved about noiselessly,
quicker at helping her than the best of maids. He put the matches
ready, the candlestick, a book, arranged her nightgown, turned back the
bedclothes.
"Come!" said she, "that will do. Now you can go."
For he stood there, his hands hanging down and his eyes wide open, as if
enmeshed in the innumerable threads of a sudden reverie.
The following day was frightful, and those that came after still more
unbearable, because of her impatience to once again seize her happiness;
an ardent lust, inflamed by the images of past experience, and that
burst forth freely on the seventh day beneath Leon's caresses. His
ardours were hidden beneath outbursts of wonder and gratitude. Emma
tasted this love in a discreet, absorbed fashion, maintained it by all
the artifices of her tenderness, and trembled a little lest it should be
lost later on.
She often said to him, with her sweet, melancholy voice--
"Ah! you too, you will leave me! You will marry! You will be like all
the others."
He asked, "What others?"
"Why, like all men," she replied. Then added, repulsing him with a
languid movement--
"You are all evil!"
One day, as they were talking philosophically of earthly disillusions,
to experiment on his jealousy, or yielding, perhaps, to an over-strong
need to pour out her heart, she told him that formerly, before him, she
had loved someone.
"Not like you," she went on quickly, protesting by the head of her child
that "nothing had passed between them."
The young man believed her, but none the less questioned her to find out
what he was.
"He was a ship's captain, my dear."
Was this not preventing any inquiry, and, at the same time, assuming a
higher ground through this pretended fascination exercised over a man
who must have been of warlike nature and accustomed to receive homage?
The clerk then felt the lowliness of his position; he longed for
epaulettes, crosses, titles. All that would please her--he gathered that
from her spendthrift habits.
Emma nevertheless concealed many of these extravagant fancies, such as
her wish to have a blue tilbury to drive into Rouen, drawn by an English
horse and driven by a groom in top-boots. It was Justin who had inspired
her with this whim, by begging her to take him into her service as
valet-de-chambre*, and if the privation of it did not lessen the
pleasure of her arrival at each rendezvous, it certainly augmented the
bitterness of the return.
* Manservant.
Often, when they talked together of Paris, she ended by murmuring, "Ah!
how happy we should be there!"
"Are we not happy?" gently answered the young man passing his hands over
her hair.
"Yes, that is true," she said. "I am mad. Kiss me!"
To her husband she was more charming than ever. She made him
pistachio-creams, and played him waltzes after dinner. So he thought
himself the most fortunate of men and Emma was without uneasiness, when,
one evening suddenly he said--
"It is Mademoiselle Lempereur, isn't it, who gives you lessons?"
"Yes."
"Well, I saw her just now," Charles went on, "at Madame Liegeard's. I
spoke to her about you, and she doesn't know you."
This was like a thunderclap. However, she replied quite naturally--
"Ah! no doubt she forgot my name."
"But perhaps," said the doctor, "there are several Demoiselles Lempereur
at Rouen who are music-mistresses."
"Possibly!" Then quickly--"But I have my receipts here. See!"
And she went to the writing-table, ransacked all the drawers, rummaged
the papers, and at last lost her head so completely that Charles
earnestly begged her not to take so much trouble about those wretched
receipts.
"Oh, I will find them," she said.
And, in fact, on the following Friday, as Charles was putting on one
of his boots in the dark cabinet where his clothes were kept, he felt
a piece of paper between the leather and his sock. He took it out and
read--
"Received, for three months' lessons and several pieces of music, the
sum of sixty-three francs.--Felicie Lempereur, professor of music."
"How the devil did it get into my boots?"
"It must," she replied, "have fallen from the old box of bills that is
on the edge of the shelf."
From that moment her existence was but one long tissue of lies, in which
she enveloped her love as in veils to hide it. It was a want, a mania,
a pleasure carried to such an extent that if she said she had the day
before walked on the right side of a road, one might know she had taken
the left.
One morning, when she had gone, as usual, rather lightly clothed, it
suddenly began to snow, and as Charles was watching the weather from the
window, he caught sight of Monsieur Bournisien in the chaise of Monsieur
Tuvache, who was driving him to Rouen. Then he went down to give the
priest a thick shawl that he was to hand over to Emma as soon as he
reached the "Croix-Rouge." When he got to the inn, Monsieur Bournisien
asked for the wife of the Yonville doctor. The landlady replied that
she very rarely came to her establishment. So that evening, when he
recognised Madame Bovary in the "Hirondelle," the cure told her his
dilemma, without, however, appearing to attach much importance to it,
for he began praising a preacher who was doing wonders at the Cathedral,
and whom all the ladies were rushing to hear.
Still, if he did not ask for any explanation, others, later on, might
prove less discreet. So she thought well to get down each time at the
"Croix-Rouge," so that the good folk of her village who saw her on the
stairs should suspect nothing.
One day, however, Monsieur Lheureux met her coming out of the Hotel
de Boulogne on Leon's arm; and she was frightened, thinking he would
gossip. He was not such a fool. But three days after he came to her
room, shut the door, and said, "I must have some money."
She declared she could not give him any. Lheureux burst into
lamentations and reminded her of all the kindnesses he had shown her.
In fact, of the two bills signed by Charles, Emma up to the present had
paid only one. As to the second, the shopkeeper, at her request, had
consented to replace it by another, which again had been renewed for a
long date. Then he drew from his pocket a list of goods not paid for; to
wit, the curtains, the carpet, the material for the armchairs, several
dresses, and divers articles of dress, the bills for which amounted to
about two thousand francs.
She bowed her head. He went on--
"But if you haven't any ready money, you have an estate." And he
reminded her of a miserable little hovel situated at Barneville, near
Aumale, that brought in almost nothing. It had formerly been part of a
small farm sold by Monsieur Bovary senior; for Lheureux knew everything,
even to the number of acres and the names of the neighbours.
"If I were in your place," he said, "I should clear myself of my debts,
and have money left over."
She pointed out the difficulty of getting a purchaser. He held out the
hope of finding one; but she asked him how she should manage to sell it.
"Haven't you your power of attorney?" he replied.
The phrase came to her like a breath of fresh air. "Leave me the bill,"
said Emma.
"Oh, it isn't worth while," answered Lheureux.
He came back the following week and boasted of having, after much
trouble, at last discovered a certain Langlois, who, for a long time,
had had an eye on the property, but without mentioning his price.
"Never mind the price!" she cried.
But they would, on the contrary, have to wait, to sound the fellow.
The thing was worth a journey, and, as she could not undertake it, he
offered to go to the place to have an interview with Langlois. On his
return he announced that the purchaser proposed four thousand francs.
Emma was radiant at this news.
"Frankly," he added, "that's a good price."
She drew half the sum at once, and when she was about to pay her account
the shopkeeper said--
"It really grieves me, on my word! to see you depriving yourself all at
once of such a big sum as that."
Then she looked at the bank-notes, and dreaming of the unlimited number
of rendezvous represented by those two thousand francs, she stammered--
"What! what!"
"Oh!" he went on, laughing good-naturedly, "one puts anything one likes
on receipts. Don't you think I know what household affairs are?" And he
looked at her fixedly, while in his hand he held two long papers that he
slid between his nails. At last, opening his pocket-book, he spread out
on the table four bills to order, each for a thousand francs.
"Sign these," he said, "and keep it all!"
She cried out, scandalised.
"But if I give you the surplus," replied Monsieur Lheureux impudently,
"is that not helping you?"
And taking a pen he wrote at the bottom of the account, "Received of
Madame Bovary four thousand francs."
"Now who can trouble you, since in six months you'll draw the arrears
for your cottage, and I don't make the last bill due till after you've
been paid?"
Emma grew rather confused in her calculations, and her ears tingled
as if gold pieces, bursting from their bags, rang all round her on
the floor. At last Lheureux explained that he had a very good friend,
Vincart, a broker at Rouen, who would discount these four bills. Then
he himself would hand over to madame the remainder after the actual debt
was paid.
But instead of two thousand francs he brought only eighteen hundred, for
the friend Vincart (which was only fair) had deducted two hundred francs
for commission and discount. Then he carelessly asked for a receipt.
"You understand--in business--sometimes. And with the date, if you
please, with the date."
A horizon of realisable whims opened out before Emma. She was prudent
enough to lay by a thousand crowns, with which the first three bills
were paid when they fell due; but the fourth, by chance, came to the
house on a Thursday, and Charles, quite upset, patiently awaited his
wife's return for an explanation.
If she had not told him about this bill, it was only to spare him such
domestic worries; she sat on his knees, caressed him, cooed to him, gave
him a long enumeration of all the indispensable things that had been got
on credit.
"Really, you must confess, considering the quantity, it isn't too dear."
Charles, at his wit's end, soon had recourse to the eternal Lheureux,
who swore he would arrange matters if the doctor would sign him two
bills, one of which was for seven hundred francs, payable in three
months. In order to arrange for this he wrote his mother a pathetic
letter. Instead of sending a reply she came herself; and when Emma
wanted to know whether he had got anything out of her, "Yes," he
replied; "but she wants to see the account." The next morning at
daybreak Emma ran to Lheureux to beg him to make out another account for
not more than a thousand francs, for to show the one for four thousand
it would be necessary to say that she had paid two-thirds, and confess,
consequently, the sale of the estate--a negotiation admirably carried
out by the shopkeeper, and which, in fact, was only actually known later
on.
Despite the low price of each article, Madame Bovary senior, of course,
thought the expenditure extravagant.
"Couldn't you do without a carpet? Why have recovered the arm-chairs? In
my time there was a single arm-chair in a house, for elderly persons--at
any rate it was so at my mother's, who was a good woman, I can tell you.
Everybody can't be rich! No fortune can hold out against waste! I should
be ashamed to coddle myself as you do! And yet I am old. I need looking
after. And there! there! fitting up gowns! fallals! What! silk for
lining at two francs, when you can get jaconet for ten sous, or even for
eight, that would do well enough!"
Emma, lying on a lounge, replied as quietly as possible--"Ah! Madame,
enough! enough!"
The other went on lecturing her, predicting they would end in the
workhouse. But it was Bovary's fault. Luckily he had promised to destroy
that power of attorney.
"What?"
"Ah! he swore he would," went on the good woman.
Emma opened the window, called Charles, and the poor fellow was obliged
to confess the promise torn from him by his mother.
Emma disappeared, then came back quickly, and majestically handed her a
thick piece of paper.
"Thank you," said the old woman. And she threw the power of attorney
into the fire.
Emma began to laugh, a strident, piercing, continuous laugh; she had an
attack of hysterics.
"Oh, my God!" cried Charles. "Ah! you really are wrong! You come here
and make scenes with her!"
His mother, shrugging her shoulders, declared it was "all put on."
But Charles, rebelling for the first time, took his wife's part, so that
Madame Bovary, senior, said she would leave. She went the very next day,
and on the threshold, as he was trying to detain her, she replied--
"No, no! You love her better than me, and you are right. It is natural.
For the rest, so much the worse! You will see. Good day--for I am not
likely to come soon again, as you say, to make scenes."
Charles nevertheless was very crestfallen before Emma, who did not hide
the resentment she still felt at his want of confidence, and it needed
many prayers before she would consent to have another power of attorney.
He even accompanied her to Monsieur Guillaumin to have a second one,
just like the other, drawn up.
"I understand," said the notary; "a man of science can't be worried with
the practical details of life."
And Charles felt relieved by this comfortable reflection, which gave his
weakness the flattering appearance of higher pre-occupation.
And what an outburst the next Thursday at the hotel in their room with
Leon! She laughed, cried, sang, sent for sherbets, wanted to smoke
cigarettes, seemed to him wild and extravagant, but adorable, superb.
He did not know what recreation of her whole being drove her more and
more to plunge into the pleasures of life. She was becoming irritable,
greedy, voluptuous; and she walked about the streets with him carrying
her head high, without fear, so she said, of compromising herself.
At times, however, Emma shuddered at the sudden thought of meeting
Rodolphe, for it seemed to her that, although they were separated
forever, she was not completely free from her subjugation to him.
One night she did not return to Yonville at all. Charles lost his head
with anxiety, and little Berthe would not go to bed without her mamma,
and sobbed enough to break her heart. Justin had gone out searching the
road at random. Monsieur Homais even had left his pharmacy.
At last, at eleven o'clock, able to bear it no longer, Charles
harnessed his chaise, jumped in, whipped up his horse, and reached the
"Croix-Rouge" about two o'clock in the morning. No one there! He thought
that the clerk had perhaps seen her; but where did he live? Happily,
Charles remembered his employer's address, and rushed off there.
Day was breaking, and he could distinguish the escutcheons over the
door, and knocked. Someone, without opening the door, shouted out the
required information, adding a few insults to those who disturb people
in the middle of the night.
The house inhabited by the clerk had neither bell, knocker, nor porter.
Charles knocked loudly at the shutters with his hands. A policeman
happened to pass by. Then he was frightened, and went away.
"I am mad," he said; "no doubt they kept her to dinner at Monsieur
Lormeaux'." But the Lormeaux no longer lived at Rouen.
"She probably stayed to look after Madame Dubreuil. Why, Madame Dubreuil
has been dead these ten months! Where can she be?"
An idea occurred to him. At a cafe he asked for a Directory, and
hurriedly looked for the name of Mademoiselle Lempereur, who lived at
No. 74 Rue de la Renelle-des-Maroquiniers.
As he was turning into the street, Emma herself appeared at the other
end of it. He threw himself upon her rather than embraced her, crying--
"What kept you yesterday?"
"I was not well."
"What was it? Where? How?"
She passed her hand over her forehead and answered, "At Mademoiselle
Lempereur's."
"I was sure of it! I was going there."
"Oh, it isn't worth while," said Emma. "She went out just now; but for
the future don't worry. I do not feel free, you see, if I know that the
least delay upsets you like this."
This was a sort of permission that she gave herself, so as to get
perfect freedom in her escapades. And she profited by it freely, fully.
When she was seized with the desire to see Leon, she set out upon any
pretext; and as he was not expecting her on that day, she went to fetch
him at his office.
It was a great delight at first, but soon he no longer concealed the
truth, which was, that his master complained very much about these
interruptions.
"Pshaw! come along," she said.
And he slipped out.
She wanted him to dress all in black, and grow a pointed beard, to
look like the portraits of Louis XIII. She wanted to see his lodgings;
thought them poor. He blushed at them, but she did not notice this, then
advised him to buy some curtains like hers, and as he objected to the
expense--
"Ah! ah! you care for your money," she said laughing.
Each time Leon had to tell her everything that he had done since their
last meeting. She asked him for some verses--some verses "for herself,"
a "love poem" in honour of her. But he never succeeded in getting a
rhyme for the second verse; and at last ended by copying a sonnet in
a "Keepsake." This was less from vanity than from the one desire of
pleasing her. He did not question her ideas; he accepted all her tastes;
he was rather becoming her mistress than she his. She had tender words
and kisses that thrilled his soul. Where could she have learnt this
corruption almost incorporeal in the strength of its profanity and
dissimulation?
| Every Thursday morning Emma rises early and takes the Hirondelle to Rouen. The sight of the coastal town never fails to inspire her. Emma and Lon come to think of their hotel room as their own home. Emma enchants Lon and he imagines that she fulfills all the ideals of a mistress. Emma basks in the youthful ardor of his love. When it is time for her to leave they grow serious and say "Till Thursday. Afterward she goes to a salon to have her hair arranged and then meets the Hirondelle for the sad journey back to Yonville. On the hill-road outside of Rouen there is a beggar whose face is deformed by disease leaving two bloody sockets in place of eyelids. He walks beside the coaches and sings a song that begins:. A clear day's warmth will often move. A lass to stray in dreams of love. The beggar terrifies Emma. At home she retreats to her room where Justin helps her arrange her things. She passes the rest of the week anticipating her weekly meeting with Lon. Sometimes she tells her lover that he will one day tire of her and even lets it slip that she loved another before him though she claims that nothing happened. This torments the young man and he desires to be more admirable in her eyes. At home she dotes on her husband who suspects nothing of her affair. One day, however, he tells her that he has seen Mademoiselle Lempereur, the woman she is supposedly taking lessons from and the teacher does not know her. Emma covers by saying that the woman probably doesn't remember her name and a few days later arranges for Charles to find a receipt for the lessons. She begins to lie often and with increasing zest. One day Monsieur Lheureux sees her walking on Lon's arm in Rouen and a few days later he visits and asks for some of the money due him. She has none but he convinces her that she could sell the run-down cottage left to them by Charles' father. He even offers to find a buyer and a week later produces a Monsieur Langlois who pays 4,000 francs. Lheureux brings Emma half the money immediately. When she tries to settle her debt with Lheureux he waves off her present obligation and tempts her by producing four promissory notes for 1,000 francs each and tells her that he will raise the remaining 2,000 francs through a banker in Rouen. After commission she receives only 1,800 but wisely puts aside 3,000 so she is able to pay the first three notes. When the fourth falls due, however, it is one of her Thursdays away and a confused Charles receives the note and waits for his wife. She explains away the debt and Charles works out an arrangement with Lheureux for two more notes and then writes to his mother for help. Instead of sending money the elder Madame Bovary comes and demands to see the bill. Emma has Lheureux fix up a false bill so that her husband and mother-in-law will not suspect that she has sold the cottage. The old woman criticizes her daughter's lavish spending and fine furnishings and tells her that she has arranged for Charles to cancel the power of attorney. Emma is hysterical and brings out the document and contemptuously throws it in the fire. Seeing his wife upset Charles upbraids his mother who leaves and promises that she will not return for a long time. After she leaves Charles begs Emma to once again take the power of attorney and they have a new document drawn up. She becomes reckless in her passion for Lon and dares to walk openly with him in the street. One Thursday night she does not return and Charles, crazed with worry, rides to Rouen in the middle of the night and eventually finds her on the street in morning. She excuses herself and criticizes him for overreacting. Before long she goes to Rouen with only the slightest excuse at any time that pleased her. She demands increasingly more of Lon's attention and he finds himself being steered by her passion. He wonders where she could have learned it | summary |
During the journeys he made to see her, Leon had often dined at the
chemist's, and he felt obliged from politeness to invite him in turn.
"With pleasure!" Monsieur Homais replied; "besides, I must invigorate
my mind, for I am getting rusty here. We'll go to the theatre, to the
restaurant; we'll make a night of it."
"Oh, my dear!" tenderly murmured Madame Homais, alarmed at the vague
perils he was preparing to brave.
"Well, what? Do you think I'm not sufficiently ruining my health living
here amid the continual emanations of the pharmacy? But there! that is
the way with women! They are jealous of science, and then are opposed to
our taking the most legitimate distractions. No matter! Count upon
me. One of these days I shall turn up at Rouen, and we'll go the pace
together."
The druggist would formerly have taken good care not to use such an
expression, but he was cultivating a gay Parisian style, which he
thought in the best taste; and, like his neighbour, Madame Bovary, he
questioned the clerk curiously about the customs of the capital; he
even talked slang to dazzle the bourgeois, saying bender, crummy, dandy,
macaroni, the cheese, cut my stick and "I'll hook it," for "I am going."
So one Thursday Emma was surprised to meet Monsieur Homais in the
kitchen of the "Lion d'Or," wearing a traveller's costume, that is to
say, wrapped in an old cloak which no one knew he had, while he carried
a valise in one hand and the foot-warmer of his establishment in the
other. He had confided his intentions to no one, for fear of causing the
public anxiety by his absence.
The idea of seeing again the place where his youth had been spent no
doubt excited him, for during the whole journey he never ceased talking,
and as soon as he had arrived, he jumped quickly out of the diligence
to go in search of Leon. In vain the clerk tried to get rid of him.
Monsieur Homais dragged him off to the large Cafe de la Normandie,
which he entered majestically, not raising his hat, thinking it very
provincial to uncover in any public place.
Emma waited for Leon three quarters of an hour. At last she ran to
his office; and, lost in all sorts of conjectures, accusing him of
indifference, and reproaching herself for her weakness, she spent the
afternoon, her face pressed against the window-panes.
At two o'clock they were still at a table opposite each other. The large
room was emptying; the stove-pipe, in the shape of a palm-tree, spread
its gilt leaves over the white ceiling, and near them, outside the
window, in the bright sunshine, a little fountain gurgled in a white
basin, where; in the midst of watercress and asparagus, three torpid
lobsters stretched across to some quails that lay heaped up in a pile on
their sides.
Homais was enjoying himself. Although he was even more intoxicated with
the luxury than the rich fare, the Pommard wine all the same rather
excited his faculties; and when the omelette au rhum* appeared, he began
propounding immoral theories about women. What seduced him above all
else was chic. He admired an elegant toilette in a well-furnished
apartment, and as to bodily qualities, he didn't dislike a young girl.
* In rum.
Leon watched the clock in despair. The druggist went on drinking,
eating, and talking.
"You must be very lonely," he said suddenly, "here at Rouen. To be sure
your lady-love doesn't live far away."
And the other blushed--
"Come now, be frank. Can you deny that at Yonville--"
The young man stammered something.
"At Madame Bovary's, you're not making love to--"
"To whom?"
"The servant!"
He was not joking; but vanity getting the better of all prudence, Leon,
in spite of himself protested. Besides, he only liked dark women.
"I approve of that," said the chemist; "they have more passion."
And whispering into his friend's ear, he pointed out the symptoms by
which one could find out if a woman had passion. He even launched into
an ethnographic digression: the German was vapourish, the French woman
licentious, the Italian passionate.
"And negresses?" asked the clerk.
"They are an artistic taste!" said Homais. "Waiter! two cups of coffee!"
"Are we going?" at last asked Leon impatiently.
"Ja!"
But before leaving he wanted to see the proprietor of the establishment
and made him a few compliments. Then the young man, to be alone, alleged
he had some business engagement.
"Ah! I will escort you," said Homais.
And all the while he was walking through the streets with him he talked
of his wife, his children; of their future, and of his business; told
him in what a decayed condition it had formerly been, and to what a
degree of perfection he had raised it.
Arrived in front of the Hotel de Boulogne, Leon left him abruptly, ran
up the stairs, and found his mistress in great excitement. At mention of
the chemist she flew into a passion. He, however, piled up good reasons;
it wasn't his fault; didn't she know Homais--did she believe that he
would prefer his company? But she turned away; he drew her back, and,
sinking on his knees, clasped her waist with his arms in a languorous
pose, full of concupiscence and supplication.
She was standing up, her large flashing eyes looked at him seriously,
almost terribly. Then tears obscured them, her red eyelids were lowered,
she gave him her hands, and Leon was pressing them to his lips when a
servant appeared to tell the gentleman that he was wanted.
"You will come back?" she said.
"Yes."
"But when?"
"Immediately."
"It's a trick," said the chemist, when he saw Leon. "I wanted to
interrupt this visit, that seemed to me to annoy you. Let's go and have
a glass of garus at Bridoux'."
Leon vowed that he must get back to his office. Then the druggist joked
him about quill-drivers and the law.
"Leave Cujas and Barthole alone a bit. Who the devil prevents you? Be a
man! Let's go to Bridoux'. You'll see his dog. It's very interesting."
And as the clerk still insisted--
"I'll go with you. I'll read a paper while I wait for you, or turn over
the leaves of a 'Code.'"
Leon, bewildered by Emma's anger, Monsieur Homais' chatter, and,
perhaps, by the heaviness of the luncheon, was undecided, and, as it
were, fascinated by the chemist, who kept repeating--
"Let's go to Bridoux'. It's just by here, in the Rue Malpalu."
Then, through cowardice, through stupidity, through that indefinable
feeling that drags us into the most distasteful acts, he allowed
himself to be led off to Bridoux', whom they found in his small yard,
superintending three workmen, who panted as they turned the large
wheel of a machine for making seltzer-water. Homais gave them some good
advice. He embraced Bridoux; they took some garus. Twenty times Leon
tried to escape, but the other seized him by the arm saying--
"Presently! I'm coming! We'll go to the 'Fanal de Rouen' to see the
fellows there. I'll introduce you to Thornassin."
At last he managed to get rid of him, and rushed straight to the hotel.
Emma was no longer there. She had just gone in a fit of anger. She
detested him now. This failing to keep their rendezvous seemed to her an
insult, and she tried to rake up other reasons to separate herself from
him. He was incapable of heroism, weak, banal, more spiritless than a
woman, avaricious too, and cowardly.
Then, growing calmer, she at length discovered that she had, no doubt,
calumniated him. But the disparaging of those we love always alienates
us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt
sticks to our fingers.
They gradually came to talking more frequently of matters outside their
love, and in the letters that Emma wrote him she spoke of flowers,
verses, the moon and the stars, naive resources of a waning passion
striving to keep itself alive by all external aids. She was constantly
promising herself a profound felicity on her next journey. Then
she confessed to herself that she felt nothing extraordinary. This
disappointment quickly gave way to a new hope, and Emma returned to him
more inflamed, more eager than ever. She undressed brutally, tearing off
the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips like a gliding
snake. She went on tiptoe, barefooted, to see once more that the
door was closed, then, pale, serious, and, without speaking, with one
movement, she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder.
Yet there was upon that brow covered with cold drops, on those quivering
lips, in those wild eyes, in the strain of those arms, something vague
and dreary that seemed to Leon to glide between them subtly as if to
separate them.
He did not dare to question her; but, seeing her so skilled, she must
have passed, he thought, through every experience of suffering and of
pleasure. What had once charmed now frightened him a little. Besides, he
rebelled against his absorption, daily more marked, by her personality.
He begrudged Emma this constant victory. He even strove not to love her;
then, when he heard the creaking of her boots, he turned coward, like
drunkards at the sight of strong drinks.
She did not fail, in truth, to lavish all sorts of attentions upon him,
from the delicacies of food to the coquettries of dress and languishing
looks. She brought roses to her breast from Yonville, which she threw
into his face; was anxious about his health, gave him advice as to his
conduct; and, in order the more surely to keep her hold on him, hoping
perhaps that heaven would take her part, she tied a medal of the
Virgin round his neck. She inquired like a virtuous mother about his
companions. She said to him--
"Don't see them; don't go out; think only of ourselves; love me!"
She would have liked to be able to watch over his life; and the idea
occurred to her of having him followed in the streets. Near the hotel
there was always a kind of loafer who accosted travellers, and who would
not refuse. But her pride revolted at this.
"Bah! so much the worse. Let him deceive me! What does it matter to me?
As If I cared for him!"
One day, when they had parted early and she was returning alone along
the boulevard, she saw the walls of her convent; then she sat down on a
form in the shade of the elm-trees. How calm that time had been! How she
longed for the ineffable sentiments of love that she had tried to figure
to herself out of books! The first month of her marriage, her rides in
the wood, the viscount that waltzed, and Lagardy singing, all repassed
before her eyes. And Leon suddenly appeared to her as far off as the
others.
"Yet I love him," she said to herself.
No matter! She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this
insufficiency in life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything
on which she leant? But if there were somewhere a being strong and
beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement,
a poet's heart in an angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing
out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find
him? Ah! how impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of
seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom,
every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left
upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.
A metallic clang droned through the air, and four strokes were heard
from the convent-clock. Four o'clock! And it seemed to her that she had
been there on that form an eternity. But an infinity of passions may be
contained in a minute, like a crowd in a small space.
Emma lived all absorbed in hers, and troubled no more about money
matters than an archduchess.
Once, however, a wretched-looking man, rubicund and bald, came to her
house, saying he had been sent by Monsieur Vincart of Rouen. He took out
the pins that held together the side-pockets of his long green overcoat,
stuck them into his sleeve, and politely handed her a paper.
It was a bill for seven hundred francs, signed by her, and which
Lheureux, in spite of all his professions, had paid away to Vincart. She
sent her servant for him. He could not come. Then the stranger, who
had remained standing, casting right and left curious glances, that his
thick, fair eyebrows hid, asked with a naive air--
"What answer am I to take Monsieur Vincart?"
"Oh," said Emma, "tell him that I haven't it. I will send next week; he
must wait; yes, till next week."
And the fellow went without another word.
But the next day at twelve o'clock she received a summons, and the sight
of the stamped paper, on which appeared several times in large letters,
"Maitre Hareng, bailiff at Buchy," so frightened her that she rushed in
hot haste to the linendraper's. She found him in his shop, doing up a
parcel.
"Your obedient!" he said; "I am at your service."
But Lheureux, all the same, went on with his work, helped by a young
girl of about thirteen, somewhat hunch-backed, who was at once his clerk
and his servant.
Then, his clogs clattering on the shop-boards, he went up in front
of Madame Bovary to the first door, and introduced her into a narrow
closet, where, in a large bureau in sapon-wood, lay some ledgers,
protected by a horizontal padlocked iron bar. Against the wall, under
some remnants of calico, one glimpsed a safe, but of such dimensions
that it must contain something besides bills and money. Monsieur
Lheureux, in fact, went in for pawnbroking, and it was there that he had
put Madame Bovary's gold chain, together with the earrings of poor old
Tellier, who, at last forced to sell out, had bought a meagre store
of grocery at Quincampoix, where he was dying of catarrh amongst his
candles, that were less yellow than his face.
Lheureux sat down in a large cane arm-chair, saying: "What news?"
"See!"
And she showed him the paper.
"Well how can I help it?"
Then she grew angry, reminding him of the promise he had given not to
pay away her bills. He acknowledged it.
"But I was pressed myself; the knife was at my own throat."
"And what will happen now?" she went on.
"Oh, it's very simple; a judgment and then a distraint--that's about
it!"
Emma kept down a desire to strike him, and asked gently if there was no
way of quieting Monsieur Vincart.
"I dare say! Quiet Vincart! You don't know him; he's more ferocious than
an Arab!"
Still Monsieur Lheureux must interfere.
"Well, listen. It seems to me so far I've been very good to you." And
opening one of his ledgers, "See," he said. Then running up the page
with his finger, "Let's see! let's see! August 3d, two hundred francs;
June 17th, a hundred and fifty; March 23d, forty-six. In April--"
He stopped, as if afraid of making some mistake.
"Not to speak of the bills signed by Monsieur Bovary, one for seven
hundred francs, and another for three hundred. As to your little
installments, with the interest, why, there's no end to 'em; one gets
quite muddled over 'em. I'll have nothing more to do with it."
She wept; she even called him "her good Monsieur Lheureux." But he
always fell back upon "that rascal Vincart." Besides, he hadn't a brass
farthing; no one was paying him now-a-days; they were eating his coat
off his back; a poor shopkeeper like him couldn't advance money.
Emma was silent, and Monsieur Lheureux, who was biting the feathers of a
quill, no doubt became uneasy at her silence, for he went on--
"Unless one of these days I have something coming in, I might--"
"Besides," said she, "as soon as the balance of Barneville--"
"What!"
And on hearing that Langlois had not yet paid he seemed much surprised.
Then in a honied voice--
"And we agree, you say?"
"Oh! to anything you like."
On this he closed his eyes to reflect, wrote down a few figures, and
declaring it would be very difficult for him, that the affair was shady,
and that he was being bled, he wrote out four bills for two hundred and
fifty francs each, to fall due month by month.
"Provided that Vincart will listen to me! However, it's settled. I don't
play the fool; I'm straight enough."
Next he carelessly showed her several new goods, not one of which,
however, was in his opinion worthy of madame.
"When I think that there's a dress at threepence-halfpenny a yard, and
warranted fast colours! And yet they actually swallow it! Of course you
understand one doesn't tell them what it really is!" He hoped by this
confession of dishonesty to others to quite convince her of his probity
to her.
Then he called her back to show her three yards of guipure that he had
lately picked up "at a sale."
"Isn't it lovely?" said Lheureux. "It is very much used now for the
backs of arm-chairs. It's quite the rage."
And, more ready than a juggler, he wrapped up the guipure in some blue
paper and put it in Emma's hands.
"But at least let me know--"
"Yes, another time," he replied, turning on his heel.
That same evening she urged Bovary to write to his mother, to ask her
to send as quickly as possible the whole of the balance due from the
father's estate. The mother-in-law replied that she had nothing more,
the winding up was over, and there was due to them besides Barneville an
income of six hundred francs, that she would pay them punctually.
Then Madame Bovary sent in accounts to two or three patients, and she
made large use of this method, which was very successful. She was always
careful to add a postscript: "Do not mention this to my husband; you
know how proud he is. Excuse me. Yours obediently." There were some
complaints; she intercepted them.
To get money she began selling her old gloves, her old hats, the old
odds and ends, and she bargained rapaciously, her peasant blood standing
her in good stead. Then on her journey to town she picked up nick-nacks
secondhand, that, in default of anyone else, Monsieur Lheureux would
certainly take off her hands. She bought ostrich feathers, Chinese
porcelain, and trunks; she borrowed from Felicite, from Madame
Lefrancois, from the landlady at the Croix-Rouge, from everybody, no
matter where.
With the money she at last received from Barneville she paid two bills;
the other fifteen hundred francs fell due. She renewed the bills, and
thus it was continually.
Sometimes, it is true, she tried to make a calculation, but she
discovered things so exorbitant that she could not believe them
possible. Then she recommenced, soon got confused, gave it all up, and
thought no more about it.
The house was very dreary now. Tradesmen were seen leaving it with angry
faces. Handkerchiefs were lying about on the stoves, and little Berthe,
to the great scandal of Madame Homais, wore stockings with holes in
them. If Charles timidly ventured a remark, she answered roughly that it
wasn't her fault.
What was the meaning of all these fits of temper? He explained
everything through her old nervous illness, and reproaching himself with
having taken her infirmities for faults, accused himself of egotism, and
longed to go and take her in his arms.
"Ah, no!" he said to himself; "I should worry her."
And he did not stir.
After dinner he walked about alone in the garden; he took little Berthe
on his knees, and unfolding his medical journal, tried to teach her
to read. But the child, who never had any lessons, soon looked up with
large, sad eyes and began to cry. Then he comforted her; went to fetch
water in her can to make rivers on the sand path, or broke off branches
from the privet hedges to plant trees in the beds. This did not spoil
the garden much, all choked now with long weeds. They owed Lestiboudois
for so many days. Then the child grew cold and asked for her mother.
"Call the servant," said Charles. "You know, dearie, that mamma does not
like to be disturbed."
Autumn was setting in, and the leaves were already falling, as they did
two years ago when she was ill. Where would it all end? And he walked up
and down, his hands behind his back.
Madame was in her room, which no one entered. She stayed there all
day long, torpid, half dressed, and from time to time burning Turkish
pastilles which she had bought at Rouen in an Algerian's shop. In order
not to have at night this sleeping man stretched at her side, by dint of
manoeuvring, she at last succeeded in banishing him to the second floor,
while she read till morning extravagant books, full of pictures of
orgies and thrilling situations. Often, seized with fear, she cried out,
and Charles hurried to her.
"Oh, go away!" she would say.
Or at other times, consumed more ardently than ever by that inner flame
to which adultery added fuel, panting, tremulous, all desire, she threw
open her window, breathed in the cold air, shook loose in the wind her
masses of hair, too heavy, and, gazing upon the stars, longed for some
princely love. She thought of him, of Leon. She would then have given
anything for a single one of those meetings that surfeited her.
These were her gala days. She wanted them to be sumptuous, and when he
alone could not pay the expenses, she made up the deficit liberally,
which happened pretty well every time. He tried to make her understand
that they would be quite as comfortable somewhere else, in a smaller
hotel, but she always found some objection.
One day she drew six small silver-gilt spoons from her bag (they were
old Roualt's wedding present), begging him to pawn them at once for her,
and Leon obeyed, though the proceeding annoyed him. He was afraid of
compromising himself.
Then, on, reflection, he began to think his mistress's ways were growing
odd, and that they were perhaps not wrong in wishing to separate him
from her.
In fact someone had sent his mother a long anonymous letter to warn her
that he was "ruining himself with a married woman," and the good lady at
once conjuring up the eternal bugbear of families, the vague pernicious
creature, the siren, the monster, who dwells fantastically in depths of
love, wrote to Lawyer Dubocage, his employer, who behaved perfectly in
the affair. He kept him for three quarters of an hour trying to open
his eyes, to warn him of the abyss into which he was falling. Such
an intrigue would damage him later on, when he set up for himself. He
implored him to break with her, and, if he would not make this sacrifice
in his own interest, to do it at least for his, Dubocage's sake.
At last Leon swore he would not see Emma again, and he reproached
himself with not having kept his word, considering all the worry and
lectures this woman might still draw down upon him, without reckoning
the jokes made by his companions as they sat round the stove in the
morning. Besides, he was soon to be head clerk; it was time to settle
down. So he gave up his flute, exalted sentiments, and poetry; for every
bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment,
has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises.
The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears
within him the debris of a poet.
He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast, and his
heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music,
dozed to the sound of a love whose delicacies he no longer noted.
They knew one another too well for any of those surprises of possession
that increase its joys a hundred-fold. She was as sick of him as he
was weary of her. Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of
marriage.
But how to get rid of him? Then, though she might feel humiliated at
the baseness of such enjoyment, she clung to it from habit or from
corruption, and each day she hungered after them the more, exhausting
all felicity in wishing for too much of it. She accused Leon of her
baffled hopes, as if he had betrayed her; and she even longed for some
catastrophe that would bring about their separation, since she had not
the courage to make up her mind to it herself.
She none the less went on writing him love letters, in virtue of the
notion that a woman must write to her lover.
But whilst she wrote it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned out
of her most ardent memories, of her finest reading, her strongest
lusts, and at last he became so real, so tangible, that she palpitated
wondering, without, however, the power to imagine him clearly, so lost
was he, like a god, beneath the abundance of his attributes. He dwelt in
that azure land where silk ladders hang from balconies under the breath
of flowers, in the light of the moon. She felt him near her; he was
coming, and would carry her right away in a kiss.
Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love wearied
her more than great debauchery.
She now felt constant ache all over her. Often she even received
summonses, stamped paper that she barely looked at. She would have liked
not to be alive, or to be always asleep.
On Mid-Lent she did not return to Yonville, but in the evening went to
a masked ball. She wore velvet breeches, red stockings, a club wig, and
three-cornered hat cocked on one side. She danced all night to the wild
tones of the trombones; people gathered round her, and in the morning
she found herself on the steps of the theatre together with five or six
masks, debardeuses* and sailors, Leon's comrades, who were talking about
having supper.
* People dressed as longshoremen.
The neighbouring cafes were full. They caught sight of one on the
harbour, a very indifferent restaurant, whose proprietor showed them to
a little room on the fourth floor.
The men were whispering in a corner, no doubt consorting about expenses.
There were a clerk, two medical students, and a shopman--what company
for her! As to the women, Emma soon perceived from the tone of their
voices that they must almost belong to the lowest class. Then she was
frightened, pushed back her chair, and cast down her eyes.
The others began to eat; she ate nothing. Her head was on fire, her eyes
smarted, and her skin was ice-cold. In her head she seemed to feel the
floor of the ball-room rebounding again beneath the rhythmical pulsation
of the thousands of dancing feet. And now the smell of the punch, the
smoke of the cigars, made her giddy. She fainted, and they carried her
to the window.
Day was breaking, and a great stain of purple colour broadened out
in the pale horizon over the St. Catherine hills. The livid river was
shivering in the wind; there was no one on the bridges; the street lamps
were going out.
She revived, and began thinking of Berthe asleep yonder in the servant's
room. Then a cart filled with long strips of iron passed by, and made a
deafening metallic vibration against the walls of the houses.
She slipped away suddenly, threw off her costume, told Leon she must get
back, and at last was alone at the Hotel de Boulogne. Everything, even
herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a
bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there
grow young again.
She went out, crossed the Boulevard, the Place Cauchoise, and the
Faubourg, as far as an open street that overlooked some gardens. She
walked rapidly; the fresh air calming her; and, little by little, the
faces of the crowd, the masks, the quadrilles, the lights, the supper,
those women, all disappeared like mists fading away. Then, reaching the
"Croix-Rouge," she threw herself on the bed in her little room on the
second floor, where there were pictures of the "Tour de Nesle." At four
o'clock Hivert awoke her.
When she got home, Felicite showed her behind the clock a grey paper.
She read--
"In virtue of the seizure in execution of a judgment."
What judgment? As a matter of fact, the evening before another paper
had been brought that she had not yet seen, and she was stunned by these
words--
"By order of the king, law, and justice, to Madame Bovary." Then,
skipping several lines, she read, "Within twenty-four hours, without
fail--" But what? "To pay the sum of eight thousand francs." And there
was even at the bottom, "She will be constrained thereto by every
form of law, and notably by a writ of distraint on her furniture and
effects."
What was to be done? In twenty-four hours--tomorrow. Lheureux, she
thought, wanted to frighten her again; for she saw through all his
devices, the object of his kindnesses. What reassured her was the very
magnitude of the sum.
However, by dint of buying and not paying, of borrowing, signing bills,
and renewing these bills that grew at each new falling-in, she had ended
by preparing a capital for Monsieur Lheureux which he was impatiently
awaiting for his speculations.
She presented herself at his place with an offhand air.
"You know what has happened to me? No doubt it's a joke!"
"How so?"
He turned away slowly, and, folding his arms, said to her--
"My good lady, did you think I should go on to all eternity being your
purveyor and banker, for the love of God? Now be just. I must get back
what I've laid out. Now be just."
She cried out against the debt.
"Ah! so much the worse. The court has admitted it. There's a judgment.
It's been notified to you. Besides, it isn't my fault. It's Vincart's."
"Could you not--?"
"Oh, nothing whatever."
"But still, now talk it over."
And she began beating about the bush; she had known nothing about it; it
was a surprise.
"Whose fault is that?" said Lheureux, bowing ironically. "While I'm
slaving like a nigger, you go gallivanting about."
"Ah! no lecturing."
"It never does any harm," he replied.
She turned coward; she implored him; she even pressed her pretty white
and slender hand against the shopkeeper's knee.
"There, that'll do! Anyone'd think you wanted to seduce me!"
"You are a wretch!" she cried.
"Oh, oh! go it! go it!"
"I will show you up. I shall tell my husband."
"All right! I too. I'll show your husband something."
And Lheureux drew from his strong box the receipt for eighteen hundred
francs that she had given him when Vincart had discounted the bills.
"Do you think," he added, "that he'll not understand your little theft,
the poor dear man?"
She collapsed, more overcome than if felled by the blow of a pole-axe.
He was walking up and down from the window to the bureau, repeating all
the while--
"Ah! I'll show him! I'll show him!" Then he approached her, and in a
soft voice said--
"It isn't pleasant, I know; but, after all, no bones are broken, and,
since that is the only way that is left for you paying back my money--"
"But where am I to get any?" said Emma, wringing her hands.
"Bah! when one has friends like you!"
And he looked at her in so keen, so terrible a fashion, that she
shuddered to her very heart.
"I promise you," she said, "to sign--"
"I've enough of your signatures."
"I will sell something."
"Get along!" he said, shrugging his shoulders; "you've not got
anything."
And he called through the peep-hole that looked down into the shop--
"Annette, don't forget the three coupons of No. 14."
The servant appeared. Emma understood, and asked how much money would be
wanted to put a stop to the proceedings.
"It is too late."
"But if I brought you several thousand francs--a quarter of the sum--a
third--perhaps the whole?"
"No; it's no use!"
And he pushed her gently towards the staircase.
"I implore you, Monsieur Lheureux, just a few days more!" She was
sobbing.
"There! tears now!"
"You are driving me to despair!"
"What do I care?" said he, shutting the door.
| Out of politeness Lon extends an invitation to Monsieur Homais to visit him in Rouen and the pharmacist, feeling something of a daredevil, decides to relive some of the glories of his youth. Emma and Lon are both surprised when Monsieur Homais accompanies Emma to Rouen one day and immediately drags the clerk off to dine. Emma is vexed and impatient and spends the afternoon waiting in their hotel room. Lon suffers through a long meal with the pharmacist who then insists on accompanying him on his business visits. Lon manages to steal a few minutes at the hotel where Emma, hysterical from waiting, fails to appreciate his predicament. Homais insists that Lon accompany him to another caf. Eventually Lon is able to return to the hotel but finds that Emma has left in a fury. In the coming weeks she tries to recapture some of her original passion for him by pushing herself to extremes. For his part, Lon grows to be somewhat frightened of her and begins to resent her. Still, he is beguiled by her beauty and her attention. One day, after leaving the hotel, she sees the walls of her old convent and sits on a nearby bench to ponder her childhood ardor and present feelings. She finds that she is totally devoted to her passions. One day a representative of Monsieur Vinart, the Rouen banker, arrives with a note for 500 francs due immediately. Emma sends him away with a promise to pay the following week. The next day, however, she receives an official protest of non-payment. She visits Lheureux in his office and he explains that he was forced to sign the note over to the banker and that Vinart will not be appeased. She is furious. He washes his hands at the whole matter and blames the banker. She pleads with him but to no avail. Finally he agrees to advance her four 250 franc notes against the balance of the cottage. Before she leaves he sells her some fine fabric on credit. Soon she finds that there is nothing to the inheritance except the cottage and 600 francs a year. She sends requests for payment to Charles' patients and selling her things in Rouen. Additionally she borrowed money from everyone she can. She signs more promissory notes. The household begins to fall into disarray and Emma becomes defensive when Charles asks about their financial troubles. Autumn arrives and she is alternatively morose and consumed by passion for Lon. She banishes Charles to sleeping in the attic while she stays awake, reading lurid novels. Lon, alarmed by the change in his mistress, wonders if he should break it off. He is about to be promoted to head clerk and he resolves to give up his romantic ideals and act sensibly. He is bored with her and her with him but she cannot give him up. She is tortured by an ideal bliss, an ideal man which she cannot grasp and she is tormented by countless official documents of debt that continue to arrive. On the night of the mid-Lenten festivities she accompanies Lon and his friends to a costume ball and in a caf afterward is disgusted by the company she is keeping. She swoons in a faint and revives thinking of her daughter. When she returns home Flicit shows her a recently arrived document that proclaims she must pay 8,000 francs the following day or suffer a public seizure of all her possessions. Lheureux refuses to help. She puts her hand on his knee but she acts insulted when he asks if she is trying to seduce him. He knowingly tells her that she has many friends and she had better raise the money through them. | summary |
During the journeys he made to see her, Leon had often dined at the
chemist's, and he felt obliged from politeness to invite him in turn.
"With pleasure!" Monsieur Homais replied; "besides, I must invigorate
my mind, for I am getting rusty here. We'll go to the theatre, to the
restaurant; we'll make a night of it."
"Oh, my dear!" tenderly murmured Madame Homais, alarmed at the vague
perils he was preparing to brave.
"Well, what? Do you think I'm not sufficiently ruining my health living
here amid the continual emanations of the pharmacy? But there! that is
the way with women! They are jealous of science, and then are opposed to
our taking the most legitimate distractions. No matter! Count upon
me. One of these days I shall turn up at Rouen, and we'll go the pace
together."
The druggist would formerly have taken good care not to use such an
expression, but he was cultivating a gay Parisian style, which he
thought in the best taste; and, like his neighbour, Madame Bovary, he
questioned the clerk curiously about the customs of the capital; he
even talked slang to dazzle the bourgeois, saying bender, crummy, dandy,
macaroni, the cheese, cut my stick and "I'll hook it," for "I am going."
So one Thursday Emma was surprised to meet Monsieur Homais in the
kitchen of the "Lion d'Or," wearing a traveller's costume, that is to
say, wrapped in an old cloak which no one knew he had, while he carried
a valise in one hand and the foot-warmer of his establishment in the
other. He had confided his intentions to no one, for fear of causing the
public anxiety by his absence.
The idea of seeing again the place where his youth had been spent no
doubt excited him, for during the whole journey he never ceased talking,
and as soon as he had arrived, he jumped quickly out of the diligence
to go in search of Leon. In vain the clerk tried to get rid of him.
Monsieur Homais dragged him off to the large Cafe de la Normandie,
which he entered majestically, not raising his hat, thinking it very
provincial to uncover in any public place.
Emma waited for Leon three quarters of an hour. At last she ran to
his office; and, lost in all sorts of conjectures, accusing him of
indifference, and reproaching herself for her weakness, she spent the
afternoon, her face pressed against the window-panes.
At two o'clock they were still at a table opposite each other. The large
room was emptying; the stove-pipe, in the shape of a palm-tree, spread
its gilt leaves over the white ceiling, and near them, outside the
window, in the bright sunshine, a little fountain gurgled in a white
basin, where; in the midst of watercress and asparagus, three torpid
lobsters stretched across to some quails that lay heaped up in a pile on
their sides.
Homais was enjoying himself. Although he was even more intoxicated with
the luxury than the rich fare, the Pommard wine all the same rather
excited his faculties; and when the omelette au rhum* appeared, he began
propounding immoral theories about women. What seduced him above all
else was chic. He admired an elegant toilette in a well-furnished
apartment, and as to bodily qualities, he didn't dislike a young girl.
* In rum.
Leon watched the clock in despair. The druggist went on drinking,
eating, and talking.
"You must be very lonely," he said suddenly, "here at Rouen. To be sure
your lady-love doesn't live far away."
And the other blushed--
"Come now, be frank. Can you deny that at Yonville--"
The young man stammered something.
"At Madame Bovary's, you're not making love to--"
"To whom?"
"The servant!"
He was not joking; but vanity getting the better of all prudence, Leon,
in spite of himself protested. Besides, he only liked dark women.
"I approve of that," said the chemist; "they have more passion."
And whispering into his friend's ear, he pointed out the symptoms by
which one could find out if a woman had passion. He even launched into
an ethnographic digression: the German was vapourish, the French woman
licentious, the Italian passionate.
"And negresses?" asked the clerk.
"They are an artistic taste!" said Homais. "Waiter! two cups of coffee!"
"Are we going?" at last asked Leon impatiently.
"Ja!"
But before leaving he wanted to see the proprietor of the establishment
and made him a few compliments. Then the young man, to be alone, alleged
he had some business engagement.
"Ah! I will escort you," said Homais.
And all the while he was walking through the streets with him he talked
of his wife, his children; of their future, and of his business; told
him in what a decayed condition it had formerly been, and to what a
degree of perfection he had raised it.
Arrived in front of the Hotel de Boulogne, Leon left him abruptly, ran
up the stairs, and found his mistress in great excitement. At mention of
the chemist she flew into a passion. He, however, piled up good reasons;
it wasn't his fault; didn't she know Homais--did she believe that he
would prefer his company? But she turned away; he drew her back, and,
sinking on his knees, clasped her waist with his arms in a languorous
pose, full of concupiscence and supplication.
She was standing up, her large flashing eyes looked at him seriously,
almost terribly. Then tears obscured them, her red eyelids were lowered,
she gave him her hands, and Leon was pressing them to his lips when a
servant appeared to tell the gentleman that he was wanted.
"You will come back?" she said.
"Yes."
"But when?"
"Immediately."
"It's a trick," said the chemist, when he saw Leon. "I wanted to
interrupt this visit, that seemed to me to annoy you. Let's go and have
a glass of garus at Bridoux'."
Leon vowed that he must get back to his office. Then the druggist joked
him about quill-drivers and the law.
"Leave Cujas and Barthole alone a bit. Who the devil prevents you? Be a
man! Let's go to Bridoux'. You'll see his dog. It's very interesting."
And as the clerk still insisted--
"I'll go with you. I'll read a paper while I wait for you, or turn over
the leaves of a 'Code.'"
Leon, bewildered by Emma's anger, Monsieur Homais' chatter, and,
perhaps, by the heaviness of the luncheon, was undecided, and, as it
were, fascinated by the chemist, who kept repeating--
"Let's go to Bridoux'. It's just by here, in the Rue Malpalu."
Then, through cowardice, through stupidity, through that indefinable
feeling that drags us into the most distasteful acts, he allowed
himself to be led off to Bridoux', whom they found in his small yard,
superintending three workmen, who panted as they turned the large
wheel of a machine for making seltzer-water. Homais gave them some good
advice. He embraced Bridoux; they took some garus. Twenty times Leon
tried to escape, but the other seized him by the arm saying--
"Presently! I'm coming! We'll go to the 'Fanal de Rouen' to see the
fellows there. I'll introduce you to Thornassin."
At last he managed to get rid of him, and rushed straight to the hotel.
Emma was no longer there. She had just gone in a fit of anger. She
detested him now. This failing to keep their rendezvous seemed to her an
insult, and she tried to rake up other reasons to separate herself from
him. He was incapable of heroism, weak, banal, more spiritless than a
woman, avaricious too, and cowardly.
Then, growing calmer, she at length discovered that she had, no doubt,
calumniated him. But the disparaging of those we love always alienates
us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt
sticks to our fingers.
They gradually came to talking more frequently of matters outside their
love, and in the letters that Emma wrote him she spoke of flowers,
verses, the moon and the stars, naive resources of a waning passion
striving to keep itself alive by all external aids. She was constantly
promising herself a profound felicity on her next journey. Then
she confessed to herself that she felt nothing extraordinary. This
disappointment quickly gave way to a new hope, and Emma returned to him
more inflamed, more eager than ever. She undressed brutally, tearing off
the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips like a gliding
snake. She went on tiptoe, barefooted, to see once more that the
door was closed, then, pale, serious, and, without speaking, with one
movement, she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder.
Yet there was upon that brow covered with cold drops, on those quivering
lips, in those wild eyes, in the strain of those arms, something vague
and dreary that seemed to Leon to glide between them subtly as if to
separate them.
He did not dare to question her; but, seeing her so skilled, she must
have passed, he thought, through every experience of suffering and of
pleasure. What had once charmed now frightened him a little. Besides, he
rebelled against his absorption, daily more marked, by her personality.
He begrudged Emma this constant victory. He even strove not to love her;
then, when he heard the creaking of her boots, he turned coward, like
drunkards at the sight of strong drinks.
She did not fail, in truth, to lavish all sorts of attentions upon him,
from the delicacies of food to the coquettries of dress and languishing
looks. She brought roses to her breast from Yonville, which she threw
into his face; was anxious about his health, gave him advice as to his
conduct; and, in order the more surely to keep her hold on him, hoping
perhaps that heaven would take her part, she tied a medal of the
Virgin round his neck. She inquired like a virtuous mother about his
companions. She said to him--
"Don't see them; don't go out; think only of ourselves; love me!"
She would have liked to be able to watch over his life; and the idea
occurred to her of having him followed in the streets. Near the hotel
there was always a kind of loafer who accosted travellers, and who would
not refuse. But her pride revolted at this.
"Bah! so much the worse. Let him deceive me! What does it matter to me?
As If I cared for him!"
One day, when they had parted early and she was returning alone along
the boulevard, she saw the walls of her convent; then she sat down on a
form in the shade of the elm-trees. How calm that time had been! How she
longed for the ineffable sentiments of love that she had tried to figure
to herself out of books! The first month of her marriage, her rides in
the wood, the viscount that waltzed, and Lagardy singing, all repassed
before her eyes. And Leon suddenly appeared to her as far off as the
others.
"Yet I love him," she said to herself.
No matter! She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this
insufficiency in life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything
on which she leant? But if there were somewhere a being strong and
beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement,
a poet's heart in an angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing
out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find
him? Ah! how impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of
seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom,
every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left
upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.
A metallic clang droned through the air, and four strokes were heard
from the convent-clock. Four o'clock! And it seemed to her that she had
been there on that form an eternity. But an infinity of passions may be
contained in a minute, like a crowd in a small space.
Emma lived all absorbed in hers, and troubled no more about money
matters than an archduchess.
Once, however, a wretched-looking man, rubicund and bald, came to her
house, saying he had been sent by Monsieur Vincart of Rouen. He took out
the pins that held together the side-pockets of his long green overcoat,
stuck them into his sleeve, and politely handed her a paper.
It was a bill for seven hundred francs, signed by her, and which
Lheureux, in spite of all his professions, had paid away to Vincart. She
sent her servant for him. He could not come. Then the stranger, who
had remained standing, casting right and left curious glances, that his
thick, fair eyebrows hid, asked with a naive air--
"What answer am I to take Monsieur Vincart?"
"Oh," said Emma, "tell him that I haven't it. I will send next week; he
must wait; yes, till next week."
And the fellow went without another word.
But the next day at twelve o'clock she received a summons, and the sight
of the stamped paper, on which appeared several times in large letters,
"Maitre Hareng, bailiff at Buchy," so frightened her that she rushed in
hot haste to the linendraper's. She found him in his shop, doing up a
parcel.
"Your obedient!" he said; "I am at your service."
But Lheureux, all the same, went on with his work, helped by a young
girl of about thirteen, somewhat hunch-backed, who was at once his clerk
and his servant.
Then, his clogs clattering on the shop-boards, he went up in front
of Madame Bovary to the first door, and introduced her into a narrow
closet, where, in a large bureau in sapon-wood, lay some ledgers,
protected by a horizontal padlocked iron bar. Against the wall, under
some remnants of calico, one glimpsed a safe, but of such dimensions
that it must contain something besides bills and money. Monsieur
Lheureux, in fact, went in for pawnbroking, and it was there that he had
put Madame Bovary's gold chain, together with the earrings of poor old
Tellier, who, at last forced to sell out, had bought a meagre store
of grocery at Quincampoix, where he was dying of catarrh amongst his
candles, that were less yellow than his face.
Lheureux sat down in a large cane arm-chair, saying: "What news?"
"See!"
And she showed him the paper.
"Well how can I help it?"
Then she grew angry, reminding him of the promise he had given not to
pay away her bills. He acknowledged it.
"But I was pressed myself; the knife was at my own throat."
"And what will happen now?" she went on.
"Oh, it's very simple; a judgment and then a distraint--that's about
it!"
Emma kept down a desire to strike him, and asked gently if there was no
way of quieting Monsieur Vincart.
"I dare say! Quiet Vincart! You don't know him; he's more ferocious than
an Arab!"
Still Monsieur Lheureux must interfere.
"Well, listen. It seems to me so far I've been very good to you." And
opening one of his ledgers, "See," he said. Then running up the page
with his finger, "Let's see! let's see! August 3d, two hundred francs;
June 17th, a hundred and fifty; March 23d, forty-six. In April--"
He stopped, as if afraid of making some mistake.
"Not to speak of the bills signed by Monsieur Bovary, one for seven
hundred francs, and another for three hundred. As to your little
installments, with the interest, why, there's no end to 'em; one gets
quite muddled over 'em. I'll have nothing more to do with it."
She wept; she even called him "her good Monsieur Lheureux." But he
always fell back upon "that rascal Vincart." Besides, he hadn't a brass
farthing; no one was paying him now-a-days; they were eating his coat
off his back; a poor shopkeeper like him couldn't advance money.
Emma was silent, and Monsieur Lheureux, who was biting the feathers of a
quill, no doubt became uneasy at her silence, for he went on--
"Unless one of these days I have something coming in, I might--"
"Besides," said she, "as soon as the balance of Barneville--"
"What!"
And on hearing that Langlois had not yet paid he seemed much surprised.
Then in a honied voice--
"And we agree, you say?"
"Oh! to anything you like."
On this he closed his eyes to reflect, wrote down a few figures, and
declaring it would be very difficult for him, that the affair was shady,
and that he was being bled, he wrote out four bills for two hundred and
fifty francs each, to fall due month by month.
"Provided that Vincart will listen to me! However, it's settled. I don't
play the fool; I'm straight enough."
Next he carelessly showed her several new goods, not one of which,
however, was in his opinion worthy of madame.
"When I think that there's a dress at threepence-halfpenny a yard, and
warranted fast colours! And yet they actually swallow it! Of course you
understand one doesn't tell them what it really is!" He hoped by this
confession of dishonesty to others to quite convince her of his probity
to her.
Then he called her back to show her three yards of guipure that he had
lately picked up "at a sale."
"Isn't it lovely?" said Lheureux. "It is very much used now for the
backs of arm-chairs. It's quite the rage."
And, more ready than a juggler, he wrapped up the guipure in some blue
paper and put it in Emma's hands.
"But at least let me know--"
"Yes, another time," he replied, turning on his heel.
That same evening she urged Bovary to write to his mother, to ask her
to send as quickly as possible the whole of the balance due from the
father's estate. The mother-in-law replied that she had nothing more,
the winding up was over, and there was due to them besides Barneville an
income of six hundred francs, that she would pay them punctually.
Then Madame Bovary sent in accounts to two or three patients, and she
made large use of this method, which was very successful. She was always
careful to add a postscript: "Do not mention this to my husband; you
know how proud he is. Excuse me. Yours obediently." There were some
complaints; she intercepted them.
To get money she began selling her old gloves, her old hats, the old
odds and ends, and she bargained rapaciously, her peasant blood standing
her in good stead. Then on her journey to town she picked up nick-nacks
secondhand, that, in default of anyone else, Monsieur Lheureux would
certainly take off her hands. She bought ostrich feathers, Chinese
porcelain, and trunks; she borrowed from Felicite, from Madame
Lefrancois, from the landlady at the Croix-Rouge, from everybody, no
matter where.
With the money she at last received from Barneville she paid two bills;
the other fifteen hundred francs fell due. She renewed the bills, and
thus it was continually.
Sometimes, it is true, she tried to make a calculation, but she
discovered things so exorbitant that she could not believe them
possible. Then she recommenced, soon got confused, gave it all up, and
thought no more about it.
The house was very dreary now. Tradesmen were seen leaving it with angry
faces. Handkerchiefs were lying about on the stoves, and little Berthe,
to the great scandal of Madame Homais, wore stockings with holes in
them. If Charles timidly ventured a remark, she answered roughly that it
wasn't her fault.
What was the meaning of all these fits of temper? He explained
everything through her old nervous illness, and reproaching himself with
having taken her infirmities for faults, accused himself of egotism, and
longed to go and take her in his arms.
"Ah, no!" he said to himself; "I should worry her."
And he did not stir.
After dinner he walked about alone in the garden; he took little Berthe
on his knees, and unfolding his medical journal, tried to teach her
to read. But the child, who never had any lessons, soon looked up with
large, sad eyes and began to cry. Then he comforted her; went to fetch
water in her can to make rivers on the sand path, or broke off branches
from the privet hedges to plant trees in the beds. This did not spoil
the garden much, all choked now with long weeds. They owed Lestiboudois
for so many days. Then the child grew cold and asked for her mother.
"Call the servant," said Charles. "You know, dearie, that mamma does not
like to be disturbed."
Autumn was setting in, and the leaves were already falling, as they did
two years ago when she was ill. Where would it all end? And he walked up
and down, his hands behind his back.
Madame was in her room, which no one entered. She stayed there all
day long, torpid, half dressed, and from time to time burning Turkish
pastilles which she had bought at Rouen in an Algerian's shop. In order
not to have at night this sleeping man stretched at her side, by dint of
manoeuvring, she at last succeeded in banishing him to the second floor,
while she read till morning extravagant books, full of pictures of
orgies and thrilling situations. Often, seized with fear, she cried out,
and Charles hurried to her.
"Oh, go away!" she would say.
Or at other times, consumed more ardently than ever by that inner flame
to which adultery added fuel, panting, tremulous, all desire, she threw
open her window, breathed in the cold air, shook loose in the wind her
masses of hair, too heavy, and, gazing upon the stars, longed for some
princely love. She thought of him, of Leon. She would then have given
anything for a single one of those meetings that surfeited her.
These were her gala days. She wanted them to be sumptuous, and when he
alone could not pay the expenses, she made up the deficit liberally,
which happened pretty well every time. He tried to make her understand
that they would be quite as comfortable somewhere else, in a smaller
hotel, but she always found some objection.
One day she drew six small silver-gilt spoons from her bag (they were
old Roualt's wedding present), begging him to pawn them at once for her,
and Leon obeyed, though the proceeding annoyed him. He was afraid of
compromising himself.
Then, on, reflection, he began to think his mistress's ways were growing
odd, and that they were perhaps not wrong in wishing to separate him
from her.
In fact someone had sent his mother a long anonymous letter to warn her
that he was "ruining himself with a married woman," and the good lady at
once conjuring up the eternal bugbear of families, the vague pernicious
creature, the siren, the monster, who dwells fantastically in depths of
love, wrote to Lawyer Dubocage, his employer, who behaved perfectly in
the affair. He kept him for three quarters of an hour trying to open
his eyes, to warn him of the abyss into which he was falling. Such
an intrigue would damage him later on, when he set up for himself. He
implored him to break with her, and, if he would not make this sacrifice
in his own interest, to do it at least for his, Dubocage's sake.
At last Leon swore he would not see Emma again, and he reproached
himself with not having kept his word, considering all the worry and
lectures this woman might still draw down upon him, without reckoning
the jokes made by his companions as they sat round the stove in the
morning. Besides, he was soon to be head clerk; it was time to settle
down. So he gave up his flute, exalted sentiments, and poetry; for every
bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment,
has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises.
The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears
within him the debris of a poet.
He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast, and his
heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music,
dozed to the sound of a love whose delicacies he no longer noted.
They knew one another too well for any of those surprises of possession
that increase its joys a hundred-fold. She was as sick of him as he
was weary of her. Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of
marriage.
But how to get rid of him? Then, though she might feel humiliated at
the baseness of such enjoyment, she clung to it from habit or from
corruption, and each day she hungered after them the more, exhausting
all felicity in wishing for too much of it. She accused Leon of her
baffled hopes, as if he had betrayed her; and she even longed for some
catastrophe that would bring about their separation, since she had not
the courage to make up her mind to it herself.
She none the less went on writing him love letters, in virtue of the
notion that a woman must write to her lover.
But whilst she wrote it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned out
of her most ardent memories, of her finest reading, her strongest
lusts, and at last he became so real, so tangible, that she palpitated
wondering, without, however, the power to imagine him clearly, so lost
was he, like a god, beneath the abundance of his attributes. He dwelt in
that azure land where silk ladders hang from balconies under the breath
of flowers, in the light of the moon. She felt him near her; he was
coming, and would carry her right away in a kiss.
Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love wearied
her more than great debauchery.
She now felt constant ache all over her. Often she even received
summonses, stamped paper that she barely looked at. She would have liked
not to be alive, or to be always asleep.
On Mid-Lent she did not return to Yonville, but in the evening went to
a masked ball. She wore velvet breeches, red stockings, a club wig, and
three-cornered hat cocked on one side. She danced all night to the wild
tones of the trombones; people gathered round her, and in the morning
she found herself on the steps of the theatre together with five or six
masks, debardeuses* and sailors, Leon's comrades, who were talking about
having supper.
* People dressed as longshoremen.
The neighbouring cafes were full. They caught sight of one on the
harbour, a very indifferent restaurant, whose proprietor showed them to
a little room on the fourth floor.
The men were whispering in a corner, no doubt consorting about expenses.
There were a clerk, two medical students, and a shopman--what company
for her! As to the women, Emma soon perceived from the tone of their
voices that they must almost belong to the lowest class. Then she was
frightened, pushed back her chair, and cast down her eyes.
The others began to eat; she ate nothing. Her head was on fire, her eyes
smarted, and her skin was ice-cold. In her head she seemed to feel the
floor of the ball-room rebounding again beneath the rhythmical pulsation
of the thousands of dancing feet. And now the smell of the punch, the
smoke of the cigars, made her giddy. She fainted, and they carried her
to the window.
Day was breaking, and a great stain of purple colour broadened out
in the pale horizon over the St. Catherine hills. The livid river was
shivering in the wind; there was no one on the bridges; the street lamps
were going out.
She revived, and began thinking of Berthe asleep yonder in the servant's
room. Then a cart filled with long strips of iron passed by, and made a
deafening metallic vibration against the walls of the houses.
She slipped away suddenly, threw off her costume, told Leon she must get
back, and at last was alone at the Hotel de Boulogne. Everything, even
herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a
bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there
grow young again.
She went out, crossed the Boulevard, the Place Cauchoise, and the
Faubourg, as far as an open street that overlooked some gardens. She
walked rapidly; the fresh air calming her; and, little by little, the
faces of the crowd, the masks, the quadrilles, the lights, the supper,
those women, all disappeared like mists fading away. Then, reaching the
"Croix-Rouge," she threw herself on the bed in her little room on the
second floor, where there were pictures of the "Tour de Nesle." At four
o'clock Hivert awoke her.
When she got home, Felicite showed her behind the clock a grey paper.
She read--
"In virtue of the seizure in execution of a judgment."
What judgment? As a matter of fact, the evening before another paper
had been brought that she had not yet seen, and she was stunned by these
words--
"By order of the king, law, and justice, to Madame Bovary." Then,
skipping several lines, she read, "Within twenty-four hours, without
fail--" But what? "To pay the sum of eight thousand francs." And there
was even at the bottom, "She will be constrained thereto by every
form of law, and notably by a writ of distraint on her furniture and
effects."
What was to be done? In twenty-four hours--tomorrow. Lheureux, she
thought, wanted to frighten her again; for she saw through all his
devices, the object of his kindnesses. What reassured her was the very
magnitude of the sum.
However, by dint of buying and not paying, of borrowing, signing bills,
and renewing these bills that grew at each new falling-in, she had ended
by preparing a capital for Monsieur Lheureux which he was impatiently
awaiting for his speculations.
She presented herself at his place with an offhand air.
"You know what has happened to me? No doubt it's a joke!"
"How so?"
He turned away slowly, and, folding his arms, said to her--
"My good lady, did you think I should go on to all eternity being your
purveyor and banker, for the love of God? Now be just. I must get back
what I've laid out. Now be just."
She cried out against the debt.
"Ah! so much the worse. The court has admitted it. There's a judgment.
It's been notified to you. Besides, it isn't my fault. It's Vincart's."
"Could you not--?"
"Oh, nothing whatever."
"But still, now talk it over."
And she began beating about the bush; she had known nothing about it; it
was a surprise.
"Whose fault is that?" said Lheureux, bowing ironically. "While I'm
slaving like a nigger, you go gallivanting about."
"Ah! no lecturing."
"It never does any harm," he replied.
She turned coward; she implored him; she even pressed her pretty white
and slender hand against the shopkeeper's knee.
"There, that'll do! Anyone'd think you wanted to seduce me!"
"You are a wretch!" she cried.
"Oh, oh! go it! go it!"
"I will show you up. I shall tell my husband."
"All right! I too. I'll show your husband something."
And Lheureux drew from his strong box the receipt for eighteen hundred
francs that she had given him when Vincart had discounted the bills.
"Do you think," he added, "that he'll not understand your little theft,
the poor dear man?"
She collapsed, more overcome than if felled by the blow of a pole-axe.
He was walking up and down from the window to the bureau, repeating all
the while--
"Ah! I'll show him! I'll show him!" Then he approached her, and in a
soft voice said--
"It isn't pleasant, I know; but, after all, no bones are broken, and,
since that is the only way that is left for you paying back my money--"
"But where am I to get any?" said Emma, wringing her hands.
"Bah! when one has friends like you!"
And he looked at her in so keen, so terrible a fashion, that she
shuddered to her very heart.
"I promise you," she said, "to sign--"
"I've enough of your signatures."
"I will sell something."
"Get along!" he said, shrugging his shoulders; "you've not got
anything."
And he called through the peep-hole that looked down into the shop--
"Annette, don't forget the three coupons of No. 14."
The servant appeared. Emma understood, and asked how much money would be
wanted to put a stop to the proceedings.
"It is too late."
"But if I brought you several thousand francs--a quarter of the sum--a
third--perhaps the whole?"
"No; it's no use!"
And he pushed her gently towards the staircase.
"I implore you, Monsieur Lheureux, just a few days more!" She was
sobbing.
"There! tears now!"
"You are driving me to despair!"
"What do I care?" said he, shutting the door.
| These chapters chronicle the beginning of the end for Emma Bovary. She begins to lie compulsively - this indicates that she is beginning to live the fiction that she believes to be her destiny as depicted in the novels. She is revealed to be a creature entirely dependent upon a world of romantic ideals that does not exist. To compensate, she simply insists that the real world adhere to those ideals. Her hedonism knows no limits and culminates when she attends the masked party with Lon's working class friends. Her intricate web of deception begins to unravel and she perceives that, like Rodolphe, Lon's ardor is beginning to wane. Unable to admit the truth, however, she pursues him with recklessness that only serves to further distance the clerk. She emasculates him by assuming control of their relationship and subsuming his tastes with her own. Lheureux perceives that she is without further funds and uses his banker in Rouen to begin the process of seizing the Bovary's possessions. With her world collapsing about her, Emma finds that the romantic ideals that form her character serve only to torture her with their inaccessibility. Her day of reckoning is close at hand and succor is not to be found | analysis |
She was stoical the next day when Maitre Hareng, the bailiff, with two
assistants, presented himself at her house to draw up the inventory for
the distraint.
They began with Bovary's consulting-room, and did not write down
the phrenological head, which was considered an "instrument of his
profession"; but in the kitchen they counted the plates; the saucepans,
the chairs, the candlesticks, and in the bedroom all the nick-nacks on
the whatnot. They examined her dresses, the linen, the dressing-room;
and her whole existence to its most intimate details, was, like a corpse
on whom a post-mortem is made, outspread before the eyes of these three
men.
Maitre Hareng, buttoned up in his thin black coat, wearing a white
choker and very tight foot-straps, repeated from time to time--"Allow
me, madame. You allow me?" Often he uttered exclamations. "Charming!
very pretty." Then he began writing again, dipping his pen into the horn
inkstand in his left hand.
When they had done with the rooms they went up to the attic. She kept a
desk there in which Rodolphe's letters were locked. It had to be opened.
"Ah! a correspondence," said Maitre Hareng, with a discreet smile. "But
allow me, for I must make sure the box contains nothing else." And he
tipped up the papers lightly, as if to shake out napoleons. Then she
grew angered to see this coarse hand, with fingers red and pulpy like
slugs, touching these pages against which her heart had beaten.
They went at last. Felicite came back. Emma had sent her out to watch
for Bovary in order to keep him off, and they hurriedly installed the
man in possession under the roof, where he swore he would remain.
During the evening Charles seemed to her careworn. Emma watched him with
a look of anguish, fancying she saw an accusation in every line of his
face. Then, when her eyes wandered over the chimney-piece ornamented
with Chinese screens, over the large curtains, the armchairs, all
those things, in a word, that had, softened the bitterness of her life,
remorse seized her or rather an immense regret, that, far from crushing,
irritated her passion. Charles placidly poked the fire, both his feet on
the fire-dogs.
Once the man, no doubt bored in his hiding-place, made a slight noise.
"Is anyone walking upstairs?" said Charles.
"No," she replied; "it is a window that has been left open, and is
rattling in the wind."
The next day, Sunday, she went to Rouen to call on all the brokers whose
names she knew. They were at their country-places or on journeys. She
was not discouraged; and those whom she did manage to see she asked for
money, declaring she must have some, and that she would pay it back.
Some laughed in her face; all refused.
At two o'clock she hurried to Leon, and knocked at the door. No one
answered. At length he appeared.
"What brings you here?"
"Do I disturb you?"
"No; but--" And he admitted that his landlord didn't like his having
"women" there.
"I must speak to you," she went on.
Then he took down the key, but she stopped him.
"No, no! Down there, in our home!"
And they went to their room at the Hotel de Boulogne.
On arriving she drank off a large glass of water. She was very pale. She
said to him--
"Leon, you will do me a service?"
And, shaking him by both hands that she grasped tightly, she added--
"Listen, I want eight thousand francs."
"But you are mad!"
"Not yet."
And thereupon, telling him the story of the distraint, she explained
her distress to him; for Charles knew nothing of it; her mother-in-law
detested her; old Rouault could do nothing; but he, Leon, he would set
about finding this indispensable sum.
"How on earth can I?"
"What a coward you are!" she cried.
Then he said stupidly, "You are exaggerating the difficulty. Perhaps,
with a thousand crowns or so the fellow could be stopped."
All the greater reason to try and do something; it was impossible that
they could not find three thousand francs. Besides, Leon, could be
security instead of her.
"Go, try, try! I will love you so!"
He went out, and came back at the end of an hour, saying, with solemn
face--
"I have been to three people with no success."
Then they remained sitting face to face at the two chimney corners,
motionless, in silence. Emma shrugged her shoulders as she stamped her
feet. He heard her murmuring--
"If I were in your place _I_ should soon get some."
"But where?"
"At your office." And she looked at him.
An infernal boldness looked out from her burning eyes, and their lids
drew close together with a lascivious and encouraging look, so that the
young man felt himself growing weak beneath the mute will of this woman
who was urging him to a crime. Then he was afraid, and to avoid any
explanation he smote his forehead, crying--
"Morel is to come back to-night; he will not refuse me, I hope" (this
was one of his friends, the son of a very rich merchant); "and I will
bring it you to-morrow," he added.
Emma did not seem to welcome this hope with all the joy he had expected.
Did she suspect the lie? He went on, blushing--
"However, if you don't see me by three o'clock do not wait for me, my
darling. I must be off now; forgive me! Goodbye!"
He pressed her hand, but it felt quite lifeless. Emma had no strength
left for any sentiment.
Four o'clock struck, and she rose to return to Yonville, mechanically
obeying the force of old habits.
The weather was fine. It was one of those March days, clear and sharp,
when the sun shines in a perfectly white sky. The Rouen folk, in
Sunday-clothes, were walking about with happy looks. She reached the
Place du Parvis. People were coming out after vespers; the crowd flowed
out through the three doors like a stream through the three arches of
a bridge, and in the middle one, more motionless than a rock, stood the
beadle.
Then she remembered the day when, all anxious and full of hope, she had
entered beneath this large nave, that had opened out before her, less
profound than her love; and she walked on weeping beneath her veil,
giddy, staggering, almost fainting.
"Take care!" cried a voice issuing from the gate of a courtyard that was
thrown open.
She stopped to let pass a black horse, pawing the ground between the
shafts of a tilbury, driven by a gentleman in sable furs. Who was it?
She knew him. The carriage darted by and disappeared.
Why, it was he--the Viscount. She turned away; the street was empty. She
was so overwhelmed, so sad, that she had to lean against a wall to keep
herself from falling.
Then she thought she had been mistaken. Anyhow, she did not know. All
within her and around her was abandoning her. She felt lost, sinking
at random into indefinable abysses, and it was almost with joy that, on
reaching the "Croix-Rouge," she saw the good Homais, who was watching
a large box full of pharmaceutical stores being hoisted on to the
"Hirondelle." In his hand he held tied in a silk handkerchief six
cheminots for his wife.
Madame Homais was very fond of these small, heavy turban-shaped loaves,
that are eaten in Lent with salt butter; a last vestige of Gothic food
that goes back, perhaps, to the time of the Crusades, and with which
the robust Normans gorged themselves of yore, fancying they saw on the
table, in the light of the yellow torches, between tankards of hippocras
and huge boars' heads, the heads of Saracens to be devoured. The
druggist's wife crunched them up as they had done--heroically, despite
her wretched teeth. And so whenever Homais journeyed to town, he never
failed to bring her home some that he bought at the great baker's in the
Rue Massacre.
"Charmed to see you," he said, offering Emma a hand to help her into the
"Hirondelle." Then he hung up his cheminots to the cords of the netting,
and remained bare-headed in an attitude pensive and Napoleonic.
But when the blind man appeared as usual at the foot of the hill he
exclaimed--
"I can't understand why the authorities tolerate such culpable
industries. Such unfortunates should be locked up and forced to work.
Progress, my word! creeps at a snail's pace. We are floundering about in
mere barbarism."
The blind man held out his hat, that flapped about at the door, as if it
were a bag in the lining that had come unnailed.
"This," said the chemist, "is a scrofulous affection."
And though he knew the poor devil, he pretended to see him for the first
time, murmured something about "cornea," "opaque cornea," "sclerotic,"
"facies," then asked him in a paternal tone--
"My friend, have you long had this terrible infirmity? Instead of
getting drunk at the public, you'd do better to die yourself."
He advised him to take good wine, good beer, and good joints. The blind
man went on with his song; he seemed, moreover, almost idiotic. At last
Monsieur Homais opened his purse--
"Now there's a sou; give me back two lairds, and don't forget my advice:
you'll be the better for it."
Hivert openly cast some doubt on the efficacy of it. But the druggist
said that he would cure himself with an antiphlogistic pomade of his own
composition, and he gave his address--"Monsieur Homais, near the market,
pretty well known."
"Now," said Hivert, "for all this trouble you'll give us your
performance."
The blind man sank down on his haunches, with his head thrown back,
whilst he rolled his greenish eyes, lolled out his tongue, and rubbed
his stomach with both hands as he uttered a kind of hollow yell like a
famished dog. Emma, filled with disgust, threw him over her shoulder
a five-franc piece. It was all her fortune. It seemed to her very fine
thus to throw it away.
The coach had gone on again when suddenly Monsieur Homais leant out
through the window, crying--
"No farinaceous or milk food, wear wool next the skin, and expose the
diseased parts to the smoke of juniper berries."
The sight of the well-known objects that defiled before her eyes
gradually diverted Emma from her present trouble. An intolerable fatigue
overwhelmed her, and she reached her home stupefied, discouraged, almost
asleep.
"Come what may come!" she said to herself. "And then, who knows? Why, at
any moment could not some extraordinary event occur? Lheureux even might
die!"
At nine o'clock in the morning she was awakened by the sound of voices
in the Place. There was a crowd round the market reading a large bill
fixed to one of the posts, and she saw Justin, who was climbing on to
a stone and tearing down the bill. But at this moment the rural guard
seized him by the collar. Monsieur Homais came out of his shop, and Mere
Lefrangois, in the midst of the crowd, seemed to be perorating.
"Madame! madame!" cried Felicite, running in, "it's abominable!"
And the poor girl, deeply moved, handed her a yellow paper that she had
just torn off the door. Emma read with a glance that all her furniture
was for sale.
Then they looked at one another silently. The servant and mistress had
no secret one from the other. At last Felicite sighed--
"If I were you, madame, I should go to Monsieur Guillaumin."
"Do you think--"
And this question meant to say--
"You who know the house through the servant, has the master spoken
sometimes of me?"
"Yes, you'd do well to go there."
She dressed, put on her black gown, and her hood with jet beads, and
that she might not be seen (there was still a crowd on the Place), she
took the path by the river, outside the village.
She reached the notary's gate quite breathless. The sky was sombre, and
a little snow was falling. At the sound of the bell, Theodore in a
red waistcoat appeared on the steps; he came to open the door almost
familiarly, as to an acquaintance, and showed her into the dining-room.
A large porcelain stove crackled beneath a cactus that filled up the
niche in the wall, and in black wood frames against the oak-stained
paper hung Steuben's "Esmeralda" and Schopin's "Potiphar." The
ready-laid table, the two silver chafing-dishes, the crystal door-knobs,
the parquet and the furniture, all shone with a scrupulous, English
cleanliness; the windows were ornamented at each corner with stained
glass.
"Now this," thought Emma, "is the dining-room I ought to have."
The notary came in pressing his palm-leaf dressing-gown to his breast
with his left arm, while with the other hand he raised and quickly put
on again his brown velvet cap, pretentiously cocked on the right side,
whence looked out the ends of three fair curls drawn from the back of
the head, following the line of his bald skull.
After he had offered her a seat he sat down to breakfast, apologising
profusely for his rudeness.
"I have come," she said, "to beg you, sir--"
"What, madame? I am listening."
And she began explaining her position to him. Monsieur Guillaumin knew
it, being secretly associated with the linendraper, from whom he always
got capital for the loans on mortgages that he was asked to make.
So he knew (and better than she herself) the long story of the bills,
small at first, bearing different names as endorsers, made out at long
dates, and constantly renewed up to the day, when, gathering together
all the protested bills, the shopkeeper had bidden his friend Vincart
take in his own name all the necessary proceedings, not wishing to pass
for a tiger with his fellow-citizens.
She mingled her story with recriminations against Lheureux, to which the
notary replied from time to time with some insignificant word. Eating
his cutlet and drinking his tea, he buried his chin in his sky-blue
cravat, into which were thrust two diamond pins, held together by a
small gold chain; and he smiled a singular smile, in a sugary, ambiguous
fashion. But noticing that her feet were damp, he said--
"Do get closer to the stove; put your feet up against the porcelain."
She was afraid of dirtying it. The notary replied in a gallant tone--
"Beautiful things spoil nothing."
Then she tried to move him, and, growing moved herself, she began
telling him about the poorness of her home, her worries, her wants.
He could understand that; an elegant woman! and, without leaving off
eating, he had turned completely round towards her, so that his knee
brushed against her boot, whose sole curled round as it smoked against
the stove.
But when she asked for a thousand sous, he closed his lips, and declared
he was very sorry he had not had the management of her fortune before,
for there were hundreds of ways very convenient, even for a lady, of
turning her money to account. They might, either in the turf-peats
of Grumesnil or building-ground at Havre, almost without risk, have
ventured on some excellent speculations; and he let her consume herself
with rage at the thought of the fabulous sums that she would certainly
have made.
"How was it," he went on, "that you didn't come to me?"
"I hardly know," she said.
"Why, hey? Did I frighten you so much? It is I, on the contrary, who
ought to complain. We hardly know one another; yet I am very devoted to
you. You do not doubt that, I hope?"
He held out his hand, took hers, covered it with a greedy kiss, then
held it on his knee; and he played delicately with her fingers whilst
he murmured a thousand blandishments. His insipid voice murmured like a
running brook; a light shone in his eyes through the glimmering of his
spectacles, and his hand was advancing up Emma's sleeve to press her
arm. She felt against her cheek his panting breath. This man oppressed
her horribly.
She sprang up and said to him--
"Sir, I am waiting."
"For what?" said the notary, who suddenly became very pale.
"This money."
"But--" Then, yielding to the outburst of too powerful a desire, "Well,
yes!"
He dragged himself towards her on his knees, regardless of his
dressing-gown.
"For pity's sake, stay. I love you!"
He seized her by her waist. Madame Bovary's face flushed purple. She
recoiled with a terrible look, crying--
"You are taking a shameless advantage of my distress, sir! I am to be
pitied--not to be sold."
And she went out.
The notary remained quite stupefied, his eyes fixed on his fine
embroidered slippers. They were a love gift, and the sight of them at
last consoled him. Besides, he reflected that such an adventure might
have carried him too far.
"What a wretch! what a scoundrel! what an infamy!" she said to herself,
as she fled with nervous steps beneath the aspens of the path. The
disappointment of her failure increased the indignation of her outraged
modesty; it seemed to her that Providence pursued her implacably, and,
strengthening herself in her pride, she had never felt so much esteem
for herself nor so much contempt for others. A spirit of warfare
transformed her. She would have liked to strike all men, to spit in
their faces, to crush them, and she walked rapidly straight on, pale,
quivering, maddened, searching the empty horizon with tear-dimmed eyes,
and as it were rejoicing in the hate that was choking her.
When she saw her house a numbness came over her. She could not go on;
and yet she must. Besides, whither could she flee?
Felicite was waiting for her at the door. "Well?"
"No!" said Emma.
And for a quarter of an hour the two of them went over the various
persons in Yonville who might perhaps be inclined to help her. But each
time that Felicite named someone Emma replied--
"Impossible! they will not!"
"And the master'll soon be in."
"I know that well enough. Leave me alone."
She had tried everything; there was nothing more to be done now; and
when Charles came in she would have to say to him--
"Go away! This carpet on which you are walking is no longer ours. In
your own house you do not possess a chair, a pin, a straw, and it is I,
poor man, who have ruined you."
Then there would be a great sob; next he would weep abundantly, and at
last, the surprise past, he would forgive her.
"Yes," she murmured, grinding her teeth, "he will forgive me, he who
would give a million if I would forgive him for having known me! Never!
never!"
This thought of Bovary's superiority to her exasperated her. Then,
whether she confessed or did not confess, presently, immediately,
to-morrow, he would know the catastrophe all the same; so she must wait
for this horrible scene, and bear the weight of his magnanimity. The
desire to return to Lheureux's seized her--what would be the use? To
write to her father--it was too late; and perhaps, she began to repent
now that she had not yielded to that other, when she heard the trot of
a horse in the alley. It was he; he was opening the gate; he was whiter
than the plaster wall. Rushing to the stairs, she ran out quickly to the
square; and the wife of the mayor, who was talking to Lestiboudois in
front of the church, saw her go in to the tax-collector's.
She hurried off to tell Madame Caron, and the two ladies went up to
the attic, and, hidden by some linen spread across props, stationed
themselves comfortably for overlooking the whole of Binet's room.
He was alone in his garret, busy imitating in wood one of those
indescribable bits of ivory, composed of crescents, of spheres hollowed
out one within the other, the whole as straight as an obelisk, and of no
use whatever; and he was beginning on the last piece--he was nearing his
goal. In the twilight of the workshop the white dust was flying from his
tools like a shower of sparks under the hoofs of a galloping horse; the
two wheels were turning, droning; Binet smiled, his chin lowered, his
nostrils distended, and, in a word, seemed lost in one of those complete
happinesses that, no doubt, belong only to commonplace occupations,
which amuse the mind with facile difficulties, and satisfy by a
realisation of that beyond which such minds have not a dream.
"Ah! there she is!" exclaimed Madame Tuvache.
But it was impossible because of the lathe to hear what she was saying.
At last these ladies thought they made out the word "francs," and Madame
Tuvache whispered in a low voice--
"She is begging him to give her time for paying her taxes."
"Apparently!" replied the other.
They saw her walking up and down, examining the napkin-rings, the
candlesticks, the banister rails against the walls, while Binet stroked
his beard with satisfaction.
"Do you think she wants to order something of him?" said Madame Tuvache.
"Why, he doesn't sell anything," objected her neighbour.
The tax-collector seemed to be listening with wide-open eyes, as if he
did not understand. She went on in a tender, suppliant manner. She came
nearer to him, her breast heaving; they no longer spoke.
"Is she making him advances?" said Madame Tuvache. Binet was scarlet to
his very ears. She took hold of his hands.
"Oh, it's too much!"
And no doubt she was suggesting something abominable to him; for the
tax-collector--yet he was brave, had fought at Bautzen and at Lutzen,
had been through the French campaign, and had even been recommended for
the cross--suddenly, as at the sight of a serpent, recoiled as far as he
could from her, crying--
"Madame! what do you mean?"
"Women like that ought to be whipped," said Madame Tuvache.
"But where is she?" continued Madame Caron, for she had disappeared
whilst they spoke; then catching sight of her going up the Grande Rue,
and turning to the right as if making for the cemetery, they were lost
in conjectures.
"Nurse Rollet," she said on reaching the nurse's, "I am choking; unlace
me!" She fell on the bed sobbing. Nurse Rollet covered her with a
petticoat and remained standing by her side. Then, as she did not
answer, the good woman withdrew, took her wheel and began spinning flax.
"Oh, leave off!" she murmured, fancying she heard Binet's lathe.
"What's bothering her?" said the nurse to herself. "Why has she come
here?"
She had rushed thither; impelled by a kind of horror that drove her from
her home.
Lying on her back, motionless, and with staring eyes, she saw things but
vaguely, although she tried to with idiotic persistence. She looked
at the scales on the walls, two brands smoking end to end, and a long
spider crawling over her head in a rent in the beam. At last she began
to collect her thoughts. She remembered--one day--Leon--Oh! how long
ago that was--the sun was shining on the river, and the clematis were
perfuming the air. Then, carried away as by a rushing torrent, she soon
began to recall the day before.
"What time is it?" she asked.
Mere Rollet went out, raised the fingers of her right hand to that side
of the sky that was brightest, and came back slowly, saying--
"Nearly three."
"Ah! thanks, thanks!"
For he would come; he would have found some money. But he would,
perhaps, go down yonder, not guessing she was here, and she told the
nurse to run to her house to fetch him.
"Be quick!"
"But, my dear lady, I'm going, I'm going!"
She wondered now that she had not thought of him from the first.
Yesterday he had given his word; he would not break it. And she already
saw herself at Lheureux's spreading out her three bank-notes on his
bureau. Then she would have to invent some story to explain matters to
Bovary. What should it be?
The nurse, however, was a long while gone. But, as there was no clock
in the cot, Emma feared she was perhaps exaggerating the length of time.
She began walking round the garden, step by step; she went into the path
by the hedge, and returned quickly, hoping that the woman would have
come back by another road. At last, weary of waiting, assailed by fears
that she thrust from her, no longer conscious whether she had been here
a century or a moment, she sat down in a corner, closed her eyes, and
stopped her ears. The gate grated; she sprang up. Before she had spoken
Mere Rollet said to her--
"There is no one at your house!"
"What?"
"Oh, no one! And the doctor is crying. He is calling for you; they're
looking for you."
Emma answered nothing. She gasped as she turned her eyes about
her, while the peasant woman, frightened at her face, drew back
instinctively, thinking her mad. Suddenly she struck her brow and
uttered a cry; for the thought of Rodolphe, like a flash of lightning in
a dark night, had passed into her soul. He was so good, so delicate, so
generous! And besides, should he hesitate to do her this service, she
would know well enough how to constrain him to it by re-waking, in a
single moment, their lost love. So she set out towards La Huchette, not
seeing that she was hastening to offer herself to that which but a while
ago had so angered her, not in the least conscious of her prostitution.
| The following day three officials arrive and inventory all the goods in the house. That evening she feels regret as she looks over all the expensive items in the house she used to temper her frustrated passion. The following day, a Sunday, she travels to Rouen to look for money but the bankers either refuse or simply laugh at her. Leon calls her crazy when he hears how much money she needs. He agrees to try to raise 3,000 francs but returns from his mission empty handed. She hints that he should steal the money from his office and the frightened clerk promises to borrow the money from a friend who is returning that night. Leon tells Emma that he will bring the money the following day but she is not to wait for him past 3 o'clock. On her way to the Hirondelle she passes the cathedral and remembers how full of hope she had been when she first met Leon there. She sees a man in a carriage that she believes is the vicomte and the sight depresses her. Monsieur Homais is also returning to Yonville and when the blind beggar accosts the carriage in his usual manner Homais lectures the man and tells him that he can heal him with a salve of his own invention. Emma gives the beggar a five franc piece - the last money she has in the world. She collapses into her bed that night resigned to let come what may. In the morning a notice in the square explains that the contents of the Bovary's house are subject to sale. Felicite, who is romantically involved with the notary Guillaumin's manservant, advises her mistress to seek funds from the notary. Guillaumin knows of her predicament through his secret business associations with Lheureux. He initially refuses to give her money but, abandoning his decorum, begins to caress her and falls on his knees and tells her that he loves her. Disgusted, Emma flees the house. She returns home where she waits for Charles, enraged that he should be in a position to be condescending to her. As he enters the front door, however, she flees out the back and the mayor's wife, Madame Tuvache sees her enter the tax collector Binet's house. Madame Tuvache and Madame Caron watch through a window and see her confront Binet and then seemingly make romantic advances to the man who recoils in horror. Emma flees to Madame Rollet's cottage and collapses sobbing on the bed. She comes to her senses and, realizing it is nearly 3 o'clock, orders the confused wet nurse to go to her house to meet Leon. Emma waits a long time but when Madame Rollet returns she tells her that he was not there. Furthermore she explains that Madame Bovary's anguished husband is calling for her and everyone is looking for her. Emma suddenly thinks of Rodolphe and sets out for La Huchette certain of help from that quarter | summary |
She asked herself as she walked along, "What am I going to say? How
shall I begin?" And as she went on she recognised the thickets,
the trees, the sea-rushes on the hill, the chateau yonder. All the
sensations of her first tenderness came back to her, and her poor aching
heart opened out amorously. A warm wind blew in her face; the melting
snow fell drop by drop from the buds to the grass.
She entered, as she used to, through the small park-gate. She reached
the avenue bordered by a double row of dense lime-trees. They were
swaying their long whispering branches to and fro. The dogs in their
kennels all barked, and the noise of their voices resounded, but brought
out no one.
She went up the large straight staircase with wooden balusters that led
to the corridor paved with dusty flags, into which several doors in a
row opened, as in a monastery or an inn. His was at the top, right
at the end, on the left. When she placed her fingers on the lock her
strength suddenly deserted her. She was afraid, almost wished he
would not be there, though this was her only hope, her last chance of
salvation. She collected her thoughts for one moment, and, strengthening
herself by the feeling of present necessity, went in.
He was in front of the fire, both his feet on the mantelpiece, smoking a
pipe.
"What! it is you!" he said, getting up hurriedly.
"Yes, it is I, Rodolphe. I should like to ask your advice."
And, despite all her efforts, it was impossible for her to open her
lips.
"You have not changed; you are charming as ever!"
"Oh," she replied bitterly, "they are poor charms since you disdained
them."
Then he began a long explanation of his conduct, excusing himself in
vague terms, in default of being able to invent better.
She yielded to his words, still more to his voice and the sight of him,
so that, she pretended to believe, or perhaps believed; in the pretext
he gave for their rupture; this was a secret on which depended the
honour, the very life of a third person.
"No matter!" she said, looking at him sadly. "I have suffered much."
He replied philosophically--
"Such is life!"
"Has life," Emma went on, "been good to you at least, since our
separation?"
"Oh, neither good nor bad."
"Perhaps it would have been better never to have parted."
"Yes, perhaps."
"You think so?" she said, drawing nearer, and she sighed. "Oh, Rodolphe!
if you but knew! I loved you so!"
It was then that she took his hand, and they remained some time, their
fingers intertwined, like that first day at the Show. With a gesture of
pride he struggled against this emotion. But sinking upon his breast she
said to him--
"How did you think I could live without you? One cannot lose the habit
of happiness. I was desolate. I thought I should die. I will tell you
about all that and you will see. And you--you fled from me!"
For, all the three years, he had carefully avoided her in consequence
of that natural cowardice that characterises the stronger sex. Emma went
on, with dainty little nods, more coaxing than an amorous kitten--
"You love others, confess it! Oh, I understand them, dear! I excuse
them. You probably seduced them as you seduced me. You are indeed a man;
you have everything to make one love you. But we'll begin again, won't
we? We will love one another. See! I am laughing; I am happy! Oh,
speak!"
And she was charming to see, with her eyes, in which trembled a tear,
like the rain of a storm in a blue corolla.
He had drawn her upon his knees, and with the back of his hand was
caressing her smooth hair, where in the twilight was mirrored like a
golden arrow one last ray of the sun. She bent down her brow; at last he
kissed her on the eyelids quite gently with the tips of his lips.
"Why, you have been crying! What for?"
She burst into tears. Rodolphe thought this was an outburst of her
love. As she did not speak, he took this silence for a last remnant of
resistance, and then he cried out--
"Oh, forgive me! You are the only one who pleases me. I was imbecile and
cruel. I love you. I will love you always. What is it. Tell me!" He was
kneeling by her.
"Well, I am ruined, Rodolphe! You must lend me three thousand francs."
"But--but--" said he, getting up slowly, while his face assumed a grave
expression.
"You know," she went on quickly, "that my husband had placed his whole
fortune at a notary's. He ran away. So we borrowed; the patients don't
pay us. Moreover, the settling of the estate is not yet done; we shall
have the money later on. But to-day, for want of three thousand francs,
we are to be sold up. It is to be at once, this very moment, and,
counting upon your friendship, I have come to you."
"Ah!" thought Rodolphe, turning very pale, "that was what she came for."
At last he said with a calm air--
"Dear madame, I have not got them."
He did not lie. If he had had them, he would, no doubt, have given them,
although it is generally disagreeable to do such fine things: a demand
for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and
most destructive.
First she looked at him for some moments.
"You have not got them!" she repeated several times. "You have not got
them! I ought to have spared myself this last shame. You never loved me.
You are no better than the others."
She was betraying, ruining herself.
Rodolphe interrupted her, declaring he was "hard up" himself.
"Ah! I pity you," said Emma. "Yes--very much."
And fixing her eyes upon an embossed carabine, that shone against its
panoply, "But when one is so poor one doesn't have silver on the butt of
one's gun. One doesn't buy a clock inlaid with tortoise shell," she went
on, pointing to a buhl timepiece, "nor silver-gilt whistles for one's
whips," and she touched them, "nor charms for one's watch. Oh, he wants
for nothing! even to a liqueur-stand in his room! For you love yourself;
you live well. You have a chateau, farms, woods; you go hunting; you
travel to Paris. Why, if it were but that," she cried, taking up two
studs from the mantelpiece, "but the least of these trifles, one can get
money for them. Oh, I do not want them, keep them!"
And she threw the two links away from her, their gold chain breaking as
it struck against the wall.
"But I! I would have given you everything. I would have sold all, worked
for you with my hands, I would have begged on the highroads for a smile,
for a look, to hear you say 'Thanks!' And you sit there quietly in your
arm-chair, as if you had not made me suffer enough already! But for you,
and you know it, I might have lived happily. What made you do it? Was
it a bet? Yet you loved me--you said so. And but a moment since--Ah!
it would have been better to have driven me away. My hands are hot with
your kisses, and there is the spot on the carpet where at my knees you
swore an eternity of love! You made me believe you; for two years you
held me in the most magnificent, the sweetest dream! Eh! Our plans for
the journey, do you remember? Oh, your letter! your letter! it tore my
heart! And then when I come back to him--to him, rich, happy, free--to
implore the help the first stranger would give, a suppliant, and
bringing back to him all my tenderness, he repulses me because it would
cost him three thousand francs!"
"I haven't got them," replied Rodolphe, with that perfect calm with
which resigned rage covers itself as with a shield.
She went out. The walls trembled, the ceiling was crushing her, and she
passed back through the long alley, stumbling against the heaps of dead
leaves scattered by the wind. At last she reached the ha-ha hedge in
front of the gate; she broke her nails against the lock in her haste to
open it. Then a hundred steps farther on, breathless, almost falling,
she stopped. And now turning round, she once more saw the impassive
chateau, with the park, the gardens, the three courts, and all the
windows of the facade.
She remained lost in stupor, and having no more consciousness of herself
than through the beating of her arteries, that she seemed to hear
bursting forth like a deafening music filling all the fields. The earth
beneath her feet was more yielding than the sea, and the furrows seemed
to her immense brown waves breaking into foam. Everything in her
head, of memories, ideas, went off at once like a thousand pieces of
fireworks. She saw her father, Lheureux's closet, their room at home,
another landscape. Madness was coming upon her; she grew afraid, and
managed to recover herself, in a confused way, it is true, for she did
not in the least remember the cause of the terrible condition she was
in, that is to say, the question of money. She suffered only in her
love, and felt her soul passing from her in this memory; as wounded men,
dying, feel their life ebb from their bleeding wounds.
Night was falling, crows were flying about.
Suddenly it seemed to her that fiery spheres were exploding in the air
like fulminating balls when they strike, and were whirling, whirling,
to melt at last upon the snow between the branches of the trees. In the
midst of each of them appeared the face of Rodolphe. They multiplied and
drew near her, penetrating, her. It all disappeared; she recognised the
lights of the houses that shone through the fog.
Now her situation, like an abyss, rose up before her. She was panting as
if her heart would burst. Then in an ecstasy of heroism, that made
her almost joyous, she ran down the hill, crossed the cow-plank, the
foot-path, the alley, the market, and reached the chemist's shop. She
was about to enter, but at the sound of the bell someone might come, and
slipping in by the gate, holding her breath, feeling her way along the
walls, she went as far as the door of the kitchen, where a candle stuck
on the stove was burning. Justin in his shirt-sleeves was carrying out a
dish.
"Ah! they are dining; I will wait."
He returned; she tapped at the window. He went out.
"The key! the one for upstairs where he keeps the--"
"What?"
And he looked at her, astonished at the pallor of her face, that stood
out white against the black background of the night. She seemed to
him extraordinarily beautiful and majestic as a phantom. Without
understanding what she wanted, he had the presentiment of something
terrible.
But she went on quickly in a love voice; in a sweet, melting voice, "I
want it; give it to me."
As the partition wall was thin, they could hear the clatter of the forks
on the plates in the dining-room.
She pretended that she wanted to kill the rats that kept her from
sleeping.
"I must tell master."
"No, stay!" Then with an indifferent air, "Oh, it's not worth while;
I'll tell him presently. Come, light me upstairs."
She entered the corridor into which the laboratory door opened. Against
the wall was a key labelled Capharnaum.
"Justin!" called the druggist impatiently.
"Let us go up."
And he followed her. The key turned in the lock, and she went straight
to the third shelf, so well did her memory guide her, seized the blue
jar, tore out the cork, plunged in her hand, and withdrawing it full of
a white powder, she began eating it.
"Stop!" he cried, rushing at her.
"Hush! someone will come."
He was in despair, was calling out.
"Say nothing, or all the blame will fall on your master."
Then she went home, suddenly calmed, and with something of the serenity
of one that had performed a duty.
When Charles, distracted by the news of the distraint, returned home,
Emma had just gone out. He cried aloud, wept, fainted, but she did not
return. Where could she be? He sent Felicite to Homais, to Monsieur
Tuvache, to Lheureux, to the "Lion d'Or," everywhere, and in the
intervals of his agony he saw his reputation destroyed, their fortune
lost, Berthe's future ruined. By what?--Not a word! He waited till six
in the evening. At last, unable to bear it any longer, and fancying she
had gone to Rouen, he set out along the highroad, walked a mile, met no
one, again waited, and returned home. She had come back.
"What was the matter? Why? Explain to me."
She sat down at her writing-table and wrote a letter, which she sealed
slowly, adding the date and the hour. Then she said in a solemn tone:
"You are to read it to-morrow; till then, I pray you, do not ask me a
single question. No, not one!"
"But--"
"Oh, leave me!"
She lay down full length on her bed. A bitter taste that she felt in her
mouth awakened her. She saw Charles, and again closed her eyes.
She was studying herself curiously, to see if she were not suffering.
But no! nothing as yet. She heard the ticking of the clock, the
crackling of the fire, and Charles breathing as he stood upright by her
bed.
"Ah! it is but a little thing, death!" she thought. "I shall fall asleep
and all will be over."
She drank a mouthful of water and turned to the wall. The frightful
taste of ink continued.
"I am thirsty; oh! so thirsty," she sighed.
"What is it?" said Charles, who was handing her a glass.
"It is nothing! Open the window; I am choking."
She was seized with a sickness so sudden that she had hardly time to
draw out her handkerchief from under the pillow.
"Take it away," she said quickly; "throw it away."
He spoke to her; she did not answer. She lay motionless, afraid that
the slightest movement might make her vomit. But she felt an icy cold
creeping from her feet to her heart.
"Ah! it is beginning," she murmured.
"What did you say?"
She turned her head from side to side with a gentle movement full of
agony, while constantly opening her mouth as if something very heavy
were weighing upon her tongue. At eight o'clock the vomiting began
again.
Charles noticed that at the bottom of the basin there was a sort of
white sediment sticking to the sides of the porcelain.
"This is extraordinary--very singular," he repeated.
But she said in a firm voice, "No, you are mistaken."
Then gently, and almost as caressing her, he passed his hand over her
stomach. She uttered a sharp cry. He fell back terror-stricken.
Then she began to groan, faintly at first. Her shoulders were shaken by
a strong shuddering, and she was growing paler than the sheets in which
her clenched fingers buried themselves. Her unequal pulse was now almost
imperceptible.
Drops of sweat oozed from her bluish face, that seemed as if rigid in
the exhalations of a metallic vapour. Her teeth chattered, her dilated
eyes looked vaguely about her, and to all questions she replied only
with a shake of the head; she even smiled once or twice. Gradually, her
moaning grew louder; a hollow shriek burst from her; she pretended she
was better and that she would get up presently. But she was seized with
convulsions and cried out--
"Ah! my God! It is horrible!"
He threw himself on his knees by her bed.
"Tell me! what have you eaten? Answer, for heaven's sake!"
And he looked at her with a tenderness in his eyes such as she had never
seen.
"Well, there--there!" she said in a faint voice. He flew to the
writing-table, tore open the seal, and read aloud: "Accuse no one." He
stopped, passed his hands across his eyes, and read it over again.
"What! help--help!"
He could only keep repeating the word: "Poisoned! poisoned!" Felicite
ran to Homais, who proclaimed it in the market-place; Madame Lefrancois
heard it at the "Lion d'Or"; some got up to go and tell their
neighbours, and all night the village was on the alert.
Distraught, faltering, reeling, Charles wandered about the room. He
knocked against the furniture, tore his hair, and the chemist had never
believed that there could be so terrible a sight.
He went home to write to Monsieur Canivet and to Doctor Lariviere. He
lost his head, and made more than fifteen rough copies. Hippolyte went
to Neufchatel, and Justin so spurred Bovary's horse that he left it
foundered and three parts dead by the hill at Bois-Guillaume.
Charles tried to look up his medical dictionary, but could not read it;
the lines were dancing.
"Be calm," said the druggist; "we have only to administer a powerful
antidote. What is the poison?"
Charles showed him the letter. It was arsenic.
"Very well," said Homais, "we must make an analysis."
For he knew that in cases of poisoning an analysis must be made; and the
other, who did not understand, answered--
"Oh, do anything! save her!"
Then going back to her, he sank upon the carpet, and lay there with his
head leaning against the edge of her bed, sobbing.
"Don't cry," she said to him. "Soon I shall not trouble you any more."
"Why was it? Who drove you to it?"
She replied. "It had to be, my dear!"
"Weren't you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could!"
"Yes, that is true--you are good--you."
And she passed her hand slowly over his hair. The sweetness of this
sensation deepened his sadness; he felt his whole being dissolving
in despair at the thought that he must lose her, just when she was
confessing more love for him than ever. And he could think of nothing;
he did not know, he did not dare; the urgent need for some immediate
resolution gave the finishing stroke to the turmoil of his mind.
So she had done, she thought, with all the treachery; and meanness,
and numberless desires that had tortured her. She hated no one now; a
twilight dimness was settling upon her thoughts, and, of all earthly
noises, Emma heard none but the intermittent lamentations of this poor
heart, sweet and indistinct like the echo of a symphony dying away.
"Bring me the child," she said, raising herself on her elbow.
"You are not worse, are you?" asked Charles.
"No, no!"
The child, serious, and still half-asleep, was carried in on the
servant's arm in her long white nightgown, from which her bare
feet peeped out. She looked wonderingly at the disordered room, and
half-closed her eyes, dazzled by the candles burning on the table. They
reminded her, no doubt, of the morning of New Year's day and Mid-Lent,
when thus awakened early by candle-light she came to her mother's bed to
fetch her presents, for she began saying--
"But where is it, mamma?" And as everybody was silent, "But I can't see
my little stocking."
Felicite held her over the bed while she still kept looking towards the
mantelpiece.
"Has nurse taken it?" she asked.
And at this name, that carried her back to the memory of her adulteries
and her calamities, Madame Bovary turned away her head, as at the
loathing of another bitterer poison that rose to her mouth. But Berthe
remained perched on the bed.
"Oh, how big your eyes are, mamma! How pale you are! how hot you are!"
Her mother looked at her. "I am frightened!" cried the child, recoiling.
Emma took her hand to kiss it; the child struggled.
"That will do. Take her away," cried Charles, who was sobbing in the
alcove.
Then the symptoms ceased for a moment; she seemed less agitated; and at
every insignificant word, at every respiration a little more easy, he
regained hope. At last, when Canivet came in, he threw himself into his
arms.
"Ah! it is you. Thanks! You are good! But she is better. See! look at
her."
His colleague was by no means of this opinion, and, as he said of
himself, "never beating about the bush," he prescribed, an emetic in
order to empty the stomach completely.
She soon began vomiting blood. Her lips became drawn. Her limbs were
convulsed, her whole body covered with brown spots, and her pulse
slipped beneath the fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp-string
nearly breaking.
After this she began to scream horribly. She cursed the poison, railed
at it, and implored it to be quick, and thrust away with her stiffened
arms everything that Charles, in more agony than herself, tried to make
her drink. He stood up, his handkerchief to his lips, with a rattling
sound in his throat, weeping, and choked by sobs that shook his whole
body. Felicite was running hither and thither in the room. Homais,
motionless, uttered great sighs; and Monsieur Canivet, always retaining
his self-command, nevertheless began to feel uneasy.
"The devil! yet she has been purged, and from the moment that the cause
ceases--"
"The effect must cease," said Homais, "that is evident."
"Oh, save her!" cried Bovary.
And, without listening to the chemist, who was still venturing the
hypothesis, "It is perhaps a salutary paroxysm," Canivet was about to
administer some theriac, when they heard the cracking of a whip; all the
windows rattled, and a post-chaise drawn by three horses abreast, up to
their ears in mud, drove at a gallop round the corner of the market. It
was Doctor Lariviere.
The apparition of a god would not have caused more commotion. Bovary
raised his hands; Canivet stopped short; and Homais pulled off his
skull-cap long before the doctor had come in.
He belonged to that great school of surgery begotten of Bichat, to that
generation, now extinct, of philosophical practitioners, who, loving
their art with a fanatical love, exercised it with enthusiasm and
wisdom. Everyone in his hospital trembled when he was angry; and his
students so revered him that they tried, as soon as they were themselves
in practice, to imitate him as much as possible. So that in all the
towns about they were found wearing his long wadded merino overcoat
and black frock-coat, whose buttoned cuffs slightly covered his brawny
hands--very beautiful hands, and that never knew gloves, as though to be
more ready to plunge into suffering. Disdainful of honours, of titles,
and of academies, like one of the old Knight-Hospitallers, generous,
fatherly to the poor, and practising virtue without believing in it, he
would almost have passed for a saint if the keenness of his intellect
had not caused him to be feared as a demon. His glance, more penetrating
than his bistouries, looked straight into your soul, and dissected every
lie athwart all assertions and all reticences. And thus he went along,
full of that debonair majesty that is given by the consciousness
of great talent, of fortune, and of forty years of a labourious and
irreproachable life.
He frowned as soon as he had passed the door when he saw the cadaverous
face of Emma stretched out on her back with her mouth open. Then, while
apparently listening to Canivet, he rubbed his fingers up and down
beneath his nostrils, and repeated--
"Good! good!"
But he made a slow gesture with his shoulders. Bovary watched him; they
looked at one another; and this man, accustomed as he was to the sight
of pain, could not keep back a tear that fell on his shirt-frill.
He tried to take Canivet into the next room. Charles followed him.
"She is very ill, isn't she? If we put on sinapisms? Anything! Oh, think
of something, you who have saved so many!"
Charles caught him in both his arms, and gazed at him wildly,
imploringly, half-fainting against his breast.
"Come, my poor fellow, courage! There is nothing more to be done."
And Doctor Lariviere turned away.
"You are going?"
"I will come back."
He went out only to give an order to the coachman, with Monsieur
Canivet, who did not care either to have Emma die under his hands.
The chemist rejoined them on the Place. He could not by temperament keep
away from celebrities, so he begged Monsieur Lariviere to do him the
signal honour of accepting some breakfast.
He sent quickly to the "Lion d'Or" for some pigeons; to the butcher's
for all the cutlets that were to be had; to Tuvache for cream; and
to Lestiboudois for eggs; and the druggist himself aided in the
preparations, while Madame Homais was saying as she pulled together the
strings of her jacket--
"You must excuse us, sir, for in this poor place, when one hasn't been
told the night before--"
"Wine glasses!" whispered Homais.
"If only we were in town, we could fall back upon stuffed trotters."
"Be quiet! Sit down, doctor!"
He thought fit, after the first few mouthfuls, to give some details as
to the catastrophe.
"We first had a feeling of siccity in the pharynx, then intolerable
pains at the epigastrium, super purgation, coma."
"But how did she poison herself?"
"I don't know, doctor, and I don't even know where she can have procured
the arsenious acid."
Justin, who was just bringing in a pile of plates, began to tremble.
"What's the matter?" said the chemist.
At this question the young man dropped the whole lot on the ground with
a crash.
"Imbecile!" cried Homais, "awkward lout! block-head! confounded ass!"
But suddenly controlling himself--
"I wished, doctor, to make an analysis, and primo I delicately
introduced a tube--"
"You would have done better," said the physician, "to introduce your
fingers into her throat."
His colleague was silent, having just before privately received a severe
lecture about his emetic, so that this good Canivet, so arrogant and so
verbose at the time of the clubfoot, was to-day very modest. He smiled
without ceasing in an approving manner.
Homais dilated in Amphytrionic pride, and the affecting thought of
Bovary vaguely contributed to his pleasure by a kind of egotistic
reflex upon himself. Then the presence of the doctor transported him.
He displayed his erudition, cited pell-mell cantharides, upas, the
manchineel, vipers.
"I have even read that various persons have found themselves
under toxicological symptoms, and, as it were, thunderstricken by
black-pudding that had been subjected to a too vehement fumigation.
At least, this was stated in a very fine report drawn up by one of our
pharmaceutical chiefs, one of our masters, the illustrious Cadet de
Gassicourt!"
Madame Homais reappeared, carrying one of those shaky machines that
are heated with spirits of wine; for Homais liked to make his coffee
at table, having, moreover, torrefied it, pulverised it, and mixed it
himself.
"Saccharum, doctor?" said he, offering the sugar.
Then he had all his children brought down, anxious to have the
physician's opinion on their constitutions.
At last Monsieur Lariviere was about to leave, when Madame Homais asked
for a consultation about her husband. He was making his blood too thick
by going to sleep every evening after dinner.
"Oh, it isn't his blood that's too thick," said the physician.
And, smiling a little at his unnoticed joke, the doctor opened the
door. But the chemist's shop was full of people; he had the greatest
difficulty in getting rid of Monsieur Tuvache, who feared his spouse
would get inflammation of the lungs, because she was in the habit of
spitting on the ashes; then of Monsieur Binet, who sometimes experienced
sudden attacks of great hunger; and of Madame Caron, who suffered
from tinglings; of Lheureux, who had vertigo; of Lestiboudois, who had
rheumatism; and of Madame Lefrancois, who had heartburn. At last the
three horses started; and it was the general opinion that he had not
shown himself at all obliging.
Public attention was distracted by the appearance of Monsieur
Bournisien, who was going across the market with the holy oil.
Homais, as was due to his principles, compared priests to ravens
attracted by the odour of death. The sight of an ecclesiastic was
personally disagreeable to him, for the cassock made him think of the
shroud, and he detested the one from some fear of the other.
Nevertheless, not shrinking from what he called his mission, he returned
to Bovary's in company with Canivet whom Monsieur Lariviere, before
leaving, had strongly urged to make this visit; and he would, but for
his wife's objections, have taken his two sons with him, in order
to accustom them to great occasions; that this might be a lesson, an
example, a solemn picture, that should remain in their heads later on.
The room when they went in was full of mournful solemnity. On the
work-table, covered over with a white cloth, there were five or six
small balls of cotton in a silver dish, near a large crucifix between
two lighted candles.
Emma, her chin sunken upon her breast, had her eyes inordinately wide
open, and her poor hands wandered over the sheets with that hideous
and soft movement of the dying, that seems as if they wanted already to
cover themselves with the shroud. Pale as a statue and with eyes red as
fire, Charles, not weeping, stood opposite her at the foot of the bed,
while the priest, bending one knee, was muttering words in a low voice.
She turned her face slowly, and seemed filled with joy on seeing
suddenly the violet stole, no doubt finding again, in the midst of
a temporary lull in her pain, the lost voluptuousness of her first
mystical transports, with the visions of eternal beatitude that were
beginning.
The priest rose to take the crucifix; then she stretched forward her
neck as one who is athirst, and glueing her lips to the body of the
Man-God, she pressed upon it with all her expiring strength the fullest
kiss of love that she had ever given. Then he recited the Misereatur and
the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began to give
extreme unction. First upon the eyes, that had so coveted all worldly
pomp; then upon the nostrils, that had been greedy of the warm breeze
and amorous odours; then upon the mouth, that had uttered lies, that had
curled with pride and cried out in lewdness; then upon the hands that
had delighted in sensual touches; and finally upon the soles of the
feet, so swift of yore, when she was running to satisfy her desires, and
that would now walk no more.
The cure wiped his fingers, threw the bit of cotton dipped in oil into
the fire, and came and sat down by the dying woman, to tell her that
she must now blend her sufferings with those of Jesus Christ and abandon
herself to the divine mercy.
Finishing his exhortations, he tried to place in her hand a blessed
candle, symbol of the celestial glory with which she was soon to be
surrounded. Emma, too weak, could not close her fingers, and the taper,
but for Monsieur Bournisien would have fallen to the ground.
However, she was not quite so pale, and her face had an expression of
serenity as if the sacrament had cured her.
The priest did not fail to point this out; he even explained to Bovary
that the Lord sometimes prolonged the life of persons when he thought it
meet for their salvation; and Charles remembered the day when, so near
death, she had received the communion. Perhaps there was no need to
despair, he thought.
In fact, she looked around her slowly, as one awakening from a dream;
then in a distinct voice she asked for her looking-glass, and remained
some time bending over it, until the big tears fell from her eyes. Then
she turned away her head with a sigh and fell back upon the pillows.
Her chest soon began panting rapidly; the whole of her tongue protruded
from her mouth; her eyes, as they rolled, grew paler, like the two
globes of a lamp that is going out, so that one might have thought
her already dead but for the fearful labouring of her ribs, shaken
by violent breathing, as if the soul were struggling to free itself.
Felicite knelt down before the crucifix, and the druggist himself
slightly bent his knees, while Monsieur Canivet looked out vaguely at
the Place. Bournisien had again begun to pray, his face bowed against
the edge of the bed, his long black cassock trailing behind him in the
room. Charles was on the other side, on his knees, his arms outstretched
towards Emma. He had taken her hands and pressed them, shuddering at
every beat of her heart, as at the shaking of a falling ruin. As the
death-rattle became stronger the priest prayed faster; his prayers
mingled with the stifled sobs of Bovary, and sometimes all seemed lost
in the muffled murmur of the Latin syllables that tolled like a passing
bell.
Suddenly on the pavement was heard a loud noise of clogs and the
clattering of a stick; and a voice rose--a raucous voice--that sang--
"Maids in the warmth of a summer day Dream of love and of love always"
Emma raised herself like a galvanised corpse, her hair undone, her eyes
fixed, staring.
"Where the sickle blades have been, Nannette, gathering ears of corn,
Passes bending down, my queen, To the earth where they were born."
"The blind man!" she cried. And Emma began to laugh, an atrocious,
frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor
wretch that stood out against the eternal night like a menace.
"The wind is strong this summer day, Her petticoat has flown away."
She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all drew near. She
was dead.
| She finds Rodolphe alone in the mansion. He apologizes for his past treatment of her and she tells him that she has suffered a great deal. He sees her sorrow and he caresses her. He reaffirms his love and begs to know what is wrong. She explains that a notary has absconded with all of her husband's money and they are to be ruined. She asks him to loan her 3,000 francs. Rodolphe turns pale and explains that he doesn't have the money. She accuses him of destroying her and mocks the richness of his supposed poverty by pointing out the expensive items in the room. He persists in his refusal and she staggers away. Night is falling and she feels herself slipping into madness. She sees the lights of her house and then, acquiring a new resolve, goes instead to the pharmacy and convinces Justin to let her into the lab where Homais keeps his arsenic. Justin is horrified when Madame Bovary seizes a great handful of the white powder and swallows it. She swears him to silence and then returns home | summary |
There is always after the death of anyone a kind of stupefaction;
so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign
ourselves to believe in it. But still, when he saw that she did not
move, Charles threw himself upon her, crying--
"Farewell! farewell!"
Homais and Canivet dragged him from the room.
"Restrain yourself!"
"Yes." said he, struggling, "I'll be quiet. I'll not do anything. But
leave me alone. I want to see her. She is my wife!"
And he wept.
"Cry," said the chemist; "let nature take her course; that will solace
you."
Weaker than a child, Charles let himself be led downstairs into the
sitting-room, and Monsieur Homais soon went home. On the Place he
was accosted by the blind man, who, having dragged himself as far as
Yonville, in the hope of getting the antiphlogistic pomade, was asking
every passer-by where the druggist lived.
"There now! as if I hadn't got other fish to fry. Well, so much the
worse; you must come later on."
And he entered the shop hurriedly.
He had to write two letters, to prepare a soothing potion for Bovary, to
invent some lie that would conceal the poisoning, and work it up into an
article for the "Fanal," without counting the people who were waiting to
get the news from him; and when the Yonvillers had all heard his story
of the arsenic that she had mistaken for sugar in making a vanilla
cream. Homais once more returned to Bovary's.
He found him alone (Monsieur Canivet had left), sitting in an arm-chair
near the window, staring with an idiotic look at the flags of the floor.
"Now," said the chemist, "you ought yourself to fix the hour for the
ceremony."
"Why? What ceremony?" Then, in a stammering, frightened voice, "Oh, no!
not that. No! I want to see her here."
Homais, to keep himself in countenance, took up a water-bottle on the
whatnot to water the geraniums.
"Ah! thanks," said Charles; "you are good."
But he did not finish, choking beneath the crowd of memories that this
action of the druggist recalled to him.
Then to distract him, Homais thought fit to talk a little horticulture:
plants wanted humidity. Charles bowed his head in sign of approbation.
"Besides, the fine days will soon be here again."
"Ah!" said Bovary.
The druggist, at his wit's end, began softly to draw aside the small
window-curtain.
"Hallo! there's Monsieur Tuvache passing."
Charles repeated like a machine---
"Monsieur Tuvache passing!"
Homais did not dare to speak to him again about the funeral
arrangements; it was the priest who succeeded in reconciling him to
them.
He shut himself up in his consulting-room, took a pen, and after sobbing
for some time, wrote--
"I wish her to be buried in her wedding-dress, with white shoes, and a
wreath. Her hair is to be spread out over her shoulders. Three coffins,
one of oak, one of mahogany, one of lead. Let no one say anything to me.
I shall have strength. Over all there is to be placed a large piece of
green velvet. This is my wish; see that it is done."
The two men were much surprised at Bovary's romantic ideas. The chemist
at once went to him and said--
"This velvet seems to me a superfetation. Besides, the expense--"
"What's that to you?" cried Charles. "Leave me! You did not love her.
Go!"
The priest took him by the arm for a turn in the garden. He discoursed
on the vanity of earthly things. God was very great, was very good: one
must submit to his decrees without a murmur; nay, must even thank him.
Charles burst out into blasphemies: "I hate your God!"
"The spirit of rebellion is still upon you," sighed the ecclesiastic.
Bovary was far away. He was walking with great strides along by the
wall, near the espalier, and he ground his teeth; he raised to heaven
looks of malediction, but not so much as a leaf stirred.
A fine rain was falling: Charles, whose chest was bare, at last began to
shiver; he went in and sat down in the kitchen.
At six o'clock a noise like a clatter of old iron was heard on the
Place; it was the "Hirondelle" coming in, and he remained with his
forehead against the windowpane, watching all the passengers get
out, one after the other. Felicite put down a mattress for him in the
drawing-room. He threw himself upon it and fell asleep.
Although a philosopher, Monsieur Homais respected the dead. So bearing
no grudge to poor Charles, he came back again in the evening to sit up
with the body; bringing with him three volumes and a pocket-book for
taking notes.
Monsieur Bournisien was there, and two large candles were burning at the
head of the bed, that had been taken out of the alcove. The druggist, on
whom the silence weighed, was not long before he began formulating some
regrets about this "unfortunate young woman." and the priest replied
that there was nothing to do now but pray for her.
"Yet," Homais went on, "one of two things; either she died in a state of
grace (as the Church has it), and then she has no need of our prayers;
or else she departed impertinent (that is, I believe, the ecclesiastical
expression), and then--"
Bournisien interrupted him, replying testily that it was none the less
necessary to pray.
"But," objected the chemist, "since God knows all our needs, what can be
the good of prayer?"
"What!" cried the ecclesiastic, "prayer! Why, aren't you a Christian?"
"Excuse me," said Homais; "I admire Christianity. To begin with, it
enfranchised the slaves, introduced into the world a morality--"
"That isn't the question. All the texts-"
"Oh! oh! As to texts, look at history; it, is known that all the texts
have been falsified by the Jesuits."
Charles came in, and advancing towards the bed, slowly drew the
curtains.
Emma's head was turned towards her right shoulder, the corner of her
mouth, which was open, seemed like a black hole at the lower part of her
face; her two thumbs were bent into the palms of her hands; a kind
of white dust besprinkled her lashes, and her eyes were beginning to
disappear in that viscous pallor that looks like a thin web, as if
spiders had spun it over. The sheet sunk in from her breast to her
knees, and then rose at the tips of her toes, and it seemed to Charles
that infinite masses, an enormous load, were weighing upon her.
The church clock struck two. They could hear the loud murmur of the
river flowing in the darkness at the foot of the terrace. Monsieur
Bournisien from time to time blew his nose noisily, and Homais' pen was
scratching over the paper.
"Come, my good friend," he said, "withdraw; this spectacle is tearing
you to pieces."
Charles once gone, the chemist and the cure recommenced their
discussions.
"Read Voltaire," said the one, "read D'Holbach, read the
'Encyclopaedia'!"
"Read the 'Letters of some Portuguese Jews,'" said the other; "read 'The
Meaning of Christianity,' by Nicolas, formerly a magistrate."
They grew warm, they grew red, they both talked at once without
listening to each other. Bournisien was scandalized at such audacity;
Homais marvelled at such stupidity; and they were on the point of
insulting one another when Charles suddenly reappeared. A fascination
drew him. He was continually coming upstairs.
He stood opposite her, the better to see her, and he lost himself in a
contemplation so deep that it was no longer painful.
He recalled stories of catalepsy, the marvels of magnetism, and he
said to himself that by willing it with all his force he might perhaps
succeed in reviving her. Once he even bent towards he, and cried in a
low voice, "Emma! Emma!" His strong breathing made the flames of the
candles tremble against the wall.
At daybreak Madame Bovary senior arrived. Charles as he embraced her
burst into another flood of tears. She tried, as the chemist had done,
to make some remarks to him on the expenses of the funeral. He became so
angry that she was silent, and he even commissioned her to go to town at
once and buy what was necessary.
Charles remained alone the whole afternoon; they had taken Berthe
to Madame Homais'; Felicite was in the room upstairs with Madame
Lefrancois.
In the evening he had some visitors. He rose, pressed their hands,
unable to speak. Then they sat down near one another, and formed a large
semicircle in front of the fire. With lowered faces, and swinging one
leg crossed over the other knee, they uttered deep sighs at intervals;
each one was inordinately bored, and yet none would be the first to go.
Homais, when he returned at nine o'clock (for the last two days only
Homais seemed to have been on the Place), was laden with a stock of
camphor, of benzine, and aromatic herbs. He also carried a large jar
full of chlorine water, to keep off all miasmata. Just then the servant,
Madame Lefrancois, and Madame Bovary senior were busy about Emma,
finishing dressing her, and they were drawing down the long stiff veil
that covered her to her satin shoes.
Felicite was sobbing--"Ah! my poor mistress! my poor mistress!"
"Look at her," said the landlady, sighing; "how pretty she still is!
Now, couldn't you swear she was going to get up in a minute?"
Then they bent over her to put on her wreath. They had to raise the head
a little, and a rush of black liquid issued, as if she were vomiting,
from her mouth.
"Oh, goodness! The dress; take care!" cried Madame Lefrancois. "Now,
just come and help," she said to the chemist. "Perhaps you're afraid?"
"I afraid?" replied he, shrugging his shoulders. "I dare say! I've seen
all sorts of things at the hospital when I was studying pharmacy. We
used to make punch in the dissecting room! Nothingness does not terrify
a philosopher; and, as I often say, I even intend to leave my body to
the hospitals, in order, later on, to serve science."
The cure on his arrival inquired how Monsieur Bovary was, and, on
the reply of the druggist, went on--"The blow, you see, is still too
recent."
Then Homais congratulated him on not being exposed, like other people,
to the loss of a beloved companion; whence there followed a discussion
on the celibacy of priests.
"For," said the chemist, "it is unnatural that a man should do without
women! There have been crimes--"
"But, good heaven!" cried the ecclesiastic, "how do you expect an
individual who is married to keep the secrets of the confessional, for
example?"
Homais fell foul of the confessional. Bournisien defended it; he
enlarged on the acts of restitution that it brought about. He cited
various anecdotes about thieves who had suddenly become honest. Military
men on approaching the tribunal of penitence had felt the scales fall
from their eyes. At Fribourg there was a minister--
His companion was asleep. Then he felt somewhat stifled by the
over-heavy atmosphere of the room; he opened the window; this awoke the
chemist.
"Come, take a pinch of snuff," he said to him. "Take it; it'll relieve
you."
A continual barking was heard in the distance. "Do you hear that dog
howling?" said the chemist.
"They smell the dead," replied the priest. "It's like bees; they leave
their hives on the decease of any person."
Homais made no remark upon these prejudices, for he had again dropped
asleep. Monsieur Bournisien, stronger than he, went on moving his lips
gently for some time, then insensibly his chin sank down, he let fall
his big black boot, and began to snore.
They sat opposite one another, with protruding stomachs, puffed-up
faces, and frowning looks, after so much disagreement uniting at last in
the same human weakness, and they moved no more than the corpse by their
side, that seemed to be sleeping.
Charles coming in did not wake them. It was the last time; he came to
bid her farewell.
The aromatic herbs were still smoking, and spirals of bluish vapour
blended at the window-sash with the fog that was coming in. There were
few stars, and the night was warm. The wax of the candles fell in great
drops upon the sheets of the bed. Charles watched them burn, tiring his
eyes against the glare of their yellow flame.
The watering on the satin gown shimmered white as moonlight. Emma was
lost beneath it; and it seemed to him that, spreading beyond her own
self, she blended confusedly with everything around her--the silence,
the night, the passing wind, the damp odours rising from the ground.
Then suddenly he saw her in the garden at Tostes, on a bench against the
thorn hedge, or else at Rouen in the streets, on the threshold of their
house, in the yard at Bertaux. He again heard the laughter of the happy
boys beneath the apple-trees: the room was filled with the perfume
of her hair; and her dress rustled in his arms with a noise like
electricity. The dress was still the same.
For a long while he thus recalled all his lost joys, her attitudes,
her movements, the sound of her voice. Upon one fit of despair followed
another, and even others, inexhaustible as the waves of an overflowing
sea.
A terrible curiosity seized him. Slowly, with the tips of his fingers,
palpitating, he lifted her veil. But he uttered a cry of horror that
awoke the other two.
They dragged him down into the sitting-room. Then Felicite came up to
say that he wanted some of her hair.
"Cut some off," replied the druggist.
And as she did not dare to, he himself stepped forward, scissors in
hand. He trembled so that he pierced the skin of the temple in several
places. At last, stiffening himself against emotion, Homais gave two
or three great cuts at random that left white patches amongst that
beautiful black hair.
The chemist and the cure plunged anew into their occupations, not
without sleeping from time to time, of which they accused each other
reciprocally at each fresh awakening. Then Monsieur Bournisien sprinkled
the room with holy water and Homais threw a little chlorine water on the
floor.
Felicite had taken care to put on the chest of drawers, for each
of them, a bottle of brandy, some cheese, and a large roll. And the
druggist, who could not hold out any longer, about four in the morning
sighed--
"My word! I should like to take some sustenance."
The priest did not need any persuading; he went out to go and say mass,
came back, and then they ate and hobnobbed, giggling a little without
knowing why, stimulated by that vague gaiety that comes upon us after
times of sadness, and at the last glass the priest said to the druggist,
as he clapped him on the shoulder--
"We shall end by understanding one another."
In the passage downstairs they met the undertaker's men, who were coming
in. Then Charles for two hours had to suffer the torture of hearing the
hammer resound against the wood. Next day they lowered her into her
oak coffin, that was fitted into the other two; but as the bier was
too large, they had to fill up the gaps with the wool of a mattress. At
last, when the three lids had been planed down, nailed, soldered, it was
placed outside in front of the door; the house was thrown open, and the
people of Yonville began to flock round.
Old Rouault arrived, and fainted on the Place when he saw the black
cloth!
| She arrives to find Charles worried for her safety and depressed about their financial ruin. Ignoring his questions she writes a letter, seals it and, telling him not to read it until the following day, lies down upon her bed and waits to die. She vomits, feels chills and experiences sharp pains. Charles pleads with her to tell him what she's eaten and seeing the love in his eyes she finally points to the letter. When Charles reads that she has poisoned herself he becomes wild with anguish. He sends for Homais who arrives to find Bovary out of his mind with worry. Homais writes letters to Monsieur Cavinet and Doctor Lariviere. Emma calls for her little girl who is frightened by the sight of her sick mother. Cavinet arrives and Charles begs him to save his wife. He prescribes an emetic and soon she is vomiting blood. Soon the celebrated Doctor Lariviere arrives and seeing Emma pulls Charles aside tells him that nothing can be done. Not wishing to see Emma die, Cavinet and Lariviere leave the room and Homais hurries after them in order to invite them to lunch. Before he can leave the town Lariviere is forced to suffer through a meal with Homais and then he is besieged by the townspeople and their complaints of illness. Homais and Cavinet, seeing the priest enter the Bovary house, return to witness the end. In her delirium Emma is pleased to see the priest and implants a passionate kiss on the crucifix. The abbs performs communion and Emma's face acquires a peaceful countenance. Suddenly she begins to breathe rapidly in the throes of death. As she suffers Emma hears the sound of the beggar from Rouen, who has come to Yonville seeking Homais' cure, singing a song that ends with the couplet:. The wind blew very hard that day. And snatched her petticoat away. Emma sits upright and calls out "The blind man. before collapsing dead. | summary |
There is always after the death of anyone a kind of stupefaction;
so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign
ourselves to believe in it. But still, when he saw that she did not
move, Charles threw himself upon her, crying--
"Farewell! farewell!"
Homais and Canivet dragged him from the room.
"Restrain yourself!"
"Yes." said he, struggling, "I'll be quiet. I'll not do anything. But
leave me alone. I want to see her. She is my wife!"
And he wept.
"Cry," said the chemist; "let nature take her course; that will solace
you."
Weaker than a child, Charles let himself be led downstairs into the
sitting-room, and Monsieur Homais soon went home. On the Place he
was accosted by the blind man, who, having dragged himself as far as
Yonville, in the hope of getting the antiphlogistic pomade, was asking
every passer-by where the druggist lived.
"There now! as if I hadn't got other fish to fry. Well, so much the
worse; you must come later on."
And he entered the shop hurriedly.
He had to write two letters, to prepare a soothing potion for Bovary, to
invent some lie that would conceal the poisoning, and work it up into an
article for the "Fanal," without counting the people who were waiting to
get the news from him; and when the Yonvillers had all heard his story
of the arsenic that she had mistaken for sugar in making a vanilla
cream. Homais once more returned to Bovary's.
He found him alone (Monsieur Canivet had left), sitting in an arm-chair
near the window, staring with an idiotic look at the flags of the floor.
"Now," said the chemist, "you ought yourself to fix the hour for the
ceremony."
"Why? What ceremony?" Then, in a stammering, frightened voice, "Oh, no!
not that. No! I want to see her here."
Homais, to keep himself in countenance, took up a water-bottle on the
whatnot to water the geraniums.
"Ah! thanks," said Charles; "you are good."
But he did not finish, choking beneath the crowd of memories that this
action of the druggist recalled to him.
Then to distract him, Homais thought fit to talk a little horticulture:
plants wanted humidity. Charles bowed his head in sign of approbation.
"Besides, the fine days will soon be here again."
"Ah!" said Bovary.
The druggist, at his wit's end, began softly to draw aside the small
window-curtain.
"Hallo! there's Monsieur Tuvache passing."
Charles repeated like a machine---
"Monsieur Tuvache passing!"
Homais did not dare to speak to him again about the funeral
arrangements; it was the priest who succeeded in reconciling him to
them.
He shut himself up in his consulting-room, took a pen, and after sobbing
for some time, wrote--
"I wish her to be buried in her wedding-dress, with white shoes, and a
wreath. Her hair is to be spread out over her shoulders. Three coffins,
one of oak, one of mahogany, one of lead. Let no one say anything to me.
I shall have strength. Over all there is to be placed a large piece of
green velvet. This is my wish; see that it is done."
The two men were much surprised at Bovary's romantic ideas. The chemist
at once went to him and said--
"This velvet seems to me a superfetation. Besides, the expense--"
"What's that to you?" cried Charles. "Leave me! You did not love her.
Go!"
The priest took him by the arm for a turn in the garden. He discoursed
on the vanity of earthly things. God was very great, was very good: one
must submit to his decrees without a murmur; nay, must even thank him.
Charles burst out into blasphemies: "I hate your God!"
"The spirit of rebellion is still upon you," sighed the ecclesiastic.
Bovary was far away. He was walking with great strides along by the
wall, near the espalier, and he ground his teeth; he raised to heaven
looks of malediction, but not so much as a leaf stirred.
A fine rain was falling: Charles, whose chest was bare, at last began to
shiver; he went in and sat down in the kitchen.
At six o'clock a noise like a clatter of old iron was heard on the
Place; it was the "Hirondelle" coming in, and he remained with his
forehead against the windowpane, watching all the passengers get
out, one after the other. Felicite put down a mattress for him in the
drawing-room. He threw himself upon it and fell asleep.
Although a philosopher, Monsieur Homais respected the dead. So bearing
no grudge to poor Charles, he came back again in the evening to sit up
with the body; bringing with him three volumes and a pocket-book for
taking notes.
Monsieur Bournisien was there, and two large candles were burning at the
head of the bed, that had been taken out of the alcove. The druggist, on
whom the silence weighed, was not long before he began formulating some
regrets about this "unfortunate young woman." and the priest replied
that there was nothing to do now but pray for her.
"Yet," Homais went on, "one of two things; either she died in a state of
grace (as the Church has it), and then she has no need of our prayers;
or else she departed impertinent (that is, I believe, the ecclesiastical
expression), and then--"
Bournisien interrupted him, replying testily that it was none the less
necessary to pray.
"But," objected the chemist, "since God knows all our needs, what can be
the good of prayer?"
"What!" cried the ecclesiastic, "prayer! Why, aren't you a Christian?"
"Excuse me," said Homais; "I admire Christianity. To begin with, it
enfranchised the slaves, introduced into the world a morality--"
"That isn't the question. All the texts-"
"Oh! oh! As to texts, look at history; it, is known that all the texts
have been falsified by the Jesuits."
Charles came in, and advancing towards the bed, slowly drew the
curtains.
Emma's head was turned towards her right shoulder, the corner of her
mouth, which was open, seemed like a black hole at the lower part of her
face; her two thumbs were bent into the palms of her hands; a kind
of white dust besprinkled her lashes, and her eyes were beginning to
disappear in that viscous pallor that looks like a thin web, as if
spiders had spun it over. The sheet sunk in from her breast to her
knees, and then rose at the tips of her toes, and it seemed to Charles
that infinite masses, an enormous load, were weighing upon her.
The church clock struck two. They could hear the loud murmur of the
river flowing in the darkness at the foot of the terrace. Monsieur
Bournisien from time to time blew his nose noisily, and Homais' pen was
scratching over the paper.
"Come, my good friend," he said, "withdraw; this spectacle is tearing
you to pieces."
Charles once gone, the chemist and the cure recommenced their
discussions.
"Read Voltaire," said the one, "read D'Holbach, read the
'Encyclopaedia'!"
"Read the 'Letters of some Portuguese Jews,'" said the other; "read 'The
Meaning of Christianity,' by Nicolas, formerly a magistrate."
They grew warm, they grew red, they both talked at once without
listening to each other. Bournisien was scandalized at such audacity;
Homais marvelled at such stupidity; and they were on the point of
insulting one another when Charles suddenly reappeared. A fascination
drew him. He was continually coming upstairs.
He stood opposite her, the better to see her, and he lost himself in a
contemplation so deep that it was no longer painful.
He recalled stories of catalepsy, the marvels of magnetism, and he
said to himself that by willing it with all his force he might perhaps
succeed in reviving her. Once he even bent towards he, and cried in a
low voice, "Emma! Emma!" His strong breathing made the flames of the
candles tremble against the wall.
At daybreak Madame Bovary senior arrived. Charles as he embraced her
burst into another flood of tears. She tried, as the chemist had done,
to make some remarks to him on the expenses of the funeral. He became so
angry that she was silent, and he even commissioned her to go to town at
once and buy what was necessary.
Charles remained alone the whole afternoon; they had taken Berthe
to Madame Homais'; Felicite was in the room upstairs with Madame
Lefrancois.
In the evening he had some visitors. He rose, pressed their hands,
unable to speak. Then they sat down near one another, and formed a large
semicircle in front of the fire. With lowered faces, and swinging one
leg crossed over the other knee, they uttered deep sighs at intervals;
each one was inordinately bored, and yet none would be the first to go.
Homais, when he returned at nine o'clock (for the last two days only
Homais seemed to have been on the Place), was laden with a stock of
camphor, of benzine, and aromatic herbs. He also carried a large jar
full of chlorine water, to keep off all miasmata. Just then the servant,
Madame Lefrancois, and Madame Bovary senior were busy about Emma,
finishing dressing her, and they were drawing down the long stiff veil
that covered her to her satin shoes.
Felicite was sobbing--"Ah! my poor mistress! my poor mistress!"
"Look at her," said the landlady, sighing; "how pretty she still is!
Now, couldn't you swear she was going to get up in a minute?"
Then they bent over her to put on her wreath. They had to raise the head
a little, and a rush of black liquid issued, as if she were vomiting,
from her mouth.
"Oh, goodness! The dress; take care!" cried Madame Lefrancois. "Now,
just come and help," she said to the chemist. "Perhaps you're afraid?"
"I afraid?" replied he, shrugging his shoulders. "I dare say! I've seen
all sorts of things at the hospital when I was studying pharmacy. We
used to make punch in the dissecting room! Nothingness does not terrify
a philosopher; and, as I often say, I even intend to leave my body to
the hospitals, in order, later on, to serve science."
The cure on his arrival inquired how Monsieur Bovary was, and, on
the reply of the druggist, went on--"The blow, you see, is still too
recent."
Then Homais congratulated him on not being exposed, like other people,
to the loss of a beloved companion; whence there followed a discussion
on the celibacy of priests.
"For," said the chemist, "it is unnatural that a man should do without
women! There have been crimes--"
"But, good heaven!" cried the ecclesiastic, "how do you expect an
individual who is married to keep the secrets of the confessional, for
example?"
Homais fell foul of the confessional. Bournisien defended it; he
enlarged on the acts of restitution that it brought about. He cited
various anecdotes about thieves who had suddenly become honest. Military
men on approaching the tribunal of penitence had felt the scales fall
from their eyes. At Fribourg there was a minister--
His companion was asleep. Then he felt somewhat stifled by the
over-heavy atmosphere of the room; he opened the window; this awoke the
chemist.
"Come, take a pinch of snuff," he said to him. "Take it; it'll relieve
you."
A continual barking was heard in the distance. "Do you hear that dog
howling?" said the chemist.
"They smell the dead," replied the priest. "It's like bees; they leave
their hives on the decease of any person."
Homais made no remark upon these prejudices, for he had again dropped
asleep. Monsieur Bournisien, stronger than he, went on moving his lips
gently for some time, then insensibly his chin sank down, he let fall
his big black boot, and began to snore.
They sat opposite one another, with protruding stomachs, puffed-up
faces, and frowning looks, after so much disagreement uniting at last in
the same human weakness, and they moved no more than the corpse by their
side, that seemed to be sleeping.
Charles coming in did not wake them. It was the last time; he came to
bid her farewell.
The aromatic herbs were still smoking, and spirals of bluish vapour
blended at the window-sash with the fog that was coming in. There were
few stars, and the night was warm. The wax of the candles fell in great
drops upon the sheets of the bed. Charles watched them burn, tiring his
eyes against the glare of their yellow flame.
The watering on the satin gown shimmered white as moonlight. Emma was
lost beneath it; and it seemed to him that, spreading beyond her own
self, she blended confusedly with everything around her--the silence,
the night, the passing wind, the damp odours rising from the ground.
Then suddenly he saw her in the garden at Tostes, on a bench against the
thorn hedge, or else at Rouen in the streets, on the threshold of their
house, in the yard at Bertaux. He again heard the laughter of the happy
boys beneath the apple-trees: the room was filled with the perfume
of her hair; and her dress rustled in his arms with a noise like
electricity. The dress was still the same.
For a long while he thus recalled all his lost joys, her attitudes,
her movements, the sound of her voice. Upon one fit of despair followed
another, and even others, inexhaustible as the waves of an overflowing
sea.
A terrible curiosity seized him. Slowly, with the tips of his fingers,
palpitating, he lifted her veil. But he uttered a cry of horror that
awoke the other two.
They dragged him down into the sitting-room. Then Felicite came up to
say that he wanted some of her hair.
"Cut some off," replied the druggist.
And as she did not dare to, he himself stepped forward, scissors in
hand. He trembled so that he pierced the skin of the temple in several
places. At last, stiffening himself against emotion, Homais gave two
or three great cuts at random that left white patches amongst that
beautiful black hair.
The chemist and the cure plunged anew into their occupations, not
without sleeping from time to time, of which they accused each other
reciprocally at each fresh awakening. Then Monsieur Bournisien sprinkled
the room with holy water and Homais threw a little chlorine water on the
floor.
Felicite had taken care to put on the chest of drawers, for each
of them, a bottle of brandy, some cheese, and a large roll. And the
druggist, who could not hold out any longer, about four in the morning
sighed--
"My word! I should like to take some sustenance."
The priest did not need any persuading; he went out to go and say mass,
came back, and then they ate and hobnobbed, giggling a little without
knowing why, stimulated by that vague gaiety that comes upon us after
times of sadness, and at the last glass the priest said to the druggist,
as he clapped him on the shoulder--
"We shall end by understanding one another."
In the passage downstairs they met the undertaker's men, who were coming
in. Then Charles for two hours had to suffer the torture of hearing the
hammer resound against the wood. Next day they lowered her into her
oak coffin, that was fitted into the other two; but as the bier was
too large, they had to fill up the gaps with the wool of a mattress. At
last, when the three lids had been planed down, nailed, soldered, it was
placed outside in front of the door; the house was thrown open, and the
people of Yonville began to flock round.
Old Rouault arrived, and fainted on the Place when he saw the black
cloth!
| Although Emma is disgusted by the notary's advances and the suggestion that he would give her money in exchange for sexual favors as her desperation rises she does not balk at making advances to Binet and then expecting certain help from Rodolphe in exchange for sex. Her interior world of idealized romance has been corrupted to prostitution by the demands of the real. Significantly, her downfall is predicated not by her extra-marital affairs but by her reckless spending and lack of bourgeois discipline with money. While she is dying, Emma shows genuine affection for Charles. She is able to do this because, by taking the poison she is simply able to perceive his devotion free of her own desires. The blind man arrives on the scene in time for Emma's death. His presence in the novel is something of a homage to the romantic novels of the early nineteenth century and the medieval wisdom of his song - in which love and death coexist - is appropriate for Emma's departure. The figure of Doctor Lariviere is modeled after Flaubert's father who was a physician in Rouen | analysis |
He had only received the chemist's letter thirty-six hours after the
event; and, from consideration for his feelings, Homais had so worded it
that it was impossible to make out what it was all about.
First, the old fellow had fallen as if struck by apoplexy. Next, he
understood that she was not dead, but she might be. At last, he had put
on his blouse, taken his hat, fastened his spurs to his boots, and set
out at full speed; and the whole of the way old Rouault, panting, was
torn by anguish. Once even he was obliged to dismount. He was dizzy; he
heard voices round about him; he felt himself going mad.
Day broke. He saw three black hens asleep in a tree. He shuddered,
horrified at this omen. Then he promised the Holy Virgin three chasubles
for the church, and that he would go barefooted from the cemetery at
Bertaux to the chapel of Vassonville.
He entered Maromme shouting for the people of the inn, burst open the
door with a thrust of his shoulder, made for a sack of oats, emptied a
bottle of sweet cider into the manger, and again mounted his nag, whose
feet struck fire as it dashed along.
He said to himself that no doubt they would save her; the doctors would
discover some remedy surely. He remembered all the miraculous cures
he had been told about. Then she appeared to him dead. She was there;
before his eyes, lying on her back in the middle of the road. He reined
up, and the hallucination disappeared.
At Quincampoix, to give himself heart, he drank three cups of coffee
one after the other. He fancied they had made a mistake in the name in
writing. He looked for the letter in his pocket, felt it there, but did
not dare to open it.
At last he began to think it was all a joke; someone's spite, the jest
of some wag; and besides, if she were dead, one would have known it. But
no! There was nothing extraordinary about the country; the sky was blue,
the trees swayed; a flock of sheep passed. He saw the village; he was
seen coming bending forward upon his horse, belabouring it with great
blows, the girths dripping with blood.
When he had recovered consciousness, he fell, weeping, into Bovary's
arms: "My girl! Emma! my child! tell me--"
The other replied, sobbing, "I don't know! I don't know! It's a curse!"
The druggist separated them. "These horrible details are useless. I will
tell this gentleman all about it. Here are the people coming. Dignity!
Come now! Philosophy!"
The poor fellow tried to show himself brave, and repeated several times.
"Yes! courage!"
"Oh," cried the old man, "so I will have, by God! I'll go along o' her
to the end!"
The bell began tolling. All was ready; they had to start. And seated in
a stall of the choir, side by side, they saw pass and repass in front of
them continually the three chanting choristers.
The serpent-player was blowing with all his might. Monsieur Bournisien,
in full vestments, was singing in a shrill voice. He bowed before the
tabernacle, raising his hands, stretched out his arms. Lestiboudois
went about the church with his whalebone stick. The bier stood near the
lectern, between four rows of candles. Charles felt inclined to get up
and put them out.
Yet he tried to stir himself to a feeling of devotion, to throw himself
into the hope of a future life in which he should see her again. He
imagined to himself she had gone on a long journey, far away, for a long
time. But when he thought of her lying there, and that all was over,
that they would lay her in the earth, he was seized with a fierce,
gloomy, despairful rage. At times he thought he felt nothing more, and
he enjoyed this lull in his pain, whilst at the same time he reproached
himself for being a wretch.
The sharp noise of an iron-ferruled stick was heard on the stones,
striking them at irregular intervals. It came from the end of the
church, and stopped short at the lower aisles. A man in a coarse brown
jacket knelt down painfully. It was Hippolyte, the stable-boy at the
"Lion d'Or." He had put on his new leg.
One of the choristers went round the nave making a collection, and the
coppers chinked one after the other on the silver plate.
"Oh, make haste! I am in pain!" cried Bovary, angrily throwing him a
five-franc piece. The churchman thanked him with a deep bow.
They sang, they knelt, they stood up; it was endless! He remembered that
once, in the early times, they had been to mass together, and they had
sat down on the other side, on the right, by the wall. The bell began
again. There was a great moving of chairs; the bearers slipped their
three staves under the coffin, and everyone left the church.
Then Justin appeared at the door of the shop. He suddenly went in again,
pale, staggering.
People were at the windows to see the procession pass. Charles at the
head walked erect. He affected a brave air, and saluted with a nod those
who, coming out from the lanes or from their doors, stood amidst the
crowd.
The six men, three on either side, walked slowly, panting a little.
The priests, the choristers, and the two choirboys recited the De
profundis*, and their voices echoed over the fields, rising and falling
with their undulations. Sometimes they disappeared in the windings of
the path; but the great silver cross rose always before the trees.
*Psalm CXXX.
The women followed in black cloaks with turned-down hoods; each of them
carried in her hands a large lighted candle, and Charles felt himself
growing weaker at this continual repetition of prayers and torches,
beneath this oppressive odour of wax and of cassocks. A fresh breeze was
blowing; the rye and colza were sprouting, little dewdrops trembled at
the roadsides and on the hawthorn hedges. All sorts of joyous sounds
filled the air; the jolting of a cart rolling afar off in the ruts, the
crowing of a cock, repeated again and again, or the gambling of a foal
running away under the apple-trees: The pure sky was fretted with rosy
clouds; a bluish haze rested upon the cots covered with iris. Charles as
he passed recognised each courtyard. He remembered mornings like this,
when, after visiting some patient, he came out from one and returned to
her.
The black cloth bestrewn with white beads blew up from time to time,
laying bare the coffin. The tired bearers walked more slowly, and it
advanced with constant jerks, like a boat that pitches with every wave.
They reached the cemetery. The men went right down to a place in the
grass where a grave was dug. They ranged themselves all round; and while
the priest spoke, the red soil thrown up at the sides kept noiselessly
slipping down at the corners.
Then when the four ropes were arranged the coffin was placed upon them.
He watched it descend; it seemed descending for ever. At last a thud was
heard; the ropes creaked as they were drawn up. Then Bournisien took
the spade handed to him by Lestiboudois; with his left hand all the
time sprinkling water, with the right he vigorously threw in a large
spadeful; and the wood of the coffin, struck by the pebbles, gave forth
that dread sound that seems to us the reverberation of eternity.
The ecclesiastic passed the holy water sprinkler to his neighbour. This
was Homais. He swung it gravely, then handed it to Charles, who sank to
his knees in the earth and threw in handfuls of it, crying, "Adieu!" He
sent her kisses; he dragged himself towards the grave, to engulf himself
with her. They led him away, and he soon grew calmer, feeling perhaps,
like the others, a vague satisfaction that it was all over.
Old Rouault on his way back began quietly smoking a pipe, which Homais
in his innermost conscience thought not quite the thing. He also noticed
that Monsieur Binet had not been present, and that Tuvache had "made
off" after mass, and that Theodore, the notary's servant wore a blue
coat, "as if one could not have got a black coat, since that is the
custom, by Jove!" And to share his observations with others he went from
group to group. They were deploring Emma's death, especially Lheureux,
who had not failed to come to the funeral.
"Poor little woman! What a trouble for her husband!"
The druggist continued, "Do you know that but for me he would have
committed some fatal attempt upon himself?"
"Such a good woman! To think that I saw her only last Saturday in my
shop."
"I haven't had leisure," said Homais, "to prepare a few words that I
would have cast upon her tomb."
Charles on getting home undressed, and old Rouault put on his blue
blouse. It was a new one, and as he had often during the journey wiped
his eyes on the sleeves, the dye had stained his face, and the traces of
tears made lines in the layer of dust that covered it.
Madame Bovary senior was with them. All three were silent. At last the
old fellow sighed--
"Do you remember, my friend, that I went to Tostes once when you had
just lost your first deceased? I consoled you at that time. I thought of
something to say then, but now--" Then, with a loud groan that shook his
whole chest, "Ah! this is the end for me, do you see! I saw my wife go,
then my son, and now to-day it's my daughter."
He wanted to go back at once to Bertaux, saying that he could not sleep
in this house. He even refused to see his granddaughter.
"No, no! It would grieve me too much. Only you'll kiss her many times
for me. Good-bye! you're a good fellow! And then I shall never forget
that," he said, slapping his thigh. "Never fear, you shall always have
your turkey."
But when he reached the top of the hill he turned back, as he had turned
once before on the road of Saint-Victor when he had parted from her. The
windows of the village were all on fire beneath the slanting rays of the
sun sinking behind the field. He put his hand over his eyes, and saw
in the horizon an enclosure of walls, where trees here and there formed
black clusters between white stones; then he went on his way at a gentle
trot, for his nag had gone lame.
Despite their fatigue, Charles and his mother stayed very long that
evening talking together. They spoke of the days of the past and of the
future. She would come to live at Yonville; she would keep house for
him; they would never part again. She was ingenious and caressing,
rejoicing in her heart at gaining once more an affection that had
wandered from her for so many years. Midnight struck. The village as
usual was silent, and Charles, awake, thought always of her.
Rodolphe, who, to distract himself, had been rambling about the wood all
day, was sleeping quietly in his chateau, and Leon, down yonder, always
slept.
There was another who at that hour was not asleep.
On the grave between the pine-trees a child was on his knees weeping,
and his heart, rent by sobs, was beating in the shadow beneath the load
of an immense regret, sweeter than the moon and fathomless as the night.
The gate suddenly grated. It was Lestiboudois; he came to fetch his
spade, that he had forgotten. He recognised Justin climbing over the
wall, and at last knew who was the culprit who stole his potatoes.
| Charles dissolves into tears. Homais returns to the pharmacy, puts off the blind man and tells the gathered crowd that Madame Bovary died of accidental poisoning. Initially resistant, Charles finally agrees to order the funeral arrangements. Against the advice of Homais and his mother, he insists that Emma be buried expensively in three coffins and with a velvet cover. That night Monsieur Homais and Monsieur Bournisien sit with the corpse and engage in a spirited argument concerning the efficacy of religion. Charles, who cannot stay away from his dead wife, interrupts them. The next night the townfolk call on Monsieur Bovary to offer condolences and Madame Lefranois and the elder Madame Bovary prepare the body for burial. That night Homais and the priest continue their vigil and their argument but eventually both men fall peacefully asleep. Charles comes to look upon his wife and screams when he lifts the veil. The priest and the pharmacist decide to partake of the brandy, cheese and bread left for them by Flicit and soon they are friendly. The coffin makers arrive and once Emma is secure inside the three coffins the doors of the house are opened to the town. Monsieur Rouault arrives and faints at the sight of the black cloth | summary |
The next day Charles had the child brought back. She asked for her
mamma. They told her she was away; that she would bring her back some
playthings. Berthe spoke of her again several times, then at last
thought no more of her. The child's gaiety broke Bovary's heart, and he
had to bear besides the intolerable consolations of the chemist.
Money troubles soon began again, Monsieur Lheureux urging on anew his
friend Vincart, and Charles pledged himself for exorbitant sums; for he
would never consent to let the smallest of the things that had belonged
to HER be sold. His mother was exasperated with him; he grew even more
angry than she did. He had altogether changed. She left the house.
Then everyone began "taking advantage" of him. Mademoiselle Lempereur
presented a bill for six months' teaching, although Emma had never taken
a lesson (despite the receipted bill she had shown Bovary); it was an
arrangement between the two women. The man at the circulating library
demanded three years' subscriptions; Mere Rollet claimed the postage due
for some twenty letters, and when Charles asked for an explanation, she
had the delicacy to reply--
"Oh, I don't know. It was for her business affairs."
With every debt he paid Charles thought he had come to the end of them.
But others followed ceaselessly. He sent in accounts for professional
attendance. He was shown the letters his wife had written. Then he had
to apologise.
Felicite now wore Madame Bovary's gowns; not all, for he had kept some
of them, and he went to look at them in her dressing-room, locking
himself up there; she was about her height, and often Charles, seeing
her from behind, was seized with an illusion, and cried out--
"Oh, stay, stay!"
But at Whitsuntide she ran away from Yonville, carried off by Theodore,
stealing all that was left of the wardrobe.
It was about this time that the widow Dupuis had the honour to inform
him of the "marriage of Monsieur Leon Dupuis her son, notary at Yvetot,
to Mademoiselle Leocadie Leboeuf of Bondeville." Charles, among the
other congratulations he sent him, wrote this sentence--
"How glad my poor wife would have been!"
One day when, wandering aimlessly about the house, he had gone up to the
attic, he felt a pellet of fine paper under his slipper. He opened it
and read: "Courage, Emma, courage. I would not bring misery into your
life." It was Rodolphe's letter, fallen to the ground between the boxes,
where it had remained, and that the wind from the dormer window had just
blown towards the door. And Charles stood, motionless and staring, in
the very same place where, long ago, Emma, in despair, and paler even
than he, had thought of dying. At last he discovered a small R at the
bottom of the second page. What did this mean? He remembered Rodolphe's
attentions, his sudden, disappearance, his constrained air when they
had met two or three times since. But the respectful tone of the letter
deceived him.
"Perhaps they loved one another platonically," he said to himself.
Besides, Charles was not of those who go to the bottom of things; he
shrank from the proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity
of his woe.
Everyone, he thought, must have adored her; all men assuredly must have
coveted her. She seemed but the more beautiful to him for this; he
was seized with a lasting, furious desire for her, that inflamed his
despair, and that was boundless, because it was now unrealisable.
To please her, as if she were still living, he adopted her
predilections, her ideas; he bought patent leather boots and took to
wearing white cravats. He put cosmetics on his moustache, and, like her,
signed notes of hand. She corrupted him from beyond the grave.
He was obliged to sell his silver piece by piece; next he sold the
drawing-room furniture. All the rooms were stripped; but the bedroom,
her own room, remained as before. After his dinner Charles went up
there. He pushed the round table in front of the fire, and drew up her
armchair. He sat down opposite it. A candle burnt in one of the gilt
candlesticks. Berthe by his side was painting prints.
He suffered, poor man, at seeing her so badly dressed, with laceless
boots, and the arm-holes of her pinafore torn down to the hips; for the
charwoman took no care of her. But she was so sweet, so pretty, and her
little head bent forward so gracefully, letting the dear fair hair fall
over her rosy cheeks, that an infinite joy came upon him, a happiness
mingled with bitterness, like those ill-made wines that taste of
resin. He mended her toys, made her puppets from cardboard, or sewed up
half-torn dolls. Then, if his eyes fell upon the workbox, a ribbon lying
about, or even a pin left in a crack of the table, he began to dream,
and looked so sad that she became as sad as he.
No one now came to see them, for Justin had run away to Rouen, where he
was a grocer's assistant, and the druggist's children saw less and less
of the child, Monsieur Homais not caring, seeing the difference of their
social position, to continue the intimacy.
The blind man, whom he had not been able to cure with the pomade, had
gone back to the hill of Bois-Guillaume, where he told the travellers of
the vain attempt of the druggist, to such an extent, that Homais when
he went to town hid himself behind the curtains of the "Hirondelle" to
avoid meeting him. He detested him, and wishing, in the interests of his
own reputation, to get rid of him at all costs, he directed against
him a secret battery, that betrayed the depth of his intellect and the
baseness of his vanity. Thus, for six consecutive months, one could read
in the "Fanal de Rouen" editorials such as these--
"All who bend their steps towards the fertile plains of Picardy have, no
doubt, remarked, by the Bois-Guillaume hill, a wretch suffering from
a horrible facial wound. He importunes, persecutes one, and levies a
regular tax on all travellers. Are we still living in the monstrous
times of the Middle Ages, when vagabonds were permitted to display in
our public places leprosy and scrofulas they had brought back from the
Crusades?"
Or--
"In spite of the laws against vagabondage, the approaches to our great
towns continue to be infected by bands of beggars. Some are seen going
about alone, and these are not, perhaps, the least dangerous. What are
our ediles about?"
Then Homais invented anecdotes--
"Yesterday, by the Bois-Guillaume hill, a skittish horse--" And then
followed the story of an accident caused by the presence of the blind
man.
He managed so well that the fellow was locked up. But he was released.
He began again, and Homais began again. It was a struggle. Homais won
it, for his foe was condemned to life-long confinement in an asylum.
This success emboldened him, and henceforth there was no longer a dog
run over, a barn burnt down, a woman beaten in the parish, of which
he did not immediately inform the public, guided always by the love of
progress and the hate of priests. He instituted comparisons between the
elementary and clerical schools to the detriment of the latter; called
to mind the massacre of St. Bartholomew a propos of a grant of one
hundred francs to the church, and denounced abuses, aired new views.
That was his phrase. Homais was digging and delving; he was becoming
dangerous.
However, he was stifling in the narrow limits of journalism, and soon a
book, a work was necessary to him. Then he composed "General Statistics
of the Canton of Yonville, followed by Climatological Remarks." The
statistics drove him to philosophy. He busied himself with great
questions: the social problem, moralisation of the poorer classes,
pisciculture, caoutchouc, railways, etc. He even began to blush at being
a bourgeois. He affected the artistic style, he smoked. He bought two
chic Pompadour statuettes to adorn his drawing-room.
He by no means gave up his shop. On the contrary, he kept well abreast
of new discoveries. He followed the great movement of chocolates; he
was the first to introduce "cocoa" and "revalenta" into the
Seine-Inferieure. He was enthusiastic about the hydro-electric
Pulvermacher chains; he wore one himself, and when at night he took off
his flannel vest, Madame Homais stood quite dazzled before the golden
spiral beneath which he was hidden, and felt her ardour redouble for
this man more bandaged than a Scythian, and splendid as one of the Magi.
He had fine ideas about Emma's tomb. First he proposed a broken column
with some drapery, next a pyramid, then a Temple of Vesta, a sort of
rotunda, or else a "mass of ruins." And in all his plans Homais always
stuck to the weeping willow, which he looked upon as the indispensable
symbol of sorrow.
Charles and he made a journey to Rouen together to look at some tombs
at a funeral furnisher's, accompanied by an artist, one Vaufrylard, a
friend of Bridoux's, who made puns all the time. At last, after having
examined some hundred designs, having ordered an estimate and made
another journey to Rouen, Charles decided in favour of a mausoleum,
which on the two principal sides was to have a "spirit bearing an
extinguished torch."
As to the inscription, Homais could think of nothing so fine as Sta
viator*, and he got no further; he racked his brain, he constantly
repeated Sta viator. At last he hit upon Amabilen conjugem calcas**,
which was adopted.
* Rest traveler.
** Tread upon a loving wife.
A strange thing was that Bovary, while continually thinking of Emma, was
forgetting her. He grew desperate as he felt this image fading from his
memory in spite of all efforts to retain it. Yet every night he dreamt
of her; it was always the same dream. He drew near her, but when he was
about to clasp her she fell into decay in his arms.
For a week he was seen going to church in the evening. Monsieur
Bournisien even paid him two or three visits, then gave him up.
Moreover, the old fellow was growing intolerant, fanatic, said Homais.
He thundered against the spirit of the age, and never failed, every
other week, in his sermon, to recount the death agony of Voltaire, who
died devouring his excrements, as everyone knows.
In spite of the economy with which Bovary lived, he was far from being
able to pay off his old debts. Lheureux refused to renew any more
bills. A distraint became imminent. Then he appealed to his mother, who
consented to let him take a mortgage on her property, but with a great
many recriminations against Emma; and in return for her sacrifice she
asked for a shawl that had escaped the depredations of Felicite. Charles
refused to give it her; they quarrelled.
She made the first overtures of reconciliation by offering to have the
little girl, who could help her in the house, to live with her. Charles
consented to this, but when the time for parting came, all his courage
failed him. Then there was a final, complete rupture.
As his affections vanished, he clung more closely to the love of his
child. She made him anxious, however, for she coughed sometimes, and had
red spots on her cheeks.
Opposite his house, flourishing and merry, was the family of the
chemist, with whom everything was prospering. Napoleon helped him in the
laboratory, Athalie embroidered him a skullcap, Irma cut out rounds of
paper to cover the preserves, and Franklin recited Pythagoras' table in
a breath. He was the happiest of fathers, the most fortunate of men.
Not so! A secret ambition devoured him. Homais hankered after the cross
of the Legion of Honour. He had plenty of claims to it.
"First, having at the time of the cholera distinguished myself by a
boundless devotion; second, by having published, at my expense,
various works of public utility, such as" (and he recalled his pamphlet
entitled, "Cider, its manufacture and effects," besides observation
on the lanigerous plant-louse, sent to the Academy; his volume of
statistics, and down to his pharmaceutical thesis); "without counting
that I am a member of several learned societies" (he was member of a
single one).
"In short!" he cried, making a pirouette, "if it were only for
distinguishing myself at fires!"
Then Homais inclined towards the Government. He secretly did the
prefect great service during the elections. He sold himself--in a word,
prostituted himself. He even addressed a petition to the sovereign
in which he implored him to "do him justice"; he called him "our good
king," and compared him to Henri IV.
And every morning the druggist rushed for the paper to see if his
nomination were in it. It was never there. At last, unable to bear it
any longer, he had a grass plot in his garden designed to represent the
Star of the Cross of Honour with two little strips of grass running from
the top to imitate the ribband. He walked round it with folded arms,
meditating on the folly of the Government and the ingratitude of men.
From respect, or from a sort of sensuality that made him carry on his
investigations slowly, Charles had not yet opened the secret drawer of
a rosewood desk which Emma had generally used. One day, however, he
sat down before it, turned the key, and pressed the spring. All Leon's
letters were there. There could be no doubt this time. He devoured them
to the very last, ransacked every corner, all the furniture, all the
drawers, behind the walls, sobbing, crying aloud, distraught, mad. He
found a box and broke it open with a kick. Rodolphe's portrait flew full
in his face in the midst of the overturned love-letters.
People wondered at his despondency. He never went out, saw no one,
refused even to visit his patients. Then they said "he shut himself up
to drink."
Sometimes, however, some curious person climbed on to the garden hedge,
and saw with amazement this long-bearded, shabbily clothed, wild man,
who wept aloud as he walked up and down.
In the evening in summer he took his little girl with him and led her to
the cemetery. They came back at nightfall, when the only light left in
the Place was that in Binet's window.
The voluptuousness of his grief was, however, incomplete, for he had no
one near him to share it, and he paid visits to Madame Lefrancois to be
able to speak of her.
But the landlady only listened with half an ear, having troubles
like himself. For Lheureux had at last established the "Favorites du
Commerce," and Hivert, who enjoyed a great reputation for doing errands,
insisted on a rise of wages, and was threatening to go over "to the
opposition shop."
One day when he had gone to the market at Argueil to sell his horse--his
last resource--he met Rodolphe.
They both turned pale when they caught sight of one another. Rodolphe,
who had only sent his card, first stammered some apologies, then grew
bolder, and even pushed his assurance (it was in the month of August and
very hot) to the length of inviting him to have a bottle of beer at the
public-house.
Leaning on the table opposite him, he chewed his cigar as he talked, and
Charles was lost in reverie at this face that she had loved. He seemed
to see again something of her in it. It was a marvel to him. He would
have liked to have been this man.
The other went on talking agriculture, cattle, pasturage, filling out
with banal phrases all the gaps where an allusion might slip in. Charles
was not listening to him; Rodolphe noticed it, and he followed the
succession of memories that crossed his face. This gradually grew
redder; the nostrils throbbed fast, the lips quivered. There was at
last a moment when Charles, full of a sombre fury, fixed his eyes on
Rodolphe, who, in something of fear, stopped talking. But soon the same
look of weary lassitude came back to his face.
"I don't blame you," he said.
Rodolphe was dumb. And Charles, his head in his hands, went on in a
broken voice, and with the resigned accent of infinite sorrow--
"No, I don't blame you now."
He even added a fine phrase, the only one he ever made--
"It is the fault of fatality!"
Rodolphe, who had managed the fatality, thought the remark very offhand
from a man in his position, comic even, and a little mean.
The next day Charles went to sit down on the seat in the arbour. Rays
of light were straying through the trellis, the vine leaves threw their
shadows on the sand, the jasmines perfumed the air, the heavens were
blue, Spanish flies buzzed round the lilies in bloom, and Charles was
suffocating like a youth beneath the vague love influences that filled
his aching heart.
At seven o'clock little Berthe, who had not seen him all the afternoon,
went to fetch him to dinner.
His head was thrown back against the wall, his eyes closed, his mouth
open, and in his hand was a long tress of black hair.
"Come along, papa," she said.
And thinking he wanted to play; she pushed him gently. He fell to the
ground. He was dead.
Thirty-six hours after, at the druggist's request, Monsieur Canivet came
thither. He made a post-mortem and found nothing.
When everything had been sold, twelve francs seventy-five centimes
remained, that served to pay for Mademoiselle Bovary's going to
her grandmother. The good woman died the same year; old Rouault was
paralysed, and it was an aunt who took charge of her. She is poor, and
sends her to a cotton-factory to earn a living.
Since Bovary's death three doctors have followed one another at Yonville
without any success, so severely did Homais attack them. He has an
enormous practice; the authorities treat him with consideration, and
public opinion protects him.
He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.
| Homais' letter to Monsieur Rouault had been too vague and the poor man had made the trip not knowing whether his daughter was alive or dead. When he regains consciousness he and Charles fall weeping into each other's arms and Homais tells them to pull themselves together for the funeral. Hippolyte attends wearing his good leg and Justin stands outside the church visibly pale and trembling. The congregation processes to the cemetery where the coffin is lowered into the ground and Charles must be restrained from pursuing his dead wife into the ground. Lheureux attends the funeral. Everyone seems visibly relieved when it is over. Monsieur Rouault immediately leaves for home. The narrator relates that Charles and his mother stayed awake late that night while the elder Madame Bovary made plans to come live with her son. Rodolphe slept well that night as did Lon but Justin was awake and weeping by Emma's grave | summary |
CHAPTER I
I
ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago,
a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky.
She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of
skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws
and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about
her. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the
reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor
had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.
A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her
taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving
beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened
to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her
arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a
lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking
the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of
expectant youth.
It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College.
The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with
axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious
girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American
Middlewest.
II
Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a bulwark of sound
religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin,
and Robert Ingersoll. Pious families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the
Dakotas send their children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the
wickedness of the universities. But it secretes friendly girls, young
men who sing, and one lady instructress who really likes Milton and
Carlyle. So the four years which Carol spent at Blodgett were not
altogether wasted. The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals,
permitted her to experiment with her perilous versatility. She played
tennis, gave chafing-dish parties, took a graduate seminar in the drama,
went "twosing," and joined half a dozen societies for the practise of
the arts or the tense stalking of a thing called General Culture.
In her class there were two or three prettier girls, but none more
eager. She was noticeable equally in the classroom grind and at dances,
though out of the three hundred students of Blodgett, scores recited
more accurately and dozens Bostoned more smoothly. Every cell of her
body was alive--thin wrists, quince-blossom skin, ingenue eyes, black
hair.
The other girls in her dormitory marveled at the slightness of her
body when they saw her in sheer negligee, or darting out wet from a
shower-bath. She seemed then but half as large as they had supposed;
a fragile child who must be cloaked with understanding kindness.
"Psychic," the girls whispered, and "spiritual." Yet so radioactive
were her nerves, so adventurous her trust in rather vaguely conceived
sweetness and light, that she was more energetic than any of the hulking
young women who, with calves bulging in heavy-ribbed woolen stockings
beneath decorous blue serge bloomers, thuddingly galloped across the
floor of the "gym" in practise for the Blodgett Ladies' Basket-Ball
Team.
Even when she was tired her dark eyes were observant. She did not yet
know the immense ability of the world to be casually cruel and proudly
dull, but if she should ever learn those dismaying powers, her eyes
would never become sullen or heavy or rheumily amorous.
For all her enthusiasms, for all the fondness and the "crushes" which
she inspired, Carol's acquaintances were shy of her. When she was most
ardently singing hymns or planning deviltry she yet seemed gently aloof
and critical. She was credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper; yet
she did question and examine unceasingly. Whatever she might become she
would never be static.
Her versatility ensnared her. By turns she hoped to discover that she
had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the ability to act, to
write, to manage organizations. Always she was disappointed, but always
she effervesced anew--over the Student Volunteers, who intended to
become missionaries, over painting scenery for the dramatic club, over
soliciting advertisements for the college magazine.
She was on the peak that Sunday afternoon when she played in chapel.
Out of the dusk her violin took up the organ theme, and the candle-light
revealed her in a straight golden frock, her arm arched to the bow, her
lips serious. Every man fell in love then with religion and Carol.
Throughout Senior year she anxiously related all her experiments and
partial successes to a career. Daily, on the library steps or in the
hall of the Main Building, the co-eds talked of "What shall we do when
we finish college?" Even the girls who knew that they were going to be
married pretended to be considering important business positions;
even they who knew that they would have to work hinted about fabulous
suitors. As for Carol, she was an orphan; her only near relative was a
vanilla-flavored sister married to an optician in St. Paul. She had used
most of the money from her father's estate. She was not in love--that
is, not often, nor ever long at a time. She would earn her living.
But how she was to earn it, how she was to conquer the world--almost
entirely for the world's own good--she did not see. Most of the girls
who were not betrothed meant to be teachers. Of these there were two
sorts: careless young women who admitted that they intended to leave the
"beastly classroom and grubby children" the minute they had a chance to
marry; and studious, sometimes bulbous-browed and pop-eyed maidens who
at class prayer-meetings requested God to "guide their feet along the
paths of greatest usefulness." Neither sort tempted Carol. The former
seemed insincere (a favorite word of hers at this era). The earnest
virgins were, she fancied, as likely to do harm as to do good by their
faith in the value of parsing Caesar.
At various times during Senior year Carol finally decided upon studying
law, writing motion-picture scenarios, professional nursing, and
marrying an unidentified hero.
Then she found a hobby in sociology.
The sociology instructor was new. He was married, and therefore taboo,
but he had come from Boston, he had lived among poets and socialists and
Jews and millionaire uplifters at the University Settlement in New
York, and he had a beautiful white strong neck. He led a giggling class
through the prisons, the charity bureaus, the employment agencies of
Minneapolis and St. Paul. Trailing at the end of the line Carol was
indignant at the prodding curiosity of the others, their manner of
staring at the poor as at a Zoo. She felt herself a great liberator.
She put her hand to her mouth, her forefinger and thumb quite painfully
pinching her lower lip, and frowned, and enjoyed being aloof.
A classmate named Stewart Snyder, a competent bulky young man in a gray
flannel shirt, a rusty black bow tie, and the green-and-purple class
cap, grumbled to her as they walked behind the others in the muck of the
South St. Paul stockyards, "These college chumps make me tired. They're
so top-lofty. They ought to of worked on the farm, the way I have. These
workmen put it all over them."
"I just love common workmen," glowed Carol.
"Only you don't want to forget that common workmen don't think they're
common!"
"You're right! I apologize!" Carol's brows lifted in the astonishment of
emotion, in a glory of abasement. Her eyes mothered the world. Stewart
Snyder peered at her. He rammed his large red fists into his pockets,
he jerked them out, he resolutely got rid of them by clenching his hands
behind him, and he stammered:
"I know. You _get_ people. Most of these darn co-eds----Say, Carol, you
could do a lot for people."
"Oh--oh well--you know--sympathy and everything--if you were--say you
were a lawyer's wife. You'd understand his clients. I'm going to be a
lawyer. I admit I fall down in sympathy sometimes. I get so dog-gone
impatient with people that can't stand the gaff. You'd be good for
a fellow that was too serious. Make him more--more--YOU
know--sympathetic!"
His slightly pouting lips, his mastiff eyes, were begging her to beg him
to go on. She fled from the steam-roller of his sentiment. She cried,
"Oh, see those poor sheep--millions and millions of them." She darted
on.
Stewart was not interesting. He hadn't a shapely white neck, and he had
never lived among celebrated reformers. She wanted, just now, to have
a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black
robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde
of grateful poor.
The supplementary reading in sociology led her to a book on
village-improvement--tree-planting, town pageants, girls' clubs. It
had pictures of greens and garden-walls in France, New England,
Pennsylvania. She had picked it up carelessly, with a slight yawn which
she patted down with her finger-tips as delicately as a cat.
She dipped into the book, lounging on her window-seat, with her slim,
lisle-stockinged legs crossed, and her knees up under her chin.
She stroked a satin pillow while she read. About her was the clothy
exuberance of a Blodgett College room: cretonne-covered window-seat,
photographs of girls, a carbon print of the Coliseum, a chafing-dish,
and a dozen pillows embroidered or beaded or pyrographed. Shockingly out
of place was a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante. It was the only trace
of Carol in the room. She had inherited the rest from generations of
girl students.
It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she regarded the
treatise on village-improvement. But she suddenly stopped fidgeting. She
strode into the book. She had fled half-way through it before the three
o'clock bell called her to the class in English history.
She sighed, "That's what I'll do after college! I'll get my hands on
one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I
suppose I'd better become a teacher then, but--I won't be that kind of
a teacher. I won't drone. Why should they have all the garden suburbs
on Long Island? Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in the
Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries to contain the Elsie
books. I'll make 'em put in a village green, and darling cottages, and a
quaint Main Street!"
Thus she triumphed through the class, which was a typical Blodgett
contest between a dreary teacher and unwilling children of twenty, won
by the teacher because his opponents had to answer his questions, while
their treacherous queries he could counter by demanding, "Have you
looked that up in the library? Well then, suppose you do!"
The history instructor was a retired minister. He was sarcastic today.
He begged of sporting young Mr. Charley Holmberg, "Now Charles, would it
interrupt your undoubtedly fascinating pursuit of that malevolent fly
if I were to ask you to tell us that you do not know anything about King
John?" He spent three delightful minutes in assuring himself of the fact
that no one exactly remembered the date of Magna Charta.
Carol did not hear him. She was completing the roof of a half-timbered
town hall. She had found one man in the prairie village who did not
appreciate her picture of winding streets and arcades, but she had
assembled the town council and dramatically defeated him.
III
Though she was Minnesota-born Carol was not an intimate of the prairie
villages. Her father, the smiling and shabby, the learned and teasingly
kind, had come from Massachusetts, and through all her childhood he
had been a judge in Mankato, which is not a prairie town, but in its
garden-sheltered streets and aisles of elms is white and green New
England reborn. Mankato lies between cliffs and the Minnesota River,
hard by Traverse des Sioux, where the first settlers made treaties
with the Indians, and the cattle-rustlers once came galloping before
hell-for-leather posses.
As she climbed along the banks of the dark river Carol listened to its
fables about the wide land of yellow waters and bleached buffalo bones
to the West; the Southern levees and singing darkies and palm trees
toward which it was forever mysteriously gliding; and she heard again
the startled bells and thick puffing of high-stacked river steamers
wrecked on sand-reefs sixty years ago. Along the decks she saw
missionaries, gamblers in tall pot hats, and Dakota chiefs with scarlet
blankets. . . . Far off whistles at night, round the river bend,
plunking paddles reechoed by the pines, and a glow on black sliding
waters.
Carol's family were self-sufficient in their inventive life, with
Christmas a rite full of surprises and tenderness, and "dressing-up
parties" spontaneous and joyously absurd. The beasts in the Milford
hearth-mythology were not the obscene Night Animals who jump out
of closets and eat little girls, but beneficent and bright-eyed
creatures--the tam htab, who is woolly and blue and lives in the
bathroom, and runs rapidly to warm small feet; the ferruginous oil
stove, who purrs and knows stories; and the skitamarigg, who will play
with children before breakfast if they spring out of bed and close the
window at the very first line of the song about puellas which father
sings while shaving.
Judge Milford's pedagogical scheme was to let the children read whatever
they pleased, and in his brown library Carol absorbed Balzac and
Rabelais and Thoreau and Max Muller. He gravely taught them the letters
on the backs of the encyclopedias, and when polite visitors asked about
the mental progress of the "little ones," they were horrified to hear
the children earnestly repeating A-And, And-Aus, Aus-Bis, Bis-Cal,
Cal-Cha.
Carol's mother died when she was nine. Her father retired from the
judiciary when she was eleven, and took the family to Minneapolis. There
he died, two years after. Her sister, a busy proper advisory soul, older
than herself, had become a stranger to her even when they lived in the
same house.
From those early brown and silver days and from her independence of
relatives Carol retained a willingness to be different from brisk
efficient book-ignoring people; an instinct to observe and wonder
at their bustle even when she was taking part in it. But, she felt
approvingly, as she discovered her career of town-planning, she was now
roused to being brisk and efficient herself.
IV
In a month Carol's ambition had clouded. Her hesitancy about becoming a
teacher had returned. She was not, she worried, strong enough to endure
the routine, and she could not picture herself standing before grinning
children and pretending to be wise and decisive. But the desire for
the creation of a beautiful town remained. When she encountered an item
about small-town women's clubs or a photograph of a straggling Main
Street, she was homesick for it, she felt robbed of her work.
It was the advice of the professor of English which led her to study
professional library-work in a Chicago school. Her imagination carved
and colored the new plan. She saw herself persuading children to read
charming fairy tales, helping young men to find books on mechanics,
being ever so courteous to old men who were hunting for newspapers--the
light of the library, an authority on books, invited to dinners with
poets and explorers, reading a paper to an association of distinguished
scholars.
V
The last faculty reception before commencement. In five days they would
be in the cyclone of final examinations.
The house of the president had been massed with palms suggestive of
polite undertaking parlors, and in the library, a ten-foot room with a
globe and the portraits of Whittier and Martha Washington, the student
orchestra was playing "Carmen" and "Madame Butterfly." Carol was dizzy
with music and the emotions of parting. She saw the palms as a jungle,
the pink-shaded electric globes as an opaline haze, and the eye-glassed
faculty as Olympians. She was melancholy at sight of the mousey girls
with whom she had "always intended to get acquainted," and the half
dozen young men who were ready to fall in love with her.
But it was Stewart Snyder whom she encouraged. He was so much manlier
than the others; he was an even warm brown, like his new ready-made suit
with its padded shoulders. She sat with him, and with two cups of
coffee and a chicken patty, upon a pile of presidential overshoes in the
coat-closet under the stairs, and as the thin music seeped in, Stewart
whispered:
"I can't stand it, this breaking up after four years! The happiest years
of life."
She believed it. "Oh, I know! To think that in just a few days we'll be
parting, and we'll never see some of the bunch again!"
"Carol, you got to listen to me! You always duck when I try to talk
seriously to you, but you got to listen to me. I'm going to be a big
lawyer, maybe a judge, and I need you, and I'd protect you----"
His arm slid behind her shoulders. The insinuating music drained her
independence. She said mournfully, "Would you take care of me?" She
touched his hand. It was warm, solid.
"You bet I would! We'd have, Lord, we'd have bully times in Yankton,
where I'm going to settle----"
"But I want to do something with life."
"What's better than making a comfy home and bringing up some cute kids
and knowing nice homey people?"
It was the immemorial male reply to the restless woman. Thus to the
young Sappho spake the melon-venders; thus the captains to Zenobia; and
in the damp cave over gnawed bones the hairy suitor thus protested to
the woman advocate of matriarchy. In the dialect of Blodgett College but
with the voice of Sappho was Carol's answer:
"Of course. I know. I suppose that's so. Honestly, I do love children.
But there's lots of women that can do housework, but I--well, if you
HAVE got a college education, you ought to use it for the world."
"I know, but you can use it just as well in the home. And gee, Carol,
just think of a bunch of us going out on an auto picnic, some nice
spring evening."
"Yes."
"And sleigh-riding in winter, and going fishing----"
Blarrrrrrr! The orchestra had crashed into the "Soldiers' Chorus"; and
she was protesting, "No! No! You're a dear, but I want to do things.
I don't understand myself but I want--everything in the world! Maybe I
can't sing or write, but I know I can be an influence in library work.
Just suppose I encouraged some boy and he became a great artist! I
will! I will do it! Stewart dear, I can't settle down to nothing but
dish-washing!"
Two minutes later--two hectic minutes--they were disturbed by
an embarrassed couple also seeking the idyllic seclusion of the
overshoe-closet.
After graduation she never saw Stewart Snyder again. She wrote to him
once a week--for one month.
VI
A year Carol spent in Chicago. Her study of library-cataloguing,
recording, books of reference, was easy and not too somniferous. She
reveled in the Art Institute, in symphonies and violin recitals and
chamber music, in the theater and classic dancing. She almost gave up
library work to become one of the young women who dance in cheese-cloth
in the moonlight. She was taken to a certified Studio Party, with
beer, cigarettes, bobbed hair, and a Russian Jewess who sang the
Internationale. It cannot be reported that Carol had anything
significant to say to the Bohemians. She was awkward with them, and
felt ignorant, and she was shocked by the free manners which she had for
years desired. But she heard and remembered discussions of Freud, Romain
Rolland, syndicalism, the Confederation Generale du Travail, feminism
vs. haremism, Chinese lyrics, nationalization of mines, Christian
Science, and fishing in Ontario.
She went home, and that was the beginning and end of her Bohemian life.
The second cousin of Carol's sister's husband lived in Winnetka, and
once invited her out to Sunday dinner. She walked back through Wilmette
and Evanston, discovered new forms of suburban architecture, and
remembered her desire to recreate villages. She decided that she would
give up library work and, by a miracle whose nature was not very clearly
revealed to her, turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and Japanese
bungalows.
The next day in library class she had to read a theme on the use of the
Cumulative Index, and she was taken so seriously in the discussion that
she put off her career of town-planning--and in the autumn she was in
the public library of St. Paul.
VII
Carol was not unhappy and she was not exhilarated, in the St. Paul
Library. She slowly confessed that she was not visibly affecting lives.
She did, at first, put into her contact with the patrons a willingness
which should have moved worlds. But so few of these stolid worlds wanted
to be moved. When she was in charge of the magazine room the readers did
not ask for suggestions about elevated essays. They grunted, "Wanta find
the Leather Goods Gazette for last February." When she was giving
out books the principal query was, "Can you tell me of a good, light,
exciting love story to read? My husband's going away for a week."
She was fond of the other librarians; proud of their aspirations. And by
the chance of propinquity she read scores of books unnatural to her gay
white littleness: volumes of anthropology with ditches of foot-notes
filled with heaps of small dusty type, Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes
for curry, voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American
improvements, treatises upon success in the real-estate business. She
took walks, and was sensible about shoes and diet. And never did she
feel that she was living.
She went to dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances.
Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's
slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her
throat tense, as she slid down the room.
During her three years of library work several men showed diligent
interest in her--the treasurer of a fur-manufacturing firm, a teacher, a
newspaper reporter, and a petty railroad official. None of them made her
more than pause in thought. For months no male emerged from the mass.
Then, at the Marburys', she met Dr. Will Kennicott.
| We look in on a hill where the Chippewa people used to live. The Chippewa aren't there anymore, but instead we see a girl staring out at a bunch of flourmills. We quickly learn that this girl is Carol Milford, and she is taking a little break from life at a place called Blodgett College. We're totally reminded that the days of bear-killing pioneer men are over, and now the spirit of rebellion in the American Midwest exists in the figure of the rebellious girl. The narrator tells us a bit about Blodgett College, which is located on the edge of Minneapolis and is a "bulwark of sound religion." In other words, you send your daughters to Blodgett to teach them good morals and to reject the theory of evolution. Carol likes to dream about doing something great with her life. She's always trying to figure out if she has any special hidden talents. As graduation approaches, Carol's friends talk about getting married and settling down. Carol isn't in love with anyone, so she decides that she'll work to make her own living. Now, it's sometime around 1910 here, so it would be expected that any woman who got married would give up her job. Meanwhile, Carol dreams about becoming someone super important in the professional world. Carol starts hanging out with a young law student named Stewart Snyder. Stewart likes Carol, but Carol finds him really boring. He tries to convince her to marry him but fails. As Carol studies for a sociology class, she reads about village improvement and neighborhood renewal. She instantly decides that she wants to dedicate her life to fixing up a town. We get a little insight into Carol's childhood, when she admired her father more than anyone in the world. Her mother died when Carol was nine years old, and her father died when she was eleven, which helps explain why she's much more independent than many other young women her age. As she gets closer to graduation, Carol loses interest in becoming a teacher. She knows that the routine of it all would bore her after a while. She eventually decides to study library work in a Chicago school. Before she graduates from college, Stewart Snyder makes one last effort and proposes to Carol. He nearly convinces her, but Carol rejects him in the end. After graduation, she never sees him again. Carol ends up spending a year in Chicago working as a librarian. For a short while, she falls in with some hipster-intellectual types, but it doesn't last long. One day, Carol is reminded of her desire to improve an American prairie town. It doesn't really matter which one, so she starts dreaming about it again. She moves back to Minnesota to work as a librarian there. Over time, Carol realizes that she isn't making a difference in the world by working in the St. Paul library. She works in this library for three years, during which time several men try to woo her, but she doesn't accept any of them. Then, one day, she meets Dr. Will Kennicott. | summary |
CHAPTER II
IT was a frail and blue and lonely Carol who trotted to the flat of the
Johnson Marburys for Sunday evening supper. Mrs. Marbury was a neighbor
and friend of Carol's sister; Mr. Marbury a traveling representative of
an insurance company. They made a specialty of sandwich-salad-coffee
lap suppers, and they regarded Carol as their literary and artistic
representative. She was the one who could be depended upon to appreciate
the Caruso phonograph record, and the Chinese lantern which Mr. Marbury
had brought back as his present from San Francisco. Carol found the
Marburys admiring and therefore admirable.
This September Sunday evening she wore a net frock with a pale pink
lining. A nap had soothed away the faint lines of tiredness beside her
eyes. She was young, naive, stimulated by the coolness. She flung
her coat at the chair in the hall of the flat, and exploded into
the green-plush living-room. The familiar group were trying to be
conversational. She saw Mr. Marbury, a woman teacher of gymnastics in
a high school, a chief clerk from the Great Northern Railway offices,
a young lawyer. But there was also a stranger, a thick tall man of
thirty-six or -seven, with stolid brown hair, lips used to giving
orders, eyes which followed everything good-naturedly, and clothes which
you could never quite remember.
Mr. Marbury boomed, "Carol, come over here and meet Doc Kennicott--Dr.
Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie. He does all our insurance-examining up
in that neck of the woods, and they do say he's some doctor!"
As she edged toward the stranger and murmured nothing in particular,
Carol remembered that Gopher Prairie was a Minnesota wheat-prairie town
of something over three thousand people.
"Pleased to meet you," stated Dr. Kennicott. His hand was strong; the
palm soft, but the back weathered, showing golden hairs against firm red
skin.
He looked at her as though she was an agreeable discovery. She tugged
her hand free and fluttered, "I must go out to the kitchen and help Mrs.
Marbury." She did not speak to him again till, after she had heated
the rolls and passed the paper napkins, Mr. Marbury captured her with
a loud, "Oh, quit fussing now. Come over here and sit down and tell
us how's tricks." He herded her to a sofa with Dr. Kennicott, who was
rather vague about the eyes, rather drooping of bulky shoulder, as
though he was wondering what he was expected to do next. As their host
left them, Kennicott awoke:
"Marbury tells me you're a high mogul in the public library. I was
surprised. Didn't hardly think you were old enough. I thought you were a
girl, still in college maybe."
"Oh, I'm dreadfully old. I expect to take to a lip-stick, and to find a
gray hair any morning now."
"Huh! You must be frightfully old--prob'ly too old to be my
granddaughter, I guess!"
Thus in the Vale of Arcady nymph and satyr beguiled the hours; precisely
thus, and not in honeyed pentameters, discoursed Elaine and the worn Sir
Launcelot in the pleached alley.
"How do you like your work?" asked the doctor.
"It's pleasant, but sometimes I feel shut off from things--the steel
stacks, and the everlasting cards smeared all over with red rubber
stamps."
"Don't you get sick of the city?"
"St. Paul? Why, don't you like it? I don't know of any lovelier view
than when you stand on Summit Avenue and look across Lower Town to the
Mississippi cliffs and the upland farms beyond."
"I know but----Of course I've spent nine years around the Twin
Cities--took my B.A. and M.D. over at the U., and had my internship in a
hospital in Minneapolis, but still, oh well, you don't get to know folks
here, way you do up home. I feel I've got something to say about running
Gopher Prairie, but you take it in a big city of two-three hundred
thousand, and I'm just one flea on the dog's back. And then I like
country driving, and the hunting in the fall. Do you know Gopher Prairie
at all?"
"No, but I hear it's a very nice town."
"Nice? Say honestly----Of course I may be prejudiced, but I've seen an
awful lot of towns--one time I went to Atlantic City for the American
Medical Association meeting, and I spent practically a week in New York!
But I never saw a town that had such up-and-coming people as Gopher
Prairie. Bresnahan--you know--the famous auto manufacturer--he comes
from Gopher Prairie. Born and brought up there! And it's a darn pretty
town. Lots of fine maples and box-elders, and there's two of the
dandiest lakes you ever saw, right near town! And we've got seven miles
of cement walks already, and building more every day! Course a lot of
these towns still put up with plank walks, but not for us, you bet!"
"Really?"
(Why was she thinking of Stewart Snyder?)
"Gopher Prairie is going to have a great future. Some of the best dairy
and wheat land in the state right near there--some of it selling right
now at one-fifty an acre, and I bet it will go up to two and a quarter
in ten years!"
"Is----Do you like your profession?"
"Nothing like it. Keeps you out, and yet you have a chance to loaf in
the office for a change."
"I don't mean that way. I mean--it's such an opportunity for sympathy."
Dr. Kennicott launched into a heavy, "Oh, these Dutch farmers don't want
sympathy. All they need is a bath and a good dose of salts."
Carol must have flinched, for instantly he was urging, "What I mean
is--I don't want you to think I'm one of these old salts-and-quinine
peddlers, but I mean: so many of my patients are husky farmers that I
suppose I get kind of case-hardened."
"It seems to me that a doctor could transform a whole community, if he
wanted to--if he saw it. He's usually the only man in the neighborhood
who has any scientific training, isn't he?"
"Yes, that's so, but I guess most of us get rusty. We land in a rut of
obstetrics and typhoid and busted legs. What we need is women like you
to jump on us. It'd be you that would transform the town."
"No, I couldn't. Too flighty. I did used to think about doing just that,
curiously enough, but I seem to have drifted away from the idea. Oh, I'm
a fine one to be lecturing you!"
"No! You're just the one. You have ideas without having lost feminine
charm. Say! Don't you think there's a lot of these women that go out for
all these movements and so on that sacrifice----"
After his remarks upon suffrage he abruptly questioned her about
herself. His kindliness and the firmness of his personality enveloped
her and she accepted him as one who had a right to know what she
thought and wore and ate and read. He was positive. He had grown from a
sketched-in stranger to a friend, whose gossip was important news. She
noticed the healthy solidity of his chest. His nose, which had seemed
irregular and large, was suddenly virile.
She was jarred out of this serious sweetness when Marbury bounced over
to them and with horrible publicity yammered, "Say, what do you two
think you're doing? Telling fortunes or making love? Let me warn you
that the doc is a frisky bacheldore, Carol. Come on now, folks, shake a
leg. Let's have some stunts or a dance or something."
She did not have another word with Dr. Kennicott until their parting:
"Been a great pleasure to meet you, Miss Milford. May I see you some
time when I come down again? I'm here quite often--taking patients to
hospitals for majors, and so on."
"Why----"
"What's your address?"
"You can ask Mr. Marbury next time you come down--if you really want to
know!"
"Want to know? Say, you wait!"
II
Of the love-making of Carol and Will Kennicott there is nothing to be
told which may not be heard on every summer evening, on every shadowy
block.
They were biology and mystery; their speech was slang phrases and flares
of poetry; their silences were contentment, or shaky crises when his arm
took her shoulder. All the beauty of youth, first discovered when it
is passing--and all the commonplaceness of a well-to-do unmarried man
encountering a pretty girl at the time when she is slightly weary of her
employment and sees no glory ahead nor any man she is glad to serve.
They liked each other honestly--they were both honest. She was
disappointed by his devotion to making money, but she was sure that
he did not lie to patients, and that he did keep up with the medical
magazines. What aroused her to something more than liking was his
boyishness when they went tramping.
They walked from St. Paul down the river to Mendota, Kennicott more
elastic-seeming in a cap and a soft crepe shirt, Carol youthful in a
tam-o'-shanter of mole velvet, a blue serge suit with an absurdly and
agreeably broad turn-down linen collar, and frivolous ankles above
athletic shoes. The High Bridge crosses the Mississippi, mounting from
low banks to a palisade of cliffs. Far down beneath it on the St. Paul
side, upon mud flats, is a wild settlement of chicken-infested gardens
and shanties patched together from discarded sign-boards, sheets of
corrugated iron, and planks fished out of the river. Carol leaned
over the rail of the bridge to look down at this Yang-tse village;
in delicious imaginary fear she shrieked that she was dizzy with the
height; and it was an extremely human satisfaction to have a strong male
snatch her back to safety, instead of having a logical woman teacher or
librarian sniff, "Well, if you're scared, why don't you get away from
the rail, then?"
From the cliffs across the river Carol and Kennicott looked back at St.
Paul on its hills; an imperial sweep from the dome of the cathedral to
the dome of the state capitol.
The river road led past rocky field slopes, deep glens, woods flamboyant
now with September, to Mendota, white walls and a spire among trees
beneath a hill, old-world in its placid ease. And for this fresh land,
the place is ancient. Here is the bold stone house which General Sibley,
the king of fur-traders, built in 1835, with plaster of river mud, and
ropes of twisted grass for laths. It has an air of centuries. In its
solid rooms Carol and Kennicott found prints from other days which the
house had seen--tail-coats of robin's-egg blue, clumsy Red River carts
laden with luxurious furs, whiskered Union soldiers in slant forage caps
and rattling sabers.
It suggested to them a common American past, and it was memorable
because they had discovered it together. They talked more trustingly,
more personally, as they trudged on. They crossed the Minnesota River in
a rowboat ferry. They climbed the hill to the round stone tower of Fort
Snelling. They saw the junction of the Mississippi and the Minnesota,
and recalled the men who had come here eighty years ago--Maine
lumbermen, York traders, soldiers from the Maryland hills.
"It's a good country, and I'm proud of it. Let's make it all that those
old boys dreamed about," the unsentimental Kennicott was moved to vow.
"Let's!"
"Come on. Come to Gopher Prairie. Show us. Make the town--well--make
it artistic. It's mighty pretty, but I'll admit we aren't any too darn
artistic. Probably the lumber-yard isn't as scrumptious as all these
Greek temples. But go to it! Make us change!"
"I would like to. Some day!"
"Now! You'd love Gopher Prairie. We've been doing a lot with lawns
and gardening the past few years, and it's so homey--the big trees
and----And the best people on earth. And keen. I bet Luke Dawson----"
Carol but half listened to the names. She could not fancy their ever
becoming important to her.
"I bet Luke Dawson has got more money than most of the swells on Summit
Avenue; and Miss Sherwin in the high school is a regular wonder--reads
Latin like I do English; and Sam Clark, the hardware man, he's a
corker--not a better man in the state to go hunting with; and if
you want culture, besides Vida Sherwin there's Reverend Warren, the
Congregational preacher, and Professor Mott, the superintendent of
schools, and Guy Pollock, the lawyer--they say he writes regular poetry
and--and Raymie Wutherspoon, he's not such an awful boob when you get to
KNOW him, and he sings swell. And----And there's plenty of others. Lym
Cass. Only of course none of them have your finesse, you might call it.
But they don't make 'em any more appreciative and so on. Come on! We're
ready for you to boss us!"
They sat on the bank below the parapet of the old fort, hidden from
observation. He circled her shoulder with his arm. Relaxed after the
walk, a chill nipping her throat, conscious of his warmth and power, she
leaned gratefully against him.
"You know I'm in love with you, Carol!"
She did not answer, but she touched the back of his hand with an
exploring finger.
"You say I'm so darn materialistic. How can I help it, unless I have you
to stir me up?"
She did not answer. She could not think.
"You say a doctor could cure a town the way he does a person. Well, you
cure the town of whatever ails it, if anything does, and I'll be your
surgical kit."
She did not follow his words, only the burring resoluteness of them.
She was shocked, thrilled, as he kissed her cheek and cried, "There's
no use saying things and saying things and saying things. Don't my arms
talk to you--now?"
"Oh, please, please!" She wondered if she ought to be angry, but it was
a drifting thought, and she discovered that she was crying.
Then they were sitting six inches apart, pretending that they had never
been nearer, while she tried to be impersonal:
"I would like to--would like to see Gopher Prairie."
"Trust me! Here she is! Brought some snapshots down to show you."
Her cheek near his sleeve, she studied a dozen village pictures. They
were streaky; she saw only trees, shrubbery, a porch indistinct in leafy
shadows. But she exclaimed over the lakes: dark water reflecting wooded
bluffs, a flight of ducks, a fisherman in shirt sleeves and a wide straw
hat, holding up a string of croppies. One winter picture of the edge of
Plover Lake had the air of an etching: lustrous slide of ice, snow in
the crevices of a boggy bank, the mound of a muskrat house, reeds in
thin black lines, arches of frosty grasses. It was an impression of cool
clear vigor.
"How'd it be to skate there for a couple of hours, or go zinging along
on a fast ice-boat, and skip back home for coffee and some hot wienies?"
he demanded.
"It might be--fun."
"But here's the picture. Here's where you come in."
A photograph of a forest clearing: pathetic new furrows straggling among
stumps, a clumsy log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with hay.
In front of it a sagging woman with tight-drawn hair, and a baby
bedraggled, smeary, glorious-eyed.
"Those are the kind of folks I practise among, good share of the time.
Nels Erdstrom, fine clean young Svenska. He'll have a corking farm in
ten years, but now----I operated his wife on a kitchen table, with my
driver giving the anesthetic. Look at that scared baby! Needs some woman
with hands like yours. Waiting for you! Just look at that baby's eyes,
look how he's begging----"
"Don't! They hurt me. Oh, it would be sweet to help him--so sweet."
As his arms moved toward her she answered all her doubts with "Sweet, so
sweet."
| Carol walks to a friend's home for dinner. When she gets there, she meets a doctor in his mid-thirties named Will Kennicott. The host introduces Carol to Will, and they get to talking. Later that evening, Will and Carol talk on the sofa. Will asks Carol about her life and says he's not a fan of big cities like she is. He likes living in his small town of Gopher Prairie. Will talks about how Gopher Prairie is a growing town with a great future ahead of it. This gets Carol's attention, since it's her dream to help build a great American town. Will says that Gopher Prairie needs a woman like Carol in it to keep people on their toes and to make sure they don't settle for less than what's good. Before they part that evening, Will asks Carol if he can see her again next time he's in town. She tells him to ask the host of the party for her address, since she won't give it to him herself. Carol and Will start hanging out a lot and going for walks around St. Paul. Carol realizes quickly that they're fond of each other. One day, Will tells Carol he loves her. Then he says that she could fulfill all her dreams of improving an American town if she moved with him to Gopher Prairie. The chapter ends with Will hugging Carol close to him while she says, "Sweet, so sweet" . | summary |
CHAPTER III
UNDER the rolling clouds of the prairie a moving mass of steel. An
irritable clank and rattle beneath a prolonged roar. The sharp scent of
oranges cutting the soggy smell of unbathed people and ancient baggage.
Towns as planless as a scattering of pasteboard boxes on an attic floor.
The stretch of faded gold stubble broken only by clumps of willows
encircling white houses and red barns.
No. 7, the way train, grumbling through Minnesota, imperceptibly
climbing the giant tableland that slopes in a thousand-mile rise from
hot Mississippi bottoms to the Rockies.
It is September, hot, very dusty.
There is no smug Pullman attached to the train, and the day coaches of
the East are replaced by free chair cars, with each seat cut into two
adjustable plush chairs, the head-rests covered with doubtful linen
towels. Halfway down the car is a semi-partition of carved oak columns,
but the aisle is of bare, splintery, grease-blackened wood. There is no
porter, no pillows, no provision for beds, but all today and all tonight
they will ride in this long steel box-farmers with perpetually tired
wives and children who seem all to be of the same age; workmen going to
new jobs; traveling salesmen with derbies and freshly shined shoes.
They are parched and cramped, the lines of their hands filled with
grime; they go to sleep curled in distorted attitudes, heads against the
window-panes or propped on rolled coats on seat-arms, and legs thrust
into the aisle. They do not read; apparently they do not think. They
wait. An early-wrinkled, young-old mother, moving as though her joints
were dry, opens a suit-case in which are seen creased blouses, a pair
of slippers worn through at the toes, a bottle of patent medicine, a tin
cup, a paper-covered book about dreams which the news-butcher has coaxed
her into buying. She brings out a graham cracker which she feeds to a
baby lying flat on a seat and wailing hopelessly. Most of the crumbs
drop on the red plush of the seat, and the woman sighs and tries to
brush them away, but they leap up impishly and fall back on the plush.
A soiled man and woman munch sandwiches and throw the crusts on the
floor. A large brick-colored Norwegian takes off his shoes, grunts in
relief, and props his feet in their thick gray socks against the seat in
front of him.
An old woman whose toothless mouth shuts like a mud-turtle's, and whose
hair is not so much white as yellow like moldy linen, with bands of pink
skull apparent between the tresses, anxiously lifts her bag, opens it,
peers in, closes it, puts it under the seat, and hastily picks it up and
opens it and hides it all over again. The bag is full of treasures and
of memories: a leather buckle, an ancient band-concert program,
scraps of ribbon, lace, satin. In the aisle beside her is an extremely
indignant parrakeet in a cage.
Two facing seats, overflowing with a Slovene iron-miner's family,
are littered with shoes, dolls, whisky bottles, bundles wrapped in
newspapers, a sewing bag. The oldest boy takes a mouth-organ out of his
coat pocket, wipes the tobacco crumbs off, and plays "Marching through
Georgia" till every head in the car begins to ache.
The news-butcher comes through selling chocolate bars and lemon drops.
A girl-child ceaselessly trots down to the water-cooler and back to her
seat. The stiff paper envelope which she uses for cup drips in the aisle
as she goes, and on each trip she stumbles over the feet of a carpenter,
who grunts, "Ouch! Look out!"
The dust-caked doors are open, and from the smoking-car drifts back a
visible blue line of stinging tobacco smoke, and with it a crackle of
laughter over the story which the young man in the bright blue suit and
lavender tie and light yellow shoes has just told to the squat man in
garage overalls.
The smell grows constantly thicker, more stale.
II
To each of the passengers his seat was his temporary home, and most of
the passengers were slatternly housekeepers. But one seat looked clean
and deceptively cool. In it were an obviously prosperous man and a
black-haired, fine-skinned girl whose pumps rested on an immaculate
horsehide bag.
They were Dr. Will Kennicott and his bride, Carol.
They had been married at the end of a year of conversational courtship,
and they were on their way to Gopher Prairie after a wedding journey in
the Colorado mountains.
The hordes of the way-train were not altogether new to Carol. She had
seen them on trips from St. Paul to Chicago. But now that they had
become her own people, to bathe and encourage and adorn, she had an
acute and uncomfortable interest in them. They distressed her. They
were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American
peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination
and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man
working over his order-blanks. But the older people, Yankees as well
as Norwegians, Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission to
poverty. They were peasants, she groaned.
"Isn't there any way of waking them up? What would happen if they
understood scientific agriculture?" she begged of Kennicott, her hand
groping for his.
It had been a transforming honeymoon. She had been frightened to
discover how tumultuous a feeling could be roused in her. Will had been
lordly--stalwart, jolly, impressively competent in making camp, tender
and understanding through the hours when they had lain side by side in a
tent pitched among pines high up on a lonely mountain spur.
His hand swallowed hers as he started from thoughts of the practise to
which he was returning. "These people? Wake 'em up? What for? They're
happy."
"But they're so provincial. No, that isn't what I mean. They're--oh, so
sunk in the mud."
"Look here, Carrie. You want to get over your city idea that because a
man's pants aren't pressed, he's a fool. These farmers are mighty keen
and up-and-coming."
"I know! That's what hurts. Life seems so hard for them--these lonely
farms and this gritty train."
"Oh, they don't mind it. Besides, things are changing. The auto, the
telephone, rural free delivery; they're bringing the farmers in closer
touch with the town. Takes time, you know, to change a wilderness like
this was fifty years ago. But already, why, they can hop into the Ford
or the Overland and get in to the movies on Saturday evening quicker
than you could get down to 'em by trolley in St. Paul."
"But if it's these towns we've been passing that the farmers run to for
relief from their bleakness----Can't you understand? Just LOOK at them!"
Kennicott was amazed. Ever since childhood he had seen these towns from
trains on this same line. He grumbled, "Why, what's the matter with 'em?
Good hustling burgs. It would astonish you to know how much wheat and
rye and corn and potatoes they ship in a year."
"But they're so ugly."
"I'll admit they aren't comfy like Gopher Prairie. But give 'em time."
"What's the use of giving them time unless some one has desire and
training enough to plan them? Hundreds of factories trying to make
attractive motor cars, but these towns--left to chance. No! That can't
be true. It must have taken genius to make them so scrawny!"
"Oh, they're not so bad," was all he answered. He pretended that his
hand was the cat and hers the mouse. For the first time she tolerated
him rather than encouraged him. She was staring out at Schoenstrom, a
hamlet of perhaps a hundred and fifty inhabitants, at which the train
was stopping.
A bearded German and his pucker-mouthed wife tugged their enormous
imitation-leather satchel from under a seat and waddled out. The station
agent hoisted a dead calf aboard the baggage-car. There were no other
visible activities in Schoenstrom. In the quiet of the halt, Carol could
hear a horse kicking his stall, a carpenter shingling a roof.
The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block, facing
the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops covered with galvanized
iron, or with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow. The buildings
were as ill-assorted, as temporary-looking, as a mining-camp street in
the motion-pictures. The railroad station was a one-room frame box, a
mirey cattle-pen on one side and a crimson wheat-elevator on the other.
The elevator, with its cupola on the ridge of a shingled roof, resembled
a broad-shouldered man with a small, vicious, pointed head. The only
habitable structures to be seen were the florid red-brick Catholic
church and rectory at the end of Main Street.
Carol picked at Kennicott's sleeve. "You wouldn't call this a not-so-bad
town, would you?"
"These Dutch burgs ARE kind of slow. Still, at that----See that fellow
coming out of the general store there, getting into the big car? I met
him once. He owns about half the town, besides the store. Rauskukle, his
name is. He owns a lot of mortgages, and he gambles in farm-lands. Good
nut on him, that fellow. Why, they say he's worth three or four hundred
thousand dollars! Got a dandy great big yellow brick house with tiled
walks and a garden and everything, other end of town--can't see it from
here--I've gone past it when I've driven through here. Yes sir!"
"Then, if he has all that, there's no excuse whatever for this place!
If his three hundred thousand went back into the town, where it belongs,
they could burn up these shacks, and build a dream-village, a jewel! Why
do the farmers and the town-people let the Baron keep it?"
"I must say I don't quite get you sometimes, Carrie. Let him? They can't
help themselves! He's a dumm old Dutchman, and probably the priest can
twist him around his finger, but when it comes to picking good farming
land, he's a regular wiz!"
"I see. He's their symbol of beauty. The town erects him, instead of
erecting buildings."
"Honestly, don't know what you're driving at. You're kind of played out,
after this long trip. You'll feel better when you get home and have a
good bath, and put on the blue negligee. That's some vampire costume,
you witch!"
He squeezed her arm, looked at her knowingly.
They moved on from the desert stillness of the Schoenstrom station. The
train creaked, banged, swayed. The air was nauseatingly thick. Kennicott
turned her face from the window, rested her head on his shoulder. She
was coaxed from her unhappy mood. But she came out of it unwillingly,
and when Kennicott was satisfied that he had corrected all her worries
and had opened a magazine of saffron detective stories, she sat upright.
Here--she meditated--is the newest empire of the world; the Northern
Middlewest; a land of dairy herds and exquisite lakes, of new
automobiles and tar-paper shanties and silos like red towers, of clumsy
speech and a hope that is boundless. An empire which feeds a quarter of
the world--yet its work is merely begun. They are pioneers, these sweaty
wayfarers, for all their telephones and bank-accounts and automatic
pianos and co-operative leagues. And for all its fat richness, theirs is
a pioneer land. What is its future? she wondered. A future of cities
and factory smut where now are loping empty fields? Homes universal and
secure? Or placid chateaux ringed with sullen huts? Youth free to find
knowledge and laughter? Willingness to sift the sanctified lies? Or
creamy-skinned fat women, smeared with grease and chalk, gorgeous in the
skins of beasts and the bloody feathers of slain birds, playing bridge
with puffy pink-nailed jeweled fingers, women who after much expenditure
of labor and bad temper still grotesquely resemble their own flatulent
lap-dogs? The ancient stale inequalities, or something different in
history, unlike the tedious maturity of other empires? What future and
what hope?
Carol's head ached with the riddle.
She saw the prairie, flat in giant patches or rolling in long hummocks.
The width and bigness of it, which had expanded her spirit an hour ago,
began to frighten her. It spread out so; it went on so uncontrollably;
she could never know it. Kennicott was closeted in his detective story.
With the loneliness which comes most depressingly in the midst of many
people she tried to forget problems, to look at the prairie objectively.
The grass beside the railroad had been burnt over; it was a smudge
prickly with charred stalks of weeds. Beyond the undeviating barbed-wire
fences were clumps of golden rod. Only this thin hedge shut them off
from the plains-shorn wheat-lands of autumn, a hundred acres to a field,
prickly and gray near-by but in the blurred distance like tawny velvet
stretched over dipping hillocks. The long rows of wheat-shocks marched
like soldiers in worn yellow tabards. The newly plowed fields were
black banners fallen on the distant slope. It was a martial immensity,
vigorous, a little harsh, unsoftened by kindly gardens.
The expanse was relieved by clumps of oaks with patches of short wild
grass; and every mile or two was a chain of cobalt slews, with the
flicker of blackbirds' wings across them.
All this working land was turned into exuberance by the light. The
sunshine was dizzy on open stubble; shadows from immense cumulus clouds
were forever sliding across low mounds; and the sky was wider and
loftier and more resolutely blue than the sky of cities . . . she
declared.
"It's a glorious country; a land to be big in," she crooned.
Then Kennicott startled her by chuckling, "D' you realize the town after
the next is Gopher Prairie? Home!"
III
That one word--home--it terrified her. Had she really bound herself to
live, inescapably, in this town called Gopher Prairie? And this thick
man beside her, who dared to define her future, he was a stranger! She
turned in her seat, stared at him. Who was he? Why was he sitting with
her? He wasn't of her kind! His neck was heavy; his speech was heavy; he
was twelve or thirteen years older than she; and about him was none of
the magic of shared adventures and eagerness. She could not believe that
she had ever slept in his arms. That was one of the dreams which you had
but did not officially admit.
She told herself how good he was, how dependable and understanding. She
touched his ear, smoothed the plane of his solid jaw, and, turning away
again, concentrated upon liking his town. It wouldn't be like these
barren settlements. It couldn't be! Why, it had three thousand
population. That was a great many people. There would be six hundred
houses or more. And----The lakes near it would be so lovely. She'd seen
them in the photographs. They had looked charming . . . hadn't they?
As the train left Wahkeenyan she began nervously to watch for the
lakes--the entrance to all her future life. But when she discovered
them, to the left of the track, her only impression of them was that
they resembled the photographs.
A mile from Gopher Prairie the track mounts a curving low ridge, and she
could see the town as a whole. With a passionate jerk she pushed up the
window, looked out, the arched fingers of her left hand trembling on the
sill, her right hand at her breast.
And she saw that Gopher Prairie was merely an enlargement of all the
hamlets which they had been passing. Only to the eyes of a Kennicott was
it exceptional. The huddled low wooden houses broke the plains scarcely
more than would a hazel thicket. The fields swept up to it, past it.
It was unprotected and unprotecting; there was no dignity in it nor
any hope of greatness. Only the tall red grain-elevator and a few tinny
church-steeples rose from the mass. It was a frontier camp. It was not a
place to live in, not possibly, not conceivably.
The people--they'd be as drab as their houses, as flat as their fields.
She couldn't stay here. She would have to wrench loose from this man,
and flee.
She peeped at him. She was at once helpless before his mature fixity,
and touched by his excitement as he sent his magazine skittering along
the aisle, stooped for their bags, came up with flushed face, and
gloated, "Here we are!"
She smiled loyally, and looked away. The train was entering town. The
houses on the outskirts were dusky old red mansions with wooden frills,
or gaunt frame shelters like grocery boxes, or new bungalows with
concrete foundations imitating stone.
Now the train was passing the elevator, the grim storage-tanks for oil,
a creamery, a lumber-yard, a stock-yard muddy and trampled and stinking.
Now they were stopping at a squat red frame station, the platform
crowded with unshaven farmers and with loafers--unadventurous people
with dead eyes. She was here. She could not go on. It was the end--the
end of the world. She sat with closed eyes, longing to push past
Kennicott, hide somewhere in the train, flee on toward the Pacific.
Something large arose in her soul and commanded, "Stop it! Stop being a
whining baby!" She stood up quickly; she said, "Isn't it wonderful to be
here at last!"
He trusted her so. She would make herself like the place. And she was
going to do tremendous things----
She followed Kennicott and the bobbing ends of the two bags which
he carried. They were held back by the slow line of disembarking
passengers. She reminded herself that she was actually at the dramatic
moment of the bride's home-coming. She ought to feel exalted. She felt
nothing at all except irritation at their slow progress toward the door.
Kennicott stooped to peer through the windows. He shyly exulted:
"Look! Look! There's a bunch come down to welcome us! Sam Clark and the
missus and Dave Dyer and Jack Elder, and, yes sir, Harry Haydock and
Juanita, and a whole crowd! I guess they see us now. Yuh, yuh sure, they
see us! See 'em waving!"
She obediently bent her head to look out at them. She had hold of
herself. She was ready to love them. But she was embarrassed by the
heartiness of the cheering group. From the vestibule she waved to them,
but she clung a second to the sleeve of the brakeman who helped her down
before she had the courage to dive into the cataract of hand-shaking
people, people whom she could not tell apart. She had the impression
that all the men had coarse voices, large damp hands, tooth-brush
mustaches, bald spots, and Masonic watch-charms.
She knew that they were welcoming her. Their hands, their smiles, their
shouts, their affectionate eyes overcame her. She stammered, "Thank you,
oh, thank you!"
One of the men was clamoring at Kennicott, "I brought my machine down to
take you home, doc."
"Fine business, Sam!" cried Kennicott; and, to Carol, "Let's jump in.
That big Paige over there. Some boat, too, believe me! Sam can show
speed to any of these Marmons from Minneapolis!"
Only when she was in the motor car did she distinguish the three people
who were to accompany them. The owner, now at the wheel, was the essence
of decent self-satisfaction; a baldish, largish, level-eyed man, rugged
of neck but sleek and round of face--face like the back of a spoon bowl.
He was chuckling at her, "Have you got us all straight yet?"
"Course she has! Trust Carrie to get things straight and get 'em darn
quick! I bet she could tell you every date in history!" boasted her
husband.
But the man looked at her reassuringly and with a certainty that he
was a person whom she could trust she confessed, "As a matter of fact I
haven't got anybody straight."
"Course you haven't, child. Well, I'm Sam Clark, dealer in hardware,
sporting goods, cream separators, and almost any kind of heavy junk you
can think of. You can call me Sam--anyway, I'm going to call you Carrie,
seein' 's you've been and gone and married this poor fish of a bum medic
that we keep round here." Carol smiled lavishly, and wished that she
called people by their given names more easily. "The fat cranky lady
back there beside you, who is pretending that she can't hear me giving
her away, is Mrs. Sam'l Clark; and this hungry-looking squirt up here
beside me is Dave Dyer, who keeps his drug store running by not filling
your hubby's prescriptions right--fact you might say he's the guy that
put the 'shun' in 'prescription.' So! Well, leave us take the bonny
bride home. Say, doc, I'll sell you the Candersen place for three
thousand plunks. Better be thinking about building a new home for
Carrie. Prettiest Frau in G. P., if you asks me!"
Contentedly Sam Clark drove off, in the heavy traffic of three Fords and
the Minniemashie House Free 'Bus.
"I shall like Mr. Clark . . . I CAN'T call him 'Sam'! They're all so
friendly." She glanced at the houses; tried not to see what she saw;
gave way in: "Why do these stories lie so? They always make the bride's
home-coming a bower of roses. Complete trust in noble spouse. Lies about
marriage. I'm NOT changed. And this town--O my God! I can't go through
with it. This junk-heap!"
Her husband bent over her. "You look like you were in a brown study.
Scared? I don't expect you to think Gopher Prairie is a paradise, after
St. Paul. I don't expect you to be crazy about it, at first. But you'll
come to like it so much--life's so free here and best people on earth."
She whispered to him (while Mrs. Clark considerately turned away), "I
love you for understanding. I'm just--I'm beastly over-sensitive. Too
many books. It's my lack of shoulder-muscles and sense. Give me time,
dear."
"You bet! All the time you want!"
She laid the back of his hand against her cheek, snuggled near him. She
was ready for her new home.
Kennicott had told her that, with his widowed mother as housekeeper, he
had occupied an old house, "but nice and roomy, and well-heated, best
furnace I could find on the market." His mother had left Carol her love,
and gone back to Lac-qui-Meurt.
It would be wonderful, she exulted, not to have to live in Other
People's Houses, but to make her own shrine. She held his hand tightly
and stared ahead as the car swung round a corner and stopped in the
street before a prosaic frame house in a small parched lawn.
IV
A concrete sidewalk with a "parking" of grass and mud. A square smug
brown house, rather damp. A narrow concrete walk up to it. Sickly yellow
leaves in a windrow with dried wings of box-elder seeds and snags
of wool from the cotton-woods. A screened porch with pillars of thin
painted pine surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed
wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze. A lugubrious bay-window
to the right of the porch. Window curtains of starched cheap lace
revealing a pink marble table with a conch shell and a Family Bible.
"You'll find it old-fashioned--what do you call it?--Mid-Victorian. I
left it as is, so you could make any changes you felt were necessary."
Kennicott sounded doubtful for the first time since he had come back to
his own.
"It's a real home!" She was moved by his humility. She gaily motioned
good-by to the Clarks. He unlocked the door--he was leaving the choice
of a maid to her, and there was no one in the house. She jiggled while
he turned the key, and scampered in. . . . It was next day before either
of them remembered that in their honeymoon camp they had planned that he
should carry her over the sill.
In hallway and front parlor she was conscious of dinginess and
lugubriousness and airlessness, but she insisted, "I'll make it all
jolly." As she followed Kennicott and the bags up to their bedroom she
quavered to herself the song of the fat little-gods of the hearth:
I have my own home,
To do what I please with,
To do what I please with,
My den for me and my mate and my cubs,
My own!
She was close in her husband's arms; she clung to him; whatever of
strangeness and slowness and insularity she might find in him, none of
that mattered so long as she could slip her hands beneath his coat, run
her fingers over the warm smoothness of the satin back of his waistcoat,
seem almost to creep into his body, find in him strength, find in the
courage and kindness of her man a shelter from the perplexing world.
"Sweet, so sweet," she whispered.
| The next time we see Dr. Will Kennicott and Carol, they're married and on their way to Gopher Prairie. Even on the train, Carol knows she'll have her work cut out for her if she wants to improve the lives of farmers and their families. All she can do is look around and mourn how dirty and dumb they all look. As Carol stares out the train window, all she sees is miles after miles of endless prairie. She is totally terrified of calling this land home, and she thinks she has made a huge mistake in marrying Will. Carol finally sees Gopher Prairie and realizes that the town is a bit of a dump and nothing like Will said it was. She realizes that he sees the place through rose-colored glasses. When they get to the train platform, Will's friends are waiting for him and his new wife. They introduce themselves, and Carol realizes she has trouble telling them apart. | summary |
CHAPTER IV
I
"THE Clarks have invited some folks to their house to meet us, tonight,"
said Kennicott, as he unpacked his suit-case.
"Oh, that is nice of them!"
"You bet. I told you you'd like 'em. Squarest people on earth. Uh,
Carrie----Would you mind if I sneaked down to the office for an hour,
just to see how things are?"
"Why, no. Of course not. I know you're keen to get back to work."
"Sure you don't mind?"
"Not a bit. Out of my way. Let me unpack."
But the advocate of freedom in marriage was as much disappointed as
a drooping bride at the alacrity with which he took that freedom and
escaped to the world of men's affairs. She gazed about their bedroom,
and its full dismalness crawled over her: the awkward knuckly L-shape
of it; the black walnut bed with apples and spotty pears carved on the
headboard; the imitation maple bureau, with pink-daubed scent-bottles
and a petticoated pin-cushion on a marble slab uncomfortably like a
gravestone; the plain pine washstand and the garlanded water-pitcher and
bowl. The scent was of horsehair and plush and Florida Water.
"How could people ever live with things like this?" she shuddered. She
saw the furniture as a circle of elderly judges, condemning her to death
by smothering. The tottering brocade chair squeaked, "Choke her--choke
her--smother her." The old linen smelled of the tomb. She was alone in
this house, this strange still house, among the shadows of dead thoughts
and haunting repressions. "I hate it! I hate it!" she panted. "Why did I
ever----"
She remembered that Kennicott's mother had brought these family
relics from the old home in Lac-qui-Meurt. "Stop it! They're perfectly
comfortable things. They're--comfortable. Besides----Oh, they're
horrible! We'll change them, right away."
Then, "But of course he HAS to see how things are at the office----"
She made a pretense of busying herself with unpacking. The chintz-lined,
silver-fitted bag which had seemed so desirable a luxury in St. Paul was
an extravagant vanity here. The daring black chemise of frail chiffon
and lace was a hussy at which the deep-bosomed bed stiffened in disgust,
and she hurled it into a bureau drawer, hid it beneath a sensible linen
blouse.
She gave up unpacking. She went to the window, with a purely literary
thought of village charm--hollyhocks and lanes and apple-cheeked
cottagers. What she saw was the side of the Seventh-Day Adventist
Church--a plain clapboard wall of a sour liver color; the ash-pile
back of the church; an unpainted stable; and an alley in which a Ford
delivery-wagon had been stranded. This was the terraced garden below her
boudoir; this was to be her scenery for----
"I mustn't! I mustn't! I'm nervous this afternoon. Am I sick? . . . Good
Lord, I hope it isn't that! Not now! How people lie! How these stories
lie! They say the bride is always so blushing and proud and happy when
she finds that out, but--I'd hate it! I'd be scared to death! Some
day but----Please, dear nebulous Lord, not now! Bearded sniffy old
men sitting and demanding that we bear children. If THEY had to bear
them----! I wish they did have to! Not now! Not till I've got hold of
this job of liking the ash-pile out there! . . . I must shut up. I'm
mildly insane. I'm going out for a walk. I'll see the town by myself. My
first view of the empire I'm going to conquer!"
She fled from the house.
She stared with seriousness at every concrete crossing, every
hitching-post, every rake for leaves; and to each house she devoted all
her speculation. What would they come to mean? How would they look six
months from now? In which of them would she be dining? Which of these
people whom she passed, now mere arrangements of hair and clothes, would
turn into intimates, loved or dreaded, different from all the other
people in the world?
As she came into the small business-section she inspected a broad-beamed
grocer in an alpaca coat who was bending over the apples and celery on a
slanted platform in front of his store. Would she ever talk to him? What
would he say if she stopped and stated, "I am Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. Some
day I hope to confide that a heap of extremely dubious pumpkins as a
window-display doesn't exhilarate me much."
(The grocer was Mr. Frederick F. Ludelmeyer, whose market is at the
corner of Main Street and Lincoln Avenue. In supposing that only she was
observant Carol was ignorant, misled by the indifference of cities. She
fancied that she was slipping through the streets invisible; but when
she had passed, Mr. Ludelmeyer puffed into the store and coughed at his
clerk, "I seen a young woman, she come along the side street. I bet she
iss Doc Kennicott's new bride, good-looker, nice legs, but she wore a
hell of a plain suit, no style, I wonder will she pay cash, I bet she
goes to Howland & Gould's more as she does here, what you done with the
poster for Fluffed Oats?")
II
When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had completely covered
the town, east and west, north and south; and she stood at the corner of
Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired.
Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half wooden
residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle
of Fords and lumber-wagons, was too small to absorb her. The broad,
straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie
on every side. She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land.
The skeleton iron windmill on the farm a few blocks away, at the north
end of Main Street, was like the ribs of a dead cow. She thought of the
coming of the Northern winter, when the unprotected houses would crouch
together in terror of storms galloping out of that wild waste. They
were so small and weak, the little brown houses. They were shelters for
sparrows, not homes for warm laughing people.
She told herself that down the street the leaves were a splendor. The
maples were orange; the oaks a solid tint of raspberry. And the lawns
had been nursed with love. But the thought would not hold. At best the
trees resembled a thinned woodlot. There was no park to rest the eyes.
And since not Gopher Prairie but Wakamin was the county-seat, there was
no court-house with its grounds.
She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most pretentious
building in sight, the one place which welcomed strangers and
determined their opinion of the charm and luxury of Gopher Prairie--the
Minniemashie House. It was a tall lean shabby structure, three stories
of yellow-streaked wood, the corners covered with sanded pine slabs
purporting to symbolize stone. In the hotel office she could see a
stretch of bare unclean floor, a line of rickety chairs with brass
cuspidors between, a writing-desk with advertisements in mother-of-pearl
letters upon the glass-covered back. The dining-room beyond was a jungle
of stained table-cloths and catsup bottles.
She looked no more at the Minniemashie House.
A man in cuffless shirt-sleeves with pink arm-garters, wearing a linen
collar but no tie, yawned his way from Dyer's Drug Store across to the
hotel. He leaned against the wall, scratched a while, sighed, and in a
bored way gossiped with a man tilted back in a chair. A lumber-wagon,
its long green box filled with large spools of barbed-wire fencing,
creaked down the block. A Ford, in reverse, sounded as though it
were shaking to pieces, then recovered and rattled away. In the Greek
candy-store was the whine of a peanut-roaster, and the oily smell of
nuts.
There was no other sound nor sign of life.
She wanted to run, fleeing from the encroaching prairie, demanding the
security of a great city. Her dreams of creating a beautiful town were
ludicrous. Oozing out from every drab wall, she felt a forbidding spirit
which she could never conquer.
She trailed down the street on one side, back on the other, glancing
into the cross streets. It was a private Seeing Main Street tour. She
was within ten minutes beholding not only the heart of a place called
Gopher Prairie, but ten thousand towns from Albany to San Diego:
Dyer's Drug Store, a corner building of regular and unreal blocks of
artificial stone. Inside the store, a greasy marble soda-fountain with
an electric lamp of red and green and curdled-yellow mosaic
shade. Pawed-over heaps of tooth-brushes and combs and packages of
shaving-soap. Shelves of soap-cartons, teething-rings, garden-seeds,
and patent medicines in yellow "packages-nostrums" for consumption, for
"women's diseases"--notorious mixtures of opium and alcohol, in
the very shop to which her husband sent patients for the filling of
prescriptions.
From a second-story window the sign "W. P. Kennicott, Phys. & Surgeon,"
gilt on black sand.
A small wooden motion-picture theater called "The Rosebud Movie Palace."
Lithographs announcing a film called "Fatty in Love."
Howland & Gould's Grocery. In the display window, black, overripe
bananas and lettuce on which a cat was sleeping. Shelves lined with red
crepe paper which was now faded and torn and concentrically spotted.
Flat against the wall of the second story the signs of lodges--the
Knights of Pythias, the Maccabees, the Woodmen, the Masons.
Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market--a reek of blood.
A jewelry shop with tinny-looking wrist-watches for women. In front of
it, at the curb, a huge wooden clock which did not go.
A fly-buzzing saloon with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign across
the front. Other saloons down the block. From them a stink of stale
beer, and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out dirty
songs--vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull--the delicacy of a
mining-camp minus its vigor. In front of the saloons, farmwives sitting
on the seats of wagons, waiting for their husbands to become drunk and
ready to start home.
A tobacco shop called "The Smoke House," filled with young men shaking
dice for cigarettes. Racks of magazines, and pictures of coy fat
prostitutes in striped bathing-suits.
A clothing store with a display of "ox-blood-shade Oxfords with bull-dog
toes." Suits which looked worn and glossless while they were still new,
flabbily draped on dummies like corpses with painted cheeks.
The Bon Ton Store--Haydock & Simons'--the largest shop in town. The
first-story front of clear glass, the plates cleverly bound at the edges
with brass. The second story of pleasant tapestry brick. One window of
excellent clothes for men, interspersed with collars of floral pique
which showed mauve daisies on a saffron ground. Newness and an obvious
notion of neatness and service. Haydock & Simons. Haydock. She had met a
Haydock at the station; Harry Haydock; an active person of thirty-five.
He seemed great to her, now, and very like a saint. His shop was clean!
Axel Egge's General Store, frequented by Scandinavian farmers. In the
shallow dark window-space heaps of sleazy sateens, badly woven galateas,
canvas shoes designed for women with bulging ankles, steel and red glass
buttons upon cards with broken edges, a cottony blanket, a granite-ware
frying-pan reposing on a sun-faded crepe blouse.
Sam Clark's Hardware Store. An air of frankly metallic enterprise. Guns
and churns and barrels of nails and beautiful shiny butcher knives.
Chester Dashaway's House Furnishing Emporium. A vista of heavy oak
rockers with leather seats, asleep in a dismal row.
Billy's Lunch. Thick handleless cups on the wet oilcloth-covered
counter. An odor of onions and the smoke of hot lard. In the doorway a
young man audibly sucking a toothpick.
The warehouse of the buyer of cream and potatoes. The sour smell of a
dairy.
The Ford Garage and the Buick Garage, competent one-story brick
and cement buildings opposite each other. Old and new cars on
grease-blackened concrete floors. Tire advertisements. The roaring of
a tested motor; a racket which beat at the nerves. Surly young men in
khaki union-overalls. The most energetic and vital places in town.
A large warehouse for agricultural implements. An impressive barricade
of green and gold wheels, of shafts and sulky seats, belonging
to machinery of which Carol knew nothing--potato-planters,
manure-spreaders, silage-cutters, disk-harrows, breaking-plows.
A feed store, its windows opaque with the dust of bran, a patent
medicine advertisement painted on its roof.
Ye Art Shoppe, Prop. Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks, Christian Science Library
open daily free. A touching fumble at beauty. A one-room shanty of
boards recently covered with rough stucco. A show-window delicately rich
in error: vases starting out to imitate tree-trunks but running off
into blobs of gilt--an aluminum ash-tray labeled "Greetings from
Gopher Prairie"--a Christian Science magazine--a stamped sofa-cushion
portraying a large ribbon tied to a small poppy, the correct skeins of
embroidery-silk lying on the pillow. Inside the shop, a glimpse of bad
carbon prints of bad and famous pictures, shelves of phonograph records
and camera films, wooden toys, and in the midst an anxious small woman
sitting in a padded rocking chair.
A barber shop and pool room. A man in shirt sleeves, presumably Del
Snafflin the proprietor, shaving a man who had a large Adam's apple.
Nat Hicks's Tailor Shop, on a side street off Main. A one-story
building. A fashion-plate showing human pitchforks in garments which
looked as hard as steel plate.
On another side street a raw red-brick Catholic Church with a varnished
yellow door.
The post-office--merely a partition of glass and brass shutting off
the rear of a mildewed room which must once have been a shop. A tilted
writing-shelf against a wall rubbed black and scattered with official
notices and army recruiting-posters.
The damp, yellow-brick schoolbuilding in its cindery grounds.
The State Bank, stucco masking wood.
The Farmers' National Bank. An Ionic temple of marble. Pure, exquisite,
solitary. A brass plate with "Ezra Stowbody, Pres't."
A score of similar shops and establishments.
Behind them and mixed with them, the houses, meek cottages or large,
comfortable, soundly uninteresting symbols of prosperity.
In all the town not one building save the Ionic bank which gave pleasure
to Carol's eyes; not a dozen buildings which suggested that, in the
fifty years of Gopher Prairie's existence, the citizens had realized
that it was either desirable or possible to make this, their common
home, amusing or attractive.
It was not only the unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid
straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy
temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. The
street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles,
gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had built
with the most valiant disregard of all the others. Between a large
new "block" of two-story brick shops on one side, and the fire-brick
Overland garage on the other side, was a one-story cottage turned into
a millinery shop. The white temple of the Farmers' Bank was elbowed back
by a grocery of glaring yellow brick. One store-building had a patchy
galvanized iron cornice; the building beside it was crowned with
battlements and pyramids of brick capped with blocks of red sandstone.
She escaped from Main Street, fled home.
She wouldn't have cared, she insisted, if the people had been comely.
She had noted a young man loafing before a shop, one unwashed hand
holding the cord of an awning; a middle-aged man who had a way of
staring at women as though he had been married too long and too
prosaically; an old farmer, solid, wholesome, but not clean--his face
like a potato fresh from the earth. None of them had shaved for three
days.
"If they can't build shrines, out here on the prairie, surely there's
nothing to prevent their buying safety-razors!" she raged.
She fought herself: "I must be wrong. People do live here. It CAN'T be
as ugly as--as I know it is! I must be wrong. But I can't do it. I can't
go through with it."
She came home too seriously worried for hysteria; and when she found
Kennicott waiting for her, and exulting, "Have a walk? Well, like
the town? Great lawns and trees, eh?" she was able to say, with a
self-protective maturity new to her, "It's very interesting."
III
The train which brought Carol to Gopher Prairie also brought Miss Bea
Sorenson.
Miss Bea was a stalwart, corn-colored, laughing young woman, and she was
bored by farm-work. She desired the excitements of city-life, and the
way to enjoy city-life was, she had decided, to "go get a yob as hired
girl in Gopher Prairie." She contentedly lugged her pasteboard telescope
from the station to her cousin, Tina Malmquist, maid of all work in the
residence of Mrs. Luke Dawson.
"Vell, so you come to town," said Tina.
"Ya. Ay get a yob," said Bea.
"Vell. . . . You got a fella now?"
"Ya. Yim Yacobson."
"Vell. I'm glat to see you. How much you vant a veek?"
"Sex dollar."
"There ain't nobody pay dat. Vait! Dr. Kennicott, I t'ink he marry a
girl from de Cities. Maybe she pay dat. Vell. You go take a valk."
"Ya," said Bea.
So it chanced that Carol Kennicott and Bea Sorenson were viewing Main
Street at the same time.
Bea had never before been in a town larger than Scandia Crossing, which
has sixty-seven inhabitants.
As she marched up the street she was meditating that it didn't hardly
seem like it was possible there could be so many folks all in one place
at the same time. My! It would take years to get acquainted with them
all. And swell people, too! A fine big gentleman in a new pink shirt
with a diamond, and not no washed-out blue denim working-shirt. A lovely
lady in a longery dress (but it must be an awful hard dress to wash).
And the stores!
Not just three of them, like there were at Scandia Crossing, but more
than four whole blocks!
The Bon Ton Store--big as four barns--my! it would simply scare a person
to go in there, with seven or eight clerks all looking at you. And the
men's suits, on figures just like human. And Axel Egge's, like home,
lots of Swedes and Norskes in there, and a card of dandy buttons, like
rubies.
A drug store with a soda fountain that was just huge, awful long, and
all lovely marble; and on it there was a great big lamp with the biggest
shade you ever saw--all different kinds colored glass stuck together;
and the soda spouts, they were silver, and they came right out of the
bottom of the lamp-stand! Behind the fountain there were glass shelves,
and bottles of new kinds of soft drinks, that nobody ever heard of.
Suppose a fella took you THERE!
A hotel, awful high, higher than Oscar Tollefson's new red barn; three
stories, one right on top of another; you had to stick your head back
to look clear up to the top. There was a swell traveling man in
there--probably been to Chicago, lots of times.
Oh, the dandiest people to know here! There was a lady going by, you
wouldn't hardly say she was any older than Bea herself; she wore a dandy
new gray suit and black pumps. She almost looked like she was looking
over the town, too. But you couldn't tell what she thought. Bea would
like to be that way--kind of quiet, so nobody would get fresh. Kind
of--oh, elegant.
A Lutheran Church. Here in the city there'd be lovely sermons, and
church twice on Sunday, EVERY Sunday!
And a movie show!
A regular theater, just for movies. With the sign "Change of bill every
evening." Pictures every evening!
There were movies in Scandia Crossing, but only once every two weeks,
and it took the Sorensons an hour to drive in--papa was such a tightwad
he wouldn't get a Ford. But here she could put on her hat any evening,
and in three minutes' walk be to the movies, and see lovely fellows in
dress-suits and Bill Hart and everything!
How could they have so many stores? Why! There was one just for tobacco
alone, and one (a lovely one--the Art Shoppy it was) for pictures and
vases and stuff, with oh, the dandiest vase made so it looked just like
a tree trunk!
Bea stood on the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue. The roar
of the city began to frighten her. There were five automobiles on the
street all at the same time--and one of 'em was a great big car that
must of cost two thousand dollars--and the 'bus was starting for a train
with five elegant-dressed fellows, and a man was pasting up red bills
with lovely pictures of washing-machines on them, and the jeweler was
laying out bracelets and wrist-watches and EVERYTHING on real velvet.
What did she care if she got six dollars a week? Or two! It was worth
while working for nothing, to be allowed to stay here. And think how it
would be in the evening, all lighted up--and not with no lamps, but with
electrics! And maybe a gentleman friend taking you to the movies and
buying you a strawberry ice cream soda!
Bea trudged back.
"Vell? You lak it?" said Tina.
"Ya. Ay lak it. Ay t'ink maybe Ay stay here," said Bea.
IV
The recently built house of Sam Clark, in which was given the party to
welcome Carol, was one of the largest in Gopher Prairie. It had a clean
sweep of clapboards, a solid squareness, a small tower, and a large
screened porch. Inside, it was as shiny, as hard, and as cheerful as a
new oak upright piano.
Carol looked imploringly at Sam Clark as he rolled to the door and
shouted, "Welcome, little lady! The keys of the city are yourn!"
Beyond him, in the hallway and the living-room, sitting in a vast prim
circle as though they were attending a funeral, she saw the guests. They
were WAITING so! They were waiting for her! The determination to be all
one pretty flowerlet of appreciation leaked away. She begged of Sam,
"I don't dare face them! They expect so much. They'll swallow me in one
mouthful--glump!--like that!"
"Why, sister, they're going to love you--same as I would if I didn't
think the doc here would beat me up!"
"B-but----I don't dare! Faces to the right of me, faces in front of me,
volley and wonder!"
She sounded hysterical to herself; she fancied that to Sam Clark she
sounded insane. But he chuckled, "Now you just cuddle under Sam's wing,
and if anybody rubbers at you too long, I'll shoo 'em off. Here we go!
Watch my smoke--Sam'l, the ladies' delight and the bridegrooms' terror!"
His arm about her, he led her in and bawled, "Ladies and worser halves,
the bride! We won't introduce her round yet, because she'll never get
your bum names straight anyway. Now bust up this star-chamber!"
They tittered politely, but they did not move from the social security
of their circle, and they did not cease staring.
Carol had given creative energy to dressing for the event. Her hair was
demure, low on her forehead with a parting and a coiled braid. Now she
wished that she had piled it high. Her frock was an ingenue slip
of lawn, with a wide gold sash and a low square neck, which gave a
suggestion of throat and molded shoulders. But as they looked her over
she was certain that it was all wrong. She wished alternately that she
had worn a spinsterish high-necked dress, and that she had dared to
shock them with a violent brick-red scarf which she had bought in
Chicago.
She was led about the circle. Her voice mechanically produced safe
remarks:
"Oh, I'm sure I'm going to like it here ever so much," and "Yes, we did
have the best time in Colorado--mountains," and "Yes, I lived in St.
Paul several years. Euclid P. Tinker? No, I don't REMEMBER meeting him,
but I'm pretty sure I've heard of him."
Kennicott took her aside and whispered, "Now I'll introduce you to them,
one at a time."
"Tell me about them first."
"Well, the nice-looking couple over there are Harry Haydock and his
wife, Juanita. Harry's dad owns most of the Bon Ton, but it's Harry who
runs it and gives it the pep. He's a hustler. Next to him is Dave Dyer
the druggist--you met him this afternoon--mighty good duck-shot.
The tall husk beyond him is Jack Elder--Jackson Elder--owns the
planing-mill, and the Minniemashie House, and quite a share in the
Farmers' National Bank. Him and his wife are good sports--him and Sam
and I go hunting together a lot. The old cheese there is Luke Dawson,
the richest man in town. Next to him is Nat Hicks, the tailor."
"Really? A tailor?"
"Sure. Why not? Maybe we're slow, but we are democratic. I go hunting
with Nat same as I do with Jack Elder."
"I'm glad. I've never met a tailor socially. It must be charming to meet
one and not have to think about what you owe him. And do you----Would
you go hunting with your barber, too?"
"No but----No use running this democracy thing into the ground.
Besides, I've known Nat for years, and besides, he's a mighty good shot
and----That's the way it is, see? Next to Nat is Chet Dashaway. Great
fellow for chinning. He'll talk your arm off, about religion or politics
or books or anything."
Carol gazed with a polite approximation to interest at Mr. Dashaway,
a tan person with a wide mouth. "Oh, I know! He's the furniture-store
man!" She was much pleased with herself.
"Yump, and he's the undertaker. You'll like him. Come shake hands with
him."
"Oh no, no! He doesn't--he doesn't do the embalming and all
that--himself? I couldn't shake hands with an undertaker!"
"Why not? You'd be proud to shake hands with a great surgeon, just after
he'd been carving up people's bellies."
She sought to regain her afternoon's calm of maturity. "Yes. You're
right. I want--oh, my dear, do you know how much I want to like the
people you like? I want to see people as they are."
"Well, don't forget to see people as other folks see them as they are!
They have the stuff. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here?
Born and brought up here!"
"Bresnahan?"
"Yes--you know--president of the Velvet Motor Company of Boston,
Mass.--make the Velvet Twelve--biggest automobile factory in New
England."
"I think I've heard of him."
"Sure you have. Why, he's a millionaire several times over! Well, Perce
comes back here for the black-bass fishing almost every summer, and he
says if he could get away from business, he'd rather live here than
in Boston or New York or any of those places. HE doesn't mind Chet's
undertaking."
"Please! I'll--I'll like everybody! I'll be the community sunbeam!"
He led her to the Dawsons.
Luke Dawson, lender of money on mortgages, owner of Northern cut-over
land, was a hesitant man in unpressed soft gray clothes, with bulging
eyes in a milky face. His wife had bleached cheeks, bleached hair,
bleached voice, and a bleached manner. She wore her expensive green
frock, with its passementeried bosom, bead tassels, and gaps between the
buttons down the back, as though she had bought it second-hand and was
afraid of meeting the former owner. They were shy. It was "Professor"
George Edwin Mott, superintendent of schools, a Chinese mandarin turned
brown, who held Carol's hand and made her welcome.
When the Dawsons and Mr. Mott had stated that they were "pleased to meet
her," there seemed to be nothing else to say, but the conversation went
on automatically.
"Do you like Gopher Prairie?" whimpered Mrs. Dawson.
"Oh, I'm sure I'm going to be ever so happy."
"There's so many nice people." Mrs. Dawson looked to Mr. Mott for social
and intellectual aid. He lectured:
"There's a fine class of people. I don't like some of these retired
farmers who come here to spend their last days--especially the Germans.
They hate to pay school-taxes. They hate to spend a cent. But the rest
are a fine class of people. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from
here? Used to go to school right at the old building!"
"I heard he did."
"Yes. He's a prince. He and I went fishing together, last time he was
here."
The Dawsons and Mr. Mott teetered upon weary feet, and smiled at Carol
with crystallized expressions. She went on:
"Tell me, Mr. Mott: Have you ever tried any experiments with any of the
new educational systems? The modern kindergarten methods or the Gary
system?"
"Oh. Those. Most of these would-be reformers are simply
notoriety-seekers. I believe in manual training, but Latin and
mathematics always will be the backbone of sound Americanism, no matter
what these faddists advocate--heaven knows what they do want--knitting,
I suppose, and classes in wiggling the ears!"
The Dawsons smiled their appreciation of listening to a savant. Carol
waited till Kennicott should rescue her. The rest of the party waited
for the miracle of being amused.
Harry and Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons and Dr. Terry Gould--the young
smart set of Gopher Prairie. She was led to them. Juanita Haydock flung
at her in a high, cackling, friendly voice:
"Well, this is SO nice to have you here. We'll have some good
parties--dances and everything. You'll have to join the Jolly Seventeen.
We play bridge and we have a supper once a month. You play, of course?"
"N-no, I don't."
"Really? In St. Paul?"
"I've always been such a book-worm."
"We'll have to teach you. Bridge is half the fun of life." Juanita had
become patronizing, and she glanced disrespectfully at Carol's golden
sash, which she had previously admired.
Harry Haydock said politely, "How do you think you're going to like the
old burg?"
"I'm sure I shall like it tremendously."
"Best people on earth here. Great hustlers, too. Course I've had lots
of chances to go live in Minneapolis, but we like it here. Real he-town.
Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here?"
Carol perceived that she had been weakened in the biological struggle
by disclosing her lack of bridge. Roused to nervous desire to regain
her position she turned on Dr. Terry Gould, the young and pool-playing
competitor of her husband. Her eyes coquetted with him while she gushed:
"I'll learn bridge. But what I really love most is the outdoors. Can't
we all get up a boating party, and fish, or whatever you do, and have a
picnic supper afterwards?"
"Now you're talking!" Dr. Gould affirmed. He looked rather too obviously
at the cream-smooth slope of her shoulder. "Like fishing? Fishing is my
middle name. I'll teach you bridge. Like cards at all?"
"I used to be rather good at bezique."
She knew that bezique was a game of cards--or a game of something else.
Roulette, possibly. But her lie was a triumph. Juanita's handsome,
high-colored, horsey face showed doubt. Harry stroked his nose and said
humbly, "Bezique? Used to be great gambling game, wasn't it?"
While others drifted to her group, Carol snatched up the conversation.
She laughed and was frivolous and rather brittle. She could not
distinguish their eyes. They were a blurry theater-audience before which
she self-consciously enacted the comedy of being the Clever Little Bride
of Doc Kennicott:
"These-here celebrated Open Spaces, that's what I'm going out for. I'll
never read anything but the sporting-page again. Will converted me on
our Colorado trip. There were so many mousey tourists who were afraid
to get out of the motor 'bus that I decided to be Annie Oakley, the Wild
Western Wampire, and I bought oh! a vociferous skirt which revealed
my perfectly nice ankles to the Presbyterian glare of all the Ioway
schoolma'ams, and I leaped from peak to peak like the nimble chamoys,
and----You may think that Herr Doctor Kennicott is a Nimrod, but you
ought to have seen me daring him to strip to his B. V. D.'s and go
swimming in an icy mountain brook."
She knew that they were thinking of becoming shocked, but Juanita
Haydock was admiring, at least. She swaggered on:
"I'm sure I'm going to ruin Will as a respectable practitioner----Is he
a good doctor, Dr. Gould?"
Kennicott's rival gasped at this insult to professional ethics, and he
took an appreciable second before he recovered his social manner.
"I'll tell you, Mrs. Kennicott." He smiled at Kennicott, to imply that
whatever he might say in the stress of being witty was not to count
against him in the commercio-medical warfare. "There's some people
in town that say the doc is a fair to middlin' diagnostician and
prescription-writer, but let me whisper this to you--but for heaven's
sake don't tell him I said so--don't you ever go to him for anything
more serious than a pendectomy of the left ear or a strabismus of the
cardiograph."
No one save Kennicott knew exactly what this meant, but they laughed,
and Sam Clark's party assumed a glittering lemon-yellow color of brocade
panels and champagne and tulle and crystal chandeliers and sporting
duchesses. Carol saw that George Edwin Mott and the blanched Mr. and
Mrs. Dawson were not yet hypnotized. They looked as though they wondered
whether they ought to look as though they disapproved. She concentrated
on them:
"But I know whom I wouldn't have dared to go to Colorado with! Mr.
Dawson there! I'm sure he's a regular heart-breaker. When we were
introduced he held my hand and squeezed it frightfully."
"Haw! Haw! Haw!" The entire company applauded. Mr. Dawson was beatified.
He had been called many things--loan-shark, skinflint, tightwad,
pussyfoot--but he had never before been called a flirt.
"He is wicked, isn't he, Mrs. Dawson? Don't you have to lock him up?"
"Oh no, but maybe I better," attempted Mrs. Dawson, a tint on her pallid
face.
For fifteen minutes Carol kept it up. She asserted that she was going
to stage a musical comedy, that she preferred cafe parfait to beefsteak,
that she hoped Dr. Kennicott would never lose his ability to make love
to charming women, and that she had a pair of gold stockings. They gaped
for more. But she could not keep it up. She retired to a chair behind
Sam Clark's bulk. The smile-wrinkles solemnly flattened out in the faces
of all the other collaborators in having a party, and again they stood
about hoping but not expecting to be amused.
Carol listened. She discovered that conversation did not exist in Gopher
Prairie. Even at this affair, which brought out the young smart set,
the hunting squire set, the respectable intellectual set, and the solid
financial set, they sat up with gaiety as with a corpse.
Juanita Haydock talked a good deal in her rattling voice but it was
invariably of personalities: the rumor that Raymie Wutherspoon was going
to send for a pair of patent leather shoes with gray buttoned tops; the
rheumatism of Champ Perry; the state of Guy Pollock's grippe; and the
dementia of Jim Howland in painting his fence salmon-pink.
Sam Clark had been talking to Carol about motor cars, but he felt
his duties as host. While he droned, his brows popped up and down. He
interrupted himself, "Must stir 'em up." He worried at his wife, "Don't
you think I better stir 'em up?" He shouldered into the center of the
room, and cried:
"Let's have some stunts, folks."
"Yes, let's!" shrieked Juanita Haydock.
"Say, Dave, give us that stunt about the Norwegian catching a hen."
"You bet; that's a slick stunt; do that, Dave!" cheered Chet Dashaway.
Mr. Dave Dyer obliged.
All the guests moved their lips in anticipation of being called on for
their own stunts.
"Ella, come on and recite 'Old Sweetheart of Mine,' for us," demanded
Sam.
Miss Ella Stowbody, the spinster daughter of the Ionic bank, scratched
her dry palms and blushed. "Oh, you don't want to hear that old thing
again."
"Sure we do! You bet!" asserted Sam.
"My voice is in terrible shape tonight."
"Tut! Come on!"
Sam loudly explained to Carol, "Ella is our shark at elocuting. She's
had professional training. She studied singing and oratory and dramatic
art and shorthand for a year, in Milwaukee."
Miss Stowbody was reciting. As encore to "An Old Sweetheart of Mine,"
she gave a peculiarly optimistic poem regarding the value of smiles.
There were four other stunts: one Jewish, one Irish, one juvenile, and
Nat Hicks's parody of Mark Antony's funeral oration.
During the winter Carol was to hear Dave Dyer's hen-catching
impersonation seven times, "An Old Sweetheart of Mine" nine times, the
Jewish story and the funeral oration twice; but now she was ardent
and, because she did so want to be happy and simple-hearted, she was as
disappointed as the others when the stunts were finished, and the party
instantly sank back into coma.
They gave up trying to be festive; they began to talk naturally, as they
did at their shops and homes.
The men and women divided, as they had been tending to do all evening.
Carol was deserted by the men, left to a group of matrons who steadily
pattered of children, sickness, and cooks--their own shop-talk. She was
piqued. She remembered visions of herself as a smart married woman in
a drawing-room, fencing with clever men. Her dejection was relieved by
speculation as to what the men were discussing, in the corner between
the piano and the phonograph. Did they rise from these housewifely
personalities to a larger world of abstractions and affairs?
She made her best curtsy to Mrs. Dawson; she twittered, "I won't have my
husband leaving me so soon! I'm going over and pull the wretch's
ears." She rose with a jeune fille bow. She was self-absorbed and
self-approving because she had attained that quality of sentimentality.
She proudly dipped across the room and, to the interest and commendation
of all beholders, sat on the arm of Kennicott's chair.
He was gossiping with Sam Clark, Luke Dawson, Jackson Elder of the
planing-mill, Chet Dashaway, Dave Dyer, Harry Haydock, and Ezra
Stowbody, president of the Ionic bank.
Ezra Stowbody was a troglodyte. He had come to Gopher Prairie in 1865.
He was a distinguished bird of prey--swooping thin nose, turtle mouth,
thick brows, port-wine cheeks, floss of white hair, contemptuous eyes.
He was not happy in the social changes of thirty years. Three decades
ago, Dr. Westlake, Julius Flickerbaugh the lawyer, Merriman Peedy the
Congregational pastor and himself had been the arbiters. That was as
it should be; the fine arts--medicine, law, religion, and
finance--recognized as aristocratic; four Yankees democratically
chatting with but ruling the Ohioans and Illini and Swedes and Germans
who had ventured to follow them. But Westlake was old, almost retired;
Julius Flickerbaugh had lost much of his practice to livelier attorneys;
Reverend (not The Reverend) Peedy was dead; and nobody was impressed in
this rotten age of automobiles by the "spanking grays" which Ezra still
drove. The town was as heterogeneous as Chicago. Norwegians and Germans
owned stores. The social leaders were common merchants. Selling nails
was considered as sacred as banking. These upstarts--the Clarks, the
Haydocks--had no dignity. They were sound and conservative in politics,
but they talked about motor cars and pump-guns and heaven only knew
what new-fangled fads. Mr. Stowbody felt out of place with them. But
his brick house with the mansard roof was still the largest residence in
town, and he held his position as squire by occasionally appearing among
the younger men and reminding them by a wintry eye that without the
banker none of them could carry on their vulgar businesses.
As Carol defied decency by sitting down with the men, Mr. Stowbody was
piping to Mr. Dawson, "Say, Luke, when was't Biggins first settled in
Winnebago Township? Wa'n't it in 1879?"
"Why no 'twa'n't!" Mr. Dawson was indignant. "He come out from Vermont
in 1867--no, wait, in 1868, it must have been--and took a claim on the
Rum River, quite a ways above Anoka."
"He did not!" roared Mr. Stowbody. "He settled first in Blue Earth
County, him and his father!"
("What's the point at issue?") Carol whispered to Kennicott.
("Whether this old duck Biggins had an English setter or a Llewellyn.
They've been arguing it all evening!")
Dave Dyer interrupted to give tidings, "D' tell you that Clara Biggins
was in town couple days ago? She bought a hot-water bottle--expensive
one, too--two dollars and thirty cents!"
"Yaaaaaah!" snarled Mr. Stowbody. "Course. She's just like her grandad
was. Never save a cent. Two dollars and twenty--thirty, was it?--two
dollars and thirty cents for a hot-water bottle! Brick wrapped up in a
flannel petticoat just as good, anyway!"
"How's Ella's tonsils, Mr. Stowbody?" yawned Chet Dashaway.
While Mr. Stowbody gave a somatic and psychic study of them, Carol
reflected, "Are they really so terribly interested in Ella's tonsils,
or even in Ella's esophagus? I wonder if I could get them away from
personalities? Let's risk damnation and try."
"There hasn't been much labor trouble around here, has there, Mr.
Stowbody?" she asked innocently.
"No, ma'am, thank God, we've been free from that, except maybe with
hired girls and farm-hands. Trouble enough with these foreign farmers;
if you don't watch these Swedes they turn socialist or populist or some
fool thing on you in a minute. Of course, if they have loans you can
make 'em listen to reason. I just have 'em come into the bank for a
talk, and tell 'em a few things. I don't mind their being democrats,
so much, but I won't stand having socialists around. But thank God, we
ain't got the labor trouble they have in these cities. Even Jack Elder
here gets along pretty well, in the planing-mill, don't you, Jack?"
"Yep. Sure. Don't need so many skilled workmen in my place, and it's
a lot of these cranky, wage-hogging, half-baked skilled mechanics that
start trouble--reading a lot of this anarchist literature and union
papers and all."
"Do you approve of union labor?" Carol inquired of Mr. Elder.
"Me? I should say not! It's like this: I don't mind dealing with my men
if they think they've got any grievances--though Lord knows what's come
over workmen, nowadays--don't appreciate a good job. But still, if they
come to me honestly, as man to man, I'll talk things over with them. But
I'm not going to have any outsider, any of these walking delegates, or
whatever fancy names they call themselves now--bunch of rich grafters,
living on the ignorant workmen! Not going to have any of those fellows
butting in and telling ME how to run MY business!"
Mr. Elder was growing more excited, more belligerent and patriotic. "I
stand for freedom and constitutional rights. If any man don't like my
shop, he can get up and git. Same way, if I don't like him, he gits.
And that's all there is to it. I simply can't understand all these
complications and hoop-te-doodles and government reports and wage-scales
and God knows what all that these fellows are balling up the labor
situation with, when it's all perfectly simple. They like what I pay
'em, or they get out. That's all there is to it!"
"What do you think of profit-sharing?" Carol ventured.
Mr. Elder thundered his answer, while the others nodded, solemnly and
in tune, like a shop-window of flexible toys, comic mandarins and judges
and ducks and clowns, set quivering by a breeze from the open door:
"All this profit-sharing and welfare work and insurance and old-age
pension is simply poppycock. Enfeebles a workman's independence--and
wastes a lot of honest profit. The half-baked thinker that isn't dry
behind the ears yet, and these suffragettes and God knows what all
buttinskis there are that are trying to tell a business man how to run
his business, and some of these college professors are just about as
bad, the whole kit and bilin' of 'em are nothing in God's world but
socialism in disguise! And it's my bounden duty as a producer to resist
every attack on the integrity of American industry to the last ditch.
Yes--SIR!"
Mr. Elder wiped his brow.
Dave Dyer added, "Sure! You bet! What they ought to do is simply to
hang every one of these agitators, and that would settle the whole thing
right off. Don't you think so, doc?"
"You bet," agreed Kennicott.
The conversation was at last relieved of the plague of Carol's
intrusions and they settled down to the question of whether the justice
of the peace had sent that hobo drunk to jail for ten days or twelve.
It was a matter not readily determined. Then Dave Dyer communicated his
carefree adventures on the gipsy trail:
"Yep. I get good time out of the flivver. 'Bout a week ago I motored
down to New Wurttemberg. That's forty-three----No, let's see: It's
seventeen miles to Belldale, and 'bout six and three-quarters, call it
seven, to Torgenquist, and it's a good nineteen miles from there to New
Wurttemberg--seventeen and seven and nineteen, that makes, uh, let me
see: seventeen and seven 's twenty-four, plus nineteen, well say plus
twenty, that makes forty-four, well anyway, say about forty-three
or -four miles from here to New Wurttemberg. We got started about
seven-fifteen, prob'ly seven-twenty, because I had to stop and fill the
radiator, and we ran along, just keeping up a good steady gait----"
Mr. Dyer did finally, for reasons and purposes admitted and justified,
attain to New Wurttemberg.
Once--only once--the presence of the alien Carol was recognized. Chet
Dashaway leaned over and said asthmatically, "Say, uh, have you been
reading this serial 'Two Out' in Tingling Tales? Corking yarn! Gosh, the
fellow that wrote it certainly can sling baseball slang!"
The others tried to look literary. Harry Haydock offered, "Juanita is
a great hand for reading high-class stuff, like 'Mid the Magnolias' by
this Sara Hetwiggin Butts, and 'Riders of Ranch Reckless.' Books. But
me," he glanced about importantly, as one convinced that no other hero
had ever been in so strange a plight, "I'm so darn busy I don't have
much time to read."
"I never read anything I can't check against," said Sam Clark.
Thus ended the literary portion of the conversation, and for seven
minutes Jackson Elder outlined reasons for believing that the
pike-fishing was better on the west shore of Lake Minniemashie than on
the east--though it was indeed quite true that on the east shore Nat
Hicks had caught a pike altogether admirable.
The talk went on. It did go on! Their voices were monotonous,
thick, emphatic. They were harshly pompous, like men in the
smoking-compartments of Pullman cars. They did not bore Carol. They
frightened her. She panted, "They will be cordial to me, because my man
belongs to their tribe. God help me if I were an outsider!"
Smiling as changelessly as an ivory figurine she sat quiescent, avoiding
thought, glancing about the living-room and hall, noting their betrayal
of unimaginative commercial prosperity. Kennicott said, "Dandy interior,
eh? My idea of how a place ought to be furnished. Modern." She looked
polite, and observed the oiled floors, hard-wood staircase, unused
fireplace with tiles which resembled brown linoleum, cut-glass vases
standing upon doilies, and the barred, shut, forbidding unit bookcases
that were half filled with swashbuckler novels and unread-looking sets
of Dickens, Kipling, O. Henry, and Elbert Hubbard.
She perceived that even personalities were failing to hold the party.
The room filled with hesitancy as with a fog. People cleared their
throats, tried to choke down yawns. The men shot their cuffs and the
women stuck their combs more firmly into their back hair.
Then a rattle, a daring hope in every eye, the swinging of a door, the
smell of strong coffee, Dave Dyer's mewing voice in a triumphant, "The
eats!" They began to chatter. They had something to do. They could
escape from themselves. They fell upon the food--chicken sandwiches,
maple cake, drug-store ice cream. Even when the food was gone they
remained cheerful. They could go home, any time now, and go to bed!
They went, with a flutter of coats, chiffon scarfs, and good-bys.
Carol and Kennicott walked home.
"Did you like them?" he asked.
"They were terribly sweet to me."
"Uh, Carrie----You ought to be more careful about shocking folks.
Talking about gold stockings, and about showing your ankles to
schoolteachers and all!" More mildly: "You gave 'em a good time, but I'd
watch out for that, 'f I were you. Juanita Haydock is such a damn cat. I
wouldn't give her a chance to criticize me."
"My poor effort to lift up the party! Was I wrong to try to amuse them?"
"No! No! Honey, I didn't mean----You were the only up-and-coming person
in the bunch. I just mean----Don't get onto legs and all that immoral
stuff. Pretty conservative crowd."
She was silent, raw with the shameful thought that the attentive circle
might have been criticizing her, laughing at her.
"Don't, please don't worry!" he pleaded.
"Silence."
"Gosh; I'm sorry I spoke about it. I just meant----But they were crazy
about you. Sam said to me, 'That little lady of yours is the slickest
thing that ever came to this town,' he said; and Ma Dawson--I didn't
hardly know whether she'd like you or not, she's such a dried-up old
bird, but she said, 'Your bride is so quick and bright, I declare, she
just wakes me up.'"
Carol liked praise, the flavor and fatness of it, but she was so
energetically being sorry for herself that she could not taste this
commendation.
"Please! Come on! Cheer up!" His lips said it, his anxious shoulder said
it, his arm about her said it, as they halted on the obscure porch of
their house.
"Do you care if they think I'm flighty, Will?"
"Me? Why, I wouldn't care if the whole world thought you were this or
that or anything else. You're my--well, you're my soul!"
He was an undefined mass, as solid-seeming as rock. She found his
sleeve, pinched it, cried, "I'm glad! It's sweet to be wanted! You must
tolerate my frivolousness. You're all I have!"
He lifted her, carried her into the house, and with her arms about his
neck she forgot Main Street.
| Will tells Carol that his friends--the Clarks--have invited them over to meet some of the townsfolk after they've gotten settled. Carol thinks this'll be nice. Before he does anything else, Will wants to drop by his office for an hour to make sure everything's all right with his work. Carol tells him to go but is secretly disappointed when he does. When she looks around Will's home, Carol realizes how ugly everything is. She basically has a panic attack when she realizes that this home and town will be her prison for the rest of her life. Carol runs into the street to take a walk, but the town doesn't make her feel any better. She only confirms what she already thought: that the place is awful, and she has no chance of changing it. Carol looks at the buildings on Main Street one by one and finds nothing in them worth exploring. Eventually, she gives up and retreats to her new home. We find out that a woman named Bea Sorenson was travelling on the same train to Gopher Prairie as Carol and Will. We look in on her now to find her arriving in her cousin's home and looking to find a job in the town. Bea takes a walk down Main Street and sees the exact opposite of what Carol has. She loves all the stores and the people, which just goes to show how much of a difference your perspective can make. Now we look in on the party that Sam Clark and his wife are hosting for Will and his new bride Carol. Will takes Carol and shows her to the room, telling her about the people before introducing her to them. Carol feels vulnerable and exposed, especially considering how much she dislikes the town so far. She never feels like she's saying anything good to the people because she can't tell how judgmental they are. She's certainly judgmental of them and their boring lives. Eventually, Carol gives up and just tries to say whatever the people around her want to hear. Carol's phony acting soon exhausts her, so she retreats to a chair to sit by herself. The host, Sam Clark, decides to make the party more exciting by calling people to tell stories and give short performances. Carol doesn't realize that she's about to hear the same stories at every party she attends that winter. She also listens to a bunch of petty gossip that makes the people spreading it seem like losers. Then the conversation turns to workers' rights, which the people in Sam's house are not fond of. They think that as businessmen, they should be able to run their businesses however they bloody well want. Carol doesn't agree with any of it. Finally, the evening ends, and Carol heads home with Will. On their way, Will cautions her about being too edgy with some of her comments. For example, she might not want to bring up any labor-related politics from now on. | summary |
CHAPTER V
I
"WE'LL steal the whole day, and go hunting. I want you to see the
country round here," Kennicott announced at breakfast. "I'd take the
car--want you to see how swell she runs since I put in a new piston.
But we'll take a team, so we can get right out into the fields. Not many
prairie chickens left now, but we might just happen to run onto a small
covey."
He fussed over his hunting-kit. He pulled his hip boots out to full
length and examined them for holes. He feverishly counted his shotgun
shells, lecturing her on the qualities of smokeless powder. He drew the
new hammerless shotgun out of its heavy tan leather case and made her
peep through the barrels to see how dazzlingly free they were from rust.
The world of hunting and camping-outfits and fishing-tackle was
unfamiliar to her, and in Kennicott's interest she found something
creative and joyous. She examined the smooth stock, the carved hard
rubber butt of the gun. The shells, with their brass caps and sleek
green bodies and hieroglyphics on the wads, were cool and comfortably
heavy in her hands.
Kennicott wore a brown canvas hunting-coat with vast pockets lining
the inside, corduroy trousers which bulged at the wrinkles, peeled and
scarred shoes, a scarecrow felt hat. In this uniform he felt virile.
They clumped out to the livery buggy, they packed the kit and the box of
lunch into the back, crying to each other that it was a magnificent day.
Kennicott had borrowed Jackson Elder's red and white English setter, a
complacent dog with a waving tail of silver hair which flickered in the
sunshine. As they started, the dog yelped, and leaped at the horses'
heads, till Kennicott took him into the buggy, where he nuzzled Carol's
knees and leaned out to sneer at farm mongrels.
The grays clattered out on the hard dirt road with a pleasant song of
hoofs: "Ta ta ta rat! Ta ta ta rat!" It was early and fresh, the air
whistling, frost bright on the golden rod. As the sun warmed the world
of stubble into a welter of yellow they turned from the highroad,
through the bars of a farmer's gate, into a field, slowly bumping over
the uneven earth. In a hollow of the rolling prairie they lost sight
even of the country road. It was warm and placid. Locusts trilled among
the dry wheat-stalks, and brilliant little flies hurtled across the
buggy. A buzz of content filled the air. Crows loitered and gossiped in
the sky.
The dog had been let out and after a dance of excitement he settled down
to a steady quartering of the field, forth and back, forth and back, his
nose down.
"Pete Rustad owns this farm, and he told me he saw a small covey of
chickens in the west forty, last week. Maybe we'll get some sport after
all," Kennicott chuckled blissfully.
She watched the dog in suspense, breathing quickly every time he seemed
to halt. She had no desire to slaughter birds, but she did desire to
belong to Kennicott's world.
The dog stopped, on the point, a forepaw held up.
"By golly! He's hit a scent! Come on!" squealed Kennicott. He leaped
from the buggy, twisted the reins about the whip-socket, swung her out,
caught up his gun, slipped in two shells, stalked toward the rigid dog,
Carol pattering after him. The setter crawled ahead, his tail quivering,
his belly close to the stubble. Carol was nervous. She expected clouds
of large birds to fly up instantly. Her eyes were strained with staring.
But they followed the dog for a quarter of a mile, turning, doubling,
crossing two low hills, kicking through a swale of weeds, crawling
between the strands of a barbed-wire fence. The walking was hard on
her pavement-trained feet. The earth was lumpy, the stubble prickly and
lined with grass, thistles, abortive stumps of clover. She dragged and
floundered.
She heard Kennicott gasp, "Look!" Three gray birds were starting up
from the stubble. They were round, dumpy, like enormous bumble bees.
Kennicott was sighting, moving the barrel. She was agitated. Why didn't
he fire? The birds would be gone! Then a crash, another, and two birds
turned somersaults in the air, plumped down.
When he showed her the birds she had no sensation of blood. These heaps
of feathers were so soft and unbruised--there was about them no hint of
death. She watched her conquering man tuck them into his inside pocket,
and trudged with him back to the buggy.
They found no more prairie chickens that morning.
At noon they drove into her first farmyard, a private village, a white
house with no porches save a low and quite dirty stoop at the back,
a crimson barn with white trimmings, a glazed brick silo, an
ex-carriage-shed, now the garage of a Ford, an unpainted cow-stable, a
chicken-house, a pig-pen, a corn-crib, a granary, the galvanized-iron
skeleton tower of a wind-mill. The dooryard was of packed yellow clay,
treeless, barren of grass, littered with rusty plowshares and wheels
of discarded cultivators. Hardened trampled mud, like lava, filled the
pig-pen. The doors of the house were grime-rubbed, the corners and eaves
were rusted with rain, and the child who stared at them from the kitchen
window was smeary-faced. But beyond the barn was a clump of scarlet
geraniums; the prairie breeze was sunshine in motion; the flashing metal
blades of the windmill revolved with a lively hum; a horse neighed, a
rooster crowed, martins flew in and out of the cow-stable.
A small spare woman with flaxen hair trotted from the house. She was
twanging a Swedish patois--not in monotone, like English, but singing
it, with a lyrical whine:
"Pete he say you kom pretty soon hunting, doctor. My, dot's fine you
kom. Is dis de bride? Ohhhh! Ve yoost say las' night, ve hope maybe ve
see her som day. My, soch a pretty lady!" Mrs. Rustad was shining with
welcome. "Vell, vell! Ay hope you lak dis country! Von't you stay for
dinner, doctor?"
"No, but I wonder if you wouldn't like to give us a glass of milk?"
condescended Kennicott.
"Vell Ay should say Ay vill! You vait har a second and Ay run on de
milk-house!" She nervously hastened to a tiny red building beside the
windmill; she came back with a pitcher of milk from which Carol filled
the thermos bottle.
As they drove off Carol admired, "She's the dearest thing I ever saw.
And she adores you. You are the Lord of the Manor."
"Oh no," much pleased, "but still they do ask my advice about things.
Bully people, these Scandinavian farmers. And prosperous, too. Helga
Rustad, she's still scared of America, but her kids will be doctors and
lawyers and governors of the state and any darn thing they want to."
"I wonder----" Carol was plunged back into last night's Weltschmerz.
"I wonder if these farmers aren't bigger than we are? So simple and
hard-working. The town lives on them. We townies are parasites, and yet
we feel superior to them. Last night I heard Mr. Haydock talking about
'hicks.' Apparently he despises the farmers because they haven't reached
the social heights of selling thread and buttons."
"Parasites? Us? Where'd the farmers be without the town? Who lends them
money? Who--why, we supply them with everything!"
"Don't you find that some of the farmers think they pay too much for the
services of the towns?"
"Oh, of course there's a lot of cranks among the farmers same as there
are among any class. Listen to some of these kickers, a fellow'd
think that the farmers ought to run the state and the whole
shooting-match--probably if they had their way they'd fill up the
legislature with a lot of farmers in manure-covered boots--yes, and
they'd come tell me I was hired on a salary now, and couldn't fix my
fees! That'd be fine for you, wouldn't it!"
"But why shouldn't they?"
"Why? That bunch of----Telling ME----Oh, for heaven's sake, let's quit
arguing. All this discussing may be all right at a party but----Let's
forget it while we're hunting."
"I know. The Wonderlust--probably it's a worse affliction than the
Wanderlust. I just wonder----"
She told herself that she had everything in the world. And after each
self-rebuke she stumbled again on "I just wonder----"
They ate their sandwiches by a prairie slew: long grass reaching up out
of clear water, mossy bogs, red-winged black-birds, the scum a splash of
gold-green. Kennicott smoked a pipe while she leaned back in the buggy
and let her tired spirit be absorbed in the Nirvana of the incomparable
sky.
They lurched to the highroad and awoke from their sun-soaked drowse at
the sound of the clopping hoofs. They paused to look for partridges in a
rim of woods, little woods, very clean and shiny and gay, silver birches
and poplars with immaculate green trunks, encircling a lake of sandy
bottom, a splashing seclusion demure in the welter of hot prairie.
Kennicott brought down a fat red squirrel and at dusk he had a dramatic
shot at a flight of ducks whirling down from the upper air, skimming the
lake, instantly vanishing.
They drove home under the sunset. Mounds of straw, and wheat-stacks like
bee-hives, stood out in startling rose and gold, and the green-tufted
stubble glistened. As the vast girdle of crimson darkened, the fulfilled
land became autumnal in deep reds and browns. The black road before
the buggy turned to a faint lavender, then was blotted to uncertain
grayness. Cattle came in a long line up to the barred gates of the
farmyards, and over the resting land was a dark glow.
Carol had found the dignity and greatness which had failed her in Main
Street.
II
Till they had a maid they took noon dinner and six o'clock supper at
Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house.
Mrs. Elisha Gurrey, relict of Deacon Gurrey the dealer in hay and grain,
was a pointed-nosed, simpering woman with iron-gray hair drawn so tight
that it resembled a soiled handkerchief covering her head. But she was
unexpectedly cheerful, and her dining-room, with its thin tablecloth on
a long pine table, had the decency of clean bareness.
In the line of unsmiling, methodically chewing guests, like horses at
a manger, Carol came to distinguish one countenance: the pale, long,
spectacled face and sandy pompadour hair of Mr. Raymond P. Wutherspoon,
known as "Raymie," professional bachelor, manager and one half the
sales-force in the shoe-department of the Bon Ton Store.
"You will enjoy Gopher Prairie very much, Mrs. Kennicott," petitioned
Raymie. His eyes were like those of a dog waiting to be let in out of
the cold. He passed the stewed apricots effusively. "There are a great
many bright cultured people here. Mrs. Wilks, the Christian Science
reader, is a very bright woman--though I am not a Scientist myself,
in fact I sing in the Episcopal choir. And Miss Sherwin of the high
school--she is such a pleasing, bright girl--I was fitting her to a pair
of tan gaiters yesterday, I declare, it really was a pleasure."
"Gimme the butter, Carrie," was Kennicott's comment. She defied him by
encouraging Raymie:
"Do you have amateur dramatics and so on here?"
"Oh yes! The town's just full of talent. The Knights of Pythias put on a
dandy minstrel show last year."
"It's nice you're so enthusiastic."
"Oh, do you really think so? Lots of folks jolly me for trying to get
up shows and so on. I tell them they have more artistic gifts than they
know. Just yesterday I was saying to Harry Haydock: if he would read
poetry, like Longfellow, or if he would join the band--I get so much
pleasure out of playing the cornet, and our band-leader, Del Snafflin,
is such a good musician, I often say he ought to give up his barbering
and become a professional musician, he could play the clarinet in
Minneapolis or New York or anywhere, but--but I couldn't get Harry to
see it at all and--I hear you and the doctor went out hunting yesterday.
Lovely country, isn't it. And did you make some calls? The mercantile
life isn't inspiring like medicine. It must be wonderful to see how
patients trust you, doctor."
"Huh. It's me that's got to do all the trusting. Be damn sight more
wonderful 'f they'd pay their bills," grumbled Kennicott and, to Carol,
he whispered something which sounded like "gentleman hen."
But Raymie's pale eyes were watering at her. She helped him with, "So
you like to read poetry?"
"Oh yes, so much--though to tell the truth, I don't get much time
for reading, we're always so busy at the store and----But we had the
dandiest professional reciter at the Pythian Sisters sociable last
winter."
Carol thought she heard a grunt from the traveling salesman at the end
of the table, and Kennicott's jerking elbow was a grunt embodied. She
persisted:
"Do you get to see many plays, Mr. Wutherspoon?"
He shone at her like a dim blue March moon, and sighed, "No, but I do
love the movies. I'm a real fan. One trouble with books is that they're
not so thoroughly safeguarded by intelligent censors as the movies are,
and when you drop into the library and take out a book you never know
what you're wasting your time on. What I like in books is a wholesome,
really improving story, and sometimes----Why, once I started a novel by
this fellow Balzac that you read about, and it told how a lady wasn't
living with her husband, I mean she wasn't his wife. It went into
details, disgustingly! And the English was real poor. I spoke to the
library about it, and they took it off the shelves. I'm not narrow,
but I must say I don't see any use in this deliberately dragging in
immorality! Life itself is so full of temptations that in literature one
wants only that which is pure and uplifting."
"What's the name of that Balzac yarn? Where can I get hold of it?"
giggled the traveling salesman.
Raymie ignored him. "But the movies, they are mostly clean, and their
humor----Don't you think that the most essential quality for a person to
have is a sense of humor?"
"I don't know. I really haven't much," said Carol.
He shook his finger at her. "Now, now, you're too modest. I'm sure we
can all see that you have a perfectly corking sense of humor. Besides,
Dr. Kennicott wouldn't marry a lady that didn't have. We all know how he
loves his fun!"
"You bet. I'm a jokey old bird. Come on, Carrie; let's beat it,"
remarked Kennicott.
Raymie implored, "And what is your chief artistic interest, Mrs.
Kennicott?"
"Oh----" Aware that the traveling salesman had murmured, "Dentistry,"
she desperately hazarded, "Architecture."
"That's a real nice art. I've always said--when Haydock & Simons were
finishing the new front on the Bon Ton building, the old man came to me,
you know, Harry's father, 'D. H.,' I always call him, and he asked me
how I liked it, and I said to him, 'Look here, D. H.,' I said--you see,
he was going to leave the front plain, and I said to him, 'It's all very
well to have modern lighting and a big display-space,' I said, 'but when
you get that in, you want to have some architecture, too,' I said, and
he laughed and said he guessed maybe I was right, and so he had 'em put
on a cornice."
"Tin!" observed the traveling salesman.
Raymie bared his teeth like a belligerent mouse. "Well, what if it is
tin? That's not my fault. I told D. H. to make it polished granite. You
make me tired!"
"Leave us go! Come on, Carrie, leave us go!" from Kennicott.
Raymie waylaid them in the hall and secretly informed Carol that she
musn't mind the traveling salesman's coarseness--he belonged to the
hwa pollwa.
Kennicott chuckled, "Well, child, how about it? Do you prefer an
artistic guy like Raymie to stupid boobs like Sam Clark and me?"
"My dear! Let's go home, and play pinochle, and laugh, and be foolish,
and slip up to bed, and sleep without dreaming. It's beautiful to be
just a solid citizeness!"
III
From the Gopher Prairie Weekly Dauntless:
One of the most charming affairs of the season was held Tuesday evening
at the handsome new residence of Sam and Mrs. Clark when many of our
most prominent citizens gathered to greet the lovely new bride of our
popular local physician, Dr. Will Kennicott. All present spoke of the
many charms of the bride, formerly Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul. Games
and stunts were the order of the day, with merry talk and conversation.
At a late hour dainty refreshments were served, and the party broke up
with many expressions of pleasure at the pleasant affair. Among those
present were Mesdames Kennicott, Elder----
* * * * *
Dr. Will Kennicott, for the past several years one of our most popular
and skilful physicians and surgeons, gave the town a delightful surprise
when he returned from an extended honeymoon tour in Colorado this week
with his charming bride, nee Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul, whose
family are socially prominent in Minneapolis and Mankato. Mrs. Kennicott
is a lady of manifold charms, not only of striking charm of appearance
but is also a distinguished graduate of a school in the East and has
for the past year been prominently connected in an important position
of responsibility with the St. Paul Public Library, in which city Dr.
"Will" had the good fortune to meet her. The city of Gopher Prairie
welcomes her to our midst and prophesies for her many happy years in
the energetic city of the twin lakes and the future. The Dr. and Mrs.
Kennicott will reside for the present at the Doctor's home on Poplar
Street which his charming mother has been keeping for him who has now
returned to her own home at Lac-qui-Meurt leaving a host of friends who
regret her absence and hope to see her soon with us again.
IV
She knew that if she was ever to effect any of the "reforms" which she
had pictured, she must have a starting-place. What confused her during
the three or four months after her marriage was not lack of perception
that she must be definite, but sheer careless happiness of her first
home.
In the pride of being a housewife she loved every detail--the brocade
armchair with the weak back, even the brass water-cock on the hot-water
reservoir, when she had become familiar with it by trying to scour it to
brilliance.
She found a maid--plump radiant Bea Sorenson from Scandia Crossing. Bea
was droll in her attempt to be at once a respectful servant and a bosom
friend. They laughed together over the fact that the stove did not draw,
over the slipperiness of fish in the pan.
Like a child playing Grandma in a trailing skirt, Carol paraded uptown
for her marketing, crying greetings to housewives along the way.
Everybody bowed to her, strangers and all, and made her feel that they
wanted her, that she belonged here. In city shops she was merely A
Customer--a hat, a voice to bore a harassed clerk. Here she was Mrs. Doc
Kennicott, and her preferences in grape-fruit and manners were known
and remembered and worth discussing . . . even if they weren't worth
fulfilling.
Shopping was a delight of brisk conferences. The very merchants whose
droning she found the dullest at the two or three parties which were
given to welcome her were the pleasantest confidants of all when they
had something to talk about--lemons or cotton voile or floor-oil.
With that skip-jack Dave Dyer, the druggist, she conducted a long
mock-quarrel. She pretended that he cheated her in the price of
magazines and candy; he pretended she was a detective from the Twin
Cities. He hid behind the prescription-counter, and when she stamped
her foot he came out wailing, "Honest, I haven't done nothing crooked
today--not yet."
She never recalled her first impression of Main Street; never
had precisely the same despair at its ugliness. By the end of two
shopping-tours everything had changed proportions. As she never entered
it, the Minniemashie House ceased to exist for her. Clark's Hardware
Store, Dyer's Drug Store, the groceries of Ole Jenson and Frederick
Ludelmeyer and Howland & Gould, the meat markets, the notions
shop--they expanded, and hid all other structures. When she entered Mr.
Ludelmeyer's store and he wheezed, "Goot mornin', Mrs. Kennicott. Vell,
dis iss a fine day," she did not notice the dustiness of the shelves
nor the stupidity of the girl clerk; and she did not remember the mute
colloquy with him on her first view of Main Street.
She could not find half the kinds of food she wanted, but that made
shopping more of an adventure. When she did contrive to get sweetbreads
at Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market the triumph was so vast that she buzzed
with excitement and admired the strong wise butcher, Mr. Dahl.
She appreciated the homely ease of village life. She liked the old men,
farmers, G.A.R. veterans, who when they gossiped sometimes squatted on
their heels on the sidewalk, like resting Indians, and reflectively spat
over the curb.
She found beauty in the children.
She had suspected that her married friends exaggerated their passion
for children. But in her work in the library, children had become
individuals to her, citizens of the State with their own rights and
their own senses of humor. In the library she had not had much time
to give them, but now she knew the luxury of stopping, gravely asking
Bessie Clark whether her doll had yet recovered from its rheumatism, and
agreeing with Oscar Martinsen that it would be Good Fun to go trapping
"mushrats."
She touched the thought, "It would be sweet to have a baby of my own. I
do want one. Tiny----No! Not yet! There's so much to do. And I'm still
tired from the job. It's in my bones."
She rested at home. She listened to the village noises common to all
the world, jungle or prairie; sounds simple and charged with magic--dogs
barking, chickens making a gurgling sound of content, children at play,
a man beating a rug, wind in the cottonwood trees, a locust fiddling,
a footstep on the walk, jaunty voices of Bea and a grocer's boy in the
kitchen, a clinking anvil, a piano--not too near.
Twice a week, at least, she drove into the country with Kennicott, to
hunt ducks in lakes enameled with sunset, or to call on patients who
looked up to her as the squire's lady and thanked her for toys and
magazines. Evenings she went with her husband to the motion pictures and
was boisterously greeted by every other couple; or, till it became too
cold, they sat on the porch, bawling to passers-by in motors, or to
neighbors who were raking the leaves. The dust became golden in the low
sun; the street was filled with the fragrance of burning leaves.
V
But she hazily wanted some one to whom she could say what she thought.
On a slow afternoon when she fidgeted over sewing and wished that the
telephone would ring, Bea announced Miss Vida Sherwin.
Despite Vida Sherwin's lively blue eyes, if you had looked at her in
detail you would have found her face slightly lined, and not so much
sallow as with the bloom rubbed off; you would have found her chest
flat, and her fingers rough from needle and chalk and penholder; her
blouses and plain cloth skirts undistinguished; and her hat worn too far
back, betraying a dry forehead. But you never did look at Vida Sherwin
in detail. You couldn't. Her electric activity veiled her. She was as
energetic as a chipmunk. Her fingers fluttered; her sympathy came out
in spurts; she sat on the edge of a chair in eagerness to be near her
auditor, to send her enthusiasms and optimism across.
She rushed into the room pouring out: "I'm afraid you'll think the
teachers have been shabby in not coming near you, but we wanted to
give you a chance to get settled. I am Vida Sherwin, and I try to teach
French and English and a few other things in the high school."
"I've been hoping to know the teachers. You see, I was a librarian----"
"Oh, you needn't tell me. I know all about you! Awful how much I
know--this gossipy village. We need you so much here. It's a dear loyal
town (and isn't loyalty the finest thing in the world!) but it's a
rough diamond, and we need you for the polishing, and we're ever so
humble----" She stopped for breath and finished her compliment with a
smile.
"If I COULD help you in any way----Would I be committing the
unpardonable sin if I whispered that I think Gopher Prairie is a tiny
bit ugly?"
"Of course it's ugly. Dreadfully! Though I'm probably the only person in
town to whom you could safely say that. (Except perhaps Guy Pollock
the lawyer--have you met him?--oh, you MUST!--he's simply a
darling--intelligence and culture and so gentle.) But I don't care so
much about the ugliness. That will change. It's the spirit that gives
me hope. It's sound. Wholesome. But afraid. It needs live creatures like
you to awaken it. I shall slave-drive you!"
"Splendid. What shall I do? I've been wondering if it would be possible
to have a good architect come here to lecture."
"Ye-es, but don't you think it would be better to work with existing
agencies? Perhaps it will sound slow to you, but I was thinking----It
would be lovely if we could get you to teach Sunday School."
Carol had the empty expression of one who finds that she has been
affectionately bowing to a complete stranger. "Oh yes. But I'm afraid I
wouldn't be much good at that. My religion is so foggy."
"I know. So is mine. I don't care a bit for dogma. Though I do stick
firmly to the belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man
and the leadership of Jesus. As you do, of course."
Carol looked respectable and thought about having tea.
"And that's all you need teach in Sunday School. It's the personal
influence. Then there's the library-board. You'd be so useful on that.
And of course there's our women's study club--the Thanatopsis Club."
"Are they doing anything? Or do they read papers made out of the
Encyclopedia?"
Miss Sherwin shrugged. "Perhaps. But still, they are so earnest. They
will respond to your fresher interest. And the Thanatopsis does do a
good social work--they've made the city plant ever so many trees, and
they run the rest-room for farmers' wives. And they do take such an
interest in refinement and culture. So--in fact, so very unique."
Carol was disappointed--by nothing very tangible. She said politely,
"I'll think them all over. I must have a while to look around first."
Miss Sherwin darted to her, smoothed her hair, peered at her. "Oh,
my dear, don't you suppose I know? These first tender days of
marriage--they're sacred to me. Home, and children that need you, and
depend on you to keep them alive, and turn to you with their wrinkly
little smiles. And the hearth and----" She hid her face from Carol as
she made an activity of patting the cushion of her chair, but she went
on with her former briskness:
"I mean, you must help us when you're ready. . . . I'm afraid you'll
think I'm conservative. I am! So much to conserve. All this treasure of
American ideals. Sturdiness and democracy and opportunity. Maybe not at
Palm Beach. But, thank heaven, we're free from such social distinctions
in Gopher Prairie. I have only one good quality--overwhelming belief in
the brains and hearts of our nation, our state, our town. It's so strong
that sometimes I do have a tiny effect on the haughty ten-thousandaires.
I shake 'em up and make 'em believe in ideals--yes, in themselves. But
I get into a rut of teaching. I need young critical things like you to
punch me up. Tell me, what are you reading?"
"I've been re-reading 'The Damnation of Theron Ware.' Do you know it?"
"Yes. It was clever. But hard. Man wanted to tear down, not build up.
Cynical. Oh, I do hope I'm not a sentimentalist. But I can't see any use
in this high-art stuff that doesn't encourage us day-laborers to plod
on."
Ensued a fifteen-minute argument about the oldest topic in the world:
It's art but is it pretty? Carol tried to be eloquent regarding honesty
of observation. Miss Sherwin stood out for sweetness and a cautious use
of the uncomfortable properties of light. At the end Carol cried:
"I don't care how much we disagree. It's a relief to have somebody
talk something besides crops. Let's make Gopher Prairie rock to its
foundations: let's have afternoon tea instead of afternoon coffee."
The delighted Bea helped her bring out the ancestral folding
sewing-table, whose yellow and black top was scarred with dotted lines
from a dressmaker's tracing-wheel, and to set it with an embroidered
lunch-cloth, and the mauve-glazed Japanese tea-set which she had brought
from St. Paul. Miss Sherwin confided her latest scheme--moral motion
pictures for country districts, with light from a portable dynamo
hitched to a Ford engine. Bea was twice called to fill the hot-water
pitcher and to make cinnamon toast.
When Kennicott came home at five he tried to be courtly, as befits the
husband of one who has afternoon tea. Carol suggested that Miss Sherwin
stay for supper, and that Kennicott invite Guy Pollock, the much-praised
lawyer, the poetic bachelor.
Yes, Pollock could come. Yes, he was over the grippe which had prevented
his going to Sam Clark's party.
Carol regretted her impulse. The man would be an opinionated politician,
heavily jocular about The Bride. But at the entrance of Guy Pollock she
discovered a personality. Pollock was a man of perhaps thirty-eight,
slender, still, deferential. His voice was low. "It was very good of you
to want me," he said, and he offered no humorous remarks, and did not
ask her if she didn't think Gopher Prairie was "the livest little burg
in the state."
She fancied that his even grayness might reveal a thousand tints of
lavender and blue and silver.
At supper he hinted his love for Sir Thomas Browne, Thoreau, Agnes
Repplier, Arthur Symons, Claude Washburn, Charles Flandrau. He presented
his idols diffidently, but he expanded in Carol's bookishness, in Miss
Sherwin's voluminous praise, in Kennicott's tolerance of any one who
amused his wife.
Carol wondered why Guy Pollock went on digging at routine law-cases;
why he remained in Gopher Prairie. She had no one whom she could ask.
Neither Kennicott nor Vida Sherwin would understand that there might be
reasons why a Pollock should not remain in Gopher Prairie. She enjoyed
the faint mystery. She felt triumphant and rather literary. She already
had a Group. It would be only a while now before she provided the town
with fanlights and a knowledge of Galsworthy. She was doing things! As
she served the emergency dessert of cocoanut and sliced oranges, she
cried to Pollock, "Don't you think we ought to get up a dramatic club?"
| Will wants to take Carol hunting so she can experience the great outdoors of Gopher Prairie. He borrows a buddy's dog and bustles Carol into his motorcar. Will and Carol reach the prairies, where Will kills a few birds with his rifle. Afterward, they stop by a Scandinavian farmer's house and ask for a glass of milk. Carol is impressed by how much these people adore Will. She admires him for a moment. Carol even wonders for a moment if the farmers are the true leaders of Gopher Prairie, since the town depends so heavily on them. Will takes exception to the idea that the townsfolk are parasites. He says that the farmers depend entirely on the money and goods the town provides them, and he argues that the townsfolk are better-educated and generally superior people. Still, Carol finds a dignity and greatness in the farmland that she doesn't find on Main Street. That evening, Carol meets a guy named Raymie Wutherspoon, who likes to put on little shows for the community. Carol thinks he might turn out to be an interesting guy--but she's disappointed to find out that he's just as boring as anyone else. Carol is surprised to find herself feeling content with being a simple housewife in Gopher Prairie--at least for the first few months of her marriage. She ends up hiring Bea Sorenson as a maid and becomes good chums with her. Carol soon finds herself thinking about having a baby. She decides to wait on this one, but she secretly wishes for someone she can tell all her deepest thoughts to. One day, a woman named Vida Sherwin comes calling on Carol. Vida agrees with Carol that Gopher Prairie is ugly and that it needs some sensible women to clean it up. But Vida is less radical than Carol when it comes to how they'll do this. Vida thinks they should start small, maybe with Carol teaching at the Sunday School. Carol would rather invite a famous architect to come to the town and give a lecture. Vida also invites Carol to join the Thanatopsis Club, which is a reading group that some of the women in the town have organized. When Will gets home from work, Carol invites Vida to stay for supper, and Will invites a lawyer named Guy Pollock to join them. When Guy arrives, he turns out to know a lot about literature. Carol wonders why Guy's working such a routine job and living in Gopher Prairie. She asks Pollock whether he thinks Gopher Prairie should have a dramatic club to host shows for the community. | summary |
CHAPTER VI
I
WHEN the first dubious November snow had filtered down, shading with
white the bare clods in the plowed fields, when the first small fire
had been started in the furnace, which is the shrine of a Gopher Prairie
home, Carol began to make the house her own. She dismissed the parlor
furniture--the golden oak table with brass knobs, the moldy brocade
chairs, the picture of "The Doctor." She went to Minneapolis, to scamper
through department stores and small Tenth Street shops devoted to
ceramics and high thought. She had to ship her treasures, but she wanted
to bring them back in her arms.
Carpenters had torn out the partition between front parlor and back
parlor, thrown it into a long room on which she lavished yellow and
deep blue; a Japanese obi with an intricacy of gold thread on stiff
ultramarine tissue, which she hung as a panel against the maize wall; a
couch with pillows of sapphire velvet and gold bands; chairs which, in
Gopher Prairie, seemed flippant. She hid the sacred family phonograph in
the dining-room, and replaced its stand with a square cabinet on which
was a squat blue jar between yellow candles.
Kennicott decided against a fireplace. "We'll have a new house in a
couple of years, anyway."
She decorated only one room. The rest, Kennicott hinted, she'd better
leave till he "made a ten-strike."
The brown cube of a house stirred and awakened; it seemed to be in
motion; it welcomed her back from shopping; it lost its mildewed
repression.
The supreme verdict was Kennicott's "Well, by golly, I was afraid the
new junk wouldn't be so comfortable, but I must say this divan, or
whatever you call it, is a lot better than that bumpy old sofa we had,
and when I look around----Well, it's worth all it cost, I guess."
Every one in town took an interest in the refurnishing. The carpenters
and painters who did not actually assist crossed the lawn to peer
through the windows and exclaim, "Fine! Looks swell!" Dave Dyer at
the drug store, Harry Haydock and Raymie Wutherspoon at the Bon Ton,
repeated daily, "How's the good work coming? I hear the house is getting
to be real classy."
Even Mrs. Bogart.
Mrs. Bogart lived across the alley from the rear of Carol's house. She
was a widow, and a Prominent Baptist, and a Good Influence. She had so
painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them
had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus
N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen
member of the toughest gang in Boytown.
Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She was the soft,
damp, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly
hopeful kind. There are in every large chicken-yard a number of old and
indignant hens who resemble Mrs. Bogart, and when they are served at
Sunday noon dinner, as fricasseed chicken with thick dumplings, they
keep up the resemblance.
Carol had noted that Mrs. Bogart from her side window kept an eye upon
the house. The Kennicotts and Mrs. Bogart did not move in the same
sets--which meant precisely the same in Gopher Prairie as it did on
Fifth Avenue or in Mayfair. But the good widow came calling.
She wheezed in, sighed, gave Carol a pulpy hand, sighed, glanced sharply
at the revelation of ankles as Carol crossed her legs, sighed, inspected
the new blue chairs, smiled with a coy sighing sound, and gave voice:
"I've wanted to call on you so long, dearie, you know we're neighbors,
but I thought I'd wait till you got settled, you must run in and see me,
how much did that big chair cost?"
"Seventy-seven dollars!"
"Sev----Sakes alive! Well, I suppose it's all right for them that can
afford it, though I do sometimes think----Of course as our pastor said
once, at Baptist Church----By the way, we haven't seen you there yet,
and of course your husband was raised up a Baptist, and I do hope
he won't drift away from the fold, of course we all know there isn't
anything, not cleverness or gifts of gold or anything, that can make
up for humility and the inward grace and they can say what they want to
about the P. E. church, but of course there's no church that has more
history or has stayed by the true principles of Christianity better
than the Baptist Church and----In what church were you raised, Mrs.
Kennicott?"
"W-why, I went to Congregational, as a girl in Mankato, but my college
was Universalist."
"Well----But of course as the Bible says, is it the Bible, at least I
know I have heard it in church and everybody admits it, it's proper for
the little bride to take her husband's vessel of faith, so we all hope
we shall see you at the Baptist Church and----As I was saying, of course
I agree with Reverend Zitterel in thinking that the great trouble with
this nation today is lack of spiritual faith--so few going to church,
and people automobiling on Sunday and heaven knows what all. But still
I do think that one trouble is this terrible waste of money, people
feeling that they've got to have bath-tubs and telephones in their
houses----I heard you were selling the old furniture cheap."
"Yes!"
"Well--of course you know your own mind, but I can't help thinking, when
Will's ma was down here keeping house for him--SHE used to run in to SEE
me, real OFTEN!--it was good enough furniture for her. But there, there,
I mustn't croak, I just wanted to let you know that when you find you
can't depend on a lot of these gadding young folks like the Haydocks and
the Dyers--and heaven only knows how much money Juanita Haydock blows in
in a year--why then you may be glad to know that slow old Aunty Bogart
is always right there, and heaven knows----" A portentous sigh. "--I
HOPE you and your husband won't have any of the troubles, with sickness
and quarreling and wasting money and all that so many of these young
couples do have and----But I must be running along now, dearie. It's
been such a pleasure and----Just run in and see me any time. I hope Will
is well? I thought he looked a wee mite peaked."
It was twenty minutes later when Mrs. Bogart finally oozed out of the
front door. Carol ran back into the living-room and jerked open the
windows. "That woman has left damp finger-prints in the air," she said.
II
Carol was extravagant, but at least she did not try to clear herself of
blame by going about whimpering, "I know I'm terribly extravagant but I
don't seem to be able to help it."
Kennicott had never thought of giving her an allowance. His mother had
never had one! As a wage-earning spinster Carol had asserted to her
fellow librarians that when she was married, she was going to have an
allowance and be business-like and modern. But it was too much trouble
to explain to Kennicott's kindly stubbornness that she was a practical
housekeeper as well as a flighty playmate. She bought a budget-plan
account book and made her budgets as exact as budgets are likely to be
when they lack budgets.
For the first month it was a honeymoon jest to beg prettily, to confess,
"I haven't a cent in the house, dear," and to be told, "You're an
extravagant little rabbit." But the budget book made her realize how
inexact were her finances. She became self-conscious; occasionally she
was indignant that she should always have to petition him for the money
with which to buy his food. She caught herself criticizing his belief
that, since his joke about trying to keep her out of the poorhouse had
once been accepted as admirable humor, it should continue to be his
daily bon mot. It was a nuisance to have to run down the street after
him because she had forgotten to ask him for money at breakfast.
But she couldn't "hurt his feelings," she reflected. He liked the
lordliness of giving largess.
She tried to reduce the frequency of begging by opening accounts and
having the bills sent to him. She had found that staple groceries,
sugar, flour, could be most cheaply purchased at Axel Egge's rustic
general store. She said sweetly to Axel:
"I think I'd better open a charge account here."
"I don't do no business except for cash," grunted Axel.
She flared, "Do you know who I am?"
"Yuh, sure, I know. The doc is good for it. But that's yoost a rule I
made. I make low prices. I do business for cash."
She stared at his red impassive face, and her fingers had the
undignified desire to slap him, but her reason agreed with him. "You're
quite right. You shouldn't break your rule for me."
Her rage had not been lost. It had been transferred to her husband. She
wanted ten pounds of sugar in a hurry, but she had no money. She ran up
the stairs to Kennicott's office. On the door was a sign advertising a
headache cure and stating, "The doctor is out, back at----" Naturally,
the blank space was not filled out. She stamped her foot. She ran down
to the drug store--the doctor's club.
As she entered she heard Mrs. Dyer demanding, "Dave, I've got to have
some money."
Carol saw that her husband was there, and two other men, all listening
in amusement.
Dave Dyer snapped, "How much do you want? Dollar be enough?"
"No, it won't! I've got to get some underclothes for the kids."
"Why, good Lord, they got enough now to fill the closet so I couldn't
find my hunting boots, last time I wanted them."
"I don't care. They're all in rags. You got to give me ten dollars----"
Carol perceived that Mrs. Dyer was accustomed to this indignity. She
perceived that the men, particularly Dave, regarded it as an excellent
jest. She waited--she knew what would come--it did. Dave yelped,
"Where's that ten dollars I gave you last year?" and he looked to the
other men to laugh. They laughed.
Cold and still, Carol walked up to Kennicott and commanded, "I want to
see you upstairs."
"Why--something the matter?"
"Yes!"
He clumped after her, up the stairs, into his barren office. Before he
could get out a query she stated:
"Yesterday, in front of a saloon, I heard a German farm-wife beg her
husband for a quarter, to get a toy for the baby--and he refused. Just
now I've heard Mrs. Dyer going through the same humiliation. And I--I'm
in the same position! I have to beg you for money. Daily! I have just
been informed that I couldn't have any sugar because I hadn't the money
to pay for it!"
"Who said that? By God, I'll kill any----"
"Tut. It wasn't his fault. It was yours. And mine. I now humbly beg
you to give me the money with which to buy meals for you to eat. And
hereafter to remember it. The next time, I sha'n't beg. I shall simply
starve. Do you understand? I can't go on being a slave----"
Her defiance, her enjoyment of the role, ran out. She was sobbing
against his overcoat, "How can you shame me so?" and he was blubbering,
"Dog-gone it, I meant to give you some, and I forgot it. I swear I won't
again. By golly I won't!"
He pressed fifty dollars upon her, and after that he remembered to give
her money regularly . . . sometimes.
Daily she determined, "But I must have a stated amount--be
business-like. System. I must do something about it." And daily she
didn't do anything about it.
III
Mrs. Bogart had, by the simpering viciousness of her comments on the new
furniture, stirred Carol to economy. She spoke judiciously to Bea
about left-overs. She read the cookbook again and, like a child with
a picture-book, she studied the diagram of the beef which gallantly
continues to browse though it is divided into cuts.
But she was a deliberate and joyous spendthrift in her preparations for
her first party, the housewarming. She made lists on every envelope
and laundry-slip in her desk. She sent orders to Minneapolis "fancy
grocers." She pinned patterns and sewed. She was irritated when
Kennicott was jocular about "these frightful big doings that are going
on." She regarded the affair as an attack on Gopher Prairie's timidity
in pleasure. "I'll make 'em lively, if nothing else. I'll make 'em stop
regarding parties as committee-meetings."
Kennicott usually considered himself the master of the house. At his
desire, she went hunting, which was his symbol of happiness, and she
ordered porridge for breakfast, which was his symbol of morality. But
when he came home on the afternoon before the housewarming he found
himself a slave, an intruder, a blunderer. Carol wailed, "Fix the
furnace so you won't have to touch it after supper. And for heaven's
sake take that horrible old door-mat off the porch. And put on your nice
brown and white shirt. Why did you come home so late? Would you mind
hurrying? Here it is almost suppertime, and those fiends are just as
likely as not to come at seven instead of eight. PLEASE hurry!"
She was as unreasonable as an amateur leading woman on a first night,
and he was reduced to humility. When she came down to supper, when she
stood in the doorway, he gasped. She was in a silver sheath, the calyx
of a lily, her piled hair like black glass; she had the fragility and
costliness of a Viennese goblet; and her eyes were intense. He was
stirred to rise from the table and to hold the chair for her; and all
through supper he ate his bread dry because he felt that she would think
him common if he said "Will you hand me the butter?"
IV
She had reached the calmness of not caring whether her guests liked
the party or not, and a state of satisfied suspense in regard to Bea's
technique in serving, before Kennicott cried from the bay-window in
the living-room, "Here comes somebody!" and Mr. and Mrs. Luke Dawson
faltered in, at a quarter to eight. Then in a shy avalanche arrived
the entire aristocracy of Gopher Prairie: all persons engaged in a
profession, or earning more than twenty-five hundred dollars a year, or
possessed of grandparents born in America.
Even while they were removing their overshoes they were peeping at the
new decorations. Carol saw Dave Dyer secretively turn over the gold
pillows to find a price-tag, and heard Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh, the
attorney, gasp, "Well, I'll be switched," as he viewed the vermilion
print hanging against the Japanese obi. She was amused. But her high
spirits slackened as she beheld them form in dress parade, in a long,
silent, uneasy circle clear round the living-room. She felt that she had
been magically whisked back to her first party, at Sam Clark's.
"Have I got to lift them, like so many pigs of iron? I don't know that I
can make them happy, but I'll make them hectic."
A silver flame in the darkling circle, she whirled around, drew them
with her smile, and sang, "I want my party to be noisy and undignified!
This is the christening of my house, and I want you to help me have a
bad influence on it, so that it will be a giddy house. For me, won't you
all join in an old-fashioned square dance? And Mr. Dyer will call."
She had a record on the phonograph; Dave Dyer was capering in the center
of the floor, loose-jointed, lean, small, rusty headed, pointed of nose,
clapping his hands and shouting, "Swing y' pardners--alamun lef!"
Even the millionaire Dawsons and Ezra Stowbody and "Professor" George
Edwin Mott danced, looking only slightly foolish; and by rushing about
the room and being coy and coaxing to all persons over forty-five, Carol
got them into a waltz and a Virginia Reel. But when she left them to
disenjoy themselves in their own way Harry Haydock put a one-step record
on the phonograph, the younger people took the floor, and all the elders
sneaked back to their chairs, with crystallized smiles which meant,
"Don't believe I'll try this one myself, but I do enjoy watching the
youngsters dance."
Half of them were silent; half resumed the discussions of that afternoon
in the store. Ezra Stowbody hunted for something to say, hid a yawn, and
offered to Lyman Cass, the owner of the flour-mill, "How d' you folks
like the new furnace, Lym? Huh? So."
"Oh, let them alone. Don't pester them. They must like it, or they
wouldn't do it." Carol warned herself. But they gazed at her so
expectantly when she flickered past that she was reconvinced that in
their debauches of respectability they had lost the power of play as
well as the power of impersonal thought. Even the dancers were gradually
crushed by the invisible force of fifty perfectly pure and well-behaved
and negative minds; and they sat down, two by two. In twenty minutes the
party was again elevated to the decorum of a prayer-meeting.
"We're going to do something exciting," Carol exclaimed to her new
confidante, Vida Sherwin. She saw that in the growing quiet her voice
had carried across the room. Nat Hicks, Ella Stowbody, and Dave Dyer
were abstracted, fingers and lips slightly moving. She knew with a
cold certainty that Dave was rehearsing his "stunt" about the Norwegian
catching the hen, Ella running over the first lines of "An Old
Sweetheart of Mine," and Nat thinking of his popular parody on Mark
Antony's oration.
"But I will not have anybody use the word 'stunt' in my house," she
whispered to Miss Sherwin.
"That's good. I tell you: why not have Raymond Wutherspoon sing?"
"Raymie? Why, my dear, he's the most sentimental yearner in town!"
"See here, child! Your opinions on house-decorating are sound, but your
opinions of people are rotten! Raymie does wag his tail. But the poor
dear----Longing for what he calls 'self-expression' and no training in
anything except selling shoes. But he can sing. And some day when
he gets away from Harry Haydock's patronage and ridicule, he'll do
something fine."
Carol apologized for her superciliousness. She urged Raymie, and warned
the planners of "stunts," "We all want you to sing, Mr. Wutherspoon.
You're the only famous actor I'm going to let appear on the stage
tonight."
While Raymie blushed and admitted, "Oh, they don't want to hear me," he
was clearing his throat, pulling his clean handkerchief farther out of
his breast pocket, and thrusting his fingers between the buttons of his
vest.
In her affection for Raymie's defender, in her desire to "discover
artistic talent," Carol prepared to be delighted by the recital.
Raymie sang "Fly as a Bird," "Thou Art My Dove," and "When the Little
Swallow Leaves Its Tiny Nest," all in a reasonably bad offertory tenor.
Carol was shuddering with the vicarious shame which sensitive people
feel when they listen to an "elocutionist" being humorous, or to a
precocious child publicly doing badly what no child should do at all.
She wanted to laugh at the gratified importance in Raymie's half-shut
eyes; she wanted to weep over the meek ambitiousness which clouded like
an aura his pale face, flap ears, and sandy pompadour. She tried to look
admiring, for the benefit of Miss Sherwin, that trusting admirer of all
that was or conceivably could be the good, the true, and the beautiful.
At the end of the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from
her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, "My! That was
sweet! Of course Raymond hasn't an unusually good voice, but don't you
think he puts such a lot of feeling into it?"
Carol lied blackly and magnificently, but without originality: "Oh yes,
I do think he has so much FEELING!"
She saw that after the strain of listening in a cultured manner the
audience had collapsed; had given up their last hope of being amused.
She cried, "Now we're going to play an idiotic game which I learned in
Chicago. You will have to take off your shoes, for a starter! After that
you will probably break your knees and shoulder-blades."
Much attention and incredulity. A few eyebrows indicating a verdict that
Doc Kennicott's bride was noisy and improper.
"I shall choose the most vicious, like Juanita Haydock and myself, as
the shepherds. The rest of you are wolves. Your shoes are the sheep.
The wolves go out into the hall. The shepherds scatter the sheep through
this room, then turn off all the lights, and the wolves crawl in from
the hall and in the darkness they try to get the shoes away from
the shepherds--who are permitted to do anything except bite and use
black-jacks. The wolves chuck the captured shoes out into the hall. No
one excused! Come on! Shoes off!"
Every one looked at every one else and waited for every one else to
begin.
Carol kicked off her silver slippers, and ignored the universal glance
at her arches. The embarrassed but loyal Vida Sherwin unbuttoned her
high black shoes. Ezra Stowbody cackled, "Well, you're a terror to old
folks. You're like the gals I used to go horseback-riding with, back in
the sixties. Ain't much accustomed to attending parties barefoot,
but here goes!" With a whoop and a gallant jerk Ezra snatched off his
elastic-sided Congress shoes.
The others giggled and followed.
When the sheep had been penned up, in the darkness the timorous wolves
crept into the living-room, squealing, halting, thrown out of their
habit of stolidity by the strangeness of advancing through nothingness
toward a waiting foe, a mysterious foe which expanded and grew more
menacing. The wolves peered to make out landmarks, they touched gliding
arms which did not seem to be attached to a body, they quivered with a
rapture of fear. Reality had vanished. A yelping squabble suddenly rose,
then Juanita Haydock's high titter, and Guy Pollock's astonished, "Ouch!
Quit! You're scalping me!"
Mrs. Luke Dawson galloped backward on stiff hands and knees into the
safety of the lighted hallway, moaning, "I declare, I nev' was so
upset in my life!" But the propriety was shaken out of her, and she
delightedly continued to ejaculate "Nev' in my LIFE" as she saw the
living-room door opened by invisible hands and shoes hurling through it,
as she heard from the darkness beyond the door a squawling, a bumping,
a resolute "Here's a lot of shoes. Come on, you wolves. Ow! Y' would,
would you!"
When Carol abruptly turned on the lights in the embattled living-room,
half of the company were sitting back against the walls, where they had
craftily remained throughout the engagement, but in the middle of the
floor Kennicott was wrestling with Harry Haydock--their collars torn
off, their hair in their eyes; and the owlish Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh
was retreating from Juanita Haydock, and gulping with unaccustomed
laughter. Guy Pollock's discreet brown scarf hung down his back. Young
Rita Simons's net blouse had lost two buttons, and betrayed more of her
delicious plump shoulder than was regarded as pure in Gopher Prairie.
Whether by shock, disgust, joy of combat, or physical activity, all the
party were freed from their years of social decorum. George Edwin Mott
giggled; Luke Dawson twisted his beard; Mrs. Clark insisted, "I did too,
Sam--I got a shoe--I never knew I could fight so terrible!"
Carol was certain that she was a great reformer.
She mercifully had combs, mirrors, brushes, needle and thread ready. She
permitted them to restore the divine decency of buttons.
The grinning Bea brought down-stairs a pile of soft thick sheets of
paper with designs of lotos blossoms, dragons, apes, in cobalt and
crimson and gray, and patterns of purple birds flying among sea-green
trees in the valleys of Nowhere.
"These," Carol announced, "are real Chinese masquerade costumes. I got
them from an importing shop in Minneapolis. You are to put them on over
your clothes, and please forget that you are Minnesotans, and turn into
mandarins and coolies and--and samurai (isn't it?), and anything else
you can think of."
While they were shyly rustling the paper costumes she disappeared. Ten
minutes after she gazed down from the stairs upon grotesquely ruddy
Yankee heads above Oriental robes, and cried to them, "The Princess
Winky Poo salutes her court!"
As they looked up she caught their suspense of admiration. They saw an
airy figure in trousers and coat of green brocade edged with gold; a
high gold collar under a proud chin; black hair pierced with jade pins;
a languid peacock fan in an out-stretched hand; eyes uplifted to a
vision of pagoda towers. When she dropped her pose and smiled down
she discovered Kennicott apoplectic with domestic pride--and gray Guy
Pollock staring beseechingly. For a second she saw nothing in all the
pink and brown mass of their faces save the hunger of the two men.
She shook off the spell and ran down. "We're going to have a real
Chinese concert. Messrs. Pollock, Kennicott, and, well, Stowbody are
drummers; the rest of us sing and play the fife."
The fifes were combs with tissue paper; the drums were tabourets and the
sewing-table. Loren Wheeler, editor of the Dauntless, led the orchestra,
with a ruler and a totally inaccurate sense of rhythm. The music was a
reminiscence of tom-toms heard at circus fortune-telling tents or at
the Minnesota State Fair, but the whole company pounded and puffed and
whined in a sing-song, and looked rapturous.
Before they were quite tired of the concert Carol led them in a dancing
procession to the dining-room, to blue bowls of chow mein, with Lichee
nuts and ginger preserved in syrup.
None of them save that city-rounder Harry Haydock had heard of any
Chinese dish except chop sooey. With agreeable doubt they ventured
through the bamboo shoots into the golden fried noodles of the chow
mein; and Dave Dyer did a not very humorous Chinese dance with Nat
Hicks; and there was hubbub and contentment.
Carol relaxed, and found that she was shockingly tired. She had carried
them on her thin shoulders. She could not keep it up. She longed for
her father, that artist at creating hysterical parties. She thought of
smoking a cigarette, to shock them, and dismissed the obscene thought
before it was quite formed. She wondered whether they could for five
minutes be coaxed to talk about something besides the winter top
of Knute Stamquist's Ford, and what Al Tingley had said about his
mother-in-law. She sighed, "Oh, let 'em alone. I've done enough." She
crossed her trousered legs, and snuggled luxuriously above her saucer
of ginger; she caught Pollock's congratulatory still smile, and thought
well of herself for having thrown a rose light on the pallid lawyer;
repented the heretical supposition that any male save her husband
existed; jumped up to find Kennicott and whisper, "Happy, my lord? . . .
No, it didn't cost much!"
"Best party this town ever saw. Only----Don't cross your legs in that
costume. Shows your knees too plain."
She was vexed. She resented his clumsiness. She returned to Guy Pollock
and talked of Chinese religions--not that she knew anything whatever
about Chinese religions, but he had read a book on the subject as, on
lonely evenings in his office, he had read at least one book on every
subject in the world. Guy's thin maturity was changing in her vision
to flushed youth and they were roaming an island in the yellow sea of
chatter when she realized that the guests were beginning that cough
which indicated, in the universal instinctive language, that they
desired to go home and go to bed.
While they asserted that it had been "the nicest party they'd ever
seen--my! so clever and original," she smiled tremendously, shook hands,
and cried many suitable things regarding children, and being sure to
wrap up warmly, and Raymie's singing and Juanita Haydock's prowess at
games. Then she turned wearily to Kennicott in a house filled with quiet
and crumbs and shreds of Chinese costumes.
He was gurgling, "I tell you, Carrie, you certainly are a wonder, and
guess you're right about waking folks up. Now you've showed 'em how,
they won't go on having the same old kind of parties and stunts and
everything. Here! Don't touch a thing! Done enough. Pop up to bed, and
I'll clear up."
His wise surgeon's-hands stroked her shoulder, and her irritation at his
clumsiness was lost in his strength.
V
From the Weekly Dauntless:
One of the most delightful social events of recent months was held
Wednesday evening in the housewarming of Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott, who
have completely redecorated their charming home on Poplar Street, and
is now extremely nifty in modern color scheme. The doctor and his bride
were at home to their numerous friends and a number of novelties in
diversions were held, including a Chinese orchestra in original and
genuine Oriental costumes, of which Ye Editor was leader. Dainty
refreshments were served in true Oriental style, and one and all voted a
delightful time.
VI
The week after, the Chet Dashaways gave a party. The circle of mourners
kept its place all evening, and Dave Dyer did the "stunt" of the
Norwegian and the hen.
| Carol vents her boredom by completely redecorating Will's home and giving it an edgy Japanese vibe. Once she's done, Will admits that it's nicer than it was before. Everyone in the town snoops around the redecorating and gossips about it. A neighbor named Mrs. Bogart is especially nosy: she comes over to visit and says some passive-aggressive, judgmental things about Carol's morals, and Carol is glad when she leaves. As time goes by, Carol quickly learns that she hates asking her husband for money. She especially hates the way the men of the town make fun of women for always spending so much. Carol quickly decides that she needs a set allowance in order to make budgets and control her spending. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bogart's sniping comments about the price of Carol's new furniture has made Carol self-consciously cheap. She does everything she can to save money around her house. When it comes to her first housewarming party, though, Carol goes all out with the expenses. Meanwhile, Will starts to feel like a stranger in his own house. Whenever he gets home from work, he feels like Carol is nagging him. At first, Carol's party is lively, but soon the gravitational pull of Gopher Prairie takes over, and the party becomes boring. Vida whispers to Carol that she should ask Raymie Wutherspoon to sing because he has a beautiful voice. Carol gives the go-ahead only to find that Raymie's voice is awful. It's just good enough for people in Gopher Prairie to think it's good. Carol gets everyone to play a scandalous game in the dark where people try to steal each other's shoes. When the lights come back on, people are freed from their usual reserve and everyone starts giggling. Carol is optimistic that she can get these people to loosen up. Next, Carol asks everyone to put on some Asian-inspired outfits and to pretend that they are from Asia instead of Minnesota. Her good time is ruined when her husband Will tells her not to cross her legs, because her costume shows too much of her knees. When the party is over, Will congratulates Carol on having a party that got people out of their shells. He's hopeful that she'll be able to change the attitudes of the whole town. But after a week, Carol's party is forgotten. The next party at another person's house is just as boring as any party before Carol arrived in Gopher Prairie. | summary |
CHAPTER VII
I
GOPHER PRAIRIE was digging in for the winter. Through late November and
all December it snowed daily; the thermometer was at zero and might
drop to twenty below, or thirty. Winter is not a season in the North
Middlewest; it is an industry. Storm sheds were erected at every door.
In every block the householders, Sam Clark, the wealthy Mr. Dawson, all
save asthmatic Ezra Stowbody who extravagantly hired a boy, were seen
perilously staggering up ladders, carrying storm windows and screwing
them to second-story jambs. While Kennicott put up his windows Carol
danced inside the bedrooms and begged him not to swallow the screws,
which he held in his mouth like an extraordinary set of external false
teeth.
The universal sign of winter was the town handyman--Miles Bjornstam, a
tall, thick, red-mustached bachelor, opinionated atheist, general-store
arguer, cynical Santa Claus. Children loved him, and he sneaked
away from work to tell them improbable stories of sea-faring and
horse-trading and bears. The children's parents either laughed at him
or hated him. He was the one democrat in town. He called both Lyman Cass
the miller and the Finn homesteader from Lost Lake by their first names.
He was known as "The Red Swede," and considered slightly insane.
Bjornstam could do anything with his hands--solder a pan, weld an
automobile spring, soothe a frightened filly, tinker a clock, carve a
Gloucester schooner which magically went into a bottle. Now, for a week,
he was commissioner general of Gopher Prairie. He was the only person
besides the repairman at Sam Clark's who understood plumbing. Everybody
begged him to look over the furnace and the water-pipes. He rushed
from house to house till after bedtime--ten o'clock. Icicles from burst
water-pipes hung along the skirt of his brown dog-skin overcoat; his
plush cap, which he never took off in the house, was a pulp of ice and
coal-dust; his red hands were cracked to rawness; he chewed the stub of
a cigar.
But he was courtly to Carol. He stooped to examine the furnace flues; he
straightened, glanced down at her, and hemmed, "Got to fix your furnace,
no matter what else I do."
The poorer houses of Gopher Prairie, where the services of Miles
Bjornstam were a luxury--which included the shanty of Miles
Bjornstam--were banked to the lower windows with earth and manure. Along
the railroad the sections of snow fence, which had been stacked all
summer in romantic wooden tents occupied by roving small boys, were set
up to prevent drifts from covering the track.
The farmers came into town in home-made sleighs, with bed-quilts and hay
piled in the rough boxes.
Fur coats, fur caps, fur mittens, overshoes buckling almost to the
knees, gray knitted scarfs ten feet long, thick woolen socks, canvas
jackets lined with fluffy yellow wool like the plumage of ducklings,
moccasins, red flannel wristlets for the blazing chapped wrists
of boys--these protections against winter were busily dug out of
moth-ball-sprinkled drawers and tar-bags in closets, and all over town
small boys were squealing, "Oh, there's my mittens!" or "Look at my
shoe-packs!" There is so sharp a division between the panting summer and
the stinging winter of the Northern plains that they rediscovered with
surprise and a feeling of heroism this armor of an Artic explorer.
Winter garments surpassed even personal gossip as the topic at parties.
It was good form to ask, "Put on your heavies yet?" There were as many
distinctions in wraps as in motor cars. The lesser sort appeared in
yellow and black dogskin coats, but Kennicott was lordly in a long
raccoon ulster and a new seal cap. When the snow was too deep for his
motor he went off on country calls in a shiny, floral, steel-tipped
cutter, only his ruddy nose and his cigar emerging from the fur.
Carol herself stirred Main Street by a loose coat of nutria. Her
finger-tips loved the silken fur.
Her liveliest activity now was organizing outdoor sports in the
motor-paralyzed town.
The automobile and bridge-whist had not only made more evident the
social divisions in Gopher Prairie but they had also enfeebled the
love of activity. It was so rich-looking to sit and drive--and so easy.
Skiing and sliding were "stupid" and "old-fashioned." In fact, the
village longed for the elegance of city recreations almost as much as
the cities longed for village sports; and Gopher Prairie took as
much pride in neglecting coasting as St. Paul--or New York--in going
coasting. Carol did inspire a successful skating-party in mid-November.
Plover Lake glistened in clear sweeps of gray-green ice, ringing to the
skates. On shore the ice-tipped reeds clattered in the wind, and oak
twigs with stubborn last leaves hung against a milky sky. Harry Haydock
did figure-eights, and Carol was certain that she had found the perfect
life. But when snow had ended the skating and she tried to get up a
moonlight sliding party, the matrons hesitated to stir away from their
radiators and their daily bridge-whist imitations of the city. She had
to nag them. They scooted down a long hill on a bob-sled, they upset
and got snow down their necks they shrieked that they would do it again
immediately--and they did not do it again at all.
She badgered another group into going skiing. They shouted and threw
snowballs, and informed her that it was SUCH fun, and they'd have
another skiing expedition right away, and they jollily returned home and
never thereafter left their manuals of bridge.
Carol was discouraged. She was grateful when Kennicott invited her to
go rabbit-hunting in the woods. She waded down stilly cloisters
between burnt stump and icy oak, through drifts marked with a million
hieroglyphics of rabbit and mouse and bird. She squealed as he leaped
on a pile of brush and fired at the rabbit which ran out. He belonged
there, masculine in reefer and sweater and high-laced boots. That night
she ate prodigiously of steak and fried potatoes; she produced electric
sparks by touching his ear with her finger-tip; she slept twelve hours;
and awoke to think how glorious was this brave land.
She rose to a radiance of sun on snow. Snug in her furs she
trotted up-town. Frosted shingles smoked against a sky colored like
flax-blossoms, sleigh-bells clinked, shouts of greeting were loud in the
thin bright air, and everywhere was a rhythmic sound of wood-sawing. It
was Saturday, and the neighbors' sons were getting up the winter fuel.
Behind walls of corded wood in back yards their sawbucks stood in
depressions scattered with canary-yellow flakes of sawdust. The frames
of their buck-saws were cherry-red, the blades blued steel, and the
fresh cut ends of the sticks--poplar, maple, iron-wood, birch--were
marked with engraved rings of growth. The boys wore shoe-packs, blue
flannel shirts with enormous pearl buttons, and mackinaws of crimson,
lemon yellow, and foxy brown.
Carol cried "Fine day!" to the boys; she came in a glow to Howland &
Gould's grocery, her collar white with frost from her breath; she bought
a can of tomatoes as though it were Orient fruit; and returned home
planning to surprise Kennicott with an omelet creole for dinner.
So brilliant was the snow-glare that when she entered the house she
saw the door-knobs, the newspaper on the table, every white surface as
dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy in the pyrotechnic dimness. When
her eyes had recovered she felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of
life. The world was so luminous that she sat down at her rickety little
desk in the living-room to make a poem. (She got no farther than "The
sky is bright, the sun is warm, there ne'er will be another storm.")
In the mid-afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called into the
country. It was Bea's evening out--her evening for the Lutheran Dance.
Carol was alone from three till midnight. She wearied of reading pure
love stories in the magazines and sat by a radiator, beginning to brood.
Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do.
II
She had, she meditated, passed through the novelty of seeing the
town and meeting people, of skating and sliding and hunting. Bea was
competent; there was no household labor except sewing and darning
and gossipy assistance to Bea in bed-making. She couldn't satisfy her
ingenuity in planning meals. At Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market you didn't
give orders--you wofully inquired whether there was anything today
besides steak and pork and ham. The cuts of beef were not cuts. They
were hacks. Lamb chops were as exotic as sharks' fins. The meat-dealers
shipped their best to the city, with its higher prices.
In all the shops there was the same lack of choice. She could not find
a glass-headed picture-nail in town; she did not hunt for the sort of
veiling she wanted--she took what she could get; and only at Howland &
Gould's was there such a luxury as canned asparagus. Routine care was
all she could devote to the house. Only by such fussing as the Widow
Bogart's could she make it fill her time.
She could not have outside employment. To the village doctor's wife it
was taboo.
She was a woman with a working brain and no work.
There were only three things which she could do: Have children; start
her career of reforming; or become so definitely a part of the town that
she would be fulfilled by the activities of church and study-club and
bridge-parties.
Children, yes, she wanted them, but----She was not quite ready. She had
been embarrassed by Kennicott's frankness, but she agreed with him
that in the insane condition of civilization, which made the rearing
of citizens more costly and perilous than any other crime, it was
inadvisable to have children till he had made more money. She was
sorry----Perhaps he had made all the mystery of love a mechanical
cautiousness but----She fled from the thought with a dubious, "Some
day."
Her "reforms," her impulses toward beauty in raw Main Street, they had
become indistinct. But she would set them going now. She would! She
swore it with soft fist beating the edges of the radiator. And at the
end of all her vows she had no notion as to when and where the crusade
was to begin.
Become an authentic part of the town? She began to think with unpleasant
lucidity. She reflected that she did not know whether the people liked
her. She had gone to the women at afternoon-coffees, to the merchants
in their stores, with so many outpouring comments and whimsies that
she hadn't given them a chance to betray their opinions of her. The men
smiled--but did they like her? She was lively among the women--but
was she one of them? She could not recall many times when she had been
admitted to the whispering of scandal which is the secret chamber of
Gopher Prairie conversation.
She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed.
Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and observed. Dave
Dyer and Sam Clark were as cordial as she had been fancying; but wasn't
there an impersonal abruptness in the "H' are yuh?" of Chet Dashaway?
Howland the grocer was curt. Was that merely his usual manner?
"It's infuriating to have to pay attention to what people think. In
St. Paul I didn't care. But here I'm spied on. They're watching
me. I mustn't let it make me self-conscious," she coaxed
herself--overstimulated by the drug of thought, and offensively on the
defensive.
III
A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a ringing iron night
when the lakes could be heard booming; a clear roistering morning. In
tam o'shanter and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior going
out to play hockey. She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run. On the
way home from shopping she yielded, as a pup would have yielded. She
galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of
slush, she gave a student "Yippee!"
She saw that in a window three old women were gasping. Their triple
glare was paralyzing. Across the street, at another window, the curtain
had secretively moved. She stopped, walked on sedately, changed from the
girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.
She never again felt quite young enough and defiant enough and free
enough to run and halloo in the public streets; and it was as a Nice
Married Woman that she attended the next weekly bridge of the Jolly
Seventeen.
IV
The Jolly Seventeen (the membership of which ranged from fourteen to
twenty-six) was the social cornice of Gopher Prairie. It was the country
club, the diplomatic set, the St. Cecilia, the Ritz oval room, the Club
de Vingt. To belong to it was to be "in." Though its membership partly
coincided with that of the Thanatopsis study club, the Jolly Seventeen
as a separate entity guffawed at the Thanatopsis, and considered it
middle-class and even "highbrow."
Most of the Jolly Seventeen were young married women, with their
husbands as associate members. Once a week they had a women's
afternoon-bridge; once a month the husbands joined them for supper and
evening-bridge; twice a year they had dances at I. O. O. F. Hall. Then
the town exploded. Only at the annual balls of the Firemen and of the
Eastern Star was there such prodigality of chiffon scarfs and tangoing
and heart-burnings, and these rival institutions were not select--hired
girls attended the Firemen's Ball, with section-hands and laborers. Ella
Stowbody had once gone to a Jolly Seventeen Soiree in the village hack,
hitherto confined to chief mourners at funerals; and Harry Haydock and
Dr. Terry Gould always appeared in the town's only specimens of evening
clothes.
The afternoon-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen which followed Carol's
lonely doubting was held at Juanita Haydock's new concrete bungalow,
with its door of polished oak and beveled plate-glass, jar of ferns in
the plastered hall, and in the living-room, a fumed oak Morris chair,
sixteen color-prints, and a square varnished table with a mat made of
cigar-ribbons on which was one Illustrated Gift Edition and one pack of
cards in a burnt-leather case.
Carol stepped into a sirocco of furnace heat. They were already playing.
Despite her flabby resolves she had not yet learned bridge. She was
winningly apologetic about it to Juanita, and ashamed that she should
have to go on being apologetic.
Mrs. Dave Dyer, a sallow woman with a thin prettiness devoted to
experiments in religious cults, illnesses, and scandal-bearing, shook
her finger at Carol and trilled, "You're a naughty one! I don't believe
you appreciate the honor, when you got into the Jolly Seventeen so
easy!"
Mrs. Chet Dashaway nudged her neighbor at the second table. But Carol
kept up the appealing bridal manner so far as possible. She twittered,
"You're perfectly right. I'm a lazy thing. I'll make Will start teaching
me this very evening." Her supplication had all the sound of birdies
in the nest, and Easter church-bells, and frosted Christmas cards.
Internally she snarled, "That ought to be saccharine enough." She sat in
the smallest rocking-chair, a model of Victorian modesty. But she saw or
she imagined that the women who had gurgled at her so welcomingly when
she had first come to Gopher Prairie were nodding at her brusquely.
During the pause after the first game she petitioned Mrs. Jackson Elder,
"Don't you think we ought to get up another bob-sled party soon?"
"It's so cold when you get dumped in the snow," said Mrs. Elder,
indifferently.
"I hate snow down my neck," volunteered Mrs. Dave Dyer, with an
unpleasant look at Carol and, turning her back, she bubbled at Rita
Simons, "Dearie, won't you run in this evening? I've got the loveliest
new Butterick pattern I want to show you."
Carol crept back to her chair. In the fervor of discussing the game they
ignored her. She was not used to being a wallflower. She struggled to
keep from oversensitiveness, from becoming unpopular by the sure method
of believing that she was unpopular; but she hadn't much reserve of
patience, and at the end of the second game, when Ella Stowbody sniffily
asked her, "Are you going to send to Minneapolis for your dress for
the next soiree--heard you were," Carol said "Don't know yet" with
unnecessary sharpness.
She was relieved by the admiration with which the jeune fille Rita
Simons looked at the steel buckles on her pumps; but she resented Mrs.
Howland's tart demand, "Don't you find that new couch of yours is too
broad to be practical?" She nodded, then shook her head, and touchily
left Mrs. Howland to get out of it any meaning she desired. Immediately
she wanted to make peace. She was close to simpering in the sweetness
with which she addressed Mrs Howland: "I think that is the prettiest
display of beef-tea your husband has in his store."
"Oh yes, Gopher Prairie isn't so much behind the times," gibed Mrs.
Howland. Some one giggled.
Their rebuffs made her haughty; her haughtiness irritated them to
franker rebuffs; they were working up to a state of painfully righteous
war when they were saved by the coming of food.
Though Juanita Haydock was highly advanced in the matters of
finger-bowls, doilies, and bath-mats, her "refreshments" were typical
of all the afternoon-coffees. Juanita's best friends, Mrs. Dyer and Mrs.
Dashaway, passed large dinner plates, each with a spoon, a fork, and a
coffee cup without saucer. They apologized and discussed the afternoon's
game as they passed through the thicket of women's feet. Then they
distributed hot buttered rolls, coffee poured from an enamel-ware pot,
stuffed olives, potato salad, and angel's-food cake. There was, even in
the most strictly conforming Gopher Prairie circles, a certain option
as to collations. The olives need not be stuffed. Doughnuts were in some
houses well thought of as a substitute for the hot buttered rolls.
But there was in all the town no heretic save Carol who omitted
angel's-food.
They ate enormously. Carol had a suspicion that the thriftier housewives
made the afternoon treat do for evening supper.
She tried to get back into the current. She edged over to Mrs. McGanum.
Chunky, amiable, young Mrs. McGanum with her breast and arms of a
milkmaid, and her loud delayed laugh which burst startlingly from
a sober face, was the daughter of old Dr. Westlake, and the wife of
Westlake's partner, Dr. McGanum. Kennicott asserted that Westlake and
McGanum and their contaminated families were tricky, but Carol had found
them gracious. She asked for friendliness by crying to Mrs. McGanum,
"How is the baby's throat now?" and she was attentive while Mrs. McGanum
rocked and knitted and placidly described symptoms.
Vida Sherwin came in after school, with Miss Ethel Villets, the
town librarian. Miss Sherwin's optimistic presence gave Carol more
confidence. She talked. She informed the circle "I drove almost down to
Wahkeenyan with Will, a few days ago. Isn't the country lovely! And I do
admire the Scandinavian farmers down there so: their big red barns and
silos and milking-machines and everything. Do you all know that lonely
Lutheran church, with the tin-covered spire, that stands out alone on
a hill? It's so bleak; somehow it seems so brave. I do think the
Scandinavians are the hardiest and best people----"
"Oh, do you THINK so?" protested Mrs. Jackson Elder. "My husband says
the Svenskas that work in the planing-mill are perfectly terrible--so
silent and cranky, and so selfish, the way they keep demanding raises.
If they had their way they'd simply ruin the business."
"Yes, and they're simply GHASTLY hired girls!" wailed Mrs. Dave Dyer.
"I swear, I work myself to skin and bone trying to please my hired
girls--when I can get them! I do everything in the world for them. They
can have their gentleman friends call on them in the kitchen any time,
and they get just the same to eat as we do, if there's, any left over,
and I practically never jump on them."
Juanita Haydock rattled, "They're ungrateful, all that class of people.
I do think the domestic problem is simply becoming awful. I don't know
what the country's coming to, with these Scandahoofian clodhoppers
demanding every cent you can save, and so ignorant and impertinent,
and on my word, demanding bath-tubs and everything--as if they weren't
mighty good and lucky at home if they got a bath in the wash-tub."
They were off, riding hard. Carol thought of Bea and waylaid them:
"But isn't it possibly the fault of the mistresses if the maids are
ungrateful? For generations we've given them the leavings of food, and
holes to live in. I don't want to boast, but I must say I don't have
much trouble with Bea. She's so friendly. The Scandinavians are sturdy
and honest----"
Mrs. Dave Dyer snapped, "Honest? Do you call it honest to hold us up for
every cent of pay they can get? I can't say that I've had any of them
steal anything (though you might call it stealing to eat so much that a
roast of beef hardly lasts three days), but just the same I don't intend
to let them think they can put anything over on ME! I always make them
pack and unpack their trunks down-stairs, right under my eyes, and then
I know they aren't being tempted to dishonesty by any slackness on MY
part!"
"How much do the maids get here?" Carol ventured.
Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker, stated in a shocked manner,
"Any place from three-fifty to five-fifty a week! I know positively that
Mrs. Clark, after swearing that she wouldn't weaken and encourage them
in their outrageous demands, went and paid five-fifty--think of it!
practically a dollar a day for unskilled work and, of course, her food
and room and a chance to do her own washing right in with the rest of
the wash. HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY, Mrs. KENNICOTT?"
"Yes! How much do you pay?" insisted half a dozen.
"W-why, I pay six a week," she feebly confessed.
They gasped. Juanita protested, "Don't you think it's hard on the rest
of us when you pay so much?" Juanita's demand was reinforced by the
universal glower.
Carol was angry. "I don't care! A maid has one of the hardest jobs on
earth. She works from ten to eighteen hours a day. She has to wash slimy
dishes and dirty clothes. She tends the children and runs to the door
with wet chapped hands and----"
Mrs. Dave Dyer broke into Carol's peroration with a furious, "That's all
very well, but believe me, I do those things myself when I'm without
a maid--and that's a good share of the time for a person that isn't
willing to yield and pay exorbitant wages!"
Carol was retorting, "But a maid does it for strangers, and all she gets
out of it is the pay----"
Their eyes were hostile. Four of them were talking at once. Vida
Sherwin's dictatorial voice cut through, took control of the revolution:
"Tut, tut, tut, tut! What angry passions--and what an idiotic
discussion! All of you getting too serious. Stop it! Carol Kennicott,
you're probably right, but you're too much ahead of the times. Juanita,
quit looking so belligerent. What is this, a card party or a hen fight?
Carol, you stop admiring yourself as the Joan of Arc of the hired girls,
or I'll spank you. You come over here and talk libraries with Ethel
Villets. Boooooo! If there's any more pecking, I'll take charge of the
hen roost myself!"
They all laughed artificially, and Carol obediently "talked libraries."
A small-town bungalow, the wives of a village doctor and a village
dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial brawl over
paying a servant a dollar more a week. Yet this insignificance echoed
cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia
and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and the orators who deemed themselves
international leaders were but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas
denouncing a million Carols, with a hundred thousand Vida Sherwins
trying to shoo away the storm.
Carol felt guilty. She devoted herself to admiring the spinsterish Miss
Villets--and immediately committed another offense against the laws of
decency.
"We haven't seen you at the library yet," Miss Villets reproved.
"I've wanted to run in so much but I've been getting settled and----I'll
probably come in so often you'll get tired of me! I hear you have such a
nice library."
"There are many who like it. We have two thousand more books than
Wakamin."
"Isn't that fine. I'm sure you are largely responsible. I've had some
experience, in St. Paul."
"So I have been informed. Not that I entirely approve of library methods
in these large cities. So careless, letting tramps and all sorts of
dirty persons practically sleep in the reading-rooms."
"I know, but the poor souls----Well, I'm sure you will agree with me in
one thing: The chief task of a librarian is to get people to read."
"You feel so? My feeling, Mrs. Kennicott, and I am merely quoting
the librarian of a very large college, is that the first duty of the
CONSCIENTIOUS librarian is to preserve the books."
"Oh!" Carol repented her "Oh." Miss Villets stiffened, and attacked:
"It may be all very well in cities, where they have unlimited funds, to
let nasty children ruin books and just deliberately tear them up, and
fresh young men take more books out than they are entitled to by the
regulations, but I'm never going to permit it in this library!"
"What if some children are destructive? They learn to read. Books are
cheaper than minds."
"Nothing is cheaper than the minds of some of these children that come
in and bother me simply because their mothers don't keep them home where
they belong. Some librarians may choose to be so wishy-washy and turn
their libraries into nursing-homes and kindergartens, but as long as I'm
in charge, the Gopher Prairie library is going to be quiet and decent,
and the books well kept!"
Carol saw that the others were listening, waiting for her to be
objectionable. She flinched before their dislike. She hastened to smile
in agreement with Miss Villets, to glance publicly at her wrist-watch,
to warble that it was "so late--have to hurry home--husband--such nice
party--maybe you were right about maids, prejudiced because Bea so
nice--such perfectly divine angel's-food, Mrs. Haydock must give me the
recipe--good-by, such happy party----"
She walked home. She reflected, "It was my fault. I was touchy. And I
opposed them so much. Only----I can't! I can't be one of them if I must
damn all the maids toiling in filthy kitchens, all the ragged hungry
children. And these women are to be my arbiters, the rest of my life!"
She ignored Bea's call from the kitchen; she ran up-stairs to the
unfrequented guest-room; she wept in terror, her body a pale arc as
she knelt beside a cumbrous black-walnut bed, beside a puffy mattress
covered with a red quilt, in a shuttered and airless room.
| The long winter is coming, and everyone in Gopher Prairie is getting their houses ready. The man who performs a lot of the winterizing work is a dude named Miles Bjornstam. The guy isn't very popular, because he's an agitator for workers' rights. Carol gets a group of people to go skiing and tobogganing. Everyone has a great time, and again it looks like people are coming out of their shells. Yet as much as people say they loved the afternoon, none of them will come out to do it again. One night, Will is called into the country while Bea, the maid, has her night off. Alone in her home, Carol realizes that she has nothing to do, especially now that the novelty of the town has worn off. She also realizes that all of her imagined reforms for the town aren't coming to pass. When there's an early thaw, Carol takes a moment to run and shout like a little girl. But she soon realizes that people from the town are looking at her like she's crazy. She's mortified and runs away. Carol goes to a meeting of a women's bridge group called "The Jolly Seventeen." She's sad to realize that she's not a social star at this event; she's just the new girl in town. She tries to fit in, but she doesn't do a great job of it. She's secretly enraged by how mindless the women's conversation is. Carol tries to bring up how much she admires the farmers and mill workers of the area. The women all scold her for sounding like a socialist and say that all the farmers and workers in the area are dirty, lazy thugs. When the women find out how much Carol pays her maid Bea every week, they nearly lose their minds. They think Carol is spoiling the help, and they don't want their own maids getting any ideas. Before she knows it, Carol also gets into a tiff with the village librarian, who doesn't like to lend books to children, because she's more interested in preserving the books' condition than in improving young minds. Carol goes home that evening mourning the fact that these women will have to be her friends for the rest of her life. | summary |
CHAPTER VIII
"DON'T I, in looking for things to do, show that I'm not attentive
enough to Will? Am I impressed enough by his work? I will be. Oh, I will
be. If I can't be one of the town, if I must be an outcast----"
When Kennicott came home she bustled, "Dear, you must tell me a lot more
about your cases. I want to know. I want to understand."
"Sure. You bet." And he went down to fix the furnace.
At supper she asked, "For instance, what did you do today?"
"Do today? How do you mean?"
"Medically. I want to understand----"
"Today? Oh, there wasn't much of anything: couple chumps with
bellyaches, and a sprained wrist, and a fool woman that thinks she wants
to kill herself because her husband doesn't like her and----Just routine
work."
"But the unhappy woman doesn't sound routine!"
"Her? Just case of nerves. You can't do much with these marriage
mix-ups."
"But dear, PLEASE, will you tell me about the next case that you do
think is interesting?"
"Sure. You bet. Tell you about anything that----Say that's pretty good
salmon. Get it at Howland's?"
II
Four days after the Jolly Seventeen debacle Vida Sherwin called and
casually blew Carol's world to pieces.
"May I come in and gossip a while?" she said, with such excess of bright
innocence that Carol was uneasy. Vida took off her furs with a bounce,
she sat down as though it were a gymnasium exercise, she flung out:
"Feel disgracefully good, this weather! Raymond Wutherspoon says if he
had my energy he'd be a grand opera singer. I always think this climate
is the finest in the world, and my friends are the dearest people in the
world, and my work is the most essential thing in the world. Probably
I fool myself. But I know one thing for certain: You're the pluckiest
little idiot in the world."
"And so you are about to flay me alive." Carol was cheerful about it.
"Am I? Perhaps. I've been wondering--I know that the third party to a
squabble is often the most to blame: the one who runs between A and B
having a beautiful time telling each of them what the other has said.
But I want you to take a big part in vitalizing Gopher Prairie and
so----Such a very unique opportunity and----Am I silly?"
"I know what you mean. I was too abrupt at the Jolly Seventeen."
"It isn't that. Matter of fact, I'm glad you told them some wholesome
truths about servants. (Though perhaps you were just a bit tactless.)
It's bigger than that. I wonder if you understand that in a secluded
community like this every newcomer is on test? People cordial to her
but watching her all the time. I remember when a Latin teacher came here
from Wellesley, they resented her broad A. Were sure it was affected. Of
course they have discussed you----"
"Have they talked about me much?"
"My dear!"
"I always feel as though I walked around in a cloud, looking out at
others but not being seen. I feel so inconspicuous and so normal--so
normal that there's nothing about me to discuss. I can't realize that
Mr. and Mrs. Haydock must gossip about me." Carol was working up a small
passion of distaste. "And I don't like it. It makes me crawly to think
of their daring to talk over all I do and say. Pawing me over! I resent
it. I hate----"
"Wait, child! Perhaps they resent some things in you. I want you to try
and be impersonal. They'd paw over anybody who came in new. Didn't you,
with newcomers in College?"
"Yes."
"Well then! Will you be impersonal? I'm paying you the compliment of
supposing that you can be. I want you to be big enough to help me make
this town worth while."
"I'll be as impersonal as cold boiled potatoes. (Not that I shall ever
be able to help you 'make the town worth while.') What do they say about
me? Really. I want to know."
"Of course the illiterate ones resent your references to anything
farther away than Minneapolis. They're so suspicious--that's it,
suspicious. And some think you dress too well."
"Oh, they do, do they! Shall I dress in gunny-sacking to suit them?"
"Please! Are you going to be a baby?"
"I'll be good," sulkily.
"You certainly will, or I won't tell you one single thing. You must
understand this: I'm not asking you to change yourself. Just want you
to know what they think. You must do that, no matter how absurd their
prejudices are, if you're going to handle them. Is it your ambition to
make this a better town, or isn't it?"
"I don't know whether it is or not!"
"Why--why----Tut, tut, now, of course it is! Why, I depend on you.
You're a born reformer."
"I am not--not any more!"
"Of course you are."
"Oh, if I really could help----So they think I'm affected?"
"My lamb, they do! Now don't say they're nervy. After all, Gopher
Prairie standards are as reasonable to Gopher Prairie as Lake Shore
Drive standards are to Chicago. And there's more Gopher Prairies than
there are Chicagos. Or Londons. And----I'll tell you the whole story:
They think you're showing off when you say 'American' instead of
'Ammurrican.' They think you're too frivolous. Life's so serious to them
that they can't imagine any kind of laughter except Juanita's snortling.
Ethel Villets was sure you were patronizing her when----"
"Oh, I was not!"
"----you talked about encouraging reading; and Mrs. Elder thought you
were patronizing when you said she had 'such a pretty little car.' She
thinks it's an enormous car! And some of the merchants say you're too
flip when you talk to them in the store and----"
"Poor me, when I was trying to be friendly!"
"----every housewife in town is doubtful about your being so chummy with
your Bea. All right to be kind, but they say you act as though she were
your cousin. (Wait now! There's plenty more.) And they think you were
eccentric in furnishing this room--they think the broad couch and that
Japanese dingus are absurd. (Wait! I know they're silly.) And I guess
I've heard a dozen criticize you because you don't go to church oftener
and----"
"I can't stand it--I can't bear to realize that they've been saying all
these things while I've been going about so happily and liking them. I
wonder if you ought to have told me? It will make me self-conscious."
"I wonder the same thing. Only answer I can get is the old saw about
knowledge being power. And some day you'll see how absorbing it is to
have power, even here; to control the town----Oh, I'm a crank. But I do
like to see things moving."
"It hurts. It makes these people seem so beastly and treacherous, when
I've been perfectly natural with them. But let's have it all. What did
they say about my Chinese house-warming party?"
"Why, uh----"
"Go on. Or I'll make up worse things than anything you can tell me."
"They did enjoy it. But I guess some of them felt you were showing
off--pretending that your husband is richer than he is."
"I can't----Their meanness of mind is beyond any horrors I could
imagine. They really thought that I----And you want to 'reform' people
like that when dynamite is so cheap? Who dared to say that? The rich or
the poor?"
"Fairly well assorted."
"Can't they at least understand me well enough to see that though I
might be affected and culturine, at least I simply couldn't commit that
other kind of vulgarity? If they must know, you may tell them, with my
compliments, that Will makes about four thousand a year, and the party
cost half of what they probably thought it did. Chinese things are not
very expensive, and I made my own costume----"
"Stop it! Stop beating me! I know all that. What they meant was: they
felt you were starting dangerous competition by giving a party such as
most people here can't afford. Four thousand is a pretty big income for
this town."
"I never thought of starting competition. Will you believe that it was
in all love and friendliness that I tried to give them the gayest party
I could? It was foolish; it was childish and noisy. But I did mean it so
well."
"I know, of course. And it certainly is unfair of them to make fun of
your having that Chinese food--chow men, was it?--and to laugh about
your wearing those pretty trousers----"
Carol sprang up, whimpering, "Oh, they didn't do that! They didn't poke
fun at my feast, that I ordered so carefully for them! And my little
Chinese costume that I was so happy making--I made it secretly, to
surprise them. And they've been ridiculing it, all this while!"
She was huddled on the couch.
Vida was stroking her hair, muttering, "I shouldn't----"
Shrouded in shame, Carol did not know when Vida slipped away. The
clock's bell, at half past five, aroused her. "I must get hold of myself
before Will comes. I hope he never knows what a fool his wife is. . . .
Frozen, sneering, horrible hearts."
Like a very small, very lonely girl she trudged up-stairs, slow step by
step, her feet dragging, her hand on the rail. It was not her husband
to whom she wanted to run for protection--it was her father, her smiling
understanding father, dead these twelve years.
III
Kennicott was yawning, stretched in the largest chair, between the
radiator and a small kerosene stove.
Cautiously, "Will dear, I wonder if the people here don't criticize me
sometimes? They must. I mean: if they ever do, you mustn't let it bother
you."
"Criticize you? Lord, I should say not. They all keep telling me you're
the swellest girl they ever saw."
"Well, I've just fancied----The merchants probably think I'm too fussy
about shopping. I'm afraid I bore Mr. Dashaway and Mr. Howland and Mr.
Ludelmeyer."
"I can tell you how that is. I didn't want to speak of it but since
you've brought it up: Chet Dashaway probably resents the fact that you
got this new furniture down in the Cities instead of here. I didn't want
to raise any objection at the time but----After all, I make my money
here and they naturally expect me to spend it here."
"If Mr. Dashaway will kindly tell me how any civilized person can
furnish a room out of the mortuary pieces that he calls----" She
remembered. She said meekly, "But I understand."
"And Howland and Ludelmeyer----Oh, you've probably handed 'em a few
roasts for the bum stocks they carry, when you just meant to jolly 'em.
But rats, what do we care! This is an independent town, not like these
Eastern holes where you have to watch your step all the time, and live
up to fool demands and social customs, and a lot of old tabbies always
busy criticizing. Everybody's free here to do what he wants to." He said
it with a flourish, and Carol perceived that he believed it. She turned
her breath of fury into a yawn.
"By the way, Carrie, while we're talking of this: Of course I like
to keep independent, and I don't believe in this business of binding
yourself to trade with the man that trades with you unless you really
want to, but same time: I'd be just as glad if you dealt with Jenson or
Ludelmeyer as much as you ran, instead of Howland & Gould, who go to Dr.
Gould every last time, and the whole tribe of 'em the same way. I don't
see why I should be paying out my good money for groceries and having
them pass it on to Terry Gould!"
"I've gone to Howland & Gould because they're better, and cleaner."
"I know. I don't mean cut them out entirely. Course Jenson is
tricky--give you short weight--and Ludelmeyer is a shiftless old Dutch
hog. But same time, I mean let's keep the trade in the family whenever
it is convenient, see how I mean?"
"I see."
"Well, guess it's about time to turn in."
He yawned, went out to look at the thermometer, slammed the door, patted
her head, unbuttoned his waistcoat, yawned, wound the clock, went down
to look at the furnace, yawned, and clumped up-stairs to bed, casually
scratching his thick woolen undershirt.
Till he bawled, "Aren't you ever coming up to bed?" she sat unmoving.
| The next time Will comes home, Carol asks to hear all about his cases. Will doesn't have anything interesting to tell her, though: it's just been a few people with stomachaches lately. Four days after Carol's first meeting with the Jolly Seventeen, Vida Sherwin comes to visit and tells Carol that the women of the town keep talking about Carol behind her back. Vida advises Carol to tone down her rebellious side if she wants to fit in with the town. Carol learns that there's basically nothing creative she can do without setting off gossip among these women. She despairs and starts to cry, but Vida comforts her. Later on, Carol asks Will if any of the men around Gopher Prairie say things about her behind her back. Will admits that some of them do. Carol hates the way that people are constantly judging her. Will asks Carol to give more of her household business to merchants who are patients of his. | summary |
CHAPTER IX
I
SHE had tripped into the meadow to teach the lambs a pretty educational
dance and found that the lambs were wolves. There was no way out between
their pressing gray shoulders. She was surrounded by fangs and sneering
eyes.
She could not go on enduring the hidden derision. She wanted to flee.
She wanted to hide in the generous indifference of cities. She practised
saying to Kennicott, "Think perhaps I'll run down to St. Paul for a few
days." But she could not trust herself to say it carelessly; could not
abide his certain questioning.
Reform the town? All she wanted was to be tolerated!
She could not look directly at people. She flushed and winced before
citizens who a week ago had been amusing objects of study, and in their
good-mornings she heard a cruel sniggering.
She encountered Juanita Haydock at Ole Jenson's grocery. She besought,
"Oh, how do you do! Heavens, what beautiful celery that is!"
"Yes, doesn't it look fresh. Harry simply has to have his celery on
Sunday, drat the man!"
Carol hastened out of the shop exulting, "She didn't make fun of me. . . .
Did she?"
In a week she had recovered from consciousness of insecurity, of shame
and whispering notoriety, but she kept her habit of avoiding people. She
walked the streets with her head down. When she spied Mrs. McGanum or
Mrs. Dyer ahead she crossed over with an elaborate pretense of looking
at a billboard. Always she was acting, for the benefit of every one she
saw--and for the benefit of the ambushed leering eyes which she did not
see.
She perceived that Vida Sherwin had told the truth. Whether she entered
a store, or swept the back porch, or stood at the bay-window in the
living-room, the village peeped at her. Once she had swung along the
street triumphant in making a home. Now she glanced at each house, and
felt, when she was safely home, that she had won past a thousand
enemies armed with ridicule. She told herself that her sensitiveness
was preposterous, but daily she was thrown into panic. She saw curtains
slide back into innocent smoothness. Old women who had been entering
their houses slipped out again to stare at her--in the wintry quiet she
could hear them tiptoeing on their porches. When she had for a blessed
hour forgotten the searchlight, when she was scampering through a chill
dusk, happy in yellow windows against gray night, her heart checked
as she realized that a head covered with a shawl was thrust up over a
snow-tipped bush to watch her.
She admitted that she was taking herself too seriously; that villagers
gape at every one. She became placid, and thought well of her
philosophy. But next morning she had a shock of shame as she entered
Ludelmeyer's. The grocer, his clerk, and neurotic Mrs. Dave Dyer had been
giggling about something. They halted, looked embarrassed, babbled about
onions. Carol felt guilty. That evening when Kennicott took her to call
on the crochety Lyman Casses, their hosts seemed flustered at their
arrival. Kennicott jovially hooted, "What makes you so hang-dog, Lym?"
The Casses tittered feebly.
Except Dave Dyer, Sam Clark, and Raymie Wutherspoon, there were no
merchants of whose welcome Carol was certain. She knew that she read
mockery into greetings but she could not control her suspicion, could
not rise from her psychic collapse. She alternately raged and flinched
at the superiority of the merchants. They did not know that they
were being rude, but they meant to have it understood that they were
prosperous and "not scared of no doctor's wife." They often said, "One
man's as good as another--and a darn sight better." This motto, however,
they did not commend to farmer customers who had had crop failures. The
Yankee merchants were crabbed; and Ole Jenson, Ludelmeyer, and Gus Dahl,
from the "Old Country," wished to be taken for Yankees. James Madison
Howland, born in New Hampshire, and Ole Jenson, born in Sweden, both
proved that they were free American citizens by grunting, "I don't
know whether I got any or not," or "Well, you can't expect me to get it
delivered by noon."
It was good form for the customers to fight back. Juanita Haydock
cheerfully jabbered, "You have it there by twelve or I'll snatch that
fresh delivery-boy bald-headed." But Carol had never been able to play
the game of friendly rudeness; and now she was certain that she never
would learn it. She formed the cowardly habit of going to Axel Egge's.
Axel was not respectable and rude. He was still a foreigner, and he
expected to remain one. His manner was heavy and uninterrogative. His
establishment was more fantastic than any cross-roads store. No one save
Axel himself could find anything. A part of the assortment of children's
stockings was under a blanket on a shelf, a part in a tin ginger-snap
box, the rest heaped like a nest of black-cotton snakes upon a
flour-barrel which was surrounded by brooms, Norwegian Bibles, dried
cod for ludfisk, boxes of apricots, and a pair and a half of lumbermen's
rubber-footed boots. The place was crowded with Scandinavian farmwives,
standing aloof in shawls and ancient fawn-colored leg o' mutton jackets,
awaiting the return of their lords. They spoke Norwegian or Swedish, and
looked at Carol uncomprehendingly. They were a relief to her--they were
not whispering that she was a poseur.
But what she told herself was that Axel Egge's was "so picturesque and
romantic."
It was in the matter of clothes that she was most self-conscious.
When she dared to go shopping in her new checked suit with the
black-embroidered sulphur collar, she had as good as invited all of
Gopher Prairie (which interested itself in nothing so intimately as in
new clothes and the cost thereof) to investigate her. It was a smart
suit with lines unfamiliar to the dragging yellow and pink frocks of the
town. The Widow Bogart's stare, from her porch, indicated, "Well I
never saw anything like that before!" Mrs. McGanum stopped Carol at
the notions shop to hint, "My, that's a nice suit--wasn't it terribly
expensive?" The gang of boys in front of the drug store commented, "Hey,
Pudgie, play you a game of checkers on that dress." Carol could not
endure it. She drew her fur coat over the suit and hastily fastened the
buttons, while the boys snickered.
II
No group angered her quite so much as these staring young roues.
She had tried to convince herself that the village, with its fresh air,
its lakes for fishing and swimming, was healthier than the artificial
city. But she was sickened by glimpses of the gang of boys from fourteen
to twenty who loafed before Dyer's Drug Store, smoking cigarettes,
displaying "fancy" shoes and purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped
buttons, whistling the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, "Oh, you baby-doll"
at every passing girl.
She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind Del Snafflin's
barber shop, and shaking dice in "The Smoke House," and gathered in
a snickering knot to listen to the "juicy stories" of Bert Tybee, the
bartender of the Minniemashie House. She heard them smacking moist lips
over every love-scene at the Rosebud Movie Palace. At the counter of the
Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful messes of decayed
bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream, and gelatinous ice-cream, they
screamed to one another, "Hey, lemme 'lone," "Quit dog-gone you, looka
what you went and done, you almost spilled my glass swater," "Like hell
I did," "Hey, gol darn your hide, don't you go sticking your coffin
nail in my i-scream," "Oh you Batty, how juh like dancing with Tillie
McGuire, last night? Some squeezing, heh, kid?"
By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered that this
was the only virile and amusing manner in which boys could function;
that boys who were not compounded of the gutter and the mining-camp
were mollycoddles and unhappy. She had taken this for granted. She had
studied the boys pityingly, but impersonally. It had not occurred to her
that they might touch her.
Now she was aware that they knew all about her; that they were waiting
for some affectation over which they could guffaw. No schoolgirl passed
their observation-posts more flushingly than did Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. In
shame she knew that they glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes,
speculating about her legs. Theirs were not young eyes--there was no
youth in all the town, she agonized. They were born old, grim and old
and spying and censorious.
She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel on the day when
she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock.
Cyrus N. Bogart, son of the righteous widow who lived across the alley,
was at this time a boy of fourteen or fifteen. Carol had already seen
quite enough of Cy Bogart. On her first evening in Gopher Prairie Cy
had appeared at the head of a "charivari," banging immensely upon a
discarded automobile fender. His companions were yelping in imitation
of coyotes. Kennicott had felt rather complimented; had gone out and
distributed a dollar. But Cy was a capitalist in charivaris. He returned
with an entirely new group, and this time there were three automobile
fenders and a carnival rattle. When Kennicott again interrupted his
shaving, Cy piped, "Naw, you got to give us two dollars," and he got it.
A week later Cy rigged a tic-tac to a window of the living-room, and the
tattoo out of the darkness frightened Carol into screaming. Since
then, in four months, she had beheld Cy hanging a cat, stealing melons,
throwing tomatoes at the Kennicott house, and making ski-tracks across
the lawn, and had heard him explaining the mysteries of generation,
with great audibility and dismaying knowledge. He was, in fact, a museum
specimen of what a small town, a well-disciplined public school, a
tradition of hearty humor, and a pious mother could produce from the
material of a courageous and ingenious mind.
Carol was afraid of him. Far from protesting when he set his mongrel on
a kitten, she worked hard at not seeing him.
The Kennicott garage was a shed littered with paint-cans, tools, a
lawn-mower, and ancient wisps of hay. Above it was a loft which Cy
Bogart and Earl Haydock, young brother of Harry, used as a den, for
smoking, hiding from whippings, and planning secret societies. They
climbed to it by a ladder on the alley side of the shed.
This morning of late January, two or three weeks after Vida's
revelations, Carol had gone into the stable-garage to find a hammer.
Snow softened her step. She heard voices in the loft above her:
"Ah gee, lez--oh, lez go down the lake and swipe some mushrats out of
somebody's traps," Cy was yawning.
"And get our ears beat off!" grumbled Earl Haydock.
"Gosh, these cigarettes are dandy. 'Member when we were just kids, and
used to smoke corn-silk and hayseed?"
"Yup. Gosh!"
Spit. "Silence."
"Say Earl, ma says if you chew tobacco you get consumption."
"Aw rats, your old lady is a crank."
"Yuh, that's so." Pause. "But she says she knows a fella that did."
"Aw, gee whiz, didn't Doc Kennicott used to chew tobacco all the time
before he married this-here girl from the Cities? He used to spit---Gee!
Some shot! He could hit a tree ten feet off."
This was news to the girl from the Cities.
"Say, how is she?" continued Earl.
"Huh? How's who?"
"You know who I mean, smarty."
A tussle, a thumping of loose boards, silence, weary narration from Cy:
"Mrs. Kennicott? Oh, she's all right, I guess." Relief to Carol, below.
"She gimme a hunk o' cake, one time. But Ma says she's stuck-up as hell.
Ma's always talking about her. Ma says if Mrs. Kennicott thought as much
about the doc as she does about her clothes, the doc wouldn't look so
peaked."
Spit. Silence.
"Yuh. Juanita's always talking about her, too," from Earl. "She says
Mrs. Kennicott thinks she knows it all. Juanita says she has to laugh
till she almost busts every time she sees Mrs. Kennicott peerading along
the street with that 'take a look--I'm a swell skirt' way she's got. But
gosh, I don't pay no attention to Juanita. She's meaner 'n a crab."
"Ma was telling somebody that she heard that Mrs. Kennicott claimed she
made forty dollars a week when she was on some job in the Cities, and
Ma says she knows posolutely that she never made but eighteen a week--Ma
says that when she's lived here a while she won't go round making a fool
of herself, pulling that bighead stuff on folks that know a whole lot
more than she does. They're all laughing up their sleeves at her."
"Say, jever notice how Mrs. Kennicott fusses around the house? Other
evening when I was coming over here, she'd forgot to pull down the
curtain, and I watched her for ten minutes. Jeeze, you'd 'a' died
laughing. She was there all alone, and she must 'a' spent five minutes
getting a picture straight. It was funny as hell the way she'd stick out
her finger to straighten the picture--deedle-dee, see my tunnin' 'ittle
finger, oh my, ain't I cute, what a fine long tail my cat's got!"
"But say, Earl, she's some good-looker, just the same, and O Ignatz! the
glad rags she must of bought for her wedding. Jever notice these low-cut
dresses and these thin shimmy-shirts she wears? I had a good squint at
'em when they were out on the line with the wash. And some ankles she's
got, heh?"
Then Carol fled.
In her innocence she had not known that the whole town could discuss
even her garments, her body. She felt that she was being dragged naked
down Main Street.
The moment it was dusk she pulled down the window-shades, all the shades
flush with the sill, but beyond them she felt moist fleering eyes.
III
She remembered, and tried to forget, and remembered more sharply the
vulgar detail of her husband's having observed the ancient customs
of the land by chewing tobacco. She would have preferred a prettier
vice--gambling or a mistress. For these she might have found a luxury
of forgiveness. She could not remember any fascinatingly wicked hero of
fiction who chewed tobacco. She asserted that it proved him to be a man
of the bold free West. She tried to align him with the hairy-chested
heroes of the motion-pictures. She curled on the couch a pallid softness
in the twilight, and fought herself, and lost the battle. Spitting did
not identify him with rangers riding the buttes; it merely bound him to
Gopher Prairie--to Nat Hicks the tailor and Bert Tybee the bartender.
"But he gave it up for me. Oh, what does it matter! We're all filthy in
some things. I think of myself as so superior, but I do eat and digest,
I do wash my dirty paws and scratch. I'm not a cool slim goddess on
a column. There aren't any! He gave it up for me. He stands by me,
believing that every one loves me. He's the Rock of Ages--in a storm of
meanness that's driving me mad . . . it will drive me mad."
All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when she noticed
that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled maternally at his
secret.
She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations
which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making
queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will
know hereafter), "Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying him?" She
quieted the doubt--without answering it.
IV
Kennicott had taken her north to Lac-qui-Meurt, in the Big Woods. It was
the entrance to a Chippewa Indian reservation, a sandy settlement among
Norway pines on the shore of a huge snow-glaring lake. She had her first
sight of his mother, except the glimpse at the wedding. Mrs. Kennicott
had a hushed and delicate breeding which dignified her woodeny
over-scrubbed cottage with its worn hard cushions in heavy rockers.
She had never lost the child's miraculous power of wonder. She asked
questions about books and cities. She murmured:
"Will is a dear hard-working boy but he's inclined to be too serious,
and you've taught him how to play. Last night I heard you both laughing
about the old Indian basket-seller, and I just lay in bed and enjoyed
your happiness."
Carol forgot her misery-hunting in this solidarity of family life.
She could depend upon them; she was not battling alone. Watching Mrs.
Kennicott flit about the kitchen she was better able to translate
Kennicott himself. He was matter-of-fact, yes, and incurably mature. He
didn't really play; he let Carol play with him. But he had his mother's
genius for trusting, her disdain for prying, her sure integrity.
From the two days at Lac-qui-Meurt Carol drew confidence in herself,
and she returned to Gopher Prairie in a throbbing calm like those golden
drugged seconds when, because he is for an instant free from pain, a
sick man revels in living.
A bright hard winter day, the wind shrill, black and silver clouds
booming across the sky, everything in panicky motion during the brief
light. They struggled against the surf of wind, through deep snow.
Kennicott was cheerful. He hailed Loren Wheeler, "Behave yourself while
I been away?" The editor bellowed, "B' gosh you stayed so long that
all your patients have got well!" and importantly took notes for the
Dauntless about their journey. Jackson Elder cried, "Hey, folks! How's
tricks up North?" Mrs. McGanum waved to them from her porch.
"They're glad to see us. We mean something here. These people are
satisfied. Why can't I be? But can I sit back all my life and be
satisfied with 'Hey, folks'? They want shouts on Main Street, and I want
violins in a paneled room. Why----?"
V
Vida Sherwin ran in after school a dozen times. She was tactful,
torrentially anecdotal. She had scuttled about town and plucked
compliments: Mrs. Dr. Westlake had pronounced Carol a "very sweet,
bright, cultured young woman," and Brad Bemis, the tinsmith at Clark's
Hardware Store, had declared that she was "easy to work for and awful
easy to look at."
But Carol could not yet take her in. She resented this outsider's
knowledge of her shame. Vida was not too long tolerant. She hinted,
"You're a great brooder, child. Buck up now. The town's quit criticizing
you, almost entirely. Come with me to the Thanatopsis Club. They
have some of the BEST papers, and current-events discussions--SO
interesting."
In Vida's demands Carol felt a compulsion, but she was too listless to
obey.
It was Bea Sorenson who was really her confidante.
However charitable toward the Lower Classes she may have thought
herself, Carol had been reared to assume that servants belong to
a distinct and inferior species. But she discovered that Bea was
extraordinarily like girls she had loved in college, and as a companion
altogether superior to the young matrons of the Jolly Seventeen. Daily
they became more frankly two girls playing at housework. Bea artlessly
considered Carol the most beautiful and accomplished lady in the
country; she was always shrieking, "My, dot's a swell hat!" or, "Ay
t'ink all dese ladies yoost die when dey see how elegant you do your
hair!" But it was not the humbleness of a servant, nor the hypocrisy of
a slave; it was the admiration of Freshman for Junior.
They made out the day's menus together. Though they began with
propriety, Carol sitting by the kitchen table and Bea at the sink or
blacking the stove, the conference was likely to end with both of them
by the table, while Bea gurgled over the ice-man's attempt to kiss her,
or Carol admitted, "Everybody knows that the doctor is lots more clever
than Dr. McGanum." When Carol came in from marketing, Bea plunged into
the hall to take off her coat, rub her frostied hands, and ask, "Vos
dere lots of folks up-town today?"
This was the welcome upon which Carol depended.
VI
Through her weeks of cowering there was no change in her surface life.
No one save Vida was aware of her agonizing. On her most despairing
days she chatted to women on the street, in stores. But without
the protection of Kennicott's presence she did not go to the Jolly
Seventeen; she delivered herself to the judgment of the town only when
she went shopping and on the ritualistic occasions of formal afternoon
calls, when Mrs. Lyman Cass or Mrs. George Edwin Mott, with clean gloves
and minute handkerchiefs and sealskin card-cases and countenances of
frozen approbation, sat on the edges of chairs and inquired, "Do you
find Gopher Prairie pleasing?" When they spent evenings of social
profit-and-loss at the Haydocks' or the Dyers' she hid behind Kennicott,
playing the simple bride.
Now she was unprotected. Kennicott had taken a patient to Rochester
for an operation. He would be away for two or three days. She had not
minded; she would loosen the matrimonial tension and be a fanciful girl
for a time. But now that he was gone the house was listeningly empty.
Bea was out this afternoon--presumably drinking coffee and talking about
"fellows" with her cousin Tina. It was the day for the monthly supper
and evening-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, but Carol dared not go.
She sat alone.
| As the weeks go by, Carol becomes completely paranoid that people are constantly making fun of her. She feels like every day is like high school, walking through a minefield of possible insults and ridicule. The more she walks around Gopher Prairie, the more Carol decides that the people she can't stand most are the young men who loiter and make catcalls at her as she walks by. One day, Carol overhears a boy named Cyrus Bogart talking with another kid named Earl Haydock. She overhears them talking about her and about how the people of the town say she's stuck up. Carol also finds out that Cyrus has watched her through the windows of her house before while she was tidying up. He laughs at how anal she is about tidiness. It kills Carol to think that she's not even in private inside her own home--that's how closely the town is always watching her. She also notices that Cyrus has paid special attention to the part of her dresses that show a little skin. That night, Carol pulls down every window blind in her house. She also wonders if she made a mistake in marrying Will Kennicott. Will takes Carol away from Gopher Prairie for a vacation. They spend time with Will's mother, which Carol finds enjoyable. When Carol and Will return to Gopher Prairie, Carol is heartened by how happy people are to see them back. But things quickly go back to their old unsatisfying ways. One day, Will has to head out of town for three days, leaving Carol alone. When her maid Bea goes out, too, Carol doesn't know what to do with herself. | summary |
CHAPTER X
THE house was haunted, long before evening. Shadows slipped down the
walls and waited behind every chair.
Did that door move?
No. She wouldn't go to the Jolly Seventeen. She hadn't energy enough to
caper before them, to smile blandly at Juanita's rudeness. Not today.
But she did want a party. Now! If some one would come in this afternoon,
some one who liked her--Vida or Mrs. Sam Clark or old Mrs. Champ Perry
or gentle Mrs. Dr. Westlake. Or Guy Pollock! She'd telephone----
No. That wouldn't be it. They must come of themselves.
Perhaps they would.
Why not?
She'd have tea ready, anyway. If they came--splendid. If not--what did
she care? She wasn't going to yield to the village and let down; she was
going to keep up a belief in the rite of tea, to which she had always
looked forward as the symbol of a leisurely fine existence. And it would
be just as much fun, even if it was so babyish, to have tea by herself
and pretend that she was entertaining clever men. It would!
She turned the shining thought into action. She bustled to the kitchen,
stoked the wood-range, sang Schumann while she boiled the kettle, warmed
up raisin cookies on a newspaper spread on the rack in the oven. She
scampered up-stairs to bring down her filmiest tea-cloth. She arranged
a silver tray. She proudly carried it into the living-room and set it on
the long cherrywood table, pushing aside a hoop of embroidery, a volume
of Conrad from the library, copies of the Saturday Evening Post, the
Literary Digest, and Kennicott's National Geographic Magazine.
She moved the tray back and forth and regarded the effect. She shook
her head. She busily unfolded the sewing-table set it in the bay-window,
patted the tea-cloth to smoothness, moved the tray. "Some time I'll have
a mahogany tea-table," she said happily.
She had brought in two cups, two plates. For herself, a straight chair,
but for the guest the big wing-chair, which she pantingly tugged to the
table.
She had finished all the preparations she could think of. She sat and
waited. She listened for the door-bell, the telephone. Her eagerness was
stilled. Her hands drooped.
Surely Vida Sherwin would hear the summons.
She glanced through the bay-window. Snow was sifting over the ridge
of the Howland house like sprays of water from a hose. The wide
yards across the street were gray with moving eddies. The black trees
shivered. The roadway was gashed with ruts of ice.
She looked at the extra cup and plate. She looked at the wing-chair. It
was so empty.
The tea was cold in the pot. With wearily dipping fingertip she tested
it. Yes. Quite cold. She couldn't wait any longer.
The cup across from her was icily clean, glisteningly empty.
Simply absurd to wait. She poured her own cup of tea. She sat and stared
at it. What was it she was going to do now? Oh yes; how idiotic; take a
lump of sugar.
She didn't want the beastly tea.
She was springing up. She was on the couch, sobbing.
II
She was thinking more sharply than she had for weeks.
She reverted to her resolution to change the town--awaken it, prod it,
"reform" it. What if they were wolves instead of lambs? They'd eat her
all the sooner if she was meek to them. Fight or be eaten. It was easier
to change the town completely than to conciliate it! She could not take
their point of view; it was a negative thing; an intellectual squalor;
a swamp of prejudices and fears. She would have to make them take hers.
She was not a Vincent de Paul, to govern and mold a people. What of
that? The tiniest change in their distrust of beauty would be the
beginning of the end; a seed to sprout and some day with thickening
roots to crack their wall of mediocrity. If she could not, as she
desired, do a great thing nobly and with laughter, yet she need not be
content with village nothingness. She would plant one seed in the blank
wall.
Was she just? Was it merely a blank wall, this town which to three
thousand and more people was the center of the universe? Hadn't she,
returning from Lac-qui-Meurt, felt the heartiness of their greetings?
No. The ten thousand Gopher Prairies had no monopoly of greetings and
friendly hands. Sam Clark was no more loyal than girl librarians she
knew in St. Paul, the people she had met in Chicago. And those others
had so much that Gopher Prairie complacently lacked--the world of gaiety
and adventure, of music and the integrity of bronze, of remembered
mists from tropic isles and Paris nights and the walls of Bagdad, of
industrial justice and a God who spake not in doggerel hymns.
One seed. Which seed it was did not matter. All knowledge and freedom
were one. But she had delayed so long in finding that seed. Could she
do something with this Thanatopsis Club? Or should she make her house
so charming that it would be an influence? She'd make Kennicott like
poetry. That was it, for a beginning! She conceived so clear a picture
of their bending over large fair pages by the fire (in a non-existent
fireplace) that the spectral presences slipped away. Doors no longer
moved; curtains were not creeping shadows but lovely dark masses in the
dusk; and when Bea came home Carol was singing at the piano which she
had not touched for many days.
Their supper was the feast of two girls. Carol was in the dining-room,
in a frock of black satin edged with gold, and Bea, in blue gingham and
an apron, dined in the kitchen; but the door was open between, and
Carol was inquiring, "Did you see any ducks in Dahl's window?" and Bea
chanting, "No, ma'am. Say, ve have a svell time, dis afternoon. Tina she
have coffee and knackebrod, and her fella vos dere, and ve yoost laughed
and laughed, and her fella say he vos president and he going to make
me queen of Finland, and Ay stick a fedder in may hair and say Ay bane
going to go to var--oh, ve vos so foolish and ve LAUGH so!"
When Carol sat at the piano again she did not think of her husband but
of the book-drugged hermit, Guy Pollock. She wished that Pollock would
come calling.
"If a girl really kissed him, he'd creep out of his den and be human. If
Will were as literate as Guy, or Guy were as executive as Will, I think
I could endure even Gopher Prairie. It's so hard to mother Will. I
could be maternal with Guy. Is that what I want, something to mother, a
man or a baby or a town? I WILL have a baby. Some day. But to have him
isolated here all his receptive years----
"And so to bed.
"Have I found my real level in Bea and kitchen-gossip?
"Oh, I do miss you, Will. But it will be pleasant to turn over in bed as
often as I want to, without worrying about waking you up.
"Am I really this settled thing called a 'married woman'? I feel
so unmarried tonight. So free. To think that there was once a Mrs.
Kennicott who let herself worry over a town called Gopher Prairie when
there was a whole world outside it!
"Of course Will is going to like poetry."
III
A black February day. Clouds hewn of ponderous timber weighing down
on the earth; an irresolute dropping of snow specks upon the trampled
wastes. Gloom but no veiling of angularity. The lines of roofs and
sidewalks sharp and inescapable.
The second day of Kennicott's absence.
She fled from the creepy house for a walk. It was thirty below zero;
too cold to exhilarate her. In the spaces between houses the wind caught
her. It stung, it gnawed at nose and ears and aching cheeks, and she
hastened from shelter to shelter, catching her breath in the lee of a
barn, grateful for the protection of a billboard covered with ragged
posters showing layer under layer of paste-smeared green and streaky
red.
The grove of oaks at the end of the street suggested Indians, hunting,
snow-shoes, and she struggled past the earth-banked cottages to the
open country, to a farm and a low hill corrugated with hard snow. In
her loose nutria coat, seal toque, virginal cheeks unmarked by lines of
village jealousies, she was as out of place on this dreary hillside as
a scarlet tanager on an ice-floe. She looked down on Gopher Prairie. The
snow, stretching without break from streets to devouring prairie beyond,
wiped out the town's pretense of being a shelter. The houses were black
specks on a white sheet. Her heart shivered with that still loneliness
as her body shivered with the wind.
She ran back into the huddle of streets, all the while protesting that
she wanted a city's yellow glare of shop-windows and restaurants, or the
primitive forest with hooded furs and a rifle, or a barnyard warm and
steamy, noisy with hens and cattle, certainly not these dun houses,
these yards choked with winter ash-piles, these roads of dirty snow and
clotted frozen mud. The zest of winter was gone. Three months more, till
May, the cold might drag on, with the snow ever filthier, the weakened
body less resistent. She wondered why the good citizens insisted on
adding the chill of prejudice, why they did not make the houses of their
spirits more warm and frivolous, like the wise chatterers of Stockholm
and Moscow.
She circled the outskirts of the town and viewed the slum of "Swede
Hollow." Wherever as many as three houses are gathered there will be a
slum of at least one house. In Gopher Prairie, the Sam Clarks boasted,
"you don't get any of this poverty that you find in cities--always
plenty of work--no need of charity--man got to be blame shiftless if he
don't get ahead." But now that the summer mask of leaves and grass was
gone, Carol discovered misery and dead hope. In a shack of thin boards
covered with tar-paper she saw the washerwoman, Mrs. Steinhof, working
in gray steam. Outside, her six-year-old boy chopped wood. He had a torn
jacket, muffler of a blue like skimmed milk. His hands were covered with
red mittens through which protruded his chapped raw knuckles. He halted
to blow on them, to cry disinterestedly.
A family of recently arrived Finns were camped in an abandoned stable. A
man of eighty was picking up lumps of coal along the railroad.
She did not know what to do about it. She felt that these independent
citizens, who had been taught that they belonged to a democracy, would
resent her trying to play Lady Bountiful.
She lost her loneliness in the activity of the village industries--the
railroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the wheat-elevator,
oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks on the snow, the creamery
with the sleds of farmers and piles of milk-cans, an unexplained stone
hut labeled "Danger--Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard,
where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as
he hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's small
planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and the burr of
circular saws. Most important, the Gopher Prairie Flour and Milling
Company, Lyman Cass president. Its windows were blanketed with
flour-dust, but it was the most stirring spot in town. Workmen were
wheeling barrels of flour into a box-car; a farmer sitting on sacks of
wheat in a bobsled argued with the wheat-buyer; machinery within the
mill boomed and whined, water gurgled in the ice-freed mill-race.
The clatter was a relief to Carol after months of smug houses. She
wished that she could work in the mill; that she did not belong to the
caste of professional-man's-wife.
She started for home, through the small slum. Before a tar-paper shack,
at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown dogskin coat and black plush
cap with lappets was watching her. His square face was confident,
his foxy mustache was picaresque. He stood erect, his hands in his
side-pockets, his pipe puffing slowly. He was forty-five or -six,
perhaps.
"How do, Mrs. Kennicott," he drawled.
She recalled him--the town handyman, who had repaired their furnace at
the beginning of winter.
"Oh, how do you do," she fluttered.
"My name 's Bjornstam. 'The Red Swede' they call me. Remember? Always
thought I'd kind of like to say howdy to you again."
"Ye--yes----I've been exploring the outskirts of town."
"Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and the Lutheran
minister and the priest represent the arts and sciences. Well, thunder,
we submerged tenth down here in Swede Hollow are no worse off than you
folks. Thank God, we don't have to go and purr at Juanity Haydock at the
Jolly Old Seventeen."
The Carol who regarded herself as completely adaptable was uncomfortable
at being chosen as comrade by a pipe-reeking odd-job man. Probably he
was one of her husband's patients. But she must keep her dignity.
"Yes, even the Jolly Seventeen isn't always so exciting. It's very cold
again today, isn't it. Well----"
Bjornstam was not respectfully valedictory. He showed no signs of
pulling a forelock. His eyebrows moved as though they had a life of
their own. With a subgrin he went on:
"Maybe I hadn't ought to talk about Mrs. Haydock and her Solemcholy
Seventeen in that fresh way. I suppose I'd be tickled to death if I was
invited to sit in with that gang. I'm what they call a pariah, I guess.
I'm the town badman, Mrs. Kennicott: town atheist, and I suppose I must
be an anarchist, too. Everybody who doesn't love the bankers and the
Grand Old Republican Party is an anarchist."
Carol had unconsciously slipped from her attitude of departure into an
attitude of listening, her face full toward him, her muff lowered. She
fumbled:
"Yes, I suppose so." Her own grudges came in a flood. "I don't see why
you shouldn't criticize the Jolly Seventeen if you want to. They aren't
sacred."
"Oh yes, they are! The dollar-sign has chased the crucifix clean off
the map. But then, I've got no kick. I do what I please, and I suppose I
ought to let them do the same."
"What do you mean by saying you're a pariah?"
"I'm poor, and yet I don't decently envy the rich. I'm an old bach.
I make enough money for a stake, and then I sit around by myself, and
shake hands with myself, and have a smoke, and read history, and I don't
contribute to the wealth of Brother Elder or Daddy Cass."
"You----I fancy you read a good deal."
"Yep. In a hit-or-a-miss way. I'll tell you: I'm a lone wolf. I trade
horses, and saw wood, and work in lumber-camps--I'm a first-rate
swamper. Always wished I could go to college. Though I s'pose I'd find
it pretty slow, and they'd probably kick me out."
"You really are a curious person, Mr.----"
"Bjornstam. Miles Bjornstam. Half Yank and half Swede. Usually known as
'that damn lazy big-mouthed calamity-howler that ain't satisfied with
the way we run things.' No, I ain't curious--whatever you mean by
that! I'm just a bookworm. Probably too much reading for the amount
of digestion I've got. Probably half-baked. I'm going to get in
'half-baked' first, and beat you to it, because it's dead sure to be
handed to a radical that wears jeans!"
They grinned together. She demanded:
"You say that the Jolly Seventeen is stupid. What makes you think so?"
"Oh, trust us borers into the foundation to know about your leisure
class. Fact, Mrs. Kennicott, I'll say that far as I can make out, the
only people in this man's town that do have any brains--I don't mean
ledger-keeping brains or duck-hunting brains or baby-spanking brains,
but real imaginative brains--are you and me and Guy Pollock and the
foreman at the flour-mill. He's a socialist, the foreman. (Don't tell
Lym Cass that! Lym would fire a socialist quicker than he would a
horse-thief!)"
"Indeed no, I sha'n't tell him."
"This foreman and I have some great set-to's. He's a regular old-line
party-member. Too dogmatic. Expects to reform everything from
deforestration to nosebleed by saying phrases like 'surplus value.'
Like reading the prayer-book. But same time, he's a Plato J. Aristotle
compared with people like Ezry Stowbody or Professor Mott or Julius
Flickerbaugh."
"It's interesting to hear about him."
He dug his toe into a drift, like a schoolboy. "Rats. You mean I talk
too much. Well, I do, when I get hold of somebody like you. You probably
want to run along and keep your nose from freezing."
"Yes, I must go, I suppose. But tell me: Why did you leave Miss Sherwin,
of the high school, out of your list of the town intelligentsia?"
"I guess maybe she does belong in it. From all I can hear she's in
everything and behind everything that looks like a reform--lot more
than most folks realize. She lets Mrs. Reverend Warren, the president
of this-here Thanatopsis Club, think she's running the works, but Miss
Sherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing
something. But way I figure it out----You see, I'm not interested in
these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this
barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water.
And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want
to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that
built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keel
up."
"Yes--that--that would be better. But I must run home. My poor nose is
nearly frozen."
"Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an old bach's shack
is like."
She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard that was
littered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless wash-tub. She was
disquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her the opportunity to be
delicate. He flung out his hand in a welcoming gesture which assumed
that she was her own counselor, that she was not a Respectable Married
Woman but fully a human being. With a shaky, "Well, just a moment, to
warm my nose," she glanced down the street to make sure that she was not
spied on, and bolted toward the shanty.
She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more considerate
host than the Red Swede.
He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with
amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the
shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs--one
constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank--and a row of
books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of
gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on "The
Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle."
There was but one picture--a magazine color-plate of a steep-roofed
village in the Harz Mountains which suggested kobolds and maidens with
golden hair.
Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, "Might throw open your
coat and put your feet up on the box in front of the stove." He tossed
his dogskin coat into the bunk, lowered himself into the barrel chair,
and droned on:
"Yeh, I'm probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my independence by
doing odd jobs, and that's more 'n these polite cusses like the clerks
in the banks do. When I'm rude to some slob, it may be partly because I
don't know better (and God knows I'm not no authority on trick forks
and what pants you wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it's because I
mean something. I'm about the only man in Johnson County that remembers
the joker in the Declaration of Independence about Americans being
supposed to have the right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.'
"I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at me like he wants me
to remember he's a highmuckamuck and worth two hundred thousand dollars,
and he says, 'Uh, Bjornquist----'
"'Bjornstam's my name, Ezra,' I says. HE knows my name, all rightee.
"'Well, whatever your name is,' he says, 'I understand you have a
gasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw up four cords of maple
for me,' he says.
"'So you like my looks, eh?' I says, kind of innocent.
"'What difference does that make? Want you to saw that wood before
Saturday,' he says, real sharp. Common workman going and getting fresh
with a fifth of a million dollars all walking around in a hand-me-down
fur coat!
"'Here's the difference it makes,' I says, just to devil him. 'How do
you know I like YOUR looks?' Maybe he didn't look sore! 'Nope,' I says,
thinking it all over, 'I don't like your application for a loan. Take it
to another bank, only there ain't any,' I says, and I walks off on him.
"Sure. Probably I was surly--and foolish. But I figured there had to be
ONE man in town independent enough to sass the banker!"
He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talked
on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendliness
and half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was a
proletarian philosophy.
At the door, she hinted:
"Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought you
were affected?"
"Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over
silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals thought about my
flying?"
It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of Bjornstam's scorn
which carried her through town. She faced Juanita Haydock, cocked
her head at Maud Dyer's brief nod, and came home to Bea radiant. She
telephoned Vida Sherwin to "run over this evening." She lustily played
Tschaikowsky--the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopher
of the tar-paper shack.
(When she hinted to Vida, "Isn't there a man here who amuses himself by
being irreverent to the village gods--Bjornstam, some such a name?"
the reform-leader said "Bjornstam? Oh yes. Fixes things. He's awfully
impertinent.")
IV
Kennicott had returned at midnight. At breakfast he said four several
times that he had missed her every moment.
On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, "The top o' the mornin'
to yez! Going to stop and pass the time of day mit Sam'l? Warmer, eh?
What'd the doc's thermometer say it was? Say, you folks better come
round and visit with us, one of these evenings. Don't be so dog-gone
proud, staying by yourselves."
Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator, stopped her in
the post-office, held her hand in his withered paws, peered at her
with faded eyes, and chuckled, "You are so fresh and blooming, my dear.
Mother was saying t'other day that a sight of you was better 'n a dose
of medicine."
In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively buying a modest
gray scarf. "We haven't seen you for so long," she said. "Wouldn't you
like to come in and play cribbage, some evening?" As though he meant it,
Pollock begged, "May I, really?"
While she was purchasing two yards of malines the vocal Raymie
Wutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long sallow face bobbing, and he
besought, "You've just got to come back to my department and see a pair
of patent leather slippers I set aside for you."
In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced her boots,
tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid on the slippers. She took them.
"You're a good salesman," she said.
"I'm not a salesman at all! I just like elegant things. All this is so
inartistic." He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves of
shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in rosettes, the display of
shoe-trees and tin boxes of blacking, the lithograph of a smirking
young woman with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry of
advertising, "My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection was
till I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes."
"But sometimes," Raymie sighed, "there is a pair of dainty little shoes
like these, and I set them aside for some one who will appreciate. When
I saw these I said right away, 'Wouldn't it be nice if they fitted Mrs.
Kennicott,' and I meant to speak to you first chance I had. I haven't
forgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey's!"
That evening Guy Pollock came in and, though Kennicott instantly
impressed him into a cribbage game, Carol was happy again.
V
She did not, in recovering something of her buoyancy, forget her
determination to begin the liberalizing of Gopher Prairie by the easy
and agreeable propaganda of teaching Kennicott to enjoy reading poetry
in the lamplight. The campaign was delayed. Twice he suggested that they
call on neighbors; once he was in the country. The fourth evening
he yawned pleasantly, stretched, and inquired, "Well, what'll we do
tonight? Shall we go to the movies?"
"I know exactly what we're going to do. Now don't ask questions! Come
and sit down by the table. There, are you comfy? Lean back and forget
you're a practical man, and listen to me."
It may be that she had been influenced by the managerial Vida Sherwin;
certainly she sounded as though she was selling culture. But she dropped
it when she sat on the couch, her chin in her hands, a volume of Yeats
on her knees, and read aloud.
Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town.
She was in the world of lonely things--the flutter of twilight linnets,
the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept
out of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal
glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold,
the woful incessant chanting and the----
"Heh-cha-cha!" coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She remembered that
he was the sort of person who chewed tobacco. She glared, while he
uneasily petitioned, "That's great stuff. Study it in college? I
like poetry fine--James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow--this
'Hiawatha.' Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But
I guess I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks."
With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to giggle, she
consoled him, "Then let's try some Tennyson. You've read him?"
"Tennyson? You bet. Read him in school. There's that:
And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell
When I put out to sea,
But let the----
Well, I don't remember all of it but----Oh, sure! And there's that 'I
met a little country boy who----' I don't remember exactly how it goes,
but the chorus ends up, 'We are seven.'"
"Yes. Well----Shall we try 'The Idylls of the King?' They're so full of
color."
"Go to it. Shoot." But he hastened to shelter himself behind a cigar.
She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an eye cocked on him,
and when she saw how much he was suffering she ran to him, kissed his
forehead, cried, "You poor forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent
turnip!"
"Look here now, that ain't----"
"Anyway, I sha'n't torture you any longer."
She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great deal of
emphasis:
There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the GRAND Trunk ROAD.
He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. But
when he complimented her, "That was fine. I don't know but what you
can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody," she banged the book and
suggested that they were not too late for the nine o'clock show at the
movies.
That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine
unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon and
the sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at Ole Jenson's Grocery.
But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered herself
laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an actor who stuffed
spaghetti down a woman's evening frock. For a second she loathed her
laughter; mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippi
she had walked the battlements with queens. But the celebrated cinema
jester's conceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into
unwilling tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled
through darkness.
VI
She went to the Jolly Seventeen's afternoon bridge. She had learned
the elements of the game from the Sam Clarks. She played quietly and
reasonably badly. She had no opinions on anything more polemic than
woolen union-suits, a topic on which Mrs. Howland discoursed for five
minutes. She smiled frequently, and was the complete canary-bird in her
manner of thanking the hostess, Mrs. Dave Dyer.
Her only anxious period was during the conference on husbands.
The young matrons discussed the intimacies of domesticity with a
frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol. Juanita Haydock
communicated Harry's method of shaving, and his interest in
deer-shooting. Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation,
her husband's inappreciation of liver and bacon. Maud Dyer chronicled
Dave's digestive disorders; quoted a recent bedtime controversy with
him in regard to Christian Science, socks and the sewing of buttons
upon vests; announced that she "simply wasn't going to stand his always
pawing girls when he went and got crazy-jealous if a man just danced
with her"; and rather more than sketched Dave's varieties of kisses.
So meekly did Carol give attention, so obviously was she at last
desirous of being one of them, that they looked on her fondly, and
encouraged her to give such details of her honeymoon as might be of
interest. She was embarrassed rather than resentful. She deliberately
misunderstood. She talked of Kennicott's overshoes and medical ideals
till they were thoroughly bored. They regarded her as agreeable but
green.
Till the end she labored to satisfy the inquisition. She bubbled at
Juanita, the president of the club, that she wanted to entertain them.
"Only," she said, "I don't know that I can give you any refreshments as
nice as Mrs. Dyer's salad, or that simply delicious angel's-food we had
at your house, dear."
"Fine! We need a hostess for the seventeenth of March. Wouldn't it be
awfully original if you made it a St. Patrick's Day bridge! I'll be
tickled to death to help you with it. I'm glad you've learned to play
bridge. At first I didn't hardly know if you were going to like Gopher
Prairie. Isn't it dandy that you've settled down to being homey with us!
Maybe we aren't as highbrow as the Cities, but we do have the daisiest
times and--oh, we go swimming in summer, and dances and--oh, lots of
good times. If folks will just take us as we are, I think we're a pretty
good bunch!"
"I'm sure of it. Thank you so much for the idea about having a St.
Patrick's Day bridge."
"Oh, that's nothing. I always think the Jolly Seventeen are so good at
original ideas. If you knew these other towns Wakamin and Joralemon and
all, you'd find out and realize that G. P. is the liveliest, smartest
town in the state. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan, the famous auto
manufacturer, came from here and----Yes, I think that a St. Patrick's
Day party would be awfully cunning and original, and yet not too queer
or freaky or anything."
| Carol sits alone in her house having no clue what to do. She knows there's a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen women's club, but she can't bring herself to go and be phony around them. Instead, she wishes that someone would come see her. Carol makes tea for herself and a visitor, since she has faith someone will call on her. But no one does, and the tea goes cold. Carol is bitterly disappointed. Carol asks Bea about her day off when she gets back. She envies Bea for being so satisfied with everything around her and decides that she's going to try to create change in her own home before she tries it on Gopher Prairie. She decides she's going to get her husband Will to like poetry. The next day, Carol goes for a walk around Gopher Prairie and wanders by a working-class slum called "Swede Hollow." She feels more connected to reality when she's around these poor people. Carol runs into Miles Bjornstam, the town handyman. Miles speaks to her plainly and criticizes the phoniness of the town. Carol is uncomfortable but also exhilarated to have someone to talk to about this subject. He invites her into his shack, which strikes Carol as improper, but she says yes, anyway. Carol looks around Miles's shack and sees how poor he is compared to her husband Will. But Miles is not self-conscious at all in front of her; he truly doesn't care what people think, and Carol admires him for it. After Carol gets home that day, her husband Will returns from his country trip. The next time Carol heads into the town, everyone acts like they're really happy to see her. It turns out that just a few days' absence is enough to make them want her back. Carol sticks by her resolution to make her husband Will interested in poetry. She sits down with him one night and reads some to him... but it's no use. Will isn't the poetic type, and it's clear that he's suffering just for her sake. In the end, Will and Carol just decide to go to a movie, where Carol finds herself laughing just as much as Will at a stupid comedy. The next time she goes to a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen, Carol avoids saying anything controversial, and she volunteers to have the club's next meeting at her house. | summary |
CHAPTER XI
I
SHE had often been invited to the weekly meetings of the Thanatopsis,
the women's study club, but she had put it off. The Thanatopsis was,
Vida Sherwin promised, "such a cozy group, and yet it puts you in touch
with all the intellectual thoughts that are going on everywhere."
Early in March Mrs. Westlake, wife of the veteran physician, marched
into Carol's living-room like an amiable old pussy and suggested, "My
dear, you really must come to the Thanatopsis this afternoon. Mrs.
Dawson is going to be leader and the poor soul is frightened to death.
She wanted me to get you to come. She says she's sure you will brighten
up the meeting with your knowledge of books and writings. (English
poetry is our topic today.) So shoo! Put on your coat!"
"English poetry? Really? I'd love to go. I didn't realize you were
reading poetry."
"Oh, we're not so slow!"
Mrs. Luke Dawson, wife of the richest man in town, gaped at them
piteously when they appeared. Her expensive frock of beaver-colored
satin with rows, plasters, and pendants of solemn brown beads was
intended for a woman twice her size. She stood wringing her hands in
front of nineteen folding chairs, in her front parlor with its faded
photograph of Minnehaha Falls in 1890, its "colored enlargement" of
Mr. Dawson, its bulbous lamp painted with sepia cows and mountains and
standing on a mortuary marble column.
She creaked, "O Mrs. Kennicott, I'm in such a fix. I'm supposed to lead
the discussion, and I wondered would you come and help?"
"What poet do you take up today?" demanded Carol, in her library tone of
"What book do you wish to take out?"
"Why, the English ones."
"Not all of them?"
"W-why yes. We're learning all of European Literature this year.
The club gets such a nice magazine, Culture Hints, and we follow its
programs. Last year our subject was Men and Women of the Bible, and next
year we'll probably take up Furnishings and China. My, it does make a
body hustle to keep up with all these new culture subjects, but it is
improving. So will you help us with the discussion today?"
On her way over Carol had decided to use the Thanatopsis as the tool
with which to liberalize the town. She had immediately conceived
enormous enthusiasm; she had chanted, "These are the real people. When
the housewives, who bear the burdens, are interested in poetry, it means
something. I'll work with them--for them--anything!"
Her enthusiasm had become watery even before thirteen women resolutely
removed their overshoes, sat down meatily, ate peppermints, dusted their
fingers, folded their hands, composed their lower thoughts, and invited
the naked muse of poetry to deliver her most improving message. They had
greeted Carol affectionately, and she tried to be a daughter to them.
But she felt insecure. Her chair was out in the open, exposed to their
gaze, and it was a hard-slatted, quivery, slippery church-parlor chair,
likely to collapse publicly and without warning. It was impossible to
sit on it without folding the hands and listening piously.
She wanted to kick the chair and run. It would make a magnificent
clatter.
She saw that Vida Sherwin was watching her. She pinched her wrist, as
though she were a noisy child in church, and when she was decent and
cramped again, she listened.
Mrs. Dawson opened the meeting by sighing, "I'm sure I'm glad to see you
all here today, and I understand that the ladies have prepared a number
of very interesting papers, this is such an interesting subject, the
poets, they have been an inspiration for higher thought, in fact wasn't
it Reverend Benlick who said that some of the poets have been as much an
inspiration as a good many of the ministers, and so we shall be glad to
hear----"
The poor lady smiled neuralgically, panted with fright, scrabbled about
the small oak table to find her eye-glasses, and continued, "We
will first have the pleasure of hearing Mrs. Jenson on the subject
'Shakespeare and Milton.'"
Mrs. Ole Jenson said that Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died 1616. He
lived in London, England, and in Stratford-on-Avon, which many American
tourists loved to visit, a lovely town with many curios and old houses
well worth examination. Many people believed that Shakespeare was the
greatest play-wright who ever lived, also a fine poet. Not much was
known about his life, but after all that did not really make so much
difference, because they loved to read his numerous plays, several of
the best known of which she would now criticize.
Perhaps the best known of his plays was "The Merchant of Venice," having
a beautiful love story and a fine appreciation of a woman's brains,
which a woman's club, even those who did not care to commit themselves
on the question of suffrage, ought to appreciate. (Laughter.) Mrs.
Jenson was sure that she, for one, would love to be like Portia. The
play was about a Jew named Shylock, and he didn't want his daughter to
marry a Venice gentleman named Antonio----
Mrs. Leonard Warren, a slender, gray, nervous woman, president of the
Thanatopsis and wife of the Congregational pastor, reported the birth
and death dates of Byron, Scott, Moore, Burns; and wound up:
"Burns was quite a poor boy and he did not enjoy the advantages we enjoy
today, except for the advantages of the fine old Scotch kirk where he
heard the Word of God preached more fearlessly than even in the finest
big brick churches in the big and so-called advanced cities of today,
but he did not have our educational advantages and Latin and the other
treasures of the mind so richly strewn before the, alas, too ofttimes
inattentive feet of our youth who do not always sufficiently appreciate
the privileges freely granted to every American boy rich or poor. Burns
had to work hard and was sometimes led by evil companionship into low
habits. But it is morally instructive to know that he was a good
student and educated himself, in striking contrast to the loose ways and
so-called aristocratic society-life of Lord Byron, on which I have just
spoken. And certainly though the lords and earls of his day may have
looked down upon Burns as a humble person, many of us have greatly
enjoyed his pieces about the mouse and other rustic subjects, with their
message of humble beauty--I am so sorry I have not got the time to quote
some of them."
Mrs. George Edwin Mott gave ten minutes to Tennyson and Browning.
Mrs. Nat Hicks, a wry-faced, curiously sweet woman, so awed by her
betters that Carol wanted to kiss her, completed the day's grim task by
a paper on "Other Poets." The other poets worthy of consideration were
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Gray, Mrs. Hemans, and Kipling.
Miss Ella Stowbody obliged with a recital of "The Recessional" and
extracts from "Lalla Rookh." By request, she gave "An Old Sweetheart of
Mine" as encore.
Gopher Prairie had finished the poets. It was ready for the next week's
labor: English Fiction and Essays.
Mrs. Dawson besought, "Now we will have a discussion of the papers, and
I am sure we shall all enjoy hearing from one who we hope to have as a
new member, Mrs. Kennicott, who with her splendid literary training and
all should be able to give us many pointers and--many helpful pointers."
Carol had warned herself not to be so "beastly supercilious." She had
insisted that in the belated quest of these work-stained women was
an aspiration which ought to stir her tears. "But they're so
self-satisfied. They think they're doing Burns a favor. They don't
believe they have a 'belated quest.' They're sure that they have culture
salted and hung up." It was out of this stupor of doubt that Mrs.
Dawson's summons roused her. She was in a panic. How could she speak
without hurting them?
Mrs. Champ Perry leaned over to stroke her hand and whisper, "You look
tired, dearie. Don't you talk unless you want to."
Affection flooded Carol; she was on her feet, searching for words and
courtesies:
"The only thing in the way of suggestion----I know you are following
a definite program, but I do wish that now you've had such a splendid
introduction, instead of going on with some other subject next year you
could return and take up the poets more in detail. Especially actual
quotations--even though their lives are so interesting and, as Mrs.
Warren said, so morally instructive. And perhaps there are several poets
not mentioned today whom it might be worth while considering--Keats, for
instance, and Matthew Arnold and Rossetti and Swinburne. Swinburne would
be such a--well, that is, such a contrast to life as we all enjoy it in
our beautiful Middle-west----"
She saw that Mrs. Leonard Warren was not with her. She captured her by
innocently continuing:
"Unless perhaps Swinburne tends to be, uh, more outspoken than you, than
we really like. What do you think, Mrs. Warren?"
The pastor's wife decided, "Why, you've caught my very thoughts, Mrs.
Kennicott. Of course I have never READ Swinburne, but years ago, when
he was in vogue, I remember Mr. Warren saying that Swinburne (or was
it Oscar Wilde? but anyway:) he said that though many so-called
intellectual people posed and pretended to find beauty in Swinburne,
there can never be genuine beauty without the message from the heart.
But at the same time I do think you have an excellent idea, and though
we have talked about Furnishings and China as the probable subject for
next year, I believe that it would be nice if the program committee
would try to work in another day entirely devoted to English poetry! In
fact, Madame Chairman, I so move you."
When Mrs. Dawson's coffee and angel's-food had helped them to recover
from the depression caused by thoughts of Shakespeare's death they all
told Carol that it was a pleasure to have her with them. The membership
committee retired to the sitting-room for three minutes and elected her
a member.
And she stopped being patronizing.
She wanted to be one of them. They were so loyal and kind. It was they
who would carry out her aspiration. Her campaign against village sloth
was actually begun! On what specific reform should she first loose
her army? During the gossip after the meeting Mrs. George Edwin Mott
remarked that the city hall seemed inadequate for the splendid modern
Gopher Prairie. Mrs. Nat Hicks timidly wished that the young people
could have free dances there--the lodge dances were so exclusive. The
city hall. That was it! Carol hurried home.
She had not realized that Gopher Prairie was a city. From Kennicott she
discovered that it was legally organized with a mayor and city-council
and wards. She was delighted by the simplicity of voting one's self a
metropolis. Why not?
She was a proud and patriotic citizen, all evening.
II
She examined the city hall, next morning. She had remembered it only as
a bleak inconspicuousness. She found it a liver-colored frame coop half
a block from Main Street. The front was an unrelieved wall of clapboards
and dirty windows. It had an unobstructed view of a vacant lot and Nat
Hicks's tailor shop. It was larger than the carpenter shop beside it,
but not so well built.
No one was about. She walked into the corridor. On one side was the
municipal court, like a country school; on the other, the room of the
volunteer fire company, with a Ford hose-cart and the ornamental helmets
used in parades, at the end of the hall, a filthy two-cell jail, now
empty but smelling of ammonia and ancient sweat. The whole second story
was a large unfinished room littered with piles of folding chairs, a
lime-crusted mortar-mixing box, and the skeletons of Fourth of July
floats covered with decomposing plaster shields and faded red, white,
and blue bunting. At the end was an abortive stage. The room was large
enough for the community dances which Mrs. Nat Hicks advocated. But
Carol was after something bigger than dances.
In the afternoon she scampered to the public library.
The library was open three afternoons and four evenings a week. It was
housed in an old dwelling, sufficient but unattractive. Carol caught
herself picturing pleasanter reading-rooms, chairs for children, an art
collection, a librarian young enough to experiment.
She berated herself, "Stop this fever of reforming everything! I WILL be
satisfied with the library! The city hall is enough for a beginning.
And it's really an excellent library. It's--it isn't so bad. . . . Is
it possible that I am to find dishonesties and stupidity in every
human activity I encounter? In schools and business and government and
everything? Is there never any contentment, never any rest?"
She shook her head as though she were shaking off water, and hastened
into the library, a young, light, amiable presence, modest in unbuttoned
fur coat, blue suit, fresh organdy collar, and tan boots roughened from
scuffling snow. Miss Villets stared at her, and Carol purred, "I was so
sorry not to see you at the Thanatopsis yesterday. Vida said you might
come."
"Oh. You went to the Thanatopsis. Did you enjoy it?"
"So much. Such good papers on the poets." Carol lied resolutely. "But I
did think they should have had you give one of the papers on poetry!"
"Well----Of course I'm not one of the bunch that seem to have the
time to take and run the club, and if they prefer to have papers on
literature by other ladies who have no literary training--after all, why
should I complain? What am I but a city employee!"
"You're not! You're the one person that does--that does--oh, you do so
much. Tell me, is there, uh----Who are the people who control the club?"
Miss Villets emphatically stamped a date in the front of "Frank on the
Lower Mississippi" for a small flaxen boy, glowered at him as though she
were stamping a warning on his brain, and sighed:
"I wouldn't put myself forward or criticize any one for the world, and
Vida is one of my best friends, and such a splendid teacher, and there
is no one in town more advanced and interested in all movements, but I
must say that no matter who the president or the committees are, Vida
Sherwin seems to be behind them all the time, and though she is always
telling me about what she is pleased to call my 'fine work in the
library,' I notice that I'm not often called on for papers, though Mrs.
Lyman Cass once volunteered and told me that she thought my paper on
'The Cathedrals of England' was the most interesting paper we had, the
year we took up English and French travel and architecture. But----And
of course Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Warren are very important in the club, as
you might expect of the wives of the superintendent of schools and
the Congregational pastor, and indeed they are both very cultured,
but----No, you may regard me as entirely unimportant. I'm sure what I
say doesn't matter a bit!"
"You're much too modest, and I'm going to tell Vida so, and, uh, I
wonder if you can give me just a teeny bit of your time and show me
where the magazine files are kept?"
She had won. She was profusely escorted to a room like a grandmother's
attic, where she discovered periodicals devoted to house-decoration and
town-planning, with a six-year file of the National Geographic. Miss
Villets blessedly left her alone. Humming, fluttering pages with
delighted fingers, Carol sat cross-legged on the floor, the magazines in
heaps about her.
She found pictures of New England streets: the dignity of Falmouth, the
charm of Concord, Stockbridge and Farmington and Hillhouse Avenue. The
fairy-book suburb of Forest Hills on Long Island. Devonshire cottages
and Essex manors and a Yorkshire High Street and Port Sunlight. The
Arab village of Djeddah--an intricately chased jewel-box. A town in
California which had changed itself from the barren brick fronts and
slatternly frame sheds of a Main Street to a way which led the eye down
a vista of arcades and gardens.
Assured that she was not quite mad in her belief that a small American
town might be lovely, as well as useful in buying wheat and selling
plows, she sat brooding, her thin fingers playing a tattoo on her
cheeks. She saw in Gopher Prairie a Georgian city hall: warm brick walls
with white shutters, a fanlight, a wide hall and curving stair. She
saw it the common home and inspiration not only of the town but of
the country about. It should contain the court-room (she couldn't get
herself to put in a jail), public library, a collection of excellent
prints, rest-room and model kitchen for farmwives, theater, lecture
room, free community ballroom, farm-bureau, gymnasium. Forming about it
and influenced by it, as mediaeval villages gathered about the castle,
she saw a new Georgian town as graceful and beloved as Annapolis or that
bowery Alexandria to which Washington rode.
All this the Thanatopsis Club was to accomplish with no difficulty
whatever, since its several husbands were the controllers of business
and politics. She was proud of herself for this practical view.
She had taken only half an hour to change a wire-fenced potato-plot into
a walled rose-garden. She hurried out to apprize Mrs. Leonard Warren, as
president of the Thanatopsis, of the miracle which had been worked.
III
At a quarter to three Carol had left home; at half-past four she had
created the Georgian town; at a quarter to five she was in the dignified
poverty of the Congregational parsonage, her enthusiasm pattering upon
Mrs. Leonard Warren like summer rain upon an old gray roof; at two
minutes to five a town of demure courtyards and welcoming dormer windows
had been erected, and at two minutes past five the entire town was as
flat as Babylon.
Erect in a black William and Mary chair against gray and speckly-brown
volumes of sermons and Biblical commentaries and Palestine geographies
upon long pine shelves, her neat black shoes firm on a rag-rug, herself
as correct and low-toned as her background, Mrs. Warren listened without
comment till Carol was quite through, then answered delicately:
"Yes, I think you draw a very nice picture of what might easily come to
pass--some day. I have no doubt that such villages will be found on the
prairie--some day. But if I might make just the least little criticism:
it seems to me that you are wrong in supposing either that the city hall
would be the proper start, or that the Thanatopsis would be the right
instrument. After all, it's the churches, isn't it, that are the
real heart of the community. As you may possibly know, my husband
is prominent in Congregational circles all through the state for
his advocacy of church-union. He hopes to see all the evangelical
denominations joined in one strong body, opposing Catholicism and
Christian Science, and properly guiding all movements that make for
morality and prohibition. Here, the combined churches could afford
a splendid club-house, maybe a stucco and half-timber building with
gargoyles and all sorts of pleasing decorations on it, which, it seems
to me, would be lots better to impress the ordinary class of people than
just a plain old-fashioned colonial house, such as you describe. And
that would be the proper center for all educational and pleasurable
activities, instead of letting them fall into the hands of the
politicians."
"I don't suppose it will take more than thirty or forty years for the
churches to get together?" Carol said innocently.
"Hardly that long even; things are moving so rapidly. So it would be a
mistake to make any other plans."
Carol did not recover her zeal till two days after, when she tried Mrs.
George Edwin Mott, wife of the superintendent of schools.
Mrs. Mott commented, "Personally, I am terribly busy with dressmaking
and having the seamstress in the house and all, but it would be splendid
to have the other members of the Thanatopsis take up the question.
Except for one thing: First and foremost, we must have a new
schoolbuilding. Mr. Mott says they are terribly cramped."
Carol went to view the old building. The grades and the high school were
combined in a damp yellow-brick structure with the narrow windows of an
antiquated jail--a hulk which expressed hatred and compulsory training.
She conceded Mrs. Mott's demand so violently that for two days she
dropped her own campaign. Then she built the school and city hall
together, as the center of the reborn town.
She ventured to the lead-colored dwelling of Mrs. Dave Dyer. Behind the
mask of winter-stripped vines and a wide porch only a foot above the
ground, the cottage was so impersonal that Carol could never visualize
it. Nor could she remember anything that was inside it. But Mrs. Dyer
was personal enough. With Carol, Mrs. Howland, Mrs. McGanum, and Vida
Sherwin she was a link between the Jolly Seventeen and the serious
Thanatopsis (in contrast to Juanita Haydock, who unnecessarily boasted
of being a "lowbrow" and publicly stated that she would "see herself
in jail before she'd write any darned old club papers"). Mrs. Dyer was
superfeminine in the kimono in which she received Carol. Her skin was
fine, pale, soft, suggesting a weak voluptuousness. At afternoon-coffees
she had been rude but now she addressed Carol as "dear," and insisted on
being called Maud. Carol did not quite know why she was uncomfortable
in this talcum-powder atmosphere, but she hastened to get into the fresh
air of her plans.
Maud Dyer granted that the city hall wasn't "so very nice," yet, as Dave
said, there was no use doing anything about it till they received
an appropriation from the state and combined a new city hall with
a national guard armory. Dave had given verdict, "What these mouthy
youngsters that hang around the pool-room need is universal military
training. Make men of 'em."
Mrs. Dyer removed the new schoolbuilding from the city hall:
"Oh, so Mrs. Mott has got you going on her school craze! She's been
dinging at that till everybody's sick and tired. What she really wants
is a big office for her dear bald-headed Gawge to sit around and look
important in. Of course I admire Mrs. Mott, and I'm very fond of
her, she's so brainy, even if she does try to butt in and run the
Thanatopsis, but I must say we're sick of her nagging. The old building
was good enough for us when we were kids! I hate these would-be women
politicians, don't you?"
IV
The first week of March had given promise of spring and stirred Carol
with a thousand desires for lakes and fields and roads. The snow was
gone except for filthy woolly patches under trees, the thermometer
leaped in a day from wind-bitten chill to itchy warmth. As soon as Carol
was convinced that even in this imprisoned North, spring could exist
again, the snow came down as abruptly as a paper storm in a theater; the
northwest gale flung it up in a half blizzard; and with her hope of a
glorified town went hope of summer meadows.
But a week later, though the snow was everywhere in slushy heaps, the
promise was unmistakable. By the invisible hints in air and sky and
earth which had aroused her every year through ten thousand generations
she knew that spring was coming. It was not a scorching, hard, dusty day
like the treacherous intruder of a week before, but soaked with languor,
softened with a milky light. Rivulets were hurrying in each alley; a
calling robin appeared by magic on the crab-apple tree in the Howlands'
yard. Everybody chuckled, "Looks like winter is going," and "This 'll
bring the frost out of the roads--have the autos out pretty soon
now--wonder what kind of bass-fishing we'll get this summer--ought to be
good crops this year."
Each evening Kennicott repeated, "We better not take off our Heavy
Underwear or the storm windows too soon--might be 'nother spell of
cold--got to be careful 'bout catching cold--wonder if the coal will
last through?"
The expanding forces of life within her choked the desire for reforming.
She trotted through the house, planning the spring cleaning with Bea.
When she attended her second meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing
about remaking the town. She listened respectably to statistics on
Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, De
Quincey, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed, constituted the writers
of English Fiction and Essays.
Not till she inspected the rest-room did she again become a fanatic.
She had often glanced at the store-building which had been turned into
a refuge in which farmwives could wait while their husbands transacted
business. She had heard Vida Sherwin and Mrs. Warren caress the virtue
of the Thanatopsis in establishing the rest-room and in sharing with the
city council the expense of maintaining it. But she had never entered it
till this March day.
She went in impulsively; nodded at the matron, a plump worthy widow
named Nodelquist, and at a couple of farm-women who were meekly rocking.
The rest-room resembled a second-hand store. It was furnished with
discarded patent rockers, lopsided reed chairs, a scratched pine table,
a gritty straw mat, old steel engravings of milkmaids being morally
amorous under willow-trees, faded chromos of roses and fish, and a
kerosene stove for warming lunches. The front window was darkened by
torn net curtains and by a mound of geraniums and rubber-plants.
While she was listening to Mrs. Nodelquist's account of how many
thousands of farmers' wives used the rest-room every year, and how much
they "appreciated the kindness of the ladies in providing them with
this lovely place, and all free," she thought, "Kindness nothing! The
kind-ladies' husbands get the farmers' trade. This is mere commercial
accommodation. And it's horrible. It ought to be the most charming room
in town, to comfort women sick of prairie kitchens. Certainly it ought
to have a clear window, so that they can see the metropolitan life go
by. Some day I'm going to make a better rest-room--a club-room. Why!
I've already planned that as part of my Georgian town hall!"
So it chanced that she was plotting against the peace of the Thanatopsis
at her third meeting (which covered Scandinavian, Russian, and Polish
Literature, with remarks by Mrs. Leonard Warren on the sinful paganism
of the Russian so-called church). Even before the entrance of the
coffee and hot rolls Carol seized on Mrs. Champ Perry, the kind and
ample-bosomed pioneer woman who gave historic dignity to the modern
matrons of the Thanatopsis. She poured out her plans. Mrs. Perry nodded
and stroked Carol's hand, but at the end she sighed:
"I wish I could agree with you, dearie. I'm sure you're one of the
Lord's anointed (even if we don't see you at the Baptist Church as often
as we'd like to)! But I'm afraid you're too tender-hearted. When Champ
and I came here we teamed-it with an ox-cart from Sauk Centre to Gopher
Prairie, and there was nothing here then but a stockade and a few
soldiers and some log cabins. When we wanted salt pork and gunpowder, we
sent out a man on horseback, and probably he was shot dead by the
Injuns before he got back. We ladies--of course we were all farmers
at first--we didn't expect any rest-room in those days. My, we'd have
thought the one they have now was simply elegant! My house was roofed
with hay and it leaked something terrible when it rained--only dry place
was under a shelf.
"And when the town grew up we thought the new city hall was real fine.
And I don't see any need for dance-halls. Dancing isn't what it was,
anyway. We used to dance modest, and we had just as much fun as all
these young folks do now with their terrible Turkey Trots and hugging
and all. But if they must neglect the Lord's injunction that young girls
ought to be modest, then I guess they manage pretty well at the K.
P. Hall and the Oddfellows', even if some of tie lodges don't always
welcome a lot of these foreigners and hired help to all their dances.
And I certainly don't see any need of a farm-bureau or this domestic
science demonstration you talk about. In my day the boys learned to farm
by honest sweating, and every gal could cook, or her ma learned her
how across her knee! Besides, ain't there a county agent at Wakamin? He
comes here once a fortnight, maybe. That's enough monkeying with this
scientific farming--Champ says there's nothing to it anyway.
"And as for a lecture hall--haven't we got the churches? Good deal
better to listen to a good old-fashioned sermon than a lot of geography
and books and things that nobody needs to know--more 'n enough heathen
learning right here in the Thanatopsis. And as for trying to make a
whole town in this Colonial architecture you talk about----I do love
nice things; to this day I run ribbons into my petticoats, even if
Champ Perry does laugh at me, the old villain! But just the same I don't
believe any of us old-timers would like to see the town that we worked
so hard to build being tore down to make a place that wouldn't look like
nothing but some Dutch story-book and not a bit like the place we loved.
And don't you think it's sweet now? All the trees and lawns? And such
comfy houses, and hot-water heat and electric lights and telephones
and cement walks and everything? Why, I thought everybody from the Twin
Cities always said it was such a beautiful town!"
Carol forswore herself; declared that Gopher Prairie had the color of
Algiers and the gaiety of Mardi Gras.
Yet the next afternoon she was pouncing on Mrs. Lyman Cass, the
hook-nosed consort of the owner of the flour-mill.
Mrs. Cass's parlor belonged to the crammed-Victorian school, as Mrs.
Luke Dawson's belonged to the bare-Victorian. It was furnished on two
principles: First, everything must resemble something else. A rocker had
a back like a lyre, a near-leather seat imitating tufted cloth, and
arms like Scotch Presbyterian lions; with knobs, scrolls, shields, and
spear-points on unexpected portions of the chair. The second principle
of the crammed-Victorian school was that every inch of the interior must
be filled with useless objects.
The walls of Mrs. Cass's parlor were plastered with "hand-painted"
pictures, "buckeye" pictures, of birch-trees, news-boys, puppies, and
church-steeples on Christmas Eve; with a plaque depicting the Exposition
Building in Minneapolis, burnt-wood portraits of Indian chiefs of no
tribe in particular, a pansy-decked poetic motto, a Yard of Roses, and
the banners of the educational institutions attended by the Casses' two
sons--Chicopee Falls Business College and McGillicuddy University. One
small square table contained a card-receiver of painted china with a rim
of wrought and gilded lead, a Family Bible, Grant's Memoirs, the latest
novel by Mrs. Gene Stratton Porter, a wooden model of a Swiss chalet
which was also a bank for dimes, a polished abalone shell holding one
black-headed pin and one empty spool, a velvet pin-cushion in a gilded
metal slipper with "Souvenir of Troy, N. Y." stamped on the toe, and an
unexplained red glass dish which had warts.
Mrs. Cass's first remark was, "I must show you all my pretty things and
art objects."
She piped, after Carol's appeal:
"I see. You think the New England villages and Colonial houses are so
much more cunning than these Middlewestern towns. I'm glad you feel that
way. You'll be interested to know I was born in Vermont."
"And don't you think we ought to try to make Gopher Prai----"
"My gracious no! We can't afford it. Taxes are much too high as it is.
We ought to retrench, and not let the city council spend another cent.
Uh----Don't you think that was a grand paper Mrs. Westlake read about
Tolstoy? I was so glad she pointed out how all his silly socialistic
ideas failed."
What Mrs. Cass said was what Kennicott said, that evening. Not in twenty
years would the council propose or Gopher Prairie vote the funds for a
new city hall.
V
Carol had avoided exposing her plans to Vida Sherwin. She was shy of the
big-sister manner; Vida would either laugh at her or snatch the idea and
change it to suit herself. But there was no other hope. When Vida came
in to tea Carol sketched her Utopia.
Vida was soothing but decisive:
"My dear, you're all off. I would like to see it: a real gardeny place
to shut out the gales. But it can't be done. What could the clubwomen
accomplish?"
"Their husbands are the most important men in town. They ARE the town!"
"But the town as a separate unit is not the husband of the Thanatopsis.
If you knew the trouble we had in getting the city council to spend the
money and cover the pumping-station with vines! Whatever you may think
of Gopher Prairie women, they're twice as progressive as the men."
"But can't the men see the ugliness?"
"They don't think it's ugly. And how can you prove it? Matter of taste.
Why should they like what a Boston architect likes?"
"What they like is to sell prunes!"
"Well, why not? Anyway, the point is that you have to work from the
inside, with what we have, rather than from the outside, with foreign
ideas. The shell ought not to be forced on the spirit. It can't be! The
bright shell has to grow out of the spirit, and express it. That means
waiting. If we keep after the city council for another ten years they
MAY vote the bonds for a new school."
"I refuse to believe that if they saw it the big men would be too
tight-fisted to spend a few dollars each for a building--think!--dancing
and lectures and plays, all done co-operatively!"
"You mention the word 'co-operative' to the merchants and they'll
lynch you! The one thing they fear more than mail-order houses is that
farmers' co-operative movements may get started."
"The secret trails that lead to scared pocket-books! Always, in
everything! And I don't have any of the fine melodrama of fiction: the
dictagraphs and speeches by torchlight. I'm merely blocked by stupidity.
Oh, I know I'm a fool. I dream of Venice, and I live in Archangel and
scold because the Northern seas aren't tender-colored. But at least they
sha'n't keep me from loving Venice, and sometime I'll run away----All
right. No more."
She flung out her hands in a gesture of renunciation.
VI
Early May; wheat springing up in blades like grass; corn and potatoes
being planted; the land humming. For two days there had been steady
rain. Even in town the roads were a furrowed welter of mud, hideous to
view and difficult to cross. Main Street was a black swamp from curb to
curb; on residence streets the grass parking beside the walks oozed gray
water. It was prickly hot, yet the town was barren under the bleak sky.
Softened neither by snow nor by waving boughs the houses squatted and
scowled, revealed in their unkempt harshness.
As she dragged homeward Carol looked with distaste at her clay-loaded
rubbers, the smeared hem of her skirt. She passed Lyman Cass's
pinnacled, dark-red, hulking house. She waded a streaky yellow pool.
This morass was not her home, she insisted. Her home, and her beautiful
town, existed in her mind. They had already been created. The task was
done. What she really had been questing was some one to share them with
her. Vida would not; Kennicott could not.
Some one to share her refuge.
Suddenly she was thinking of Guy Pollock.
She dismissed him. He was too cautious. She needed a spirit as young and
unreasonable as her own. And she would never find it. Youth would never
come singing. She was beaten.
Yet that same evening she had an idea which solved the rebuilding of
Gopher Prairie.
Within ten minutes she was jerking the old-fashioned bell-pull of Luke
Dawson. Mrs. Dawson opened the door and peered doubtfully about the
edge of it. Carol kissed her cheek, and frisked into the lugubrious
sitting-room.
"Well, well, you're a sight for sore eyes!" chuckled Mr. Dawson,
dropping his newspaper, pushing his spectacles back on his forehead.
"You seem so excited," sighed Mrs. Dawson.
"I am! Mr. Dawson, aren't you a millionaire?"
He cocked his head, and purred, "Well, I guess if I cashed in on all my
securities and farm-holdings and my interests in iron on the Mesaba and
in Northern timber and cut-over lands, I could push two million dollars
pretty close, and I've made every cent of it by hard work and having the
sense to not go out and spend every----"
"I think I want most of it from you!"
The Dawsons glanced at each other in appreciation of the jest; and
he chirped, "You're worse than Reverend Benlick! He don't hardly ever
strike me for more than ten dollars--at a time!"
"I'm not joking. I mean it! Your children in the Cities are grown-up and
well-to-do. You don't want to die and leave your name unknown. Why not
do a big, original thing? Why not rebuild the whole town? Get a great
architect, and have him plan a town that would be suitable to the
prairie. Perhaps he'd create some entirely new form of architecture.
Then tear down all these shambling buildings----"
Mr. Dawson had decided that she really did mean it. He wailed, "Why,
that would cost at least three or four million dollars!"
"But you alone, just one man, have two of those millions!"
"Me? Spend all my hard-earned cash on building houses for a lot of
shiftless beggars that never had the sense to save their money? Not
that I've ever been mean. Mama could always have a hired girl to do the
work--when we could find one. But her and I have worked our fingers to
the bone and--spend it on a lot of these rascals----?"
"Please! Don't be angry! I just mean--I mean----Oh, not spend all of it,
of course, but if you led off the list, and the others came in, and if
they heard you talk about a more attractive town----"
"Why now, child, you've got a lot of notions. Besides what's the matter
with the town? Looks good to me. I've had people that have traveled
all over the world tell me time and again that Gopher Prairie is the
prettiest place in the Middlewest. Good enough for anybody. Certainly
good enough for Mama and me. Besides! Mama and me are planning to go
out to Pasadena and buy a bungalow and live there."
VII
She had met Miles Bjornstam on the street. For the second of welcome
encounter this workman with the bandit mustache and the muddy overalls
seemed nearer than any one else to the credulous youth which she was
seeking to fight beside her, and she told him, as a cheerful anecdote, a
little of her story.
He grunted, "I never thought I'd be agreeing with Old Man Dawson, the
penny-pinching old land-thief--and a fine briber he is, too. But you
got the wrong slant. You aren't one of the people--yet. You want to do
something for the town. I don't! I want the town to do something for
itself. We don't want old Dawson's money--not if it's a gift, with a
string. We'll take it away from him, because it belongs to us. You got
to get more iron and cussedness into you. Come join us cheerful bums,
and some day--when we educate ourselves and quit being bums--we'll take
things and run 'em straight."
He had changed from her friend to a cynical man in overalls. She could
not relish the autocracy of "cheerful bums."
She forgot him as she tramped the outskirts of town.
She had replaced the city hall project by an entirely new and highly
exhilarating thought of how little was done for these unpicturesque
poor.
VIII
The spring of the plains is not a reluctant virgin but brazen and soon
away. The mud roads of a few days ago are powdery dust and the puddles
beside them have hardened into lozenges of black sleek earth like
cracked patent leather.
Carol was panting as she crept to the meeting of the Thanatopsis program
committee which was to decide the subject for next fall and winter.
Madam Chairman (Miss Ella Stowbody in an oyster-colored blouse) asked if
there was any new business.
Carol rose. She suggested that the Thanatopsis ought to help the poor
of the town. She was ever so correct and modern. She did not, she said,
want charity for them, but a chance of self-help; an employment bureau,
direction in washing babies and making pleasing stews, possibly a
municipal fund for home-building. "What do you think of my plans, Mrs.
Warren?" she concluded.
Speaking judiciously, as one related to the church by marriage, Mrs.
Warren gave verdict:
"I'm sure we're all heartily in accord with Mrs. Kennicott in feeling
that wherever genuine poverty is encountered, it is not only noblesse
oblige but a joy to fulfil our duty to the less fortunate ones. But I
must say it seems to me we should lose the whole point of the thing by
not regarding it as charity. Why, that's the chief adornment of the true
Christian and the church! The Bible has laid it down for our guidance.
'Faith, Hope, and CHARITY,' it says, and, 'The poor ye have with ye
always,' which indicates that there never can be anything to these
so-called scientific schemes for abolishing charity, never! And isn't it
better so? I should hate to think of a world in which we were deprived
of all the pleasure of giving. Besides, if these shiftless folks realize
they're getting charity, and not something to which they have a right,
they're so much more grateful."
"Besides," snorted Miss Ella Stowbody, "they've been fooling you, Mrs.
Kennicott. There isn't any real poverty here. Take that Mrs. Steinhof
you speak of: I send her our washing whenever there's too much for our
hired girl--I must have sent her ten dollars' worth the past year alone!
I'm sure Papa would never approve of a city home-building fund. Papa
says these folks are fakers. Especially all these tenant farmers that
pretend they have so much trouble getting seed and machinery. Papa
says they simply won't pay their debts. He says he's sure he hates to
foreclose mortgages, but it's the only way to make them respect the
law."
"And then think of all the clothes we give these people!" said Mrs.
Jackson Elder.
Carol intruded again. "Oh yes. The clothes. I was going to speak of
that. Don't you think that when we give clothes to the poor, if we
do give them old ones, we ought to mend them first and make them as
presentable as we can? Next Christmas when the Thanatopsis makes its
distribution, wouldn't it be jolly if we got together and sewed on the
clothes, and trimmed hats, and made them----"
"Heavens and earth, they have more time than we have! They ought to be
mighty good and grateful to get anything, no matter what shape it's in.
I know I'm not going to sit and sew for that lazy Mrs. Vopni, with all
I've got to do!" snapped Ella Stowbody.
They were glaring at Carol. She reflected that Mrs. Vopni, whose husband
had been killed by a train, had ten children.
But Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks was smiling. Mrs. Wilks was the proprietor of
Ye Art Shoppe and Magazine and Book Store, and the reader of the small
Christian Science church. She made it all clear:
"If this class of people had an understanding of Science and that we are
the children of God and nothing can harm us, they wouldn't be in error
and poverty."
Mrs. Jackson Elder confirmed, "Besides, it strikes me the club is
already doing enough, with tree-planting and the anti-fly campaign and
the responsibility for the rest-room--to say nothing of the fact that
we've talked of trying to get the railroad to put in a park at the
station!"
"I think so too!" said Madam Chairman. She glanced uneasily at Miss
Sherwin. "But what do you think, Vida?"
Vida smiled tactfully at each of the committee, and announced, "Well, I
don't believe we'd better start anything more right now. But it's been
a privilege to hear Carol's dear generous ideas, hasn't it! Oh! There is
one thing we must decide on at once. We must get together and oppose
any move on the part of the Minneapolis clubs to elect another State
Federation president from the Twin Cities. And this Mrs. Edgar Potbury
they're putting forward--I know there are people who think she's a
bright interesting speaker, but I regard her as very shallow. What do
you say to my writing to the Lake Ojibawasha Club, telling them that if
their district will support Mrs. Warren for second vice-president, we'll
support their Mrs. Hagelton (and such a dear, lovely, cultivated woman,
too) for president."
"Yes! We ought to show up those Minneapolis folks!" Ella Stowbody
said acidly. "And oh, by the way, we must oppose this movement of Mrs.
Potbury's to have the state clubs come out definitely in favor of woman
suffrage. Women haven't any place in politics. They would lose all their
daintiness and charm if they became involved in these horried plots
and log-rolling and all this awful political stuff about scandal and
personalities and so on."
All--save one--nodded. They interrupted the formal business-meeting
to discuss Mrs. Edgar Potbury's husband, Mrs. Potbury's income, Mrs.
Potbury's sedan, Mrs. Potbury's residence, Mrs. Potbury's oratorical
style, Mrs. Potbury's mandarin evening coat, Mrs. Potbury's coiffure,
and Mrs. Potbury's altogether reprehensible influence on the State
Federation of Women's Clubs.
Before the program committee adjourned they took three minutes to
decide which of the subjects suggested by the magazine Culture Hints,
Furnishings and China, or The Bible as Literature, would be better for
the coming year. There was one annoying incident. Mrs. Dr. Kennicott
interfered and showed off again. She commented, "Don't you think that we
already get enough of the Bible in our churches and Sunday Schools?"
Mrs. Leonard Warren, somewhat out of order but much more out of temper,
cried, "Well upon my word! I didn't suppose there was any one who felt
that we could get enough of the Bible! I guess if the Grand Old Book
has withstood the attacks of infidels for these two thousand years it is
worth our SLIGHT consideration!"
"Oh, I didn't mean----" Carol begged. Inasmuch as she did mean, it was
hard to be extremely lucid. "But I wish, instead of limiting ourselves
either to the Bible, or to anecdotes about the Brothers Adam's wigs,
which Culture Hints seems to regard as the significant point about
furniture, we could study some of the really stirring ideas that are
springing up today--whether it's chemistry or anthropology or labor
problems--the things that are going to mean so terribly much."
Everybody cleared her polite throat.
Madam Chairman inquired, "Is there any other discussion? Will some
one make a motion to adopt the suggestion of Vida Sherwin--to take up
Furnishings and China?"
It was adopted, unanimously.
"Checkmate!" murmured Carol, as she held up her hand.
Had she actually believed that she could plant a seed of liberalism
in the blank wall of mediocrity? How had she fallen into the folly of
trying to plant anything whatever in a wall so smooth and sun-glazed,
and so satisfying to the happy sleepers within?
| One day, a woman from the town's Thanatopsis Club barges into Carol's house and says Carol should go to the club's next meeting, where they'll discuss English poetry. Carol didn't realize this group was so literary, and she answers that she'd be delighted to go. Unfortunately, Carol quickly learns that the discussion of the poets is totally superficial. All they do is talk about the poets' lives and accomplishments without ever actually looking at their work. Carol tries to correct this, but what she says is over the heads of her listeners. Still, Carol tries hard to fit in, despite her dissatisfaction. The next day, Carol decides to check out the building for City Hall. She also visits the town library and asks the librarian there to give a talk sometime for the Thanatopsis Club, since she's the only woman in the town who might actually know about books. The woman says that the Thanatopsis Club has never been very keen on her. Carol decides to confide her dreams for Gopher Prairie to Miss Villets. But Miss Villets thinks that if the town is going to be improved, it'll have to be done through the churches. Carol doesn't like this idea, because she thinks that churches are stuck in the past. Unfortunately, Carol gets stuck contributing to plans that the town has already set in motion. Carol asks another woman named Mrs. Cass if they could find ways to rebuild the town's major buildings. Mrs. Cass rejects the idea by saying that taxes are too high as it is, and the town shouldn't be allowed to spend one more cent. Carol finally decides to approach a millionaire in the town, Luke Dawson, and ask him to give all his money to making Gopher Prairie more beautiful. Dawson basically laughs her out of his house. Plus, he thinks the town is fine just the way it is. After failing, Carol heads back to hang out with Miles Bjornstam to vent her frustrations about the town. He actually agrees with Mr. Dawson because he doesn't want some millionaire stepping in to help the town--he wants the town to help itself. At her next Thanatopsis meeting, Carol suggests that the club should try to help the poor people of the town by creating an employment bureau. She doesn't want to offer charity, but a chance to help the poor help themselves. The women are only interested in charity, though, since they figure there's no point in helping the poor if it doesn't make them feel good about themselves. Plus, the women don't really believe there's any true poverty in the town. The women of the club are more interested in getting more Bible study into the town. Carol thinks they've already got enough Bible study, but the women are offended at the idea that anyone can ever have enough Bible study. After this meeting, Carol more or less gives up on ever trying to change her town. | summary |
CHAPTER XII
ONE week of authentic spring, one rare sweet week of May, one tranquil
moment between the blast of winter and the charge of summer. Daily Carol
walked from town into flashing country hysteric with new life.
One enchanted hour when she returned to youth and a belief in the
possibility of beauty.
She had walked northward toward the upper shore of Plover Lake, taking
to the railroad track, whose directness and dryness make it the natural
highway for pedestrians on the plains. She stepped from tie to tie, in
long strides. At each road-crossing she had to crawl over a cattle-guard
of sharpened timbers. She walked the rails, balancing with arms
extended, cautious heel before toe. As she lost balance her body bent
over, her arms revolved wildly, and when she toppled she laughed aloud.
The thick grass beside the track, coarse and prickly with many burnings,
hid canary-yellow buttercups and the mauve petals and woolly sage-green
coats of the pasque flowers. The branches of the kinnikinic brush were
red and smooth as lacquer on a saki bowl.
She ran down the gravelly embankment, smiled at children gathering
flowers in a little basket, thrust a handful of the soft pasque flowers
into the bosom of her white blouse. Fields of springing wheat drew her
from the straight propriety of the railroad and she crawled through the
rusty barbed-wire fence. She followed a furrow between low wheat blades
and a field of rye which showed silver lights as it flowed before the
wind. She found a pasture by the lake. So sprinkled was the pasture with
rag-baby blossoms and the cottony herb of Indian tobacco that it spread
out like a rare old Persian carpet of cream and rose and delicate green.
Under her feet the rough grass made a pleasant crunching. Sweet winds
blew from the sunny lake beside her, and small waves sputtered on the
meadowy shore. She leaped a tiny creek bowered in pussy-willow buds. She
was nearing a frivolous grove of birch and poplar and wild plum trees.
The poplar foliage had the downiness of a Corot arbor; the green and
silver trunks were as candid as the birches, as slender and lustrous
as the limbs of a Pierrot. The cloudy white blossoms of the plum trees
filled the grove with a springtime mistiness which gave an illusion of
distance.
She ran into the wood, crying out for joy of freedom regained after
winter. Choke-cherry blossoms lured her from the outer sun-warmed spaces
to depths of green stillness, where a submarine light came through the
young leaves. She walked pensively along an abandoned road. She found a
moccasin-flower beside a lichen-covered log. At the end of the road she
saw the open acres--dipping rolling fields bright with wheat.
"I believe! The woodland gods still live! And out there, the great land.
It's beautiful as the mountains. What do I care for Thanatopsises?"
She came out on the prairie, spacious under an arch of boldly cut
clouds. Small pools glittered. Above a marsh red-winged blackbirds
chased a crow in a swift melodrama of the air. On a hill was silhouetted
a man following a drag. His horse bent its neck and plodded, content.
A path took her to the Corinth road, leading back to town. Dandelions
glowed in patches amidst the wild grass by the way. A stream golloped
through a concrete culvert beneath the road. She trudged in healthy
weariness.
A man in a bumping Ford rattled up beside her, hailed, "Give you a lift,
Mrs. Kennicott?"
"Thank you. It's awfully good of you, but I'm enjoying the walk."
"Great day, by golly. I seen some wheat that must of been five inches
high. Well, so long."
She hadn't the dimmest notion who he was, but his greeting warmed her.
This countryman gave her a companionship which she had never (whether
by her fault or theirs or neither) been able to find in the matrons and
commercial lords of the town.
Half a mile from town, in a hollow between hazelnut bushes and a brook,
she discovered a gipsy encampment: a covered wagon, a tent, a bunch of
pegged-out horses. A broad-shouldered man was squatted on his heels,
holding a frying-pan over a camp-fire. He looked toward her. He was
Miles Bjornstam.
"Well, well, what you doing out here?" he roared. "Come have a hunk o'
bacon. Pete! Hey, Pete!"
A tousled person came from behind the covered wagon.
"Pete, here's the one honest-to-God lady in my bum town. Come on, crawl
in and set a couple minutes, Mrs. Kennicott. I'm hiking off for all
summer."
The Red Swede staggered up, rubbed his cramped knees, lumbered to the
wire fence, held the strands apart for her. She unconsciously smiled at
him as she went through. Her skirt caught on a barb; he carefully freed
it.
Beside this man in blue flannel shirt, baggy khaki trousers, uneven
suspenders, and vile felt hat, she was small and exquisite.
The surly Pete set out an upturned bucket for her. She lounged on it,
her elbows on her knees. "Where are you going?" she asked.
"Just starting off for the summer, horse-trading." Bjornstam chuckled.
His red mustache caught the sun. "Regular hoboes and public benefactors
we are. Take a hike like this every once in a while. Sharks on horses.
Buy 'em from farmers and sell 'em to others. We're honest--frequently.
Great time. Camp along the road. I was wishing I had a chance to say
good-by to you before I ducked out but----Say, you better come along
with us."
"I'd like to."
"While you're playing mumblety-peg with Mrs. Lym Cass, Pete and me
will be rambling across Dakota, through the Bad Lands, into the butte
country, and when fall comes, we'll be crossing over a pass of the Big
Horn Mountains, maybe, and camp in a snow-storm, quarter of a mile right
straight up above a lake. Then in the morning we'll lie snug in our
blankets and look up through the pines at an eagle. How'd it strike you?
Heh? Eagle soaring and soaring all day--big wide sky----"
"Don't! Or I will go with you, and I'm afraid there might be some slight
scandal. Perhaps some day I'll do it. Good-by."
Her hand disappeared in his blackened leather glove. From the turn in
the road she waved at him. She walked on more soberly now, and she was
lonely.
But the wheat and grass were sleek velvet under the sunset; the prairie
clouds were tawny gold; and she swung happily into Main Street.
II
Through the first days of June she drove with Kennicott on his calls.
She identified him with the virile land; she admired him as she saw with
what respect the farmers obeyed him. She was out in the early chill,
after a hasty cup of coffee, reaching open country as the fresh sun came
up in that unspoiled world. Meadow larks called from the tops of thin
split fence-posts. The wild roses smelled clean.
As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was a solemnity of radial
bands, like a heavenly fan of beaten gold; the limitless circle of the
grain was a green sea rimmed with fog, and the willow wind-breaks were
palmy isles.
Before July the close heat blanketed them. The tortured earth cracked.
Farmers panted through corn-fields behind cultivators and the sweating
flanks of horses. While she waited for Kennicott in the car, before a
farmhouse, the seat burned her fingers and her head ached with the glare
on fenders and hood.
A black thunder-shower was followed by a dust storm which turned the
sky yellow with the hint of a coming tornado. Impalpable black dust
far-borne from Dakota covered the inner sills of the closed windows.
The July heat was ever more stifling. They crawled along Main Street by
day; they found it hard to sleep at night. They brought mattresses down
to the living-room, and thrashed and turned by the open window. Ten
times a night they talked of going out to soak themselves with the
hose and wade through the dew, but they were too listless to take the
trouble. On cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the gnats
appeared in swarms which peppered their faces and caught in their
throats.
She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but Kennicott declared
that it would be "kind of hard to get away, just NOW." The Health and
Improvement Committee of the Thanatopsis asked her to take part in the
anti-fly campaign, and she toiled about town persuading householders to
use the fly-traps furnished by the club, or giving out money prizes to
fly-swatting children. She was loyal enough but not ardent, and without
ever quite intending to, she began to neglect the task as heat sucked at
her strength.
Kennicott and she motored North and spent a week with his mother--that
is, Carol spent it with his mother, while he fished for bass.
The great event was their purchase of a summer cottage, down on Lake
Minniemashie.
Perhaps the most amiable feature of life in Gopher Prairie was the
summer cottages. They were merely two-room shanties, with a seepage of
broken-down chairs, peeling veneered tables, chromos pasted on wooden
walls, and inefficient kerosene stoves. They were so thin-walled and so
close together that you could--and did--hear a baby being spanked in the
fifth cottage off. But they were set among elms and lindens on a bluff
which looked across the lake to fields of ripened wheat sloping up to
green woods.
Here the matrons forgot social jealousies, and sat gossiping in gingham;
or, in old bathing-suits, surrounded by hysterical children, they
paddled for hours. Carol joined them; she ducked shrieking small boys,
and helped babies construct sand-basins for unfortunate minnows.
She liked Juanita Haydock and Maud Dyer when she helped them make
picnic-supper for the men, who came motoring out from town each evening.
She was easier and more natural with them. In the debate as to whether
there should be veal loaf or poached egg on hash, she had no chance to
be heretical and oversensitive.
They danced sometimes, in the evening; they had a minstrel show, with
Kennicott surprisingly good as end-man; always they were encircled by
children wise in the lore of woodchucks and gophers and rafts and willow
whistles.
If they could have continued this normal barbaric life Carol would have
been the most enthusiastic citizen of Gopher Prairie. She was relieved
to be assured that she did not want bookish conversation alone; that she
did not expect the town to become a Bohemia. She was content now. She
did not criticize.
But in September, when the year was at its richest, custom dictated that
it was time to return to town; to remove the children from the waste
occupation of learning the earth, and send them back to lessons about
the number of potatoes which (in a delightful world untroubled by
commission-houses or shortages in freight-cars) William sold to John.
The women who had cheerfully gone bathing all summer looked doubtful
when Carol begged, "Let's keep up an outdoor life this winter, let's
slide and skate." Their hearts shut again till spring, and the nine
months of cliques and radiators and dainty refreshments began all over.
III
Carol had started a salon.
Since Kennicott, Vida Sherwin, and Guy Pollock were her only lions,
and since Kennicott would have preferred Sam Clark to all the poets and
radicals in the entire world, her private and self-defensive clique did
not get beyond one evening dinner for Vida and Guy, on her first wedding
anniversary; and that dinner did not get beyond a controversy regarding
Raymie Wutherspoon's yearnings.
Guy Pollock was the gentlest person she had found here. He spoke of her
new jade and cream frock naturally, not jocosely; he held her chair
for her as they sat down to dinner; and he did not, like Kennicott,
interrupt her to shout, "Oh say, speaking of that, I heard a good story
today." But Guy was incurably hermit. He sat late and talked hard, and
did not come again.
Then she met Champ Perry in the post-office--and decided that in the
history of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher Prairie, for all
of America. We have lost their sturdiness, she told herself. We must
restore the last of the veterans to power and follow them on the
backward path to the integrity of Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlers
dancing in a saw-mill.
She read in the records of the Minnesota Territorial Pioneers that only
sixty years ago, not so far back as the birth of her own father, four
cabins had composed Gopher Prairie. The log stockade which Mrs. Champ
Perry was to find when she trekked in was built afterward by the
soldiers as a defense against the Sioux. The four cabins were inhabited
by Maine Yankees who had come up the Mississippi to St. Paul and driven
north over virgin prairie into virgin woods. They ground their own
corn; the men-folks shot ducks and pigeons and prairie chickens; the
new breakings yielded the turnip-like rutabagas, which they ate raw
and boiled and baked and raw again. For treat they had wild plums and
crab-apples and tiny wild strawberries.
Grasshoppers came darkening the sky, and in an hour ate the farmwife's
garden and the farmer's coat. Precious horses painfully brought from
Illinois, were drowned in bogs or stampeded by the fear of blizzards.
Snow blew through the chinks of new-made cabins, and Eastern children,
with flowery muslin dresses, shivered all winter and in summer were red
and black with mosquito bites. Indians were everywhere; they camped in
dooryards, stalked into kitchens to demand doughnuts, came with rifles
across their backs into schoolhouses and begged to see the pictures
in the geographies. Packs of timber-wolves treed the children; and the
settlers found dens of rattle-snakes, killed fifty, a hundred, in a day.
Yet it was a buoyant life. Carol read enviously in the admirable
Minnesota chronicles called "Old Rail Fence Corners" the reminiscence of
Mrs. Mahlon Black, who settled in Stillwater in 1848:
"There was nothing to parade over in those days. We took it as it came
and had happy lives. . . . We would all gather together and in about two
minutes would be having a good time--playing cards or dancing. . . . We
used to waltz and dance contra dances. None of these new jigs and not
wear any clothes to speak of. We covered our hides in those days; no
tight skirts like now. You could take three or four steps inside our
skirts and then not reach the edge. One of the boys would fiddle a while
and then some one would spell him and he could get a dance. Sometimes
they would dance and fiddle too."
She reflected that if she could not have ballrooms of gray and rose
and crystal, she wanted to be swinging across a puncheon-floor with a
dancing fiddler. This smug in-between town, which had exchanged "Money
Musk" for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic
old nor the sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet unimagined
how, turn it back to simplicity?
She herself knew two of the pioneers: the Perrys. Champ Perry was the
buyer at the grain-elevator. He weighed wagons of wheat on a rough
platform-scale, in the cracks of which the kernels sprouted every
spring. Between times he napped in the dusty peace of his office.
She called on the Perrys at their rooms above Howland & Gould's grocery.
When they were already old they had lost the money, which they had
invested in an elevator. They had given up their beloved yellow brick
house and moved into these rooms over a store, which were the Gopher
Prairie equivalent of a flat. A broad stairway led from the street
to the upper hall, along which were the doors of a lawyer's office, a
dentist's, a photographer's "studio," the lodge-rooms of the Affiliated
Order of Spartans and, at the back, the Perrys' apartment.
They received her (their first caller in a month) with aged fluttering
tenderness. Mrs. Perry confided, "My, it's a shame we got to entertain
you in such a cramped place. And there ain't any water except that ole
iron sink outside in the hall, but still, as I say to Champ, beggars
can't be choosers. 'Sides, the brick house was too big for me to sweep,
and it was way out, and it's nice to be living down here among folks.
Yes, we're glad to be here. But----Some day, maybe we can have a house
of our own again. We're saving up----Oh, dear, if we could have our own
home! But these rooms are real nice, ain't they!"
As old people will, the world over, they had moved as much as possible
of their familiar furniture into this small space. Carol had none of the
superiority she felt toward Mrs. Lyman Cass's plutocratic parlor. She
was at home here. She noted with tenderness all the makeshifts: the
darned chair-arms, the patent rocker covered with sleazy cretonne, the
pasted strips of paper mending the birch-bark napkin-rings labeled "Papa"
and "Mama."
She hinted of her new enthusiasm. To find one of the "young folks" who
took them seriously, heartened the Perrys, and she easily drew from
them the principles by which Gopher Prairie should be born again--should
again become amusing to live in.
This was their philosophy complete . . . in the era of aeroplanes and
syndicalism:
The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational,
and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordained
standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. "We don't need
all this new-fangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that's
ruining our young men in colleges. What we need is to get back to the
true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have
it preached to us."
The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the
agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs.
All socialists ought to be hanged.
"Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals
in his novels, and folks say he's made prett' near a million dollars out
of 'em."
People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred
are wicked.
Europeans are still wickeder.
It doesn't hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody
who touches wine is headed straight for hell.
Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be.
Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody.
The farmers want too much for their wheat.
The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the salaries they
pay.
There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybody
worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm.
IV
Carol's hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the nodding
dwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home with a headache.
Next day she saw Miles Bjornstam on the street.
"Just back from Montana. Great summer. Pumped my lungs chuck-full of
Rocky Mountain air. Now for another whirl at sassing the bosses of
Gopher Prairie." She smiled at him, and the Perrys faded, the pioneers
faded, till they were but daguerreotypes in a black walnut cupboard.
| Carol starts going for long walks in nature alone to calm her mind and to feel better about her place in the world. This is the only time she feels she gets to act like a kid. While she's walking, Carol sees Miles Bjornstam. The guy invites her to join him and a buddy named Pete for a hunk of bacon. It sounds like Miles is just about to leave town to do some horse-trading for the summer. When Carol finally walks away from Miles, she feels lonely. When the summer heat rolls in, the whole town of Gopher Prairie becomes uncomfortable. The families of Gopher Prairie eventually go to their summer cottages. Carol visits a couple known as the "Champ Perrys" who used to be very rich but who lost quite a lot of money and now live in a cramped apartment. All she hears from them is the same conservative dogma she's always heard from Gopher Prairie. Carol had visited them hoping for inspiration because Champ Perry's ancestors had been pioneers--but she's sad to find out that Champ is just like everyone else. The next time she goes out, Carol runs into Miles, who is fresh back from horse-trading. She instantly feels more admiration for him than for anyone else she knows. | summary |
CHAPTER XIII
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 democracy).
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.
| Carol keeps calling on the Champ Perrys out of loyalty more than anything else. But the next time she calls on them, they aren't at home. She sees a light under one of the other doors in their building, and she knocks on it, only to find Guy Pollock, her husband's lawyer friend, on the other side. Carol sits down with Guy, and they soon get to talking about Gopher Prairie. Carol realizes that Guy is a kindred spirit who thinks that there's much more to life than Gopher Prairie has to offer. Unfortunately, Guy is too scared to rock the boat or move anywhere else. The way he puts it, there is a "Village Virus" that's gotten into his system and made him spineless. The more Carol and Guy walk, the more Carol feels a romantic attraction to him. But she also feels repulsed by his submission to Gopher Prairie, because it's the exact kind of thing she's trying to avoid. Guy starts tiptoeing around the idea that he wants to be romantically involved with Carol, but then he admits he's too much of a coward to do so. He gets to talking about how even Carol's husband Will is in unfriendly competition with the other doctors in town, but Carol is unwilling to believe he's so petty. Guy crosses his room and caresses Carol's hand , but then he retreats. It's getting late, and Carol wants to leave before her meeting with Guy becomes any more inappropriate. But he convinces her to stay by inviting some neighbors over to keep everything on the up and up. | summary |
CHAPTER XIV
SHE was marching home.
"No. I couldn't fall in love with him. I like him, very much. But
he's too much of a recluse. Could I kiss him? No! No! Guy Pollock at
twenty-six I could have kissed him then, maybe, even if I were married
to some one else, and probably I'd have been glib in persuading myself
that 'it wasn't really wrong.'
"The amazing thing is that I'm not more amazed at myself. I, the
virtuous young matron. Am I to be trusted? If the Prince Charming
came----
"A Gopher Prairie housewife, married a year, and yearning for a 'Prince
Charming' like a bachfisch of sixteen! They say that marriage is a magic
change. But I'm not changed. But----
"No! I wouldn't want to fall in love, even if the Prince did come. I
wouldn't want to hurt Will. I am fond of Will. I am! He doesn't stir me,
not any longer. But I depend on him. He is home and children.
"I wonder when we will begin to have children? I do want them.
"I wonder whether I remembered to tell Bea to have hominy tomorrow,
instead of oatmeal? She will have gone to bed by now. Perhaps I'll be up
early enough----
"Ever so fond of Will. I wouldn't hurt him, even if I had to lose the
mad love. If the Prince came I'd look once at him, and run. Darn fast!
Oh, Carol, you are not heroic nor fine. You are the immutable vulgar
young female.
"But I'm not the faithless wife who enjoys confiding that she's
'misunderstood.' Oh, I'm not, I'm not!
"Am I?
"At least I didn't whisper to Guy about Will's faults and his blindness
to my remarkable soul. I didn't! Matter of fact, Will probably
understands me perfectly! If only--if he would just back me up in
rousing the town.
"How many, how incredibly many wives there must be who tingle over the
first Guy Pollock who smiles at them. No! I will not be one of that
herd of yearners! The coy virgin brides. Yet probably if the Prince were
young and dared to face life----
"I'm not half as well oriented as that Mrs. Dillon. So obviously adoring
her dentist! And seeing Guy only as an eccentric fogy.
"They weren't silk, Mrs. Dillon's stockings. They were lisle. Her legs
are nice and slim. But no nicer than mine. I hate cotton tops on silk
stockings. . . . Are my ankles getting fat? I will NOT have fat ankles!
"No. I am fond of Will. His work--one farmer he pulls through diphtheria
is worth all my yammering for a castle in Spain. A castle with baths.
"This hat is so tight. I must stretch it. Guy liked it.
"There's the house. I'm awfully chilly. Time to get out the fur coat.
I wonder if I'll ever have a beaver coat? Nutria is NOT the same thing!
Beaver-glossy. Like to run my fingers over it. Guy's mustache like
beaver. How utterly absurd!
"I am, I AM fond of Will, and----Can't I ever find another word than
'fond'?
"He's home. He'll think I was out late.
"Why can't he ever remember to pull down the shades? Cy Bogart and all
the beastly boys peeping in. But the poor dear, he's absent-minded about
minute--minush--whatever the word is. He has so much worry and work,
while I do nothing but jabber to Bea.
"I MUSTN'T forget the hominy----"
She was flying into the hall. Kennicott looked up from the Journal of
the American Medical Society.
"Hello! What time did you get back?" she cried.
"About nine. You been gadding. Here it is past eleven!" Good-natured yet
not quite approving.
"Did it feel neglected?"
"Well, you didn't remember to close the lower draft in the furnace."
"Oh, I'm so sorry. But I don't often forget things like that, do I?"
She dropped into his lap and (after he had jerked back his head to save
his eye-glasses, and removed the glasses, and settled her in a position
less cramping to his legs, and casually cleared his throat) he kissed
her amiably, and remarked:
"Nope, I must say you're fairly good about things like that. I wasn't
kicking. I just meant I wouldn't want the fire to go out on us. Leave
that draft open and the fire might burn up and go out on us. And the
nights are beginning to get pretty cold again. Pretty cold on my drive.
I put the side-curtains up, it was so chilly. But the generator is
working all right now."
"Yes. It is chilly. But I feel fine after my walk."
"Go walking?"
"I went up to see the Perrys." By a definite act of will she added
the truth: "They weren't in. And I saw Guy Pollock. Dropped into his
office."
"Why, you haven't been sitting and chinning with him till eleven
o'clock?"
"Of course there were some other people there and----Will! What do you
think of Dr. Westlake?"
"Westlake? Why?"
"I noticed him on the street today."
"Was he limping? If the poor fish would have his teeth X-rayed, I'll bet
nine and a half cents he'd find an abscess there. 'Rheumatism' he calls
it. Rheumatism, hell! He's behind the times. Wonder he doesn't bleed
himself! Wellllllll----" A profound and serious yawn. "I hate to break
up the party, but it's getting late, and a doctor never knows when he'll
get routed out before morning." (She remembered that he had given this
explanation, in these words, not less than thirty times in the year.) "I
guess we better be trotting up to bed. I've wound the clock and looked
at the furnace. Did you lock the front door when you came in?"
They trailed up-stairs, after he had turned out the lights and twice
tested the front door to make sure it was fast. While they talked
they were preparing for bed. Carol still sought to maintain privacy by
undressing behind the screen of the closet door. Kennicott was not so
reticent. Tonight, as every night, she was irritated by having to push
the old plush chair out of the way before she could open the closet
door. Every time she opened the door she shoved the chair. Ten times an
hour. But Kennicott liked to have the chair in the room, and there was
no place for it except in front of the closet.
She pushed it, felt angry, hid her anger. Kennicott was yawning, more
portentously. The room smelled stale. She shrugged and became chatty:
"You were speaking of Dr. Westlake. Tell me--you've never summed him up:
Is he really a good doctor?"
"Oh yes, he's a wise old coot."
("There! You see there is no medical rivalry. Not in my house!" she said
triumphantly to Guy Pollock.)
She hung her silk petticoat on a closet hook, and went on, "Dr. Westlake
is so gentle and scholarly----"
"Well, I don't know as I'd say he was such a whale of a scholar. I've
always had a suspicion he did a good deal of four-flushing about that.
He likes to have people think he keeps up his French and Greek and Lord
knows what all; and he's always got an old Dago book lying around the
sitting-room, but I've got a hunch he reads detective stories 'bout like
the rest of us. And I don't know where he'd ever learn so dog-gone many
languages anyway! He kind of lets people assume he went to Harvard
or Berlin or Oxford or somewhere, but I looked him up in the medical
register, and he graduated from a hick college in Pennsylvania, 'way
back in 1861!"
"But this is the important thing: Is he an honest doctor?"
"How do you mean 'honest'? Depends on what you mean."
"Suppose you were sick. Would you call him in? Would you let me call him
in?"
"Not if I were well enough to cuss and bite, I wouldn't! No, SIR! I
wouldn't have the old fake in the house. Makes me tired, his everlasting
palavering and soft-soaping. He's all right for an ordinary bellyache
or holding some fool woman's hand, but I wouldn't call him in for an
honest-to-God illness, not much I wouldn't, NO-sir! You know I don't
do much back-biting, but same time----I'll tell you, Carrrie: I've never
got over being sore at Westlake for the way he treated Mrs. Jonderquist.
Nothing the matter with her, what she really needed was a rest, but
Westlake kept calling on her and calling on her for weeks, almost every
day, and he sent her a good big fat bill, too, you can bet! I never
did forgive him for that. Nice decent hard-working people like the
Jonderquists!"
In her batiste nightgown she was standing at the bureau engaged in the
invariable rites of wishing that she had a real dressing-table with a
triple mirror, of bending toward the streaky glass and raising her chin
to inspect a pin-head mole on her throat, and finally of brushing her
hair. In rhythm to the strokes she went on:
"But, Will, there isn't any of what you might call financial rivalry
between you and the partners--Westlake and McGanum--is there?"
He flipped into bed with a solemn back-somersault and a ludicrous kick
of his heels as he tucked his legs under the blankets. He snorted, "Lord
no! I never begrudge any man a nickel he can get away from me--fairly."
"But is Westlake fair? Isn't he sly?"
"Sly is the word. He's a fox, that boy!"
She saw Guy Pollock's grin in the mirror. She flushed.
Kennicott, with his arms behind his head, was yawning:
"Yump. He's smooth, too smooth. But I bet I make prett' near as much
as Westlake and McGanum both together, though I've never wanted to grab
more than my just share. If anybody wants to go to the partners instead
of to me, that's his business. Though I must say it makes me tired when
Westlake gets hold of the Dawsons. Here Luke Dawson had been coming to
me for every toeache and headache and a lot of little things that just
wasted my time, and then when his grandchild was here last summer and
had summer-complaint, I suppose, or something like that, probably--you
know, the time you and I drove up to Lac-qui-Meurt--why, Westlake got
hold of Ma Dawson, and scared her to death, and made her think the kid
had appendicitis, and, by golly, if he and McGanum didn't operate, and
holler their heads off about the terrible adhesions they found, and what
a regular Charley and Will Mayo they were for classy surgery. They let
on that if they'd waited two hours more the kid would have developed
peritonitis, and God knows what all; and then they collected a nice
fat hundred and fifty dollars. And probably they'd have charged three
hundred, if they hadn't been afraid of me! I'm no hog, but I certainly
do hate to give old Luke ten dollars' worth of advice for a dollar and a
half, and then see a hundred and fifty go glimmering. And if I can't do
a better 'pendectomy than either Westlake or McGanum, I'll eat my hat!"
As she crept into bed she was dazzled by Guy's blazing grin. She
experimented:
"But Westlake is cleverer than his son-in-law, don't you think?"
"Yes, Westlake may be old-fashioned and all that, but he's got a certain
amount of intuition, while McGanum goes into everything bull-headed, and
butts his way through like a damn yahoo, and tries to argue his patients
into having whatever he diagnoses them as having! About the best thing
Mac can do is to stick to baby-snatching. He's just about on a par with
this bone-pounding chiropractor female, Mrs. Mattie Gooch."
"Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. McGanum, though--they're nice. They've been
awfully cordial to me."
"Well, no reason why they shouldn't be, is there? Oh, they're nice
enough--though you can bet your bottom dollar they're both plugging for
their husbands all the time, trying to get the business. And I don't
know as I call it so damn cordial in Mrs. McGanum when I holler at her
on the street and she nods back like she had a sore neck. Still, she's
all right. It's Ma Westlake that makes the mischief, pussyfooting around
all the time. But I wouldn't trust any Westlake out of the whole lot,
and while Mrs. McGanum SEEMS square enough, you don't never want to
forget that she's Westlake's daughter. You bet!"
"What about Dr. Gould? Don't you think he's worse than either Westlake
or McGanum? He's so cheap--drinking, and playing pool, and always
smoking cigars in such a cocky way----"
"That's all right now! Terry Gould is a good deal of a tin-horn sport,
but he knows a lot about medicine, and don't you forget it for one
second!"
She stared down Guy's grin, and asked more cheerfully, "Is he honest,
too?"
"Ooooooooooo! Gosh I'm sleepy!" He burrowed beneath the bedclothes in
a luxurious stretch, and came up like a diver, shaking his head, as
he complained, "How's that? Who? Terry Gould honest? Don't start me
laughing--I'm too nice and sleepy! I didn't say he was honest. I said
he had savvy enough to find the index in 'Gray's Anatomy,' which is more
than McGanum can do! But I didn't say anything about his being honest.
He isn't. Terry is crooked as a dog's hind leg. He's done me more than
one dirty trick. He told Mrs. Glorbach, seventeen miles out, that I
wasn't up-to-date in obstetrics. Fat lot of good it did him! She came
right in and told me! And Terry's lazy. He'd let a pneumonia patient
choke rather than interrupt a poker game."
"Oh no. I can't believe----"
"Well now, I'm telling you!"
"Does he play much poker? Dr. Dillon told me that Dr. Gould wanted him
to play----"
"Dillon told you what? Where'd you meet Dillon? He's just come to town."
"He and his wife were at Mr. Pollock's tonight."
"Say, uh, what'd you think of them? Didn't Dillon strike you as pretty
light-waisted?"
"Why no. He seemed intelligent. I'm sure he's much more wide-awake than
our dentist."
"Well now, the old man is a good dentist. He knows his business. And
Dillon----I wouldn't cuddle up to the Dillons too close, if I were you.
All right for Pollock, and that's none of our business, but we----I
think I'd just give the Dillons the glad hand and pass 'em up."
"But why? He isn't a rival."
"That's--all--right!" Kennicott was aggressively awake now. "He'll work
right in with Westlake and McGanum. Matter of fact, I suspect they
were largely responsible for his locating here. They'll be sending him
patients, and he'll send all that he can get hold of to them. I don't
trust anybody that's too much hand-in-glove with Westlake. You give
Dillon a shot at some fellow that's just bought a farm here and drifts
into town to get his teeth looked at, and after Dillon gets through with
him, you'll see him edging around to Westlake and McGanum, every time!"
Carol reached for her blouse, which hung on a chair by the bed. She
draped it about her shoulders, and sat up studying Kennicott, her chin
in her hands. In the gray light from the small electric bulb down the
hall she could see that he was frowning.
"Will, this is--I must get this straight. Some one said to me the other
day that in towns like this, even more than in cities, all the doctors
hate each other, because of the money----"
"Who said that?"
"It doesn't matter."
"I'll bet a hat it was your Vida Sherwin. She's a brainy woman, but
she'd be a damn sight brainier if she kept her mouth shut and didn't let
so much of her brains ooze out that way."
"Will! O Will! That's horrible! Aside from the vulgarity----Some ways,
Vida is my best friend. Even if she HAD said it. Which, as a matter of
fact, she didn't." He reared up his thick shoulders, in absurd pink and
green flannelette pajamas. He sat straight, and irritatingly snapped his
fingers, and growled:
"Well, if she didn't say it, let's forget her. Doesn't make any
difference who said it, anyway. The point is that you believe it. God!
To think you don't understand me any better than that! Money!"
("This is the first real quarrel we've ever had," she was agonizing.)
He thrust out his long arm and snatched his wrinkly vest from a chair.
He took out a cigar, a match. He tossed the vest on the floor. He
lighted the cigar and puffed savagely. He broke up the match and snapped
the fragments at the foot-board.
She suddenly saw the foot-board of the bed as the foot-stone of the
grave of love.
The room was drab-colored and ill-ventilated--Kennicott did not "believe
in opening the windows so darn wide that you heat all outdoors." The
stale air seemed never to change. In the light from the hall they were
two lumps of bedclothes with shoulders and tousled heads attached.
She begged, "I didn't mean to wake you up, dear. And please don't smoke.
You've been smoking so much. Please go back to sleep. I'm sorry."
"Being sorry 's all right, but I'm going to tell you one or two things.
This falling for anybody's say-so about medical jealousy and competition
is simply part and parcel of your usual willingness to think the worst
you possibly can of us poor dubs in Gopher Prairie. Trouble with women
like you is, you always want to ARGUE. Can't take things the way they
are. Got to argue. Well, I'm not going to argue about this in any way,
shape, manner, or form. Trouble with you is, you don't make any effort
to appreciate us. You're so damned superior, and think the city is such
a hell of a lot finer place, and you want us to do what YOU want, all
the time----"
"That's not true! It's I who make the effort. It's they--it's you--who
stand back and criticize. I have to come over to the town's opinion;
I have to devote myself to their interests. They can't even SEE my
interests, to say nothing of adopting them. I get ever so excited about
their old Lake Minniemashie and the cottages, but they simply guffaw (in
that lovely friendly way you advertise so much) if I speak of wanting to
see Taormina also."
"Sure, Tormina, whatever that is--some nice expensive millionaire
colony, I suppose. Sure; that's the idea; champagne taste and beer
income; and make sure that we never will have more than a beer income,
too!"
"Are you by any chance implying that I am not economical?"
"Well, I hadn't intended to, but since you bring it up yourself, I don't
mind saying the grocery bills are about twice what they ought to be."
"Yes, they probably are. I'm not economical. I can't be. Thanks to you!"
"Where d' you get that 'thanks to you'?"
"Please don't be quite so colloquial--or shall I say VULGAR?"
"I'll be as damn colloquial as I want to. How do you get that 'thanks to
you'? Here about a year ago you jump me for not remembering to give you
money. Well, I'm reasonable. I didn't blame you, and I SAID I was to
blame. But have I ever forgotten it since--practically?"
"No. You haven't--practically! But that isn't it. I ought to have an
allowance. I will, too! I must have an agreement for a regular stated
amount, every month."
"Fine idea! Of course a doctor gets a regular stated amount! Sure! A
thousand one month--and lucky if he makes a hundred the next."
"Very well then, a percentage. Or something else. No matter how much you
vary, you can make a rough average for----"
"But what's the idea? What are you trying to get at? Mean to say I'm
unreasonable? Think I'm so unreliable and tightwad that you've got to
tie me down with a contract? By God, that hurts! I thought I'd been
pretty generous and decent, and I took a lot of pleasure--thinks I,
'she'll be tickled when I hand her over this twenty'--or fifty, or
whatever it was; and now seems you been wanting to make it a kind of
alimony. Me, like a poor fool, thinking I was liberal all the while, and
you----"
"Please stop pitying yourself! You're having a beautiful time feeling
injured. I admit all you say. Certainly. You've given me money both
freely and amiably. Quite as if I were your mistress!"
"Carrie!"
"I mean it! What was a magnificent spectacle of generosity to you was
humiliation to me. You GAVE me money--gave it to your mistress, if she
was complaisant, and then you----"
"Carrie!"
"(Don't interrupt me!)--then you felt you'd discharged all obligation.
Well, hereafter I'll refuse your money, as a gift. Either I'm your
partner, in charge of the household department of our business, with a
regular budget for it, or else I'm nothing. If I'm to be a mistress,
I shall choose my lovers. Oh, I hate it--I hate it--this smirking and
hoping for money--and then not even spending it on jewels as a mistress
has a right to, but spending it on double-boilers and socks for you!
Yes indeed! You're generous! You give me a dollar, right out--the only
proviso is that I must spend it on a tie for you! And you give it when
and as you wish. How can I be anything but uneconomical?"
"Oh well, of course, looking at it that way----"
"I can't shop around, can't buy in large quantities, have to stick to
stores where I have a charge account, good deal of the time, can't plan
because I don't know how much money I can depend on. That's what I pay
for your charming sentimentalities about giving so generously. You make
me----"
"Wait! Wait! You know you're exaggerating. You never thought about that
mistress stuff till just this minute! Matter of fact, you never have
'smirked and hoped for money.' But all the same, you may be right. You
ought to run the household as a business. I'll figure out a definite
plan tomorrow, and hereafter you'll be on a regular amount or
percentage, with your own checking account."
"Oh, that IS decent of you!" She turned toward him, trying to be
affectionate. But his eyes were pink and unlovely in the flare of the
match with which he lighted his dead and malodorous cigar. His head
drooped, and a ridge of flesh scattered with pale small bristles bulged
out under his chin.
She sat in abeyance till he croaked:
"No. 'Tisn't especially decent. It's just fair. And God knows I want
to be fair. But I expect others to be fair, too. And you're so high and
mighty about people. Take Sam Clark; best soul that ever lived, honest
and loyal and a damn good fellow----"
("Yes, and a good shot at ducks, don't forget that!")
("Well, and he is a good shot, too!) Sam drops around in the evening to
sit and visit, and by golly just because he takes a dry smoke and rolls
his cigar around in his mouth, and maybe spits a few times, you look
at him as if he was a hog. Oh, you didn't know I was onto you, and I
certainly hope Sam hasn't noticed it, but I never miss it."
"I have felt that way. Spitting--ugh! But I'm sorry you caught my
thoughts. I tried to be nice; I tried to hide them."
"Maybe I catch a whole lot more than you think I do!"
"Yes, perhaps you do."
"And d' you know why Sam doesn't light his cigar when he's here?"
"Why?"
"He's so darn afraid you'll be offended if he smokes. You scare him.
Every time he speaks of the weather you jump him because he ain't
talking about poetry or Gertie--Goethe?--or some other highbrow junk.
You've got him so leery he scarcely dares to come here."
"Oh, I AM sorry. (Though I'm sure it's you who are exaggerating now.")
"Well now, I don't know as I am! And I can tell you one thing: if you
keep on you'll manage to drive away every friend I've got."
"That would be horrible of me. You KNOW I don't mean to Will, what is it
about me that frightens Sam--if I do frighten him."
"Oh, you do, all right! 'Stead of putting his legs up on another chair,
and unbuttoning his vest, and telling a good story or maybe kidding
me about something, he sits on the edge of his chair and tries to make
conversation about politics, and he doesn't even cuss, and Sam's never
real comfortable unless he can cuss a little!"
"In other words, he isn't comfortable unless he can behave like a
peasant in a mud hut!"
"Now that'll be about enough of that! You want to know how you scare
him? First you deliberately fire some question at him that you know darn
well he can't answer--any fool could see you were experimenting with
him--and then you shock him by talking of mistresses or something, like
you were doing just now----"
"Of course the pure Samuel never speaks of such erring ladies in his
private conversations!"
"Not when there's ladies around! You can bet your life on that!"
"So the impurity lies in failing to pretend that----"
"Now we won't go into all that--eugenics or whatever damn fad you choose
to call it. As I say, first you shock him, and then you become so darn
flighty that nobody can follow you. Either you want to dance, or you
bang the piano, or else you get moody as the devil and don't want to
talk or anything else. If you must be temperamental, why can't you be
that way by yourself?"
"My dear man, there's nothing I'd like better than to be by myself
occasionally! To have a room of my own! I suppose you expect me to sit
here and dream delicately and satisfy my 'temperamentality' while you
wander in from the bathroom with lather all over your face, and shout,
'Seen my brown pants?'"
"Huh!" He did not sound impressed. He made no answer. He turned out of
bed, his feet making one solid thud on the floor. He marched from the
room, a grotesque figure in baggy union-pajamas. She heard him drawing
a drink of water at the bathroom tap. She was furious at the
contemptuousness of his exit. She snuggled down in bed, and looked
away from him as he returned. He ignored her. As he flumped into bed he
yawned, and casually stated:
"Well, you'll have plenty of privacy when we build a new house.
"When?"
"Oh, I'll build it all right, don't you fret! But of course I don't
expect any credit for it."
Now it was she who grunted "Huh!" and ignored him, and felt independent
and masterful as she shot up out of bed, turned her back on him,
fished a lone and petrified chocolate out of her glove-box in the
top right-hand drawer of the bureau, gnawed at it, found that it had
cocoanut filling, said "Damn!" wished that she had not said it, so that
she might be superior to his colloquialism, and hurled the chocolate
into the wastebasket, where it made an evil and mocking clatter among
the debris of torn linen collars and toothpaste box. Then, in great
dignity and self-dramatization, she returned to bed.
All this time he had been talking on, embroidering his assertion that
he "didn't expect any credit." She was reflecting that he was a rustic,
that she hated him, that she had been insane to marry him, that she had
married him only because she was tired of work, that she must get her
long gloves cleaned, that she would never do anything more for him,
and that she mustn't forget his hominy for breakfast. She was roused to
attention by his storming:
"I'm a fool to think about a new house. By the time I get it built
you'll probably have succeeded in your plan to get me completely in
Dutch with every friend and every patient I've got."
She sat up with a bounce. She said coldly, "Thank you very much for
revealing your real opinion of me. If that's the way you feel, if I'm
such a hindrance to you, I can't stay under this roof another minute.
And I am perfectly well able to earn my own living. I will go at once,
and you may get a divorce at your pleasure! What you want is a nice
sweet cow of a woman who will enjoy having your dear friends talk about
the weather and spit on the floor!"
"Tut! Don't be a fool!"
"You will very soon find out whether I'm a fool or not! I mean it! Do
you think I'd stay here one second after I found out that I was injuring
you? At least I have enough sense of justice not to do that."
"Please stop flying off at tangents, Carrie. This----"
"Tangents? TANGENTS! Let me tell you----"
"----isn't a theater-play; it's a serious effort to have us get together
on fundamentals. We've both been cranky, and said a lot of things we
didn't mean. I wish we were a couple o' bloomin' poets and just talked
about roses and moonshine, but we're human. All right. Let's cut out
jabbing at each other. Let's admit we both do fool things. See here: You
KNOW you feel superior to folks. You're not as bad as I say, but you're
not as good as you say--not by a long shot! What's the reason you're so
superior? Why can't you take folks as they are?"
Her preparations for stalking out of the Doll's House were not yet
visible. She mused:
"I think perhaps it's my childhood." She halted. When she went on
her voice had an artificial sound, her words the bookish quality of
emotional meditation. "My father was the tenderest man in the world, but
he did feel superior to ordinary people. Well, he was! And the Minnesota
Valley----I used to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a
time, my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to write
poems. The shiny tilted roofs below me, and the river, and beyond it the
level fields in the mist, and the rim of palisades across----It held my
thoughts in. I LIVED, in the valley. But the prairie--all my thoughts go
flying off into the big space. Do you think it might be that?"
"Um, well, maybe, but----Carrie, you always talk so much about getting
all you can out of life, and not letting the years slip by, and here you
deliberately go and deprive yourself of a lot of real good home pleasure
by not enjoying people unless they wear frock coats and trot out----"
("Morning clothes. Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean t' interrupt you.")
"----to a lot of tea-parties. Take Jack Elder. You think Jack hasn't got
any ideas about anything but manufacturing and the tariff on lumber.
But do you know that Jack is nutty about music? He'll put a grand-opera
record on the phonograph and sit and listen to it and close his
eyes----Or you take Lym Cass. Ever realize what a well-informed man he
is?"
"But IS he? Gopher Prairie calls anybody 'well-informed' who's been
through the State Capitol and heard about Gladstone."
"Now I'm telling you! Lym reads a lot--solid stuff--history. Or take
Mart Mahoney, the garageman. He's got a lot of Perry prints of famous
pictures in his office. Or old Bingham Playfair, that died here 'bout a
year ago--lived seven miles out. He was a captain in the Civil War,
and knew General Sherman, and they say he was a miner in Nevada right
alongside of Mark Twain. You'll find these characters in all these small
towns, and a pile of savvy in every single one of them, if you just dig
for it."
"I know. And I do love them. Especially people like Champ Perry. But I
can't be so very enthusiastic over the smug cits like Jack Elder."
"Then I'm a smug cit, too, whatever that is."
"No, you're a scientist. Oh, I will try and get the music out of Mr.
Elder. Only, why can't he let it COME out, instead of being ashamed of
it, and always talking about hunting dogs? But I will try. Is it all
right now?"
"Sure. But there's one other thing. You might give me some attention,
too!"
"That's unjust! You have everything I am!"
"No, I haven't. You think you respect me--you always hand out some
spiel about my being so 'useful.' But you never think of me as having
ambitions, just as much as you have----"
"Perhaps not. I think of you as being perfectly satisfied."
"Well, I'm not, not by a long shot! I don't want to be a plug general
practitioner all my life, like Westlake, and die in harness because I
can't get out of it, and have 'em say, 'He was a good fellow, but he
couldn't save a cent.' Not that I care a whoop what they say, after I've
kicked in and can't hear 'em, but I want to put enough money away so you
and I can be independent some day, and not have to work unless I feel
like it, and I want to have a good house--by golly, I'll have as good
a house as anybody in THIS town!--and if we want to travel and see your
Tormina or whatever it is, why we can do it, with enough money in our
jeans so we won't have to take anything off anybody, or fret about our
old age. You never worry about what might happen if we got sick and
didn't have a good fat wad salted away, do you!"
"I don't suppose I do."
"Well then, I have to do it for you. And if you think for one moment
I want to be stuck in this burg all my life, and not have a chance to
travel and see the different points of interest and all that, then you
simply don't get me. I want to have a squint at the world, much's you
do. Only, I'm practical about it. First place, I'm going to make the
money--I'm investing in good safe farmlands. Do you understand why now?"
"Yes."
"Will you try and see if you can't think of me as something more than
just a dollar-chasing roughneck?"
"Oh, my dear, I haven't been just! I AM difficile. And I won't call on
the Dillons! And if Dr. Dillon is working for Westlake and McGanum, I
hate him!"
| As she walks home from Guy Pollock's, Carol wonders if she's capable of cheating on her husband Will. All kinds of thoughts fly through her head until she reaches home, where Will asks what's kept her out so late. She tells him she's been at Guy Pollock's and has to reassure him by saying that the neighbors were over, too. She doesn't bother to tell him about the long time she spent with Guy before these neighbors came over. Carol decides to fish for Will's opinions on the other doctors in Gopher Prairie to see if Guy was right about his competitiveness. She's sad to see that Will does have a grudge against the other doctors. Will realizes what Carol is implying and gets angry with her for being so willing to think poorly of him. He goes to sleep angry, and Carol feels that the love in their marriage is gone. Carol uses the argument as an opportunity to bring up the fact that she wants a set allowance from Will. He argues that his income goes up and down depending on business, so he can't arrange for a set amount. So Carol wants a percentage, and yadda yadda, it goes on like that. Will eventually agrees to let Carol establish a budget so that she can run their household like a business. Carol is tender with Will for a moment, but then they start arguing again. Will says that Carol just likes to be dissatisfied because she thinks her dissatisfaction makes her superior to people who just enjoy life. Carol admits that there might be something to this. Will also thinks that Carol doesn't have enough sympathy for the people of Gopher Prairie. Will mentions that Carol isn't the only person in the world who's dissatisfied. He just isn't selfish enough to go broadcasting his own dissatisfaction all over town. | summary |
CHAPTER XV
THAT December she was in love with her husband.
She romanticized herself not as a great reformer but as the wife of a
country physician. The realities of the doctor's household were colored
by her pride.
Late at night, a step on the wooden porch, heard through her confusion
of sleep; the storm-door opened; fumbling over the inner door-panels;
the buzz of the electric bell. Kennicott muttering "Gol darn it," but
patiently creeping out of bed, remembering to draw the covers up to keep
her warm, feeling for slippers and bathrobe, clumping down-stairs.
From below, half-heard in her drowsiness, a colloquy in the
pidgin-German of the farmers who have forgotten the Old Country language
without learning the new:
"Hello, Barney, wass willst du?"
"Morgen, doctor. Die Frau ist ja awful sick. All night she been having
an awful pain in de belly."
"How long she been this way? Wie lang, eh?"
"I dunno, maybe two days."
"Why didn't you come for me yesterday, instead of waking me up out of a
sound sleep? Here it is two o'clock! So spat--warum, eh?"
"Nun aber, I know it, but she got soch a lot vorse last evening. I
t'ought maybe all de time it go avay, but it got a lot vorse."
"Any fever?"
"Vell ja, I t'ink she got fever."
"Which side is the pain on?"
"Huh?"
"Das Schmertz--die Weh--which side is it on? Here?"
"So. Right here it is."
"Any rigidity there?"
"Huh?"
"Is it rigid--stiff--I mean, does the belly feel hard to the fingers?"
"I dunno. She ain't said yet."
"What she been eating?"
"Vell, I t'ink about vot ve alwis eat, maybe corn beef and cabbage and
sausage, und so weiter. Doc, sie weint immer, all the time she holler
like hell. I vish you come."
"Well, all right, but you call me earlier, next time. Look here, Barney,
you better install a 'phone--telephone haben. Some of you Dutchmen will
be dying one of these days before you can fetch the doctor."
The door closing. Barney's wagon--the wheels silent in the snow, but the
wagon-body rattling. Kennicott clicking the receiver-hook to rouse the
night telephone-operator, giving a number, waiting, cursing mildly,
waiting again, and at last growling, "Hello, Gus, this is the doctor.
Say, uh, send me up a team. Guess snow's too thick for a machine. Going
eight miles south. All right. Huh? The hell I will! Don't you go back
to sleep. Huh? Well, that's all right now, you didn't wait so very darn
long. All right, Gus; shoot her along. By!"
His step on the stairs; his quiet moving about the frigid room while he
dressed; his abstracted and meaningless cough. She was supposed to be
asleep; she was too exquisitely drowsy to break the charm by speaking.
On a slip of paper laid on the bureau--she could hear the pencil
grinding against the marble slab--he wrote his destination. He went out,
hungry, chilly, unprotesting; and she, before she fell asleep again,
loved him for his sturdiness, and saw the drama of his riding by night
to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured children
standing at a window, waiting for him. He suddenly had in her eyes the
heroism of a wireless operator on a ship in a collision; of an explorer,
fever-clawed, deserted by his bearers, but going on--jungle--going----
At six, when the light faltered in as through ground glass and bleakly
identified the chairs as gray rectangles, she heard his step on the
porch; heard him at the furnace: the rattle of shaking the grate, the
slow grinding removal of ashes, the shovel thrust into the coal-bin,
the abrupt clatter of the coal as it flew into the fire-box, the fussy
regulation of drafts--the daily sounds of a Gopher Prairie life, now
first appealing to her as something brave and enduring, many-colored
and free. She visioned the fire-box: flames turned to lemon and metallic
gold as the coal-dust sifted over them; thin twisty flutters of purple,
ghost flames which gave no light, slipping up between the dark banked
coals.
It was luxurious in bed, and the house would be warm for her when
she rose, she reflected. What a worthless cat she was! What were her
aspirations beside his capability?
She awoke again as he dropped into bed.
"Seems just a few minutes ago that you started out!"
"I've been away four hours. I've operated a woman for appendicitis, in
a Dutch kitchen. Came awful close to losing her, too, but I pulled her
through all right. Close squeak. Barney says he shot ten rabbits last
Sunday."
He was instantly asleep--one hour of rest before he had to be up and
ready for the farmers who came in early. She marveled that in what was
to her but a night-blurred moment, he should have been in a distant
place, have taken charge of a strange house, have slashed a woman, saved
a life.
What wonder he detested the lazy Westlake and McGanum! How could the
easy Guy Pollock understand this skill and endurance?
Then Kennicott was grumbling, "Seven-fifteen! Aren't you ever going
to get up for breakfast?" and he was not a hero-scientist but a rather
irritable and commonplace man who needed a shave. They had coffee,
griddle-cakes, and sausages, and talked about Mrs. McGanum's atrocious
alligator-hide belt. Night witchery and morning disillusion were alike
forgotten in the march of realities and days.
II
Familiar to the doctor's wife was the man with an injured leg, driven in
from the country on a Sunday afternoon and brought to the house. He
sat in a rocker in the back of a lumber-wagon, his face pale from the
anguish of the jolting. His leg was thrust out before him, resting on
a starch-box and covered with a leather-bound horse-blanket. His drab
courageous wife drove the wagon, and she helped Kennicott support him as
he hobbled up the steps, into the house.
"Fellow cut his leg with an ax--pretty bad gash--Halvor Nelson, nine
miles out," Kennicott observed.
Carol fluttered at the back of the room, childishly excited when she was
sent to fetch towels and a basin of water. Kennicott lifted the farmer
into a chair and chuckled, "There we are, Halvor! We'll have you out
fixing fences and drinking aquavit in a month." The farmwife sat on
the couch, expressionless, bulky in a man's dogskin coat and unplumbed
layers of jackets. The flowery silk handkerchief which she had worn over
her head now hung about her seamed neck. Her white wool gloves lay in
her lap.
Kennicott drew from the injured leg the thick red "German sock," the
innumerous other socks of gray and white wool, then the spiral bandage.
The leg was of an unwholesome dead white, with the black hairs feeble
and thin and flattened, and the scar a puckered line of crimson. Surely,
Carol shuddered, this was not human flesh, the rosy shining tissue of
the amorous poets.
Kennicott examined the scar, smiled at Halvor and his wife, chanted,
"Fine, b' gosh! Couldn't be better!"
The Nelsons looked deprecating. The farmer nodded a cue to his wife and
she mourned:
"Vell, how much ve going to owe you, doctor?"
"I guess it'll be----Let's see: one drive out and two calls. I guess
it'll be about eleven dollars in all, Lena."
"I dunno ve can pay you yoost a little w'ile, doctor."
Kennicott lumbered over to her, patted her shoulder, roared, "Why, Lord
love you, sister, I won't worry if I never get it! You pay me next fall,
when you get your crop. . . . Carrie! Suppose you or Bea could shake up
a cup of coffee and some cold lamb for the Nelsons? They got a long cold
drive ahead."
III
He had been gone since morning; her eyes ached with reading; Vida
Sherwin could not come to tea. She wandered through the house, empty as
the bleary street without. The problem of "Will the doctor be home in
time for supper, or shall I sit down without him?" was important in
the household. Six was the rigid, the canonical supper-hour, but at
half-past six he had not come. Much speculation with Bea: Had the
obstetrical case taken longer than he had expected? Had he been called
somewhere else? Was the snow much heavier out in the country, so that he
should have taken a buggy, or even a cutter, instead of the car? Here in
town it had melted a lot, but still----
A honking, a shout, the motor engine raced before it was shut off.
She hurried to the window. The car was a monster at rest after furious
adventures. The headlights blazed on the clots of ice in the road so
that the tiniest lumps gave mountainous shadows, and the taillight cast
a circle of ruby on the snow behind. Kennicott was opening the door,
crying, "Here we are, old girl! Got stuck couple times, but we made it,
by golly, we made it, and here we be! Come on! Food! Eatin's!"
She rushed to him, patted his fur coat, the long hairs smooth but chilly
to her fingers. She joyously summoned Bea, "All right! He's here! We'll
sit right down!"
IV
There were, to inform the doctor's wife of his successes no clapping
audiences nor book-reviews nor honorary degrees. But there was a
letter written by a German farmer recently moved from Minnesota to
Saskatchewan:
Dear sor, as you haf bin treading mee for a fue Weaks dis Somer and
seen wat is rong wit mee so in Regarding to dat i wont to tank you. the
Doctor heir say wat shot bee rong wit mee and day give mee som Madsin
but it diten halp mee like wat you dit. Now day glaim dat i Woten Neet
aney Madsin ad all wat you tink?
Well i haven ben tacking aney ting for about one & 1/2 Mont but i dont
get better so i like to heir Wat you tink about it i feel like dis
Disconfebil feeling around the Stomac after eating and dat Pain around
Heard and down the arm and about 3 to 3 1/2 Hour after Eating i feel
weeak like and dissy and a dull Hadig. Now you gust lett mee know Wat
you tink about mee, i do Wat you say.
V
She encountered Guy Pollock at the drug store. He looked at her as
though he had a right to; he spoke softly. "I haven't see you, the last
few days."
"No. I've been out in the country with Will several times. He's so----Do
you know that people like you and me can never understand people like
him? We're a pair of hypercritical loafers, you and I, while he quietly
goes and does things."
She nodded and smiled and was very busy about purchasing boric acid. He
stared after her, and slipped away.
When she found that he was gone she was slightly disconcerted.
VI
She could--at times--agree with Kennicott that the shaving-and-corsets
familiarity of married life was not dreary vulgarity but a wholesome
frankness; that artificial reticences might merely be irritating. She
was not much disturbed when for hours he sat about the living-room in
his honest socks. But she would not listen to his theory that "all this
romance stuff is simply moonshine--elegant when you're courting, but no
use busting yourself keeping it up all your life."
She thought of surprises, games, to vary the days. She knitted an
astounding purple scarf, which she hid under his supper plate. (When
he discovered it he looked embarrassed, and gasped, "Is today an
anniversary or something? Gosh, I'd forgotten it!")
Once she filled a thermos bottle with hot coffee a corn-flakes box with
cookies just baked by Bea, and bustled to his office at three in the
afternoon. She hid her bundles in the hall and peeped in.
The office was shabby. Kennicott had inherited it from a medical
predecessor, and changed it only by adding a white enameled
operating-table, a sterilizer, a Roentgen-ray apparatus, and a small
portable typewriter. It was a suite of two rooms: a waiting-room with
straight chairs, shaky pine table, and those coverless and unknown
magazines which are found only in the offices of dentists and
doctors. The room beyond, looking on Main Street, was business-office,
consulting-room, operating-room, and, in an alcove, bacteriological
and chemical laboratory. The wooden floors of both rooms were bare; the
furniture was brown and scaly.
Waiting for the doctor were two women, as still as though they were
paralyzed, and a man in a railroad brakeman's uniform, holding his
bandaged right hand with his tanned left. They stared at Carol. She sat
modestly in a stiff chair, feeling frivolous and out of place.
Kennicott appeared at the inner door, ushering out a bleached man with
a trickle of wan beard, and consoling him, "All right, Dad. Be careful
about the sugar, and mind the diet I gave you. Gut the prescription
filled, and come in and see me next week. Say, uh, better, uh, better
not drink too much beer. All right, Dad."
His voice was artificially hearty. He looked absently at Carol. He was
a medical machine now, not a domestic machine. "What is it, Carrie?" he
droned.
"No hurry. Just wanted to say hello."
"Well----"
Self-pity because he did not divine that this was a surprise party
rendered her sad and interesting to herself, and she had the pleasure of
the martyrs in saying bravely to him, "It's nothing special. If you're
busy long I'll trot home."
While she waited she ceased to pity and began to mock herself. For the
first time she observed the waiting-room. Oh yes, the doctor's family
had to have obi panels and a wide couch and an electric percolator, but
any hole was good enough for sick tired common people who were nothing
but the one means and excuse for the doctor's existing! No. She couldn't
blame Kennicott. He was satisfied by the shabby chairs. He put up with
them as his patients did. It was her neglected province--she who had
been going about talking of rebuilding the whole town!
When the patients were gone she brought in her bundles.
"What's those?" wondered Kennicott.
"Turn your back! Look out of the window!"
He obeyed--not very much bored. When she cried "Now!" a feast of cookies
and small hard candies and hot coffee was spread on the roll-top desk in
the inner room.
His broad face lightened. "That's a new one on me! Never was more
surprised in my life! And, by golly, I believe I am hungry. Say, this is
fine."
When the first exhilaration of the surprise had declined she demanded,
"Will! I'm going to refurnish your waiting-room!"
"What's the matter with it? It's all right."
"It is not! It's hideous. We can afford to give your patients a better
place. And it would be good business." She felt tremendously politic.
"Rats! I don't worry about the business. You look here now: As I told
you----Just because I like to tuck a few dollars away, I'll be switched
if I'll stand for your thinking I'm nothing but a dollar-chasing----"
"Stop it! Quick! I'm not hurting your feelings! I'm not criticizing! I'm
the adoring least one of thy harem. I just mean----"
Two days later, with pictures, wicker chairs, a rug, she had made the
waiting-room habitable; and Kennicott admitted, "Does look a lot better.
Never thought much about it. Guess I need being bullied."
She was convinced that she was gloriously content in her career as
doctor's-wife.
VII
She tried to free herself from the speculation and disillusionment which
had been twitching at her; sought to dismiss all the opinionation of an
insurgent era. She wanted to shine upon the veal-faced bristly-bearded
Lyman Cass as much as upon Miles Bjornstam or Guy Pollock. She gave a
reception for the Thanatopsis Club. But her real acquiring of merit
was in calling upon that Mrs. Bogart whose gossipy good opinion was so
valuable to a doctor.
Though the Bogart house was next door she had entered it but three
times. Now she put on her new moleskin cap, which made her face small
and innocent, she rubbed off the traces of a lip-stick--and fled across
the alley before her admirable resolution should sneak away.
The age of houses, like the age of men, has small relation to their
years. The dull-green cottage of the good Widow Bogart was twenty years
old, but it had the antiquity of Cheops, and the smell of mummy-dust.
Its neatness rebuked the street. The two stones by the path were painted
yellow; the outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice
that it was not concealed at all; the last iron dog remaining in Gopher
Prairie stood among whitewashed conch-shells upon the lawn. The hallway
was dismayingly scrubbed; the kitchen was an exercise in mathematics,
with problems worked out in equidistant chairs.
The parlor was kept for visitors. Carol suggested, "Let's sit in the
kitchen. Please don't trouble to light the parlor stove."
"No trouble at all! My gracious, and you coming so seldom and all, and
the kitchen is a perfect sight, I try to keep it clean, but Cy will
track mud all over it, I've spoken to him about it a hundred times if
I've spoken once, no, you sit right there, dearie, and I'll make a fire,
no trouble at all, practically no trouble at all."
Mrs. Bogart groaned, rubbed her joints, and repeatedly dusted her hands
while she made the fire, and when Carol tried to help she lamented,
"Oh, it doesn't matter; guess I ain't good for much but toil and workin'
anyway; seems as though that's what a lot of folks think."
The parlor was distinguished by an expanse of rag carpet from which, as
they entered, Mrs. Bogart hastily picked one sad dead fly. In the center
of the carpet was a rug depicting a red Newfoundland dog, reclining in a
green and yellow daisy field and labeled "Our Friend." The parlor organ,
tall and thin, was adorned with a mirror partly circular, partly square,
and partly diamond-shaped, and with brackets holding a pot of geraniums,
a mouth-organ, and a copy of "The Oldtime Hymnal." On the center
table was a Sears-Roebuck mail-order catalogue, a silver frame with
photographs of the Baptist Church and of an elderly clergyman, and
an aluminum tray containing a rattlesnake's rattle and a broken
spectacle-lens.
Mrs. Bogart spoke of the eloquence of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel,
the coldness of cold days, the price of poplar wood, Dave Dyer's new
hair-cut, and Cy Bogart's essential piety. "As I said to his Sunday
School teacher, Cy may be a little wild, but that's because he's got so
much better brains than a lot of these boys, and this farmer that claims
he caught Cy stealing 'beggies, is a liar, and I ought to have the law
on him."
Mrs. Bogart went thoroughly into the rumor that the girl waiter at
Billy's Lunch was not all she might be--or, rather, was quite all she
might be.
"My lands, what can you expect when everybody knows what her mother was?
And if these traveling salesmen would let her alone she would be all
right, though I certainly don't believe she ought to be allowed to think
she can pull the wool over our eyes. The sooner she's sent to the
school for incorrigible girls down at Sauk Centre, the better for all
and----Won't you just have a cup of coffee, Carol dearie, I'm sure you
won't mind old Aunty Bogart calling you by your first name when you
think how long I've known Will, and I was such a friend of his dear
lovely mother when she lived here and--was that fur cap expensive?
But----Don't you think it's awful, the way folks talk in this town?"
Mrs. Bogart hitched her chair nearer. Her large face, with its
disturbing collection of moles and lone black hairs, wrinkled
cunningly. She showed her decayed teeth in a reproving smile, and in the
confidential voice of one who scents stale bedroom scandal she breathed:
"I just don't see how folks can talk and act like they do. You don't
know the things that go on under cover. This town--why it's only the
religious training I've given Cy that's kept him so innocent of--things.
Just the other day----I never pay no attention to stories, but I heard
it mighty good and straight that Harry Haydock is carrying on with a
girl that clerks in a store down in Minneapolis, and poor Juanita
not knowing anything about it--though maybe it's the judgment of
God, because before she married Harry she acted up with more than one
boy----Well, I don't like to say it, and maybe I ain't up-to-date, like
Cy says, but I always believed a lady shouldn't even give names to all
sorts of dreadful things, but just the same I know there was at least
one case where Juanita and a boy--well, they were just dreadful.
And--and----Then there's that Ole Jenson the grocer, that thinks he's so
plaguey smart, and I know he made up to a farmer's wife and----And this
awful man Bjornstam that does chores, and Nat Hicks and----"
There was, it seemed, no person in town who was not living a life of
shame except Mrs. Bogart, and naturally she resented it.
She knew. She had always happened to be there. Once, she whispered, she
was going by when an indiscreet window-shade had been left up a couple
of inches. Once she had noticed a man and woman holding hands, and right
at a Methodist sociable!
"Another thing----Heaven knows I never want to start trouble, but I
can't help what I see from my back steps, and I notice your hired girl
Bea carrying on with the grocery boys and all----"
"Mrs. Bogart! I'd trust Bea as I would myself!"
"Oh, dearie, you don't understand me! I'm sure she's a good girl. I mean
she's green, and I hope that none of these horrid young men that there
are around town will get her into trouble! It's their parents' fault,
letting them run wild and hear evil things. If I had my way there
wouldn't be none of them, not boys nor girls neither, allowed to know
anything about--about things till they was married. It's terrible the
bald way that some folks talk. It just shows and gives away what awful
thoughts they got inside them, and there's nothing can cure them except
coming right to God and kneeling down like I do at prayer-meeting every
Wednesday evening, and saying, 'O God, I would be a miserable sinner
except for thy grace.'
"I'd make every last one of these brats go to Sunday School and learn
to think about nice things 'stead of about cigarettes and goings-on--and
these dances they have at the lodges are the worst thing that ever
happened to this town, lot of young men squeezing girls and finding
out----Oh, it's dreadful. I've told the mayor he ought to put a stop
to them and----There was one boy in this town, I don't want to be
suspicious or uncharitable but----"
It was half an hour before Carol escaped.
She stopped on her own porch and thought viciously:
"If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I
must be on the side of the devil. But--isn't she like me? She too wants
to 'reform the town'! She too criticizes everybody! She too thinks the
men are vulgar and limited! AM I LIKE HER? This is ghastly!"
That evening she did not merely consent to play cribbage with Kennicott;
she urged him to play; and she worked up a hectic interest in land-deals
and Sam Clark.
VIII
In courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph of Nels
Erdstrom's baby and log cabin, but she had never seen the Erdstroms.
They had become merely "patients of the doctor." Kennicott telephoned
her on a mid-December afternoon, "Want to throw your coat on and drive
out to Erdstrom's with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice."
"Oh yes!" She hastened to put on woolen stockings, high boots, sweater,
muffler, cap, mittens.
The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for the motor. They
drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked over them was a blue woolen
cover, prickly to her wrists, and outside of it a buffalo robe, humble
and moth-eaten now, used ever since the bison herds had streaked the
prairie a few miles to the west.
The scattered houses between which they passed in town were small and
desolate in contrast to the expanse of huge snowy yards and wide
street. They crossed the railroad tracks, and instantly were in the farm
country. The big piebald horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to
trot. The carriage squeaked in rhythm. Kennicott drove with clucks of
"There boy, take it easy!" He was thinking. He paid no attention to
Carol. Yet it was he who commented, "Pretty nice, over there," as they
approached an oak-grove where shifty winter sunlight quivered in the
hollow between two snow-drifts.
They drove from the natural prairie to a cleared district which twenty
years ago had been forest. The country seemed to stretch unchanging to
the North Pole: low hill, brush-scraggly bottom, reedy creek, muskrat
mound, fields with frozen brown clods thrust up through the snow.
Her ears and nose were pinched; her breath frosted her collar; her
fingers ached.
"Getting colder," she said.
"Yup."
That was all their conversation for three miles. Yet she was happy.
They reached Nels Erdstrom's at four, and with a throb she recognized
the courageous venture which had lured her to Gopher Prairie: the
cleared fields, furrows among stumps, a log cabin chinked with mud and
roofed with dry hay. But Nels had prospered. He used the log cabin as a
barn; and a new house reared up, a proud, unwise, Gopher Prairie
house, the more naked and ungraceful in its glossy white paint and pink
trimmings. Every tree had been cut down. The house was so unsheltered,
so battered by the wind, so bleakly thrust out into the harsh clearing,
that Carol shivered. But they were welcomed warmly enough in the
kitchen, with its crisp new plaster, its black and nickel range, its
cream separator in a corner.
Mrs. Erdstrom begged her to sit in the parlor, where there was a
phonograph and an oak and leather davenport, the prairie farmer's
proofs of social progress, but she dropped down by the kitchen stove and
insisted, "Please don't mind me." When Mrs. Erdstrom had followed the
doctor out of the room Carol glanced in a friendly way at the grained
pine cupboard, the framed Lutheran Konfirmations Attest, the traces
of fried eggs and sausages on the dining table against the wall, and a
jewel among calendars, presenting not only a lithographic young woman
with cherry lips, and a Swedish advertisement of Axel Egge's grocery,
but also a thermometer and a match-holder.
She saw that a boy of four or five was staring at her from the hall,
a boy in gingham shirt and faded corduroy trousers, but large-eyed,
firm-mouthed, wide-browed. He vanished, then peeped in again, biting his
knuckles, turning his shoulder toward her in shyness.
Didn't she remember--what was it?--Kennicott sitting beside her at Fort
Snelling, urging, "See how scared that baby is. Needs some woman like
you."
Magic had fluttered about her then--magic of sunset and cool air and the
curiosity of lovers. She held out her hands as much to that sanctity as
to the boy.
He edged into the room, doubtfully sucking his thumb.
"Hello," she said. "What's your name?"
"Hee, hee, hee!"
"You're quite right. I agree with you. Silly people like me always ask
children their names."
"Hee, hee, hee!"
"Come here and I'll tell you the story of--well, I don't know what it
will be about, but it will have a slim heroine and a Prince Charming."
He stood stoically while she spun nonsense. His giggling ceased. She was
winning him. Then the telephone bell--two long rings, one short.
Mrs. Erdstrom galloped into the room, shrieked into the transmitter,
"Vell? Yes, yes, dis is Erdstrom's place! Heh? Oh, you vant de doctor?"
Kennicott appeared, growled into the telephone:
"Well, what do you want? Oh, hello Dave; what do you want? Which
Morgenroth's? Adolph's? All right. Amputation? Yuh, I see. Say, Dave,
get Gus to harness up and take my surgical kit down there--and have him
take some chloroform. I'll go straight down from here. May not get
home tonight. You can get me at Adolph's. Huh? No, Carrie can give the
anesthetic, I guess. G'-by. Huh? No; tell me about that tomorrow--too
damn many people always listening in on this farmers' line."
He turned to Carol. "Adolph Morgenroth, farmer ten miles southwest of
town, got his arm crushed-fixing his cow-shed and a post caved in on
him--smashed him up pretty bad--may have to amputate, Dave Dyer says.
Afraid we'll have to go right from here. Darn sorry to drag you clear
down there with me----"
"Please do. Don't mind me a bit."
"Think you could give the anesthetic? Usually have my driver do it."
"If you'll tell me how."
"All right. Say, did you hear me putting one over on these goats that
are always rubbering in on party-wires? I hope they heard me! Well. . . .
Now, Bessie, don't you worry about Nels. He's getting along all right.
Tomorrow you or one of the neighbors drive in and get this prescription
filled at Dyer's. Give him a teaspoonful every four hours. Good-by.
Hel-lo! Here's the little fellow! My Lord, Bessie, it ain't possible
this is the fellow that used to be so sickly? Why, say, he's a great big
strapping Svenska now--going to be bigger 'n his daddy!"
Kennicott's bluffness made the child squirm with a delight which Carol
could not evoke. It was a humble wife who followed the busy doctor out
to the carriage, and her ambition was not to play Rachmaninoff better,
nor to build town halls, but to chuckle at babies.
The sunset was merely a flush of rose on a dome of silver, with oak
twigs and thin poplar branches against it, but a silo on the horizon
changed from a red tank to a tower of violet misted over with gray. The
purple road vanished, and without lights, in the darkness of a world
destroyed, they swayed on--toward nothing.
It was a bumpy cold way to the Morgenroth farm, and she was asleep when
they arrived.
Here was no glaring new house with a proud phonograph, but a low
whitewashed kitchen smelling of cream and cabbage. Adolph Morgenroth was
lying on a couch in the rarely used dining-room. His heavy work-scarred
wife was shaking her hands in anxiety.
Carol felt that Kennicott would do something magnificent and startling.
But he was casual. He greeted the man, "Well, well, Adolph, have to fix
you up, eh?" Quietly, to the wife, "Hat die drug store my schwartze bag
hier geschickt? So--schon. Wie viel Uhr ist 's? Sieben? Nun, lassen uns
ein wenig supper zuerst haben. Got any of that good beer left--giebt 's
noch Bier?"
He had supped in four minutes. His coat off, his sleeves rolled up, he
was scrubbing his hands in a tin basin in the sink, using the bar of
yellow kitchen soap.
Carol had not dared to look into the farther room while she labored over
the supper of beer, rye bread, moist cornbeef and cabbage, set on the
kitchen table. The man in there was groaning. In her one glance she
had seen that his blue flannel shirt was open at a corded tobacco-brown
neck, the hollows of which were sprinkled with thin black and gray
hairs. He was covered with a sheet, like a corpse, and outside the sheet
was his right arm, wrapped in towels stained with blood.
But Kennicott strode into the other room gaily, and she followed him.
With surprising delicacy in his large fingers he unwrapped the towels
and revealed an arm which, below the elbow, was a mass of blood and raw
flesh. The man bellowed. The room grew thick about her; she was very
seasick; she fled to a chair in the kitchen. Through the haze of nausea
she heard Kennicott grumbling, "Afraid it will have to come off, Adolph.
What did you do? Fall on a reaper blade? We'll fix it right up. Carrie!
CAROL!"
She couldn't--she couldn't get up. Then she was up, her knees like
water, her stomach revolving a thousand times a second, her eyes filmed,
her ears full of roaring. She couldn't reach the dining-room. She was
going to faint. Then she was in the dining-room, leaning against the
wall, trying to smile, flushing hot and cold along her chest and sides,
while Kennicott mumbled, "Say, help Mrs. Morgenroth and me carry him
in on the kitchen table. No, first go out and shove those two tables
together, and put a blanket on them and a clean sheet."
It was salvation to push the heavy tables, to scrub them, to be exact in
placing the sheet. Her head cleared; she was able to look calmly in at
her husband and the farmwife while they undressed the wailing man, got
him into a clean nightgown, and washed his arm. Kennicott came to lay
out his instruments. She realized that, with no hospital facilities, yet
with no worry about it, her husband--HER HUSBAND--was going to perform
a surgical operation, that miraculous boldness of which one read in
stories about famous surgeons.
She helped them to move Adolph into the kitchen. The man was in such a
funk that he would not use his legs. He was heavy, and smelled of sweat
and the stable. But she put her arm about his waist, her sleek head by
his chest; she tugged at him; she clicked her tongue in imitation of
Kennicott's cheerful noises.
When Adolph was on the table Kennicott laid a hemispheric steel and
cotton frame on his face; suggested to Carol, "Now you sit here at his
head and keep the ether dripping--about this fast, see? I'll watch
his breathing. Look who's here! Real anesthetist! Ochsner hasn't got a
better one! Class, eh? . . . Now, now, Adolph, take it easy. This won't
hurt you a bit. Put you all nice and asleep and it won't hurt a bit.
Schweig' mal! Bald schlaft man grat wie ein Kind. So! So! Bald geht's
besser!"
As she let the ether drip, nervously trying to keep the rhythm that
Kennicott had indicated, Carol stared at her husband with the abandon of
hero-worship.
He shook his head. "Bad light--bad light. Here, Mrs. Morgenroth, you
stand right here and hold this lamp. Hier, und dieses--dieses lamp
halten--so!"
By that streaky glimmer he worked, swiftly, at ease. The room was still.
Carol tried to look at him, yet not look at the seeping blood, the
crimson slash, the vicious scalpel. The ether fumes were sweet, choking.
Her head seemed to be floating away from her body. Her arm was feeble.
It was not the blood but the grating of the surgical saw on the living
bone that broke her, and she knew that she had been fighting off nausea,
that she was beaten. She was lost in dizziness. She heard Kennicott's
voice--
"Sick? Trot outdoors couple minutes. Adolph will stay under now."
She was fumbling at a door-knob which whirled in insulting circles;
she was on the stoop, gasping, forcing air into her chest, her head
clearing. As she returned she caught the scene as a whole: the cavernous
kitchen, two milk-cans a leaden patch by the wall, hams dangling from a
beam, bats of light at the stove door, and in the center, illuminated
by a small glass lamp held by a frightened stout woman, Dr. Kennicott
bending over a body which was humped under a sheet--the surgeon, his
bare arms daubed with blood, his hands, in pale-yellow rubber gloves,
loosening the tourniquet, his face without emotion save when he threw
up his head and clucked at the farmwife, "Hold that light steady just a
second more--noch blos esn wenig."
"He speaks a vulgar, common, incorrect German of life and death and
birth and the soil. I read the French and German of sentimental
lovers and Christmas garlands. And I thought that it was I who had the
culture!" she worshiped as she returned to her place.
After a time he snapped, "That's enough. Don't give him any more ether."
He was concentrated on tying an artery. His gruffness seemed heroic to
her.
As he shaped the flap of flesh she murmured, "Oh, you ARE wonderful!"
He was surprised. "Why, this is a cinch. Now if it had been like last
week----Get me some more water. Now last week I had a case with an ooze
in the peritoneal cavity, and by golly if it wasn't a stomach ulcer that
I hadn't suspected and----There. Say, I certainly am sleepy. Let's turn
in here. Too late to drive home. And tastes to me like a storm coming."
IX
They slept on a feather bed with their fur coats over them; in the
morning they broke ice in the pitcher--the vast flowered and gilt
pitcher.
Kennicott's storm had not come. When they set out it was hazy and
growing warmer. After a mile she saw that he was studying a dark cloud
in the north. He urged the horses to the run. But she forgot his unusual
haste in wonder at the tragic landscape. The pale snow, the prickles of
old stubble, and the clumps of ragged brush faded into a gray obscurity.
Under the hillocks were cold shadows. The willows about a farmhouse were
agitated by the rising wind, and the patches of bare wood where the bark
had peeled away were white as the flesh of a leper. The snowy slews were
of a harsh flatness. The whole land was cruel, and a climbing cloud of
slate-edged blackness dominated the sky.
"Guess we're about in for a blizzard," speculated Kennicott "We can make
Ben McGonegal's, anyway."
"Blizzard? Really? Why----But still we used to think they were fun when
I was a girl. Daddy had to stay home from court, and we'd stand at the
window and watch the snow."
"Not much fun on the prairie. Get lost. Freeze to death. Take no
chances." He chirruped at the horses. They were flying now, the carriage
rocking on the hard ruts.
The whole air suddenly crystallized into large damp flakes. The horses
and the buffalo robe were covered with snow; her face was wet; the
thin butt of the whip held a white ridge. The air became colder. The
snowflakes were harder; they shot in level lines, clawing at her face.
She could not see a hundred feet ahead.
Kennicott was stern. He bent forward, the reins firm in his coonskin
gauntlets. She was certain that he would get through. He always got
through things.
Save for his presence, the world and all normal living disappeared. They
were lost in the boiling snow. He leaned close to bawl, "Letting the
horses have their heads. They'll get us home."
With a terrifying bump they were off the road, slanting with two wheels
in the ditch, but instantly they were jerked back as the horses fled
on. She gasped. She tried to, and did not, feel brave as she pulled the
woolen robe up about her chin.
They were passing something like a dark wall on the right. "I know that
barn!" he yelped. He pulled at the reins. Peeping from the covers she
saw his teeth pinch his lower lip, saw him scowl as he slackened and
sawed and jerked sharply again at the racing horses.
They stopped.
"Farmhouse there. Put robe around you and come on," he cried.
It was like diving into icy water to climb out of the carriage, but
on the ground she smiled at him, her face little and childish and pink
above the buffalo robe over her shoulders. In a swirl of flakes which
scratched at their eyes like a maniac darkness, he unbuckled the
harness. He turned and plodded back, a ponderous furry figure, holding
the horses' bridles, Carol's hand dragging at his sleeve.
They came to the cloudy bulk of a barn whose outer wall was directly
upon the road. Feeling along it, he found a gate, led them into a yard,
into the barn. The interior was warm. It stunned them with its languid
quiet.
He carefully drove the horses into stalls.
Her toes were coals of pain. "Let's run for the house," she said.
"Can't. Not yet. Might never find it. Might get lost ten feet away from
it. Sit over in this stall, near the horses. We'll rush for the house
when the blizzard lifts."
"I'm so stiff! I can't walk!"
He carried her into the stall, stripped off her overshoes and boots,
stopping to blow on his purple fingers as he fumbled at her laces.
He rubbed her feet, and covered her with the buffalo robe and
horse-blankets from the pile on the feed-box. She was drowsy, hemmed in
by the storm. She sighed:
"You're so strong and yet so skilful and not afraid of blood or storm
or----"
"Used to it. Only thing that's bothered me was the chance the ether
fumes might explode, last night."
"I don't understand."
"Why, Dave, the darn fool, sent me ether, instead of chloroform like I
told him, and you know ether fumes are mighty inflammable, especially
with that lamp right by the table. But I had to operate, of
course--wound chuck-full of barnyard filth that way."
"You knew all the time that----Both you and I might have been blown up?
You knew it while you were operating?"
"Sure. Didn't you? Why, what's the matter?"
| We learn that Carol suddenly falls back in love with Will when December rolls around. We can assume that this chapter will tell us why that happens. One night, Carol wakes up to hear Will talking to a German farmer whose wife is sick. Turns out that Will needs to leave, and Carol finds herself admiring him as a hero. She falls back asleep and finds Will dropping into bed beside her just as she wakes up. On a different day, a cart pulls into the Kennicotts' yard carrying a guy with a wounded leg. Carol is excited when Will asks her to fetch some hot water and blankets. The next time Carol sees Guy Pollock at the store, he seems to think there's still something between them, but Carol isn't feeling it anymore. Carol brings Will some sweets at his office and then tells him she's going to redecorate his waiting room. He thinks it's good the way it is, but once she's done with it, he admits that there's a big improvement. One day, Mrs. Bogart drops by and says she doesn't like the way Carol's maid Bea has been fraternizing with the grocery delivery people. Carol basically tells her to mind her own beeswax. Another day, Will invites Carol to come along with him on one of his house calls in the country. When Carol and Will get to the person's house, Carol realizes that she's going to have to help Will while he performs an arm amputation right on the person's kitchen table. She has to deliver the anesthetic and nearly faints in the process. When the Kennicotts head home the next day, they get caught in a snowstorm and have to take shelter in a barn. Will takes this opportunity to tell Carol that the two of them were lucky not to blow themselves up the night before, since he had used flammable ether as an anesthetic instead of chloroform. | summary |
CHAPTER XVI
KENNICOTT was heavily pleased by her Christmas presents, and he gave her
a diamond bar-pin. But she could not persuade herself that he was much
interested in the rites of the morning, in the tree she had decorated,
the three stockings she had hung, the ribbons and gilt seals and hidden
messages. He said only:
"Nice way to fix things, all right. What do you say we go down to Jack
Elder's and have a game of five hundred this afternoon?"
She remembered her father's Christmas fantasies: the sacred old rag
doll at the top of the tree, the score of cheap presents, the punch and
carols, the roast chestnuts by the fire, and the gravity with which the
judge opened the children's scrawly notes and took cognizance of demands
for sled-rides, for opinions upon the existence of Santa Claus. She
remembered him reading out a long indictment of himself for being a
sentimentalist, against the peace and dignity of the State of Minnesota.
She remembered his thin legs twinkling before their sled----
She muttered unsteadily, "Must run up and put on my shoes--slippers so
cold." In the not very romantic solitude of the locked bathroom she sat
on the slippery edge of the tub and wept.
II
Kennicott had five hobbies: medicine, land-investment, Carol, motoring,
and hunting. It is not certain in what order he preferred them. Solid
though his enthusiasms were in the matter of medicine--his admiration
of this city surgeon, his condemnation of that for tricky ways of
persuading country practitioners to bring in surgical patients,
his indignation about fee-splitting, his pride in a new X-ray
apparatus--none of these beatified him as did motoring.
He nursed his two-year-old Buick even in winter, when it was stored in
the stable-garage behind the house. He filled the grease-cups, varnished
a fender, removed from beneath the back seat the debris of gloves,
copper washers, crumpled maps, dust, and greasy rags. Winter noons he
wandered out and stared owlishly at the car. He became excited over a
fabulous "trip we might take next summer." He galloped to the station,
brought home railway maps, and traced motor-routes from Gopher Prairie
to Winnipeg or Des Moines or Grand Marais, thinking aloud and expecting
her to be effusive about such academic questions as "Now I wonder if we
could stop at Baraboo and break the jump from La Crosse to Chicago?"
To him motoring was a faith not to be questioned, a high-church cult,
with electric sparks for candles, and piston-rings possessing the
sanctity of altar-vessels. His liturgy was composed of intoned and
metrical road-comments: "They say there's a pretty good hike from Duluth
to International Falls."
Hunting was equally a devotion, full of metaphysical concepts veiled
from Carol. All winter he read sporting-catalogues, and thought about
remarkable past shots: "'Member that time when I got two ducks on a
long chance, just at sunset?" At least once a month he drew his favorite
repeating shotgun, his "pump gun," from its wrapper of greased canton
flannel; he oiled the trigger, and spent silent ecstatic moments aiming
at the ceiling. Sunday mornings Carol heard him trudging up to the
attic and there, an hour later, she found him turning over boots, wooden
duck-decoys, lunch-boxes, or reflectively squinting at old shells,
rubbing their brass caps with his sleeve and shaking his head as he
thought about their uselessness.
He kept the loading-tools he had used as a boy: a capper for shot-gun
shells, a mold for lead bullets. When once, in a housewifely frenzy for
getting rid of things, she raged, "Why don't you give these away?" he
solemnly defended them, "Well, you can't tell; they might come in handy
some day."
She flushed. She wondered if he was thinking of the child they would
have when, as he put it, they were "sure they could afford one."
Mysteriously aching, nebulously sad, she slipped away, half-convinced
but only half-convinced that it was horrible and unnatural, this
postponement of release of mother-affection, this sacrifice to her
opinionation and to his cautious desire for prosperity.
"But it would be worse if he were like Sam Clark--insisted on having
children," she considered; then, "If Will were the Prince, wouldn't I
DEMAND his child?"
Kennicott's land-deals were both financial advancement and favorite
game. Driving through the country, he noticed which farms had good
crops; he heard the news about the restless farmer who was "thinking
about selling out here and pulling his freight for Alberta." He asked
the veterinarian about the value of different breeds of stock; he
inquired of Lyman Cass whether or not Einar Gyseldson really had had a
yield of forty bushels of wheat to the acre. He was always consulting
Julius Flickerbaugh, who handled more real estate than law, and more law
than justice. He studied township maps, and read notices of auctions.
Thus he was able to buy a quarter-section of land for one hundred and
fifty dollars an acre, and to sell it in a year or two, after installing
a cement floor in the barn and running water in the house, for one
hundred and eighty or even two hundred.
He spoke of these details to Sam Clark . . . rather often.
In all his games, cars and guns and land, he expected Carol to take an
interest. But he did not give her the facts which might have created
interest. He talked only of the obvious and tedious aspects; never of
his aspirations in finance, nor of the mechanical principles of motors.
This month of romance she was eager to understand his hobbies. She
shivered in the garage while he spent half an hour in deciding whether
to put alcohol or patent non-freezing liquid into the radiator, or to
drain out the water entirely. "Or no, then I wouldn't want to take
her out if it turned warm--still, of course, I could fill the
radiator again--wouldn't take so awful long--just take a few pails
of water--still, if it turned cold on me again before I drained
it----Course there's some people that put in kerosene, but they say it
rots the hose-connections and----Where did I put that lug-wrench?"
It was at this point that she gave up being a motorist and retired to
the house.
In their new intimacy he was more communicative about his practise;
he informed her, with the invariable warning not to tell, that Mrs.
Sunderquist had another baby coming, that the "hired girl at Howland's
was in trouble." But when she asked technical questions he did not know
how to answer; when she inquired, "Exactly what is the method of taking
out the tonsils?" he yawned, "Tonsilectomy? Why you just----If there's
pus, you operate. Just take 'em out. Seen the newspaper? What the devil
did Bea do with it?"
She did not try again.
III
They had gone to the "movies." The movies were almost as vital
to Kennicott and the other solid citizens of Gopher Prairie as
land-speculation and guns and automobiles.
The feature film portrayed a brave young Yankee who conquered a South
American republic. He turned the natives from their barbarous habits of
singing and laughing to the vigorous sanity, the Pep and Punch and
Go, of the North; he taught them to work in factories, to wear Klassy
Kollege Klothes, and to shout, "Oh, you baby doll, watch me gather
in the mazuma." He changed nature itself. A mountain which had borne
nothing but lilies and cedars and loafing clouds was by his Hustle so
inspirited that it broke out in long wooden sheds, and piles of iron
ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore to be converted into
steamers to carry iron ore.
The intellectual tension induced by the master film was relieved by a
livelier, more lyric and less philosophical drama: Mack Schnarken and
the Bathing Suit Babes in a comedy of manners entitled "Right on the
Coco." Mr. Schnarken was at various high moments a cook, a life-guard,
a burlesque actor, and a sculptor. There was a hotel hallway up which
policemen charged, only to be stunned by plaster busts hurled upon them
from the innumerous doors. If the plot lacked lucidity, the dual motif
of legs and pie was clear and sure. Bathing and modeling were equally
sound occasions for legs; the wedding-scene was but an approach to the
thunderous climax when Mr. Schnarken slipped a piece of custard pie into
the clergyman's rear pocket.
The audience in the Rosebud Movie Palace squealed and wiped their eyes;
they scrambled under the seats for overshoes, mittens, and mufflers,
while the screen announced that next week Mr. Schnarken might be seen
in a new, riproaring, extra-special superfeature of the Clean Comedy
Corporation entitled, "Under Mollie's Bed."
"I'm glad," said Carol to Kennicott as they stooped before the northwest
gale which was torturing the barren street, "that this is a moral
country. We don't allow any of these beastly frank novels."
"Yump. Vice Society and Postal Department won't stand for them. The
American people don't like filth."
"Yes. It's fine. I'm glad we have such dainty romances as 'Right on the
Coco' instead."
"Say what in heck do you think you're trying to do? Kid me?"
He was silent. She awaited his anger. She meditated upon his gutter
patois, the Boeotian dialect characteristic of Gopher Prairie. He
laughed puzzlingly. When they came into the glow of the house he laughed
again. He condescended:
"I've got to hand it to you. You're consistent, all right. I'd of
thought that after getting this look-in at a lot of good decent farmers,
you'd get over this high-art stuff, but you hang right on."
"Well----" To herself: "He takes advantage of my trying to be good."
"Tell you, Carrie: There's just three classes of people: folks that
haven't got any ideas at all; and cranks that kick about everything; and
Regular Guys, the fellows with sticktuitiveness, that boost and get the
world's work done."
"Then I'm probably a crank." She smiled negligently.
"No. I won't admit it. You do like to talk, but at a show-down you'd
prefer Sam Clark to any damn long-haired artist."
"Oh--well----"
"Oh well!" mockingly. "My, we're just going to change everything, aren't
we! Going to tell fellows that have been making movies for ten years
how to direct 'em; and tell architects how to build towns; and make the
magazines publish nothing but a lot of highbrow stories about old maids,
and about wives that don't know what they want. Oh, we're a terror! . . .
Come on now, Carrie; come out of it; wake up! You've got a fine nerve,
kicking about a movie because it shows a few legs! Why, you're always
touting these Greek dancers, or whatever they are, that don't even wear
a shimmy!"
"But, dear, the trouble with that film--it wasn't that it got in so many
legs, but that it giggled coyly and promised to show more of them, and
then didn't keep the promise. It was Peeping Tom's idea of humor."
"I don't get you. Look here now----"
She lay awake, while he rumbled with sleep
"I must go on. My 'crank ideas;' he calls them. I thought that adoring
him, watching him operate, would be enough. It isn't. Not after the
first thrill.
"I don't want to hurt him. But I must go on.
"It isn't enough, to stand by while he fills an automobile radiator and
chucks me bits of information.
"If I stood by and admired him long enough, I would be content. I would
become a 'nice little woman.' The Village Virus. Already----I'm not
reading anything. I haven't touched the piano for a week. I'm letting
the days drown in worship of 'a good deal, ten plunks more per acre.' I
won't! I won't succumb!
"How? I've failed at everything: the Thanatopsis, parties, pioneers,
city hall, Guy and Vida. But----It doesn't MATTER! I'm not trying to
'reform the town' now. I'm not trying to organize Browning Clubs,
and sit in clean white kids yearning up at lecturers with ribbony
eyeglasses. I am trying to save my soul.
"Will Kennicott, asleep there, trusting me, thinking he holds me. And
I'm leaving him. All of me left him when he laughed at me. It wasn't
enough for him that I admired him; I must change myself and grow like
him. He takes advantage. No more. It's finished. I will go on."
IV
Her violin lay on top of the upright piano. She picked it up. Since she
had last touched it the dried strings had snapped, and upon it lay a
gold and crimson cigar-band.
V
She longed to see Guy Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in
the faith. But Kennicott's dominance was heavy upon her. She could not
determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia--by
dislike of the emotional labor of the "scenes" which would be involved
in asserting independence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty:
not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad
breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades.
The second evening after the movies she impulsively summoned Vida
Sherwin and Guy to the house for pop-corn and cider. In the living-room
Vida and Kennicott debated "the value of manual training in grades below
the eighth," while Carol sat beside Guy at the dining table, buttering
pop-corn. She was quickened by the speculation in his eyes. She
murmured:
"Guy, do you want to help me?"
"My dear! How?"
"I don't know!"
He waited.
"I think I want you to help me find out what has made the darkness of
the women. Gray darkness and shadowy trees. We're all in it, ten million
women, young married women with good prosperous husbands, and business
women in linen collars, and grandmothers that gad out to teas, and wives
of under-paid miners, and farmwives who really like to make butter and
go to church. What is it we want--and need? Will Kennicott there would
say that we need lots of children and hard work. But it isn't that.
There's the same discontent in women with eight children and one more
coming--always one more coming! And you find it in stenographers and
wives who scrub, just as much as in girl college-graduates who wonder
how they can escape their kind parents. What do we want?"
"Essentially, I think, you are like myself, Carol; you want to go back
to an age of tranquillity and charming manners. You want to enthrone
good taste again."
"Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh--no! I believe all of us want
the same things--we're all together, the industrial workers and the
women and the farmers and the negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and
even a few of the Respectables. It's all the same revolt, in all the
classes that have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a
more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying.
We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're
tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired
of hearing the politicians and priests and cautious reformers (and the
husbands!) coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a
Utopia already made; just give us a bit more time and we'll produce it;
trust us; we're wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said
that. We want our Utopia NOW--and we're going to try our hands at it.
All we want is--everything for all of us! For every housewife and every
longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want
everything. We shatn't get it. So we shatn't ever be content----"
She wondered why he was wincing. He broke in:
"See here, my dear, I certainly hope you don't class yourself with a lot
of trouble-making labor-leaders! Democracy is all right theoretically,
and I'll admit there are industrial injustices, but I'd rather have them
than see the world reduced to a dead level of mediocrity. I refuse to
believe that you have anything in common with a lot of laboring men
rowing for bigger wages so that they can buy wretched flivvers and
hideous player-pianos and----"
At this second, in Buenos Ayres, a newspaper editor broke his routine of
being bored by exchanges to assert, "Any injustice is better than seeing
the world reduced to a gray level of scientific dullness." At this
second a clerk standing at the bar of a New York saloon stopped milling
his secret fear of his nagging office-manager long enough to growl
at the chauffeur beside him, "Aw, you socialists make me sick! I'm an
individualist. I ain't going to be nagged by no bureaus and take orders
off labor-leaders. And mean to say a hobo's as good as you and me?"
At this second Carol realized that for all Guy's love of dead elegances
his timidity was as depressing to her as the bulkiness of Sam Clark. She
realized that he was not a mystery, as she had excitedly believed; not
a romantic messenger from the World Outside on whom she could count for
escape. He belonged to Gopher Prairie, absolutely. She was snatched back
from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.
He was completing his protest, "You don't want to be mixed up in all
this orgy of meaningless discontent?"
She soothed him. "No, I don't. I'm not heroic. I'm scared by all the
fighting that's going on in the world. I want nobility and adventure,
but perhaps I want still more to curl on the hearth with some one I
love."
"Would you----"
He did not finish it. He picked up a handful of pop-corn, let it run
through his fingers, looked at her wistfully.
With the loneliness of one who has put away a possible love Carol saw
that he was a stranger. She saw that he had never been anything but
a frame on which she had hung shining garments. If she had let him
diffidently make love to her, it was not because she cared, but because
she did not care, because it did not matter.
She smiled at him with the exasperating tactfulness of a woman checking
a flirtation; a smile like an airy pat on the arm. She sighed, "You're
a dear to let me tell you my imaginary troubles." She bounced up, and
trilled, "Shall we take the pop-corn in to them now?"
Guy looked after her desolately.
While she teased Vida and Kennicott she was repeating, "I must go on."
VI
Miles Bjornstam, the pariah "Red Swede," had brought his circular saw
and portable gasoline engine to the house, to cut the cords of poplar
for the kitchen range. Kennicott had given the order; Carol knew nothing
of it till she heard the ringing of the saw, and glanced out to see
Bjornstam, in black leather jacket and enormous ragged purple
mittens, pressing sticks against the whirling blade, and flinging
the stove-lengths to one side. The red irritable motor kept up a red
irritable "tip-tip-tip-tip-tip-tip." The whine of the saw rose till it
simulated the shriek of a fire-alarm whistle at night, but always at the
end it gave a lively metallic clang, and in the stillness she heard the
flump of the cut stick falling on the pile.
She threw a motor robe over her, ran out. Bjornstam welcomed her, "Well,
well, well! Here's old Miles, fresh as ever. Well say, that's all right;
he ain't even begun to be cheeky yet; next summer he's going to take you
out on his horse-trading trip, clear into Idaho."
"Yes, and I may go!"
"How's tricks? Crazy about the town yet?"
"No, but I probably shall be, some day."
"Don't let 'em get you. Kick 'em in the face!"
He shouted at her while he worked. The pile of stove-wood grew
astonishingly. The pale bark of the poplar sticks was mottled with
lichens of sage-green and dusty gray; the newly sawed ends were
fresh-colored, with the agreeable roughness of a woolen muffler. To the
sterile winter air the wood gave a scent of March sap.
Kennicott telephoned that he was going into the country. Bjornstam had
not finished his work at noon, and she invited him to have dinner with
Bea in the kitchen. She wished that she were independent enough to dine
with these her guests. She considered their friendliness, she sneered at
"social distinctions," she raged at her own taboos--and she continued
to regard them as retainers and herself as a lady. She sat in the
dining-room and listened through the door to Bjornstam's booming and
Bea's giggles. She was the more absurd to herself in that, after the
rite of dining alone, she could go out to the kitchen, lean against the
sink, and talk to them.
They were attracted to each other; a Swedish Othello and Desdemona, more
useful and amiable than their prototypes. Bjornstam told his scapes:
selling horses in a Montana mining-camp, breaking a log-jam, being
impertinent to a "two-fisted" millionaire lumberman. Bea gurgled "Oh
my!" and kept his coffee cup filled.
He took a long time to finish the wood. He had frequently to go into the
kitchen to get warm. Carol heard him confiding to Bea, "You're a darn
nice Swede girl. I guess if I had a woman like you I wouldn't be such
a sorehead. Gosh, your kitchen is clean; makes an old bach feel sloppy.
Say, that's nice hair you got. Huh? Me fresh? Saaaay, girl, if I ever do
get fresh, you'll know it. Why, I could pick you up with one finger,
and hold you in the air long enough to read Robert J. Ingersoll clean
through. Ingersoll? Oh, he's a religious writer. Sure. You'd like him
fine."
When he drove off he waved to Bea; and Carol, lonely at the window
above, was envious of their pastoral.
"And I----But I will go on."
| When Christmas comes, Carol finds herself crying and missing her father, even though he's been dead for more than a decade. She realizes that her Christmases with Will will never be like the ones she grew up with. Carol makes a new effort to appreciate the things Will loves in life, including his motorcar and his land speculation. But Will isn't very good at giving Carol the facts she'd need to appreciate them. Carol eventually gives up and retreats into her boring, lonely life. She keeps arguing with Will about making Gopher Prairie a more fulfilling place to live in. He argues that everyone likes it except her. Carol approaches Guy Pollock again for help living in Gopher Prairie. It turns out that there's not much he can do for her, since he has learned to accept the way things are. One day, while Will is out, Carol invites Miles Bjornstam to have dinner in her kitchen with her maid Bea. Carol eats in a different room because that's what's considered proper. Miles and Bea really hit it off, and Carol is envious of their connection. | summary |
CHAPTER XVII
I
THEY were driving down the lake to the cottages that moonlit January
night, twenty of them in the bob-sled. They sang "Toy Land" and "Seeing
Nelly Home"; they leaped from the low back of the sled to race over the
slippery snow ruts; and when they were tired they climbed on the runners
for a lift. The moon-tipped flakes kicked up by the horses settled over
the revelers and dripped down their necks, but they laughed, yelped,
beat their leather mittens against their chests. The harness rattled,
the sleigh-bells were frantic, Jack Elder's setter sprang beside the
horses, barking.
For a time Carol raced with them. The cold air gave fictive power. She
felt that she could run on all night, leap twenty feet at a stride. But
the excess of energy tired her, and she was glad to snuggle under the
comforters which covered the hay in the sled-box.
In the midst of the babel she found enchanted quietude.
Along the road the shadows from oak-branches were inked on the snow
like bars of music. Then the sled came out on the surface of Lake
Minniemashie. Across the thick ice was a veritable road, a short-cut
for farmers. On the glaring expanse of the lake-levels of hard crust,
flashes of green ice blown clear, chains of drifts ribbed like the
sea-beach--the moonlight was overwhelming. It stormed on the snow, it
turned the woods ashore into crystals of fire. The night was tropical
and voluptuous. In that drugged magic there was no difference between
heavy heat and insinuating cold.
Carol was dream-strayed. The turbulent voices, even Guy Pollock being
connotative beside her, were nothing. She repeated:
Deep on the convent-roof the snows
Are sparkling to the moon.
The words and the light blurred into one vast indefinite happiness, and
she believed that some great thing was coming to her. She withdrew from
the clamor into a worship of incomprehensible gods. The night expanded,
she was conscious of the universe, and all mysteries stooped down to
her.
She was jarred out of her ecstasy as the bob-sled bumped up the steep
road to the bluff where stood the cottages.
They dismounted at Jack Elder's shack. The interior walls of unpainted
boards, which had been grateful in August, were forbidding in the chill.
In fur coats and mufflers tied over caps they were a strange company,
bears and walruses talking. Jack Elder lighted the shavings waiting in
the belly of a cast-iron stove which was like an enlarged bean-pot.
They piled their wraps high on a rocker, and cheered the rocker as it
solemnly tipped over backward.
Mrs. Elder and Mrs. Sam Clark made coffee in an enormous blackened tin
pot; Vida Sherwin and Mrs. McGanum unpacked doughnuts and gingerbread;
Mrs. Dave Dyer warmed up "hot dogs"--frankfurters in rolls; Dr. Terry
Gould, after announcing, "Ladies and gents, prepare to be shocked; shock
line forms on the right," produced a bottle of bourbon whisky.
The others danced, muttering "Ouch!" as their frosted feet struck the
pine planks. Carol had lost her dream. Harry Haydock lifted her by the
waist and swung her. She laughed. The gravity of the people who stood
apart and talked made her the more impatient for frolic.
Kennicott, Sam Clark, Jackson Elder, young Dr. McGanum, and James
Madison Howland, teetering on their toes near the stove, conversed
with the sedate pomposity of the commercialist. In details the men were
unlike, yet they said the same things in the same hearty monotonous
voices. You had to look at them to see which was speaking.
"Well, we made pretty good time coming up," from one--any one.
"Yump, we hit it up after we struck the good going on the lake."
"Seems kind of slow though, after driving an auto."
"Yump, it does, at that. Say, how'd you make out with that Sphinx tire
you got?"
"Seems to hold out fine. Still, I don't know's I like it any better than
the Roadeater Cord."
"Yump, nothing better than a Roadeater. Especially the cord. The cord's
lots better than the fabric."
"Yump, you said something----Roadeater's a good tire."
"Say, how'd you come out with Pete Garsheim on his payments?"
"He's paying up pretty good. That's a nice piece of land he's got."
"Yump, that's a dandy farm."
"Yump, Pete's got a good place there."
They glided from these serious topics into the jocose insults which are
the wit of Main Street. Sam Clark was particularly apt at them. "What's
this wild-eyed sale of summer caps you think you're trying to pull
off?" he clamored at Harry Haydock. "Did you steal 'em, or are you just
overcharging us, as usual? . . . Oh say, speaking about caps, d'I ever
tell you the good one I've got on Will? The doc thinks he's a pretty
good driver, fact, he thinks he's almost got human intelligence, but one
time he had his machine out in the rain, and the poor fish, he hadn't
put on chains, and thinks I----"
Carol had heard the story rather often. She fled back to the dancers,
and at Dave Dyer's masterstroke of dropping an icicle down Mrs.
McGanum's back she applauded hysterically.
They sat on the floor, devouring the food. The men giggled amiably as
they passed the whisky bottle, and laughed, "There's a real sport!" when
Juanita Haydock took a sip. Carol tried to follow; she believed that she
desired to be drunk and riotous; but the whisky choked her and as she
saw Kennicott frown she handed the bottle on repentantly. Somewhat too
late she remembered that she had given up domesticity and repentance.
"Let's play charades!" said Raymie Wutherspoon.
"Oh yes, do let us," said Ella Stowbody.
"That's the caper," sanctioned Harry Haydock.
They interpreted the word "making" as May and King. The crown was a red
flannel mitten cocked on Sam Clark's broad pink bald head. They forgot
they were respectable. They made-believe. Carol was stimulated to cry:
"Let's form a dramatic club and give a play! Shall we? It's been so much
fun tonight!"
They looked affable.
"Sure," observed Sam Clark loyally.
"Oh, do let us! I think it would be lovely to present 'Romeo and
Juliet'!" yearned Ella Stowbody.
"Be a whale of a lot of fun," Dr. Terry Gould granted.
"But if we did," Carol cautioned, "it would be awfully silly to have
amateur theatricals. We ought to paint our own scenery and everything,
and really do something fine. There'd be a lot of hard work. Would
you--would we all be punctual at rehearsals, do you suppose?"
"You bet!" "Sure." "That's the idea." "Fellow ought to be prompt at
rehearsals," they all agreed.
"Then let's meet next week and form the Gopher Prairie Dramatic
Association!" Carol sang.
She drove home loving these friends who raced through moonlit snow,
had Bohemian parties, and were about to create beauty in the theater.
Everything was solved. She would be an authentic part of the town,
yet escape the coma of the Village Virus. . . . She would be free of
Kennicott again, without hurting him, without his knowing.
She had triumphed.
The moon was small and high now, and unheeding.
II
Though they had all been certain that they longed for the privilege of
attending committee meetings and rehearsals, the dramatic association as
definitely formed consisted only of Kennicott, Carol, Guy Pollock,
Vida Sherwin, Ella Stowbody, the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, Raymie
Wutherspoon, Dr. Terry Gould, and four new candidates: flirtatious Rita
Simons, Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon and Myrtle Cass, an uncomely but
intense girl of nineteen. Of these fifteen only seven came to the first
meeting. The rest telephoned their unparalleled regrets and engagements
and illnesses, and announced that they would be present at all other
meetings through eternity.
Carol was made president and director.
She had added the Dillons. Despite Kennicott's apprehension the dentist
and his wife had not been taken up by the Westlakes but had remained
as definitely outside really smart society as Willis Woodford, who was
teller, bookkeeper, and janitor in Stowbody's bank. Carol had noted Mrs.
Dillon dragging past the house during a bridge of the Jolly Seventeen,
looking in with pathetic lips at the splendor of the accepted. She
impulsively invited the Dillons to the dramatic association meeting, and
when Kennicott was brusque to them she was unusually cordial, and felt
virtuous.
That self-approval balanced her disappointment at the smallness of the
meeting, and her embarrassment during Raymie Wutherspoon's repetitions
of "The stage needs uplifting," and "I believe that there are great
lessons in some plays."
Ella Stowbody, who was a professional, having studied elocution in
Milwaukee, disapproved of Carol's enthusiasm for recent plays. Miss
Stowbody expressed the fundamental principle of the American drama: the
only way to be artistic is to present Shakespeare. As no one listened to
her she sat back and looked like Lady Macbeth.
III
The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to American drama three
or four years later, were only in embryo. But of this fast coming revolt
Carol had premonitions. She knew from some lost magazine article that
in Dublin were innovators called The Irish Players. She knew confusedly
that a man named Gordon Craig had painted scenery--or had he written
plays? She felt that in the turbulence of the drama she was discovering
a history more important than the commonplace chronicles which dealt
with senators and their pompous puerilities. She had a sensation of
familiarity; a dream of sitting in a Brussels cafe and going afterward
to a tiny gay theater under a cathedral wall.
The advertisement in the Minneapolis paper leaped from the page to her
eyes:
The Cosmos School of Music, Oratory, and
Dramatic Art announces a program of four
one-act plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats,
and Lord Dunsany.
She had to be there! She begged Kennicott to "run down to the Cities"
with her.
"Well, I don't know. Be fun to take in a show, but why the deuce do you
want to see those darn foreign plays, given by a lot of amateurs? Why
don't you wait for a regular play, later on? There's going to be some
corkers coming: 'Lottie of Two-Gun Rancho,' and 'Cops and Crooks'--real
Broadway stuff, with the New York casts. What's this junk you want
to see? Hm. 'How He Lied to Her Husband.' That doesn't listen so bad.
Sounds racy. And, uh, well, I could go to the motor show, I suppose. I'd
like to see this new Hup roadster. Well----"
She never knew which attraction made him decide.
She had four days of delightful worry--over the hole in her one good
silk petticoat, the loss of a string of beads from her chiffon and brown
velvet frock, the catsup stain on her best georgette crepe blouse. She
wailed, "I haven't a single solitary thing that's fit to be seen in,"
and enjoyed herself very much indeed.
Kennicott went about casually letting people know that he was "going to
run down to the Cities and see some shows."
As the train plodded through the gray prairie, on a windless day with
the smoke from the engine clinging to the fields in giant cotton-rolls,
in a low and writhing wall which shut off the snowy fields, she did not
look out of the window. She closed her eyes and hummed, and did not know
that she was humming.
She was the young poet attacking fame and Paris.
In the Minneapolis station the crowd of lumberjacks, farmers, and
Swedish families with innumerous children and grandparents and paper
parcels, their foggy crowding and their clamor confused her. She felt
rustic in this once familiar city, after a year and a half of
Gopher Prairie. She was certain that Kennicott was taking the wrong
trolley-car. By dusk, the liquor warehouses, Hebraic clothing-shops,
and lodging-houses on lower Hennepin Avenue were smoky, hideous,
ill-tempered. She was battered by the noise and shuttling of the
rush-hour traffic. When a clerk in an overcoat too closely fitted at the
waist stared at her, she moved nearer to Kennicott's arm. The clerk was
flippant and urban. He was a superior person, used to this tumult. Was
he laughing at her?
For a moment she wanted the secure quiet of Gopher Prairie.
In the hotel-lobby she was self-conscious. She was not used to hotels;
she remembered with jealousy how often Juanita Haydock talked of the
famous hotels in Chicago. She could not face the traveling salesmen,
baronial in large leather chairs. She wanted people to believe that her
husband and she were accustomed to luxury and chill elegance; she was
faintly angry at him for the vulgar way in which, after signing the
register "Dr. W. P. Kennicott & wife," he bellowed at the clerk, "Got a
nice room with bath for us, old man?" She gazed about haughtily, but as
she discovered that no one was interested in her she felt foolish, and
ashamed of her irritation.
She asserted, "This silly lobby is too florid," and simultaneously she
admired it: the onyx columns with gilt capitals, the crown-embroidered
velvet curtains at the restaurant door, the silk-roped alcove where
pretty girls perpetually waited for mysterious men, the two-pound boxes
of candy and the variety of magazines at the news-stand. The hidden
orchestra was lively. She saw a man who looked like a European diplomat,
in a loose top-coat and a Homburg hat. A woman with a broadtail coat,
a heavy lace veil, pearl earrings, and a close black hat entered the
restaurant. "Heavens! That's the first really smart woman I've seen in a
year!" Carol exulted. She felt metropolitan.
But as she followed Kennicott to the elevator the coat-check girl, a
confident young woman, with cheeks powdered like lime, and a blouse
low and thin and furiously crimson, inspected her, and under that
supercilious glance Carol was shy again. She unconsciously waited
for the bellboy to precede her into the elevator. When he snorted "Go
ahead!" she was mortified. He thought she was a hayseed, she worried.
The moment she was in their room, with the bellboy safely out of the
way, she looked critically at Kennicott. For the first time in months
she really saw him.
His clothes were too heavy and provincial. His decent gray suit, made
by Nat Hicks of Gopher Prairie, might have been of sheet iron; it had
no distinction of cut, no easy grace like the diplomat's Burberry. His
black shoes were blunt and not well polished. His scarf was a stupid
brown. He needed a shave.
But she forgot her doubt as she realized the ingenuities of the room.
She ran about, turning on the taps of the bathtub, which gushed instead
of dribbling like the taps at home, snatching the new wash-rag out of
its envelope of oiled paper, trying the rose-shaded light between the
twin beds, pulling out the drawers of the kidney-shaped walnut desk to
examine the engraved stationery, planning to write on it to every one
she knew, admiring the claret-colored velvet armchair and the blue rug,
testing the ice-water tap, and squealing happily when the water really
did come out cold. She flung her arms about Kennicott, kissed him.
"Like it, old lady?"
"It's adorable. It's so amusing. I love you for bringing me. You really
are a dear!"
He looked blankly indulgent, and yawned, and condescended, "That's a
pretty slick arrangement on the radiator, so you can adjust it at any
temperature you want. Must take a big furnace to run this place. Gosh, I
hope Bea remembers to turn off the drafts tonight."
Under the glass cover of the dressing-table was a menu with the most
enchanting dishes: breast of guinea hen De Vitresse, pommes de terre a
la Russe, meringue Chantilly, gateaux Bruxelles.
"Oh, let's----I'm going to have a hot bath, and put on my new hat with
the wool flowers, and let's go down and eat for hours, and we'll have a
cocktail!" she chanted.
While Kennicott labored over ordering it was annoying to see him permit
the waiter to be impertinent, but as the cocktail elevated her to a
bridge among colored stars, as the oysters came in--not canned oysters
in the Gopher Prairie fashion, but on the half-shell--she cried, "If you
only knew how wonderful it is not to have had to plan this dinner, and
order it at the butcher's and fuss and think about it, and then
watch Bea cook it! I feel so free. And to have new kinds of food, and
different patterns of dishes and linen, and not worry about whether the
pudding is being spoiled! Oh, this is a great moment for me!"
IV
They had all the experiences of provincials in a metropolis. After
breakfast Carol bustled to a hair-dresser's, bought gloves and a blouse,
and importantly met Kennicott in front of an optician's, in accordance
with plans laid down, revised, and verified. They admired the diamonds
and furs and frosty silverware and mahogany chairs and polished morocco
sewing-boxes in shop-windows, and were abashed by the throngs in the
department-stores, and were bullied by a clerk into buying too many
shirts for Kennicott, and gaped at the "clever novelty perfumes--just
in from New York." Carol got three books on the theater, and spent
an exultant hour in warning herself that she could not afford this
rajah-silk frock, in thinking how envious it would make Juanita Haydock,
in closing her eyes, and buying it. Kennicott went from shop to shop,
earnestly hunting down a felt-covered device to keep the windshield of
his car clear of rain.
They dined extravagantly at their hotel at night, and next morning
sneaked round the corner to economize at a Childs' Restaurant. They were
tired by three in the afternoon, and dozed at the motion-pictures and
said they wished they were back in Gopher Prairie--and by eleven in the
evening they were again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant
that was frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days. They
sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and listened to a
brassy automatic piano, and were altogether cosmopolitan.
On the street they met people from home--the McGanums. They laughed,
shook hands repeatedly, and exclaimed, "Well, this is quite a
coincidence!" They asked when the McGanums had come down, and begged for
news of the town they had left two days before. Whatever the
McGanums were at home, here they stood out as so superior to all the
undistinguishable strangers absurdly hurrying past that the Kennicotts
held them as long as they could. The McGanums said good-by as though
they were going to Tibet instead of to the station to catch No. 7 north.
They explored Minneapolis. Kennicott was conversational and technical
regarding gluten and cockle-cylinders and No. I Hard, when they were
shown through the gray stone hulks and new cement elevators of the
largest flour-mills in the world. They looked across Loring Park and
the Parade to the towers of St. Mark's and the Procathedral, and the
red roofs of houses climbing Kenwood Hill. They drove about the chain of
garden-circled lakes, and viewed the houses of the millers and lumbermen
and real estate peers--the potentates of the expanding city. They
surveyed the small eccentric bungalows with pergolas, the houses of
pebbledash and tapestry brick with sleeping-porches above sun-parlors,
and one vast incredible chateau fronting the Lake of the Isles. They
tramped through a shining-new section of apartment-houses; not the tall
bleak apartments of Eastern cities but low structures of cheerful yellow
brick, in which each flat had its glass-enclosed porch with swinging
couch and scarlet cushions and Russian brass bowls. Between a waste of
tracks and a raw gouged hill they found poverty in staggering shanties.
They saw miles of the city which they had never known in their days
of absorption in college. They were distinguished explorers, and they
remarked, in great mutual esteem, "I bet Harry Haydock's never seen the
City like this! Why, he'd never have sense enough to study the machinery
in the mills, or go through all these outlying districts. Wonder folks
in Gopher Prairie wouldn't use their legs and explore, the way we do!"
They had two meals with Carol's sister, and were bored, and felt that
intimacy which beatifies married people when they suddenly admit that
they equally dislike a relative of either of them.
So it was with affection but also with weariness that they approached
the evening on which Carol was to see the plays at the dramatic school.
Kennicott suggested not going. "So darn tired from all this walking;
don't know but what we better turn in early and get rested up." It was
only from duty that Carol dragged him and herself out of the warm
hotel, into a stinking trolley, up the brownstone steps of the converted
residence which lugubriously housed the dramatic school.
V
They were in a long whitewashed hall with a clumsy draw-curtain across
the front. The folding chairs were filled with people who looked washed
and ironed: parents of the pupils, girl students, dutiful teachers.
"Strikes me it's going to be punk. If the first play isn't good, let's
beat it," said Kennicott hopefully.
"All right," she yawned. With hazy eyes she tried to read the lists of
characters, which were hidden among lifeless advertisements of pianos,
music-dealers, restaurants, candy.
She regarded the Schnitzler play with no vast interest. The actors
moved and spoke stiffly. Just as its cynicism was beginning to rouse her
village-dulled frivolity, it was over.
"Don't think a whale of a lot of that. How about taking a sneak?"
petitioned Kennicott.
"Oh, let's try the next one, 'How He Lied to Her Husband.'"
The Shaw conceit amused her, and perplexed Kennicott:
"Strikes me it's darn fresh. Thought it would be racy. Don't know as I
think much of a play where a husband actually claims he wants a fellow
to make love to his wife. No husband ever did that! Shall we shake a
leg?"
"I want to see this Yeats thing, 'Land of Heart's Desire.' I used to
love it in college." She was awake now, and urgent. "I know you didn't
care so much for Yeats when I read him aloud to you, but you just see if
you don't adore him on the stage."
Most of the cast were as unwieldy as oak chairs marching, and the
setting was an arty arrangement of batik scarfs and heavy tables, but
Maire Bruin was slim as Carol, and larger-eyed, and her voice was
a morning bell. In her, Carol lived, and on her lifting voice was
transported from this sleepy small-town husband and all the rows of
polite parents to the stilly loft of a thatched cottage where in a green
dimness, beside a window caressed by linden branches, she bent over a
chronicle of twilight women and the ancient gods.
"Well--gosh--nice kid played that girl--good-looker," said Kennicott.
"Want to stay for the last piece? Heh?"
She shivered. She did not answer.
The curtain was again drawn aside. On the stage they saw nothing but
long green curtains and a leather chair. Two young men in brown robes
like furniture-covers were gesturing vacuously and droning cryptic
sentences full of repetitions.
It was Carol's first hearing of Dunsany. She sympathized with the
restless Kennicott as he felt in his pocket for a cigar and unhappily
put it back.
Without understanding when or how, without a tangible change in the
stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was conscious of another time
and place.
Stately and aloof among vainglorious tiring-maids, a queen in robes
that murmured on the marble floor, she trod the gallery of a crumbling
palace. In the courtyard, elephants trumpeted, and swart men with beards
dyed crimson stood with blood-stained hands folded upon their hilts,
guarding the caravan from El Sharnak, the camels with Tyrian stuffs
of topaz and cinnabar. Beyond the turrets of the outer wall the jungle
glared and shrieked, and the sun was furious above drenched orchids.
A youth came striding through the steel-bossed doors, the sword-bitten
doors that were higher than ten tall men. He was in flexible mail, and
under the rim of his planished morion were amorous curls. His hand was
out to her; before she touched it she could feel its warmth----
"Gosh all hemlock! What the dickens is all this stuff about, Carrie?"
She was no Syrian queen. She was Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. She fell with a
jolt into a whitewashed hall and sat looking at two scared girls and a
young man in wrinkled tights.
Kennicott fondly rambled as they left the hall:
"What the deuce did that last spiel mean? Couldn't make head or tail of
it. If that's highbrow drama, give me a cow-puncher movie, every time!
Thank God, that's over, and we can get to bed. Wonder if we wouldn't
make time by walking over to Nicollet to take a car? One thing I will
say for that dump: they had it warm enough. Must have a big hot-air
furnace, I guess. Wonder how much coal it takes to run 'em through the
winter?"
In the car he affectionately patted her knee, and he was for a second
the striding youth in armor; then he was Doc Kennicott of Gopher
Prairie, and she was recaptured by Main Street. Never, not all her life,
would she behold jungles and the tombs of kings. There were strange
things in the world, they really existed; but she would never see them.
She would recreate them in plays!
She would make the dramatic association understand her aspiration. They
would, surely they would----
She looked doubtfully at the impenetrable reality of yawning trolley
conductor and sleepy passengers and placards advertising soap and
underwear.
| Carol rides with twenty other people in a large sled to some lakeside cottages. She tries her best to feel merry. All of the talk at the party is superficial and repetitive, but Carol does her best to enjoy herself. She tells the folks at the party that Gopher Prairie should get together a dramatic association that can put on plays. People are really into the idea, although we're not sure how well they'll follow through on it. Carol later convinces Will to take her to Minneapolis so she can study how plays are put on in the big city. When they get there, though, she's ashamed of how hickish she and Will must look to the city folk. Will wants to get out of the plays as soon as the two of them sit down. Carol convinces him to stay for several more, but she can feel how badly he wants to leave. She tries to fantasize and put herself in the plays, but Will's comments keep pulling her back out. | summary |
CHAPTER XVIII
I
SHE hurried to the first meeting of the play-reading committee. Her
jungle romance had faded, but she retained a religious fervor, a surge
of half-formed thought about the creation of beauty by suggestion.
A Dunsany play would be too difficult for the Gopher Prairie
association. She would let them compromise on Shaw--on "Androcles and
the Lion," which had just been published.
The committee was composed of Carol, Vida Sherwin, Guy Pollock, Raymie
Wutherspoon, and Juanita Haydock. They were exalted by the picture of
themselves as being simultaneously business-like and artistic. They
were entertained by Vida in the parlor of Mrs. Elisha Gurrey's
boarding-house, with its steel engraving of Grant at Appomattox, its
basket of stereoscopic views, and its mysterious stains on the gritty
carpet.
Vida was an advocate of culture-buying and efficiency-systems. She
hinted that they ought to have (as at the committee-meetings of the
Thanatopsis) a "regular order of business," and "the reading of the
minutes," but as there were no minutes to read, and as no one knew
exactly what was the regular order of the business of being literary,
they had to give up efficiency.
Carol, as chairman, said politely, "Have you any ideas about what play
we'd better give first?" She waited for them to look abashed and vacant,
so that she might suggest "Androcles."
Guy Pollock answered with disconcerting readiness, "I'll tell you: since
we're going to try to do something artistic, and not simply fool around,
I believe we ought to give something classic. How about 'The School for
Scandal'?"
"Why----Don't you think that has been done a good deal?"
"Yes, perhaps it has."
Carol was ready to say, "How about Bernard Shaw?" when he treacherously
went on, "How would it be then to give a Greek drama--say 'Oedipus
Tyrannus'?"
"Why, I don't believe----"
Vida Sherwin intruded, "I'm sure that would be too hard for us. Now I've
brought something that I think would be awfully jolly."
She held out, and Carol incredulously took, a thin gray pamphlet
entitled "McGinerty's Mother-in-law." It was the sort of farce which is
advertised in "school entertainment" catalogues as:
Riproaring knock-out, 5 m. 3 f., time 2 hrs., interior set, popular with
churches and all high-class occasions.
Carol glanced from the scabrous object to Vida, and realized that she
was not joking.
"But this is--this is--why, it's just a----Why, Vida, I thought you
appreciated--well--appreciated art."
Vida snorted, "Oh. Art. Oh yes. I do like art. It's very nice. But after
all, what does it matter what kind of play we give as long as we get the
association started? The thing that matters is something that none of
you have spoken of, that is: what are we going to do with the money, if
we make any? I think it would be awfully nice if we presented the high
school with a full set of Stoddard's travel-lectures!"
Carol moaned, "Oh, but Vida dear, do forgive me but this farce----Now
what I'd like us to give is something distinguished. Say Shaw's
'Androcles.' Have any of you read it?"
"Yes. Good play," said Guy Pollock.
Then Raymie Wutherspoon astoundingly spoke up:
"So have I. I read through all the plays in the public library, so's
to be ready for this meeting. And----But I don't believe you grasp
the irreligious ideas in this 'Androcles,' Mrs. Kennicott. I guess the
feminine mind is too innocent to understand all these immoral writers.
I'm sure I don't want to criticize Bernard Shaw; I understand he is very
popular with the highbrows in Minneapolis; but just the same----As far
as I can make out, he's downright improper! The things he SAYS----Well,
it would be a very risky thing for our young folks to see. It seems to
me that a play that doesn't leave a nice taste in the mouth and that
hasn't any message is nothing but--nothing but----Well, whatever it may
be, it isn't art. So----Now I've found a play that is clean, and there's
some awfully funny scenes in it, too. I laughed out loud, reading it.
It's called 'His Mother's Heart,' and it's about a young man in college
who gets in with a lot of free-thinkers and boozers and everything, but
in the end his mother's influence----"
Juanita Haydock broke in with a derisive, "Oh rats, Raymie! Can the
mother's influence! I say let's give something with some class to it.
I bet we could get the rights to 'The Girl from Kankakee,' and that's a
real show. It ran for eleven months in New York!"
"That would be lots of fun, if it wouldn't cost too much," reflected
Vida.
Carol's was the only vote cast against "The Girl from Kankakee."
II
She disliked "The Girl from Kankakee" even more than she had expected.
It narrated the success of a farm-lassie in clearing her brother of a
charge of forgery. She became secretary to a New York millionaire and
social counselor to his wife; and after a well-conceived speech on the
discomfort of having money, she married his son.
There was also a humorous office-boy.
Carol discerned that both Juanita Haydock and Ella Stowbody wanted the
lead. She let Juanita have it. Juanita kissed her and in the exuberant
manner of a new star presented to the executive committee her theory,
"What we want in a play is humor and pep. There's where American
playwrights put it all over these darn old European glooms."
As selected by Carol and confirmed by the committee, the persons of the
play were:
John Grimm, a millionaire . . . . Guy Pollock
His wife. . . . . . . . . Miss Vida Sherwin
His son . . . . . . . . . Dr. Harvey Dillon
His business rival. . . . . . . Raymond T. Wutherspoon
Friend of Mrs. Grimm . . . . . . Miss Ella Stowbody
The girl from Kankakee . . . . . Mrs. Harold C. Haydock
Her brother. . . . . . . . Dr. Terence Gould
Her mother . . . . . . . . Mrs. David Dyer
Stenographer . . . . . . . . Miss Rita Simons
Office-boy . . . . . . . . Miss Myrtle Cass
Maid in the Grimms' home . . . . Mrs. W. P. Kennicott
Direction of Mrs. Kennicott
Among the minor lamentations was Maud Dyer's "Well of course I suppose I
look old enough to be Juanita's mother, even if Juanita is eight months
older than I am, but I don't know as I care to have everybody noticing
it and----"
Carol pleaded, "Oh, my DEAR! You two look exactly the same age. I chose
you because you have such a darling complexion, and you know with powder
and a white wig, anybody looks twice her age, and I want the mother to
be sweet, no matter who else is."
Ella Stowbody, the professional, perceiving that it was because of a
conspiracy of jealousy that she had been given a small part, alternated
between lofty amusement and Christian patience.
Carol hinted that the play would be improved by cutting, but as every
actor except Vida and Guy and herself wailed at the loss of a single
line, she was defeated. She told herself that, after all, a great deal
could be done with direction and settings.
Sam Clark had boastfully written about the dramatic association to his
schoolmate, Percy Bresnahan, president of the Velvet Motor Company
of Boston. Bresnahan sent a check for a hundred dollars; Sam added
twenty-five and brought the fund to Carol, fondly crying, "There!
That'll give you a start for putting the thing across swell!"
She rented the second floor of the city hall for two months. All through
the spring the association thrilled to its own talent in that dismal
room. They cleared out the bunting, ballot-boxes, handbills, legless
chairs. They attacked the stage. It was a simple-minded stage. It was
raised above the floor, and it did have a movable curtain, painted with
the advertisement of a druggist dead these ten years, but otherwise
it might not have been recognized as a stage. There were two
dressing-rooms, one for men, one for women, on either side. The
dressing-room doors were also the stage-entrances, opening from the
house, and many a citizen of Gopher Prairie had for his first glimpse of
romance the bare shoulders of the leading woman.
There were three sets of scenery: a woodland, a Poor Interior, and a
Rich Interior, the last also useful for railway stations, offices, and
as a background for the Swedish Quartette from Chicago. There were three
gradations of lighting: full on, half on, and entirely off.
This was the only theater in Gopher Prairie. It was known as the "op'ra
house." Once, strolling companies had used it for performances of "The
Two Orphans," and "Nellie the Beautiful Cloak Model," and "Othello" with
specialties between acts, but now the motion-pictures had ousted the
gipsy drama.
Carol intended to be furiously modern in constructing the office-set,
the drawing-room for Mr. Grimm, and the Humble Home near Kankakee.
It was the first time that any one in Gopher Prairie had been so
revolutionary as to use enclosed scenes with continuous side-walls. The
rooms in the op'ra house sets had separate wing-pieces for sides, which
simplified dramaturgy, as the villain could always get out of the hero's
way by walking out through the wall.
The inhabitants of the Humble Home were supposed to be amiable and
intelligent. Carol planned for them a simple set with warm color. She
could see the beginning of the play: all dark save the high settles and
the solid wooden table between them, which were to be illuminated by a
ray from offstage. The high light was a polished copper pot filled with
primroses. Less clearly she sketched the Grimm drawing-room as a series
of cool high white arches.
As to how she was to produce these effects she had no notion.
She discovered that, despite the enthusiastic young writers, the
drama was not half so native and close to the soil as motor cars and
telephones. She discovered that simple arts require sophisticated
training. She discovered that to produce one perfect stage-picture would
be as difficult as to turn all of Gopher Prairie into a Georgian garden.
She read all she could find regarding staging, she bought paint and
light wood; she borrowed furniture and drapes unscrupulously; she made
Kennicott turn carpenter. She collided with the problem of lighting.
Against the protest of Kennicott and Vida she mortgaged the association
by sending to Minneapolis for a baby spotlight, a strip light, a dimming
device, and blue and amber bulbs; and with the gloating rapture of
a born painter first turned loose among colors, she spent absorbed
evenings in grouping, dimming-painting with lights.
Only Kennicott, Guy, and Vida helped her. They speculated as to how
flats could be lashed together to form a wall; they hung crocus-yellow
curtains at the windows; they blacked the sheet-iron stove; they put on
aprons and swept. The rest of the association dropped into the theater
every evening, and were literary and superior. They had borrowed
Carol's manuals of play-production and had become extremely stagey in
vocabulary.
Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons, and Raymie Wutherspoon sat on a sawhorse,
watching Carol try to get the right position for a picture on the wall
in the first scene.
"I don't want to hand myself anything but I believe I'll give a swell
performance in this first act," confided Juanita. "I wish Carol wasn't
so bossy though. She doesn't understand clothes. I want to wear, oh,
a dandy dress I have--all scarlet--and I said to her, 'When I enter
wouldn't it knock their eyes out if I just stood there at the door in
this straight scarlet thing?' But she wouldn't let me."
Young Rita agreed, "She's so much taken up with her old details and
carpentering and everything that she can't see the picture as a whole.
Now I thought it would be lovely if we had an office-scene like the one
in 'Little, But Oh My!' Because I SAW that, in Duluth. But she simply
wouldn't listen at all."
Juanita sighed, "I wanted to give one speech like Ethel Barrymore would,
if she was in a play like this. (Harry and I heard her one time in
Minneapolis--we had dandy seats, in the orchestra--I just know I could
imitate her.) Carol didn't pay any attention to my suggestion. I don't
want to criticize but I guess Ethel knows more about acting than Carol
does!"
"Say, do you think Carol has the right dope about using a strip light
behind the fireplace in the second act? I told her I thought we ought to
use a bunch," offered Raymie. "And I suggested it would be lovely if we
used a cyclorama outside the window in the first act, and what do you
think she said? 'Yes, and it would be lovely to have Eleanora Duse play
the lead,' she said, 'and aside from the fact that it's evening in the
first act, you're a great technician,' she said. I must say I think she
was pretty sarcastic. I've been reading up, and I know I could build a
cyclorama, if she didn't want to run everything."
"Yes, and another thing, I think the entrance in the first act ought to
be L. U. E., not L. 3 E.," from Juanita.
"And why does she just use plain white tormenters?"
"What's a tormenter?" blurted Rita Simons.
The savants stared at her ignorance.
III
Carol did not resent their criticisms, she didn't very much resent
their sudden knowledge, so long as they let her make pictures. It was at
rehearsals that the quarrrels broke. No one understood that rehearsals
were as real engagements as bridge-games or sociables at the Episcopal
Church. They gaily came in half an hour late, or they vociferously came
in ten minutes early, and they were so hurt that they whispered about
resigning when Carol protested. They telephoned, "I don't think I'd
better come out; afraid the dampness might start my toothache," or
"Guess can't make it tonight; Dave wants me to sit in on a poker game."
When, after a month of labor, as many as nine-elevenths of the cast were
often present at a rehearsal; when most of them had learned their parts
and some of them spoke like human beings, Carol had a new shock in the
realization that Guy Pollock and herself were very bad actors, and that
Raymie Wutherspoon was a surprisingly good one. For all her visions
she could not control her voice, and she was bored by the fiftieth
repetition of her few lines as maid. Guy pulled his soft mustache,
looked self-conscious, and turned Mr. Grimm into a limp dummy. But
Raymie, as the villain, had no repressions. The tilt of his head was
full of character; his drawl was admirably vicious.
There was an evening when Carol hoped she was going to make a play; a
rehearsal during which Guy stopped looking abashed.
From that evening the play declined.
They were weary. "We know our parts well enough now; what's the use of
getting sick of them?" they complained. They began to skylark; to play
with the sacred lights; to giggle when Carol was trying to make the
sentimental Myrtle Cass into a humorous office-boy; to act everything
but "The Girl from Kankakee." After loafing through his proper part
Dr. Terry Gould had great applause for his burlesque of "Hamlet." Even
Raymie lost his simple faith, and tried to show that he could do a
vaudeville shuffle.
Carol turned on the company. "See here, I want this nonsense to stop.
We've simply got to get down to work."
Juanita Haydock led the mutiny: "Look here, Carol, don't be so bossy.
After all, we're doing this play principally for the fun of it, and if
we have fun out of a lot of monkey-shines, why then----"
"Ye-es," feebly.
"You said one time that folks in G. P. didn't get enough fun out of
life. And now we are having a circus, you want us to stop!"
Carol answered slowly: "I wonder if I can explain what I mean? It's the
difference between looking at the comic page and looking at Manet. I
want fun out of this, of course. Only----I don't think it would be
less fun, but more, to produce as perfect a play as we can." She was
curiously exalted; her voice was strained; she stared not at the company
but at the grotesques scrawled on the backs of wing-pieces by forgotten
stage-hands. "I wonder if you can understand the 'fun' of making a
beautiful thing, the pride and satisfaction of it, and the holiness!"
The company glanced doubtfully at one another. In Gopher Prairie it
is not good form to be holy except at a church, between ten-thirty and
twelve on Sunday.
"But if we want to do it, we've got to work; we must have
self-discipline."
They were at once amused and embarrassed. They did not want to affront
this mad woman. They backed off and tried to rehearse. Carol did not
hear Juanita, in front, protesting to Maud Dyer, "If she calls it fun
and holiness to sweat over her darned old play--well, I don't!"
IV
Carol attended the only professional play which came to Gopher Prairie
that spring. It was a "tent show, presenting snappy new dramas under
canvas." The hard-working actors doubled in brass, and took tickets;
and between acts sang about the moon in June, and sold Dr. Wintergreen's
Surefire Tonic for Ills of the Heart, Lungs, Kidneys, and Bowels. They
presented "Sunbonnet Nell: A Dramatic Comedy of the Ozarks," with J.
Witherbee Boothby wringing the soul by his resonant "Yuh ain't done
right by mah little gal, Mr. City Man, but yer a-goin' to find that back
in these-yere hills there's honest folks and good shots!"
The audience, on planks beneath the patched tent, admired Mr. Boothby's
beard and long rifle; stamped their feet in the dust at the spectacle
of his heroism; shouted when the comedian aped the City Lady's use of a
lorgnon by looking through a doughnut stuck on a fork; wept visibly over
Mr. Boothby's Little Gal Nell, who was also Mr. Boothby's legal wife
Pearl, and when the curtain went down, listened respectfully to Mr.
Boothby's lecture on Dr. Wintergreen's Tonic as a cure for tape-worms,
which he illustrated by horrible pallid objects curled in bottles of
yellowing alcohol.
Carol shook her head. "Juanita is right. I'm a fool. Holiness of the
drama! Bernard Shaw! The only trouble with 'The Girl from Kankakee' is
that it's too subtle for Gopher Prairie!"
She sought faith in spacious banal phrases, taken from books: "the
instinctive nobility of simple souls," "need only the opportunity, to
appreciate fine things," and "sturdy exponents of democracy." But these
optimisms did not sound so loud as the laughter of the audience at the
funny-man's line, "Yes, by heckelum, I'm a smart fella." She wanted to
give up the play, the dramatic association, the town. As she came out
of the tent and walked with Kennicott down the dusty spring street, she
peered at this straggling wooden village and felt that she could not
possibly stay here through all of tomorrow.
It was Miles Bjornstam who gave her strength--he and the fact that every
seat for "The Girl from Kankakee" had been sold.
Bjornstam was "keeping company" with Bea. Every night he was sitting on
the back steps. Once when Carol appeared he grumbled, "Hope you're going
to give this burg one good show. If you don't, reckon nobody ever will."
V
It was the great night; it was the night of the play. The two
dressing-rooms were swirling with actors, panting, twitchy pale. Del
Snafflin the barber, who was as much a professional as Ella, having once
gone on in a mob scene at a stock-company performance in Minneapolis,
was making them up, and showing his scorn for amateurs with, "Stand
still! For the love o' Mike, how do you expect me to get your eyelids
dark if you keep a-wigglin'?" The actors were beseeching, "Hey, Del, put
some red in my nostrils--you put some in Rita's--gee, you didn't hardly
do anything to my face."
They were enormously theatric. They examined Del's makeup box, they
sniffed the scent of grease-paint, every minute they ran out to peep
through the hole in the curtain, they came back to inspect their wigs
and costumes, they read on the whitewashed walls of the dressing-rooms
the pencil inscriptions: "The Flora Flanders Comedy Company," and "This
is a bum theater," and felt that they were companions of these vanished
troupers.
Carol, smart in maid's uniform, coaxed the temporary stage-hands to
finish setting the first act, wailed at Kennicott, the electrician, "Now
for heaven's sake remember the change in cue for the ambers in Act Two,"
slipped out to ask Dave Dyer, the ticket-taker, if he could get some
more chairs, warned the frightened Myrtle Cass to be sure to upset the
waste-basket when John Grimm called, "Here you, Reddy."
Del Snafflin's orchestra of piano, violin, and cornet began to tune up
and every one behind the magic line of the proscenic arch was frightened
into paralysis. Carol wavered to the hole in the curtain. There were so
many people out there, staring so hard----
In the second row she saw Miles Bjornstam, not with Bea but alone.
He really wanted to see the play! It was a good omen. Who could tell?
Perhaps this evening would convert Gopher Prairie to conscious beauty.
She darted into the women's dressing-room, roused Maud Dyer from her
fainting panic, pushed her to the wings, and ordered the curtain up.
It rose doubtfully, it staggered and trembled, but it did get up without
catching--this time. Then she realized that Kennicott had forgotten to
turn off the houselights. Some one out front was giggling.
She galloped round to the left wing, herself pulled the switch, looked
so ferociously at Kennicott that he quaked, and fled back.
Mrs. Dyer was creeping out on the half-darkened stage. The play was
begun.
And with that instant Carol realized that it was a bad play abominably
acted.
Encouraging them with lying smiles, she watched her work go to pieces.
The settings seemed flimsy, the lighting commonplace. She watched
Guy Pollock stammer and twist his mustache when he should have been a
bullying magnate; Vida Sherwin, as Grimm's timid wife, chatter at the
audience as though they were her class in high-school English; Juanita,
in the leading role, defy Mr. Grimm as though she were repeating a list
of things she had to buy at the grocery this morning; Ella Stowbody
remark "I'd like a cup of tea" as though she were reciting "Curfew Shall
Not Ring Tonight"; and Dr. Gould, making love to Rita Simons, squeak,
"My--my--you--are--a--won'erful--girl."
Myrtle Cass, as the office-boy, was so much pleased by the applause of
her relatives, then so much agitated by the remarks of Cy Bogart, in the
back row, in reference to her wearing trousers, that she could hardly
be got off the stage. Only Raymie was so unsociable as to devote himself
entirely to acting.
That she was right in her opinion of the play Carol was certain when
Miles Bjornstam went out after the first act, and did not come back.
VI
Between the second and third acts she called the company together,
and supplicated, "I want to know something, before we have a chance to
separate. Whether we're doing well or badly tonight, it is a beginning.
But will we take it as merely a beginning? How many of you will pledge
yourselves to start in with me, right away, tomorrow, and plan for
another play, to be given in September?"
They stared at her; they nodded at Juanita's protest: "I think
one's enough for a while. It's going elegant tonight, but another
play----Seems to me it'll be time enough to talk about that next fall.
Carol! I hope you don't mean to hint and suggest we're not doing fine
tonight? I'm sure the applause shows the audience think it's just
dandy!"
Then Carol knew how completely she had failed.
As the audience seeped out she heard B. J. Gougerling the banker say to
Howland the grocer, "Well, I think the folks did splendid; just as good
as professionals. But I don't care much for these plays. What I like is
a good movie, with auto accidents and hold-ups, and some git to it, and
not all this talky-talk."
Then Carol knew how certain she was to fail again.
She wearily did not blame them, company nor audience. Herself she blamed
for trying to carve intaglios in good wholesome jack-pine.
"It's the worst defeat of all. I'm beaten. By Main Street. 'I must go
on.' But I can't!"
She was not vastly encouraged by the Gopher Prairie Dauntless:
. . . would be impossible to distinguish among the actors when all gave
such fine account of themselves in difficult roles of this well-known
New York stage play. Guy Pollock as the old millionaire could not have
been bettered for his fine impersonation of the gruff old millionaire;
Mrs. Harry Haydock as the young lady from the West who so easily showed
the New York four-flushers where they got off was a vision of loveliness
and with fine stage presence. Miss Vida Sherwin the ever popular teacher
in our high school pleased as Mrs. Grimm, Dr. Gould was well suited in
the role of young lover--girls you better look out, remember the doc is a
bachelor. The local Four Hundred also report that he is a great hand at
shaking the light fantastic tootsies in the dance. As the stenographer
Rita Simons was pretty as a picture, and Miss Ella Stowbody's long and
intensive study of the drama and kindred arts in Eastern schools was
seen in the fine finish of her part.
. . . to no one is greater credit to be given than to Mrs. Will Kennicott
on whose capable shoulders fell the burden of directing.
"So kindly," Carol mused, "so well meant, so neighborly--and so
confoundedly untrue. Is it really my failure, or theirs?"
She sought to be sensible; she elaborately explained to herself that it
was hysterical to condemn Gopher Prairie because it did not foam over
the drama. Its justification was in its service as a market-town for
farmers. How bravely and generously it did its work, forwarding the
bread of the world, feeding and healing the farmers!
Then, on the corner below her husband's office, she heard a farmer
holding forth:
"Sure. Course I was beaten. The shipper and the grocers here wouldn't
pay us a decent price for our potatoes, even though folks in the cities
were howling for 'em. So we says, well, we'll get a truck and ship 'em
right down to Minneapolis. But the commission merchants there were in
cahoots with the local shipper here; they said they wouldn't pay us
a cent more than he would, not even if they was nearer to the market.
Well, we found we could get higher prices in Chicago, but when we tried
to get freight cars to ship there, the railroads wouldn't let us have
'em--even though they had cars standing empty right here in the yards.
There you got it--good market, and these towns keeping us from it. Gus,
that's the way these towns work all the time. They pay what they want
to for our wheat, but we pay what they want us to for their clothes.
Stowbody and Dawson foreclose every mortgage they can, and put in tenant
farmers. The Dauntless lies to us about the Nonpartisan League, the
lawyers sting us, the machinery-dealers hate to carry us over bad years,
and then their daughters put on swell dresses and look at us as if we
were a bunch of hoboes. Man, I'd like to burn this town!"
Kennicott observed, "There's that old crank Wes Brannigan shooting off
his mouth again. Gosh, but he loves to hear himself talk! They ought to
run that fellow out of town!"
VII
She felt old and detached through high-school commencement week, which
is the fete of youth in Gopher Prairie; through baccalaureate sermon,
senior Parade, junior entertainment, commencement address by an Iowa
clergyman who asserted that he believed in the virtue of virtuousness,
and the procession of Decoration Day, when the few Civil War veterans
followed Champ Perry, in his rusty forage-cap, along the spring-powdered
road to the cemetery. She met Guy; she found that she had nothing to
say to him. Her head ached in an aimless way. When Kennicott rejoiced,
"We'll have a great time this summer; move down to the lake early and
wear old clothes and act natural," she smiled, but her smile creaked.
In the prairie heat she trudged along unchanging ways, talked about
nothing to tepid people, and reflected that she might never escape from
them.
She was startled to find that she was using the word "escape."
Then, for three years which passed like one curt paragraph, she ceased
to find anything interesting save the Bjornstams and her baby.
| Back in Gopher Prairie, Carol calls the first meeting of the dramatic club and asks for any suggestions for the play they should put on. She already has a high-minded play to recommend, but she's shocked to find out that every person is adamant about doing the play they want to do. When Carol finally recommends her choice, it gets shot down almost immediately. The group ends up choosing a lame play called "The Girl from Kankakee." Carol thinks it might be okay but then hates it from the moment she first sees the script. It doesn't take long for Carol to get on everyone's nerves with her constant nitpicking and perfectionism. Everyone talks and laughs about her behind her back, and pretty soon people stop showing up for every rehearsal. Carol attends the only professional play that comes to Gopher Prairie that year, but she's disappointed to see how amateurish it is. In the meantime, Miles Bjornstam starts courting Carol's maid, Bea Sorenson. He tells Carol he hopes that she'll put on a good show, because if she doesn't, no one ever will. The play ends up being a total disaster on its opening night. Carol can see how awful it is, but everyone in the audience and the cast thinks it's great. This puts Carol in a terrible dilemma. Should she tell them how horrible it is, or should she let them go on thinking it's great? Three years go by in a flash for Carol, as she settles back into a mindless and ambitionless life in Gopher Prairie. The only thing that interests her is the baby that Bea Sorenson ends up having with Miles Bjornstam after they're married. | summary |
CHAPTER XIX
I
IN three years of exile from herself Carol had certain experiences
chronicled as important by the Dauntless, or discussed by the Jolly
Seventeen, but the event unchronicled, undiscussed, and supremely
controlling, was her slow admission of longing to find her own people.
II
Bea and Miles Bjornstam were married in June, a month after "The Girl
from Kankakee." Miles had turned respectable. He had renounced his
criticisms of state and society; he had given up roving as horse-trader,
and wearing red mackinaws in lumber-camps; he had gone to work as
engineer in Jackson Elder's planing-mill; he was to be seen upon the
streets endeavoring to be neighborly with suspicious men whom he had
taunted for years.
Carol was the patroness and manager of the wedding. Juanita Haydock
mocked, "You're a chump to let a good hired girl like Bea go. Besides!
How do you know it's a good thing, her marrying a sassy bum like this
awful Red Swede person? Get wise! Chase the man off with a mop, and
hold onto your Svenska while the holding's good. Huh? Me go to their
Scandahoofian wedding? Not a chance!"
The other matrons echoed Juanita. Carol was dismayed by the casualness
of their cruelty, but she persisted. Miles had exclaimed to her, "Jack
Elder says maybe he'll come to the wedding! Gee, it would be nice to
have Bea meet the Boss as a reg'lar married lady. Some day I'll be so
well off that Bea can play with Mrs. Elder--and you! Watch us!"
There was an uneasy knot of only nine guests at the service in the
unpainted Lutheran Church--Carol, Kennicott, Guy Pollock, and the Champ
Perrys, all brought by Carol; Bea's frightened rustic parents, her
cousin Tina, and Pete, Miles's ex-partner in horse-trading, a surly,
hairy man who had bought a black suit and come twelve hundred miles from
Spokane for the event.
Miles continuously glanced back at the church door. Jackson Elder did
not appear. The door did not once open after the awkward entrance of the
first guests. Miles's hand closed on Bea's arm.
He had, with Carol's help, made his shanty over into a cottage with
white curtains and a canary and a chintz chair.
Carol coaxed the powerful matrons to call on Bea. They half scoffed,
half promised to go.
Bea's successor was the oldish, broad, silent Oscarina, who was
suspicious of her frivolous mistress for a month, so that Juanita
Haydock was able to crow, "There, smarty, I told you you'd run into the
Domestic Problem!" But Oscarina adopted Carol as a daughter, and with
her as faithful to the kitchen as Bea had been, there was nothing
changed in Carol's life.
III
She was unexpectedly appointed to the town library-board by Ole Jenson,
the new mayor. The other members were Dr. Westlake, Lyman Cass, Julius
Flickerbaugh the attorney, Guy Pollock, and Martin Mahoney, former
livery-stable keeper and now owner of a garage. She was delighted. She
went to the first meeting rather condescendingly, regarding herself
as the only one besides Guy who knew anything about books or library
methods. She was planning to revolutionize the whole system.
Her condescension was ruined and her humility wholesomely increased when
she found the board, in the shabby room on the second floor of the house
which had been converted into the library, not discussing the weather
and longing to play checkers, but talking about books. She discovered
that amiable old Dr. Westlake read everything in verse and "light
fiction"; that Lyman Cass, the veal-faced, bristly-bearded owner of the
mill, had tramped through Gibbon, Hume, Grote, Prescott, and the other
thick historians; that he could repeat pages from them--and did. When
Dr. Westlake whispered to her, "Yes, Lym is a very well-informed man,
but he's modest about it," she felt uninformed and immodest, and scolded
at herself that she had missed the human potentialities in this vast
Gopher Prairie. When Dr. Westlake quoted the "Paradiso," "Don Quixote,"
"Wilhelm Meister," and the Koran, she reflected that no one she knew,
not even her father, had read all four.
She came diffidently to the second meeting of the board. She did not
plan to revolutionize anything. She hoped that the wise elders might be
so tolerant as to listen to her suggestions about changing the shelving
of the juveniles.
Yet after four sessions of the library-board she was where she had been
before the first session. She had found that for all their pride in
being reading men, Westlake and Cass and even Guy had no conception of
making the library familiar to the whole town. They used it, they passed
resolutions about it, and they left it as dead as Moses. Only the Henty
books and the Elsie books and the latest optimisms by moral female
novelists and virile clergymen were in general demand, and the board
themselves were interested only in old, stilted volumes. They had no
tenderness for the noisiness of youth discovering great literature.
If she was egotistic about her tiny learning, they were at least as much
so regarding theirs. And for all their talk of the need of additional
library-tax none of them was willing to risk censure by battling for it,
though they now had so small a fund that, after paying for rent, heat,
light, and Miss Villets's salary, they had only a hundred dollars a year
for the purchase of books.
The Incident of the Seventeen Cents killed her none too enduring
interest.
She had come to the board-meeting singing with a plan. She had made
a list of thirty European novels of the past ten years, with twenty
important books on psychology, education, and economics which the
library lacked. She had made Kennicott promise to give fifteen dollars.
If each of the board would contribute the same, they could have the
books.
Lym Cass looked alarmed, scratched himself, and protested, "I think
it would be a bad precedent for the board-members to contribute
money--uh--not that I mind, but it wouldn't be fair--establish
precedent. Gracious! They don't pay us a cent for our services!
Certainly can't expect us to pay for the privilege of serving!"
Only Guy looked sympathetic, and he stroked the pine table and said
nothing.
The rest of the meeting they gave to a bellicose investigation of the
fact that there was seventeen cents less than there should be in the
Fund. Miss Villets was summoned; she spent half an hour in explosively
defending herself; the seventeen cents were gnawed over, penny by penny;
and Carol, glancing at the carefully inscribed list which had been
so lovely and exciting an hour before, was silent, and sorry for Miss
Villets, and sorrier for herself.
She was reasonably regular in attendance till her two years were up and
Vida Sherwin was appointed to the board in her place, but she did not
try to be revolutionary. In the plodding course of her life there was
nothing changed, and nothing new.
IV
Kennicott made an excellent land-deal, but as he told her none of the
details, she was not greatly exalted or agitated. What did agitate her
was his announcement, half whispered and half blurted, half tender and
half coldly medical, that they "ought to have a baby, now they could
afford it." They had so long agreed that "perhaps it would be just as
well not to have any children for a while yet," that childlessness had
come to be natural. Now, she feared and longed and did not know; she
hesitatingly assented, and wished that she had not assented.
As there appeared no change in their drowsy relations, she forgot all
about it, and life was planless.
V
Idling on the porch of their summer cottage at the lake, on afternoons
when Kennicott was in town, when the water was glazed and the whole air
languid, she pictured a hundred escapes: Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm,
with limousines, golden shops, a cathedral spire. A reed hut on
fantastic piles above the mud of a jungle river. A suite in Paris,
immense high grave rooms, with lambrequins and a balcony. The Enchanted
Mesa. An ancient stone mill in Maryland, at the turn of the road,
between rocky brook and abrupt hills. An upland moor of sheep and
flitting cool sunlight. A clanging dock where steel cranes unloaded
steamers from Buenos Ayres and Tsing-tao. A Munich concert-hall, and a
famous 'cellist playing--playing to her.
One scene had a persistent witchery:
She stood on a terrace overlooking a boulevard by the warm sea. She was
certain, though she had no reason for it, that the place was Mentone.
Along the drive below her swept barouches, with a mechanical tlot-tlot,
tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, and great cars with polished black hoods and
engines quiet as the sigh of an old man. In them were women erect,
slender, enameled, and expressionless as marionettes, their small hands
upon parasols, their unchanging eyes always forward, ignoring the men
beside them, tall men with gray hair and distinguished faces. Beyond the
drive were painted sea and painted sands, and blue and yellow pavilions.
Nothing moved except the gliding carriages, and the people were small
and wooden, spots in a picture drenched with gold and hard bright blues.
There was no sound of sea or winds; no softness of whispers nor of
falling petals; nothing but yellow and cobalt and staring light, and the
never-changing tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot----
She startled. She whimpered. It was the rapid ticking of the clock which
had hypnotized her into hearing the steady hoofs. No aching color of the
sea and pride of supercilious people, but the reality of a round-bellied
nickel alarm-clock on a shelf against a fuzzy unplaned pine wall, with
a stiff gray wash-rag hanging above it and a kerosene-stove standing
below.
A thousand dreams governed by the fiction she had read, drawn from the
pictures she had envied, absorbed her drowsy lake afternoons, but
always in the midst of them Kennicott came out from town, drew on khaki
trousers which were plastered with dry fish-scales, asked, "Enjoying
yourself?" and did not listen to her answer.
And nothing was changed, and there was no reason to believe that there
ever would be change.
VI
Trains!
At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She realized
that in town she had depended upon them for assurance that there
remained a world beyond.
The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie.
It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel,
and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he
might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated
and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories,
colleges, army.
The East remembered generations when there had been no railroad, and had
no awe of it; but here the railroads had been before time was. The towns
had been staked out on barren prairie as convenient points for future
train-halts; and back in 1860 and 1870 there had been much profit, much
opportunity to found aristocratic families, in the possession of advance
knowledge as to where the towns would arise.
If a town was in disfavor, the railroad could ignore it, cut it off from
commerce, slay it. To Gopher Prairie the tracks were eternal verities,
and boards of railroad directors an omnipotence. The smallest boy or the
most secluded grandam could tell you whether No. 32 had a hot-box last
Tuesday, whether No. 7 was going to put on an extra day-coach; and the
name of the president of the road was familiar to every breakfast table.
Even in this new era of motors the citizens went down to the station
to see the trains go through. It was their romance; their only mystery
besides mass at the Catholic Church; and from the trains came lords of
the outer world--traveling salesmen with piping on their waistcoats, and
visiting cousins from Milwaukee.
Gopher Prairie had once been a "division-point." The roundhouse and
repair-shops were gone, but two conductors still retained residence,
and they were persons of distinction, men who traveled and talked to
strangers, who wore uniforms with brass buttons, and knew all about
these crooked games of con-men. They were a special caste, neither above
nor below the Haydocks, but apart, artists and adventurers.
The night telegraph-operator at the railroad station was the most
melodramatic figure in town: awake at three in the morning, alone in a
room hectic with clatter of the telegraph key. All night he "talked"
to operators twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away. It was always to be
expected that he would be held up by robbers. He never was, but round
him was a suggestion of masked faces at the window, revolvers, cords
binding him to a chair, his struggle to crawl to the key before he
fainted.
During blizzards everything about the railroad was melodramatic. There
were days when the town was completely shut off, when they had no mail,
no express, no fresh meat, no newspapers. At last the rotary snow-plow
came through, bucking the drifts, sending up a geyser, and the way to
the Outside was open again. The brakemen, in mufflers and fur caps,
running along the tops of ice-coated freight-cars; the engineers
scratching frost from the cab windows and looking out, inscrutable,
self-contained, pilots of the prairie sea--they were heroism, they were
to Carol the daring of the quest in a world of groceries and sermons.
To the small boys the railroad was a familiar playground. They climbed
the iron ladders on the sides of the box-cars; built fires behind piles
of old ties; waved to favorite brakemen. But to Carol it was magic.
She was motoring with Kennicott, the car lumping through darkness, the
lights showing mud-puddles and ragged weeds by the road. A train coming!
A rapid chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck. It was hurling
past--the Pacific Flyer, an arrow of golden flame. Light from the
fire-box splashed the under side of the trailing smoke. Instantly the
vision was gone; Carol was back in the long darkness; and Kennicott was
giving his version of that fire and wonder: "No. 19. Must be 'bout ten
minutes late."
In town, she listened from bed to the express whistling in the cut a
mile north. Uuuuuuu!--faint, nervous, distrait, horn of the free night
riders journeying to the tall towns where were laughter and
banners and the sound of bells--Uuuuu! Uuuuu!--the world going
by--Uuuuuuu!--fainter, more wistful, gone.
Down here there were no trains. The stillness was very great. The
prairie encircled the lake, lay round her, raw, dusty, thick. Only the
train could cut it. Some day she would take a train; and that would be a
great taking.
VII
She turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the dramatic
association, to the library-board.
Besides the permanent Mother Chautauqua, in New York, there are, all
over these States, commercial Chautauqua companies which send out to
every smallest town troupes of lecturers and "entertainers" to give a
week of culture under canvas. Living in Minneapolis, Carol had never
encountered the ambulant Chautauqua, and the announcement of its coming
to Gopher Prairie gave her hope that others might be doing the vague
things which she had attempted. She pictured a condensed university
course brought to the people. Mornings when she came in from the lake
with Kennicott she saw placards in every shop-window, and strung on
a cord across Main Street, a line of pennants alternately worded
"The Boland Chautauqua COMING!" and "A solid week of inspiration and
enjoyment!" But she was disappointed when she saw the program. It did
not seem to be a tabloid university; it did not seem to be any kind of
a university; it seemed to be a combination of vaudeville performance Y.
M. C. A. lecture, and the graduation exercises of an elocution class.
She took her doubt to Kennicott. He insisted, "Well, maybe it won't be
so awful darn intellectual, the way you and I might like it, but it's
a whole lot better than nothing." Vida Sherwin added, "They have
some splendid speakers. If the people don't carry off so much actual
information, they do get a lot of new ideas, and that's what counts."
During the Chautauqua Carol attended three evening meetings, two
afternoon meetings, and one in the morning. She was impressed by the
audience: the sallow women in skirts and blouses, eager to be made to
think, the men in vests and shirt-sleeves, eager to be allowed to laugh,
and the wriggling children, eager to sneak away. She liked the plain
benches, the portable stage under its red marquee, the great tent over
all, shadowy above strings of incandescent bulbs at night and by day
casting an amber radiance on the patient crowd. The scent of dust
and trampled grass and sun-baked wood gave her an illusion of Syrian
caravans; she forgot the speakers while she listened to noises outside
the tent: two farmers talking hoarsely, a wagon creaking down Main
Street, the crow of a rooster. She was content. But it was the
contentment of the lost hunter stopping to rest.
For from the Chautauqua itself she got nothing but wind and chaff and
heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and
primitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm.
These were the several instructors in the condensed university's
seven-day course:
Nine lecturers, four of them ex-ministers, and one an ex-congressman,
all of them delivering "inspirational addresses." The only facts or
opinions which Carol derived from them were: Lincoln was a celebrated
president of the United States, but in his youth extremely poor. James
J. Hill was the best-known railroad-man of the West, and in his youth
extremely poor. Honesty and courtesy in business are preferable
to boorishness and exposed trickery, but this is not to be taken
personally, since all persons in Gopher Prairie are known to be honest
and courteous. London is a large city. A distinguished statesman once
taught Sunday School.
Four "entertainers" who told Jewish stories, Irish stories, German
stories, Chinese stories, and Tennessee mountaineer stories, most of
which Carol had heard.
A "lady elocutionist" who recited Kipling and imitated children.
A lecturer with motion-pictures of an Andean exploration; excellent
pictures and a halting narrative.
Three brass-bands, a company of six opera-singers, a Hawaiian sextette,
and four youths who played saxophones and guitars disguised as
wash-boards. The most applauded pieces were those, such as the "Lucia"
inevitability, which the audience had heard most often.
The local superintendent, who remained through the week while the other
enlighteners went to other Chautauquas for their daily performances. The
superintendent was a bookish, underfed man who worked hard at rousing
artificial enthusiasm, at trying to make the audience cheer by dividing
them into competitive squads and telling them that they were intelligent
and made splendid communal noises. He gave most of the morning lectures,
droning with equal unhappy facility about poetry, the Holy Land, and the
injustice to employers in any system of profit-sharing.
The final item was a man who neither lectured, inspired, nor
entertained; a plain little man with his hands in his pockets. All the
other speakers had confessed, "I cannot keep from telling the citizens
of your beautiful city that none of the talent on this circuit have
found a more charming spot or more enterprising and hospitable people."
But the little man suggested that the architecture of Gopher Prairie was
haphazard, and that it was sottish to let the lake-front be monopolized
by the cinder-heaped wall of the railroad embankment. Afterward the
audience grumbled, "Maybe that guy's got the right dope, but what's the
use of looking on the dark side of things all the time? New ideas are
first-rate, but not all this criticism. Enough trouble in life without
looking for it!"
Thus the Chautauqua, as Carol saw it. After it, the town felt proud and
educated.
VIII
Two weeks later the Great War smote Europe.
For a month Gopher Prairie had the delight of shuddering, then, as the
war settled down to a business of trench-fighting, they forgot.
When Carol talked about the Balkans, and the possibility of a German
revolution, Kennicott yawned, "Oh yes, it's a great old scrap, but it's
none of our business. Folks out here are too busy growing corn to monkey
with any fool war that those foreigners want to get themselves into."
It was Miles Bjornstam who said, "I can't figure it out. I'm opposed to
wars, but still, seems like Germany has got to be licked because them
Junkers stands in the way of progress."
She was calling on Miles and Bea, early in autumn. They had received
her with cries, with dusting of chairs, and a running to fetch water for
coffee. Miles stood and beamed at her. He fell often and joyously into
his old irreverence about the lords of Gopher Prairie, but always--with
a certain difficulty--he added something decorous and appreciative.
"Lots of people have come to see you, haven't they?" Carol hinted.
"Why, Bea's cousin Tina comes in right along, and the foreman at the
mill, and----Oh, we have good times. Say, take a look at that Bea!
Wouldn't you think she was a canary-bird, to listen to her, and to see
that Scandahoofian tow-head of hers? But say, know what she is? She's
a mother hen! Way she fusses over me--way she makes old Miles wear a
necktie! Hate to spoil her by letting her hear it, but she's one pretty
darn nice--nice----Hell! What do we care if none of the dirty snobs come
and call? We've got each other."
Carol worried about their struggle, but she forgot it in the stress of
sickness and fear. For that autumn she knew that a baby was coming,
that at last life promised to be interesting in the peril of the great
change.
| After he marries Bea Sorenson and settles down, Miles Bjornstam stops talking about his radical political views and tries harder to fit in. The change is depressing for Carol, who always liked the way Miles stirred the pot. Very few people attend Miles and Bea's wedding, because they all think they're above these working-class nobodies. The whole thing is depressing for Carol. Carol gets elected to the library board only to find out once again that she's not capable of making any real change in Gopher Prairie. Meanwhile, Will makes a land deal that gets him a lot of money. He suggests to Carol that the time is right for them to have a baby. Carol still doesn't want to have one. A travelling show comes through Gopher Prairie and boasts about giving community courses in interesting subjects. But Carol finds that it's all too dumbed-down for her liking. The show makes everyone in Gopher Prairie feel like they've become much more educated. Two weeks later, World War I breaks out in Europe. A little later on, Carol realizes that she's pregnant. | summary |
CHAPTER XX
I
THE baby was coming. Each morning she was nauseated, chilly, bedraggled,
and certain that she would never again be attractive; each twilight
she was afraid. She did not feel exalted, but unkempt and furious. The
period of daily sickness crawled into an endless time of boredom. It
became difficult for her to move about, and she raged that she, who
had been slim and light-footed, should have to lean on a stick, and be
heartily commented upon by street gossips. She was encircled by greasy
eyes. Every matron hinted, "Now that you're going to be a mother,
dearie, you'll get over all these ideas of yours and settle down."
She felt that willy-nilly she was being initiated into the assembly
of housekeepers; with the baby for hostage, she would never escape;
presently she would be drinking coffee and rocking and talking about
diapers.
"I could stand fighting them. I'm used to that. But this being taken in,
being taken as a matter of course, I can't stand it--and I must stand
it!"
She alternately detested herself for not appreciating the kindly women,
and detested them for their advice: lugubrious hints as to how much she
would suffer in labor, details of baby-hygiene based on long experience
and total misunderstanding, superstitious cautions about the things she
must eat and read and look at in prenatal care for the baby's soul, and
always a pest of simpering baby-talk. Mrs. Champ Perry bustled in to
lend "Ben Hur," as a preventive of future infant immorality. The Widow
Bogart appeared trailing pinkish exclamations, "And how is our lovely
'ittle muzzy today! My, ain't it just like they always say: being in
a Family Way does make the girlie so lovely, just like a Madonna. Tell
me--" Her whisper was tinged with salaciousness--"does oo feel the dear
itsy one stirring, the pledge of love? I remember with Cy, of course he
was so big----"
"I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogart. My complexion is rotten, and my hair
is coming out, and I look like a potato-bag, and I think my arches are
falling, and he isn't a pledge of love, and I'm afraid he WILL look like
us, and I don't believe in mother-devotion, and the whole business is a
confounded nuisance of a biological process," remarked Carol.
Then the baby was born, without unusual difficulty: a boy with straight
back and strong legs. The first day she hated him for the tides of pain
and hopeless fear he had caused; she resented his raw ugliness. After
that she loved him with all the devotion and instinct at which she
had scoffed. She marveled at the perfection of the miniature hands as
noisily as did Kennicott, she was overwhelmed by the trust with
which the baby turned to her; passion for him grew with each unpoetic
irritating thing she had to do for him.
He was named Hugh, for her father.
Hugh developed into a thin healthy child with a large head and straight
delicate hair of a faint brown. He was thoughtful and casual--a
Kennicott.
For two years nothing else existed. She did not, as the cynical matrons
had prophesied, "give up worrying about the world and other folks'
babies soon as she got one of her own to fight for." The barbarity of
that willingness to sacrifice other children so that one child might
have too much was impossible to her. But she would sacrifice herself.
She understood consecration--she who answered Kennicott's hints about
having Hugh christened: "I refuse to insult my baby and myself by asking
an ignorant young man in a frock coat to sanction him, to permit me
to have him! I refuse to subject him to any devil-chasing rites! If I
didn't give my baby--MY BABY--enough sanctification in those nine hours
of hell, then he can't get any more out of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel!"
"Well, Baptists hardly ever christen kids. I was kind of thinking more
about Reverend Warren," said Kennicott.
Hugh was her reason for living, promise of accomplishment in the future,
shrine of adoration--and a diverting toy. "I thought I'd be a dilettante
mother, but I'm as dismayingly natural as Mrs. Bogart," she boasted.
For two--years Carol was a part of the town; as much one of Our Young
Mothers as Mrs. McGanum. Her opinionation seemed dead; she had no
apparent desire for escape; her brooding centered on Hugh. While she
wondered at the pearl texture of his ear she exulted, "I feel like an
old woman, with a skin like sandpaper, beside him, and I'm glad of it!
He is perfect. He shall have everything. He sha'n't always stay here in
Gopher Prairie. . . . I wonder which is really the best, Harvard or Yale
or Oxford?"
II
The people who hemmed her in had been brilliantly reinforced by Mr. and
Mrs. Whittier N. Smail--Kennicott's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie.
The true Main Streetite defines a relative as a person to whose house
you go uninvited, to stay as long as you like. If you hear that Lym Cass
on his journey East has spent all his time "visiting" in Oyster Center,
it does not mean that he prefers that village to the rest of New
England, but that he has relatives there. It does not mean that he has
written to the relatives these many years, nor that they have ever given
signs of a desire to look upon him. But "you wouldn't expect a man to
go and spend good money at a hotel in Boston, when his own third cousins
live right in the same state, would you?"
When the Smails sold their creamery in North Dakota they visited Mr.
Smail's sister, Kennicott's mother, at Lac-qui-Meurt, then plodded on
to Gopher Prairie to stay with their nephew. They appeared unannounced,
before the baby was born, took their welcome for granted, and
immediately began to complain of the fact that their room faced north.
Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie assumed that it was their privilege as
relatives to laugh at Carol, and their duty as Christians to let her
know how absurd her "notions" were. They objected to the food, to
Oscarina's lack of friendliness, to the wind, the rain, and the
immodesty of Carol's maternity gowns. They were strong and enduring; for
an hour at a time they could go on heaving questions about her father's
income, about her theology, and about the reason why she had not put on
her rubbers when she had gone across the street. For fussy discussion
they had a rich, full genius, and their example developed in Kennicott a
tendency to the same form of affectionate flaying.
If Carol was so indiscreet as to murmur that she had a small headache,
instantly the two Smails and Kennicott were at it. Every five minutes,
every time she sat down or rose or spoke to Oscarina, they twanged, "Is
your head better now? Where does it hurt? Don't you keep hartshorn in
the house? Didn't you walk too far today? Have you tried hartshorn?
Don't you keep some in the house so it will be handy? Does it feel
better now? How does it feel? Do your eyes hurt, too? What time do you
usually get to bed? As late as THAT? Well! How does it feel now?"
In her presence Uncle Whittier snorted at Kennicott, "Carol get these
headaches often? Huh? Be better for her if she didn't go gadding around
to all these bridge-whist parties, and took some care of herself once in
a while!"
They kept it up, commenting, questioning, commenting, questioning,
till her determination broke and she bleated, "For heaven's SAKE, don't
dis-CUSS it! My head 's all RIGHT!"
She listened to the Smails and Kennicott trying to determine by
dialectics whether the copy of the Dauntless, which Aunt Bessie wanted
to send to her sister in Alberta, ought to have two or four cents
postage on it. Carol would have taken it to the drug store and weighed
it, but then she was a dreamer, while they were practical people (as
they frequently admitted). So they sought to evolve the postal rate from
their inner consciousnesses, which, combined with entire frankness in
thinking aloud, was their method of settling all problems.
The Smails did not "believe in all this nonsense" about privacy and
reticence. When Carol left a letter from her sister on the table, she
was astounded to hear from Uncle Whittier, "I see your sister says her
husband is doing fine. You ought to go see her oftener. I asked Will
and he says you don't go see her very often. My! You ought to go see her
oftener!"
If Carol was writing a letter to a classmate, or planning the week's
menus, she could be certain that Aunt Bessie would pop in and titter,
"Now don't let me disturb you, I just wanted to see where you were,
don't stop, I'm not going to stay only a second. I just wondered if
you could possibly have thought that I didn't eat the onions this noon
because I didn't think they were properly cooked, but that wasn't the
reason at all, it wasn't because I didn't think they were well cooked,
I'm sure that everything in your house is always very dainty and nice,
though I do think that Oscarina is careless about some things, she
doesn't appreciate the big wages you pay her, and she is so cranky, all
these Swedes are so cranky, I don't really see why you have a Swede,
but----But that wasn't it, I didn't eat them not because I didn't think
they weren't cooked proper, it was just--I find that onions don't agree
with me, it's very strange, ever since I had an attack of biliousness
one time, I have found that onions, either fried onions or raw ones, and
Whittier does love raw onions with vinegar and sugar on them----"
It was pure affection.
Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more disconcerting
than intelligent hatred is demanding love.
She supposed that she was being gracefully dull and standardized in
the Smails' presence, but they scented the heretic, and with
forward-stooping delight they sat and tried to drag out her ludicrous
concepts for their amusement. They were like the Sunday-afternoon mob
starting at monkeys in the Zoo, poking fingers and making faces and
giggling at the resentment of the more dignified race.
With a loose-lipped, superior, village smile Uncle Whittier hinted,
"What's this I hear about your thinking Gopher Prairie ought to be
all tore down and rebuilt, Carrie? I don't know where folks get these
new-fangled ideas. Lots of farmers in Dakota getting 'em these days.
About co-operation. Think they can run stores better 'n storekeepers!
Huh!"
"Whit and I didn't need no co-operation as long as we was farming!"
triumphed Aunt Bessie. "Carrie, tell your old auntie now: don't you ever
go to church on Sunday? You do go sometimes? But you ought to go every
Sunday! When you're as old as I am, you'll learn that no matter how
smart folks think they are, God knows a whole lot more than they do, and
then you'll realize and be glad to go and listen to your pastor!"
In the manner of one who has just beheld a two-headed calf they repeated
that they had "never HEARD such funny ideas!" They were staggered to
learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married
to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that
divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not
bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical
authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet
not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and
the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden; that
mushrooms are as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word "dude" is
no longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel
who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence and
business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight; that
it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy flannels next the skin
in winter; that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel
organ; that some poets do not have long hair; and that Jews are not
always pedlers or pants-makers.
"Where does she get all them the'ries?" marveled Uncle Whittier Smail;
while Aunt Bessie inquired, "Do you suppose there's many folks got
notions like hers? My! If there are," and her tone settled the fact that
there were not, "I just don't know what the world's coming to!"
Patiently--more or less--Carol awaited the exquisite day when they would
announce departure. After three weeks Uncle Whittier remarked, "We kinda
like Gopher Prairie. Guess maybe we'll stay here. We'd been wondering
what we'd do, now we've sold the creamery and my farms. So I had a talk
with Ole Jenson about his grocery, and I guess I'll buy him out and
storekeep for a while."
He did.
Carol rebelled. Kennicott soothed her: "Oh, we won't see much of them.
They'll have their own house."
She resolved to be so chilly that they would stay away. But she had no
talent for conscious insolence. They found a house, but Carol was never
safe from their appearance with a hearty, "Thought we'd drop in this
evening and keep you from being lonely. Why, you ain't had them curtains
washed yet!" Invariably, whenever she was touched by the realization
that it was they who were lonely, they wrecked her pitying affection by
comments--questions--comments--advice.
They immediately became friendly with all of their own race, with the
Luke Dawsons, the Deacon Piersons, and Mrs. Bogart; and brought them
along in the evening. Aunt Bessie was a bridge over whom the older
women, bearing gifts of counsel and the ignorance of experience, poured
into Carol's island of reserve. Aunt Bessie urged the good Widow Bogart,
"Drop in and see Carrie real often. Young folks today don't understand
housekeeping like we do."
Mrs. Bogart showed herself perfectly willing to be an associate
relative.
Carol was thinking up protective insults when Kennicott's mother came
down to stay with Brother Whittier for two months. Carol was fond of
Mrs. Kennicott. She could not carry out her insults.
She felt trapped.
She had been kidnaped by the town. She was Aunt Bessie's niece, and she
was to be a mother. She was expected, she almost expected herself, to
sit forever talking of babies, cooks, embroidery stitches, the price of
potatoes, and the tastes of husbands in the matter of spinach.
She found a refuge in the Jolly Seventeen. She suddenly understood that
they could be depended upon to laugh with her at Mrs. Bogart, and she
now saw Juanita Haydock's gossip not as vulgarity but as gaiety and
remarkable analysis.
Her life had changed, even before Hugh appeared. She looked forward to
the next bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, and the security of whispering
with her dear friends Maud Dyer and Juanita and Mrs. McGanum.
She was part of the town. Its philosophy and its feuds dominated her.
III
She was no longer irritated by the cooing of the matrons, nor by their
opinion that diet didn't matter so long as the Little Ones had plenty of
lace and moist kisses, but she concluded that in the care of babies as
in politics, intelligence was superior to quotations about pansies. She
liked best to talk about Hugh to Kennicott, Vida, and the Bjornstams.
She was happily domestic when Kennicott sat by her on the floor, to
watch baby make faces. She was delighted when Miles, speaking as one man
to another, admonished Hugh, "I wouldn't stand them skirts if I was you.
Come on. Join the union and strike. Make 'em give you pants."
As a parent, Kennicott was moved to establish the first child-welfare
week held in Gopher Prairie. Carol helped him weigh babies and
examine their throats, and she wrote out the diets for mute German and
Scandinavian mothers.
The aristocracy of Gopher Prairie, even the wives of the rival doctors,
took part, and for several days there was community spirit and much
uplift. But this reign of love was overthrown when the prize for Best
Baby was awarded not to decent parents but to Bea and Miles Bjornstam!
The good matrons glared at Olaf Bjornstam, with his blue eyes, his
honey-colored hair, and magnificent back, and they remarked, "Well, Mrs.
Kennicott, maybe that Swede brat is as healthy as your husband says he
is, but let me tell you I hate to think of the future that awaits any
boy with a hired girl for a mother and an awful irreligious socialist
for a pa!"
She raged, but so violent was the current of their respectability, so
persistent was Aunt Bessie in running to her with their blabber, that
she was embarrassed when she took Hugh to play with Olaf. She hated
herself for it, but she hoped that no one saw her go into the Bjornstam
shanty. She hated herself and the town's indifferent cruelty when she
saw Bea's radiant devotion to both babies alike; when she saw Miles
staring at them wistfully.
He had saved money, had quit Elder's planing-mill and started a dairy
on a vacant lot near his shack. He was proud of his three cows and sixty
chickens, and got up nights to nurse them.
"I'll be a big farmer before you can bat an eye! I tell you that young
fellow Olaf is going to go East to college along with the Haydock kids.
Uh----Lots of folks dropping in to chin with Bea and me now. Say! Ma
Bogart come in one day! She was----I liked the old lady fine. And the
mill foreman comes in right along. Oh, we got lots of friends. You bet!"
IV
Though the town seemed to Carol to change no more than the surrounding
fields, there was a constant shifting, these three years. The citizen of
the prairie drifts always westward. It may be because he is the heir of
ancient migrations--and it may be because he finds within his own
spirit so little adventure that he is driven to seek it by changing his
horizon. The towns remain unvaried, yet the individual faces alter
like classes in college. The Gopher Prairie jeweler sells out, for no
discernible reason, and moves on to Alberta or the state of Washington,
to open a shop precisely like his former one, in a town precisely like
the one he has left. There is, except among professional men and the
wealthy, small permanence either of residence or occupation. A man
becomes farmer, grocer, town policeman, garageman, restaurant-owner,
postmaster, insurance-agent, and farmer all over again, and the
community more or less patiently suffers from his lack of knowledge in
each of his experiments.
Ole Jenson the grocer and Dahl the butcher moved on to South Dakota
and Idaho. Luke and Mrs. Dawson picked up ten thousand acres of prairie
soil, in the magic portable form of a small check book, and went to
Pasadena, to a bungalow and sunshine and cafeterias. Chet Dashaway sold
his furniture and undertaking business and wandered to Los Angeles,
where, the Dauntless reported, "Our good friend Chester has accepted a
fine position with a real-estate firm, and his wife has in the charming
social circles of the Queen City of the Southwestland that same
popularity which she enjoyed in our own society sets."
Rita Simons was married to Terry Gould, and rivaled Juanita Haydock as
the gayest of the Young Married Set. But Juanita also acquired merit.
Harry's father died, Harry became senior partner in the Bon Ton Store,
and Juanita was more acidulous and shrewd and cackling than ever. She
bought an evening frock, and exposed her collar-bone to the wonder of
the Jolly Seventeen, and talked of moving to Minneapolis.
To defend her position against the new Mrs. Terry Gould she sought to
attach Carol to her faction by giggling that "SOME folks might call Rita
innocent, but I've got a hunch that she isn't half as ignorant of things
as brides are supposed to be--and of course Terry isn't one-two-three as
a doctor alongside of your husband."
Carol herself would gladly have followed Mr. Ole Jenson, and migrated
even to another Main Street; flight from familiar tedium to new tedium
would have for a time the outer look and promise of adventure. She
hinted to Kennicott of the probable medical advantages of Montana and
Oregon. She knew that he was satisfied with Gopher Prairie, but it gave
her vicarious hope to think of going, to ask for railroad folders at the
station, to trace the maps with a restless forefinger.
Yet to the casual eye she was not discontented, she was not an abnormal
and distressing traitor to the faith of Main Street.
The settled citizen believes that the rebel is constantly in a stew of
complaining and, hearing of a Carol Kennicott, he gasps, "What an
awful person! She must be a Holy Terror to live with! Glad MY folks are
satisfied with things way they are!" Actually, it was not so much as
five minutes a day that Carol devoted to lonely desires. It is
probable that the agitated citizen has within his circle at least one
inarticulate rebel with aspirations as wayward as Carol's.
The presence of the baby had made her take Gopher Prairie and the brown
house seriously, as natural places of residence. She pleased Kennicott
by being friendly with the complacent maturity of Mrs. Clark and Mrs.
Elder, and when she had often enough been in conference upon the Elders'
new Cadillac car, or the job which the oldest Clark boy had taken in
the office of the flour-mill, these topics became important, things to
follow up day by day.
With nine-tenths of her emotion concentrated upon Hugh, she did not
criticize shops, streets, acquaintances . . . this year or two. She
hurried to Uncle Whittier's store for a package of corn-flakes, she
abstractedly listened to Uncle Whittier's denunciation of Martin
Mahoney for asserting that the wind last Tuesday had been south and not
southwest, she came back along streets that held no surprises nor the
startling faces of strangers. Thinking of Hugh's teething all the way,
she did not reflect that this store, these drab blocks, made up all her
background. She did her work, and she triumphed over winning from the
Clarks at five hundred.
The most considerable event of the two years after the birth of Hugh
occurred when Vida Sherwin resigned from the high school and was
married. Carol was her attendant, and as the wedding was at the
Episcopal Church, all the women wore new kid slippers and long white kid
gloves, and looked refined.
For years Carol had been little sister to Vida, and had never in the
least known to what degree Vida loved her and hated her and in curious
strained ways was bound to her.
| Carol hates the experience of being pregnant in Gopher Prairie, because all the women seem to treat the pregnancy as their business. They all make comments about how Carol will have to give up her weird ideas in order to be a good mom. When the baby is first born, Carol doesn't like him at all, but after a while, she becomes completely devoted to him. After the baby is born, Will's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie move to Gopher Prairie to be closer to them. These people are about as meddling as any relatives could possibly be, and they constantly criticize Carol's behavior and ideas. Carol tries to act rudely to keep the in-laws away, but she can't do a good enough job. | summary |
CHAPTER XXI
I
GRAY steel that seems unmoving because it spins so fast in the balanced
fly-wheel, gray snow in an avenue of elms, gray dawn with the sun behind
it--this was the gray of Vida Sherwin's life at thirty-six.
She was small and active and sallow; her yellow hair was faded, and
looked dry; her blue silk blouses and modest lace collars and high black
shoes and sailor hats were as literal and uncharming as a schoolroom
desk; but her eyes determined her appearance, revealed her as a
personage and a force, indicated her faith in the goodness and purpose
of everything. They were blue, and they were never still; they expressed
amusement, pity, enthusiasm. If she had been seen in sleep, with the
wrinkles beside her eyes stilled and the creased lids hiding the radiant
irises, she would have lost her potency.
She was born in a hill-smothered Wisconsin village where her father
was a prosy minister; she labored through a sanctimonious college; she
taught for two years in an iron-range town of blurry-faced Tatars and
Montenegrins, and wastes of ore, and when she came to Gopher Prairie,
its trees and the shining spaciousness of the wheat prairie made her
certain that she was in paradise.
She admitted to her fellow-teachers that the schoolbuilding was
slightly damp, but she insisted that the rooms were "arranged so
conveniently--and then that bust of President McKinley at the head of
the stairs, it's a lovely art-work, and isn't it an inspiration to have
the brave, honest, martyr president to think about!" She taught French,
English, and history, and the Sophomore Latin class, which dealt in
matters of a metaphysical nature called Indirect Discourse and the
Ablative Absolute. Each year she was reconvinced that the pupils were
beginning to learn more quickly. She spent four winters in building up
the Debating Society, and when the debate really was lively one Friday
afternoon, and the speakers of pieces did not forget their lines, she
felt rewarded.
She lived an engrossed useful life, and seemed as cool and simple as an
apple. But secretly she was creeping among fears, longing, and guilt.
She knew what it was, but she dared not name it. She hated even the
sound of the word "sex." When she dreamed of being a woman of the harem,
with great white warm limbs, she awoke to shudder, defenseless in
the dusk of her room. She prayed to Jesus, always to the Son of God,
offering him the terrible power of her adoration, addressing him as the
eternal lover, growing passionate, exalted, large, as she contemplated
his splendor. Thus she mounted to endurance and surcease.
By day, rattling about in many activities, she was able to ridicule her
blazing nights of darkness. With spurious cheerfulness she announced
everywhere, "I guess I'm a born spinster," and "No one will ever marry
a plain schoolma'am like me," and "You men, great big noisy bothersome
creatures, we women wouldn't have you round the place, dirtying up nice
clean rooms, if it wasn't that you have to be petted and guided. We just
ought to say 'Scat!' to all of you!"
But when a man held her close at a dance, even when "Professor"
George Edwin Mott patted her hand paternally as they considered the
naughtinesses of Cy Bogart, she quivered, and reflected how superior she
was to have kept her virginity.
In the autumn of 1911, a year before Dr. Will Kennicott was married,
Vida was his partner at a five-hundred tournament. She was thirty-four
then; Kennicott about thirty-six. To her he was a superb, boyish,
diverting creature; all the heroic qualities in a manly magnificent
body. They had been helping the hostess to serve the Waldorf salad and
coffee and gingerbread. They were in the kitchen, side by side on a
bench, while the others ponderously supped in the room beyond.
Kennicott was masculine and experimental. He stroked Vida's hand, he put
his arm carelessly about her shoulder.
"Don't!" she said sharply.
"You're a cunning thing," he offered, patting the back of her shoulder
in an exploratory manner.
While she strained away, she longed to move nearer to him. He bent over,
looked at her knowingly. She glanced down at his left hand as it touched
her knee. She sprang up, started noisily and needlessly to wash the
dishes. He helped her. He was too lazy to adventure further--and too
used to women in his profession. She was grateful for the impersonality
of his talk. It enabled her to gain control. She knew that she had
skirted wild thoughts.
A month after, on a sleighing-party, under the buffalo robes in the
bob-sled, he whispered, "You pretend to be a grown-up schoolteacher, but
you're nothing but a kiddie." His arm was about her. She resisted.
"Don't you like the poor lonely bachelor?" he yammered in a fatuous way.
"No, I don't! You don't care for me in the least. You're just practising
on me."
"You're so mean! I'm terribly fond of you."
"I'm not of you. And I'm not going to let myself be fond of you,
either."
He persistently drew her toward him. She clutched his arm. Then she
threw off the robe, climbed out of the sled, raced after it with Harry
Haydock. At the dance which followed the sleigh-ride Kennicott was
devoted to the watery prettiness of Maud Dyer, and Vida was noisily
interested in getting up a Virginia Reel. Without seeming to watch
Kennicott, she knew that he did not once look at her.
That was all of her first love-affair.
He gave no sign of remembering that he was "terribly fond." She waited
for him; she reveled in longing, and in a sense of guilt because she
longed. She told herself that she did not want part of him; unless he
gave her all his devotion she would never let him touch her; and when
she found that she was probably lying, she burned with scorn. She fought
it out in prayer. She knelt in a pink flannel nightgown, her thin hair
down her back, her forehead as full of horror as a mask of tragedy,
while she identified her love for the Son of God with her love for a
mortal, and wondered if any other woman had ever been so sacrilegious.
She wanted to be a nun and observe perpetual adoration. She bought a
rosary, but she had been so bitterly reared as a Protestant that she
could not bring herself to use it.
Yet none of her intimates in the school and in the boarding-house knew
of her abyss of passion. They said she was "so optimistic."
When she heard that Kennicott was to marry a girl, pretty, young, and
imposingly from the Cities, Vida despaired. She congratulated Kennicott;
carelessly ascertained from him the hour of marriage. At that hour,
sitting in her room, Vida pictured the wedding in St. Paul. Full of an
ecstasy which horrified her, she followed Kennicott and the girl who had
stolen her place, followed them to the train, through the evening, the
night.
She was relieved when she had worked out a belief that she wasn't really
shameful, that there was a mystical relation between herself and Carol,
so that she was vicariously yet veritably with Kennicott, and had the
right to be.
She saw Carol during the first five minutes in Gopher Prairie. She
stared at the passing motor, at Kennicott and the girl beside him. In
that fog world of transference of emotion Vida had no normal jealousy
but a conviction that, since through Carol she had received Kennicott's
love, then Carol was a part of her, an astral self, a heightened and
more beloved self. She was glad of the girl's charm, of the smooth black
hair, the airy head and young shoulders. But she was suddenly angry.
Carol glanced at her for a quarter-second, but looked past her, at an
old roadside barn. If she had made the great sacrifice, at least she
expected gratitude and recognition, Vida raged, while her conscious
schoolroom mind fussily begged her to control this insanity.
During her first call half of her wanted to welcome a fellow reader of
books; the other half itched to find out whether Carol knew anything
about Kennicott's former interest in herself. She discovered that Carol
was not aware that he had ever touched another woman's hand. Carol was
an amusing, naive, curiously learned child. While Vida was most actively
describing the glories of the Thanatopsis, and complimenting this
librarian on her training as a worker, she was fancying that this girl
was the child born of herself and Kennicott; and out of that symbolizing
she had a comfort she had not known for months.
When she came home, after supper with the Kennicotts and Guy Pollock,
she had a sudden and rather pleasant backsliding from devotion. She
bustled into her room, she slammed her hat on the bed, and chattered, "I
don't CARE! I'm a lot like her--except a few years older. I'm light and
quick, too, and I can talk just as well as she can, and I'm sure----Men
are such fools. I'd be ten times as sweet to make love to as that dreamy
baby. And I AM as good-looking!"
But as she sat on the bed and stared at her thin thighs, defiance oozed
away. She mourned:
"No. I'm not. Dear God, how we fool ourselves! I pretend I'm
'spiritual.' I pretend my legs are graceful. They aren't. They're
skinny. Old-maidish. I hate it! I hate that impertinent young woman! A
selfish cat, taking his love for granted. . . . No, she's adorable. . . .
I don't think she ought to be so friendly with Guy Pollock."
For a year Vida loved Carol, longed to and did not pry into the details
of her relations with Kennicott, enjoyed her spirit of play as expressed
in childish tea-parties, and, with the mystic bond between them
forgotten, was healthily vexed by Carol's assumption that she was a
sociological messiah come to save Gopher Prairie. This last facet of
Vida's thought was the one which, after a year, was most often turned to
the light. In a testy way she brooded, "These people that want to change
everything all of a sudden without doing any work, make me tired! Here I
have to go and work for four years, picking out the pupils for
debates, and drilling them, and nagging at them to get them to look up
references, and begging them to choose their own subjects--four years,
to get up a couple of good debates! And she comes rushing in, and
expects in one year to change the whole town into a lollypop paradise
with everybody stopping everything else to grow tulips and drink tea.
And it's a comfy homey old town, too!"
She had such an outburst after each of Carol's campaigns--for better
Thanatopsis programs, for Shavian plays, for more human schools--but she
never betrayed herself, and always she was penitent.
Vida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal. She believed that
details could excitingly be altered, but that things-in-general were
comely and kind and immutable. Carol was, without understanding or
accepting it, a revolutionist, a radical, and therefore possessed of
"constructive ideas," which only the destroyer can have, since the
reformer believes that all the essential constructing has already been
done. After years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more
than the fancied loss of Kennicott's love which held Vida irritably
fascinated.
But the birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion. She was
indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in having borne
Kennicott's child. She admitted that Carol seemed to have affection and
immaculate care for the baby, but she began to identify herself now with
Kennicott, and in this phase to feel that she had endured quite too much
from Carol's instability.
She recalled certain other women who had come from the Outside and had
not appreciated Gopher Prairie. She remembered the rector's wife who had
been chilly to callers and who was rumored throughout the town to
have said, "Re-ah-ly I cawn't endure this bucolic heartiness in the
responses." The woman was positively known to have worn handkerchiefs in
her bodice as padding--oh, the town had simply roared at her. Of course
the rector and she were got rid of in a few months.
Then there was the mysterious woman with the dyed hair and penciled
eyebrows, who wore tight English dresses, like basques, who smelled of
stale musk, who flirted with the men and got them to advance money
for her expenses in a lawsuit, who laughed at Vida's reading at a
school-entertainment, and went off owing a hotel-bill and the three
hundred dollars she had borrowed.
Vida insisted that she loved Carol, but with some satisfaction she
compared her to these traducers of the town.
II
Vida had enjoyed Raymie Wutherspoon's singing in the Episcopal choir;
she had thoroughly reviewed the weather with him at Methodist sociables
and in the Bon Ton. But she did not really know him till she moved to
Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house. It was five years after her affair with
Kennicott. She was thirty-nine, Raymie perhaps a year younger.
She said to him, and sincerely, "My! You can do anything, with your
brains and tact and that heavenly voice. You were so good in 'The Girl
from Kankakee.' You made me feel terribly stupid. If you'd gone on the
stage, I believe you'd be just as good as anybody in Minneapolis. But
still, I'm not sorry you stuck to business. It's such a constructive
career."
"Do you really think so?" yearned Raymie, across the apple-sauce.
It was the first time that either of them had found a dependable
intellectual companionship. They looked down on Willis Woodford the
bank-clerk, and his anxious babycentric wife, the silent Lyman Casses,
the slangy traveling man, and the rest of Mrs. Gurrey's unenlightened
guests. They sat opposite, and they sat late. They were exhilarated to
find that they agreed in confession of faith:
"People like Sam Clark and Harry Haydock aren't earnest about music and
pictures and eloquent sermons and really refined movies, but then, on
the other hand, people like Carol Kennicott put too much stress on all
this art. Folks ought to appreciate lovely things, but just the same,
they got to be practical and--they got to look at things in a practical
way."
Smiling, passing each other the pressed-glass pickle-dish, seeing Mrs.
Gurrey's linty supper-cloth irradiated by the light of intimacy, Vida
and Raymie talked about Carol's rose-colored turban, Carol's sweetness,
Carol's new low shoes, Carol's erroneous theory that there was no need
of strict discipline in school, Carol's amiability in the Bon Ton,
Carol's flow of wild ideas, which, honestly, just simply made you
nervous trying to keep track of them.
About the lovely display of gents' shirts in the Bon Ton window as
dressed by Raymie, about Raymie's offertory last Sunday, the fact that
there weren't any of these new solos as nice as "Jerusalem the Golden,"
and the way Raymie stood up to Juanita Haydock when she came into the
store and tried to run things and he as much as told her that she was
so anxious to have folks think she was smart and bright that she
said things she didn't mean, and anyway, Raymie was running the
shoe-department, and if Juanita, or Harry either, didn't like the way he
ran things, they could go get another man.
About Vida's new jabot which made her look thirty-two (Vida's estimate)
or twenty-two (Raymie's estimate), Vida's plan to have the high-school
Debating Society give a playlet, and the difficulty of keeping the
younger boys well behaved on the playground when a big lubber like Cy
Bogart acted up so.
About the picture post-card which Mrs. Dawson had sent to Mrs. Cass from
Pasadena, showing roses growing right outdoors in February, the change
in time on No. 4, the reckless way Dr. Gould always drove his auto, the
reckless way almost all these people drove their autos, the fallacy of
supposing that these socialists could carry on a government for as much
as six months if they ever did have a chance to try out their theories,
and the crazy way in which Carol jumped from subject to subject.
Vida had once beheld Raymie as a thin man with spectacles, mournful
drawn-out face, and colorless stiff hair. Now she noted that his jaw was
square, that his long hands moved quickly and were bleached in a refined
manner, and that his trusting eyes indicated that he had "led a clean
life." She began to call him "Ray," and to bounce in defense of his
unselfishness and thoughtfulness every time Juanita Haydock or Rita
Gould giggled about him at the Jolly Seventeen.
On a Sunday afternoon of late autumn they walked down to Lake
Minniemashie. Ray said that he would like to see the ocean; it must be a
grand sight; it must be much grander than a lake, even a great big lake.
Vida had seen it, she stated modestly; she had seen it on a summer trip
to Cape Cod.
"Have you been clear to Cape Cod? Massachusetts? I knew you'd traveled,
but I never realized you'd been that far!"
Made taller and younger by his interest she poured out, "Oh my yes.
It was a wonderful trip. So many points of interest through
Massachusetts--historical. There's Lexington where we turned back
the redcoats, and Longfellow's home at Cambridge, and Cape Cod--just
everything--fishermen and whale-ships and sand-dunes and everything."
She wished that she had a little cane to carry. He broke off a willow
branch.
"My, you're strong!" she said.
"No, not very. I wish there was a Y. M. C. A. here, so I could take up
regular exercise. I used to think I could do pretty good acrobatics, if
I had a chance."
"I'm sure you could. You're unusually lithe, for a large man."
"Oh no, not so very. But I wish we had a Y. M. It would be dandy to have
lectures and everything, and I'd like to take a class in improving
the memory--I believe a fellow ought to go on educating himself and
improving his mind even if he is in business, don't you, Vida--I guess
I'm kind of fresh to call you 'Vida'!"
"I've been calling you 'Ray' for weeks!"
He wondered why she sounded tart.
He helped her down the bank to the edge of the lake but dropped her hand
abruptly, and as they sat on a willow log and he brushed her sleeve, he
delicately moved over and murmured, "Oh, excuse me--accident."
She stared at the mud-browned chilly water, the floating gray reeds.
"You look so thoughtful," he said.
She threw out her hands. "I am! Will you kindly tell me what's the use
of--anything! Oh, don't mind me. I'm a moody old hen. Tell me about your
plan for getting a partnership in the Bon Ton. I do think you're right:
Harry Haydock and that mean old Simons ought to give you one."
He hymned the old unhappy wars in which he had been Achilles and the
mellifluous Nestor, yet gone his righteous ways unheeded by the cruel
kings. . . . "Why, if I've told 'em once, I've told 'em a dozen times to
get in a side-line of light-weight pants for gents' summer wear, and of
course here they go and let a cheap kike like Rifkin beat them to it and
grab the trade right off 'em, and then Harry said--you know how Harry
is, maybe he don't mean to be grouchy, but he's such a sore-head----"
He gave her a hand to rise. "If you don't MIND. I think a fellow is
awful if a lady goes on a walk with him and she can't trust him and he
tries to flirt with her and all."
"I'm sure you're highly trustworthy!" she snapped, and she sprang up
without his aid. Then, smiling excessively, "Uh--don't you think Carol
sometimes fails to appreciate Dr. Will's ability?"
III
Ray habitually asked her about his window-trimming, the display of the
new shoes, the best music for the entertainment at the Eastern Star, and
(though he was recognized as a professional authority on what the town
called "gents' furnishings") about his own clothes. She persuaded him
not to wear the small bow ties which made him look like an elongated
Sunday School scholar. Once she burst out:
"Ray, I could shake you! Do you know you're too apologetic? You always
appreciate other people too much. You fuss over Carol Kennicott when she
has some crazy theory that we all ought to turn anarchists or live on
figs and nuts or something. And you listen when Harry Haydock tries to
show off and talk about turnovers and credits and things you know lots
better than he does. Look folks in the eye! Glare at 'em! Talk deep!
You're the smartest man in town, if you only knew it. You ARE!"
He could not believe it. He kept coming back to her for confirmation. He
practised glaring and talking deep, but he circuitously hinted to Vida
that when he had tried to look Harry Haydock in the eye, Harry had
inquired, "What's the matter with you, Raymie? Got a pain?" But
afterward Harry had asked about Kantbeatum socks in a manner which, Ray
felt, was somehow different from his former condescension.
They were sitting on the squat yellow satin settee in the boarding-house
parlor. As Ray reannounced that he simply wouldn't stand it many more
years if Harry didn't give him a partnership, his gesticulating hand
touched Vida's shoulders.
"Oh, excuse me!" he pleaded.
"It's all right. Well, I think I must be running up to my room.
Headache," she said briefly.
IV
Ray and she had stopped in at Dyer's for a hot chocolate on their way
home from the movies, that March evening. Vida speculated, "Do you know
that I may not be here next year?"
"What do you mean?"
With her fragile narrow nails she smoothed the glass slab which formed
the top of the round table at which they sat. She peeped through the
glass at the perfume-boxes of black and gold and citron in the hollow
table. She looked about at shelves of red rubber water-bottles, pale
yellow sponges, wash-rags with blue borders, hair-brushes of polished
cherry backs. She shook her head like a nervous medium coming out of a
trance, stared at him unhappily, demanded:
"Why should I stay here? And I must make up my mind. Now. Time to renew
our teaching-contracts for next year. I think I'll go teach in some
other town. Everybody here is tired of me. I might as well go. Before
folks come out and SAY they're tired of me. I have to decide tonight. I
might as well----Oh, no matter. Come. Let's skip. It's late."
She sprang up, ignoring his wail of "Vida! Wait! Sit down! Gosh! I'm
flabbergasted! Gee! Vida!" She marched out. While he was paying his
check she got ahead. He ran after her, blubbering, "Vida! Wait!" In the
shade of the lilacs in front of the Gougerling house he came up with
her, stayed her flight by a hand on her shoulder.
"Oh, don't! Don't! What does it matter?" she begged. She was sobbing,
her soft wrinkly lids soaked with tears. "Who cares for my affection or
help? I might as well drift on, forgotten. O Ray, please don't hold
me. Let me go. I'll just decide not to renew my contract here, and--and
drift--way off----"
His hand was steady on her shoulder. She dropped her head, rubbed the
back of his hand with her cheek.
They were married in June.
V
They took the Ole Jenson house. "It's small," said Vida, "but it's got
the dearest vegetable garden, and I love having time to get near to
Nature for once."
Though she became Vida Wutherspoon technically, and though she certainly
had no ideals about the independence of keeping her name, she continued
to be known as Vida Sherwin.
She had resigned from the school, but she kept up one class in English.
She bustled about on every committee of the Thanatopsis; she was always
popping into the rest-room to make Mrs. Nodelquist sweep the floor;
she was appointed to the library-board to succeed Carol; she taught the
Senior Girls' Class in the Episcopal Sunday School, and tried to revive
the King's Daughters. She exploded into self-confidence and happiness;
her draining thoughts were by marriage turned into energy. She became
daily and visibly more plump, and though she chattered as eagerly, she
was less obviously admiring of marital bliss, less sentimental about
babies, sharper in demanding that the entire town share her reforms--the
purchase of a park, the compulsory cleaning of back-yards.
She penned Harry Haydock at his desk in the Bon Ton; she interrupted
his joking; she told him that it was Ray who had built up the
shoe-department and men's department; she demanded that he be made a
partner. Before Harry could answer she threatened that Ray and she would
start a rival shop. "I'll clerk behind the counter myself, and a Certain
Party is all ready to put up the money."
She rather wondered who the Certain Party was.
Ray was made a one-sixth partner.
He became a glorified floor-walker, greeting the men with new poise, no
longer coyly subservient to pretty women. When he was not affectionately
coercing people into buying things they did not need, he stood at the
back of the store, glowing, abstracted, feeling masculine as he recalled
the tempestuous surprises of love revealed by Vida.
The only remnant of Vida's identification of herself with Carol was a
jealousy when she saw Kennicott and Ray together, and reflected that
some people might suppose that Kennicott was his superior. She was sure
that Carol thought so, and she wanted to shriek, "You needn't try to
gloat! I wouldn't have your pokey old husband. He hasn't one single bit
of Ray's spiritual nobility."
| The novel takes a moment away from Carol Kennicott to tell us about the inner life of Vida Sherwin. It turns out that Vida had a bit of a thing going with Will Kennicott that never panned out, but Vida was still a little crushed when she found out Will had married Carol. Carol never knew that Vida would have some secret reason to dislike her. It doesn't make Vida's life any easier when she realizes that Carol thinks she's above everyone in Gopher Prairie. Still, she tries her best to like Carol and to be like a big sister to her. Eventually, Vida starts hanging out with Raymie Wutherspoon, and they strike up a deep friendship. Then, when both of them are nearing the age of forty, they get married. It's clear to everyone in the town that Vida and Raymie are much happier once they're married. | summary |
CHAPTER XXII
I
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, particularly 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?"
| Carol sees the happiness that Vida Sherwin has after getting married and wishes she could be happy in the same way. Her new solution to dealing with her situation is to read more and to find out what kinds of ideas women in her situation are starting to have all over the U.S. The more she reads, the more Carol develops grand theories of how towns like Gopher Prairie work behind the scenes. She hates the fact that the town takes all of the interesting things about people who move there and grind them all into dullness. Carol takes her new ideas about why Gopher Prairie stinks and tells them to Vida. Vida is more satisfied with her life than she's ever been, though, and she dismisses Carol as a Negative Nelly. Vida also tells Carol that the town will be building a new school--no thanks to Carol's involvement. Carol realizes that even if something does happen to make the town better, she won't be involved, because people don't like her. | summary |
CHAPTER XXIII
I
WHEN America entered the Great European War, Vida sent Raymie off to an
officers' training-camp--less than a year after her wedding. Raymie was
diligent and rather strong. He came out a first lieutenant of infantry,
and was one of the earliest sent abroad.
Carol grew definitely afraid of Vida as Vida transferred the passion
which had been released in marriage to the cause of the war; as she
lost all tolerance. When Carol was touched by the desire for heroism
in Raymie and tried tactfully to express it, Vida made her feel like an
impertinent child.
By enlistment and draft, the sons of Lyman Cass, Nat Hicks, Sam Clark
joined the army. But most of the soldiers were the sons of German and
Swedish farmers unknown to Carol. Dr. Terry Gould and Dr. McGanum became
captains in the medical corps, and were stationed at camps in Iowa and
Georgia. They were the only officers, besides Raymie, from the Gopher
Prairie district. Kennicott wanted to go with them, but the several
doctors of the town forgot medical rivalry and, meeting in council,
decided that he would do better to wait and keep the town well till he
should be needed. Kennicott was forty-two now; the only youngish doctor
left in a radius of eighteen miles. Old Dr. Westlake, who loved comfort
like a cat, protestingly rolled out at night for country calls, and
hunted through his collar-box for his G. A. R. button.
Carol did not quite know what she thought about Kennicott's going.
Certainly she was no Spartan wife. She knew that he wanted to go; she
knew that this longing was always in him, behind his unchanged
trudging and remarks about the weather. She felt for him an admiring
affection--and she was sorry that she had nothing more than affection.
Cy Bogart was the spectacular warrior of the town. Cy was no longer the
weedy boy who had sat in the loft speculating about Carol's egotism and
the mysteries of generation. He was nineteen now, tall, broad, busy, the
"town sport," famous for his ability to drink beer, to shake dice, to
tell undesirable stories, and, from his post in front of Dyer's drug
store, to embarrass the girls by "jollying" them as they passed. His
face was at once peach-bloomed and pimply.
Cy was to be heard publishing it abroad that if he couldn't get the
Widow Bogart's permission to enlist, he'd run away and enlist without
it. He shouted that he "hated every dirty Hun; by gosh, if he could just
poke a bayonet into one big fat Heinie and learn him some decency and
democracy, he'd die happy." Cy got much reputation by whipping a farmboy
named Adolph Pochbauer for being a "damn hyphenated German." . . . This
was the younger Pochbauer, who was killed in the Argonne, while he was
trying to bring the body of his Yankee captain back to the lines. At
this time Cy Bogart was still dwelling in Gopher Prairie and planning to
go to war.
II
Everywhere Carol heard that the war was going to bring a basic change
in psychology, to purify and uplift everything from marital relations to
national politics, and she tried to exult in it. Only she did not find
it. She saw the women who made bandages for the Red Cross giving
up bridge, and laughing at having to do without sugar, but over the
surgical-dressings they did not speak of God and the souls of men, but
of Miles Bjornstam's impudence, of Terry Gould's scandalous carryings-on
with a farmer's daughter four years ago, of cooking cabbage, and of
altering blouses. Their references to the war touched atrocities only.
She herself was punctual, and efficient at making dressings, but she
could not, like Mrs. Lyman Cass and Mrs. Bogart, fill the dressings with
hate for enemies.
When she protested to Vida, "The young do the work while these old ones
sit around and interrupt us and gag with hate because they're too feeble
to do anything but hate," then Vida turned on her:
"If you can't be reverent, at least don't be so pert and opinionated,
now when men and women are dying. Some of us--we have given up so much,
and we're glad to. At least we expect that you others sha'n't try to be
witty at our expense."
There was weeping.
Carol did desire to see the Prussian autocracy defeated; she did
persuade herself that there were no autocracies save that of Prussia;
she did thrill to motion-pictures of troops embarking in New York; and
she was uncomfortable when she met Miles Bjornstam on the street and he
croaked:
"How's tricks? Things going fine with me; got two new cows. Well, have
you become a patriot? Eh? Sure, they'll bring democracy--the democracy
of death. Yes, sure, in every war since the Garden of Eden the workmen
have gone out to fight each other for perfectly good reasons--handed to
them by their bosses. Now me, I'm wise. I'm so wise that I know I don't
know anything about the war."
It was not a thought of the war that remained with her after Miles's
declamation but a perception that she and Vida and all of the
good-intentioners who wanted to "do something for the common people"
were insignificant, because the "common people" were able to do things
for themselves, and highly likely to, as soon as they learned the
fact. The conception of millions of workmen like Miles taking control
frightened her, and she scuttled rapidly away from the thought of a time
when she might no longer retain the position of Lady Bountiful to the
Bjornstams and Beas and Oscarinas whom she loved--and patronized.
III
It was in June, two months after America's entrance into the war, that
the momentous event happened--the visit of the great Percy Bresnahan,
the millionaire president of the Velvet Motor Car Company of Boston, the
one native son who was always to be mentioned to strangers.
For two weeks there were rumors. Sam Clark cried to Kennicott, "Say, I
hear Perce Bresnahan is coming! By golly it'll be great to see the old
scout, eh?" Finally the Dauntless printed, on the front page with a No. 1
head, a letter from Bresnahan to Jackson Elder:
DEAR JACK:
Well, Jack, I find I can make it. I'm to go to Washington as a dollar
a year man for the government, in the aviation motor section, and tell
them how much I don't know about carburetors. But before I start in
being a hero I want to shoot out and catch me a big black bass and cuss
out you and Sam Clark and Harry Haydock and Will Kennicott and the rest
of you pirates. I'll land in G. P. on June 7, on No. 7 from Mpls. Shake
a day-day. Tell Bert Tybee to save me a glass of beer.
Sincerely yours,
Perce.
All members of the social, financial, scientific, literary, and sporting
sets were at No. 7 to meet Bresnahan; Mrs. Lyman Cass was beside Del
Snafflin the barber, and Juanita Haydock almost cordial to Miss Villets
the librarian. Carol saw Bresnahan laughing down at them from the train
vestibule--big, immaculate, overjawed, with the eye of an executive. In
the voice of the professional Good Fellow he bellowed, "Howdy, folks!"
As she was introduced to him (not he to her) Bresnahan looked into her
eyes, and his hand-shake was warm, unhurried.
He declined the offers of motors; he walked off, his arm about the
shoulder of Nat Hicks the sporting tailor, with the elegant Harry
Haydock carrying one of his enormous pale leather bags, Del Snafflin
the other, Jack Elder bearing an overcoat, and Julius Flickerbaugh
the fishing-tackle. Carol noted that though Bresnahan wore spats and
a stick, no small boy jeered. She decided, "I must have Will get a
double-breasted blue coat and a wing collar and a dotted bow-tie like
his."
That evening, when Kennicott was trimming the grass along the walk
with sheep-shears, Bresnahan rolled up, alone. He was now in corduroy
trousers, khaki shirt open at the throat, a white boating hat, and
marvelous canvas-and-leather shoes "On the job there, old Will! Say, my
Lord, this is living, to come back and get into a regular man-sized pair
of pants. They can talk all they want to about the city, but my idea of
a good time is to loaf around and see you boys and catch a gamey bass!"
He hustled up the walk and blared at Carol, "Where's that little fellow?
I hear you've got one fine big he-boy that you're holding out on me!"
"He's gone to bed," rather briefly.
"I know. And rules are rules, these days. Kids get routed through the
shop like a motor. But look here, sister; I'm one great hand at busting
rules. Come on now, let Uncle Perce have a look at him. Please now,
sister?"
He put his arm about her waist; it was a large, strong, sophisticated
arm, and very agreeable; he grinned at her with a devastating
knowingness, while Kennicott glowed inanely. She flushed; she was
alarmed by the ease with which the big-city man invaded her guarded
personality. She was glad, in retreat, to scamper ahead of the two men
up-stairs to the hall-room in which Hugh slept. All the way Kennicott
muttered, "Well, well, say, gee whittakers but it's good to have you
back, certainly is good to see you!"
Hugh lay on his stomach, making an earnest business of sleeping. He
burrowed his eyes in the dwarf blue pillow to escape the electric light,
then sat up abruptly, small and frail in his woolly nightdrawers, his
floss of brown hair wild, the pillow clutched to his breast. He
wailed. He stared at the stranger, in a manner of patient dismissal.
He explained confidentially to Carol, "Daddy wouldn't let it be morning
yet. What does the pillow say?"
Bresnahan dropped his arm caressingly on Carol's shoulder; he
pronounced, "My Lord, you're a lucky girl to have a fine young husk like
that. I figure Will knew what he was doing when he persuaded you to take
a chance on an old bum like him! They tell me you come from St. Paul.
We're going to get you to come to Boston some day." He leaned over
the bed. "Young man, you're the slickest sight I've seen this side of
Boston. With your permission, may we present you with a slight token of
our regard and appreciation of your long service?"
He held out a red rubber Pierrot. Hugh remarked, "Gimme it," hid it
under the bedclothes, and stared at Bresnahan as though he had never
seen the man before.
For once Carol permitted herself the spiritual luxury of not asking
"Why, Hugh dear, what do you say when some one gives you a present?"
The great man was apparently waiting. They stood in inane suspense till
Bresnahan led them out, rumbling, "How about planning a fishing-trip,
Will?"
He remained for half an hour. Always he told Carol what a charming
person she was; always he looked at her knowingly.
"Yes. He probably would make a woman fall in love with him. But it
wouldn't last a week. I'd get tired of his confounded buoyancy.
His hypocrisy. He's a spiritual bully. He makes me rude to him in
self-defense. Oh yes, he is glad to be here. He does like us. He's so
good an actor that he convinces his own self. . . . I'd HATE him in
Boston. He'd have all the obvious big-city things. Limousines.
Discreet evening-clothes. Order a clever dinner at a smart restaurant.
Drawing-room decorated by the best firm--but the pictures giving him
away. I'd rather talk to Guy Pollock in his dusty office. . . . How I
lie! His arm coaxed my shoulder and his eyes dared me not to admire him.
I'd be afraid of him. I hate him! . . . Oh, the inconceivable egotistic
imagination of women! All this stew of analysis about a man, a good,
decent, friendly, efficient man, because he was kind to me, as Will's
wife!"
IV
The Kennicotts, the Elders, the Clarks, and Bresnahan went fishing
at Red Squaw Lake. They drove forty miles to the lake in Elder's new
Cadillac. There was much laughter and bustle at the start, much storing
of lunch-baskets and jointed poles, much inquiry as to whether it would
really bother Carol to sit with her feet up on a roll of shawls.
When they were ready to go Mrs. Clark lamented, "Oh, Sam, I forgot
my magazine," and Bresnahan bullied, "Come on now, if you women think
you're going to be literary, you can't go with us tough guys!" Every
one laughed a great deal, and as they drove on Mrs. Clark explained that
though probably she would not have read it, still, she might have wanted
to, while the other girls had a nap in the afternoon, and she was right
in the middle of a serial--it was an awfully exciting story--it seems
that this girl was a Turkish dancer (only she was really the daughter of
an American lady and a Russian prince) and men kept running after her,
just disgustingly, but she remained pure, and there was a scene----
While the men floated on the lake, casting for black bass, the women
prepared lunch and yawned. Carol was a little resentful of the manner in
which the men assumed that they did not care to fish. "I don't want to
go with them, but I would like the privilege of refusing."
The lunch was long and pleasant. It was a background for the talk of the
great man come home, hints of cities and large imperative affairs and
famous people, jocosely modest admissions that, yes, their friend Perce
was doing about as well as most of these "Boston swells that think so
much of themselves because they come from rich old families and went to
college and everything. Believe me, it's us new business men that are
running Beantown today, and not a lot of fussy old bucks snoozing in
their clubs!"
Carol realized that he was not one of the sons of Gopher Prairie who,
if they do not actually starve in the East, are invariably spoken of as
"highly successful"; and she found behind his too incessant flattery a
genuine affection for his mates. It was in the matter of the war that
he most favored and thrilled them. Dropping his voice while they bent
nearer (there was no one within two miles to overhear), he disclosed
the fact that in both Boston and Washington he'd been getting a lot of
inside stuff on the war--right straight from headquarters--he was in
touch with some men--couldn't name them but they were darn high up in
both the War and State Departments--and he would say--only for Pete's
sake they mustn't breathe one word of this; it was strictly on the
Q.T. and not generally known outside of Washington--but just between
ourselves--and they could take this for gospel--Spain had finally
decided to join the Entente allies in the Grand Scrap. Yes, sir, there'd
be two million fully equipped Spanish soldiers fighting with us in
France in one month now. Some surprise for Germany, all right!
"How about the prospects for revolution in Germany?" reverently asked
Kennicott.
The authority grunted, "Nothing to it. The one thing you can bet on is
that no matter what happens to the German people, win or lose, they'll
stick by the Kaiser till hell freezes over. I got that absolutely
straight, from a fellow who's on the inside of the inside in Washington.
No, sir! I don't pretend to know much about international affairs
but one thing you can put down as settled is that Germany will be a
Hohenzollern empire for the next forty years. At that, I don't know as
it's so bad. The Kaiser and the Junkers keep a firm hand on a lot
of these red agitators who'd be worse than a king if they could get
control."
"I'm terribly interested in this uprising that overthrew the Czar in
Russia," suggested Carol. She had finally been conquered by the man's
wizard knowledge of affairs.
Kennicott apologized for her: "Carrie's nuts about this Russian
revolution. Is there much to it, Perce?"
"There is not!" Bresnahan said flatly. "I can speak by the book there.
Carol, honey, I'm surprised to find you talking like a New York Russian
Jew, or one of these long-hairs! I can tell you, only you don't need to
let every one in on it, this is confidential, I got it from a man who's
close to the State Department, but as a matter of fact the Czar will
be back in power before the end of the year. You read a lot about his
retiring and about his being killed, but I know he's got a big army back
of him, and he'll show these damn agitators, lazy beggars hunting for
a soft berth bossing the poor goats that fall for 'em, he'll show 'em
where they get off!"
Carol was sorry to hear that the Czar was coming back, but she said
nothing. The others had looked vacant at the mention of a country so far
away as Russia. Now they edged in and asked Bresnahan what he thought
about the Packard car, investments in Texas oil-wells, the comparative
merits of young men born in Minnesota and in Massachusetts, the question
of prohibition, the future cost of motor tires, and wasn't it true that
American aviators put it all over these Frenchmen?
They were glad to find that he agreed with them on every point.
As she heard Bresnahan announce, "We're perfectly willing to talk to
any committee the men may choose, but we're not going to stand for some
outside agitator butting in and telling us how we're going to run our
plant!" Carol remembered that Jackson Elder (now meekly receiving New
Ideas) had said the same thing in the same words.
While Sam Clark was digging up from his memory a long and immensely
detailed story of the crushing things he had said to a Pullman porter,
named George, Bresnahan hugged his knees and rocked and watched Carol.
She wondered if he did not understand the laboriousness of the smile
with which she listened to Kennicott's account of the "good one he had
on Carrie," that marital, coyly improper, ten-times-told tale of how she
had forgotten to attend to Hugh because she was "all het up pounding the
box"--which may be translated as "eagerly playing the piano." She was
certain that Bresnahan saw through her when she pretended not to hear
Kennicott's invitation to join a game of cribbage. She feared the
comments he might make; she was irritated by her fear.
She was equally irritated, when the motor returned through Gopher
Prairie, to find that she was proud of sharing in Bresnahan's kudos
as people waved, and Juanita Haydock leaned from a window. She said to
herself, "As though I cared whether I'm seen with this fat phonograph!"
and simultaneously, "Everybody has noticed how much Will and I are
playing with Mr. Bresnahan."
The town was full of his stories, his friendliness, his memory for
names, his clothes, his trout-flies, his generosity. He had given
a hundred dollars to Father Klubok the priest, and a hundred to the
Reverend Mr. Zitterel the Baptist minister, for Americanization work.
At the Bon Ton, Carol heard Nat Hicks the tailor exulting:
"Old Perce certainly pulled a good one on this fellow Bjornstam that
always is shooting off his mouth. He's supposed to of settled down since
he got married, but Lord, those fellows that think they know it all,
they never change. Well, the Red Swede got the grand razz handed to him,
all right. He had the nerve to breeze up to Perce, at Dave Dyer's, and
he said, he said to Perce, 'I've always wanted to look at a man that was
so useful that folks would pay him a million dollars for existing,' and
Perce gave him the once-over and come right back, 'Have, eh?' he says.
'Well,' he says, 'I've been looking for a man so useful sweeping floors
that I could pay him four dollars a day. Want the job, my friend?' Ha,
ha, ha! Say, you know how lippy Bjornstam is? Well for once he didn't
have a thing to say. He tried to get fresh, and tell what a rotten
town this is, and Perce come right back at him, 'If you don't like this
country, you better get out of it and go back to Germany, where you
belong!' Say, maybe us fellows didn't give Bjornstam the horse-laugh
though! Oh, Perce is the white-haired boy in this burg, all rightee!"
V
Bresnahan had borrowed Jackson Elder's motor; he stopped at the
Kennicotts'; he bawled at Carol, rocking with Hugh on the porch, "Better
come for a ride."
She wanted to snub him. "Thanks so much, but I'm being maternal."
"Bring him along! Bring him along!" Bresnahan was out of the seat,
stalking up the sidewalk, and the rest of her protests and dignities
were feeble.
She did not bring Hugh along.
Bresnahan was silent for a mile, in words, But he looked at her as
though he meant her to know that he understood everything she thought.
She observed how deep was his chest.
"Lovely fields over there," he said.
"You really like them? There's no profit in them."
He chuckled. "Sister, you can't get away with it. I'm onto you. You
consider me a big bluff. Well, maybe I am. But so are you, my dear--and
pretty enough so that I'd try to make love to you, if I weren't afraid
you'd slap me."
"Mr. Bresnahan, do you talk that way to your wife's friends? And do you
call them 'sister'?"
"As a matter of fact, I do! And I make 'em like it. Score two!" But his
chuckle was not so rotund, and he was very attentive to the ammeter.
In a moment he was cautiously attacking: "That's a wonderful boy, Will
Kennicott. Great work these country practitioners are doing. The other
day, in Washington, I was talking to a big scientific shark, a professor
in Johns Hopkins medical school, and he was saying that no one has ever
sufficiently appreciated the general practitioner and the sympathy
and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the young scientific
fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories
that they miss the human element. Except in the case of a few freak
diseases that no respectable human being would waste his time having,
it's the old doc that keeps a community well, mind and body. And
strikes me that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed counter
practitioners I've ever met. Eh?"
"I'm sure he is. He's a servant of reality."
"Come again? Um. Yes. All of that, whatever that is. . . . Say, child,
you don't care a whole lot for Gopher Prairie, if I'm not mistaken."
"Nope."
"There's where you're missing a big chance. There's nothing to these
cities. Believe me, I KNOW! This is a good town, as they go. You're
lucky to be here. I wish I could shy on!"
"Very well, why don't you?"
"Huh? Why--Lord--can't get away fr----"
"You don't have to stay. I do! So I want to change it. Do you know that
men like you, prominent men, do quite a reasonable amount of harm by
insisting that your native towns and native states are perfect? It's
you who encourage the denizens not to change. They quote you, and go on
believing that they live in paradise, and----" She clenched her fist.
"The incredible dullness of it!"
"Suppose you were right. Even so, don't you think you waste a lot of
thundering on one poor scared little town? Kind of mean!"
"I tell you it's dull. DULL!"
"The folks don't find it dull. These couples like the Haydocks have a
high old time; dances and cards----"
"They don't. They're bored. Almost every one here is. Vacuousness and
bad manners and spiteful gossip--that's what I hate."
"Those things--course they're here. So are they in Boston! And every
place else! Why, the faults you find in this town are simply human
nature, and never will be changed."
"Perhaps. But in a Boston all the good Carols (I'll admit I have no
faults) can find one another and play. But here--I'm alone, in a stale
pool--except as it's stirred by the great Mr. Bresnahan!"
"My Lord, to hear you tell it, a fellow 'd think that all the denizens,
as you impolitely call 'em, are so confoundedly unhappy that it's a
wonder they don't all up and commit suicide. But they seem to struggle
along somehow!"
"They don't know what they miss. And anybody can endure anything. Look
at men in mines and in prisons."
He drew up on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. He glanced across
the reeds reflected on the water, the quiver of wavelets like crumpled
tinfoil, the distant shores patched with dark woods, silvery oats and
deep yellow wheat. He patted her hand. "Sis----Carol, you're a darling
girl, but you're difficult. Know what I think?"
"Yes."
"Humph. Maybe you do, but----My humble (not too humble!) opinion is that
you like to be different. You like to think you're peculiar. Why, if you
knew how many tens of thousands of women, especially in New York, say
just what you do, you'd lose all the fun of thinking you're a lone
genius and you'd be on the band-wagon whooping it up for Gopher Prairie
and a good decent family life. There's always about a million young
women just out of college who want to teach their grandmothers how to
suck eggs."
"How proud you are of that homely rustic metaphor! You use it at
'banquets' and directors' meetings, and boast of your climb from a
humble homestead."
"Huh! You may have my number. I'm not telling. But look here: You're
so prejudiced against Gopher Prairie that you overshoot the mark;
you antagonize those who might be inclined to agree with you in some
particulars but----Great guns, the town can't be all wrong!"
"No, it isn't. But it could be. Let me tell you a fable. Imagine a
cavewoman complaining to her mate. She doesn't like one single thing;
she hates the damp cave, the rats running over her bare legs, the stiff
skin garments, the eating of half-raw meat, her husband's bushy face,
the constant battles, and the worship of the spirits who will hoodoo her
unless she gives the priests her best claw necklace. Her man protests,
'But it can't all be wrong!' and he thinks he has reduced her to
absurdity. Now you assume that a world which produces a Percy Bresnahan
and a Velvet Motor Company must be civilized. It is? Aren't we only
about half-way along in barbarism? I suggest Mrs. Bogart as a test. And
we'll continue in barbarism just as long as people as nearly intelligent
as you continue to defend things as they are because they are."
"You're a fair spieler, child. But, by golly, I'd like to see you try
to design a new manifold, or run a factory and keep a lot of your fellow
reds from Czech-slovenski-magyar-godknowswheria on the job! You'd drop
your theories so darn quick! I'm not any defender of things as they are.
Sure. They're rotten. Only I'm sensible."
He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty
to friends. She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside
of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when
an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing
statistics.
He was so much the man, the worker, the friend, that she liked him when
she most tried to stand out against him; he was so much the successful
executive that she did not want him to despise her. His manner of
sneering at what he called "parlor socialists" (though the phrase was
not overwhelmingly new) had a power which made her wish to placate his
company of well-fed, speed-loving administrators. When he demanded,
"Would you like to associate with nothing but a lot of turkey-necked,
horn-spectacled nuts that have adenoids and need a hair-cut, and that
spend all their time kicking about 'conditions' and never do a lick of
work?" she said, "No, but just the same----" When he asserted, "Even
if your cavewoman was right in knocking the whole works, I bet some
red-blooded Regular Fellow, some real He-man, found her a nice dry cave,
and not any whining criticizing radical," she wriggled her head feebly,
between a nod and a shake.
His large hands, sensual lips, easy voice supported his self-confidence.
He made her feel young and soft--as Kennicott had once made her feel.
She had nothing to say when he bent his powerful head and experimented,
"My dear, I'm sorry I'm going away from this town. You'd be a darling
child to play with. You ARE pretty! Some day in Boston I'll show you how
we buy a lunch. Well, hang it, got to be starting back."
The only answer to his gospel of beef which she could find, when she was
home, was a wail of "But just the same----"
She did not see him again before he departed for Washington.
His eyes remained. His glances at her lips and hair and shoulders had
revealed to her that she was not a wife-and-mother alone, but a girl;
that there still were men in the world, as there had been in college
days.
That admiration led her to study Kennicott, to tear at the shroud of
intimacy, to perceive the strangeness of the most familiar.
| We're at the point where America has decided to enter World War I. Vida sends her new husband Raymie off to a training camp so he can do his part for his country. Mrs. Bogart's son Cy wants to join the army so he can kill some Germans, but Mrs. Bogart won't let him, since he's still only a teenager. Meanwhile, Carol keeps hearing about how the war is going to bring about a basic change in human psychology and wipe the slate clean. She hopes this is the case, even though it'll take a lot of death to accomplish it. The town gets excited when it finds out that its most famous son, Percy Bresnahan, will be coming to visit. Percy is the president of a car company in Boston, and everyone is proud of how rich and powerful he has become. Bresnahan pays a special visit to the Kennicott house and flirts a little with Carol. Carol is cold with him, but part of her likes the attention. Bresnahan goes on a picnic with Will and Carol the next day, and people from the town are eager to know Bresnahan's inside gossip about the war. He hates the German Empire, but he still thinks it's better than the alternative, which is all the communists and socialists agitating in the German streets. Carol later hears a story about how Miles Bjornstam tried to smack-talk Bresnahan for being a greedy capitalist. But apparently Bresnahan verbally humiliated Miles and got everyone in the town gloating over the victory. Worst of all, Carol is crushed to realize that she thinks of Bresnahan as a real man and feels attracted to him, even though he stands for everything she dislikes in the world. | summary |
CHAPTER XXIV
I
ALL that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott. She recalled
a hundred grotesqueries: her comic dismay at his having chewed tobacco,
the evening when she had tried to read poetry to him; matters which had
seemed to vanish with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that
he had been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She made
much of her consoling affection for him in little things. She liked the
homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his strength and handiness
as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; his boyishness when he ran
to her to be comforted because he had found rust in the barrel of his
pump-gun. But at the highest he was to her another Hugh, without the
glamor of Hugh's unknown future.
There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning.
Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other doctors the
Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage but remained in town, dusty
and irritable. In the afternoon, when she went to Oleson & McGuire's
(formerly Dahl & Oleson's), Carol was vexed by the assumption of
the youthful clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be
neighborly and rude. He was no more brusquely familiar than a dozen
other clerks of the town, but her nerves were heat-scorched.
When she asked for codfish, for supper, he grunted, "What d'you want
that darned old dry stuff for?"
"I like it!"
"Punk! Guess the doc can afford something better than that. Try some of
the new wienies we got in. Swell. The Haydocks use 'em."
She exploded. "My dear young man, it is not your duty to instruct me in
housekeeping, and it doesn't particularly concern me what the Haydocks
condescend to approve!"
He was hurt. He hastily wrapped up the leprous fragment of fish; he
gaped as she trailed out. She lamented, "I shouldn't have spoken so. He
didn't mean anything. He doesn't know when he is being rude."
Her repentance was not proof against Uncle Whittier when she stopped in
at his grocery for salt and a package of safety matches. Uncle Whittier,
in a shirt collarless and soaked with sweat in a brown streak down his
back, was whining at a clerk, "Come on now, get a hustle on and lug
that pound cake up to Mis' Cass's. Some folks in this town think a
storekeeper ain't got nothing to do but chase out 'phone-orders. . . .
Hello, Carrie. That dress you got on looks kind of low in the neck to
me. May be decent and modest--I suppose I'm old-fashioned--but I never
thought much of showing the whole town a woman's bust! Hee, hee, hee!
. . . Afternoon, Mrs. Hicks. Sage? Just out of it. Lemme sell you some
other spices. Heh?" Uncle Whittier was nasally indignant "CERTAINLY! Got
PLENTY other spices jus' good as sage for any purp'se whatever! What's
the matter with--well, with allspice?" When Mrs. Hicks had gone, he
raged, "Some folks don't know what they want!"
"Sweating sanctimonious bully--my husband's uncle!" thought Carol.
She crept into Dave Dyer's. Dave held up his arms with, "Don't shoot!
I surrender!" She smiled, but it occurred to her that for nearly five
years Dave had kept up this game of pretending that she threatened his
life.
As she went dragging through the prickly-hot street she reflected that a
citizen of Gopher Prairie does not have jests--he has a jest. Every
cold morning for five winters Lyman Cass had remarked, "Fair to middlin'
chilly--get worse before it gets better." Fifty times had Ezra Stowbody
informed the public that Carol had once asked, "Shall I indorse this
check on the back?" Fifty times had Sam Clark called to her, "Where'd
you steal that hat?" Fifty times had the mention of Barney Cahoon,
the town drayman, like a nickel in a slot produced from Kennicott the
apocryphal story of Barney's directing a minister, "Come down to the
depot and get your case of religious books--they're leaking!"
She came home by the unvarying route. She knew every house-front, every
street-crossing, every billboard, every tree, every dog. She knew every
blackened banana-skin and empty cigarette-box in the gutters. She knew
every greeting. When Jim Howland stopped and gaped at her there was
no possibility that he was about to confide anything but his grudging,
"Well, haryuh t'day?"
All her future life, this same red-labeled bread-crate in front of the
bakery, this same thimble-shaped crack in the sidewalk a quarter of a
block beyond Stowbody's granite hitching-post----
She silently handed her purchases to the silent Oscarina. She sat on the
porch, rocking, fanning, twitchy with Hugh's whining.
Kennicott came home, grumbled, "What the devil is the kid yapping
about?"
"I guess you can stand it ten minutes if I can stand it all day!"
He came to supper in his shirt sleeves, his vest partly open, revealing
discolored suspenders.
"Why don't you put on your nice Palm Beach suit, and take off that
hideous vest?" she complained.
"Too much trouble. Too hot to go up-stairs."
She realized that for perhaps a year she had not definitely looked
at her husband. She regarded his table-manners. He violently chased
fragments of fish about his plate with a knife and licked the knife
after gobbling them. She was slightly sick. She asserted, "I'm
ridiculous. What do these things matter! Don't be so simple!" But she
knew that to her they did matter, these solecisms and mixed tenses of
the table.
She realized that they found little to say; that, incredibly, they were
like the talked-out couples whom she had pitied at restaurants.
Bresnahan would have spouted in a lively, exciting, unreliable manner.
She realized that Kennicott's clothes were seldom pressed. His coat was
wrinkled; his trousers would flap at the knees when he arose. His shoes
were unblacked, and they were of an elderly shapelessness. He refused
to wear soft hats; cleaved to a hard derby, as a symbol of virility and
prosperity; and sometimes he forgot to take it off in the house. She
peeped at his cuffs. They were frayed in prickles of starched linen.
She had turned them once; she clipped them every week; but when she had
begged him to throw the shirt away, last Sunday morning at the crisis
of the weekly bath, he had uneasily protested, "Oh, it'll wear quite a
while yet."
He was shaved (by himself or more socially by Del Snafflin) only three
times a week. This morning had not been one of the three times.
Yet he was vain of his new turn-down collars and sleek ties; he often
spoke of the "sloppy dressing" of Dr. McGanum; and he laughed at old men
who wore detachable cuffs or Gladstone collars.
Carol did not care much for the creamed codfish that evening.
She noted that his nails were jagged and ill-shaped from his habit of
cutting them with a pocket-knife and despising a nail-file as effeminate
and urban. That they were invariably clean, that his were the scoured
fingers of the surgeon, made his stubborn untidiness the more jarring.
They were wise hands, kind hands, but they were not the hands of love.
She remembered him in the days of courtship. He had tried to please her,
then, had touched her by sheepishly wearing a colored band on his straw
hat. Was it possible that those days of fumbling for each other were
gone so completely? He had read books, to impress her; had said (she
recalled it ironically) that she was to point out his every fault; had
insisted once, as they sat in the secret place beneath the walls of Fort
Snelling----
She shut the door on her thoughts. That was sacred ground. But it WAS a
shame that----
She nervously pushed away her cake and stewed apricots.
After supper, when they had been driven in from the porch by mosquitos,
when Kennicott had for the two-hundredth time in five years commented,
"We must have a new screen on the porch--lets all the bugs in," they sat
reading, and she noted, and detested herself for noting, and noted again
his habitual awkwardness. He slumped down in one chair, his legs up on
another, and he explored the recesses of his left ear with the end of
his little finger--she could hear the faint smack--he kept it up--he
kept it up----
He blurted, "Oh. Forgot tell you. Some of the fellows coming in to play
poker this evening. Suppose we could have some crackers and cheese and
beer?"
She nodded.
"He might have mentioned it before. Oh well, it's his house."
The poker-party straggled in: Sam Clark, Jack Elder, Dave Dyer, Jim
Howland. To her they mechanically said, "'Devenin'," but to Kennicott,
in a heroic male manner, "Well, well, shall we start playing? Got a
hunch I'm going to lick somebody real bad." No one suggested that she
join them. She told herself that it was her own fault, because she was
not more friendly; but she remembered that they never asked Mrs. Sam
Clark to play.
Bresnahan would have asked her.
She sat in the living-room, glancing across the hall at the men as they
humped over the dining table.
They were in shirt sleeves; smoking, chewing, spitting incessantly;
lowering their voices for a moment so that she did not hear what they
said and afterward giggling hoarsely; using over and over the canonical
phrases: "Three to dole," "I raise you a finif," "Come on now, ante up;
what do you think this is, a pink tea?" The cigar-smoke was acrid and
pervasive. The firmness with which the men mouthed their cigars made the
lower part of their faces expressionless, heavy, unappealing. They were
like politicians cynically dividing appointments.
How could they understand her world?
Did that faint and delicate world exist? Was she a fool? She doubted her
world, doubted herself, and was sick in the acid, smoke-stained air.
She slipped back into brooding upon the habituality of the house.
Kennicott was as fixed in routine as an isolated old man. At first
he had amorously deceived himself into liking her experiments with
food--the one medium in which she could express imagination--but now
he wanted only his round of favorite dishes: steak, roast beef, boiled
pig's-feet, oatmeal, baked apples. Because at some more flexible period
he had advanced from oranges to grape-fruit he considered himself an
epicure.
During their first autumn she had smiled over his affection for his
hunting-coat, but now that the leather had come unstitched in dribbles
of pale yellow thread, and tatters of canvas, smeared with dirt of the
fields and grease from gun-cleaning, hung in a border of rags, she hated
the thing.
Wasn't her whole life like that hunting-coat?
She knew every nick and brown spot on each piece of the set of china
purchased by Kennicott's mother in 1895--discreet china with a pattern
of washed-out forget-me-nots, rimmed with blurred gold: the gravy-boat,
in a saucer which did not match, the solemn and evangelical covered
vegetable-dishes, the two platters.
Twenty times had Kennicott sighed over the fact that Bea had broken the
other platter--the medium-sized one.
The kitchen.
Damp black iron sink, damp whitey-yellow drain-board with shreds of
discolored wood which from long scrubbing were as soft as cotton thread,
warped table, alarm clock, stove bravely blackened by Oscarina but an
abomination in its loose doors and broken drafts and oven that never
would keep an even heat.
Carol had done her best by the kitchen: painted it white, put up
curtains, replaced a six-year-old calendar by a color print. She had
hoped for tiling, and a kerosene range for summer cooking, but Kennicott
always postponed these expenses.
She was better acquainted with the utensils in the kitchen than with
Vida Sherwin or Guy Pollock. The can-opener, whose soft gray metal
handle was twisted from some ancient effort to pry open a window,
was more pertinent to her than all the cathedrals in Europe; and
more significant than the future of Asia was the never-settled weekly
question as to whether the small kitchen knife with the unpainted handle
or the second-best buckhorn carving-knife was better for cutting up cold
chicken for Sunday supper.
II
She was ignored by the males till midnight. Her husband called, "Suppose
we could have some eats, Carrie?" As she passed through the dining-room
the men smiled on her, belly-smiles. None of them noticed her while she
was serving the crackers and cheese and sardines and beer. They were
determining the exact psychology of Dave Dyer in standing pat, two hours
before.
When they were gone she said to Kennicott, "Your friends have the
manners of a barroom. They expect me to wait on them like a servant.
They're not so much interested in me as they would be in a waiter,
because they don't have to tip me. Unfortunately! Well, good night."
So rarely did she nag in this petty, hot-weather fashion that he was
astonished rather than angry. "Hey! Wait! What's the idea? I must say
I don't get you. The boys----Barroom? Why, Perce Bresnahan was saying
there isn't a finer bunch of royal good fellows anywhere than just the
crowd that were here tonight!"
They stood in the lower hall. He was too shocked to go on with his
duties of locking the front door and winding his watch and the clock.
"Bresnahan! I'm sick of him!" She meant nothing in particular.
"Why, Carrie, he's one of the biggest men in the country! Boston just
eats out of his hand!"
"I wonder if it does? How do we know but that in Boston, among well-bred
people, he may be regarded as an absolute lout? The way he calls women
'Sister,' and the way----"
"Now look here! That'll do! Of course I know you don't mean it--you're
simply hot and tired, and trying to work off your peeve on me. But just
the same, I won't stand your jumping on Perce. You----It's just like
your attitude toward the war--so darn afraid that America will become
militaristic----"
"But you are the pure patriot!"
"By God, I am!"
"Yes, I heard you talking to Sam Clark tonight about ways of avoiding
the income tax!"
He had recovered enough to lock the door; he clumped up-stairs ahead of
her, growling, "You don't know what you're talking about. I'm perfectly
willing to pay my full tax--fact, I'm in favor of the income tax--even
though I do think it's a penalty on frugality and enterprise--fact, it's
an unjust, darn-fool tax. But just the same, I'll pay it. Only, I'm not
idiot enough to pay more than the government makes me pay, and Sam and
I were just figuring out whether all automobile expenses oughn't to be
exemptions. I'll take a lot off you, Carrie, but I don't propose for one
second to stand your saying I'm not patriotic. You know mighty well and
good that I've tried to get away and join the army. And at the beginning
of the whole fracas I said--I've said right along--that we ought to have
entered the war the minute Germany invaded Belgium. You don't get me at
all. You can't appreciate a man's work. You're abnormal. You've
fussed so much with these fool novels and books and all this highbrow
junk----You like to argue!"
It ended, a quarter of an hour later, in his calling her a "neurotic"
before he turned away and pretended to sleep.
For the first time they had failed to make peace.
"There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by
side. His calls mine 'neurotic'; mine calls his 'stupid.' We'll never
understand each other, never; and it's madness for us to debate--to lie
together in a hot bed in a creepy room--enemies, yoked."
III
It clarified in her the longing for a place of her own.
"While it's so hot, I think I'll sleep in the spare room," she said next
day.
"Not a bad idea." He was cheerful and kindly.
The room was filled with a lumbering double bed and a cheap pine bureau.
She stored the bed in the attic; replaced it by a cot which, with a
denim cover, made a couch by day; put in a dressing-table, a rocker
transformed by a cretonne cover; had Miles Bjornstam build book-shelves.
Kennicott slowly understood that she meant to keep up her seclusion. In
his queries, "Changing the whole room?" "Putting your books in there?"
she caught his dismay. But it was so easy, once her door was closed, to
shut out his worry. That hurt her--the ease of forgetting him.
Aunt Bessie Smail sleuthed out this anarchy. She yammered, "Why, Carrie,
you ain't going to sleep all alone by yourself? I don't believe in that.
Married folks should have the same room, of course! Don't go getting
silly notions. No telling what a thing like that might lead to. Suppose
I up and told your Uncle Whit that I wanted a room of my own!"
Carol spoke of recipes for corn-pudding.
But from Mrs. Dr. Westlake she drew encouragement. She had made an
afternoon call on Mrs. Westlake. She was for the first time invited
up-stairs, and found the suave old woman sewing in a white and mahogany
room with a small bed.
"Oh, do you have your own royal apartments, and the doctor his?" Carol
hinted.
"Indeed I do! The doctor says it's bad enough to have to stand my temper
at meals. Do----" Mrs. Westlake looked at her sharply. "Why, don't you
do the same thing?"
"I've been thinking about it." Carol laughed in an embarrassed way.
"Then you wouldn't regard me as a complete hussy if I wanted to be by
myself now and then?"
"Why, child, every woman ought to get off by herself and turn over her
thoughts--about children, and God, and how bad her complexion is, and
the way men don't really understand her, and how much work she finds to
do in the house, and how much patience it takes to endure some things in
a man's love."
"Yes!" Carol said it in a gasp, her hands twisted together. She wanted
to confess not only her hatred for the Aunt Bessies but her covert
irritation toward those she best loved: her alienation from Kennicott,
her disappointment in Guy Pollock, her uneasiness in the presence of
Vida. She had enough self-control to confine herself to, "Yes. Men! The
dear blundering souls, we do have to get off and laugh at them."
"Of course we do. Not that you have to laugh at Dr. Kennicott so much,
but MY man, heavens, now there's a rare old bird! Reading story-books
when he ought to be tending to business! 'Marcus Westlake,' I say to
him, 'you're a romantic old fool.' And does he get angry? He does not!
He chuckles and says, 'Yes, my beloved, folks do say that married
people grow to resemble each other!' Drat him!" Mrs. Westlake laughed
comfortably.
After such a disclosure what could Carol do but return the courtesy by
remarking that as for Kennicott, he wasn't romantic enough--the darling.
Before she left she had babbled to Mrs. Westlake her dislike for Aunt
Bessie, the fact that Kennicott's income was now more than five thousand
a year, her view of the reason why Vida had married Raymie (which
included some thoroughly insincere praise of Raymie's "kind heart"), her
opinion of the library-board, just what Kennicott had said about Mrs.
Carthal's diabetes, and what Kennicott thought of the several surgeons
in the Cities.
She went home soothed by confession, inspirited by finding a new friend.
IV
The tragicomedy of the "domestic situation."
Oscarina went back home to help on the farm, and Carol had a succession
of maids, with gaps between. The lack of servants was becoming one
of the most cramping problems of the prairie town. Increasingly the
farmers' daughters rebelled against village dullness, and against the
unchanged attitude of the Juanitas toward "hired girls." They went off
to city kitchens, or to city shops and factories, that they might be
free and even human after hours.
The Jolly Seventeen were delighted at Carol's desertion by the loyal
Oscarina. They reminded her that she had said, "I don't have any trouble
with maids; see how Oscarina stays on."
Between incumbencies of Finn maids from the North Woods, Germans from
the prairies, occasional Swedes and Norwegians and Icelanders, Carol did
her own work--and endured Aunt Bessie's skittering in to tell her how to
dampen a broom for fluffy dust, how to sugar doughnuts, how to stuff
a goose. Carol was deft, and won shy praise from Kennicott, but as her
shoulder blades began to sting, she wondered how many millions of women
had lied to themselves during the death-rimmed years through which they
had pretended to enjoy the puerile methods persisting in housework.
She doubted the convenience and, as a natural sequent, the sanctity of
the monogamous and separate home which she had regarded as the basis of
all decent life.
She considered her doubts vicious. She refused to remember how many of
the women of the Jolly Seventeen nagged their husbands and were nagged
by them.
She energetically did not whine to Kennicott. But her eyes ached; she
was not the girl in breeches and a flannel shirt who had cooked over a
camp-fire in the Colorado mountains five years ago. Her ambition was to
get to bed at nine; her strongest emotion was resentment over rising at
half-past six to care for Hugh. The back of her neck ached as she got
out of bed. She was cynical about the joys of a simple laborious life.
She understood why workmen and workmen's wives are not grateful to their
kind employers.
At mid-morning, when she was momentarily free from the ache in her neck
and back, she was glad of the reality of work. The hours were living
and nimble. But she had no desire to read the eloquent little newspaper
essays in praise of labor which are daily written by the white-browed
journalistic prophets. She felt independent and (though she hid it) a
bit surly.
In cleaning the house she pondered upon the maid's-room. It was a
slant-roofed, small-windowed hole above the kitchen, oppressive in
summer, frigid in winter. She saw that while she had been considering
herself an unusually good mistress, she had been permitting her friends
Bea and Oscarina to live in a sty. She complained to Kennicott. "What's
the matter with it?" he growled, as they stood on the perilous stairs
dodging up from the kitchen. She commented upon the sloping roof of
unplastered boards stained in brown rings by the rain, the uneven floor,
the cot and its tumbled discouraged-looking quilts, the broken rocker,
the distorting mirror.
"Maybe it ain't any Hotel Radisson parlor, but still, it's so much
better than anything these hired girls are accustomed to at home that
they think it's fine. Seems foolish to spend money when they wouldn't
appreciate it."
But that night he drawled, with the casualness of a man who wishes to be
surprising and delightful, "Carrie, don't know but what we might begin
to think about building a new house, one of these days. How'd you like
that?"
"W-why----"
"I'm getting to the point now where I feel we can afford one--and a
corker! I'll show this burg something like a real house! We'll put one
over on Sam and Harry! Make folks sit up an' take notice!"
"Yes," she said.
He did not go on.
Daily he returned to the subject of the new house, but as to time and
mode he was indefinite. At first she believed. She babbled of a low
stone house with lattice windows and tulip-beds, of colonial brick, of
a white frame cottage with green shutters and dormer windows. To her
enthusiasms he answered, "Well, ye-es, might be worth thinking about.
Remember where I put my pipe?" When she pressed him he fidgeted, "I
don't know; seems to me those kind of houses you speak of have been
overdone."
It proved that what he wanted was a house exactly like Sam Clark's,
which was exactly like every third new house in every town in the
country: a square, yellow stolidity with immaculate clapboards, a broad
screened porch, tidy grass-plots, and concrete walks; a house resembling
the mind of a merchant who votes the party ticket straight and goes to
church once a month and owns a good car.
He admitted, "Well, yes, maybe it isn't so darn artistic but----Matter
of fact, though, I don't want a place just like Sam's. Maybe I would cut
off that fool tower he's got, and I think probably it would look better
painted a nice cream color. That yellow on Sam's house is too kind
of flashy. Then there's another kind of house that's mighty nice and
substantial-looking, with shingles, in a nice brown stain, instead of
clapboards--seen some in Minneapolis. You're way off your base when you
say I only like one kind of house!"
Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie came in one evening when Carol was
sleepily advocating a rose-garden cottage.
"You've had a lot of experience with housekeeping, aunty, and don't you
think," Kennicott appealed, "that it would be sensible to have a nice
square house, and pay more attention to getting a crackajack furnace
than to all this architecture and doodads?"
Aunt Bessie worked her lips as though they were an elastic band. "Why
of course! I know how it is with young folks like you, Carrie; you want
towers and bay-windows and pianos and heaven knows what all, but the
thing to get is closets and a good furnace and a handy place to hang out
the washing, and the rest don't matter."
Uncle Whittier dribbled a little, put his face near to Carol's, and
sputtered, "Course it don't! What d'you care what folks think about
the outside of your house? It's the inside you're living in. None of my
business, but I must say you young folks that'd rather have cakes than
potatoes get me riled."
She reached her room before she became savage. Below, dreadfully
near, she could hear the broom-swish of Aunt Bessie's voice, and the
mop-pounding of Uncle Whittier's grumble. She had a reasonless dread
that they would intrude on her, then a fear that she would yield
to Gopher Prairie's conception of duty toward an Aunt Bessie and go
down-stairs to be "nice." She felt the demand for standardized behavior
coming in waves from all the citizens who sat in their sitting-rooms
watching her with respectable eyes, waiting, demanding, unyielding. She
snarled, "Oh, all right, I'll go!" She powdered her nose, straightened
her collar, and coldly marched down-stairs. The three elders ignored
her. They had advanced from the new house to agreeable general fussing.
Aunt Bessie was saying, in a tone like the munching of dry toast:
"I do think Mr. Stowbody ought to have had the rain-pipe fixed at our
store right away. I went to see him on Tuesday morning before ten, no,
it was couple minutes after ten, but anyway, it was long before noon--I
know because I went right from the bank to the meat market to get some
steak--my! I think it's outrageous, the prices Oleson & McGuire charge
for their meat, and it isn't as if they gave you a good cut either but
just any old thing, and I had time to get it, and I stopped in at Mrs.
Bogart's to ask about her rheumatism----"
Carol was watching Uncle Whittier. She knew from his taut expression
that he was not listening to Aunt Bessie but herding his own thoughts,
and that he would interrupt her bluntly. He did:
"Will, where c'n I get an extra pair of pants for this coat and vest? D'
want to pay too much."
"Well, guess Nat Hicks could make you up a pair. But if I were you, I'd
drop into Ike Rifkin's--his prices are lower than the Bon Ton's."
"Humph. Got the new stove in your office yet?"
"No, been looking at some at Sam Clark's but----"
"Well, y' ought get 't in. Don't do to put off getting a stove all
summer, and then have it come cold on you in the fall."
Carol smiled upon them ingratiatingly. "Do you dears mind if I slip up
to bed? I'm rather tired--cleaned the upstairs today."
She retreated. She was certain that they were discussing her, and foully
forgiving her. She lay awake till she heard the distant creak of a bed
which indicated that Kennicott had retired. Then she felt safe.
It was Kennicott who brought up the matter of the Smails at breakfast.
With no visible connection he said, "Uncle Whit is kind of clumsy, but
just the same, he's a pretty wise old coot. He's certainly making good
with the store."
Carol smiled, and Kennicott was pleased that she had come to her senses.
"As Whit says, after all the first thing is to have the inside of a
house right, and darn the people on the outside looking in!"
It seemed settled that the house was to be a sound example of the Sam
Clark school.
Kennicott made much of erecting it entirely for her and the baby. He
spoke of closets for her frocks, and "a comfy sewing-room." But when
he drew on a leaf from an old account-book (he was a paper-saver and a
string-picker) the plans for the garage, he gave much more attention
to a cement floor and a work-bench and a gasoline-tank than he had to
sewing-rooms.
She sat back and was afraid.
In the present rookery there were odd things--a step up from the hall
to the dining-room, a picturesqueness in the shed and bedraggled lilac
bush. But the new place would be smooth, standardized, fixed. It was
probable, now that Kennicott was past forty, and settled, that this
would be the last venture he would ever make in building. So long as she
stayed in this ark, she would always have a possibility of change, but
once she was in the new house, there she would sit for all the rest of
her life--there she would die. Desperately she wanted to put it off,
against the chance of miracles. While Kennicott was chattering about a
patent swing-door for the garage she saw the swing-doors of a prison.
She never voluntarily returned to the project. Aggrieved, Kennicott
stopped drawing plans, and in ten days the new house was forgotten.
V
Every year since their marriage Carol had longed for a trip through the
East. Every year Kennicott had talked of attending the American Medical
Association convention, "and then afterwards we could do the East
up brown. I know New York clean through--spent pretty near a week
there--but I would like to see New England and all these historic places
and have some sea-food." He talked of it from February to May, and in
May he invariably decided that coming confinement-cases or land-deals
would prevent his "getting away from home-base for very long THIS
year--and no sense going till we can do it right."
The weariness of dish-washing had increased her desire to go. She
pictured herself looking at Emerson's manse, bathing in a surf of jade
and ivory, wearing a trottoir and a summer fur, meeting an aristocratic
Stranger. In the spring Kennicott had pathetically volunteered, "S'pose
you'd like to get in a good long tour this summer, but with Gould and
Mac away and so many patients depending on me, don't see how I can make
it. By golly, I feel like a tightwad though, not taking you." Through
all this restless July after she had tasted Bresnahan's disturbing
flavor of travel and gaiety, she wanted to go, but she said nothing.
They spoke of and postponed a trip to the Twin Cities. When she
suggested, as though it were a tremendous joke, "I think baby and I
might up and leave you, and run off to Cape Cod by ourselves!" his only
reaction was "Golly, don't know but what you may almost have to do that,
if we don't get in a trip next year."
Toward the end of July he proposed, "Say, the Beavers are holding a
convention in Joralemon, street fair and everything. We might go down
tomorrow. And I'd like to see Dr. Calibree about some business. Put in
the whole day. Might help some to make up for our trip. Fine fellow, Dr.
Calibree."
Joralemon was a prairie town of the size of Gopher Prairie.
Their motor was out of order, and there was no passenger-train at an
early hour. They went down by freight-train, after the weighty and
conversational business of leaving Hugh with Aunt Bessie. Carol was
exultant over this irregular jaunting. It was the first unusual thing,
except the glance of Bresnahan, that had happened since the weaning of
Hugh. They rode in the caboose, the small red cupola-topped car jerked
along at the end of the train. It was a roving shanty, the cabin of a
land schooner, with black oilcloth seats along the side, and for desk, a
pine board to be let down on hinges. Kennicott played seven-up with the
conductor and two brakemen. Carol liked the blue silk kerchiefs about
the brakemen's throats; she liked their welcome to her, and their air of
friendly independence. Since there were no sweating passengers crammed
in beside her, she reveled in the train's slowness. She was part of
these lakes and tawny wheat-fields. She liked the smell of hot earth and
clean grease; and the leisurely chug-a-chug, chug-a-chug of the trucks
was a song of contentment in the sun.
She pretended that she was going to the Rockies. When they reached
Joralemon she was radiant with holiday-making.
Her eagerness began to lessen the moment they stopped at a red frame
station exactly like the one they had just left at Gopher Prairie,
and Kennicott yawned, "Right on time. Just in time for dinner at the
Calibrees'. I 'phoned the doctor from G. P. that we'd be here. 'We'll
catch the freight that gets in before twelve,' I told him. He said
he'd meet us at the depot and take us right up to the house for dinner.
Calibree is a good man, and you'll find his wife is a mighty brainy
little woman, bright as a dollar. By golly, there he is."
Dr. Calibree was a squat, clean-shaven, conscientious-looking man of
forty. He was curiously like his own brown-painted motor car, with
eye-glasses for windshield. "Want you to meet my wife, doctor--Carrie,
make you 'quainted with Dr. Calibree," said Kennicott. Calibree bowed
quietly and shook her hand, but before he had finished shaking it he was
concentrating upon Kennicott with, "Nice to see you, doctor. Say, don't
let me forget to ask you about what you did in that exopthalmic goiter
case--that Bohemian woman at Wahkeenyan."
The two men, on the front seat of the car, chanted goiters and ignored
her. She did not know it. She was trying to feed her illusion of
adventure by staring at unfamiliar houses . . . drab cottages, artificial
stone bungalows, square painty stolidities with immaculate clapboards
and broad screened porches and tidy grass-plots.
Calibree handed her over to his wife, a thick woman who called
her "dearie," and asked if she was hot and, visibly searching for
conversation, produced, "Let's see, you and the doctor have a Little
One, haven't you?" At dinner Mrs. Calibree served the corned beef and
cabbage and looked steamy, looked like the steamy leaves of cabbage. The
men were oblivious of their wives as they gave the social passwords of
Main Street, the orthodox opinions on weather, crops, and motor cars,
then flung away restraint and gyrated in the debauch of shop-talk.
Stroking his chin, drawling in the ecstasy of being erudite, Kennicott
inquired, "Say, doctor, what success have you had with thyroid for
treatment of pains in the legs before child-birth?"
Carol did not resent their assumption that she was too ignorant to be
admitted to masculine mysteries. She was used to it. But the cabbage and
Mrs. Calibree's monotonous "I don't know what we're coming to with
all this difficulty getting hired girls" were gumming her eyes with
drowsiness. She sought to clear them by appealing to Calibree, in a
manner of exaggerated liveliness, "Doctor, have the medical societies
in Minnesota ever advocated legislation for help to nursing mothers?"
Calibree slowly revolved toward her. "Uh--I've never--uh--never looked
into it. I don't believe much in getting mixed up in politics." He
turned squarely from her and, peering earnestly at Kennicott, resumed,
"Doctor, what's been your experience with unilateral pyelonephritis?
Buckburn of Baltimore advocates decapsulation and nephrotomy, but seems
to me----"
Not till after two did they rise. In the lee of the stonily mature trio
Carol proceeded to the street fair which added mundane gaiety to the
annual rites of the United and Fraternal Order of Beavers. Beavers,
human Beavers, were everywhere: thirty-second degree Beavers in gray
sack suits and decent derbies, more flippant Beavers in crash summer
coats and straw hats, rustic Beavers in shirt sleeves and frayed
suspenders; but whatever his caste-symbols, every Beaver was
distinguished by an enormous shrimp-colored ribbon lettered in silver,
"Sir Knight and Brother, U. F. O. B., Annual State Convention." On the
motherly shirtwaist of each of their wives was a badge "Sir Knight's
Lady." The Duluth delegation had brought their famous Beaver amateur
band, in Zouave costumes of green velvet jacket, blue trousers, and
scarlet fez. The strange thing was that beneath their scarlet pride the
Zouaves' faces remained those of American business-men, pink, smooth,
eye-glassed; and as they stood playing in a circle, at the corner of
Main Street and Second, as they tootled on fifes or with swelling cheeks
blew into cornets, their eyes remained as owlish as though they were
sitting at desks under the sign "This Is My Busy Day."
Carol had supposed that the Beavers were average citizens organized for
the purposes of getting cheap life-insurance and playing poker at the
lodge-rooms every second Wednesday, but she saw a large poster which
proclaimed:
BEAVERS
U. F. O. B.
The greatest influence for good citizenship in the
country. The jolliest aggregation of red-blooded,
open-handed, hustle-em-up good fellows in the world.
Joralemon welcomes you to her hospitable city.
Kennicott read the poster and to Calibree admired, "Strong lodge, the
Beavers. Never joined. Don't know but what I will."
Calibree adumbrated, "They're a good bunch. Good strong lodge. See that
fellow there that's playing the snare drum? He's the smartest wholesale
grocer in Duluth, they say. Guess it would be worth joining. Oh say, are
you doing much insurance examining?"
They went on to the street fair.
Lining one block of Main Street were the "attractions"--two hot-dog
stands, a lemonade and pop-corn stand, a merry-go-round, and booths in
which balls might be thrown at rag dolls, if one wished to throw balls
at rag dolls. The dignified delegates were shy of the booths, but
country boys with brickred necks and pale-blue ties and bright-yellow
shoes, who had brought sweethearts into town in somewhat dusty and
listed Fords, were wolfing sandwiches, drinking strawberry pop out of
bottles, and riding the revolving crimson and gold horses. They shrieked
and giggled; peanut-roasters whistled; the merry-go-round pounded out
monotonous music; the barkers bawled, "Here's your chance--here's
your chance--come on here, boy--come on here--give that girl a good
time--give her a swell time--here's your chance to win a genuwine gold
watch for five cents, half a dime, the twentieth part of a dollah!"
The prairie sun jabbed the unshaded street with shafts that were like
poisonous thorns the tinny cornices above the brick stores were glaring;
the dull breeze scattered dust on sweaty Beavers who crawled along in
tight scorching new shoes, up two blocks and back, up two blocks and
back, wondering what to do next, working at having a good time.
Carol's head ached as she trailed behind the unsmiling Calibrees along
the block of booths. She chirruped at Kennicott, "Let's be wild! Let's
ride on the merry-go-round and grab a gold ring!"
Kennicott considered it, and mumbled to Calibree, "Think you folks would
like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?"
Calibree considered it, and mumbled to his wife, "Think you'd like to
stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?"
Mrs. Calibree smiled in a washed-out manner, and sighed, "Oh no, I don't
believe I care to much, but you folks go ahead and try it."
Calibree stated to Kennicott, "No, I don't believe we care to a whole
lot, but you folks go ahead and try it."
Kennicott summarized the whole case against wildness: "Let's try it some
other time, Carrie."
She gave it up. She looked at the town. She saw that in adventuring
from Main Street, Gopher Prairie, to Main Street, Joralemon, she had not
stirred. There were the same two-story brick groceries with lodge-signs
above the awnings; the same one-story wooden millinery shop; the same
fire-brick garages; the same prairie at the open end of the wide
street; the same people wondering whether the levity of eating a hot-dog
sandwich would break their taboos.
They reached Gopher Prairie at nine in the evening.
"You look kind of hot," said Kennicott.
"Yes."
"Joralemon is an enterprising town, don't you think so?" She broke. "No!
I think it's an ash-heap."
"Why, Carrie!"
He worried over it for a week. While he ground his plate with his knife
as he energetically pursued fragments of bacon, he peeped at her.
| After Bresnahan has left Gopher Prairie, Carol becomes especially sensitive to all the things she finds ugly about her husband. She doesn't bother to act happy when he has his gross friends over for a poker night. Once the poker guys have left, Carol has a huge fight with Will. She calls his friends disgusting and rude, while he says he's sick of his friends not wanting to come over because Carol is so judgmental. Over time, Carol decides that what she really wants is a room of her own. She begins to use a spare room as her place of escape. She also starts sleeping in this room and away from Will. Will seems to sense Carol's dissatisfaction, because one night he tells her he's thinking of building a new house. Carol thinks of this new house as a way to make her mark on the beauty of Gopher Prairie, but she's crushed to realize that Will wants a house that'll look just like anyone else's. After ten days, the thought of the new house is forgotten because Carol loses interest. Carol thinks she would like to take a trip East to New York. Will thinks it's a good idea at first, but then he backs off when he feels like he's too busy with work. Instead, Will takes Carol to a street fair in another middle-of-nowhere prairie town. They stay with a man named Calibree, and even when Carol tries to participate in the conversation, the men talk about other things she doesn't understand. Carol tries to get Will to ride a merry-go-round with her at the street fair, but nothing doing: Will isn't into it. Once again, Carol goes from feeling young to feeling old. | summary |
CHAPTER XXV
"CARRIE'S all right. She's finicky, but she'll get over it. But I wish
she'd hurry up about it! What she can't understand is that a fellow
practising medicine in a small town like this has got to cut out the
highbrow stuff, and not spend all his time going to concerts and
shining his shoes. (Not but what he might be just as good at all these
intellectual and art things as some other folks, if he had the time
for it!)" Dr. Will Kennicott was brooding in his office, during a free
moment toward the end of the summer afternoon. He hunched down in his
tilted desk-chair, undid a button of his shirt, glanced at the state
news in the back of the Journal of the American Medical Association,
dropped the magazine, leaned back with his right thumb hooked in the
arm-hole of his vest and his left thumb stroking the back of his hair.
"By golly, she's taking an awful big chance, though. You'd expect her
to learn by and by that I won't be a parlor lizard. She says we try
to 'make her over.' Well, she's always trying to make me over, from a
perfectly good M. D. into a damn poet with a socialist necktie! She'd
have a fit if she knew how many women would be willing to cuddle up to
Friend Will and comfort him, if he'd give 'em the chance! There's still
a few dames that think the old man isn't so darn unattractive! I'm
glad I've ducked all that woman-game since I've been married but----Be
switched if sometimes I don't feel tempted to shine up to some girl that
has sense enough to take life as it is; some frau that doesn't want to
talk Longfellow all the time, but just hold my hand and say, 'You look
all in, honey. Take it easy, and don't try to talk.'
"Carrie thinks she's such a whale at analyzing folks. Giving the town
the once-over. Telling us where we get off. Why, she'd simply turn up
her toes and croak if she found out how much she doesn't know about the
high old times a wise guy could have in this burg on the Q.T., if he
wasn't faithful to his wife. But I am. At that, no matter what faults
she's got, there's nobody here, no, nor in Minn'aplus either, that's as
nice-looking and square and bright as Carrie. She ought to of been an
artist or a writer or one of those things. But once she took a shot at
living here, she ought to stick by it. Pretty----Lord yes. But cold. She
simply doesn't know what passion is. She simply hasn't got an i-dea how
hard it is for a full-blooded man to go on pretending to be satisfied
with just being endured. It gets awful tiresome, having to feel like a
criminal just because I'm normal. She's getting so she doesn't even care
for my kissing her. Well----
"I guess I can weather it, same as I did earning my way through school
and getting started in practise. But I wonder how long I can stand being
an outsider in my own home?"
He sat up at the entrance of Mrs. Dave Dyer. She slumped into a chair
and gasped with the heat. He chuckled, "Well, well, Maud, this is fine.
Where's the subscription-list? What cause do I get robbed for, this
trip?"
"I haven't any subscription-list, Will. I want to see you
professionally."
"And you a Christian Scientist? Have you given that up? What next? New
Thought or Spiritualism?"
"No, I have not given it up!"
"Strikes me it's kind of a knock on the sisterhood, your coming to see a
doctor!"
"No, it isn't. It's just that my faith isn't strong enough yet. So there
now! And besides, you ARE kind of consoling, Will. I mean as a man, not
just as a doctor. You're so strong and placid."
He sat on the edge of his desk, coatless, his vest swinging open with
the thick gold line of his watch-chain across the gap, his hands in his
trousers pockets, his big arms bent and easy. As she purred he cocked
an interested eye. Maud Dyer was neurotic, religiocentric, faded; her
emotions were moist, and her figure was unsystematic--splendid thighs
and arms, with thick ankles, and a body that was bulgy in the wrong
places. But her milky skin was delicious, her eyes were alive, her
chestnut hair shone, and there was a tender slope from her ears to the
shadowy place below her jaw.
With unusual solicitude he uttered his stock phrase, "Well, what seems
to be the matter, Maud?"
"I've got such a backache all the time. I'm afraid the organic trouble
that you treated me for is coming back."
"Any definite signs of it?"
"N-no, but I think you'd better examine me."
"Nope. Don't believe it's necessary, Maud. To be honest, between old
friends, I think your troubles are mostly imaginary. I can't really
advise you to have an examination."
She flushed, looked out of the window. He was conscious that his voice
was not impersonal and even.
She turned quickly. "Will, you always say my troubles are imaginary. Why
can't you be scientific? I've been reading an article about these new
nerve-specialists, and they claim that lots of 'imaginary' ailments,
yes, and lots of real pain, too, are what they call psychoses, and they
order a change in a woman's way of living so she can get on a higher
plane----"
"Wait! Wait! Whoa-up! Wait now! Don't mix up your Christian Science and
your psychology! They're two entirely different fads! You'll be mixing
in socialism next! You're as bad as Carrie, with your 'psychoses.'
Why, Good Lord, Maud, I could talk about neuroses and psychoses and
inhibitions and repressions and complexes just as well as any damn
specialist, if I got paid for it, if I was in the city and had the nerve
to charge the fees that those fellows do. If a specialist stung you for
a hundred-dollar consultation-fee and told you to go to New York to duck
Dave's nagging, you'd do it, to save the hundred dollars! But you know
me--I'm your neighbor--you see me mowing the lawn--you figure I'm just
a plug general practitioner. If I said, 'Go to New York,' Dave and you
would laugh your heads off and say, 'Look at the airs Will is putting
on. What does he think he is?'
"As a matter of fact, you're right. You have a perfectly well-developed
case of repression of sex instinct, and it raises the old Ned with your
body. What you need is to get away from Dave and travel, yes, and go to
every dog-gone kind of New Thought and Bahai and Swami and Hooptedoodle
meeting you can find. I know it, well 's you do. But how can I advise
it? Dave would be up here taking my hide off. I'm willing to be family
physician and priest and lawyer and plumber and wet-nurse, but I draw
the line at making Dave loosen up on money. Too hard a job in weather
like this! So, savvy, my dear? Believe it will rain if this heat
keeps----"
"But, Will, he'd never give it to me on my say-so. He'd never let me
go away. You know how Dave is: so jolly and liberal in society, and oh,
just LOVES to match quarters, and such a perfect sport if he loses! But
at home he pinches a nickel till the buffalo drips blood. I have to nag
him for every single dollar."
"Sure, I know, but it's your fight, honey. Keep after him. He'd simply
resent my butting in."
He crossed over and patted her shoulder. Outside the window, beyond the
fly-screen that was opaque with dust and cottonwood lint, Main Street
was hushed except for the impatient throb of a standing motor car. She
took his firm hand, pressed his knuckles against her cheek.
"O Will, Dave is so mean and little and noisy--the shrimp! You're
so calm. When he's cutting up at parties I see you standing back and
watching him--the way a mastiff watches a terrier."
He fought for professional dignity with, "Dave 's not a bad fellow."
Lingeringly she released his hand. "Will, drop round by the house this
evening and scold me. Make me be good and sensible. And I'm so lonely."
"If I did, Dave would be there, and we'd have to play cards. It's his
evening off from the store."
"No. The clerk just got called to Corinth--mother sick. Dave will be in
the store till midnight. Oh, come on over. There's some lovely beer on
the ice, and we can sit and talk and be all cool and lazy. That wouldn't
be wrong of us, WOULD it!"
"No, no, course it wouldn't be wrong. But still, oughtn't to----" He saw
Carol, slim black and ivory, cool, scornful of intrigue.
"All right. But I'll be so lonely."
Her throat seemed young, above her loose blouse of muslin and
machine-lace.
"Tell you, Maud: I'll drop in just for a minute, if I happen to be
called down that way."
"If you'd like," demurely. "O Will, I just want comfort. I know you're
all married, and my, such a proud papa, and of course now----If I could
just sit near you in the dusk, and be quiet, and forget Dave! You WILL
come?"
"Sure I will!"
"I'll expect you. I'll be lonely if you don't come! Good-by."
He cursed himself: "Darned fool, what 'd I promise to go for? I'll
have to keep my promise, or she'll feel hurt. She's a good, decent,
affectionate girl, and Dave's a cheap skate, all right. She's got more
life to her than Carol has. All my fault, anyway. Why can't I be more
cagey, like Calibree and McGanum and the rest of the doctors? Oh, I
am, but Maud's such a demanding idiot. Deliberately bamboozling me into
going up there tonight. Matter of principle: ought not to let her get
away with it. I won't go. I'll call her up and tell her I won't go.
Me, with Carrie at home, finest little woman in the world, and a
messy-minded female like Maud Dyer--no, SIR! Though there's no need of
hurting her feelings. I may just drop in for a second, to tell her I
can't stay. All my fault anyway; ought never to have started in and
jollied Maud along in the old days. If it's my fault, I've got no right
to punish Maud. I could just drop in for a second and then pretend I
had a country call and beat it. Damn nuisance, though, having to fake up
excuses. Lord, why can't the women let you alone? Just because once or
twice, seven hundred million years ago, you were a poor fool, why can't
they let you forget it? Maud's own fault. I'll stay strictly away. Take
Carrie to the movies, and forget Maud. . . . But it would be kind of hot
at the movies tonight."
He fled from himself. He rammed on his hat, threw his coat over his arm,
banged the door, locked it, tramped downstairs. "I won't go!" he said
sturdily and, as he said it, he would have given a good deal to know
whether he was going.
He was refreshed, as always, by the familiar windows and faces. It
restored his soul to have Sam Clark trustingly bellow, "Better come down
to the lake this evening and have a swim, doc. Ain't you going to open
your cottage at all, this summer? By golly, we miss you." He noted the
progress on the new garage. He had triumphed in the laying of every
course of bricks; in them he had seen the growth of the town. His pride
was ushered back to its throne by the respectfulness of Oley Sundquist:
"Evenin', doc! The woman is a lot better. That was swell medicine you
gave her." He was calmed by the mechanicalness of the tasks at home:
burning the gray web of a tent-worm on the wild cherry tree, sealing
with gum a cut in the right front tire of the car, sprinkling the road
before the house. The hose was cool to his hands. As the bright arrows
fell with a faint puttering sound, a crescent of blackness was formed in
the gray dust.
Dave Dyer came along.
"Where going, Dave?"
"Down to the store. Just had supper."
"But Thursday 's your night off."
"Sure, but Pete went home. His mother 's supposed to be sick. Gosh,
these clerks you get nowadays--overpay 'em and then they won't work!"
"That's tough, Dave. You'll have to work clear up till twelve, then."
"Yup. Better drop in and have a cigar, if you're downtown.
"Well, I may, at that. May have to go down and see Mrs. Champ Perry.
She's ailing. So long, Dave."
Kennicott had not yet entered the house. He was conscious that Carol was
near him, that she was important, that he was afraid of her disapproval;
but he was content to be alone. When he had finished sprinkling he
strolled into the house, up to the baby's room, and cried to Hugh,
"Story-time for the old man, eh?"
Carol was in a low chair, framed and haloed by the window behind her,
an image in pale gold. The baby curled in her lap, his head on her arm,
listening with gravity while she sang from Gene Field:
'Tis little Luddy-Dud in the morning--
'Tis little Luddy-Dud at night:
And all day long
'Tis the same dear song
Of that growing, crowing, knowing little sprite.
Kennicott was enchanted.
"Maud Dyer? I should say not!"
When the current maid bawled up-stairs, "Supper on de table!" Kennicott
was upon his back, flapping his hands in the earnest effort to be a
seal, thrilled by the strength with which his son kicked him. He slipped
his arm about Carol's shoulder; he went down to supper rejoicing that he
was cleansed of perilous stuff. While Carol was putting the baby to
bed he sat on the front steps. Nat Hicks, tailor and roue, came to sit
beside him. Between waves of his hand as he drove off mosquitos, Nat
whispered, "Say, doc, you don't feel like imagining you're a bacheldore
again, and coming out for a Time tonight, do you?"
"As how?"
"You know this new dressmaker, Mrs. Swiftwaite?--swell dame with
blondine hair? Well, she's a pretty good goer. Me and Harry Haydock are
going to take her and that fat wren that works in the Bon Ton--nice kid,
too--on an auto ride tonight. Maybe we'll drive down to that farm Harry
bought. We're taking some beer, and some of the smoothest rye you ever
laid tongue to. I'm not predicting none, but if we don't have a picnic,
I'll miss my guess."
"Go to it. No skin off my ear, Nat. Think I want to be fifth wheel in
the coach?"
"No, but look here: The little Swiftwaite has a friend with her from
Winona, dandy looker and some gay bird, and Harry and me thought maybe
you'd like to sneak off for one evening."
"No--no----"
"Rats now, doc, forget your everlasting dignity. You used to be a pretty
good sport yourself, when you were foot-free."
It may have been the fact that Mrs. Swiftwaite's friend remained to
Kennicott an ill-told rumor, it may have been Carol's voice, wistful
in the pallid evening as she sang to Hugh, it may have been natural and
commendable virtue, but certainly he was positive:
"Nope. I'm married for keeps. Don't pretend to be any saint. Like to
get out and raise Cain and shoot a few drinks. But a fellow owes a
duty----Straight now, won't you feel like a sneak when you come back to
the missus after your jamboree?"
"Me? My moral in life is, 'What they don't know won't hurt 'em none.'
The way to handle wives, like the fellow says, is to catch 'em early,
treat 'em rough, and tell 'em nothing!"
"Well, that's your business, I suppose. But I can't get away with it.
Besides that--way I figure it, this illicit love-making is the one game
that you always lose at. If you do lose, you feel foolish; and if you
win, as soon as you find out how little it is that you've been scheming
for, why then you lose worse than ever. Nature stinging us, as usual.
But at that, I guess a lot of wives in this burg would be surprised if
they knew everything that goes on behind their backs, eh, Nattie?"
"WOULD they! Say, boy! If the good wives knew what some of the boys get
away with when they go down to the Cities, why, they'd throw a fit!
Sure you won't come, doc? Think of getting all cooled off by a good long
drive, and then the lov-e-ly Swiftwaite's white hand mixing you a good
stiff highball!"
"Nope. Nope. Sorry. Guess I won't," grumbled Kennicott.
He was glad that Nat showed signs of going. But he was restless. He
heard Carol on the stairs. "Come have a seat--have the whole earth!" he
shouted jovially.
She did not answer his joviality. She sat on the porch, rocked silently,
then sighed, "So many mosquitos out here. You haven't had the screen
fixed."
As though he was testing her he said quietly, "Head aching again?"
"Oh, not much, but----This maid is SO slow to learn. I have to show her
everything. I had to clean most of the silver myself. And Hugh was so
bad all afternoon. He whined so. Poor soul, he was hot, but he did wear
me out."
"Uh----You usually want to get out. Like to walk down to the lake shore?
(The girl can stay home.) Or go to the movies? Come on, let's go to the
movies! Or shall we jump in the car and run out to Sam's, for a swim?"
"If you don't mind, dear, I'm afraid I'm rather tired."
"Why don't you sleep down-stairs tonight, on the couch? Be cooler. I'm
going to bring down my mattress. Come on! Keep the old man company.
Can't tell--I might get scared of burglars. Lettin' little fellow like
me stay all alone by himself!"
"It's sweet of you to think of it, but I like my own room so much. But
you go ahead and do it, dear. Why don't you sleep on the couch, instead
of putting your mattress on the floor? Well I believe I'll run in and
read for just a second--want to look at the last Vogue--and then perhaps
I'll go by-by. Unless you want me, dear? Of course if there's anything
you really WANT me for?"
"No. No. . . . Matter of fact, I really ought to run down and see Mrs.
Champ Perry. She's ailing. So you skip in and----May drop in at the drug
store. If I'm not home when you get sleepy, don't wait up for me."
He kissed her, rambled off, nodded to Jim Howland, stopped indifferently
to speak to Mrs. Terry Gould. But his heart was racing, his stomach
was constricted. He walked more slowly. He reached Dave Dyer's yard. He
glanced in. On the porch, sheltered by a wild-grape vine, was the
figure of a woman in white. He heard the swing-couch creak as she sat up
abruptly, peered, then leaned back and pretended to relax.
"Be nice to have some cool beer. Just drop in for a second," he
insisted, as he opened the Dyer gate.
II
Mrs. Bogart was calling upon Carol, protected by Aunt Bessie Smail.
"Have you heard about this awful woman that's supposed to have come here
to do dressmaking--a Mrs. Swiftwaite--awful peroxide blonde?" moaned
Mrs. Bogart. "They say there's some of the awfullest goings-on at her
house--mere boys and old gray-headed rips sneaking in there evenings
and drinking licker and every kind of goings-on. We women can't never
realize the carnal thoughts in the hearts of men. I tell you, even
though I been acquainted with Will Kennicott almost since he was a mere
boy, seems like, I wouldn't trust even him! Who knows what designin'
women might tempt him! Especially a doctor, with women rushin' in to see
him at his office and all! You know I never hint around, but haven't you
felt that----"
Carol was furious. "I don't pretend that Will has no faults. But one
thing I do know: He's as simple-hearted about what you call 'goings-on'
as a babe. And if he ever were such a sad dog as to look at another
woman, I certainly hope he'd have spirit enough to do the tempting, and
not be coaxed into it, as in your depressing picture!"
"Why, what a wicked thing to say, Carrie!" from Aunt Bessie.
"No, I mean it! Oh, of course, I don't mean it! But----I know every
thought in his head so well that he couldn't hide anything even if he
wanted to. Now this morning----He was out late, last night; he had to
go see Mrs. Perry, who is ailing, and then fix a man's hand, and this
morning he was so quiet and thoughtful at breakfast and----" She leaned
forward, breathed dramatically to the two perched harpies, "What do you
suppose he was thinking of?"
"What?" trembled Mrs. Bogart.
"Whether the grass needs cutting, probably! There, there! Don't mind my
naughtiness. I have some fresh-made raisin cookies for you."
| Will sits in his office and broods about Carol's dissatisfaction. He simply can't see why she hasn't gotten used to her situation in Gopher Prairie yet. Part of him thinks that she's intentionally resisting satisfaction because she has too much pride. While Will broods, a woman named Maud Dyer comes into his office asking him to examine her. He's surprised to see her, because Maud supposedly believes that only God should heal sickness. We get the sense, though, that Maud just wants Will to examine her body for its own sake, if you catch our meaning... Will seems to catch Mrs. Dyer's drift, too. So he tells her that she has a repressed sex instinct and instructs her to take a vacation to help give herself an outlet for it. Before leaving, Mrs. Dyer asks Will to come to her house that night and "scold" her, since her husband will be out and she'll be feeling lonely. Instead of going to Maud Dyer's, Will goes home to be with Carol and their son Hugh. But the temptations keep coming when his buddy Nat Hicks comes to his house and invites him out for a rowdy night with some beer and some local girls. Again, Will does the right thing and turns down the opportunity to get wild. When he comes back into the house, Will is so proud of himself that he asks Carol to start sleeping in the same bed with him again. She refuses and says she likes her own bed. So once again, Will hits a brick wall when he tries to establish intimacy with his wife. Will heads back out into the street and walks to Maud Dyer's house. He peeks through the window and sees she's alone. The last time we see him, he's pushing the gate of the house and walking through. Back at the Kennicott house, we find Mrs. Bogart paying a visit to Carol. Mrs. Bogart is complaining about a local woman named Mrs. Swiftwaite, who's new to town and apparently a little too friendly with the men. Mrs. Bogart tells Carol to be careful letting Will around this new woman. Carol gets offended and says that Will is the most loyal husband in the world. She doesn't realize that at this very moment, Will is alone with another woman. Carol makes the mistake of thinking that Will only thinks about furnaces and cutting the grass. | summary |
CHAPTER XXVI
CAROL'S liveliest interest was in her walks with the baby. Hugh wanted
to know what the box-elder tree said, and what the Ford garage said, and
what the big cloud said, and she told him, with a feeling that she was
not in the least making up stories, but discovering the souls of things.
They had an especial fondness for the hitching-post in front of the
mill. It was a brown post, stout and agreeable; the smooth leg of it
held the sunlight, while its neck, grooved by hitching-straps, tickled
one's fingers. Carol had never been awake to the earth except as a show
of changing color and great satisfying masses; she had lived in people
and in ideas about having ideas; but Hugh's questions made her attentive
to the comedies of sparrows, robins, blue jays, yellowhammers; she
regained her pleasure in the arching flight of swallows, and added to it
a solicitude about their nests and family squabbles.
She forgot her seasons of boredom. She said to Hugh, "We're two fat
disreputable old minstrels roaming round the world," and he echoed her,
"Roamin' round--roamin' round."
The high adventure, the secret place to which they both fled joyously,
was the house of Miles and Bea and Olaf Bjornstam.
Kennicott steadily disapproved of the Bjornstams. He protested, "What
do you want to talk to that crank for?" He hinted that a former "Swede
hired girl" was low company for the son of Dr. Will Kennicott. She did
not explain. She did not quite understand it herself; did not know that
in the Bjornstams she found her friends, her club, her sympathy and her
ration of blessed cynicism. For a time the gossip of Juanita Haydock and
the Jolly Seventeen had been a refuge from the droning of Aunt Bessie,
but the relief had not continued. The young matrons made her nervous.
They talked so loud, always so loud. They filled a room with
clashing cackle; their jests and gags they repeated nine times over.
Unconsciously, she had discarded the Jolly Seventeen, Guy Pollock, Vida,
and every one save Mrs. Dr. Westlake and the friends whom she did not
clearly know as friends--the Bjornstams.
To Hugh, the Red Swede was the most heroic and powerful person in the
world. With unrestrained adoration he trotted after while Miles fed the
cows, chased his one pig--an animal of lax and migratory instincts--or
dramatically slaughtered a chicken. And to Hugh, Olaf was lord among
mortal men, less stalwart than the old monarch, King Miles, but more
understanding of the relations and values of things, of small sticks,
lone playing-cards, and irretrievably injured hoops.
Carol saw, though she did not admit, that Olaf was not only more
beautiful than her own dark child, but more gracious. Olaf was a Norse
chieftain: straight, sunny-haired, large-limbed, resplendently amiable
to his subjects. Hugh was a vulgarian; a bustling business man. It was
Hugh that bounced and said "Let's play"; Olaf that opened luminous blue
eyes and agreed "All right," in condescending gentleness. If Hugh batted
him--and Hugh did bat him--Olaf was unafraid but shocked. In magnificent
solitude he marched toward the house, while Hugh bewailed his sin and
the overclouding of august favor.
The two friends played with an imperial chariot which Miles had made out
of a starch-box and four red spools; together they stuck switches into
a mouse-hole, with vast satisfaction though entirely without known
results.
Bea, the chubby and humming Bea, impartially gave cookies and scoldings
to both children, and if Carol refused a cup of coffee and a wafer of
buttered knackebrod, she was desolated.
Miles had done well with his dairy. He had six cows, two hundred
chickens, a cream separator, a Ford truck. In the spring he had built a
two-room addition to his shack. That illustrious building was to Hugh a
carnival. Uncle Miles did the most spectacular, unexpected things: ran
up the ladder; stood on the ridge-pole, waving a hammer and singing
something about "To arms, my citizens"; nailed shingles faster than
Aunt Bessie could iron handkerchiefs; and lifted a two-by-six with Hugh
riding on one end and Olaf on the other. Uncle Miles's most ecstatic
trick was to make figures not on paper but right on a new pine board,
with the broadest softest pencil in the world. There was a thing worth
seeing!
The tools! In his office Father had tools fascinating in their shininess
and curious shapes, but they were sharp, they were something called
sterized, and they distinctly were not for boys to touch. In fact it
was a good dodge to volunteer "I must not touch," when you looked at the
tools on the glass shelves in Father's office. But Uncle Miles, who
was a person altogether superior to Father, let you handle all his kit
except the saws. There was a hammer with a silver head; there was a
metal thing like a big L; there was a magic instrument, very precious,
made out of costly red wood and gold, with a tube which contained a
drop--no, it wasn't a drop, it was a nothing, which lived in the water,
but the nothing LOOKED like a drop, and it ran in a frightened way
up and down the tube, no matter how cautiously you tilted the magic
instrument. And there were nails, very different and clever--big
valiant spikes, middle-sized ones which were not very interesting, and
shingle-nails much jollier than the fussed-up fairies in the yellow
book.
II
While he had worked on the addition Miles had talked frankly to Carol.
He admitted now that so long as he stayed in Gopher Prairie he would
remain a pariah. Bea's Lutheran friends were as much offended by his
agnostic gibes as the merchants by his radicalism. "And I can't seem to
keep my mouth shut. I think I'm being a baa-lamb, and not springing any
theories wilder than 'c-a-t spells cat,' but when folks have gone, I
re'lize I've been stepping on their pet religious corns. Oh, the mill
foreman keeps dropping in, and that Danish shoemaker, and one fellow
from Elder's factory, and a few Svenskas, but you know Bea: big
good-hearted wench like her wants a lot of folks around--likes to fuss
over 'em--never satisfied unless she tiring herself out making coffee
for somebody.
"Once she kidnapped me and drug me to the Methodist Church. I goes in,
pious as Widow Bogart, and sits still and never cracks a smile while
the preacher is favoring us with his misinformation on evolution. But
afterwards, when the old stalwarts were pumphandling everybody at the
door and calling 'em 'Brother' and 'Sister,' they let me sail right by
with nary a clinch. They figure I'm the town badman. Always will be, I
guess. It'll have to be Olaf who goes on. 'And sometimes----Blamed if I
don't feel like coming out and saying, 'I've been conservative. Nothing
to it. Now I'm going to start something in these rotten one-horse
lumber-camps west of town.' But Bea's got me hypnotized. Lord, Mrs.
Kennicott, do you re'lize what a jolly, square, faithful woman she is?
And I love Olaf----Oh well, I won't go and get sentimental on you.
"Course I've had thoughts of pulling up stakes and going West. Maybe
if they didn't know it beforehand, they wouldn't find out I'd ever been
guilty of trying to think for myself. But--oh, I've worked hard, and
built up this dairy business, and I hate to start all over again, and
move Bea and the kid into another one-room shack. That's how they get
us! Encourage us to be thrifty and own our own houses, and then, by
golly, they've got us; they know we won't dare risk everything by
committing lez--what is it? lez majesty?--I mean they know we won't be
hinting around that if we had a co-operative bank, we could get along
without Stowbody. Well----As long as I can sit and play pinochle with
Bea, and tell whoppers to Olaf about his daddy's adventures in the
woods, and how he snared a wapaloosie and knew Paul Bunyan, why, I
don't mind being a bum. It's just for them that I mind. Say! Say! Don't
whisper a word to Bea, but when I get this addition done, I'm going to
buy her a phonograph!"
He did.
While she was busy with the activities her work-hungry muscles
found--washing, ironing, mending, baking, dusting, preserving, plucking
a chicken, painting the sink; tasks which, because she was Miles's full
partner, were exciting and creative--Bea listened to the phonograph
records with rapture like that of cattle in a warm stable. The addition
gave her a kitchen with a bedroom above. The original one-room shack was
now a living-room, with the phonograph, a genuine leather-upholstered
golden-oak rocker, and a picture of Governor John Johnson.
In late July Carol went to the Bjornstams' desirous of a chance to
express her opinion of Beavers and Calibrees and Joralemons. She found
Olaf abed, restless from a slight fever, and Bea flushed and dizzy but
trying to keep up her work. She lured Miles aside and worried:
"They don't look at all well. What's the matter?"
"Their stomachs are out of whack. I wanted to call in Doc Kennicott, but
Bea thinks the doc doesn't like us--she thinks maybe he's sore because
you come down here. But I'm getting worried."
"I'm going to call the doctor at once."
She yearned over Olaf. His lambent eyes were stupid, he moaned, he
rubbed his forehead.
"Have they been eating something that's been bad for them?" she
fluttered to Miles.
"Might be bum water. I'll tell you: We used to get our water at Oscar
Eklund's place, over across the street, but Oscar kept dinging at me,
and hinting I was a tightwad not to dig a well of my own. One time
he said, 'Sure, you socialists are great on divvying up other folks'
money--and water!' I knew if he kept it up there'd be a fuss, and I
ain't safe to have around, once a fuss starts; I'm likely to forget
myself and let loose with a punch in the snoot. I offered to pay Oscar
but he refused--he'd rather have the chance to kid me. So I starts
getting water down at Mrs. Fageros's, in the hollow there, and I don't
believe it's real good. Figuring to dig my own well this fall."
One scarlet word was before Carol's eyes while she listened. She fled to
Kennicott's office. He gravely heard her out; nodded, said, "Be right
over."
He examined Bea and Olaf. He shook his head. "Yes. Looks to me like
typhoid."
"Golly, I've seen typhoid in lumber-camps," groaned Miles, all the
strength dripping out of him. "Have they got it very bad?"
"Oh, we'll take good care of them," said Kennicott, and for the first
time in their acquaintance he smiled on Miles and clapped his shoulder.
"Won't you need a nurse?" demanded Carol.
"Why----" To Miles, Kennicott hinted, "Couldn't you get Bea's cousin,
Tina?"
"She's down at the old folks', in the country."
"Then let me do it!" Carol insisted. "They need some one to cook for
them, and isn't it good to give them sponge baths, in typhoid?"
"Yes. All right." Kennicott was automatic; he was the official, the
physician. "I guess probably it would be hard to get a nurse here in
town just now. Mrs. Stiver is busy with an obstetrical case, and that
town nurse of yours is off on vacation, ain't she? All right, Bjornstam
can spell you at night."
All week, from eight each morning till midnight, Carol fed them, bathed
them, smoothed sheets, took temperatures. Miles refused to let her cook.
Terrified, pallid, noiseless in stocking feet, he did the kitchen work
and the sweeping, his big red hands awkwardly careful. Kennicott came
in three times a day, unchangingly tender and hopeful in the sick-room,
evenly polite to Miles.
Carol understood how great was her love for her friends. It bore
her through; it made her arm steady and tireless to bathe them.
What exhausted her was the sight of Bea and Olaf turned into flaccid
invalids, uncomfortably flushed after taking food, begging for the
healing of sleep at night.
During the second week Olaf's powerful legs were flabby. Spots of a
viciously delicate pink came out on his chest and back. His cheeks sank.
He looked frightened. His tongue was brown and revolting. His confident
voice dwindled to a bewildered murmur, ceaseless and racking.
Bea had stayed on her feet too long at the beginning. The moment
Kennicott had ordered her to bed she had begun to collapse. One early
evening she startled them by screaming, in an intense abdominal pain,
and within half an hour she was in a delirium. Till dawn Carol was
with her, and not all of Bea's groping through the blackness of
half-delirious pain was so pitiful to Carol as the way in which Miles
silently peered into the room from the top of the narrow stairs.
Carol slept three hours next morning, and ran back. Bea was altogether
delirious but she muttered nothing save, "Olaf--ve have such a good
time----"
At ten, while Carol was preparing an ice-bag in the kitchen, Miles
answered a knock. At the front door she saw Vida Sherwin, Maud Dyer, and
Mrs. Zitterel, wife of the Baptist pastor. They were carrying grapes,
and women's-magazines, magazines with high-colored pictures and
optimistic fiction.
"We just heard your wife was sick. We've come to see if there isn't
something we can do," chirruped Vida.
Miles looked steadily at the three women. "You're too late. You can't
do nothing now. Bea's always kind of hoped that you folks would come see
her. She wanted to have a chance and be friends. She used to sit waiting
for somebody to knock. I've seen her sitting here, waiting. Now----Oh,
you ain't worth God-damning." He shut the door.
All day Carol watched Olaf's strength oozing. He was emaciated. His ribs
were grim clear lines, his skin was clammy, his pulse was feeble but
terrifyingly rapid. It beat--beat--beat in a drum-roll of death. Late
that afternoon he sobbed, and died.
Bea did not know it. She was delirious. Next morning, when she went,
she did not know that Olaf would no longer swing his lath sword on the
door-step, no longer rule his subjects of the cattle-yard; that Miles's
son would not go East to college.
Miles, Carol, Kennicott were silent. They washed the bodies together,
their eyes veiled.
"Go home now and sleep. You're pretty tired. I can't ever pay you back
for what you done," Miles whispered to Carol.
"Yes. But I'll be back here tomorrow. Go with you to the funeral," she
said laboriously.
When the time for the funeral came, Carol was in bed, collapsed. She
assumed that neighbors would go. They had not told her that word of
Miles's rebuff to Vida had spread through town, a cyclonic fury.
It was only by chance that, leaning on her elbow in bed, she glanced
through the window and saw the funeral of Bea and Olaf. There was
no music, no carriages. There was only Miles Bjornstam, in his black
wedding-suit, walking quite alone, head down, behind the shabby hearse
that bore the bodies of his wife and baby.
An hour after, Hugh came into her room crying, and when she said as
cheerily as she could, "What is it, dear?" he besought, "Mummy, I want
to go play with Olaf."
That afternoon Juanita Haydock dropped in to brighten Carol. She said,
"Too bad about this Bea that was your hired girl. But I don't waste
any sympathy on that man of hers. Everybody says he drank too much, and
treated his family awful, and that's how they got sick."
| Carol's favorite thing to do in Gopher Prairie is to take her son Hugh and visit Miles and Bea Bjornstam. Will doesn't like it one bit, because he thinks the Bjornstams are beneath them socially. Plus, Miles is a labor agitator. But Carol goes to the Bjornstams' anyway. She loves the way Miles lets the children hold his tools. She thinks that Miles's farm life is more authentic than her world of upper-class boredom. She's sad when Miles starts talking about moving his family West. One day, Carol drops by to find Miles's son Olaf and wife Bea looking pretty sick. Miles didn't want to call Will, because he thinks Will doesn't like him. But Carol calls Will right away. When Will has a chance to inspect Bea and Olaf, the news isn't good: he's figured out that both of them have typhoid fever. Carol volunteers to be the nurse while Will tries to treat them. When it becomes clear that neither Bea or Olaf will survive, some of the town's women come with food and offers for help, but Miles throws them off his front step, saying that his wife Bea had always hoped for visitors but had never had any, because everyone in the town was too stuck up. After Bea and Olaf have died, Carol goes home. Her son Hugh runs up to her crying and says he wants to play with Olaf. Meanwhile, the people around town hate Miles more than ever after he dared to insult the town's women. They also blame him for making his wife and child sick by being a terrible person. It's clear that this kind of talk totally shreds Carol's soul. | summary |
CHAPTER XXVII
I
A LETTER from Raymie Wutherspoon, in France, said that he had been sent
to the front, been slightly wounded, been made a captain. From Vida's
pride Carol sought to draw a stimulant to rouse her from depression.
Miles had sold his dairy. He had several thousand dollars. To Carol he
said good-by with a mumbled word, a harsh hand-shake, "Going to buy a
farm in northern Alberta--far off from folks as I can get." He turned
sharply away, but he did not walk with his former spring. His shoulders
seemed old.
It was said that before he went he cursed the town. There was talk
of arresting him, of riding him on a rail. It was rumored that at the
station old Champ Perry rebuked him, "You better not come back here.
We've got respect for your dead, but we haven't got any for a blasphemer
and a traitor that won't do anything for his country and only bought one
Liberty Bond."
Some of the people who had been at the station declared that Miles made
some dreadful seditious retort: something about loving German workmen
more than American bankers; but others asserted that he couldn't find
one word with which to answer the veteran; that he merely sneaked up on
the platform of the train. He must have felt guilty, everybody agreed,
for as the train left town, a farmer saw him standing in the vestibule
and looking out.
His house--with the addition which he had built four months ago--was
very near the track on which his train passed.
When Carol went there, for the last time, she found Olaf's chariot with
its red spool wheels standing in the sunny corner beside the stable. She
wondered if a quick eye could have noticed it from a train.
That day and that week she went reluctantly to Red Cross work; she
stitched and packed silently, while Vida read the war bulletins. And she
said nothing at all when Kennicott commented, "From what Champ says,
I guess Bjornstam was a bad egg, after all. In spite of Bea, don't
know but what the citizens' committee ought to have forced him to
be patriotic--let on like they could send him to jail if he didn't
volunteer and come through for bonds and the Y. M. C. A. They've worked
that stunt fine with all these German farmers."
II
She found no inspiration but she did find a dependable kindness in Mrs.
Westlake, and at last she yielded to the old woman's receptivity and had
relief in sobbing the story of Bea.
Guy Pollock she often met on the street, but he was merely a pleasant
voice which said things about Charles Lamb and sunsets.
Her most positive experience was the revelation of Mrs. Flickerbaugh,
the tall, thin, twitchy wife of the attorney. Carol encountered her at
the drug store.
"Walking?" snapped Mrs. Flickerbaugh.
"Why, yes."
"Humph. Guess you're the only female in this town that retains the use
of her legs. Come home and have a cup o' tea with me."
Because she had nothing else to do, Carol went. But she was
uncomfortable in the presence of the amused stares which Mrs.
Flickerbaugh's raiment drew. Today, in reeking early August, she wore a
man's cap, a skinny fur like a dead cat, a necklace of imitation pearls,
a scabrous satin blouse, and a thick cloth skirt hiked up in front.
"Come in. Sit down. Stick the baby in that rocker. Hope you don't mind
the house looking like a rat's nest. You don't like this town. Neither
do I," said Mrs. Flickerbaugh.
"Why----"
"Course you don't!"
"Well then, I don't! But I'm sure that some day I'll find some solution.
Probably I'm a hexagonal peg. Solution: find the hexagonal hole." Carol
was very brisk.
"How do you know you ever will find it?"
"There's Mrs. Westlake. She's naturally a big-city woman--she ought to
have a lovely old house in Philadelphia or Boston--but she escapes by
being absorbed in reading."
"You be satisfied to never do anything but read?"
"No, but Heavens, one can't go on hating a town always!"
"Why not? I can! I've hated it for thirty-two years. I'll die here--and
I'll hate it till I die. I ought to have been a business woman. I had
a good deal of talent for tending to figures. All gone now. Some folks
think I'm crazy. Guess I am. Sit and grouch. Go to church and sing
hymns. Folks think I'm religious. Tut! Trying to forget washing and
ironing and mending socks. Want an office of my own, and sell things.
Julius never hear of it. Too late."
Carol sat on the gritty couch, and sank into fear. Could this drabness
of life keep up forever, then? Would she some day so despise herself
and her neighbors that she too would walk Main Street an old skinny
eccentric woman in a mangy cat's-fur? As she crept home she felt that
the trap had finally closed. She went into the house, a frail small
woman, still winsome but hopeless of eye as she staggered with the
weight of the drowsy boy in her arms.
She sat alone on the porch, that evening. It seemed that Kennicott had
to make a professional call on Mrs. Dave Dyer.
Under the stilly boughs and the black gauze of dusk the street was
meshed in silence. There was but the hum of motor tires crunching the
road, the creak of a rocker on the Howlands' porch, the slap of a hand
attacking a mosquito, a heat-weary conversation starting and dying, the
precise rhythm of crickets, the thud of moths against the screen--sounds
that were a distilled silence. It was a street beyond the end of
the world, beyond the boundaries of hope. Though she should sit here
forever, no brave procession, no one who was interesting, would be
coming by. It was tediousness made tangible, a street builded of
lassitude and of futility.
Myrtle Cass appeared, with Cy Bogart. She giggled and bounced when Cy
tickled her ear in village love. They strolled with the half-dancing
gait of lovers, kicking their feet out sideways or shuffling a dragging
jig, and the concrete walk sounded to the broken two-four rhythm. Their
voices had a dusky turbulence. Suddenly, to the woman rocking on the
porch of the doctor's house, the night came alive, and she felt that
everywhere in the darkness panted an ardent quest which she was missing
as she sank back to wait for----There must be something.
| We learn that Vida Sherwin's husband, Raymie Wutherspoon, has been wounded in the war and made into a fancy military captain for his trouble. Meanwhile, Miles Bjornstam sells his dairy and gets out of Gopher Prairie once and for all. His departure is crushing to Carol. A woman named Mrs. Flickerbaugh invites Carol over for tea. Carol is hesitant because the woman is eccentric, but she eventually agrees. Once they talk for a while, Carol is horrified to learn that Mrs. Flickerbaugh has hated Gopher Prairie her whole life and that she will probably end up like her. | summary |
CHAPTER XXVIII
IT WAS at a supper of the Jolly Seventeen in August that Carol heard of
"Elizabeth," from Mrs. Dave Dyer.
Carol was fond of Maud Dyer, because she had been particularly agreeable
lately; had obviously repented of the nervous distaste which she had
once shown. Maud patted her hand when they met, and asked about Hugh.
Kennicott said that he was "kind of sorry for the girl, some ways; she's
too darn emotional, but still, Dave is sort of mean to her." He was
polite to poor Maud when they all went down to the cottages for a swim.
Carol was proud of that sympathy in him, and now she took pains to sit
with their new friend.
Mrs. Dyer was bubbling, "Oh, have you folks heard about this young
fellow that's just come to town that the boys call 'Elizabeth'? He's
working in Nat Hicks's tailor shop. I bet he doesn't make eighteen a
week, but my! isn't he the perfect lady though! He talks so refined, and
oh, the lugs he puts on--belted coat, and pique collar with a gold pin,
and socks to match his necktie, and honest--you won't believe this, but
I got it straight--this fellow, you know he's staying at Mrs. Gurrey's
punk old boarding-house, and they say he asked Mrs. Gurrey if he ought
to put on a dress-suit for supper! Imagine! Can you beat that? And him
nothing but a Swede tailor--Erik Valborg his name is. But he used to be
in a tailor shop in Minneapolis (they do say he's a smart needle-pusher,
at that) and he tries to let on that he's a regular city fellow. They
say he tries to make people think he's a poet--carries books around and
pretends to read 'em. Myrtle Cass says she met him at a dance, and he
was mooning around all over the place, and he asked her did she like
flowers and poetry and music and everything; he spieled like he was a
regular United States Senator; and Myrtle--she's a devil, that girl,
ha! ha!--she kidded him along, and got him going, and honest, what d'you
think he said? He said he didn't find any intellectual companionship
in this town. Can you BEAT it? Imagine! And him a Swede tailor! My! And
they say he's the most awful mollycoddle--looks just like a girl. The
boys call him 'Elizabeth,' and they stop him and ask about the books he
lets on to have read, and he goes and tells them, and they take it
all in and jolly him terribly, and he never gets onto the fact they're
kidding him. Oh, I think it's just TOO funny!"
The Jolly Seventeen laughed, and Carol laughed with them. Mrs. Jack
Elder added that this Erik Valborg had confided to Mrs. Gurrey that he
would "love to design clothes for women." Imagine! Mrs. Harvey Dillon
had had a glimpse of him, but honestly, she'd thought he was awfully
handsome. This was instantly controverted by Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife
of the banker. Mrs. Gougerling had had, she reported, a good look
at this Valborg fellow. She and B. J. had been motoring, and passed
"Elizabeth" out by McGruder's Bridge. He was wearing the awfullest
clothes, with the waist pinched in like a girl's. He was sitting on
a rock doing nothing, but when he heard the Gougerling car coming he
snatched a book out of his pocket, and as they went by he pretended to
be reading it, to show off. And he wasn't really good-looking--just kind
of soft, as B. J. had pointed out.
When the husbands came they joined in the expose. "My name is Elizabeth.
I'm the celebrated musical tailor. The skirts fall for me by the thou.
Do I get some more veal loaf?" merrily shrieked Dave Dyer. He had some
admirable stories about the tricks the town youngsters had played on
Valborg. They had dropped a decaying perch into his pocket. They had
pinned on his back a sign, "I'm the prize boob, kick me."
Glad of any laughter, Carol joined the frolic, and surprised them by
crying, "Dave, I do think you're the dearest thing since you got your
hair cut!" That was an excellent sally. Everybody applauded. Kennicott
looked proud.
She decided that sometime she really must go out of her way to pass
Hicks's shop and see this freak.
II
She was at Sunday morning service at the Baptist Church, in a solemn row
with her husband, Hugh, Uncle Whittier, Aunt Bessie.
Despite Aunt Bessie's nagging the Kennicotts rarely attended church. The
doctor asserted, "Sure, religion is a fine influence--got to have it to
keep the lower classes in order--fact, it's the only thing that appeals
to a lot of those fellows and makes 'em respect the rights of property.
And I guess this theology is O.K.; lot of wise old coots figured it
all out, and they knew more about it than we do." He believed in the
Christian religion, and never thought about it, he believed in the
church, and seldom went near it; he was shocked by Carol's lack of
faith, and wasn't quite sure what was the nature of the faith that she
lacked.
Carol herself was an uneasy and dodging agnostic.
When she ventured to Sunday School and heard the teachers droning that
the genealogy of Shamsherai was a valuable ethical problem for children
to think about; when she experimented with Wednesday prayer-meeting and
listened to store-keeping elders giving their unvarying weekly testimony
in primitive erotic symbols and such gory Chaldean phrases as "washed
in the blood of the lamb" and "a vengeful God"; when Mrs. Bogart boasted
that through his boyhood she had made Cy confess nightly upon the basis
of the Ten Commandments; then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian
religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as
Zoroastrianism--without the splendor. But when she went to church
suppers and felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with which the sisters
served cold ham and scalloped potatoes; when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to
her, on an afternoon call, "My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes
you to come into abiding grace," then Carol found the humanness behind
the sanguinary and alien theology. Always she perceived that the
churches--Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Catholic, all of
them--which had seemed so unimportant to the judge's home in her
childhood, so isolated from the city struggle in St. Paul, were
still, in Gopher Prairie, the strongest of the forces compelling
respectability.
This August Sunday she had been tempted by the announcement that the
Reverend Edmund Zitterel would preach on the topic "America, Face Your
Problems!" With the great war, workmen in every nation showing a desire
to control industries, Russia hinting a leftward revolution against
Kerensky, woman suffrage coming, there seemed to be plenty of problems
for the Reverend Mr. Zitterel to call on America to face. Carol gathered
her family and trotted off behind Uncle Whittier.
The congregation faced the heat with informality. Men with highly
plastered hair, so painfully shaved that their faces looked sore,
removed their coats, sighed, and unbuttoned two buttons of their
uncreased Sunday vests. Large-bosomed, white-bloused, hot-necked,
spectacled matrons--the Mothers in Israel, pioneers and friends of Mrs.
Champ Perry--waved their palm-leaf fans in a steady rhythm. Abashed boys
slunk into the rear pews and giggled, while milky little girls, up front
with their mothers, self-consciously kept from turning around.
The church was half barn and half Gopher Prairie parlor. The streaky
brown wallpaper was broken in its dismal sweep only by framed texts,
"Come unto Me" and "The Lord is My Shepherd," by a list of hymns, and by
a crimson and green diagram, staggeringly drawn upon hemp-colored paper,
indicating the alarming ease with which a young man may descend from
Palaces of Pleasure and the House of Pride to Eternal Damnation. But the
varnished oak pews and the new red carpet and the three large chairs on
the platform, behind the bare reading-stand, were all of a rocking-chair
comfort.
Carol was civic and neighborly and commendable today. She beamed and
bowed. She trolled out with the others the hymn:
How pleasant 'tis on Sabbath morn
To gather in the church
And there I'll have no carnal thoughts,
Nor sin shall me besmirch.
With a rustle of starched linen skirts and stiff shirt-fronts, the
congregation sat down, and gave heed to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel. The
priest was a thin, swart, intense young man with a bang. He wore a
black sack suit and a lilac tie. He smote the enormous Bible on the
reading-stand, vociferated, "Come, let us reason together," delivered a
prayer informing Almighty God of the news of the past week, and began to
reason.
It proved that the only problems which America had to face were
Mormonism and Prohibition:
"Don't let any of these self-conceited fellows that are always trying to
stir up trouble deceive you with the belief that there's anything to
all these smart-aleck movements to let the unions and the Farmers'
Nonpartisan League kill all our initiative and enterprise by fixing
wages and prices. There isn't any movement that amounts to a whoop
without it's got a moral background. And let me tell you that while
folks are fussing about what they call 'economics' and 'socialism'
and 'science' and a lot of things that are nothing in the world but a
disguise for atheism, the Old Satan is busy spreading his secret net
and tentacles out there in Utah, under his guise of Joe Smith or Brigham
Young or whoever their leaders happen to be today, it doesn't make any
difference, and they're making game of the Old Bible that has led this
American people through its manifold trials and tribulations to its firm
position as the fulfilment of the prophecies and the recognized leader
of all nations. 'Sit thou on my right hand till I make thine enemies
the footstool of my feet,' said the Lord of Hosts, Acts II, the
thirty-fourth verse--and let me tell you right now, you got to get up a
good deal earlier in the morning than you get up even when you're going
fishing, if you want to be smarter than the Lord, who has shown us the
straight and narrow way, and he that passeth therefrom is in
eternal peril and, to return to this vital and terrible subject of
Mormonism--and as I say, it is terrible to realize how little attention
is given to this evil right here in our midst and on our very doorstep,
as it were--it's a shame and a disgrace that the Congress of these
United States spends all its time talking about inconsequential
financial matters that ought to be left to the Treasury Department, as I
understand it, instead of arising in their might and passing a law that
any one admitting he is a Mormon shall simply be deported and as it were
kicked out of this free country in which we haven't got any room for
polygamy and the tyrannies of Satan.
"And, to digress for a moment, especially as there are more of them in
this state than there are Mormons, though you never can tell what will
happen with this vain generation of young girls, that think more about
wearing silk stockings than about minding their mothers and learning to
bake a good loaf of bread, and many of them listening to these sneaking
Mormon missionaries--and I actually heard one of them talking right out
on a street-corner in Duluth, a few years ago, and the officers of the
law not protesting--but still, as they are a smaller but more immediate
problem, let me stop for just a moment to pay my respects to these
Seventh-Day Adventists. Not that they are immoral, I don't mean, but
when a body of men go on insisting that Saturday is the Sabbath, after
Christ himself has clearly indicated the new dispensation, then I think
the legislature ought to step in----"
At this point Carol awoke.
She got through three more minutes by studying the face of a girl in
the pew across: a sensitive unhappy girl whose longing poured out
with intimidating self-revelation as she worshiped Mr. Zitterel. Carol
wondered who the girl was. She had seen her at church suppers. She
considered how many of the three thousand people in the town she did not
know; to how many of them the Thanatopsis and the Jolly Seventeen were
icy social peaks; how many of them might be toiling through boredom
thicker than her own--with greater courage.
She examined her nails. She read two hymns. She got some satisfaction
out of rubbing an itching knuckle. She pillowed on her shoulder the head
of the baby who, after killing time in the same manner as his mother,
was so fortunate as to fall asleep. She read the introduction,
title-page, and acknowledgment of copyrights, in the hymnal. She tried
to evolve a philosophy which would explain why Kennicott could never
tie his scarf so that it would reach the top of the gap in his turn-down
collar.
There were no other diversions to be found in the pew. She glanced back
at the congregation. She thought that it would be amiable to bow to Mrs.
Champ Perry.
Her slow turning head stopped, galvanized.
Across the aisle, two rows back, was a strange young man who shone among
the cud-chewing citizens like a visitant from the sun-amber curls, low
forehead, fine nose, chin smooth but not raw from Sabbath shaving. His
lips startled her. The lips of men in Gopher Prairie are flat in the
face, straight and grudging. The stranger's mouth was arched, the upper
lip short. He wore a brown jersey coat, a delft-blue bow, a white silk
shirt, white flannel trousers. He suggested the ocean beach, a tennis
court, anything but the sun-blistered utility of Main Street.
A visitor from Minneapolis, here for business? No. He wasn't a business
man. He was a poet. Keats was in his face, and Shelley, and Arthur
Upson, whom she had once seen in Minneapolis. He was at once too
sensitive and too sophisticated to touch business as she knew it in
Gopher Prairie.
With restrained amusement he was analyzing the noisy Mr. Zitterel. Carol
was ashamed to have this spy from the Great World hear the pastor's
maundering. She felt responsible for the town. She resented his gaping
at their private rites. She flushed, turned away. But she continued to
feel his presence.
How could she meet him? She must! For an hour of talk. He was all that
she was hungry for. She could not let him get away without a word--and
she would have to. She pictured, and ridiculed, herself as walking up
to him and remarking, "I am sick with the Village Virus. Will you please
tell me what people are saying and playing in New York?" She pictured,
and groaned over, the expression of Kennicott if she should say,
"Why wouldn't it be reasonable for you, my soul, to ask that complete
stranger in the brown jersey coat to come to supper tonight?"
She brooded, not looking back. She warned herself that she was probably
exaggerating; that no young man could have all these exalted qualities.
Wasn't he too obviously smart, too glossy-new? Like a movie actor.
Probably he was a traveling salesman who sang tenor and fancied himself
in imitations of Newport clothes and spoke of "the swellest business
proposition that ever came down the pike." In a panic she peered at him.
No! This was no hustling salesman, this boy with the curving Grecian
lips and the serious eyes.
She rose after the service, carefully taking Kennicott's arm and smiling
at him in a mute assertion that she was devoted to him no matter what
happened. She followed the Mystery's soft brown jersey shoulders out of
the church.
Fatty Hicks, the shrill and puffy son of Nat, flapped his hand at the
beautiful stranger and jeered, "How's the kid? All dolled up like a
plush horse today, ain't we!"
Carol was exceeding sick. Her herald from the outside was Erik Valborg,
"Elizabeth." Apprentice tailor! Gasoline and hot goose! Mending dirty
jackets! Respectfully holding a tape-measure about a paunch!
And yet, she insisted, this boy was also himself.
III
They had Sunday dinner with the Smails, in a dining-room which centered
about a fruit and flower piece and a crayon-enlargement of Uncle
Whittier. Carol did not heed Aunt Bessie's fussing in regard to Mrs.
Robert B. Schminke's bead necklace and Whittier's error in putting on
the striped pants, day like this. She did not taste the shreds of roast
pork. She said vacuously:
"Uh--Will, I wonder if that young man in the white flannel trousers, at
church this morning, was this Valborg person that they're all talking
about?"
"Yump. That's him. Wasn't that the darndest get-up he had on!" Kennicott
scratched at a white smear on his hard gray sleeve.
"It wasn't so bad. I wonder where he comes from? He seems to have lived
in cities a good deal. Is he from the East?"
"The East? Him? Why, he comes from a farm right up north here, just this
side of Jefferson. I know his father slightly--Adolph Valborg--typical
cranky old Swede farmer."
"Oh, really?" blandly.
"Believe he has lived in Minneapolis for quite some time, though.
Learned his trade there. And I will say he's bright, some ways. Reads
a lot. Pollock says he takes more books out of the library than anybody
else in town. Huh! He's kind of like you in that!"
The Smails and Kennicott laughed very much at this sly jest. Uncle
Whittier seized the conversation. "That fellow that's working for Hicks?
Milksop, that's what he is. Makes me tired to see a young fellow that
ought to be in the war, or anyway out in the fields earning his living
honest, like I done when I was young, doing a woman's work and then come
out and dress up like a show-actor! Why, when I was his age----"
Carol reflected that the carving-knife would make an excellent dagger
with which to kill Uncle Whittier. It would slide in easily. The
headlines would be terrible.
Kennicott said judiciously, "Oh, I don't want to be unjust to him.
I believe he took his physical examination for military service. Got
varicose veins--not bad, but enough to disqualify him. Though I will say
he doesn't look like a fellow that would be so awful darn crazy to poke
his bayonet into a Hun's guts."
"Will! PLEASE!"
"Well, he don't. Looks soft to me. And they say he told Del Snafflin,
when he was getting a hair-cut on Saturday, that he wished he could play
the piano."
"Isn't it wonderful how much we all know about one another in a town
like this," said Carol innocently.
Kennicott was suspicious, but Aunt Bessie, serving the floating island
pudding, agreed, "Yes, it is wonderful. Folks can get away with all
sorts of meannesses and sins in these terrible cities, but they can't
here. I was noticing this tailor fellow this morning, and when Mrs.
Riggs offered to share her hymn-book with him, he shook his head, and
all the while we was singing he just stood there like a bump on a log
and never opened his mouth. Everybody says he's got an idea that he's
got so much better manners and all than what the rest of us have, but if
that's what he calls good manners, I want to know!"
Carol again studied the carving-knife. Blood on the whiteness of a
tablecloth might be gorgeous.
Then:
"Fool! Neurotic impossibilist! Telling yourself orchard fairy-tales--at
thirty. . . . Dear Lord, am I really THIRTY? That boy can't be more than
twenty-five."
IV
She went calling.
Boarding with the Widow Bogart was Fern Mullins, a girl of twenty-two
who was to be teacher of English, French, and gymnastics in the high
school this coming session. Fern Mullins had come to town early, for the
six-weeks normal course for country teachers. Carol had noticed her on
the street, had heard almost as much about her as about Erik Valborg.
She was tall, weedy, pretty, and incurably rakish. Whether she wore a
low middy collar or dressed reticently for school in a black suit with a
high-necked blouse, she was airy, flippant. "She looks like an absolute
totty," said all the Mrs. Sam Clarks, disapprovingly, and all the
Juanita Haydocks, enviously.
That Sunday evening, sitting in baggy canvas lawn-chairs beside the
house, the Kennicotts saw Fern laughing with Cy Bogart who, though still
a junior in high school, was now a lump of a man, only two or three
years younger than Fern. Cy had to go downtown for weighty matters
connected with the pool-parlor. Fern drooped on the Bogart porch, her
chin in her hands.
"She looks lonely," said Kennicott.
"She does, poor soul. I believe I'll go over and speak to her. I was
introduced to her at Dave's but I haven't called." Carol was slipping
across the lawn, a white figure in the dimness, faintly brushing the
dewy grass. She was thinking of Erik and of the fact that her feet
were wet, and she was casual in her greeting: "Hello! The doctor and I
wondered if you were lonely."
Resentfully, "I am!"
Carol concentrated on her. "My dear, you sound so! I know how it is. I
used to be tired when I was on the job--I was a librarian. What was your
college? I was Blodgett."
More interestedly, "I went to the U." Fern meant the University of
Minnesota.
"You must have had a splendid time. Blodgett was a bit dull."
"Where were you a librarian?" challengingly.
"St. Paul--the main library."
"Honest? Oh dear, I wish I was back in the Cities! This is my first year
of teaching, and I'm scared stiff. I did have the best time in college:
dramatics and basket-ball and fussing and dancing--I'm simply crazy
about dancing. And here, except when I have the kids in gymnasium class,
or when I'm chaperoning the basket-ball team on a trip out-of-town, I
won't dare to move above a whisper. I guess they don't care much if
you put any pep into teaching or not, as long as you look like a Good
Influence out of school-hours--and that means never doing anything you
want to. This normal course is bad enough, but the regular school will
be FIERCE! If it wasn't too late to get a job in the Cities, I swear I'd
resign here. I bet I won't dare to go to a single dance all winter. If
I cut loose and danced the way I like to, they'd think I was a perfect
hellion--poor harmless me! Oh, I oughtn't to be talking like this. Fern,
you never could be cagey!"
"Don't be frightened, my dear! . . . Doesn't that sound atrociously old
and kind! I'm talking to you the way Mrs. Westlake talks to me! That's
having a husband and a kitchen range, I suppose. But I feel young, and I
want to dance like a--like a hellion?--too. So I sympathize."
Fern made a sound of gratitude. Carol inquired, "What experience did you
have with college dramatics? I tried to start a kind of Little Theater
here. It was dreadful. I must tell you about it----"
Two hours later, when Kennicott came over to greet Fern and to yawn,
"Look here, Carrie, don't you suppose you better be thinking about
turning in? I've got a hard day tomorrow," the two were talking so
intimately that they constantly interrupted each other.
As she went respectably home, convoyed by a husband, and decorously
holding up her skirts, Carol rejoiced, "Everything has changed! I have
two friends, Fern and----But who's the other? That's queer; I thought
there was----Oh, how absurd!"
V
She often passed Erik Valborg on the street; the brown jersey coat
became unremarkable. When she was driving with Kennicott, in early
evening, she saw him on the lake shore, reading a thin book which might
easily have been poetry. She noted that he was the only person in the
motorized town who still took long walks.
She told herself that she was the daughter of a judge, the wife of a
doctor, and that she did not care to know a capering tailor. She told
herself that she was not responsive to men . . . not even to Percy
Bresnahan. She told herself that a woman of thirty who heeded a boy
of twenty-five was ridiculous. And on Friday, when she had convinced
herself that the errand was necessary, she went to Nat Hicks's shop,
bearing the not very romantic burden of a pair of her husband's
trousers. Hicks was in the back room. She faced the Greek god who, in a
somewhat ungodlike way, was stitching a coat on a scaley sewing-machine,
in a room of smutted plaster walls.
She saw that his hands were not in keeping with a Hellenic face. They
were thick, roughened with needle and hot iron and plow-handle. Even
in the shop he persisted in his finery. He wore a silk shirt, a topaz
scarf, thin tan shoes.
This she absorbed while she was saying curtly, "Can I get these pressed,
please?"
Not rising from the sewing-machine he stuck out his hand, mumbled, "When
do you want them?"
"Oh, Monday."
The adventure was over. She was marching out.
"What name?" he called after her.
He had risen and, despite the farcicality of Dr. Will Kennicott's bulgy
trousers draped over his arm, he had the grace of a cat.
"Kennicott."
"Kennicott. Oh! Oh say, you're Mrs. Dr. Kennicott then, aren't you?"
"Yes." She stood at the door. Now that she had carried out her
preposterous impulse to see what he was like, she was cold, she was as
ready to detect familiarities as the virtuous Miss Ella Stowbody.
"I've heard about you. Myrtle Cass was saying you got up a dramatic club
and gave a dandy play. I've always wished I had a chance to belong to a
Little Theater, and give some European plays, or whimsical like Barrie,
or a pageant."
He pronounced it "pagent"; he rhymed "pag" with "rag."
Carol nodded in the manner of a lady being kind to a tradesman, and one
of her selves sneered, "Our Erik is indeed a lost John Keats."
He was appealing, "Do you suppose it would be possible to get up another
dramatic club this coming fall?"
"Well, it might be worth thinking of." She came out of her several
conflicting poses, and said sincerely, "There's a new teacher, Miss
Mullins, who might have some talent. That would make three of us for a
nucleus. If we could scrape up half a dozen we might give a real play
with a small cast. Have you had any experience?"
"Just a bum club that some of us got up in Minneapolis when I was
working there. We had one good man, an interior decorator--maybe he was
kind of sis and effeminate, but he really was an artist, and we gave one
dandy play. But I----Of course I've always had to work hard, and study
by myself, and I'm probably sloppy, and I'd love it if I had training in
rehearsing--I mean, the crankier the director was, the better I'd like
it. If you didn't want to use me as an actor, I'd love to design the
costumes. I'm crazy about fabrics--textures and colors and designs."
She knew that he was trying to keep her from going, trying to indicate
that he was something more than a person to whom one brought trousers
for pressing. He besought:
"Some day I hope I can get away from this fool repairing, when I have
the money saved up. I want to go East and work for some big dressmaker,
and study art drawing, and become a high-class designer. Or do you think
that's a kind of fiddlin' ambition for a fellow? I was brought up on
a farm. And then monkeyin' round with silks! I don't know. What do you
think? Myrtle Cass says you're awfully educated."
"I am. Awfully. Tell me: Have the boys made fun of your ambition?"
She was seventy years old, and sexless, and more advisory than Vida
Sherwin.
"Well, they have, at that. They've jollied me a good deal, here and
Minneapolis both. They say dressmaking is ladies' work. (But I was
willing to get drafted for the war! I tried to get in. But they
rejected me. But I did try! ) I thought some of working up in a gents'
furnishings store, and I had a chance to travel on the road for a
clothing house, but somehow--I hate this tailoring, but I can't seem
to get enthusiastic about salesmanship. I keep thinking about a room in
gray oatmeal paper with prints in very narrow gold frames--or would it
be better in white enamel paneling?--but anyway, it looks out on
Fifth Avenue, and I'm designing a sumptuous----" He made it
"sump-too-ous"--"robe of linden green chiffon over cloth of gold! You
know--tileul. It's elegant. . . . What do you think?"
"Why not? What do you care for the opinion of city rowdies, or a lot
of farm boys? But you mustn't, you really mustn't, let casual strangers
like me have a chance to judge you."
"Well----You aren't a stranger, one way. Myrtle Cass--Miss Cass, should
say--she's spoken about you so often. I wanted to call on you--and the
doctor--but I didn't quite have the nerve. One evening I walked past
your house, but you and your husband were talking on the porch, and you
looked so chummy and happy I didn't dare butt in."
Maternally, "I think it's extremely nice of you to want to be trained
in--in enunciation by a stage-director. Perhaps I could help you. I'm
a thoroughly sound and uninspired schoolma'am by instinct; quite
hopelessly mature."
"Oh, you aren't EITHER!"
She was not very successful at accepting his fervor with the air of
amused woman of the world, but she sounded reasonably impersonal: "Thank
you. Shall we see if we really can get up a new dramatic club? I'll tell
you: Come to the house this evening, about eight. I'll ask Miss Mullins
to come over, and we'll talk about it."
VI
"He has absolutely no sense of humor. Less than Will. But hasn't
he-----What is a 'sense of humor'? Isn't the thing he lacks the
back-slapping jocosity that passes for humor here? Anyway----Poor lamb,
coaxing me to stay and play with him! Poor lonely lamb! If he could be
free from Nat Hickses, from people who say 'dandy' and 'bum,' would he
develop?
"I wonder if Whitman didn't use Brooklyn back-street slang, as a boy?
"No. Not Whitman. He's Keats--sensitive to silken things. 'Innumerable
of stains and splendid dyes as are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd
wings.' Keats, here! A bewildered spirit fallen on Main Street. And Main
Street laughs till it aches, giggles till the spirit doubts his own self
and tries to give up the use of wings for the correct uses of a 'gents'
furnishings store.' Gopher Prairie with its celebrated eleven miles of
cement walk. . . . I wonder how much of the cement is made out of the
tombstones of John Keatses?"
VII
Kennicott was cordial to Fern Mullins, teased her, told her he was a
"great hand for running off with pretty school-teachers," and promised
that if the school-board should object to her dancing, he would "bat 'em
one over the head and tell 'em how lucky they were to get a girl with
some go to her, for once."
But to Erik Valborg he was not cordial. He shook hands loosely, and
said, "H' are yuh."
Nat Hicks was socially acceptable; he had been here for years, and
owned his shop; but this person was merely Nat's workman, and the
town's principle of perfect democracy was not meant to be applied
indiscriminately.
The conference on a dramatic club theoretically included Kennicott, but
he sat back, patting yawns, conscious of Fern's ankles, smiling amiably
on the children at their sport.
Fern wanted to tell her grievances; Carol was sulky every time she
thought of "The Girl from Kankakee"; it was Erik who made suggestions.
He had read with astounding breadth, and astounding lack of judgment.
His voice was sensitive to liquids, but he overused the word "glorious."
He mispronounced a tenth of the words he had from books, but he knew it.
He was insistent, but he was shy.
When he demanded, "I'd like to stage 'Suppressed Desires,' by Cook and
Miss Glaspell," Carol ceased to be patronizing. He was not the yearner:
he was the artist, sure of his vision. "I'd make it simple. Use a big
window at the back, with a cyclorama of a blue that would simply hit you
in the eye, and just one tree-branch, to suggest a park below. Put
the breakfast table on a dais. Let the colors be kind of arty and
tea-roomy--orange chairs, and orange and blue table, and blue Japanese
breakfast set, and some place, one big flat smear of black--bang! Oh.
Another play I wish we could do is Tennyson Jesse's 'The Black Mask.'
I've never seen it but----Glorious ending, where this woman looks at
the man with his face all blown away, and she just gives one horrible
scream."
"Good God, is that your idea of a glorious ending?" bayed Kennicott.
"That sounds fierce! I do love artistic things, but not the horrible
ones," moaned Fern Mullins.
Erik was bewildered; glanced at Carol. She nodded loyally.
At the end of the conference they had decided nothing.
| Carol goes to a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen and speaks to Maud Dyer, who for some reason has been really nice to Carol lately. Let's not forget that the last time we saw her, she was getting a private visit from Carol's husband Will... Maud Dyer tells all about a new young tailor named Erik who has moved into Gopher Prairie. He's so fancy in his manner and dress that people have nicknamed him Elizabeth. Apparently, this dude whines and moans about how he can't find any intellectual companionship in the town. Everyone laughs, including Carol. They even find out that it's Erik's dream to design clothing for women. When the meeting is over, Carol decides that she'll walk by the tailor shop to have a look at the new "freak" in town. Next, Carol attends a sermon by the local Baptist reverend that's all about loving America and crushing communism... and apparently Mormonism. During the sermon, Carol looks around and sees a young man who shines out from among the boring people of Gopher Prairie. After the sermon, she asks who the young man was and finds out that he's none other than Erik Valbourg, the effeminate tailor no one seems to like. She decides that she must meet him. Later, Carol brings Valbourg up when talking to Will and her in-laws. They make fun of Erik, and Carol thinks about murdering her in-laws with a knife. When Erik Valbourg first came to Gopher Prairie, there was a young woman named Fern Mullins who came on the same train. The folks around the town are suspicious of her because she's so pretty and not shy about showing it off. Carol goes to introduce herself to Fern and learns that Fern wishes she were back in a big city. Carol can relate and feels an instant connection with Fern. One day, Carol takes a pair of Will's pants to get pressed at the tailor's. She runs into Erik Valbourg and he gets excited when he finds out who she is. He's heard all about her knowledge of culture and her efforts to start a dramatic club. He feels like he's found someone he can finally talk to. He thinks Carol should get a club together again and volunteers to make the costumes. Carol goes away thinking that Erik has no sense of humor and only a superficial bit of knowledge. But she's still attracted by the way he seems to reach for the stars with everything he does. Will, meanwhile, always greets Erik rudely, because he thinks Erik is beneath him. Sure enough, Carol holds another meeting of the Gopher Prairie Dramatic Club, and Erik is one of the first to arrive. He has a grand vision for the play they should put on, although the ending is a little gruesome for the conservative folks of Gopher Prairie. | summary |
CHAPTER XXIX
SHE had walked up the railroad track with Hugh, this Sunday afternoon.
She saw Erik Valborg coming, in an ancient highwater suit, tramping
sullenly and alone, striking at the rails with a stick. For a second
she unreasoningly wanted to avoid him, but she kept on, and she serenely
talked about God, whose voice, Hugh asserted, made the humming in the
telegraph wires. Erik stared, straightened. They greeted each other with
"Hello."
"Hugh, say how-do-you-do to Mr. Valborg."
"Oh, dear me, he's got a button unbuttoned," worried Erik, kneeling.
Carol frowned, then noted the strength with which he swung the baby in
the air.
"May I walk along a piece with you?"
"I'm tired. Let's rest on those ties. Then I must be trotting back."
They sat on a heap of discarded railroad ties, oak logs spotted with
cinnamon-colored dry-rot and marked with metallic brown streaks where
iron plates had rested. Hugh learned that the pile was the hiding-place
of Injuns; he went gunning for them while the elders talked of
uninteresting things.
The telegraph wires thrummed, thrummed, thrummed above them; the rails
were glaring hard lines; the goldenrod smelled dusty. Across the track
was a pasture of dwarf clover and sparse lawn cut by earthy cow-paths;
beyond its placid narrow green, the rough immensity of new stubble,
jagged with wheat-stacks like huge pineapples.
Erik talked of books; flamed like a recent convert to any faith. He
exhibited as many titles and authors as possible, halting only to
appeal, "Have you read his last book? Don't you think he's a terribly
strong writer?"
She was dizzy. But when he insisted, "You've been a librarian; tell
me; do I read too much fiction?" she advised him loftily, rather
discursively. He had, she indicated, never studied. He had skipped from
one emotion to another. Especially--she hesitated, then flung it at
him--he must not guess at pronunciations; he must endure the nuisance of
stopping to reach for the dictionary.
"I'm talking like a cranky teacher," she sighed.
"No! And I will study! Read the damned dictionary right through." He
crossed his legs and bent over, clutching his ankle with both hands. "I
know what you mean. I've been rushing from picture to picture, like a
kid let loose in an art gallery for the first time. You see, it's so
awful recent that I've found there was a world--well, a world where
beautiful things counted. I was on the farm till I was nineteen. Dad is
a good farmer, but nothing else. Do you know why he first sent me off to
learn tailoring? I wanted to study drawing, and he had a cousin that'd
made a lot of money tailoring out in Dakota, and he said tailoring was
a lot like drawing, so he sent me down to a punk hole called Curlew,
to work in a tailor shop. Up to that time I'd only had three months'
schooling a year--walked to school two miles, through snow up to my
knees--and Dad never would stand for my having a single book except
schoolbooks.
"I never read a novel till I got 'Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall' out
of the library at Curlew. I thought it was the loveliest thing in the
world! Next I read 'Barriers Burned Away' and then Pope's translation of
Homer. Some combination, all right! When I went to Minneapolis, just
two years ago, I guess I'd read pretty much everything in that Curlew
library, but I'd never heard of Rossetti or John Sargent or Balzac or
Brahms. But----Yump, I'll study. Look here! Shall I get out of this
tailoring, this pressing and repairing?"
"I don't see why a surgeon should spend very much time cobbling shoes."
"But what if I find I can't really draw and design? After fussing around
in New York or Chicago, I'd feel like a fool if I had to go back to work
in a gents' furnishings store!"
"Please say 'haberdashery.'"
"Haberdashery? All right. I'll remember." He shrugged and spread his
fingers wide.
She was humbled by his humility; she put away in her mind, to take out
and worry over later, a speculation as to whether it was not she who
was naive. She urged, "What if you do have to go back? Most of us do! We
can't all be artists--myself, for instance. We have to darn socks, and
yet we're not content to think of nothing but socks and darning-cotton.
I'd demand all I could get--whether I finally settled down to designing
frocks or building temples or pressing pants. What if you do drop back?
You'll have had the adventure. Don't be too meek toward life! Go! You're
young, you're unmarried. Try everything! Don't listen to Nat Hicks and
Sam Clark and be a 'steady young man'--in order to help them make
money. You're still a blessed innocent. Go and play till the Good People
capture you!"
"But I don't just want to play. I want to make something beautiful. God!
And I don't know enough. Do you get it? Do you understand? Nobody else
ever has! Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"And so----But here's what bothers me: I like fabrics; dinky things like
that; little drawings and elegant words. But look over there at those
fields. Big! New! Don't it seem kind of a shame to leave this and go
back to the East and Europe, and do what all those people have been
doing so long? Being careful about words, when there's millions of
bushels off wheat here! Reading this fellow Pater, when I've helped Dad
to clear fields!"
"It's good to clear fields. But it's not for you. It's one of our
favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds,
and high mountains make high purpose. I thought that myself, when I
first came to the prairie. 'Big--new.' Oh, I don't want to deny the
prairie future. It will be magnificent. But equally I'm hanged if I want
to be bullied by it, go to war on behalf of Main Street, be bullied and
BULLIED by the faith that the future is already here in the present, and
that all of us must stay and worship wheat-stacks and insist that
this is 'God's Country'--and never, of course, do anything original
or gay-colored that would help to make that future! Anyway, you don't
belong here. Sam Clark and Nat Hicks, that's what our big newness has
produced. Go! Before it's too late, as it has been for--for some of us.
Young man, go East and grow up with the revolution! Then perhaps you
may come back and tell Sam and Nat and me what to do with the land we've
been clearing--if we'll listen--if we don't lynch you first!"
He looked at her reverently. She could hear him saying,
"I've always wanted to know a woman who would talk to me like that."
Her hearing was faulty. He was saying nothing of the sort. He was
saying:
"Why aren't you happy with your husband?"
"I--you----"
"He doesn't care for the 'blessed innocent' part of you, does he!"
"Erik, you mustn't----"
"First you tell me to go and be free, and then you say that I
'mustn't'!"
"I know. But you mustn't----You must be more impersonal!"
He glowered at her like a downy young owl. She wasn't sure but she
thought that he muttered, "I'm damned if I will." She considered with
wholesome fear the perils of meddling with other people's destinies, and
she said timidly, "Hadn't we better start back now?"
He mused, "You're younger than I am. Your lips are for songs about
rivers in the morning and lakes at twilight. I don't see how anybody
could ever hurt you. . . . Yes. We better go."
He trudged beside her, his eyes averted. Hugh experimentally took his
thumb. He looked down at the baby seriously. He burst out, "All right.
I'll do it. I'll stay here one year. Save. Not spend so much money on
clothes. And then I'll go East, to art-school. Work on the side-tailor
shop, dressmaker's. I'll learn what I'm good for: designing clothes,
stage-settings, illustrating, or selling collars to fat men. All
settled." He peered at her, unsmiling.
"Can you stand it here in town for a year?"
"With you to look at?"
"Please! I mean: Don't the people here think you're an odd bird? (They
do me, I assure you!)"
"I don't know. I never notice much. Oh, they do kid me about not being
in the army--especially the old warhorses, the old men that aren't going
themselves. And this Bogart boy. And Mr. Hicks's son--he's a horrible
brat. But probably he's licensed to say what he thinks about his
father's hired man!"
"He's beastly!"
They were in town. They passed Aunt Bessie's house. Aunt Bessie and
Mrs. Bogart were at the window, and Carol saw that they were staring so
intently that they answered her wave only with the stiffly raised hands
of automatons. In the next block Mrs. Dr. Westlake was gaping from her
porch. Carol said with an embarrassed quaver:
"I want to run in and see Mrs. Westlake. I'll say good-by here."
She avoided his eyes.
Mrs. Westlake was affable. Carol felt that she was expected to explain;
and while she was mentally asserting that she'd be hanged if she'd
explain, she was explaining:
"Hugh captured that Valborg boy up the track. They became such good
friends. And I talked to him for a while. I'd heard he was eccentric,
but really, I found him quite intelligent. Crude, but he reads--reads
almost the way Dr. Westlake does."
"That's fine. Why does he stick here in town? What's this I hear about
his being interested in Myrtle Cass?"
"I don't know. Is he? I'm sure he isn't! He said he was quite lonely!
Besides, Myrtle is a babe in arms!"
"Twenty-one if she's a day!"
"Well----Is the doctor going to do any hunting this fall?"
II
The need of explaining Erik dragged her back into doubting. For all his
ardent reading, and his ardent life, was he anything but a small-town
youth bred on an illiberal farm and in cheap tailor shops? He had rough
hands. She had been attracted only by hands that were fine and suave,
like those of her father. Delicate hands and resolute purpose. But this
boy--powerful seamed hands and flabby will.
"It's not appealing weakness like his, but sane strength that will
animate the Gopher Prairies. Only----Does that mean anything? Or am
I echoing Vida? The world has always let 'strong' statesmen and
soldiers--the men with strong voices--take control, and what have the
thundering boobies done? What is 'strength'?
"This classifying of people! I suppose tailors differ as much as
burglars or kings.
"Erik frightened me when he turned on me. Of course he didn't mean
anything, but I mustn't let him be so personal.
"Amazing impertinence!
"But he didn't mean to be.
"His hands are FIRM. I wonder if sculptors don't have thick hands, too?
"Of course if there really is anything I can do to HELP the boy----
"Though I despise these people who interfere. He must be independent."
III
She wasn't altogether pleased, the week after, when Erik was independent
and, without asking for her inspiration, planned the tennis tournament.
It proved that he had learned to play in Minneapolis; that, next to
Juanita Haydock, he had the best serve in town. Tennis was well spoken
of in Gopher Prairie and almost never played. There were three courts:
one belonging to Harry Haydock, one to the cottages at the lake, and
one, a rough field on the outskirts, laid out by a defunct tennis
association.
Erik had been seen in flannels and an imitation panama hat, playing on
the abandoned court with Willis Woodford, the clerk in Stowbody's bank.
Suddenly he was going about proposing the reorganization of the tennis
association, and writing names in a fifteen-cent note-book bought for
the purpose at Dyer's. When he came to Carol he was so excited over
being an organizer that he did not stop to talk of himself and Aubrey
Beardsley for more than ten minutes. He begged, "Will you get some of
the folks to come in?" and she nodded agreeably.
He proposed an informal exhibition match to advertise the association;
he suggested that Carol and himself, the Haydocks, the Woodfords, and
the Dillons play doubles, and that the association be formed from
the gathered enthusiasts. He had asked Harry Haydock to be tentative
president. Harry, he reported, had promised, "All right. You bet. But
you go ahead and arrange things, and I'll O.K. 'em." Erik planned that
the match should be held Saturday afternoon, on the old public court
at the edge of town. He was happy in being, for the first time, part of
Gopher Prairie.
Through the week Carol heard how select an attendance there was to be.
Kennicott growled that he didn't care to go.
Had he any objections to her playing with Erik?
No; sure not; she needed the exercise. Carol went to the match early.
The court was in a meadow out on the New Antonia road. Only Erik was
there. He was dashing about with a rake, trying to make the court
somewhat less like a plowed field. He admitted that he had stage fright
at the thought of the coming horde. Willis and Mrs. Woodford arrived,
Willis in home-made knickers and black sneakers through at the toe;
then Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon, people as harmless and grateful as the
Woodfords.
Carol was embarrassed and excessively agreeable, like the bishop's lady
trying not to feel out of place at a Baptist bazaar.
They waited.
The match was scheduled for three. As spectators there assembled one
youthful grocery clerk, stopping his Ford delivery wagon to stare from
the seat, and one solemn small boy, tugging a smaller sister who had a
careless nose.
"I wonder where the Haydocks are? They ought to show up, at least," said
Erik.
Carol smiled confidently at him, and peered down the empty road toward
town. Only heat-waves and dust and dusty weeds.
At half-past three no one had come, and the grocery boy reluctantly got
out, cranked his Ford, glared at them in a disillusioned manner, and
rattled away. The small boy and his sister ate grass and sighed.
The players pretended to be exhilarated by practising service, but they
startled at each dust-cloud from a motor car. None of the cars turned
into the meadow-none till a quarter to four, when Kennicott drove in.
Carol's heart swelled. "How loyal he is! Depend on him! He'd come,
if nobody else did. Even though he doesn't care for the game. The old
darling!"
Kennicott did not alight. He called out, "Carrie! Harry Haydock 'phoned
me that they've decided to hold the tennis matches, or whatever you call
'em, down at the cottages at the lake, instead of here. The bunch are
down there now: Haydocks and Dyers and Clarks and everybody. Harry
wanted to know if I'd bring you down. I guess I can take the time--come
right back after supper."
Before Carol could sum it all up, Erik stammered, "Why, Haydock didn't
say anything to me about the change. Of course he's the president,
but----"
Kennicott looked at him heavily, and grunted, "I don't know a thing
about it. . . . Coming, Carrie?"
"I am not! The match was to be here, and it will be here! You can tell
Harry Haydock that he's beastly rude!" She rallied the five who had
been left out, who would always be left out. "Come on! We'll toss to
see which four of us play the Only and Original First Annual Tennis
Tournament of Forest Hills, Del Monte, and Gopher Prairie!"
"Don't know as I blame you," said Kennicott. "Well have supper at home
then?" He drove off.
She hated him for his composure. He had ruined her defiance. She felt
much less like Susan B. Anthony as she turned to her huddled followers.
Mrs. Dillon and Willis Woodford lost the toss. The others played out
the game, slowly, painfully, stumbling on the rough earth, muffing the
easiest shots, watched only by the small boy and his sniveling sister.
Beyond the court stretched the eternal stubble-fields. The four
marionettes, awkwardly going through exercises, insignificant in the hot
sweep of contemptuous land, were not heroic; their voices did not ring
out in the score, but sounded apologetic; and when the game was over
they glanced about as though they were waiting to be laughed at.
They walked home. Carol took Erik's arm. Through her thin linen sleeve
she could feel the crumply warmth of his familiar brown jersey coat. She
observed that there were purple and red gold threads interwoven with the
brown. She remembered the first time she had seen it.
Their talk was nothing but improvisations on the theme: "I never did
like this Haydock. He just considers his own convenience." Ahead
of them, the Dillons and Woodfords spoke of the weather and B. J.
Gougerling's new bungalow. No one referred to their tennis tournament.
At her gate Carol shook hands firmly with Erik and smiled at him.
Next morning, Sunday morning, when Carol was on the porch, the Haydocks
drove up.
"We didn't mean to be rude to you, dearie!" implored Juanita. "I
wouldn't have you think that for anything. We planned that Will and you
should come down and have supper at our cottage."
"No. I'm sure you didn't mean to be." Carol was super-neighborly. "But
I do think you ought to apologize to poor Erik Valborg. He was terribly
hurt."
"Oh. Valborg. I don't care so much what he thinks," objected Harry.
"He's nothing but a conceited buttinsky. Juanita and I kind of figured
he was trying to run this tennis thing too darn much anyway."
"But you asked him to make arrangements."
"I know, but I don't like him. Good Lord, you couldn't hurt his
feelings! He dresses up like a chorus man--and, by golly, he looks like
one!--but he's nothing but a Swede farm boy, and these foreigners, they
all got hides like a covey of rhinoceroses ."
"But he IS hurt!"
"Well----I don't suppose I ought to have gone off half-cocked, and not
jollied him along. I'll give him a cigar. He'll----"
Juanita had been licking her lips and staring at Carol. She interrupted
her husband, "Yes, I do think Harry ought to fix it up with him. You
LIKE him, DON'T you, Carol??"
Over and through Carol ran a frightened cautiousness. "Like him? I
haven't an i-dea. He seems to be a very decent young man. I just felt
that when he'd worked so hard on the plans for the match, it was a shame
not to be nice to him."
"Maybe there's something to that," mumbled Harry; then, at sight of
Kennicott coming round the corner tugging the red garden hose by its
brass nozzle, he roared in relief, "What d' you think you're trying to
do, doc?"
While Kennicott explained in detail all that he thought he was trying
to do, while he rubbed his chin and gravely stated, "Struck me the grass
was looking kind of brown in patches--didn't know but what I'd give it
a sprinkling," and while Harry agreed that this was an excellent
idea, Juanita made friendly noises and, behind the gilt screen of an
affectionate smile, watched Carol's face.
IV
She wanted to see Erik. She wanted some one to play with! There wasn't
even so dignified and sound an excuse as having Kennicott's trousers
pressed; when she inspected them, all three pairs looked discouragingly
neat. She probably would not have ventured on it had she not spied Nat
Hicks in the pool-parlor, being witty over bottle-pool. Erik was alone!
She fluttered toward the tailor shop, dashed into its slovenly heat
with the comic fastidiousness of a humming bird dipping into a dry
tiger-lily. It was after she had entered that she found an excuse.
Erik was in the back room, cross-legged on a long table, sewing a vest.
But he looked as though he were doing this eccentric thing to amuse
himself.
"Hello. I wonder if you couldn't plan a sports-suit for me?" she said
breathlessly.
He stared at her; he protested, "No, I won't! God! I'm not going to be a
tailor with you!"
"Why, Erik!" she said, like a mildly shocked mother.
It occurred to her that she did not need a suit, and that the order
might have been hard to explain to Kennicott.
He swung down from the table. "I want to show you something." He
rummaged in the roll-top desk on which Nat Hicks kept bills, buttons,
calendars, buckles, thread-channeled wax, shotgun shells, samples of
brocade for "fancy vests," fishing-reels, pornographic post-cards,
shreds of buckram lining. He pulled out a blurred sheet of Bristol board
and anxiously gave it to her. It was a sketch for a frock. It was not
well drawn; it was too finicking; the pillars in the background were
grotesquely squat. But the frock had an original back, very low, with
a central triangular section from the waist to a string of jet beads at
the neck.
"It's stunning. But how it would shock Mrs. Clark!"
"Yes, wouldn't it!"
"You must let yourself go more when you're drawing."
"Don't know if I can. I've started kind of late. But listen! What do you
think I've done this two weeks? I've read almost clear through a Latin
grammar, and about twenty pages of Caesar."
"Splendid! You are lucky. You haven't a teacher to make you artificial."
"You're my teacher!"
There was a dangerous edge of personality to his voice. She was offended
and agitated. She turned her shoulder on him, stared through the back
window, studying this typical center of a typical Main Street block,
a vista hidden from casual strollers. The backs of the chief
establishments in town surrounded a quadrangle neglected, dirty, and
incomparably dismal. From the front, Howland & Gould's grocery was smug
enough, but attached to the rear was a lean-to of storm streaked pine
lumber with a sanded tar roof--a staggering doubtful shed behind which
was a heap of ashes, splintered packing-boxes, shreds of excelsior,
crumpled straw-board, broken olive-bottles, rotten fruit, and utterly
disintegrated vegetables: orange carrots turning black, and potatoes
with ulcers. The rear of the Bon Ton Store was grim with blistered
black-painted iron shutters, under them a pile of once glossy red
shirt-boxes, now a pulp from recent rain.
As seen from Main Street, Oleson & McGuire's Meat Market had a sanitary
and virtuous expression with its new tile counter, fresh sawdust on the
floor, and a hanging veal cut in rosettes. But she now viewed a back
room with a homemade refrigerator of yellow smeared with black grease.
A man in an apron spotted with dry blood was hoisting out a hard slab of
meat.
Behind Billy's Lunch, the cook, in an apron which must long ago have
been white, smoked a pipe and spat at the pest of sticky flies. In the
center of the block, by itself, was the stable for the three horses of
the drayman, and beside it a pile of manure.
The rear of Ezra Stowbody's bank was whitewashed, and back of it was
a concrete walk and a three-foot square of grass, but the window was
barred, and behind the bars she saw Willis Woodford cramped over figures
in pompous books. He raised his head, jerkily rubbed his eyes, and went
back to the eternity of figures.
The backs of the other shops were an impressionistic picture of dirty
grays, drained browns, writhing heaps of refuse.
"Mine is a back-yard romance--with a journeyman tailor!"
She was saved from self-pity as she began to think through Erik's mind.
She turned to him with an indignant, "It's disgusting that this is all
you have to look at."
He considered it. "Outside there? I don't notice much. I'm learning to
look inside. Not awful easy!"
"Yes. . . . I must be hurrying."
As she walked home--without hurrying--she remembered her father saying
to a serious ten-year-old Carol, "Lady, only a fool thinks he's superior
to beautiful bindings, but only a double-distilled fool reads nothing
but bindings."
She was startled by the return of her father, startled by a sudden
conviction that in this flaxen boy she had found the gray reticent judge
who was divine love, perfect under-standing. She debated it, furiously
denied it, reaffirmed it, ridiculed it. Of one thing she was unhappily
certain: there was nothing of the beloved father image in Will
Kennicott.
V
She wondered why she sang so often, and why she found so many pleasant
things--lamplight seen though trees on a cool evening, sunshine on brown
wood, morning sparrows, black sloping roofs turned to plates of silver
by moonlight. Pleasant things, small friendly things, and pleasant
places--a field of goldenrod, a pasture by the creek--and suddenly
a wealth of pleasant people. Vida was lenient to Carol at the
surgical-dressing class; Mrs. Dave Dyer flattered her with questions
about her health, baby, cook, and opinions on the war.
Mrs. Dyer seemed not to share the town's prejudice against Erik. "He's
a nice-looking fellow; we must have him go on one of our picnics some
time." Unexpectedly, Dave Dyer also liked him. The tight-fisted little
farceur had a confused reverence for anything that seemed to him refined
or clever. He answered Harry Haydock's sneers, "That's all right now!
Elizabeth may doll himself up too much, but he's smart, and don't you
forget it! I was asking round trying to find out where this Ukraine is,
and darn if he didn't tell me. What's the matter with his talking so
polite? Hell's bells, Harry, no harm in being polite. There's some
regular he-men that are just as polite as women, prett' near."
Carol found herself going about rejoicing, "How neighborly the town is!"
She drew up with a dismayed "Am I falling in love with this boy? That's
ridiculous! I'm merely interested in him. I like to think of helping him
to succeed."
But as she dusted the living-room, mended a collar-band, bathed Hugh,
she was picturing herself and a young artistan Apollo nameless and
evasive--building a house in the Berkshires or in Virginia; exuberantly
buying a chair with his first check; reading poetry together, and
frequently being earnest over valuable statistics about labor; tumbling
out of bed early for a Sunday walk, and chattering (where Kennicott
would have yawned) over bread and butter by a lake. Hugh was in her
pictures, and he adored the young artist, who made castles of chairs and
rugs for him. Beyond these playtimes she saw the "things I could do for
Erik"--and she admitted that Erik did partly make up the image of her
altogether perfect artist.
In panic she insisted on being attentive to Kennicott, when he wanted to
be left alone to read the newspaper.
VI
She needed new clothes. Kennicott had promised, "We'll have a good trip
down to the Cities in the fall, and take plenty of time for it, and you
can get your new glad-rags then." But as she examined her wardrobe she
flung her ancient black velvet frock on the floor and raged, "They're
disgraceful. Everything I have is falling to pieces."
There was a new dressmaker and milliner, a Mrs. Swiftwaite. It was
said that she was not altogether an elevating influence in the way she
glanced at men; that she would as soon take away a legally appropriated
husband as not; that if there WAS any Mr. Swiftwaite, "it certainly was
strange that nobody seemed to know anything about him!" But she had made
for Rita Gould an organdy frock and hat to match universally admitted
to be "too cunning for words," and the matrons went cautiously,
with darting eyes and excessive politeness, to the rooms which Mrs.
Swiftwaite had taken in the old Luke Dawson house, on Floral Avenue.
With none of the spiritual preparation which normally precedes the
buying of new clothes in Gopher Prairie, Carol marched into Mrs.
Swiftwaite's, and demanded, "I want to see a hat, and possibly a
blouse."
In the dingy old front parlor which she had tried to make smart with a
pier glass, covers from fashion magazines, anemic French prints, Mrs.
Swiftwaite moved smoothly among the dress-dummies and hat-rests, spoke
smoothly as she took up a small black and red turban. "I am sure the
lady will find this extremely attractive."
"It's dreadfully tabby and small-towny," thought Carol, while she
soothed, "I don't believe it quite goes with me."
"It's the choicest thing I have, and I'm sure you'll find it suits you
beautifully. It has a great deal of chic. Please try it on," said Mrs.
Swiftwaite, more smoothly than ever.
Carol studied the woman. She was as imitative as a glass diamond. She
was the more rustic in her effort to appear urban. She wore a severe
high-collared blouse with a row of small black buttons, which
was becoming to her low-breasted slim neatness, but her skirt was
hysterically checkered, her cheeks were too highly rouged, her lips too
sharply penciled. She was magnificently a specimen of the illiterate
divorcee of forty made up to look thirty, clever, and alluring.
While she was trying on the hat Carol felt very condescending. She took
it off, shook her head, explained with the kind smile for inferiors,
"I'm afraid it won't do, though it's unusually nice for so small a town
as this."
"But it's really absolutely New-Yorkish."
"Well, it----"
"You see, I know my New York styles. I lived in New York for years,
besides almost a year in Akron!"
"You did?" Carol was polite, and edged away, and went home unhappily.
She was wondering whether her own airs were as laughable as Mrs.
Swiftwaite's. She put on the eye-glasses which Kennicott had recently
given to her for reading, and looked over a grocery bill. She
went hastily up to her room, to her mirror. She was in a mood of
self-depreciation. Accurately or not, this was the picture she saw in
the mirror:
Neat rimless eye-glasses. Black hair clumsily tucked under a mauve straw
hat which would have suited a spinster. Cheeks clear, bloodless. Thin
nose. Gentle mouth and chin. A modest voile blouse with an edging of
lace at the neck. A virginal sweetness and timorousness--no flare of
gaiety, no suggestion of cities, music, quick laughter.
"I have become a small-town woman. Absolute. Typical. Modest and moral
and safe. Protected from life. GENTEEL! The Village Virus--the village
virtuousness. My hair--just scrambled together. What can Erik see in
that wedded spinster there? He does like me! Because I'm the only woman
who's decent to him! How long before he'll wake up to me? . . . I've
waked up to myself. . . . Am I as old as--as old as I am?
"Not really old. Become careless. Let myself look tabby.
"I want to chuck every stitch I own. Black hair and pale cheeks--they'd
go with a Spanish dancer's costume--rose behind my ear, scarlet mantilla
over one shoulder, the other bare."
She seized the rouge sponge, daubed her cheeks, scratched at her lips
with the vermilion pencil until they stung, tore open her collar. She
posed with her thin arms in the attitude of the fandango. She dropped
them sharply. She shook her head. "My heart doesn't dance," she said.
She flushed as she fastened her blouse.
"At least I'm much more graceful than Fern Mullins. Heavens! When I came
here from the Cities, girls imitated me. Now I'm trying to imitate a
city girl."
| One day, Carol goes walking with her son Hugh along the Gopher Prairie railroad tracks and runs into Erik Valbourg. Erik takes immediate notice of Hugh and straightens his outfit. Erik and Carol chat for a while about books, and Carol calls him out for not really knowing what he's talking about. Erik apologizes and asks if Carol can recommend things for him to read. He knows he's a poser, but he has big dreams. At this point, Erik decides to throw away decorum and ask Carol if she's happy in her marriage. Carol thinks this is a bit forward, but part of her is happy that Erik has asked. When Carol and Erik get back into town, Carol sees some old women staring at her through a window. From that point on, she feels like she needs to explain to everyone why she was walking with someone like Erik. The more she thinks about him, the more she wants to support his dreams and help him escape from Gopher Prairie. Erik won't be daunted by his social status, though. For starters, he organizes a tennis tournament for the town. Unfortunately, some higher-ups decide to change the location of the tennis tournament at the last second without informing Erik. They're making it pretty clear that he doesn't belong among them. When Carol scolds the folks for changing the tennis plans, Juanita Haydock, a neighbor, notices that Carol is defending Erik a little too much and implies that Carol likes Erik. This comment immediately makes Carol back down. Carol starts making up reasons to visit the tailor shop, ordering suits that her husband Will doesn't want or need. Over time, Carol finds herself singing more often and feeling cheerful. She suddenly realizes that she might have a crush on Erik. She becomes more critical of the clothes she wears and tries to look good around Erik whenever she can. | summary |
CHAPTER XXX
FERN Mullins rushed into the house on a Saturday morning early in
September and shrieked at Carol, "School starts next Tuesday. I've got
to have one more spree before I'm arrested. Let's get up a picnic down
the lake for this afternoon. Won't you come, Mrs. Kennicott, and the
doctor? Cy Bogart wants to go--he's a brat but he's lively."
"I don't think the doctor can go," sedately. "He said something about
having to make a country call this afternoon. But I'd love to."
"That's dandy! Who can we get?"
"Mrs. Dyer might be chaperon. She's been so nice. And maybe Dave, if he
could get away from the store."
"How about Erik Valborg? I think he's got lots more style than these
town boys. You like him all right, don't you?"
So the picnic of Carol, Fern, Erik, Cy Bogart, and the Dyers was not
only moral but inevitable.
They drove to the birch grove on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie.
Dave Dyer was his most clownish self. He yelped, jigged, wore Carol's
hat, dropped an ant down Fern's back, and when they went swimming (the
women modestly changing in the car with the side curtains up, the men
undressing behind the bushes, constantly repeating, "Gee, hope we don't
run into poison ivy"), Dave splashed water on them and dived to clutch
his wife's ankle. He infected the others. Erik gave an imitation of
the Greek dancers he had seen in vaudeville, and when they sat down to
picnic supper spread on a lap-robe on the grass, Cy climbed a tree to
throw acorns at them.
But Carol could not frolic.
She had made herself young, with parted hair, sailor blouse and large
blue bow, white canvas shoes and short linen skirt. Her mirror had
asserted that she looked exactly as she had in college, that her throat
was smooth, her collar-bone not very noticeable. But she was under
restraint. When they swam she enjoyed the freshness of the water but
she was irritated by Cy's tricks, by Dave's excessive good spirits. She
admired Erik's dance; he could never betray bad taste, as Cy did,
and Dave. She waited for him to come to her. He did not come. By his
joyousness he had apparently endeared himself to the Dyers. Maud watched
him and, after supper, cried to him, "Come sit down beside me, bad boy!"
Carol winced at his willingness to be a bad boy and come and sit, at
his enjoyment of a not very stimulating game in which Maud, Dave, and
Cy snatched slices of cold tongue from one another's plates. Maud, it
seemed, was slightly dizzy from the swim. She remarked publicly, "Dr.
Kennicott has helped me so much by putting me on a diet," but it was
to Erik alone that she gave the complete version of her peculiarity in
being so sensitive, so easily hurt by the slightest cross word, that she
simply had to have nice cheery friends.
Erik was nice and cheery.
Carol assured herself, "Whatever faults I may have, I certainly couldn't
ever be jealous. I do like Maud; she's always so pleasant. But I wonder
if she isn't just a bit fond of fishing for men's sympathy? Playing
with Erik, and her married----Well----But she looks at him in that
languishing, swooning, mid-Victorian way. Disgusting!"
Cy Bogart lay between the roots of a big birch, smoking his pipe and
teasing Fern, assuring her that a week from now, when he was again a
high-school boy and she his teacher, he'd wink at her in class. Maud
Dyer wanted Erik to "come down to the beach to see the darling little
minnies." Carol was left to Dave, who tried to entertain her with
humorous accounts of Ella Stowbody's fondness for chocolate peppermints.
She watched Maud Dyer put her hand on Erik's shoulder to steady herself.
"Disgusting!" she thought.
Cy Bogart covered Fern's nervous hand with his red paw, and when she
bounced with half-anger and shrieked, "Let go, I tell you!" he grinned
and waved his pipe--a gangling twenty-year-old satyr.
"Disgusting!"
When Maud and Erik returned and the grouping shifted, Erik muttered at
Carol, "There's a boat on shore. Let's skip off and have a row."
"What will they think?" she worried. She saw Maud Dyer peer at Erik with
moist possessive eyes. "Yes! Let's!" she said.
She cried to the party, with the canonical amount of sprightliness,
"Good-by, everybody. We'll wireless you from China."
As the rhythmic oars plopped and creaked, as she floated on an unreality
of delicate gray over which the sunset was poured out thin, the
irritation of Cy and Maud slipped away. Erik smiled at her proudly. She
considered him--coatless, in white thin shirt. She was conscious of his
male differentness, of his flat masculine sides, his thin thighs, his
easy rowing. They talked of the library, of the movies. He hummed and
she softly sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." A breeze shivered across the
agate lake. The wrinkled water was like armor damascened and polished.
The breeze flowed round the boat in a chill current. Carol drew the
collar of her middy blouse over her bare throat.
"Getting cold. Afraid we'll have to go back," she said.
"Let's not go back to them yet. They'll be cutting up. Let's keep along
the shore."
"But you enjoy the 'cutting up!' Maud and you had a beautiful time."
"Why! We just walked on the shore and talked about fishing!"
She was relieved, and apologetic to her friend Maud. "Of course. I was
joking."
"I'll tell you! Let's land here and sit on the shore--that bunch of
hazel-brush will shelter us from the wind--and watch the sunset. It's
like melted lead. Just a short while! We don't want to go back and
listen to them!"
"No, but----" She said nothing while he sped ashore. The keel clashed
on the stones. He stood on the forward seat, holding out his hand.
They were alone, in the ripple-lapping silence. She rose slowly, slowly
stepped over the water in the bottom of the old boat. She took his hand
confidently. Unspeaking they sat on a bleached log, in a russet twilight
which hinted of autumn. Linden leaves fluttered about them.
"I wish----Are you cold now?" he whispered.
"A little." She shivered. But it was not with cold.
"I wish we could curl up in the leaves there, covered all up, and lie
looking out at the dark."
"I wish we could." As though it was comfortably understood that he did
not mean to be taken seriously.
"Like what all the poets say--brown nymph and faun."
"No. I can't be a nymph any more. Too old----Erik, am I old? Am I faded
and small-towny?"
"Why, you're the youngest----Your eyes are like a girl's. They're
so--well, I mean, like you believed everything. Even if you do teach
me, I feel a thousand years older than you, instead of maybe a year
younger."
"Four or five years younger!"
"Anyway, your eyes are so innocent and your cheeks so soft----Damn it,
it makes me want to cry, somehow, you're so defenseless; and I want to
protect you and----There's nothing to protect you against!"
"Am I young? Am I? Honestly? Truly?" She betrayed for a moment the
childish, mock-imploring tone that comes into the voice of the most
serious woman when an agreeable man treats her as a girl; the childish
tone and childish pursed-up lips and shy lift of the cheek.
"Yes, you are!"
"You're dear to believe it, Will--ERIK!"
"Will you play with me? A lot?"
"Perhaps."
"Would you really like to curl in the leaves and watch the stars swing
by overhead?"
"I think it's rather better to be sitting here!" He twined his fingers
with hers. "And Erik, we must go back."
"Why?"
"It's somewhat late to outline all the history of social custom!"
"I know. We must. Are you glad we ran away though?"
"Yes." She was quiet, perfectly simple. But she rose.
He circled her waist with a brusque arm. She did not resist. She did
not care. He was neither a peasant tailor, a potential artist, a
social complication, nor a peril. He was himself, and in him, in the
personality flowing from him, she was unreasoningly content. In his
nearness she caught a new view of his head; the last light brought out
the planes of his neck, his flat ruddied cheeks, the side of his nose,
the depression of his temples. Not as coy or uneasy lovers but as
companions they walked to the boat, and he lifted her up on the prow.
She began to talk intently, as he rowed: "Erik, you've got to work! You
ought to be a personage. You're robbed of your kingdom. Fight for it!
Take one of these correspondence courses in drawing--they mayn't be any
good in themselves, but they'll make you try to draw and----"
As they reached the picnic ground she perceived that it was dark, that
they had been gone for a long time.
"What will they say?" she wondered.
The others greeted them with the inevitable storm of humor and slight
vexation: "Where the deuce do you think you've been?" "You're a fine
pair, you are!" Erik and Carol looked self-conscious; failed in their
effort to be witty. All the way home Carol was embarrassed. Once Cy
winked at her. That Cy, the Peeping Tom of the garage-loft, should
consider her a fellow-sinner----She was furious and frightened and
exultant by turns, and in all her moods certain that Kennicott would
read her adventuring in her face.
She came into the house awkwardly defiant.
Her husband, half asleep under the lamp, greeted her, "Well, well, have
nice time?"
She could not answer. He looked at her. But his look did not sharpen.
He began to wind his watch, yawning the old "Welllllll, guess it's about
time to turn in."
That was all. Yet she was not glad. She was almost disappointed.
II
Mrs. Bogart called next day. She had a hen-like, crumb-pecking, diligent
appearance. Her smile was too innocent. The pecking started instantly:
"Cy says you had lots of fun at the picnic yesterday. Did you enjoy it?"
"Oh yes. I raced Cy at swimming. He beat me badly. He's so strong, isn't
he!"
"Poor boy, just crazy to get into the war, too, but----This Erik Valborg
was along, wa'n't he?"
"Yes."
"I think he's an awful handsome fellow, and they say he's smart. Do you
like him?"
"He seems very polite."
"Cy says you and him had a lovely boat-ride. My, that must have been
pleasant."
"Yes, except that I couldn't get Mr. Valborg to say a word. I wanted
to ask him about the suit Mr. Hicks is making for my husband. But he
insisted on singing. Still, it was restful, floating around on the water
and singing. So happy and innocent. Don't you think it's a shame, Mrs.
Bogart, that people in this town don't do more nice clean things like
that, instead of all this horrible gossiping?"
"Yes. . . . Yes."
Mrs. Bogart sounded vacant. Her bonnet was awry; she was incomparably
dowdy. Carol stared at her, felt contemptuous, ready at last to rebel
against the trap, and as the rusty goodwife fished again, "Plannin' some
more picnics?" she flung out, "I haven't the slightest idea! Oh. Is that
Hugh crying? I must run up to him."
But up-stairs she remembered that Mrs. Bogart had seen her walking
with Erik from the railroad track into town, and she was chilly with
disquietude.
At the Jolly Seventeen, two days after, she was effusive to Maud Dyer,
to Juanita Haydock. She fancied that every one was watching her, but
she could not be sure, and in rare strong moments she did not care.
She could rebel against the town's prying now that she had something,
however indistinct, for which to rebel.
In a passionate escape there must be not only a place from which to flee
but a place to which to flee. She had known that she would gladly leave
Gopher Prairie, leave Main Street and all that it signified, but she
had had no destination. She had one now. That destination was not Erik
Valborg and the love of Erik. She continued to assure herself that she
wasn't in love with him but merely "fond of him, and interested in his
success." Yet in him she had discovered both her need of youth and the
fact that youth would welcome her. It was not Erik to whom she must
escape, but universal and joyous youth, in class-rooms, in studios, in
offices, in meetings to protest against Things in General. . . . But
universal and joyous youth rather resembled Erik.
All week she thought of things she wished to say to him. High, improving
things. She began to admit that she was lonely without him. Then she was
afraid.
It was at the Baptist church supper, a week after the picnic, that
she saw him again. She had gone with Kennicott and Aunt Bessie to the
supper, which was spread on oilcloth-covered and trestle-supported
tables in the church basement. Erik was helping Myrtle Cass to fill
coffee cups for the waitresses. The congregation had doffed their
piety. Children tumbled under the tables, and Deacon Pierson greeted the
women with a rolling, "Where's Brother Jones, sister, where's Brother
Jones? Not going to be with us tonight? Well, you tell Sister Perry to
hand you a plate, and make 'em give you enough oyster pie!"
Erik shared in the cheerfulness. He laughed with Myrtle, jogged her
elbow when she was filling cups, made deep mock bows to the waitresses
as they came up for coffee. Myrtle was enchanted by his humor. From the
other end of the room, a matron among matrons, Carol observed
Myrtle, and hated her, and caught herself at it. "To be jealous of
a wooden-faced village girl!" But she kept it up. She detested Erik;
gloated over his gaucheries--his "breaks," she called them. When he
was too expressive, too much like a Russian dancer, in saluting Deacon
Pierson, Carol had the ecstasy of pain in seeing the deacon's sneer.
When, trying to talk to three girls at once, he dropped a cup and
effeminately wailed, "Oh dear!" she sympathized with--and ached
over--the insulting secret glances of the girls.
From meanly hating him she rose to compassion as she saw that his eyes
begged every one to like him. She perceived how inaccurate her judgments
could be. At the picnic she had fancied that Maud Dyer looked upon Erik
too sentimentally, and she had snarled, "I hate these married women who
cheapen themselves and feed on boys." But at the supper Maud was one of
the waitresses; she bustled with platters of cake, she was pleasant to
old women; and to Erik she gave no attention at all. Indeed, when she
had her own supper, she joined the Kennicotts, and how ludicrous it was
to suppose that Maud was a gourmet of emotions Carol saw in the fact
that she talked not to one of the town beaux but to the safe Kennicott
himself!
When Carol glanced at Erik again she discovered that Mrs. Bogart had
an eye on her. It was a shock to know that at last there was something
which could make her afraid of Mrs. Bogart's spying.
"What am I doing? Am I in love with Erik? Unfaithful? I? I want youth
but I don't want him--I mean, I don't want youth--enough to break up my
life. I must get out of this. Quick."
She said to Kennicott on their way home, "Will! I want to run away for a
few days. Wouldn't you like to skip down to Chicago?"
"Still be pretty hot there. No fun in a big city till winter. What do
you want to go for?"
"People! To occupy my mind. I want stimulus."
"Stimulus?" He spoke good-naturedly. "Who's been feeding you meat? You
got that 'stimulus' out of one of these fool stories about wives that
don't know when they're well off. Stimulus! Seriously, though, to cut
out the jollying, I can't get away."
"Then why don't I run off by myself?"
"Why----'Tisn't the money, you understand. But what about Hugh?"
"Leave him with Aunt Bessie. It would be just for a few days."
"I don't think much of this business of leaving kids around. Bad for
'em."
"So you don't think----"
"I'll tell you: I think we better stay put till after the war. Then
we'll have a dandy long trip. No, I don't think you better plan much
about going away now."
So she was thrown at Erik.
III
She awoke at ebb-time, at three of the morning, woke sharply and fully;
and sharply and coldly as her father pronouncing sentence on a cruel
swindler she gave judgment:
"A pitiful and tawdry love-affair.
"No splendor, no defiance. A self-deceived little woman whispering in
corners with a pretentious little man.
"No, he is not. He is fine. Aspiring. It's not his fault. His eyes are
sweet when he looks at me. Sweet, so sweet."
She pitied herself that her romance should be pitiful; she sighed that
in this colorless hour, to this austere self, it should seem tawdry.
Then, in a very great desire of rebellion and unleashing of all her
hatreds, "The pettier and more tawdry it is, the more blame to Main
Street. It shows how much I've been longing to escape. Any way out! Any
humility so long as I can flee. Main Street has done this to me. I came
here eager for nobilities, ready for work, and now----Any way out.
"I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't
know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is.
Like ants and August sun on a wound.
"Tawdry! Pitiful! Carol--the clean girl that used to walk so
fast!--sneaking and tittering in dark corners, being sentimental and
jealous at church suppers!"
At breakfast-time her agonies were night-blurred, and persisted only as
a nervous irresolution.
IV
Few of the aristocrats of the Jolly Seventeen attended the humble
folk-meets of the Baptist and Methodist church suppers, where the Willis
Woodfords, the Dillons, the Champ Perrys, Oleson the butcher, Brad Bemis
the tinsmith, and Deacon Pierson found release from loneliness. But all
of the smart set went to the lawn-festivals of the Episcopal Church, and
were reprovingly polite to outsiders.
The Harry Haydocks gave the last lawn-festival of the season; a splendor
of Japanese lanterns and card-tables and chicken patties and Neapolitan
ice-cream. Erik was no longer entirely an outsider. He was eating his
ice-cream with a group of the people most solidly "in"--the Dyers,
Myrtle Cass, Guy Pollock, the Jackson Elders. The Haydocks themselves
kept aloof, but the others tolerated him. He would never, Carol fancied,
be one of the town pillars, because he was not orthodox in hunting and
motoring and poker. But he was winning approbation by his liveliness,
his gaiety--the qualities least important in him.
When the group summoned Carol she made several very well-taken points in
regard to the weather.
Myrtle cried to Erik, "Come on! We don't belong with these old folks.
I want to make you 'quainted with the jolliest girl, she comes from
Wakamin, she's staying with Mary Howland."
Carol saw him being profuse to the guest from Wakamin. She saw him
confidentially strolling with Myrtle. She burst out to Mrs. Westlake,
"Valborg and Myrtle seem to have quite a crush on each other."
Mrs. Westlake glanced at her curiously before she mumbled, "Yes, don't
they."
"I'm mad, to talk this way," Carol worried.
She had regained a feeling of social virtue by telling Juanita Haydock
"how darling her lawn looked with the Japanese lanterns" when she saw
that Erik was stalking her. Though he was merely ambling about with his
hands in his pockets, though he did not peep at her, she knew that he
was calling her. She sidled away from Juanita. Erik hastened to her. She
nodded coolly (she was proud of her coolness).
"Carol! I've got a wonderful chance! Don't know but what some ways
it might be better than going East to take art. Myrtle Cass says----I
dropped in to say howdy to Myrtle last evening, and had quite a long
talk with her father, and he said he was hunting for a fellow to go to
work in the flour mill and learn the whole business, and maybe become
general manager. I know something about wheat from my farming, and I
worked a couple of months in the flour mill at Curlew when I got sick of
tailoring. What do you think? You said any work was artistic if it was
done by an artist. And flour is so important. What do you think?"
"Wait! Wait!"
This sensitive boy would be very skilfully stamped into conformity by
Lyman Cass and his sallow daughter; but did she detest the plan for this
reason? "I must be honest. I mustn't tamper with his future to please my
vanity." But she had no sure vision. She turned on him:
"How can I decide? It's up to you. Do you want to become a person like
Lym Cass, or do you want to become a person like--yes, like me! Wait!
Don't be flattering. Be honest. This is important."
"I know. I am a person like you now! I mean, I want to rebel."
"Yes. We're alike," gravely.
"Only I'm not sure I can put through my schemes. I really can't draw
much. I guess I have pretty fair taste in fabrics, but since I've known
you I don't like to think about fussing with dress-designing. But as a
miller, I'd have the means--books, piano, travel."
"I'm going to be frank and beastly. Don't you realize that it isn't just
because her papa needs a bright young man in the mill that Myrtle is
amiable to you? Can't you understand what she'll do to you when she has
you, when she sends you to church and makes you become respectable?"
He glared at her. "I don't know. I suppose so."
"You are thoroughly unstable!"
"What if I am? Most fish out of water are! Don't talk like Mrs. Bogart!
How can I be anything but 'unstable'--wandering from farm to tailor
shop to books, no training, nothing but trying to make books talk to
me! Probably I'll fail. Oh, I know it; probably I'm uneven. But I'm not
unstable in thinking about this job in the mill--and Myrtle. I know what
I want. I want you!"
"Please, please, oh, please!"
"I do. I'm not a schoolboy any more. I want you. If I take Myrtle, it's
to forget you."
"Please, please!"
"It's you that are unstable! You talk at things and play at things, but
you're scared. Would I mind it if you and I went off to poverty, and I
had to dig ditches? I would not! But you would. I think you would come
to like me, but you won't admit it. I wouldn't have said this, but when
you sneer at Myrtle and the mill----If I'm not to have good sensible
things like those, d' you think I'll be content with trying to become a
damn dressmaker, after YOU? Are you fair? Are you?"
"No, I suppose not."
"Do you like me? Do you?"
"Yes----No! Please! I can't talk any more."
"Not here. Mrs. Haydock is looking at us."
"No, nor anywhere. O Erik, I am fond of you, but I'm afraid."
"What of?"
"Of Them! Of my rulers--Gopher Prairie. . . . My dear boy, we are
talking very foolishly. I am a normal wife and a good mother, and you
are--oh, a college freshman."
"You do like me! I'm going to make you love me!"
She looked at him once, recklessly, and walked away with a serene gait
that was a disordered flight.
Kennicott grumbled on their way home, "You and this Valborg fellow seem
quite chummy."
"Oh, we are. He's interested in Myrtle Cass, and I was telling him how
nice she is."
In her room she marveled, "I have become a liar. I'm snarled with lies
and foggy analyses and desires--I who was clear and sure."
She hurried into Kennicott's room, sat on the edge of his bed. He
flapped a drowsy welcoming hand at her from the expanse of quilt and
dented pillows.
"Will, I really think I ought to trot off to St. Paul or Chicago or some
place."
"I thought we settled all that, few nights ago! Wait till we can have a
real trip." He shook himself out of his drowsiness. "You might give me a
good-night kiss."
She did--dutifully. He held her lips against his for an intolerable
time. "Don't you like the old man any more?" he coaxed. He sat up and
shyly fitted his palm about the slimness of her waist.
"Of course. I like you very much indeed." Even to herself it sounded
flat. She longed to be able to throw into her voice the facile passion
of a light woman. She patted his cheek.
He sighed, "I'm sorry you're so tired. Seems like----But of course you
aren't very strong."
"Yes. . . . Then you don't think--you're quite sure I ought to stay here
in town?"
"I told you so! I certainly do!"
She crept back to her room, a small timorous figure in white.
"I can't face Will down--demand the right. He'd be obstinate. And I
can't even go off and earn my living again. Out of the habit of it. He's
driving me----I'm afraid of what he's driving me to. Afraid.
"That man in there, snoring in stale air, my husband? Could any ceremony
make him my husband?
"No. I don't want to hurt him. I want to love him. I can't, when I'm
thinking of Erik. Am I too honest--a funny topsy-turvy honesty--the
faithfulness of unfaith? I wish I had a more compartmental mind, like
men. I'm too monogamous--toward Erik!--my child Erik, who needs me.
"Is an illicit affair like a gambling debt--demands stricter honor than
the legitimate debt of matrimony, because it's not legally enforced?
"That's nonsense! I don't care in the least for Erik! Not for any man. I
want to be let alone, in a woman world--a world without Main Street,
or politicians, or business men, or men with that sudden beastly hungry
look, that glistening unfrank expression that wives know----
"If Erik were here, if he would just sit quiet and kind and talk, I
could be still, I could go to sleep.
"I am so tired. If I could sleep----"
| Fern Mullins, the new schoolteacher, busts into Carol's house and asks her to come on one last picnic before the school year starts. She also wants to bring along Cy Bogart, who will soon be a student of Fern's. Carol makes sure to invite Erik Valbourg along. While on the picnic, Valbourg invites Carol to take a boat ride with him. She agrees, even though she knows it'll cause a bit of a scandal with the other picnickers. The next day, Mrs. Bogart visits Carol and brings up Erik. She's obviously fishing for some admission of guilt from Carol, but Carol keeps a straight face. She's uncomfortable on the inside, because she knows Mrs. Bogart has seen her walking alone with Erik before. A suspicious woman like that is bound to put two and two together. From this point on, Carol seems to catch Mrs. Bogart watching any time she so much as glances in Erik's direction. Carol decides that the best thing to do is get away from Erik and Mrs. Bogart altogether. She asks Will if she can have a few days to spend in Chicago by herself. Will rejects the idea, leaving Carol at the mercy of her feelings for Erik... and the more she likes him, the more she hates Gopher Prairie. One day, Erik runs up to Carol at a lawn party and basically tells her he's in love with her. He's been hanging out with another local girl, but he says that he's only doing it to take his mind off Carol. Carol tells him she's too scared of the judgment of Gopher Prairie to do anything about it. Carol walks away from Erik. Later that afternoon, Will grabs her by the arm and confronts her about how much time she's been spending around Erik. But Carol lies right to his face by saying that she's helping fix up Erik with another local girl. | summary |
CHAPTER XXXI
THEIR night came unheralded.
Kennicott was on a country call. It was cool but Carol huddled on the
porch, rocking, meditating, rocking. The house was lonely and repellent,
and though she sighed, "I ought to go in and read--so many things to
read--ought to go in," she remained. Suddenly Erik was coming, turning
in, swinging open the screen door, touching her hand.
"Erik!"
"Saw your husband driving out of town. Couldn't stand it."
"Well----You mustn't stay more than five minutes."
"Couldn't stand not seeing you. Every day, towards evening, felt I had
to see you--pictured you so clear. I've been good though, staying away,
haven't I!"
"And you must go on being good."
"Why must I?"
"We better not stay here on the porch. The Howlands across the street
are such window-peepers, and Mrs. Bogart----"
She did not look at him but she could divine his tremulousness as he
stumbled indoors. A moment ago the night had been coldly empty; now it
was incalculable, hot, treacherous. But it is women who are the calm
realists once they discard the fetishes of the premarital hunt. Carol
was serene as she murmured, "Hungry? I have some little honey-colored
cakes. You may have two, and then you must skip home."
"Take me up and let me see Hugh asleep."
"I don't believe----"
"Just a glimpse!"
"Well----"
She doubtfully led the way to the hallroom-nursery. Their heads close,
Erik's curls pleasant as they touched her cheek, they looked in at the
baby. Hugh was pink with slumber. He had burrowed into his pillow with
such energy that it was almost smothering him. Beside it was a celluloid
rhinoceros; tight in his hand a torn picture of Old King Cole.
"Shhh!" said Carol, quite automatically. She tiptoed in to pat the
pillow. As she returned to Erik she had a friendly sense of his waiting
for her. They smiled at each other. She did not think of Kennicott, the
baby's father. What she did think was that some one rather like Erik, an
older and surer Erik, ought to be Hugh's father. The three of them would
play--incredible imaginative games.
"Carol! You've told me about your own room. Let me peep in at it."
"But you mustn't stay, not a second. We must go downstairs."
"Yes."
"Will you be good?"
"R-reasonably!" He was pale, large-eyed, serious.
"You've got to be more than reasonably good!" She felt sensible and
superior; she was energetic about pushing open the door.
Kennicott had always seemed out of place there but Erik surprisingly
harmonized with the spirit of the room as he stroked the books, glanced
at the prints. He held out his hands. He came toward her. She was weak,
betrayed to a warm softness. Her head was tilted back. Her eyes were
closed. Her thoughts were formless but many-colored. She felt his kiss,
diffident and reverent, on her eyelid.
Then she knew that it was impossible.
She shook herself. She sprang from him. "Please!" she said sharply.
He looked at her unyielding.
"I am fond of you," she said. "Don't spoil everything. Be my friend."
"How many thousands and millions of women must have said that! And now
you! And it doesn't spoil everything. It glorifies everything."
"Dear, I do think there's a tiny streak of fairy in you--whatever you do
with it. Perhaps I'd have loved that once. But I won't. It's too late.
But I'll keep a fondness for you. Impersonal--I will be impersonal! It
needn't be just a thin talky fondness. You do need me, don't you? Only
you and my son need me. I've wanted so to be wanted! Once I wanted
love to be given to me. Now I'll be content if I can give. . . . Almost
content!
"We women, we like to do things for men. Poor men! We swoop on you when
you're defenseless and fuss over you and insist on reforming you. But
it's so pitifully deep in us. You'll be the one thing in which I haven't
failed. Do something definite! Even if it's just selling cottons. Sell
beautiful cottons--caravans from China----"
"Carol! Stop! You do love me!"
"I do not! It's just----Can't you understand? Everything crushes in on
me so, all the gaping dull people, and I look for a way out----Please
go. I can't stand any more. Please!"
He was gone. And she was not relieved by the quiet of the house. She was
empty and the house was empty and she needed him. She wanted to go
on talking, to get this threshed out, to build a sane friendship. She
wavered down to the living-room, looked out of the bay-window. He was
not to be seen. But Mrs. Westlake was. She was walking past, and in
the light from the corner arc-lamp she quickly inspected the porch, the
windows. Carol dropped the curtain, stood with movement and reflection
paralyzed. Automatically, without reasoning, she mumbled, "I will see
him again soon and make him understand we must be friends. But----The
house is so empty. It echoes so."
II
Kennicott had seemed nervous and absent-minded through that supper-hour,
two evenings after. He prowled about the living-room, then growled:
"What the dickens have you been saying to Ma Westlake?"
Carol's book rattled. "What do you mean?"
"I told you that Westlake and his wife were jealous of us, and here you
been chumming up to them and----From what Dave tells me, Ma Westlake has
been going around town saying you told her that you hate Aunt Bessie,
and that you fixed up your own room because I snore, and you said
Bjornstam was too good for Bea, and then, just recent, that you were
sore on the town because we don't all go down on our knees and beg this
Valborg fellow to come take supper with us. God only knows what else she
says you said."
"It's not true, any of it! I did like Mrs. Westlake, and I've called on
her, and apparently she's gone and twisted everything I've said----"
"Sure. Of course she would. Didn't I tell you she would? She's an old
cat, like her pussyfooting, hand-holding husband. Lord, if I was sick,
I'd rather have a faith-healer than Westlake, and she's another slice
off the same bacon. What I can't understand though----"
She waited, taut.
"----is whatever possessed you to let her pump you, bright a girl as
you are. I don't care what you told her--we all get peeved sometimes
and want to blow off steam, that's natural--but if you wanted to keep it
dark, why didn't you advertise it in the Dauntless, or get a megaphone
and stand on top of the hotel and holler, or do anything besides spill
it to her!"
"I know. You told me. But she was so motherly. And I didn't have any
woman----Vida 's become so married and proprietary."
"Well, next time you'll have better sense."
He patted her head, flumped down behind his newspaper, said nothing
more.
Enemies leered through the windows, stole on her from the hall. She had
no one save Erik. This kind good man Kennicott--he was an elder
brother. It was Erik, her fellow outcast, to whom she wanted to run for
sanctuary. Through her storm she was, to the eye, sitting quietly with
her fingers between the pages of a baby-blue book on home-dressmaking.
But her dismay at Mrs. Westlake's treachery had risen to active dread.
What had the woman said of her and Erik? What did she know? What had she
seen? Who else would join in the baying hunt? Who else had seen her
with Erik? What had she to fear from the Dyers, Cy Bogart, Juanita, Aunt
Bessie? What precisely had she answered to Mrs. Bogart's questioning?
All next day she was too restless to stay home, yet as she walked the
streets on fictitious errands she was afraid of every person she met.
She waited for them to speak; waited with foreboding. She repeated, "I
mustn't ever see Erik again." But the words did not register. She had no
ecstatic indulgence in the sense of guilt which is, to the women of Main
Street, the surest escape from blank tediousness.
At five, crumpled in a chair in the living-room, she started at the
sound of the bell. Some one opened the door. She waited, uneasy. Vida
Sherwin charged into the room. "Here's the one person I can trust!"
Carol rejoiced.
Vida was serious but affectionate. She bustled at Carol with, "Oh, there
you are, dearie, so glad t' find you in, sit down, want to talk to you."
Carol sat, obedient.
Vida fussily tugged over a large chair and launched out:
"I've been hearing vague rumors you were interested in this Erik
Valborg. I knew you couldn't be guilty, and I'm surer than ever of it
now. Here we are, as blooming as a daisy."
"How does a respectable matron look when she feels guilty?"
Carol sounded resentful.
"Why----Oh, it would show! Besides! I know that you, of all people, are
the one that can appreciate Dr. Will."
"What have you been hearing?"
"Nothing, really. I just heard Mrs. Bogart say she'd seen you and
Valborg walking together a lot." Vida's chirping slackened. She looked
at her nails. "But----I suspect you do like Valborg. Oh, I don't mean in
any wrong way. But you're young; you don't know what an innocent liking
might drift into. You always pretend to be so sophisticated and all,
but you're a baby. Just because you are so innocent, you don't know what
evil thoughts may lurk in that fellow's brain."
"You don't suppose Valborg could actually think about making love to
me?"
Her rather cheap sport ended abruptly as Vida cried, with contorted
face, "What do you know about the thoughts in hearts? You just play at
reforming the world. You don't know what it means to suffer."
There are two insults which no human being will endure: the assertion
that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion
that he has never known trouble. Carol said furiously, "You think I
don't suffer? You think I've always had an easy----"
"No, you don't. I'm going to tell you something I've never told a living
soul, not even Ray." The dam of repressed imagination which Vida had
builded for years, which now, with Raymie off at the wars, she was
building again, gave way.
"I was--I liked Will terribly well. One time at a party--oh, before
he met you, of course--but we held hands, and we were so happy. But I
didn't feel I was really suited to him. I let him go. Please don't think
I still love him! I see now that Ray was predestined to be my mate. But
because I liked him, I know how sincere and pure and noble Will is, and
his thoughts never straying from the path of rectitude, and----If I gave
him up to you, at least you've got to appreciate him! We danced together
and laughed so, and I gave him up, but----This IS my affair! I'm NOT
intruding! I see the whole thing as he does, because of all I've told
you. Maybe it's shameless to bare my heart this way, but I do it for
him--for him and you!"
Carol understood that Vida believed herself to have recited minutely and
brazenly a story of intimate love; understood that, in alarm, she was
trying to cover her shame as she struggled on, "Liked him in the most
honorable way--simply can't help it if I still see things through
his eyes----If I gave him up, I certainly am not beyond my rights
in demanding that you take care to avoid even the appearance of evil
and----" She was weeping; an insignificant, flushed, ungracefully
weeping woman.
Carol could not endure it. She ran to Vida, kissed her forehead,
comforted her with a murmur of dove-like sounds, sought to reassure her
with worn and hastily assembled gifts of words: "Oh, I appreciate it so
much," and "You are so fine and splendid," and "Let me assure you there
isn't a thing to what you've heard," and "Oh, indeed, I do know how
sincere Will is, and as you say, so--so sincere."
Vida believed that she had explained many deep and devious matters. She
came out of her hysteria like a sparrow shaking off rain-drops. She sat
up, and took advantage of her victory:
"I don't want to rub it in, but you can see for yourself now, this is
all a result of your being so discontented and not appreciating the dear
good people here. And another thing: People like you and me, who want to
reform things, have to be particularly careful about appearances. Think
how much better you can criticize conventional customs if you yourself
live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can't say you're attacking
them to excuse your own infractions."
To Carol was given a sudden great philosophical understanding, an
explanation of half the cautious reforms in history. "Yes. I've heard
that plea. It's a good one. It sets revolts aside to cool. It keeps
strays in the flock. To word it differently: 'You must live up to the
popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then
you MUST live up to it!'"
"I don't think so at all," said Vida vaguely. She began to look hurt,
and Carol let her be oracular.
III
Vida had done her a service; had made all agonizing seem so fatuous that
she ceased writhing and saw that her whole problem was simple as mutton:
she was interested in Erik's aspiration; interest gave her a hesitating
fondness for him; and the future would take care of the event. . . .
But at night, thinking in bed, she protested, "I'm not a falsely
accused innocent, though! If it were some one more resolute than Erik, a
fighter, an artist with bearded surly lips----They're only in books.
Is that the real tragedy, that I never shall know tragedy, never find
anything but blustery complications that turn out to be a farce?
"No one big enough or pitiful enough to sacrifice for. Tragedy in
neat blouses; the eternal flame all nice and safe in a kerosene stove.
Neither heroic faith nor heroic guilt. Peeping at love from behind lace
curtains--on Main Street!"
Aunt Bessie crept in next day, tried to pump her, tried to prime the
pump by again hinting that Kennicott might have his own affairs. Carol
snapped, "Whatever I may do, I'll have you to understand that Will is
only too safe!" She wished afterward that she had not been so lofty. How
much would Aunt Bessie make of "Whatever I may do?"
When Kennicott came home he poked at things, and hemmed, and brought
out, "Saw aunty, this afternoon. She said you weren't very polite to
her."
Carol laughed. He looked at her in a puzzled way and fled to his
newspaper.
IV
She lay sleepless. She alternately considered ways of leaving Kennicott,
and remembered his virtues, pitied his bewilderment in face of the
subtle corroding sicknesses which he could not dose nor cut out. Didn't
he perhaps need her more than did the book-solaced Erik? Suppose Will
were to die, suddenly. Suppose she never again saw him at breakfast,
silent but amiable, listening to her chatter. Suppose he never again
played elephant for Hugh. Suppose----A country call, a slippery road,
his motor skidding, the edge of the road crumbling, the car turning
turtle, Will pinned beneath, suffering, brought home maimed, looking at
her with spaniel eyes--or waiting for her, calling for her, while she
was in Chicago, knowing nothing of it. Suppose he were sued by some
vicious shrieking woman for malpractice. He tried to get witnesses;
Westlake spread lies; his friends doubted him; his self-confidence was
so broken that it was horrible to see the indecision of the decisive
man; he was convicted, handcuffed, taken on a train----
She ran to his room. At her nervous push the door swung sharply in,
struck a chair. He awoke, gasped, then in a steady voice: "What is it,
dear? Anything wrong?" She darted to him, fumbled for the familiar harsh
bristly cheek. How well she knew it, every seam, and hardness of bone,
and roll of fat! Yet when he sighed, "This is a nice visit," and dropped
his hand on her thin-covered shoulder, she said, too cheerily, "I
thought I heard you moaning. So silly of me. Good night, dear."
V
She did not see Erik for a fortnight, save once at church and once when
she went to the tailor shop to talk over the plans, contingencies, and
strategy of Kennicott's annual campaign for getting a new suit. Nat
Hicks was there, and he was not so deferential as he had been. With
unnecessary jauntiness he chuckled, "Some nice flannels, them
samples, heh?" Needlessly he touched her arm to call attention to the
fashion-plates, and humorously he glanced from her to Erik. At home she
wondered if the little beast might not be suggesting himself as a rival
to Erik, but that abysmal bedragglement she would not consider.
She saw Juanita Haydock slowly walking past the house--as Mrs. Westlake
had once walked past.
She met Mrs. Westlake in Uncle Whittier's store, and before that alert
stare forgot her determination to be rude, and was shakily cordial.
She was sure that all the men on the street, even Guy Pollock and Sam
Clark, leered at her in an interested hopeful way, as though she were
a notorious divorcee. She felt as insecure as a shadowed criminal. She
wished to see Erik, and wished that she had never seen him. She fancied
that Kennicott was the only person in town who did not know all--know
incomparably more than there was to know--about herself and Erik. She
crouched in her chair as she imagined men talking of her, thick-voiced,
obscene, in barber shops and the tobacco-stinking pool parlor.
Through early autumn Fern Mullins was the only person who broke the
suspense. The frivolous teacher had come to accept Carol as of her
own youth, and though school had begun she rushed in daily to suggest
dances, welsh-rabbit parties.
Fern begged her to go as chaperon to a barn-dance in the country, on a
Saturday evening. Carol could not go. The next day, the storm crashed.
| Carol sits on the porch one evening while Will is out on a country house call. Erik comes marching onto the porch and touches her hand, saying that he saw Will drive out of town and decided to come over. Carol doesn't want any neighbors to see them, so she leads Erik into the house. Erik wants to see Carol's son sleeping, and she lets him... but maybe he's just trying to get her upstairs. Erik steps up to her and kisses her face. Eventually, Carol convinces Erik to leave. When he's gone, she feels completely empty. She glances out the window to see if she can see him leaving, but all she finds is her nosy neighbor standing in front of her house and inspecting it. She feels paralyzed by the thought that this neighbor saw Erik leave while Will wasn't at home. When Will gets back home, he accuses Carol of getting too chummy with the wife of his medical rival, Dr. Westlake. He's heard that Carol trash talks her in-laws with this woman, and he doesn't want to hear any more of it. The next day, Vida Sherwin visits to tell Carol that there have been rumors about her being involved with Erik Valbourg. Carol denies it outright, although it's clear that she's rattled. Carol starts to have daydreams about Will dying while she is somewhere with Erik. She awakens from the dream and runs to be in bed with Will, feeling horribly guilty. Carol goes the next two weeks without speaking to Erik. One night, Fern Mullins asks Carol to be a chaperone at a barn dance in the area, but Carol rejects her, and we find out that something bad happened after that. | summary |
CHAPTER XXXII
I
CAROL was on the back porch, tightening a bolt on the baby's go-cart,
this Sunday afternoon. Through an open window of the Bogart house she
heard a screeching, heard Mrs. Bogart's haggish voice:
" . . . did too, and there's no use your denying it no you don't, you march
yourself right straight out of the house . . . never in my life heard of
such . . . never had nobody talk to me like . . . walk in the ways of sin
and nastiness . . . leave your clothes here, and heaven knows that's more
than you deserve . . . any of your lip or I'll call the policeman."
The voice of the other interlocutor Carol did not catch, nor, though
Mrs. Bogart was proclaiming that he was her confidant and present
assistant, did she catch the voice of Mrs. Bogart's God.
"Another row with Cy," Carol inferred.
She trundled the go-cart down the back steps and tentatively wheeled it
across the yard, proud of her repairs. She heard steps on the sidewalk.
She saw not Cy Bogart but Fern Mullins, carrying a suit-case, hurrying
up the street with her head low. The widow, standing on the porch with
buttery arms akimbo, yammered after the fleeing girl:
"And don't you dare show your face on this block again. You can send the
drayman for your trunk. My house has been contaminated long enough. Why
the Lord should afflict me----"
Fern was gone. The righteous widow glared, banged into the house, came
out poking at her bonnet, marched away. By this time Carol was staring
in a manner not visibly to be distinguished from the window-peeping of
the rest of Gopher Prairie. She saw Mrs. Bogart enter the Howland house,
then the Casses'. Not till suppertime did she reach the Kennicotts. The
doctor answered her ring, and greeted her, "Well, well? how's the good
neighbor?"
The good neighbor charged into the living-room, waving the most unctuous
of black kid gloves and delightedly sputtering:
"You may well ask how I am! I really do wonder how I could go through
the awful scenes of this day--and the impudence I took from that woman's
tongue, that ought to be cut out----"
"Whoa! Whoa! Hold up!" roared Kennicott. "Who's the hussy, Sister
Bogart? Sit down and take it cool and tell us about it."
"I can't sit down, I must hurry home, but I couldn't devote myself to my
own selfish cares till I'd warned you, and heaven knows I don't expect
any thanks for trying to warn the town against her, there's always so
much evil in the world that folks simply won't see or appreciate your
trying to safeguard them----And forcing herself in here to get in with
you and Carrie, many 's the time I've seen her doing it, and, thank
heaven, she was found out in time before she could do any more harm, it
simply breaks my heart and prostrates me to think what she may have done
already, even if some of us that understand and know about things----"
"Whoa-up! Who are you talking about?"
"She's talking about Fern Mullins," Carol put in, not pleasantly.
"Huh?"
Kennicott was incredulous.
"I certainly am!" flourished Mrs. Bogart, "and good and thankful you
may be that I found her out in time, before she could get YOU into
something, Carol, because even if you are my neighbor and Will's wife
and a cultured lady, let me tell you right now, Carol Kennicott, that
you ain't always as respectful to--you ain't as reverent--you don't
stick by the good old ways like they was laid down for us by God in the
Bible, and while of course there ain't a bit of harm in having a good
laugh, and I know there ain't any real wickedness in you, yet just the
same you don't fear God and hate the transgressors of his commandments
like you ought to, and you may be thankful I found out this serpent I
nourished in my bosom--and oh yes! oh yes indeed! my lady must have
two eggs every morning for breakfast, and eggs sixty cents a dozen, and
wa'n't satisfied with one, like most folks--what did she care how much
they cost or if a person couldn't make hardly nothing on her board and
room, in fact I just took her in out of charity and I might have known
from the kind of stockings and clothes that she sneaked into my house in
her trunk----"
Before they got her story she had five more minutes of obscene
wallowing. The gutter comedy turned into high tragedy, with Nemesis
in black kid gloves. The actual story was simple, depressing, and
unimportant. As to details Mrs. Bogart was indefinite, and angry that
she should be questioned.
Fern Mullins and Cy had, the evening before, driven alone to a
barn-dance in the country. (Carol brought out the admission that Fern
had tried to get a chaperon.) At the dance Cy had kissed Fern--she
confessed that. Cy had obtained a pint of whisky; he said that he didn't
remember where he had got it; Mrs. Bogart implied that Fern had given
it to him; Fern herself insisted that he had stolen it from a farmer's
overcoat--which, Mrs. Bogart raged, was obviously a lie. He had become
soggily drunk. Fern had driven him home; deposited him, retching and
wabbling, on the Bogart porch.
Never before had her boy been drunk, shrieked Mrs. Bogart. When
Kennicott grunted, she owned, "Well, maybe once or twice I've smelled
licker on his breath." She also, with an air of being only too
scrupulously exact, granted that sometimes he did not come home till
morning. But he couldn't ever have been drunk, for he always had
the best excuses: the other boys had tempted him to go down the lake
spearing pickerel by torchlight, or he had been out in a "machine that
ran out of gas." Anyway, never before had her boy fallen into the hands
of a "designing woman."
"What do you suppose Miss Mullins could design to do with him?" insisted
Carol.
Mrs. Bogart was puzzled, gave it up, went on. This morning, when she had
faced both of them, Cy had manfully confessed that all of the blame was
on Fern, because the teacher--his own teacher--had dared him to take a
drink. Fern had tried to deny it.
"Then," gabbled Mrs. Bogart, "then that woman had the impudence to
say to me, 'What purpose could I have in wanting the filthy pup to get
drunk?' That's just what she called him--pup. 'I'll have no such nasty
language in my house,' I says, 'and you pretending and pulling the wool
over people's eyes and making them think you're educated and fit to be
a teacher and look out for young people's morals--you're worse 'n any
street-walker!' I says. I let her have it good. I wa'n't going to flinch
from my bounden duty and let her think that decent folks had to stand
for her vile talk. 'Purpose?' I says, 'Purpose? I'll tell you what
purpose you had! Ain't I seen you making up to everything in pants
that'd waste time and pay attention to your impert'nence? Ain't I seen
you showing off your legs with them short skirts of yours, trying
to make out like you was so girlish and la-de-da, running along the
street?'"
Carol was very sick at this version of Fern's eager youth, but she was
sicker as Mrs. Bogart hinted that no one could tell what had happened
between Fern and Cy before the drive home. Without exactly describing
the scene, by her power of lustful imagination the woman suggested dark
country places apart from the lanterns and rude fiddling and banging
dance-steps in the barn, then madness and harsh hateful conquest. Carol
was too sick to interrupt. It was Kennicott who cried, "Oh, for God's
sake quit it! You haven't any idea what happened. You haven't given us a
single proof yet that Fern is anything but a rattle-brained youngster."
"I haven't, eh? Well, what do you say to this? I come straight out and
I says to her, 'Did you or did you not taste the whisky Cy had?' and she
says, 'I think I did take one sip--Cy made me,' she said. She owned up
to that much, so you can imagine----"
"Does that prove her a prostitute?" asked Carol.
"Carrie! Don't you never use a word like that again!" wailed the
outraged Puritan.
"Well, does it prove her to be a bad woman, that she took a taste of
whisky? I've done it myself!"
"That's different. Not that I approve your doing it. What do the
Scriptures tell us? 'Strong drink is a mocker'! But that's entirely
different from a teacher drinking with one of her own pupils."
"Yes, it does sound bad. Fern was silly, undoubtedly. But as a matter
of fact she's only a year or two older than Cy and probably a good many
years younger in experience of vice."
"That's--not--true! She is plenty old enough to corrupt him!
"The job of corrupting Cy was done by your sinless town, five years
ago!"
Mrs. Bogart did not rage in return. Suddenly she was hopeless. Her head
drooped. She patted her black kid gloves, picked at a thread of her
faded brown skirt, and sighed, "He's a good boy, and awful affectionate
if you treat him right. Some thinks he's terrible wild, but that's
because he's young. And he's so brave and truthful--why, he was one of
the first in town that wanted to enlist for the war, and I had to speak
real sharp to him to keep him from running away. I didn't want him to
get into no bad influences round these camps--and then," Mrs. Bogart
rose from her pitifulness, recovered her pace, "then I go and bring into
my own house a woman that's worse, when all's said and done, than any
bad woman he could have met. You say this Mullins woman is too young
and inexperienced to corrupt Cy. Well then, she's too young and
inexperienced to teach him, too, one or t'other, you can't have your
cake and eat it! So it don't make no difference which reason they fire
her for, and that's practically almost what I said to the school-board."
"Have you been telling this story to the members of the school-board?"
"I certainly have! Every one of 'em! And their wives I says to them,
''Tain't my affair to decide what you should or should not do with your
teachers,' I says, 'and I ain't presuming to dictate in any way, shape,
manner, or form. I just want to know,' I says, 'whether you're going
to go on record as keeping here in our schools, among a lot of innocent
boys and girls, a woman that drinks, smokes, curses, uses bad language,
and does such dreadful things as I wouldn't lay tongue to but you know
what I mean,' I says, 'and if so, I'll just see to it that the town
learns about it.' And that's what I told Professor Mott, too, being
superintendent--and he's a righteous man, not going autoing on the
Sabbath like the school-board members. And the professor as much as
admitted he was suspicious of the Mullins woman himself."
II
Kennicott was less shocked and much less frightened than Carol, and more
articulate in his description of Mrs. Bogart, when she had gone.
Maud Dyer telephoned to Carol and, after a rather improbable question
about cooking lima beans with bacon, demanded, "Have you heard the
scandal about this Miss Mullins and Cy Bogart?"
"I'm sure it's a lie."
"Oh, probably is." Maud's manner indicated that the falsity of the story
was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness.
Carol crept to her room, sat with hands curled tight together as she
listened to a plague of voices. She could hear the town yelping with it,
every soul of them, gleeful at new details, panting to win importance by
having details of their own to add. How well they would make up for what
they had been afraid to do by imagining it in another! They who had
not been entirely afraid (but merely careful and sneaky), all the
barber-shop roues and millinery-parlor mondaines, how archly they
were giggling (this second--she could hear them at it); with what
self-commendation they were cackling their suavest wit: "You can't tell
ME she ain't a gay bird; I'm wise!"
And not one man in town to carry out their pioneer tradition of superb
and contemptuous cursing, not one to verify the myth that their "rough
chivalry" and "rugged virtues" were more generous than the petty
scandal-picking of older lands, not one dramatic frontiersman to
thunder, with fantastic and fictional oaths, "What are you hinting
at? What are you snickering at? What facts have you? What are these
unheard-of sins you condemn so much--and like so well?"
No one to say it. Not Kennicott nor Guy Pollock nor Champ Perry.
Erik? Possibly. He would sputter uneasy protest.
She suddenly wondered what subterranean connection her interest in Erik
had with this affair. Wasn't it because they had been prevented by her
caste from bounding on her own trail that they were howling at Fern?
III
Before supper she found, by half a dozen telephone calls, that Fern had
fled to the Minniemashie House. She hastened there, trying not to be
self-conscious about the people who looked at her on the street. The
clerk said indifferently that he "guessed" Miss Mullins was up in Room
37, and left Carol to find the way. She hunted along the stale-smelling
corridors with their wallpaper of cerise daisies and poison-green
rosettes, streaked in white spots from spilled water, their frayed red
and yellow matting, and rows of pine doors painted a sickly blue. She
could not find the number. In the darkness at the end of a corridor she
had to feel the aluminum figures on the door-panels. She was startled
once by a man's voice: "Yep? Whadyuh want?" and fled. When she reached
the right door she stood listening. She made out a long sobbing. There
was no answer till her third knock; then an alarmed "Who is it? Go
away!"
Her hatred of the town turned resolute as she pushed open the door.
Yesterday she had seen Fern Mullins in boots and tweed skirt and
canary-yellow sweater, fleet and self-possessed. Now she lay across
the bed, in crumpled lavender cotton and shabby pumps, very feminine,
utterly cowed. She lifted her head in stupid terror. Her hair was in
tousled strings and her face was sallow, creased. Her eyes were a blur
from weeping.
"I didn't! I didn't!" was all she would say at first, and she repeated
it while Carol kissed her cheek, stroked her hair, bathed her forehead.
She rested then, while Carol looked about the room--the welcome to
strangers, the sanctuary of hospitable Main Street, the lucrative
property of Kennicott's friend, Jackson Elder. It smelled of old linen
and decaying carpet and ancient tobacco smoke. The bed was rickety,
with a thin knotty mattress; the sand-colored walls were scratched and
gouged; in every corner, under everything, were fluffy dust and cigar
ashes; on the tilted wash-stand was a nicked and squatty pitcher; the
only chair was a grim straight object of spotty varnish; but there was
an altogether splendid gilt and rose cuspidor.
She did not try to draw out Fern's story; Fern insisted on telling it.
She had gone to the party, not quite liking Cy but willing to endure him
for the sake of dancing, of escaping from Mrs. Bogart's flow of moral
comments, of relaxing after the first strained weeks of teaching. Cy
"promised to be good." He was, on the way out. There were a few workmen
from Gopher Prairie at the dance, with many young farm-people. Half
a dozen squatters from a degenerate colony in a brush-hidden hollow,
planters of potatoes, suspected thieves, came in noisily drunk. They all
pounded the floor of the barn in old-fashioned square dances, swinging
their partners, skipping, laughing, under the incantations of Del
Snafflin the barber, who fiddled and called the figures. Cy had two
drinks from pocket-flasks. Fern saw him fumbling among the overcoats
piled on the feedbox at the far end of the barn; soon after she heard a
farmer declaring that some one had stolen his bottle. She taxed Cy with
the theft; he chuckled, "Oh, it's just a joke; I'm going to give it
back." He demanded that she take a drink. Unless she did, he wouldn't
return the bottle.
"I just brushed my lips with it, and gave it back to him," moaned Fern.
She sat up, glared at Carol. "Did you ever take a drink?"
"I have. A few. I'd love to have one right now! This contact with
righteousness has about done me up!"
Fern could laugh then. "So would I! I don't suppose I've had five drinks
in my life, but if I meet just one more Bogart and Son----Well, I didn't
really touch that bottle--horrible raw whisky--though I'd have loved
some wine. I felt so jolly. The barn was almost like a stage scene--the
high rafters, and the dark stalls, and tin lanterns swinging, and a
silage-cutter up at the end like some mysterious kind of machine. And
I'd been having lots of fun dancing with the nicest young farmer, so
strong and nice, and awfully intelligent. But I got uneasy when I saw
how Cy was. So I doubt if I touched two drops of the beastly stuff. Do
you suppose God is punishing me for even wanting wine?"
"My dear, Mrs. Bogart's god may be--Main Street's god. But all the
courageous intelligent people are fighting him . . . though he slay us."
Fern danced again with the young farmer; she forgot Cy while she was
talking with a girl who had taken the University agricultural course.
Cy could not have returned the bottle; he came staggering toward
her--taking time to make himself offensive to every girl on the way
and to dance a jig. She insisted on their returning. Cy went with her,
chuckling and jigging. He kissed her, outside the door. . . . "And
to think I used to think it was interesting to have men kiss you at
a dance!". . . She ignored the kiss, in the need of getting him home
before he started a fight. A farmer helped her harness the buggy, while
Cy snored in the seat. He awoke before they set out; all the way home he
alternately slept and tried to make love to her.
"I'm almost as strong as he is. I managed to keep him away while I
drove--such a rickety buggy. I didn't feel like a girl; I felt like a
scrubwoman--no, I guess I was too scared to have any feelings at all. It
was terribly dark. I got home, somehow. But it was hard, the time I had
to get out, and it was quite muddy, to read a sign-post--I lit matches
that I took from Cy's coat pocket, and he followed me--he fell off
the buggy step into the mud, and got up and tried to make love to me,
and----I was scared. But I hit him. Quite hard. And got in, and so he
ran after the buggy, crying like a baby, and I let him in again, and
right away again he was trying----But no matter. I got him home. Up on
the porch. Mrs. Bogart was waiting up. . . .
"You know, it was funny; all the time she was--oh, talking to me--and Cy
was being terribly sick--I just kept thinking, 'I've still got to drive
the buggy down to the livery stable. I wonder if the livery man will be
awake?' But I got through somehow. I took the buggy down to the stable,
and got to my room. I locked my door, but Mrs. Bogart kept saying
things, outside the door. Stood out there saying things about me,
dreadful things, and rattling the knob. And all the while I could hear
Cy in the back yard-being sick. I don't think I'll ever marry any man.
And then today----
"She drove me right out of the house. She wouldn't listen to me, all
morning. Just to Cy. I suppose he's over his headache now. Even at
breakfast he thought the whole thing was a grand joke. I suppose right
this minute he's going around town boasting about his 'conquest.' You
understand--oh, DON'T you understand? I DID keep him away! But I don't
see how I can face my school. They say country towns are fine for
bringing up boys in, but----I can't believe this is me, lying here and
saying this. I don't BELIEVE what happened last night.
"Oh. This was curious: When I took off my dress last night--it was a
darling dress, I loved it so, but of course the mud had spoiled it. I
cried over it and----No matter. But my white silk stockings were all
torn, and the strange thing is, I don't know whether I caught my legs
in the briers when I got out to look at the sign-post, or whether Cy
scratched me when I was fighting him off."
IV
Sam Clark was president of the school-board. When Carol told him Fern's
story Sam looked sympathetic and neighborly, and Mrs. Clark sat by
cooing, "Oh, isn't that too bad." Carol was interrupted only when Mrs.
Clark begged, "Dear, don't speak so bitter about 'pious' people. There's
lots of sincere practising Christians that are real tolerant. Like the
Champ Perrys."
"Yes. I know. Unfortunately there are enough kindly people in the
churches to keep them going."
When Carol had finished, Mrs. Clark breathed, "Poor girl; I don't doubt
her story a bit," and Sam rumbled, "Yuh, sure. Miss Mullins is young and
reckless, but everybody in town, except Ma Bogart, knows what Cy is. But
Miss Mullins was a fool to go with him."
"But not wicked enough to pay for it with disgrace?"
"N-no, but----" Sam avoided verdicts, clung to the entrancing horrors
of the story. "Ma Bogart cussed her out all morning, did she? Jumped her
neck, eh? Ma certainly is one hell-cat."
"Yes, you know how she is; so vicious."
"Oh no, her best style ain't her viciousness. What she pulls in our
store is to come in smiling with Christian Fortitude and keep a clerk
busy for one hour while she picks out half a dozen fourpenny nails. I
remember one time----"
"Sam!" Carol was uneasy. "You'll fight for Fern, won't you? When Mrs.
Bogart came to see you did she make definite charges?"
"Well, yes, you might say she did."
"But the school-board won't act on them?"
"Guess we'll more or less have to."
"But you'll exonerate Fern?"
"I'll do what I can for the girl personally, but you know what the board
is. There's Reverend Zitterel; Sister Bogart about half runs his church,
so of course he'll take her say-so; and Ezra Stowbody, as a banker he
has to be all hell for morality and purity. Might 's well admit it,
Carrie; I'm afraid there'll be a majority of the board against her. Not
that any of us would believe a word Cy said, not if he swore it on a
stack of Bibles, but still, after all this gossip, Miss Mullins wouldn't
hardly be the party to chaperon our basket-ball team when it went out of
town to play other high schools, would she!"
"Perhaps not, but couldn't some one else?"
"Why, that's one of the things she was hired for." Sam sounded stubborn.
"Do you realize that this isn't just a matter of a job, and hiring and
firing; that it's actually sending a splendid girl out with a beastly
stain on her, giving all the other Bogarts in the world a chance at her?
That's what will happen if you discharge her."
Sam moved uncomfortably, looked at his wife, scratched his head, sighed,
said nothing.
"Won't you fight for her on the board? If you lose, won't you, and
whoever agrees with you, make a minority report?"
"No reports made in a case like this. Our rule is to just decide the
thing and announce the final decision, whether it's unanimous or not."
"Rules! Against a girl's future! Dear God! Rules of a school-board! Sam!
Won't you stand by Fern, and threaten to resign from the board if they
try to discharge her?"
Rather testy, tired of so many subtleties, he complained, "Well, I'll do
what I can, but I'll have to wait till the board meets."
And "I'll do what I can," together with the secret admission "Of
course you and I know what Ma Bogart is," was all Carol could get
from Superintendent George Edwin Mott, Ezra Stowbody, the Reverend Mr.
Zitterel or any other member of the school-board.
Afterward she wondered whether Mr. Zitterel could have been referring
to herself when he observed, "There's too much license in high places
in this town, though, and the wages of sin is death--or anyway, bein'
fired." The holy leer with which the priest said it remained in her
mind.
She was at the hotel before eight next morning. Fern longed to go to
school, to face the tittering, but she was too shaky. Carol read to
her all day and, by reassuring her, convinced her own self that the
school-board would be just. She was less sure of it that evening when,
at the motion pictures, she heard Mrs. Gougerling exclaim to Mrs.
Howland, "She may be so innocent and all, and I suppose she probably is,
but still, if she drank a whole bottle of whisky at that dance, the way
everybody says she did, she may have forgotten she was so innocent! Hee,
hee, hee!" Maud Dyer, leaning back from her seat, put in, "That's what
I've said all along. I don't want to roast anybody, but have you noticed
the way she looks at men?"
"When will they have me on the scaffold?" Carol speculated.
Nat Hicks stopped the Kennicotts on their way home. Carol hated him for
his manner of assuming that they two had a mysterious understanding.
Without quite winking he seemed to wink at her as he gurgled, "What do
you folks think about this Mullins woman? I'm not strait-laced, but I
tell you we got to have decent women in our schools. D' you know what I
heard? They say whatever she may of done afterwards, this Mullins dame
took two quarts of whisky to the dance with her, and got stewed before
Cy did! Some tank, that wren! Ha, ha, ha!"
"Rats, I don't believe it," Kennicott muttered.
He got Carol away before she was able to speak.
She saw Erik passing the house, late, alone, and she stared after him,
longing for the lively bitterness of the things he would say about the
town. Kennicott had nothing for her but "Oh, course, ev'body likes a
juicy story, but they don't intend to be mean."
She went up to bed proving to herself that the members of the
school-board were superior men.
It was Tuesday afternoon before she learned that the board had met
at ten in the morning and voted to "accept Miss Fern Mullins's
resignation." Sam Clark telephoned the news to her. "We're not making
any charges. We're just letting her resign. Would you like to drop over
to the hotel and ask her to write the resignation, now we've accepted
it? Glad I could get the board to put it that way. It's thanks to you."
"But can't you see that the town will take this as proof of the
charges?"
"We're--not--making--no--charges--whatever!" Sam was obviously finding
it hard to be patient.
Fern left town that evening.
Carol went with her to the train. The two girls elbowed through a silent
lip-licking crowd. Carol tried to stare them down but in face of
the impishness of the boys and the bovine gaping of the men, she was
embarrassed. Fern did not glance at them. Carol felt her arm tremble,
though she was tearless, listless, plodding. She squeezed Carol's hand,
said something unintelligible, stumbled up into the vestibule.
Carol remembered that Miles Bjornstam had also taken a train. What would
be the scene at the station when she herself took departure?
She walked up-town behind two strangers.
One of them was giggling, "See that good-looking wench that got on here?
The swell kid with the small black hat? She's some charmer! I was here
yesterday, before my jump to Ojibway Falls, and I heard all about
her. Seems she was a teacher, but she certainly was a high-roller--O
boy!--high, wide, and fancy! Her and couple of other skirts bought a
whole case of whisky and went on a tear, and one night, darned if this
bunch of cradle-robbers didn't get hold of some young kids, just small
boys, and they all got lit up like a White Way, and went out to a
roughneck dance, and they say----"
The narrator turned, saw a woman near and, not being a common person nor
a coarse workman but a clever salesman and a householder, lowered
his voice for the rest of the tale. During it the other man laughed
hoarsely.
Carol turned off on a side-street.
She passed Cy Bogart. He was humorously narrating some achievement to a
group which included Nat Hicks, Del Snafflin, Bert Tybee the bartender,
and A. Tennyson O'Hearn the shyster lawyer. They were men far older than
Cy but they accepted him as one of their own, and encouraged him to go
on.
It was a week before she received from Fern a letter of which this was a
part:
. . . & of course my family did not really believe the story but as
they were sure I must have done something wrong they just lectured
me generally, in fact jawed me till I have gone to live at a boarding
house. The teachers' agencies must know the story, man at one almost
slammed the door in my face when I went to ask about a job, & at another
the woman in charge was beastly. Don't know what I will do. Don't seem
to feel very well. May marry a fellow that's in love with me but he's so
stupid that he makes me SCREAM.
Dear Mrs. Kennicott you were the only one that believed me. I guess it's
a joke on me, I was such a simp, I felt quite heroic while I was driving
the buggy back that night & keeping Cy away from me. I guess I expected
the people in Gopher Prairie to admire me. I did use to be admired for
my athletics at the U.--just five months ago.
| Carol is outside doing some work when she overhears Mrs. Bogart from next door throwing Fern Mullins out of her house. Fern has been boarding with Mrs. Bogart until now, but Mrs. Bogart calls her an immoral harlot and kicks her into the street. When Carol asks what's going on, Bogart tells her that Fern took her poor, innocent son Cy to a barn dance and got him drunk. And she's his teacher, for crying out loud! Carol immediately knows the whole story is a lie, because Cy is the most dishonest kid in town. But Mrs. Bogart refuses to believe her son is anything other than a total angel. Carol knows she needs to protect Fern. If Fern gets fired by the local school board, she'll never find a job anywhere, because word about why she got fired will spread quickly. Carol visits the school board president, Sam Clark, to straighten things out. Sam Clark knows that the story didn't happen and that Cy Bogart is a liar, but he still thinks Fern will be fired because of the scandal the story has caused. Carol can't believe Sam is willing to ruin a young woman's career so easily, but he says his hands are tied because there are some mighty conservative people on the school board. Fern ends up leaving the town in disgrace. She later sends a letter to Carol thanking her for being the only person in Gopher Prairie who believed in her. | summary |
CHAPTER XXXIII
FOR a month which was one suspended moment of doubt she saw Erik only
casually, at an Eastern Star dance, at the shop, where, in the
presence of Nat Hicks, they conferred with immense particularity on the
significance of having one or two buttons on the cuff of Kennicott's New
Suit. For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous.
Thus barred from him, depressed in the thought of Fern, Carol was
suddenly and for the first time convinced that she loved Erik.
She told herself a thousand inspiriting things which he would say if he
had the opportunity; for them she admired him, loved him. But she was
afraid to summon him. He understood, he did not come. She forgot her
every doubt of him, and her discomfort in his background. Each day it
seemed impossible to get through the desolation of not seeing him. Each
morning, each afternoon, each evening was a compartment divided from all
other units of time, distinguished by a sudden "Oh! I want to see Erik!"
which was as devastating as though she had never said it before.
There were wretched periods when she could not picture him. Usually
he stood out in her mind in some little moment--glancing up from his
preposterous pressing-iron, or running on the beach with Dave Dyer.
But sometimes he had vanished; he was only an opinion. She worried then
about his appearance: Weren't his wrists too large and red? Wasn't his
nose a snub, like so many Scandinavians? Was he at all the graceful
thing she had fancied? When she encountered him on the street she was
as much reassuring herself as rejoicing in his presence. More disturbing
than being unable to visualize him was the darting remembrance of some
intimate aspect: his face as they had walked to the boat together at the
picnic; the ruddy light on his temples, neck-cords, flat cheeks.
On a November evening when Kennicott was in the country she answered the
bell and was confused to find Erik at the door, stooped, imploring, his
hands in the pockets of his topcoat. As though he had been rehearsing
his speech he instantly besought:
"Saw your husband driving away. I've got to see you. I can't stand it.
Come for a walk. I know! People might see us. But they won't if we hike
into the country. I'll wait for you by the elevator. Take as long as you
want to--oh, come quick!"
"In a few minutes," she promised.
She murmured, "I'll just talk to him for a quarter of an hour and come
home." She put an her tweed coat and rubber overshoes, considering how
honest and hopeless are rubbers, how clearly their chaperonage proved
that she wasn't going to a lovers' tryst.
She found him in the shadow of the grain-elevator, sulkily kicking at
a rail of the side-track. As she came toward him she fancied that his
whole body expanded. But he said nothing, nor she; he patted her sleeve,
she returned the pat, and they crossed the railroad tracks, found a
road, clumped toward open country.
"Chilly night, but I like this melancholy gray," he said.
"Yes."
They passed a moaning clump of trees and splashed along the wet road.
He tucked her hand into the side-pocket of his overcoat. She caught his
thumb and, sighing, held it exactly as Hugh held hers when they went
walking. She thought about Hugh. The current maid was in for the
evening, but was it safe to leave the baby with her? The thought was
distant and elusive.
Erik began to talk, slowly, revealingly. He made for her a picture of
his work in a large tailor shop in Minneapolis: the steam and heat, and
the drudgery; the men in darned vests and crumpled trousers, men who
"rushed growlers of beer" and were cynical about women, who laughed at
him and played jokes on him. "But I didn't mind, because I could keep
away from them outside. I used to go to the Art Institute and the Walker
Gallery, and tramp clear around Lake Harriet, or hike out to the Gates
house and imagine it was a chateau in Italy and I lived in it. I was a
marquis and collected tapestries--that was after I was wounded in Padua.
The only really bad time was when a tailor named Finkelfarb found a
diary I was trying to keep and he read it aloud in the shop--it was a
bad fight." He laughed. "I got fined five dollars. But that's all gone
now. Seems as though you stand between me and the gas stoves--the long
flames with mauve edges, licking up around the irons and making that
sneering sound all day--aaaaah!"
Her fingers tightened about his thumb as she perceived the hot low room,
the pounding of pressing-irons, the reek of scorched cloth, and Erik
among giggling gnomes. His fingertip crept through the opening of her
glove and smoothed her palm. She snatched her hand away, stripped off
her glove, tucked her hand back into his.
He was saying something about a "wonderful person." In her tranquillity
she let the words blow by and heeded only the beating wings of his
voice.
She was conscious that he was fumbling for impressive speech.
"Say, uh--Carol, I've written a poem about you."
"That's nice. Let's hear it."
"Damn it, don't be so casual about it! Can't you take me seriously?"
"My dear boy, if I took you seriously----! I don't want us to be hurt
more than--more than we will be. Tell me the poem. I've never had a poem
written about me!"
"It isn't really a poem. It's just some words that I love because it
seems to me they catch what you are. Of course probably they won't seem
so to anybody else, but----Well----
Little and tender and merry and wise
With eyes that meet my eyes.
Do you get the idea the way I do?"
"Yes! I'm terribly grateful!" And she was grateful--while she
impersonally noted how bad a verse it was.
She was aware of the haggard beauty in the lowering night. Monstrous
tattered clouds sprawled round a forlorn moon; puddles and rocks
glistened with inner light. They were passing a grove of scrub poplars,
feeble by day but looming now like a menacing wall. She stopped. They
heard the branches dripping, the wet leaves sullenly plumping on the
soggy earth.
"Waiting--waiting--everything is waiting," she whispered. She drew her
hand from his, pressed her clenched fingers against her lips. She was
lost in the somberness. "I am happy--so we must go home, before we have
time to become unhappy. But can't we sit on a log for a minute and just
listen?"
"No. Too wet. But I wish we could build a fire, and you could sit on
my overcoat beside it. I'm a grand fire-builder! My cousin Lars and me
spent a week one time in a cabin way up in the Big Woods, snowed in.
The fireplace was filled with a dome of ice when we got there, but we
chopped it out, and jammed the thing full of pine-boughs. Couldn't we
build a fire back here in the woods and sit by it for a while?"
She pondered, half-way between yielding and refusal. Her head ached
faintly. She was in abeyance. Everything, the night, his silhouette, the
cautious-treading future, was as undistinguishable as though she were
drifting bodiless in a Fourth Dimension. While her mind groped, the
lights of a motor car swooped round a bend in the road, and they stood
farther apart. "What ought I to do?" she mused. "I think----Oh, I won't
be robbed! I AM good! If I'm so enslaved that I can't sit by the fire
with a man and talk, then I'd better be dead!"
The lights of the thrumming car grew magically; were upon them; abruptly
stopped. From behind the dimness of the windshield a voice, annoyed,
sharp: "Hello there!"
She realized that it was Kennicott.
The irritation in his voice smoothed out. "Having a walk?"
They made schoolboyish sounds of assent.
"Pretty wet, isn't it? Better ride back. Jump up in front here,
Valborg."
His manner of swinging open the door was a command. Carol was conscious
that Erik was climbing in, that she was apparently to sit in the back,
and that she had been left to open the rear door for herself. Instantly
the wonder which had flamed to the gusty skies was quenched, and she was
Mrs. W. P. Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, riding in a squeaking old car,
and likely to be lectured by her husband.
She feared what Kennicott would say to Erik. She bent toward them.
Kennicott was observing, "Going to have some rain before the night 's
over, all right."
"Yes," said Erik.
"Been funny season this year, anyway. Never saw it with such a cold
October and such a nice November. 'Member we had a snow way back on
October ninth! But it certainly was nice up to the twenty-first, this
month--as I remember it, not a flake of snow in November so far, has
there been? But I shouldn't wonder if we'd be having some snow 'most any
time now."
"Yes, good chance of it," said Erik.
"Wish I'd had more time to go after the ducks this fall. By golly, what
do you think?" Kennicott sounded appealing. "Fellow wrote me from Man
Trap Lake that he shot seven mallards and couple of canvas-back in one
hour!"
"That must have been fine," said Erik.
Carol was ignored. But Kennicott was blustrously cheerful. He shouted
to a farmer, as he slowed up to pass the frightened team, "There we
are--schon gut!" She sat back, neglected, frozen, unheroic heroine in
a drama insanely undramatic. She made a decision resolute and enduring.
She would tell Kennicott----What would she tell him? She could not say
that she loved Erik. DID she love him? But she would have it out.
She was not sure whether it was pity for Kennicott's blindness, or
irritation at his assumption that he was enough to fill any woman's
life, which prompted her, but she knew that she was out of the trap,
that she could be frank; and she was exhilarated with the adventure of
it . . . while in front he was entertaining Erik:
"Nothing like an hour on a duck-pass to make you relish your victuals
and----Gosh, this machine hasn't got the power of a fountain pen. Guess
the cylinders are jam-cram-full of carbon again. Don't know but what
maybe I'll have to put in another set of piston-rings."
He stopped on Main Street and clucked hospitably, "There, that'll give
you just a block to walk. G' night."
Carol was in suspense. Would Erik sneak away?
He stolidly moved to the back of the car, thrust in his hand, muttered,
"Good night--Carol. I'm glad we had our walk." She pressed his hand. The
car was flapping on. He was hidden from her--by a corner drug store on
Main Street!
Kennicott did not recognize her till he drew up before the house. Then
he condescended, "Better jump out here and I'll take the boat around
back. Say, see if the back door is unlocked, will you?" She unlatched
the door for him. She realized that she still carried the damp glove she
had stripped off for Erik. She drew it on. She stood in the center of
the living-room, unmoving, in damp coat and muddy rubbers. Kennicott was
as opaque as ever. Her task wouldn't be anything so lively as having
to endure a scolding, but only an exasperating effort to command his
attention so that he would understand the nebulous things she had to
tell him, instead of interrupting her by yawning, winding the clock, and
going up to bed. She heard him shoveling coal into the furnace. He came
through the kitchen energetically, but before he spoke to her he did
stop in the hall, did wind the clock.
He sauntered into the living-room and his glance passed from her
drenched hat to her smeared rubbers. She could hear--she could hear,
see, taste, smell, touch--his "Better take your coat off, Carrie; looks
kind of wet." Yes, there it was:
"Well, Carrie, you better----" He chucked his own coat on a chair,
stalked to her, went on with a rising tingling voice, "----you better
cut it out now. I'm not going to do the out-raged husband stunt. I like
you and I respect you, and I'd probably look like a boob if I tried to
be dramatic. But I think it's about time for you and Valborg to call a
halt before you get in Dutch, like Fern Mullins did."
"Do you----"
"Course. I know all about it. What d' you expect in a town that's as
filled with busybodies, that have plenty of time to stick their noses
into other folks' business, as this is? Not that they've had the nerve
to do much tattling to me, but they've hinted around a lot, and anyway,
I could see for myself that you liked him. But of course I knew how cold
you were, I knew you wouldn't stand it even if Valborg did try to hold
your hand or kiss you, so I didn't worry. But same time, I hope you
don't suppose this husky young Swede farmer is as innocent and Platonic
and all that stuff as you are! Wait now, don't get sore! I'm not
knocking him. He isn't a bad sort. And he's young and likes to gas about
books. Course you like him. That isn't the real rub. But haven't you
just seen what this town can do, once it goes and gets moral on you,
like it did with Fern? You probably think that two young folks making
love are alone if anybody ever is, but there's nothing in this town
that you don't do in company with a whole lot of uninvited but awful
interested guests. Don't you realize that if Ma Westlake and a few
others got started they'd drive you up a tree, and you'd find yourself
so well advertised as being in love with this Valborg fellow that you'd
HAVE to be, just to spite 'em!"
"Let me sit down," was all Carol could say. She drooped on the couch,
wearily, without elasticity.
He yawned, "Gimme your coat and rubbers," and while she stripped them
off he twiddled his watch-chain, felt the radiator, peered at the
thermometer. He shook out her wraps in the hall, hung them up with
exactly his usual care. He pushed a chair near to her and sat bolt up.
He looked like a physician about to give sound and undesired advice.
Before he could launch into his heavy discourse she desperately got in,
"Please! I want you to know that I was going to tell you everything,
tonight."
"Well, I don't suppose there's really much to tell."
"But there is. I'm fond of Erik. He appeals to something in here." She
touched her breast. "And I admire him. He isn't just a 'young Swede
farmer.' He's an artist----"
"Wait now! He's had a chance all evening to tell you what a whale of
a fine fellow he is. Now it's my turn. I can't talk artistic,
but----Carrie, do you understand my work?" He leaned forward, thick
capable hands on thick sturdy thighs, mature and slow, yet beseeching.
"No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in
the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes.
You're all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from
the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of. Do you
realize what my job is? I go round twenty-four hours a day, in mud and
blizzard, trying my damnedest to heal everybody, rich or poor. You--that
're always spieling about how scientists ought to rule the world,
instead of a bunch of spread-eagle politicians--can't you see that I'm
all the science there is here? And I can stand the cold and the bumpy
roads and the lonely rides at night. All I need is to have you here at
home to welcome me. I don't expect you to be passionate--not any more
I don't--but I do expect you to appreciate my work. I bring babies into
the world, and save lives, and make cranky husbands quit being mean to
their wives. And then you go and moon over a Swede tailor because he can
talk about how to put ruchings on a skirt! Hell of a thing for a man to
fuss over!"
She flew out at him: "You make your side clear. Let me give mine. I
admit all you say--except about Erik. But is it only you, and the baby,
that want me to back you up, that demand things from me? They're all on
me, the whole town! I can feel their hot breaths on my neck! Aunt Bessie
and that horrible slavering old Uncle Whittier and Juanita and Mrs.
Westlake and Mrs. Bogart and all of them. And you welcome them, you
encourage them to drag me down into their cave! I won't stand it! Do you
hear? Now, right now, I'm done. And it's Erik who gives me the courage.
You say he just thinks about ruches (which do not usually go on skirts,
by the way!). I tell you he thinks about God, the God that Mrs. Bogart
covers up with greasy gingham wrappers! Erik will be a great man some
day, and if I could contribute one tiny bit to his success----"
"Wait, wait, wait now! Hold up! You're assuming that your Erik will make
good. As a matter of fact, at my age he'll be running a one-man tailor
shop in some burg about the size of Schoenstrom."
"He will not!"
"That's what he's headed for now all right, and he's twenty-five or -six
and----What's he done to make you think he'll ever be anything but a
pants-presser?"
"He has sensitiveness and talent----"
"Wait now! What has he actually done in the art line? Has he done one
first-class picture or--sketch, d' you call it? Or one poem, or played
the piano, or anything except gas about what he's going to do?"
She looked thoughtful.
"Then it's a hundred to one shot that he never will. Way I understand
it, even these fellows that do something pretty good at home and get to
go to art school, there ain't more than one out of ten of 'em, maybe one
out of a hundred, that ever get above grinding out a bum living--about
as artistic as plumbing. And when it comes down to this tailor, why,
can't you see--you that take on so about psychology--can't you see that
it's just by contrast with folks like Doc McGanum or Lym Cass that this
fellow seems artistic? Suppose you'd met up with him first in one of
these reg'lar New York studios! You wouldn't notice him any more 'n a
rabbit!"
She huddled over folded hands like a temple virgin shivering on her
knees before the thin warmth of a brazier. She could not answer.
Kennicott rose quickly, sat on the couch, took both her hands. "Suppose
he fails--as he will! Suppose he goes back to tailoring, and you're his
wife. Is that going to be this artistic life you've been thinking about?
He's in some bum shack, pressing pants all day, or stooped over sewing,
and having to be polite to any grouch that blows in and jams a dirty
stinking old suit in his face and says, 'Here you, fix this, and be
blame quick about it.' He won't even have enough savvy to get him a big
shop. He'll pike along doing his own work--unless you, his wife, go help
him, go help him in the shop, and stand over a table all day, pushing a
big heavy iron. Your complexion will look fine after about fifteen years
of baking that way, won't it! And you'll be humped over like an old
hag. And probably you'll live in one room back of the shop. And then
at night--oh, you'll have your artist--sure! He'll come in stinking
of gasoline, and cranky from hard work, and hinting around that if it
hadn't been for you, he'd of gone East and been a great artist. Sure!
And you'll be entertaining his relatives----Talk about Uncle Whit!
You'll be having some old Axel Axelberg coming in with manure on his
boots and sitting down to supper in his socks and yelling at you, 'Hurry
up now, you vimmin make me sick!' Yes, and you'll have a squalling brat
every year, tugging at you while you press clothes, and you won't love
'em like you do Hugh up-stairs, all downy and asleep----"
"Please! Not any more!"
Her face was on his knee.
He bent to kiss her neck. "I don't want to be unfair. I guess love is
a great thing, all right. But think it would stand much of that kind of
stuff? Oh, honey, am I so bad? Can't you like me at all? I've--I've been
so fond of you!"
She snatched up his hand, she kissed it. Presently she sobbed, "I won't
ever see him again. I can't, now. The hot living-room behind the tailor
shop----I don't love him enough for that. And you are----Even if I were
sure of him, sure he was the real thing, I don't think I could actually
leave you. This marriage, it weaves people together. It's not easy to
break, even when it ought to be broken."
"And do you want to break it?"
"No!"
He lifted her, carried her up-stairs, laid her on her bed, turned to the
door.
"Come kiss me," she whimpered.
He kissed her lightly and slipped away. For an hour she heard him moving
about his room, lighting a cigar, drumming with his knuckles on a chair.
She felt that he was a bulwark between her and the darkness that grew
thicker as the delayed storm came down in sleet.
II
He was cheery and more casual than ever at breakfast. All day she tried
to devise a way of giving Erik up. Telephone? The village central would
unquestionably "listen in." A letter? It might be found. Go to see
him? Impossible. That evening Kennicott gave her, without comment, an
envelope. The letter was signed "E. V."
I know I can't do anything but make trouble for you, I think. I am going
to Minneapolis tonight and from there as soon as I can either to New
York or Chicago. I will do as big things as I can. I--I can't write I
love you too much--God keep you.
Until she heard the whistle which told her that the Minneapolis train
was leaving town, she kept herself from thinking, from moving. Then it
was all over. She had no plan nor desire for anything.
When she caught Kennicott looking at her over his newspaper she fled
to his arms, thrusting the paper aside, and for the first time in years
they were lovers. But she knew that she still had no plan in life, save
always to go along the same streets, past the same people, to the same
shops.
III
A week after Erik's going the maid startled her by announcing, "There's
a Mr. Valborg down-stairs say he vant to see you."
She was conscious of the maid's interested stare, angry at this
shattering of the calm in which she had hidden. She crept down, peeped
into the living-room. It was not Erik Valborg who stood there; it was a
small, gray-bearded, yellow-faced man in mucky boots, canvas jacket, and
red mittens. He glowered at her with shrewd red eyes.
"You de doc's wife?"
"Yes."
"I'm Adolph Valborg, from up by Jefferson. I'm Erik's father."
"Oh!" He was a monkey-faced little man, and not gentle.
"What you done wit' my son?"
"I don't think I understand you."
"I t'ink you're going to understand before I get t'rough! Where is he?"
"Why, really----I presume that he's in Minneapolis."
"You presume!" He looked through her with a contemptuousness such as
she could not have imagined. Only an insane contortion of spelling could
portray his lyric whine, his mangled consonants. He clamored, "Presume!
Dot's a fine word! I don't want no fine words and I don't want no more
lies! I want to know what you KNOW!"
"See here, Mr. Valborg, you may stop this bullying right now. I'm not
one of your farmwomen. I don't know where your son is, and there's no
reason why I should know." Her defiance ran out in face of his immense
flaxen stolidity. He raised his fist, worked up his anger with the
gesture, and sneered:
"You dirty city women wit' your fine ways and fine dresses! A father
come here trying to save his boy from wickedness, and you call him a
bully! By God, I don't have to take nothin' off you nor your husband! I
ain't one of your hired men. For one time a woman like you is going to
hear de trut' about what you are, and no fine city words to it, needer."
"Really, Mr. Valborg----"
"What you done wit' him? Heh? I'll yoost tell you what you done! He was
a good boy, even if he was a damn fool. I want him back on de farm. He
don't make enough money tailoring. And I can't get me no hired man! I
want to take him back on de farm. And you butt in and fool wit' him and
make love wit' him, and get him to run away!"
"You are lying! It's not true that----It's not true, and if it were, you
would have no right to speak like this."
"Don't talk foolish. I know. Ain't I heard from a fellow dot live right
here in town how you been acting wit' de boy? I know what you done!
Walking wit' him in de country! Hiding in de woods wit' him! Yes and I
guess you talk about religion in de woods! Sure! Women like you--you're
worse dan street-walkers! Rich women like you, wit' fine husbands and
no decent work to do--and me, look at my hands, look how I work, look at
those hands! But you, oh God no, you mustn't work, you're too fine to
do decent work. You got to play wit' young fellows, younger as you are,
laughing and rolling around and acting like de animals! You let my son
alone, d' you hear?" He was shaking his fist in her face. She could
smell the manure and sweat. "It ain't no use talkin' to women like you.
Get no trut' out of you. But next time I go by your husband!"
He was marching into the hall. Carol flung herself on him, her clenching
hand on his hayseed-dusty shoulder. "You horrible old man, you've always
tried to turn Erik into a slave, to fatten your pocketbook! You've
sneered at him, and overworked him, and probably you've succeeded in
preventing his ever rising above your muck-heap! And now because you
can't drag him back, you come here to vent----Go tell my husband, go
tell him, and don't blame me when he kills you, when my husband kills
you--he will kill you----"
The man grunted, looked at her impassively, said one word, and walked
out.
She heard the word very plainly.
She did not quite reach the couch. Her knees gave way, she pitched
forward. She heard her mind saying, "You haven't fainted. This is
ridiculous. You're simply dramatizing yourself. Get up." But she could
not move. When Kennicott arrived she was lying on the couch. His step
quickened. "What's happened, Carrie? You haven't got a bit of blood in
your face."
She clutched his arm. "You've got to be sweet to me, and kind! I'm going
to California--mountains, sea. Please don't argue about it, because I'm
going."
Quietly, "All right. We'll go. You and I. Leave the kid here with Aunt
Bessie."
"Now!"
"Well yes, just as soon as we can get away. Now don't talk any more.
Just imagine you've already started." He smoothed her hair, and not till
after supper did he continue: "I meant it about California. But I think
we better wait three weeks or so, till I get hold of some young fellow
released from the medical corps to take my practice. And if people are
gossiping, you don't want to give them a chance by running away. Can you
stand it and face 'em for three weeks or so?"
"Yes," she said emptily.
IV
People covertly stared at her on the street. Aunt Bessie tried to
catechize her about Erik's disappearance, and it was Kennicott who
silenced the woman with a savage, "Say, are you hinting that Carrie had
anything to do with that fellow's beating it? Then let me tell you, and
you can go right out and tell the whole bloomin' town, that Carrie and
I took Val--took Erik riding, and he asked me about getting a better job
in Minneapolis, and I advised him to go to it. . . . Getting much sugar
in at the store now?"
Guy Pollock crossed the street to be pleasant apropos of California and
new novels. Vida Sherwin dragged her to the Jolly Seventeen. There, with
every one rigidly listening, Maud Dyer shot at Carol, "I hear Erik has
left town."
Carol was amiable. "Yes, so I hear. In fact, he called me up--told me he
had been offered a lovely job in the city. So sorry he's gone. He would
have been valuable if we'd tried to start the dramatic association
again. Still, I wouldn't be here for the association myself, because
Will is all in from work, and I'm thinking of taking him to California.
Juanita--you know the Coast so well--tell me: would you start in at Los
Angeles or San Francisco, and what are the best hotels?"
The Jolly Seventeen looked disappointed, but the Jolly Seventeen liked
to give advice, the Jolly Seventeen liked to mention the expensive
hotels at which they had stayed. (A meal counted as a stay.) Before they
could question her again Carol escorted in with drum and fife the topic
of Raymie Wutherspoon. Vida had news from her husband. He had been
gassed in the trenches, had been in a hospital for two weeks, had been
promoted to major, was learning French.
She left Hugh with Aunt Bessie.
But for Kennicott she would have taken him. She hoped that in some
miraculous way yet unrevealed she might find it possible to remain in
California. She did not want to see Gopher Prairie again.
The Smails were to occupy the Kennicott house, and quite the hardest
thing to endure in the month of waiting was the series of conferences
between Kennicott and Uncle Whittier in regard to heating the garage and
having the furnace flues cleaned.
Did Carol, Kennicott inquired, wish to stop in Minneapolis to buy new
clothes?
"No! I want to get as far away as I can as soon as I can. Let's wait
till Los Angeles."
"Sure, sure! Just as you like. Cheer up! We're going to have a large
wide time, and everything 'll be different when we come back."
VI
Dusk on a snowy December afternoon. The sleeper which would connect
at Kansas City with the California train rolled out of St. Paul with
a chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick as it crossed the other
tracks. It bumped through the factory belt, gained speed. Carol could
see nothing but gray fields, which had closed in on her all the way from
Gopher Prairie. Ahead was darkness.
"For an hour, in Minneapolis, I must have been near Erik. He's still
there, somewhere. He'll be gone when I come back. I'll never know where
he has gone."
As Kennicott switched on the seat-light she turned drearily to the
illustrations in a motion-picture magazine.
| Carol goes another month only seeing Erik Valbourg in casual situations, but he shows up on her doorstep the next time he sees Will heading into the country. He says he can't take it anymore and that he needs to see her. He wants her to come for a walk with him. Erik and Carol head deep enough into nature for no one to find them. Erik recites a little poem he wrote for Carol, and she realizes that it's terrible. She then thinks about sitting with him and kissing him. But as they walk, some headlights come down the road... and who is it but Carol's husband Will, not looking too impressed. He orders them into the car and drives Erik back into town. Once Erik is gone, Will tells Carol he knows all about her crush on Erik, and he wants things between them to stop immediately. He calls Erik a loser, which makes Carol really mad. She defends Erik and says she admires his ambition. Will fights back by saying that Erik is a no-talent hack who likes to talk a big game. Some sad part of Carol realizes that Will is right. Erik will probably never be able to make good on his dreams. Eventually, Carol feels awful about what she's done. She realizes that she doesn't appreciate Will enough and begs his forgiveness. For a guy who's been cheated on, Will seems pretty willing to forget the whole affair ever happened. Not long after, Erik Valbourg gets on a train and leaves Gopher Prairie to pursue his dreams. Shortly after that, Erik's father shows up at Carol's house and demands to know where Erik is. He wants Erik to come home to work on the family farm, and he blames Carol for putting all kinds of crazy ideas in the boy's head. Carol tells him to get lost, and he basically calls her a loose woman. Now everyone in town knows about Carol's little affair with Erik. She can feel their judgment everywhere she goes. So she decides to take off for California, and Will comes with her. | summary |
CHAPTER XXXIV
THEY journeyed for three and a half months. They saw the Grand Canyon,
the adobe walls of Sante Fe and, in a drive from El Paso into Mexico,
their first foreign land. They jogged from San Diego and La Jolla to Los
Angeles, Pasadena, Riverside, through towns with bell-towered missions
and orange-groves; they viewed Monterey and San Francisco and a forest
of sequoias. They bathed in the surf and climbed foothills and danced,
they saw a polo game and the making of motion-pictures, they sent one
hundred and seventeen souvenir post-cards to Gopher Prairie, and once,
on a dune by a foggy sea when she was walking alone, Carol found an
artist, and he looked up at her and said, "Too damned wet to paint; sit
down and talk," and so for ten minutes she lived in a romantic novel.
Her only struggle was in coaxing Kennicott not to spend all his time
with the tourists from the ten thousand other Gopher Prairies. In
winter, California is full of people from Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and
Oklahoma, who, having traveled thousands of miles from their familiar
villages, hasten to secure an illusion of not having left them. They
hunt for people from their own states to stand between them and the
shame of naked mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel
porches, at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and
crops and county politics back home. Kennicott discussed land-prices
with them, he went into the merits of the several sorts of motor cars
with them, he was intimate with train porters, and he insisted on seeing
the Luke Dawsons at their flimsy bungalow in Pasadena, where Luke sat
and yearned to go back and make some more money. But Kennicott gave
promise of learning to play. He shouted in the pool at the Coronado, and
he spoke of (though he did nothing more radical than speak of) buying
evening-clothes. Carol was touched by his efforts to enjoy picture
galleries, and the dogged way in which he accumulated dates and
dimensions when they followed monkish guides through missions.
She felt strong. Whenever she was restless she dodged her thoughts by
the familiar vagabond fallacy of running away from them, of moving on
to a new place, and thus she persuaded herself that she was tranquil. In
March she willingly agreed with Kennicott that it was time to go home.
She was longing for Hugh.
They left Monterey on April first, on a day of high blue skies and
poppies and a summer sea.
As the train struck in among the hills she resolved, "I'm going to love
the fine Will Kennicott quality that there is in Gopher Prairie. The
nobility of good sense. It will be sweet to see Vida and Guy and the
Clarks. And I'm going to see my baby! All the words he'll be able to say
now! It's a new start. Everything will be different!"
Thus on April first, among dappled hills and the bronze of scrub oaks,
while Kennicott seesawed on his toes and chuckled, "Wonder what Hugh'll
say when he sees us?"
Three days later they reached Gopher Prairie in a sleet storm.
II
No one knew that they were coming; no one met them; and because of the
icy roads, the only conveyance at the station was the hotel 'bus, which
they missed while Kennicott was giving his trunk-check to the station
agent--the only person to welcome them. Carol waited for him in the
station, among huddled German women with shawls and umbrellas, and
ragged-bearded farmers in corduroy coats; peasants mute as oxen, in a
room thick with the steam of wet coats, the reek of the red-hot stove,
the stench of sawdust boxes which served as cuspidors. The afternoon
light was as reluctant as a winter dawn.
"This is a useful market-center, an interesting pioneer post, but it is
not a home for me," meditated the stranger Carol.
Kennicott suggested, "I'd 'phone for a flivver but it'd take quite a
while for it to get here. Let's walk."
They stepped uncomfortably from the safety of the plank platform and,
balancing on their toes, taking cautious strides, ventured along the
road. The sleety rain was turning to snow. The air was stealthily cold.
Beneath an inch of water was a layer of ice, so that as they wavered
with their suit-cases they slid and almost fell. The wet snow drenched
their gloves; the water underfoot splashed their itching ankles. They
scuffled inch by inch for three blocks. In front of Harry Haydock's
Kennicott sighed:
"We better stop in here and 'phone for a machine."
She followed him like a wet kitten.
The Haydocks saw them laboring up the slippery concrete walk, up the
perilous front steps, and came to the door chanting:
"Well, well, well, back again, eh? Say, this is fine! Have a fine trip?
My, you look like a rose, Carol. How did you like the coast, doc? Well,
well, well! Where-all did you go?"
But as Kennicott began to proclaim the list of places achieved, Harry
interrupted with an account of how much he himself had seen, two years
ago. When Kennicott boasted, "We went through the mission at Santa
Barbara," Harry broke in, "Yeh, that's an interesting old mission. Say,
I'll never forget that hotel there, doc. It was swell. Why, the rooms
were made just like these old monasteries. Juanita and I went from Santa
Barbara to San Luis Obispo. You folks go to San Luis Obispo?"
"No, but----"
"Well you ought to gone to San Luis Obispo. And then we went from there
to a ranch, least they called it a ranch----"
Kennicott got in only one considerable narrative, which began:
"Say, I never knew--did you, Harry?--that in the Chicago district the
Kutz Kar sells as well as the Overland? I never thought much of the
Kutz. But I met a gentleman on the train--it was when we were pulling
out of Albuquerque, and I was sitting on the back platform of the
observation car, and this man was next to me and he asked me for a
light, and we got to talking, and come to find out, he came from Aurora,
and when he found out I came from Minnesota he asked me if I knew Dr.
Clemworth of Red Wing, and of course, while I've never met him, I've
heard of Clemworth lots of times, and seems he's this man's brother!
Quite a coincidence! Well, we got to talking, and we called the
porter--that was a pretty good porter on that car--and we had a couple
bottles of ginger ale, and I happened to mention the Kutz Kar, and this
man--seems he's driven a lot of different kinds of cars--he's got
a Franklin now--and he said that he'd tried the Kutz and liked it
first-rate. Well, when we got into a station--I don't remember the name
of it--Carrie, what the deuce was the name of that first stop we made
the other side of Albuquerque?--well, anyway, I guess we must have
stopped there to take on water, and this man and I got out to stretch
our legs, and darned if there wasn't a Kutz drawn right up at the depot
platform, and he pointed out something I'd never noticed, and I was
glad to learn about it: seems that the gear lever in the Kutz is an inch
longer----"
Even this chronicle of voyages Harry interrupted, with remarks on the
advantages of the ball-gear-shift.
Kennicott gave up hope of adequate credit for being a traveled man, and
telephoned to a garage for a Ford taxicab, while Juanita kissed Carol
and made sure of being the first to tell the latest, which included
seven distinct and proven scandals about Mrs. Swiftwaite, and one
considerable doubt as to the chastity of Cy Bogart.
They saw the Ford sedan making its way over the water-lined ice, through
the snow-storm, like a tug-boat in a fog. The driver stopped at a
corner. The car skidded, it turned about with comic reluctance, crashed
into a tree, and stood tilted on a broken wheel.
The Kennicotts refused Harry Haydock's not too urgent offer to take them
home in his car "if I can manage to get it out of the garage--terrible
day--stayed home from the store--but if you say so, I'll take a shot at
it." Carol gurgled, "No, I think we'd better walk; probably make better
time, and I'm just crazy to see my baby." With their suit-cases they
waddled on. Their coats were soaked through.
Carol had forgotten her facile hopes. She looked about with impersonal
eyes. But Kennicott, through rain-blurred lashes, caught the glory that
was Back Home.
She noted bare tree-trunks, black branches, the spongy brown earth
between patches of decayed snow on the lawns. The vacant lots were
full of tall dead weeds. Stripped of summer leaves the houses were
hopeless--temporary shelters.
Kennicott chuckled, "By golly, look down there! Jack Elder must have
painted his garage. And look! Martin Mahoney has put up a new fence
around his chicken yard. Say, that's a good fence, eh? Chicken-tight
and dog-tight. That's certainly a dandy fence. Wonder how much it cost a
yard? Yes, sir, they been building right along, even in winter. Got more
enterprise than these Californians. Pretty good to be home, eh?"
She noted that all winter long the citizens had been throwing garbage
into their back yards, to be cleaned up in spring. The recent thaw had
disclosed heaps of ashes, dog-bones, torn bedding, clotted paint-cans,
all half covered by the icy pools which filled the hollows of the yards.
The refuse had stained the water to vile colors of waste: thin red, sour
yellow, streaky brown.
Kennicott chuckled, "Look over there on Main Street! They got the
feed store all fixed up, and a new sign on it, black and gold. That'll
improve the appearance of the block a lot."
She noted that the few people whom they passed wore their raggedest
coats for the evil day. They were scarecrows in a shanty town. . . . "To
think," she marveled, "of coming two thousand miles, past mountains
and cities, to get off here, and to plan to stay here! What conceivable
reason for choosing this particular place?"
She noted a figure in a rusty coat and a cloth cap.
Kennicott chuckled, "Look who's coming! It's Sam Clark! Gosh, all rigged
out for the weather."
The two men shook hands a dozen times and, in the Western fashion,
bumbled, "Well, well, well, well, you old hell-hound, you old devil,
how are you, anyway? You old horse-thief, maybe it ain't good to see
you again!" While Sam nodded at her over Kennicott's shoulder, she was
embarrassed.
"Perhaps I should never have gone away. I'm out of practise in lying. I
wish they would get it over! Just a block more and--my baby!"
They were home. She brushed past the welcoming Aunt Bessie and knelt
by Hugh. As he stammered, "O mummy, mummy, don't go away! Stay with me,
mummy!" she cried, "No, I'll never leave you again!"
He volunteered, "That's daddy."
"By golly, he knows us just as if we'd never been away!" said Kennicott.
"You don't find any of these California kids as bright as he is, at his
age!"
When the trunk came they piled about Hugh the bewhiskered little wooden
men fitting one inside another, the miniature junk, and the Oriental
drum, from San Francisco Chinatown; the blocks carved by the old
Frenchman in San Diego; the lariat from San Antonio.
"Will you forgive mummy for going away? Will you?" she whispered.
Absorbed in Hugh, asking a hundred questions about him--had he had any
colds? did he still dawdle over his oatmeal? what about unfortunate
morning incidents? she viewed Aunt Bessie only as a source of
information, and was able to ignore her hint, pointed by a coyly shaken
finger, "Now that you've had such a fine long trip and spent so much
money and all, I hope you're going to settle down and be satisfied and
not----"
"Does he like carrots yet?" replied Carol.
She was cheerful as the snow began to conceal the slatternly yards. She
assured herself that the streets of New York and Chicago were as ugly as
Gopher Prairie in such weather; she dismissed the thought, "But they
do have charming interiors for refuge." She sang as she energetically
looked over Hugh's clothes.
The afternoon grew old and dark. Aunt Bessie went home. Carol took the
baby into her own room. The maid came in complaining, "I can't get no
extra milk to make chipped beef for supper." Hugh was sleepy, and he had
been spoiled by Aunt Bessie. Even to a returned mother, his whining and
his trick of seven times snatching her silver brush were fatiguing. As a
background, behind the noises of Hugh and the kitchen, the house reeked
with a colorless stillness.
From the window she heard Kennicott greeting the Widow Bogart as he had
always done, always, every snowy evening: "Guess this 'll keep up all
night." She waited. There they were, the furnace sounds, unalterable,
eternal: removing ashes, shoveling coal.
Yes. She was back home! Nothing had changed. She had never been away.
California? Had she seen it? Had she for one minute left this scraping
sound of the small shovel in the ash-pit of the furnace? But Kennicott
preposterously supposed that she had. Never had she been quite so far
from going away as now when he believed she had just come back. She
felt oozing through the walls the spirit of small houses and righteous
people. At that instant she knew that in running away she had merely
hidden her doubts behind the officious stir of travel.
"Dear God, don't let me begin agonizing again!" she sobbed. Hugh wept
with her.
"Wait for mummy a second!" She hastened down to the cellar, to
Kennicott.
He was standing before the furnace. However inadequate the rest of the
house, he had seen to it that the fundamental cellar should be large
and clean, the square pillars whitewashed, and the bins for coal and
potatoes and trunks convenient. A glow from the drafts fell on the
smooth gray cement floor at his feet. He was whistling tenderly, staring
at the furnace with eyes which saw the black-domed monster as a symbol
of home and of the beloved routine to which he had returned--his
gipsying decently accomplished, his duty of viewing "sights" and
"curios" performed with thoroughness. Unconscious of her, he stooped
and peered in at the blue flames among the coals. He closed the door
briskly, and made a whirling gesture with his right hand, out of pure
bliss.
He saw her. "Why, hello, old lady! Pretty darn good to be back, eh?"
"Yes," she lied, while she quaked, "Not now. I can't face the job of
explaining now. He's been so good. He trusts me. And I'm going to break
his heart!"
She smiled at him. She tidied his sacred cellar by throwing an empty
bluing bottle into the trash bin. She mourned, "It's only the baby that
holds me. If Hugh died----" She fled upstairs in panic and made sure
that nothing had happened to Hugh in these four minutes.
She saw a pencil-mark on a window-sill. She had made it on a September
day when she had been planning a picnic for Fern Mullins and Erik. Fern
and she had been hysterical with nonsense, had invented mad parties for
all the coming winter. She glanced across the alley at the room which
Fern had occupied. A rag of a gray curtain masked the still window.
She tried to think of some one to whom she wanted to telephone. There
was no one.
The Sam Clarks called that evening and encouraged her to describe the
missions. A dozen times they told her how glad they were to have her
back.
"It is good to be wanted," she thought. "It will drug me. But----Oh, is
all life, always, an unresolved But?"
| The trip to California is a good one, although Carol still has a tough time compromising on the stuff she likes for the sake of what Will likes. All Will wants to do is talk to other travellers who are from his part of the world. Will and Carol's homecoming to Gopher Prairie is every bit as depressing as Carol thinks it'll be, though Will loves being back home. He makes note of all the tiny things people have changed. For example, there are new chicken-wire fences. Carol's aunt in-law scolds her for always being so dissatisfied and remarks that she hopes the trip to California got the ants out of her pants. | summary |
CHAPTER XXXV
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.
| Carol tries to keep herself as busy as possible in order to avoid thinking too much about her crummy life. She's happy when Vida Sherwin's husband Raymie finally comes back from the war. Gopher Prairie is booming because the price of wheat has been crazy high during the war. Still, all the money ends up funneling into the pockets of the rich people in town. The farmers and laborers are no better off. A dude named James Blausser comes to Gopher Prairie to help turn the town into a modern American city. He starts a whole advertising campaign around how great Gopher Prairie is. Everyone gets into the new sense of town pride except Carol, and Will gets really annoyed with her for it. He thinks that she's just a stick in the mud determined never to be happy. Carol is amazed that a town could be so successful and not introduce a single scrap of high culture. | summary |
CHAPTER XXXVI
KENNICOTT was not so inhumanly patient that he could continue to forgive
Carol's heresies, to woo her as he had on the venture to California. She
tried to be inconspicuous, but she was betrayed by her failure to glow
over the boosting. Kennicott believed in it; demanded that she say
patriotic things about the White Way and the new factory. He snorted,
"By golly, I've done all I could, and now I expect you to play the game.
Here you been complaining for years about us being so poky, and now when
Blausser comes along and does stir up excitement and beautify the town
like you've always wanted somebody to, why, you say he's a roughneck,
and you won't jump on the band-wagon."
Once, when Kennicott announced at noon-dinner, "What do you know
about this! They say there's a chance we may get another
factory--cream-separator works!" he added, "You might try to look
interested, even if you ain't!" The baby was frightened by the Jovian
roar; ran wailing to hide his face in Carol's lap; and Kennicott had to
make himself humble and court both mother and child. The dim injustice
of not being understood even by his son left him irritable. He felt
injured.
An event which did not directly touch them brought down his wrath.
In the early autumn, news came from Wakamin that the sheriff had
forbidden an organizer for the National Nonpartisan League to speak
anywhere in the county. The organizer had defied the sheriff, and
announced that in a few days he would address a farmers' political
meeting. That night, the news ran, a mob of a hundred business men
led by the sheriff--the tame village street and the smug village faces
ruddled by the light of bobbing lanterns, the mob flowing between the
squatty rows of shops--had taken the organizer from his hotel, ridden
him on a fence-rail, put him on a freight train, and warned him not to
return.
The story was threshed out in Dave Dyer's drug store, with Sam Clark,
Kennicott, and Carol present.
"That's the way to treat those fellows--only they ought to have lynched
him!" declared Sam, and Kennicott and Dave Dyer joined in a proud "You
bet!"
Carol walked out hastily, Kennicott observing her.
Through supper-time she knew that he was bubbling and would soon boil
over. When the baby was abed, and they sat composedly in canvas chairs
on the porch, he experimented; "I had a hunch you thought Sam was kind
of hard on that fellow they kicked out of Wakamin."
"Wasn't Sam rather needlessly heroic?"
"All these organizers, yes, and a whole lot of the German and
Squarehead farmers themselves, they're seditious as the devil--disloyal,
non-patriotic, pro-German pacifists, that's what they are!"
"Did this organizer say anything pro-German?"
"Not on your life! They didn't give him a chance!" His laugh was stagey.
"So the whole thing was illegal--and led by the sheriff! Precisely how
do you expect these aliens to obey your law if the officer of the law
teaches them to break it? Is it a new kind of logic?"
"Maybe it wasn't exactly regular, but what's the odds? They knew this
fellow would try to stir up trouble. Whenever it comes right down to a
question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it's
justifiable to set aside ordinary procedure."
"What editorial did he get that from?" she wondered, as she protested,
"See here, my beloved, why can't you Tories declare war honestly? You
don't oppose this organizer because you think he's seditious but
because you're afraid that the farmers he is organizing will deprive you
townsmen of the money you make out of mortgages and wheat and shops.
Of course, since we're at war with Germany, anything that any one of us
doesn't like is 'pro-German,' whether it's business competition or
bad music. If we were fighting England, you'd call the radicals
'pro-English.' When this war is over, I suppose you'll be calling them
'red anarchists.' What an eternal art it is--such a glittery delightful
art--finding hard names for our opponents! How we do sanctify our
efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for
ourselves! The churches have always done it, and the political
orators--and I suppose I do it when I call Mrs. Bogart a 'Puritan' and
Mr. Stowbody a 'capitalist.' But you business men are going to beat all
the rest of us at it, with your simple-hearted, energetic, pompous----"
She got so far only because Kennicott was slow in shaking off respect
for her. Now he bayed:
"That'll be about all from you! I've stood for your sneering at this
town, and saying how ugly and dull it is. I've stood for your refusing
to appreciate good fellows like Sam. I've even stood for your ridiculing
our Watch Gopher Prairie Grow campaign. But one thing I'm not going
to stand: I'm not going to stand my own wife being seditious. You can
camouflage all you want to, but you know darn well that these radicals,
as you call 'em, are opposed to the war, and let me tell you right here
and now, and you and all these long-haired men and short-haired women
can beef all you want to, but we're going to take these fellows, and if
they ain't patriotic, we're going to make them be patriotic. And--Lord
knows I never thought I'd have to say this to my own wife--but if you go
defending these fellows, then the same thing applies to you! Next thing,
I suppose you'll be yapping about free speech. Free speech! There's too
much free speech and free gas and free beer and free love and all the
rest of your damned mouthy freedom, and if I had my way I'd make you
folks live up to the established rules of decency even if I had to take
you----"
"Will!" She was not timorous now. "Am I pro-German if I fail to throb to
Honest Jim Blausser, too? Let's have my whole duty as a wife!"
He was grumbling, "The whole thing's right in line with the criticism
you've always been making. Might have known you'd oppose any decent
constructive work for the town or for----"
"You're right. All I've done has been in line. I don't belong to Gopher
Prairie. That isn't meant as a condemnation of Gopher Prairie, and it
may be a condemnation of me. All right! I don't care! I don't belong
here, and I'm going. I'm not asking permission any more. I'm simply
going."
He grunted. "Do you mind telling me, if it isn't too much trouble, how
long you're going for?"
"I don't know. Perhaps for a year. Perhaps for a lifetime."
"I see. Well, of course, I'll be tickled to death to sell out my
practise and go anywhere you say. Would you like to have me go with you
to Paris and study art, maybe, and wear velveteen pants and a woman's
bonnet, and live on spaghetti?"
"No, I think we can save you that trouble. You don't quite understand.
I am going--I really am--and alone! I've got to find out what my work
is----"
"Work? Work? Sure! That's the whole trouble with you! You haven't got
enough work to do. If you had five kids and no hired girl, and had to
help with the chores and separate the cream, like these farmers' wives,
then you wouldn't be so discontented."
"I know. That's what most men--and women--like you WOULD say. That's how
they would explain all I am and all I want. And I shouldn't argue with
them. These business men, from their crushing labors of sitting in an
office seven hours a day, would calmly recommend that I have a dozen
children. As it happens, I've done that sort of thing. There've been a
good many times when we hadn't a maid, and I did all the housework, and
cared for Hugh, and went to Red Cross, and did it all very efficiently.
I'm a good cook and a good sweeper, and you don't dare say I'm not!"
"N-no, you're----"
"But was I more happy when I was drudging? I was not. I was just
bedraggled and unhappy. It's work--but not my work. I could run
an office or a library, or nurse and teach children. But solitary
dish-washing isn't enough to satisfy me--or many other women. We're
going to chuck it. We're going to wash 'em by machinery, and come out
and play with you men in the offices and clubs and politics you've
cleverly kept for yourselves! Oh, we're hopeless, we dissatisfied women!
Then why do you want to have us about the place, to fret you? So it's
for your sake that I'm going!"
"Of course a little thing like Hugh makes no difference!"
"Yes, all the difference. That's why I'm going to take him with me."
"Suppose I refuse?"
"You won't!"
Forlornly, "Uh----Carrie, what the devil is it you want, anyway?"
"Oh, conversation! No, it's much more than that. I think it's a
greatness of life--a refusal to be content with even the healthiest
mud."
"Don't you know that nobody ever solved a problem by running away from
it?"
"Perhaps. Only I choose to make my own definition of 'running away' I
don't call----Do you realize how big a world there is beyond this Gopher
Prairie where you'd keep me all my life? It may be that some day I'll
come back, but not till I can bring something more than I have now. And
even if I am cowardly and run away--all right, call it cowardly, call me
anything you want to! I've been ruled too long by fear of being called
things. I'm going away to be quiet and think. I'm--I'm going! I have a
right to my own life."
"So have I to mine!"
"Well?"
"I have a right to my life--and you're it, you're my life! You've made
yourself so. I'm damned if I'll agree to all your freak notions, but I
will say I've got to depend on you. Never thought of that complication,
did you, in this 'off to Bohemia, and express yourself, and free love,
and live your own life' stuff!"
"You have a right to me if you can keep me. Can you?"
He moved uneasily.
II
For a month they discussed it. They hurt each other very much, and
sometimes they were close to weeping, and invariably he used banal
phrases about her duties and she used phrases quite as banal about
freedom, and through it all, her discovery that she really could get
away from Main Street was as sweet as the discovery of love. Kennicott
never consented definitely. At most he agreed to a public theory that
she was "going to take a short trip and see what the East was like in
wartime."
She set out for Washington in October--just before the war ended.
She had determined on Washington because it was less intimidating than
the obvious New York, because she hoped to find streets in which Hugh
could play, and because in the stress of war-work, with its demand for
thousands of temporary clerks, she could be initiated into the world of
offices.
Hugh was to go with her, despite the wails and rather extensive comments
of Aunt Bessie.
She wondered if she might not encounter Erik in the East but it was a
chance thought, soon forgotten.
III
The last thing she saw on the station platform was Kennicott, faithfully
waving his hand, his face so full of uncomprehending loneliness that he
could not smile but only twitch up his lips. She waved to him as long
as she could, and when he was lost she wanted to leap from the vestibule
and run back to him. She thought of a hundred tendernesses she had
neglected.
She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was not the highest
of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether
excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb.
She sighed, "I couldn't do this if it weren't for Will's kindness, his
giving me money." But a second after: "I wonder how many women would
always stay home if they had the money?"
Hugh complained, "Notice me, mummy!" He was beside her on the red plush
seat of the day-coach; a boy of three and a half. "I'm tired of playing
train. Let's play something else. Let's go see Auntie Bogart."
"Oh, NO! Do you really like Mrs. Bogart?"
"Yes. She gives me cookies and she tells me about the Dear Lord. You
never tell me about the Dear Lord. Why don't you tell me about the
Dear Lord? Auntie Bogart says I'm going to be a preacher. Can I be a
preacher? Can I preach about the Dear Lord?"
"Oh, please wait till my generation has stopped rebelling before yours
starts in!"
"What's a generation?"
"It's a ray in the illumination of the spirit."
"That's foolish." He was a serious and literal person, and rather
humorless. She kissed his frown, and marveled:
"I am running away from my husband, after liking a Swedish ne'er-do-well
and expressing immoral opinions, just as in a romantic story. And my own
son reproves me because I haven't given him religious instruction. But
the story doesn't go right. I'm neither groaning nor being dramatically
saved. I keep on running away, and I enjoy it. I'm mad with joy over it.
Gopher Prairie is lost back there in the dust and stubble, and I look
forward----"
She continued it to Hugh: "Darling, do you know what mother and you are
going to find beyond the blue horizon rim?"
"What?" flatly.
"We're going to find elephants with golden howdahs from which peep young
maharanees with necklaces of rubies, and a dawn sea colored like the
breast of a dove, and a white and green house filled with books and
silver tea-sets."
"And cookies?"
"Cookies? Oh, most decidedly cookies. We've had enough of bread and
porridge. We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on
no cookies at all."
"That's foolish."
"It is, O male Kennicott!"
"Huh!" said Kennicott II, and went to sleep on her shoulder.
IV
The theory of the Dauntless regarding Carol's absence:
Mrs. Will Kennicott and son Hugh left on No. 24 on Saturday last for
a stay of some months in Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Washington.
Mrs. Kennicott confided to _Ye Scribe_ that she will be connected with one
of the multifarious war activities now centering in the Nation's
Capital for a brief period before returning. Her countless friends who
appreciate her splendid labors with the local Red Cross realize how
valuable she will be to any war board with which she chooses to become
connected. Gopher Prairie thus adds another shining star to its service
flag and without wishing to knock any neighboring communities, we would
like to know any town of anywheres near our size in the state that has
such a sterling war record. Another reason why you'd better Watch Gopher
Prairie Grow.
* * *
Mr. and Mrs. David Dyer, Mrs. Dyer's sister, Mrs. Jennie Dayborn of
Jackrabbit, and Dr. Will Kennicott drove to Minniemashie on Tuesday for
a delightful picnic.
| As Gopher Prairie gets more successful, it gets more and more intolerant of people who don't like it. Carol starts hearing stories about labor organizers being arrested. Will thinks it's all a great idea because he's drunk the pro-capitalist Kool-Aid. He and Carol continue to fight constantly, only now Will doesn't back down like he used to. He just calls Carol a crank whenever she expresses dissatisfaction. Carol finally decides to leave Gopher Prairie and to take Hugh with her. Will doesn't put up much of a fight. Carol leaves town, and the Gopher Prairie newspaper makes up a story about how she has gone to Washington to help in the war effort like a great patriot. | summary |
CHAPTER XXXVII
I
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.
| Carol moves to Washington and finds a job in the War Risk Insurance bureau. It ain't all that interesting, but Carol loves having a job and being in the public sphere of a big city. The truth is that she really doesn't miss Gopher Prairie. Carol is also surprised to find that she's actually a little too conservative for some parts of big-city life. She realizes that Gopher Prairie has changed her since she first moved to it. Still, she loves the way that people in the city don't care what people think of them. Everyone's reputation seems to be stable and assured in a way that's not the case in Gopher Prairie. Carol also finds lots of like-minded people who think Gopher Prairie is just a hickish backwater. She feels a little bad when she hears other people making fun of the place, though. She realizes that she doesn't dislike individuals but only the institutions that grind individuals into dull conformists. | summary |
CHAPTER XXXVIII
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 he did not ask questions, and
he 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.
| After a year in Washington, Carol starts craving more adventure than her office work allows her. She goes for a walk and sees two people she knows from Gopher Prairie. She's surprised at how happy she is to see them. Thirteen months after her move to Washington, Will comes to see her. The visit goes pretty well, but when it's all over, Carol still doesn't want to move back to Gopher Prairie with Will. He's clearly disappointed, but like a patient partner, he says he'll continue to wait for her. In fact, he agrees that it's a good idea that she doesn't come home just yet. Over time, Carol's hatred of Gopher Prairie melts away. She doesn't see it as a boring town but as a prairie settlement struggling to create civilization. After nearly two years in Washington, Carol decides to head back to Gopher Prairie. We also find out that she's pregnant with her second child. And the dates might not add up for the child to be Will's... | summary |
CHAPTER XXXIX
SHE wondered all the way home what her sensations would be. She wondered
about it so much that she had every sensation she had imagined. She was
excited by each familiar porch, each hearty "Well, well!" and flattered
to be, for a day, the most important news of the community. She bustled
about, making calls. Juanita Haydock bubbled over their Washington
encounter, and took Carol to her social bosom. This ancient opponent
seemed likely to be her most intimate friend, for Vida Sherwin, though
she was cordial, stood back and watched for imported heresies.
In the evening Carol went to the mill. The mystical Om-Om-Om of the
dynamos in the electric-light plant behind the mill was louder in the
darkness. Outside sat the night watchman, Champ Perry. He held up his
stringy hands and squeaked, "We've all missed you terrible."
Who in Washington would miss her?
Who in Washington could be depended upon like Guy Pollock? When she saw
him on the street, smiling as always, he seemed an eternal thing, a part
of her own self.
After a week she decided that she was neither glad nor sorry to be back.
She entered each day with the matter-of-fact attitude with which she
had gone to her office in Washington. It was her task; there would be
mechanical details and meaningless talk; what of it?
The only problem which she had approached with emotion proved
insignificant. She had, on the train, worked herself up to such devotion
that she was willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her
life with Kennicott.
He mumbled, ten minutes after she had entered the house, "Say, I've kept
your room for you like it was. I've kind of come round to your way of
thinking. Don't see why folks need to get on each other's nerves just
because they're friendly. Darned if I haven't got so I like a little
privacy and mulling things over by myself."
II
She had left a city which sat up nights to talk of universal transition;
of European revolution, guild socialism, free verse. She had fancied
that all the world was changing.
She found that it was not.
In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were prohibition, the place
in Minneapolis where you could get whisky at thirteen dollars a quart,
recipes for home-made beer, the "high cost of living," the presidential
election, Clark's new car, and not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart.
Their problems were exactly what they had been two years ago, what they
had been twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years to
come. With the world a possible volcano, the husbandmen were plowing at
the base of the mountain. A volcano does occasionally drop a river
of lava on even the best of agriculturists, to their astonishment and
considerable injury, but their cousins inherit the farms and a year or
two later go back to the plowing.
She was unable to rhapsodize much over the seven new bungalows and the
two garages which Kennicott had made to seem so important. Her intensest
thought about them was, "Oh yes, they're all right I suppose." The
change which she did heed was the erection of the schoolbuilding, with
its cheerful brick walls, broad windows, gymnasium, classrooms for
agriculture and cooking. It indicated Vida's triumph, and it stirred her
to activity--any activity. She went to Vida with a jaunty, "I think I
shall work for you. And I'll begin at the bottom."
She did. She relieved the attendant at the rest-room for an hour a
day. Her only innovation was painting the pine table a black and orange
rather shocking to the Thanatopsis. She talked to the farmwives and
soothed their babies and was happy.
Thinking of them she did not think of the ugliness of Main Street as she
hurried along it to the chatter of the Jolly Seventeen.
She wore her eye-glasses on the street now. She was beginning to ask
Kennicott and Juanita if she didn't look young, much younger than
thirty-three. The eye-glasses pinched her nose. She considered
spectacles. They would make her seem older, and hopelessly settled.
No! She would not wear spectacles yet. But she tried on a pair at
Kennicott's office. They really were much more comfortable.
III
Dr. Westlake, Sam Clark, Nat Hicks, and Del Snafflin were talking in
Del's barber shop.
"Well, I see Kennicott's wife is taking a whirl at the rest-room, now,"
said Dr. Westlake. He emphasized the "now."
Del interrupted the shaving of Sam and, with his brush dripping lather,
he observed jocularly:
"What'll she be up to next? They say she used to claim this burg wasn't
swell enough for a city girl like her, and would we please tax ourselves
about thirty-seven point nine and fix it all up pretty, with tidies on
the hydrants and statoos on the lawns----"
Sam irritably blew the lather from his lips, with milky small bubbles,
and snorted, "Be a good thing for most of us roughnecks if we did have
a smart woman to tell us how to fix up the town. Just as much to her
kicking as there was to Jim Blausser's gassing about factories. And you
can bet Mrs. Kennicott is smart, even if she is skittish. Glad to see
her back."
Dr. Westlake hastened to play safe. "So was I! So was I! She's got a
nice way about her, and she knows a good deal about books, or fiction
anyway. Of course she's like all the rest of these women--not
solidly founded--not scholarly--doesn't know anything about political
economy--falls for every new idea that some windjamming crank puts out.
But she's a nice woman. She'll probably fix up the rest-room, and the
rest-room is a fine thing, brings a lot of business to town. And now
that Mrs. Kennicott's been away, maybe she's got over some of her fool
ideas. Maybe she realizes that folks simply laugh at her when she tries
to tell us how to run everything."
"Sure. She'll take a tumble to herself," said Nat Hicks, sucking in
his lips judicially. "As far as I'm concerned, I'll say she's as nice a
looking skirt as there is in town. But yow!" His tone electrified them.
"Guess she'll miss that Swede Valborg that used to work for me! They was
a pair! Talking poetry and moonshine! If they could of got away with it,
they'd of been so darn lovey-dovey----"
Sam Clark interrupted, "Rats, they never even thought about making love,
Just talking books and all that junk. I tell you, Carrie Kennicott's
a smart woman, and these smart educated women all get funny ideas, but
they get over 'em after they've had three or four kids. You'll see her
settled down one of these days, and teaching Sunday School and helping
at sociables and behaving herself, and not trying to butt into business
and politics. Sure!"
After only fifteen minutes of conference on her stockings, her son, her
separate bedroom, her music, her ancient interest in Guy Pollock, her
probable salary in Washington, and every remark which she was known to
have made since her return, the supreme council decided that they would
permit Carol Kennicott to live, and they passed on to a consideration of
Nat Hicks's New One about the traveling salesman and the old maid.
IV
For some reason which was totally mysterious to Carol, Maud Dyer seemed
to resent her return. At the Jolly Seventeen Maud giggled nervously,
"Well, I suppose you found war-work a good excuse to stay away and have
a swell time. Juanita! Don't you think we ought to make Carrie tell us
about the officers she met in Washington?"
They rustled and stared. Carol looked at them. Their curiosity seemed
natural and unimportant.
"Oh yes, yes indeed, have to do that some day," she yawned.
She no longer took Aunt Bessie Smail seriously enough to struggle for
independence. She saw that Aunt Bessie did not mean to intrude; that
she wanted to do things for all the Kennicotts. Thus Carol hit upon the
tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth,
but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness,
so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected
with laughter. She divined that when Aunt Bessie came in with a jar of
wild-grape jelly she was waiting in hope of being asked for the recipe.
After that she could be irritated but she could not be depressed by Aunt
Bessie's simoom of questioning.
She wasn't depressed even when she heard Mrs. Bogart observe, "Now we've
got prohibition it seems to me that the next problem of the country
ain't so much abolishing cigarettes as it is to make folks observe the
Sabbath and arrest these law-breakers that play baseball and go to the
movies and all on the Lord's Day."
Only one thing bruised Carol's vanity. Few people asked her about
Washington. They who had most admiringly begged Percy Bresnahan for his
opinions were least interested in her facts. She laughed at herself when
she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned
hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as
much as ever.
Her baby, born in August, was a girl. Carol could not decide whether she
was to become a feminist leader or marry a scientist or both, but did
settle on Vassar and a tricolette suit with a small black hat for her
Freshman year.
VI
Hugh was loquacious at breakfast. He desired to give his impressions of
owls and F Street.
"Don't make so much noise. You talk too much," growled Kennicott.
Carol flared. "Don't speak to him that way! Why don't you listen to him?
He has some very interesting things to tell."
"What's the idea? Mean to say you expect me to spend all my time
listening to his chatter?"
"Why not?"
"For one thing, he's got to learn a little discipline. Time for him to
start getting educated."
"I've learned much more discipline, I've had much more education, from
him than he has from me."
"What's this? Some new-fangled idea of raising kids you got in
Washington?"
"Perhaps. Did you ever realize that children are people?"
"That's all right. I'm not going to have him monopolizing the
conversation."
"No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I'm going to bring him up
as a human being. He has just as many thoughts as we have, and I want
him to develop them, not take Gopher Prairie's version of them. That's
my biggest work now--keeping myself, keeping you, from 'educating' him."
"Well, let's not scrap about it. But I'm not going to have him spoiled."
Kennicott had forgotten it in ten minutes; and she forgot it--this time.
VII
The Kennicotts and the Sam Clarks had driven north to a duck-pass
between two lakes, on an autumn day of blue and copper.
Kennicott had given her a light twenty-gauge shotgun. She had a first
lesson in shooting, in keeping her eyes open, not wincing, understanding
that the bead at the end of the barrel really had something to do with
pointing the gun. She was radiant; she almost believed Sam when he
insisted that it was she who had shot the mallard at which they had
fired together.
She sat on the bank of the reedy lake and found rest in Mrs. Clark's
drawling comments on nothing. The brown dusk was still. Behind them were
dark marshes. The plowed acres smelled fresh. The lake was garnet and
silver. The voices of the men, waiting for the last flight, were clear
in the cool air.
"Mark left!" sang Kennicott, in a long-drawn call.
Three ducks were swooping down in a swift line. The guns banged, and
a duck fluttered. The men pushed their light boat out on the burnished
lake, disappeared beyond the reeds. Their cheerful voices and the slow
splash and clank of oars came back to Carol from the dimness. In the sky
a fiery plain sloped down to a serene harbor. It dissolved; the lake
was white marble; and Kennicott was crying, "Well, old lady, how about
hiking out for home? Supper taste pretty good, eh?"
"I'll sit back with Ethel," she said, at the car.
It was the first time she had called Mrs. Clark by her given name; the
first time she had willingly sat back, a woman of Main Street.
"I'm hungry. It's good to be hungry," she reflected, as they drove away.
She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was conscious of an
unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska, a dominion which
will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile.
Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire
and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum
inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia.
"Let's all go to the movies tomorrow night. Awfully exciting film," said
Ethel Clark.
"Well, I was going to read a new book but----All right, let's go," said
Carol.
VIII
"They're too much for me," Carol sighed to Kennicott. "I've been
thinking about getting up an annual Community Day, when the whole town
would forget feuds and go out and have sports and a picnic and a dance.
But Bert Tybee (why did you ever elect him mayor?)--he's kidnapped my
idea. He wants the Community Day, but he wants to have some politician
'give an address.' That's just the stilted sort of thing I've tried to
avoid. He asked Vida, and of course she agreed with him."
Kennicott considered the matter while he wound the clock and they
tramped up-stairs.
"Yes, it would jar you to have Bert butting in," he said amiably. "Are
you going to do much fussing over this Community stunt? Don't you ever
get tired of fretting and stewing and experimenting?"
"I haven't even started. Look!" She led him to the nursery door, pointed
at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. "Do you see that object on the
pillow? Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you
Tories were wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these
children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will
see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an
industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to
Mars."
"Yump, probably be changes all right," yawned Kennicott.
She sat on the edge of his bed while he hunted through his bureau for a
collar which ought to be there and persistently wasn't.
"I'll go on, always. And I am happy. But this Community Day makes me see
how thoroughly I'm beaten."
"That darn collar certainly is gone for keeps," muttered Kennicott and,
louder, "Yes, I guess you----I didn't quite catch what you said, dear."
She patted his pillows, turned down his sheets, as she reflected:
"But I have won in this: I've never excused my failures by sneering at
my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit
that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that
Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit
that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought
the good fight, but I have kept the faith."
"Sure. You bet you have," said Kennicott. "Well, good night. Sort of
feels to me like it might snow tomorrow. Have to be thinking about
putting up the storm-windows pretty soon. Say, did you notice whether
the girl put that screwdriver back?"
| Carol moves back to Gopher Prairie and gives birth to a baby girl. Immediately, Carol starts making plans for her daughter's life, assuming that the future will give young women many more options than it has given her. Carol gets back into the routines of Gopher Prairie, but she refuses to ever accept the town the way it is. She might not be able to change it, but she'll never give in to the popular opinion that the town is fine the way it is and that there's no need for improvement. Carol wants to help create a world that'll give more possibilities to her daughter, and she finds hope in thinking about the distant future. | summary |
CHAPTER XXXIX
SHE wondered all the way home what her sensations would be. She wondered
about it so much that she had every sensation she had imagined. She was
excited by each familiar porch, each hearty "Well, well!" and flattered
to be, for a day, the most important news of the community. She bustled
about, making calls. Juanita Haydock bubbled over their Washington
encounter, and took Carol to her social bosom. This ancient opponent
seemed likely to be her most intimate friend, for Vida Sherwin, though
she was cordial, stood back and watched for imported heresies.
In the evening Carol went to the mill. The mystical Om-Om-Om of the
dynamos in the electric-light plant behind the mill was louder in the
darkness. Outside sat the night watchman, Champ Perry. He held up his
stringy hands and squeaked, "We've all missed you terrible."
Who in Washington would miss her?
Who in Washington could be depended upon like Guy Pollock? When she saw
him on the street, smiling as always, he seemed an eternal thing, a part
of her own self.
After a week she decided that she was neither glad nor sorry to be back.
She entered each day with the matter-of-fact attitude with which she
had gone to her office in Washington. It was her task; there would be
mechanical details and meaningless talk; what of it?
The only problem which she had approached with emotion proved
insignificant. She had, on the train, worked herself up to such devotion
that she was willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her
life with Kennicott.
He mumbled, ten minutes after she had entered the house, "Say, I've kept
your room for you like it was. I've kind of come round to your way of
thinking. Don't see why folks need to get on each other's nerves just
because they're friendly. Darned if I haven't got so I like a little
privacy and mulling things over by myself."
II
She had left a city which sat up nights to talk of universal transition;
of European revolution, guild socialism, free verse. She had fancied
that all the world was changing.
She found that it was not.
In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were prohibition, the place
in Minneapolis where you could get whisky at thirteen dollars a quart,
recipes for home-made beer, the "high cost of living," the presidential
election, Clark's new car, and not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart.
Their problems were exactly what they had been two years ago, what they
had been twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years to
come. With the world a possible volcano, the husbandmen were plowing at
the base of the mountain. A volcano does occasionally drop a river
of lava on even the best of agriculturists, to their astonishment and
considerable injury, but their cousins inherit the farms and a year or
two later go back to the plowing.
She was unable to rhapsodize much over the seven new bungalows and the
two garages which Kennicott had made to seem so important. Her intensest
thought about them was, "Oh yes, they're all right I suppose." The
change which she did heed was the erection of the schoolbuilding, with
its cheerful brick walls, broad windows, gymnasium, classrooms for
agriculture and cooking. It indicated Vida's triumph, and it stirred her
to activity--any activity. She went to Vida with a jaunty, "I think I
shall work for you. And I'll begin at the bottom."
She did. She relieved the attendant at the rest-room for an hour a
day. Her only innovation was painting the pine table a black and orange
rather shocking to the Thanatopsis. She talked to the farmwives and
soothed their babies and was happy.
Thinking of them she did not think of the ugliness of Main Street as she
hurried along it to the chatter of the Jolly Seventeen.
She wore her eye-glasses on the street now. She was beginning to ask
Kennicott and Juanita if she didn't look young, much younger than
thirty-three. The eye-glasses pinched her nose. She considered
spectacles. They would make her seem older, and hopelessly settled.
No! She would not wear spectacles yet. But she tried on a pair at
Kennicott's office. They really were much more comfortable.
III
Dr. Westlake, Sam Clark, Nat Hicks, and Del Snafflin were talking in
Del's barber shop.
"Well, I see Kennicott's wife is taking a whirl at the rest-room, now,"
said Dr. Westlake. He emphasized the "now."
Del interrupted the shaving of Sam and, with his brush dripping lather,
he observed jocularly:
"What'll she be up to next? They say she used to claim this burg wasn't
swell enough for a city girl like her, and would we please tax ourselves
about thirty-seven point nine and fix it all up pretty, with tidies on
the hydrants and statoos on the lawns----"
Sam irritably blew the lather from his lips, with milky small bubbles,
and snorted, "Be a good thing for most of us roughnecks if we did have
a smart woman to tell us how to fix up the town. Just as much to her
kicking as there was to Jim Blausser's gassing about factories. And you
can bet Mrs. Kennicott is smart, even if she is skittish. Glad to see
her back."
Dr. Westlake hastened to play safe. "So was I! So was I! She's got a
nice way about her, and she knows a good deal about books, or fiction
anyway. Of course she's like all the rest of these women--not
solidly founded--not scholarly--doesn't know anything about political
economy--falls for every new idea that some windjamming crank puts out.
But she's a nice woman. She'll probably fix up the rest-room, and the
rest-room is a fine thing, brings a lot of business to town. And now
that Mrs. Kennicott's been away, maybe she's got over some of her fool
ideas. Maybe she realizes that folks simply laugh at her when she tries
to tell us how to run everything."
"Sure. She'll take a tumble to herself," said Nat Hicks, sucking in
his lips judicially. "As far as I'm concerned, I'll say she's as nice a
looking skirt as there is in town. But yow!" His tone electrified them.
"Guess she'll miss that Swede Valborg that used to work for me! They was
a pair! Talking poetry and moonshine! If they could of got away with it,
they'd of been so darn lovey-dovey----"
Sam Clark interrupted, "Rats, they never even thought about making love,
Just talking books and all that junk. I tell you, Carrie Kennicott's
a smart woman, and these smart educated women all get funny ideas, but
they get over 'em after they've had three or four kids. You'll see her
settled down one of these days, and teaching Sunday School and helping
at sociables and behaving herself, and not trying to butt into business
and politics. Sure!"
After only fifteen minutes of conference on her stockings, her son, her
separate bedroom, her music, her ancient interest in Guy Pollock, her
probable salary in Washington, and every remark which she was known to
have made since her return, the supreme council decided that they would
permit Carol Kennicott to live, and they passed on to a consideration of
Nat Hicks's New One about the traveling salesman and the old maid.
IV
For some reason which was totally mysterious to Carol, Maud Dyer seemed
to resent her return. At the Jolly Seventeen Maud giggled nervously,
"Well, I suppose you found war-work a good excuse to stay away and have
a swell time. Juanita! Don't you think we ought to make Carrie tell us
about the officers she met in Washington?"
They rustled and stared. Carol looked at them. Their curiosity seemed
natural and unimportant.
"Oh yes, yes indeed, have to do that some day," she yawned.
She no longer took Aunt Bessie Smail seriously enough to struggle for
independence. She saw that Aunt Bessie did not mean to intrude; that
she wanted to do things for all the Kennicotts. Thus Carol hit upon the
tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth,
but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness,
so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected
with laughter. She divined that when Aunt Bessie came in with a jar of
wild-grape jelly she was waiting in hope of being asked for the recipe.
After that she could be irritated but she could not be depressed by Aunt
Bessie's simoom of questioning.
She wasn't depressed even when she heard Mrs. Bogart observe, "Now we've
got prohibition it seems to me that the next problem of the country
ain't so much abolishing cigarettes as it is to make folks observe the
Sabbath and arrest these law-breakers that play baseball and go to the
movies and all on the Lord's Day."
Only one thing bruised Carol's vanity. Few people asked her about
Washington. They who had most admiringly begged Percy Bresnahan for his
opinions were least interested in her facts. She laughed at herself when
she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned
hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as
much as ever.
Her baby, born in August, was a girl. Carol could not decide whether she
was to become a feminist leader or marry a scientist or both, but did
settle on Vassar and a tricolette suit with a small black hat for her
Freshman year.
VI
Hugh was loquacious at breakfast. He desired to give his impressions of
owls and F Street.
"Don't make so much noise. You talk too much," growled Kennicott.
Carol flared. "Don't speak to him that way! Why don't you listen to him?
He has some very interesting things to tell."
"What's the idea? Mean to say you expect me to spend all my time
listening to his chatter?"
"Why not?"
"For one thing, he's got to learn a little discipline. Time for him to
start getting educated."
"I've learned much more discipline, I've had much more education, from
him than he has from me."
"What's this? Some new-fangled idea of raising kids you got in
Washington?"
"Perhaps. Did you ever realize that children are people?"
"That's all right. I'm not going to have him monopolizing the
conversation."
"No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I'm going to bring him up
as a human being. He has just as many thoughts as we have, and I want
him to develop them, not take Gopher Prairie's version of them. That's
my biggest work now--keeping myself, keeping you, from 'educating' him."
"Well, let's not scrap about it. But I'm not going to have him spoiled."
Kennicott had forgotten it in ten minutes; and she forgot it--this time.
VII
The Kennicotts and the Sam Clarks had driven north to a duck-pass
between two lakes, on an autumn day of blue and copper.
Kennicott had given her a light twenty-gauge shotgun. She had a first
lesson in shooting, in keeping her eyes open, not wincing, understanding
that the bead at the end of the barrel really had something to do with
pointing the gun. She was radiant; she almost believed Sam when he
insisted that it was she who had shot the mallard at which they had
fired together.
She sat on the bank of the reedy lake and found rest in Mrs. Clark's
drawling comments on nothing. The brown dusk was still. Behind them were
dark marshes. The plowed acres smelled fresh. The lake was garnet and
silver. The voices of the men, waiting for the last flight, were clear
in the cool air.
"Mark left!" sang Kennicott, in a long-drawn call.
Three ducks were swooping down in a swift line. The guns banged, and
a duck fluttered. The men pushed their light boat out on the burnished
lake, disappeared beyond the reeds. Their cheerful voices and the slow
splash and clank of oars came back to Carol from the dimness. In the sky
a fiery plain sloped down to a serene harbor. It dissolved; the lake
was white marble; and Kennicott was crying, "Well, old lady, how about
hiking out for home? Supper taste pretty good, eh?"
"I'll sit back with Ethel," she said, at the car.
It was the first time she had called Mrs. Clark by her given name; the
first time she had willingly sat back, a woman of Main Street.
"I'm hungry. It's good to be hungry," she reflected, as they drove away.
She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was conscious of an
unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska, a dominion which
will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile.
Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire
and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum
inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia.
"Let's all go to the movies tomorrow night. Awfully exciting film," said
Ethel Clark.
"Well, I was going to read a new book but----All right, let's go," said
Carol.
VIII
"They're too much for me," Carol sighed to Kennicott. "I've been
thinking about getting up an annual Community Day, when the whole town
would forget feuds and go out and have sports and a picnic and a dance.
But Bert Tybee (why did you ever elect him mayor?)--he's kidnapped my
idea. He wants the Community Day, but he wants to have some politician
'give an address.' That's just the stilted sort of thing I've tried to
avoid. He asked Vida, and of course she agreed with him."
Kennicott considered the matter while he wound the clock and they
tramped up-stairs.
"Yes, it would jar you to have Bert butting in," he said amiably. "Are
you going to do much fussing over this Community stunt? Don't you ever
get tired of fretting and stewing and experimenting?"
"I haven't even started. Look!" She led him to the nursery door, pointed
at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. "Do you see that object on the
pillow? Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you
Tories were wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these
children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will
see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an
industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to
Mars."
"Yump, probably be changes all right," yawned Kennicott.
She sat on the edge of his bed while he hunted through his bureau for a
collar which ought to be there and persistently wasn't.
"I'll go on, always. And I am happy. But this Community Day makes me see
how thoroughly I'm beaten."
"That darn collar certainly is gone for keeps," muttered Kennicott and,
louder, "Yes, I guess you----I didn't quite catch what you said, dear."
She patted his pillows, turned down his sheets, as she reflected:
"But I have won in this: I've never excused my failures by sneering at
my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit
that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that
Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit
that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought
the good fight, but I have kept the faith."
"Sure. You bet you have," said Kennicott. "Well, good night. Sort of
feels to me like it might snow tomorrow. Have to be thinking about
putting up the storm-windows pretty soon. Say, did you notice whether
the girl put that screwdriver back?"
| Returning to Gopher Prairie of her own volition, Carol finds that some of her old acquaintances have missed her, something that would not occur in Washington. The town has not changed, however, except for the new school building, seven new bungalows, and two garages. The men, including Dr. Westlake and Sam Clark, talk over her intimate problems in a barber shop conference and decide to let her live. Curiously, Maud Dyer seems to resent Carol's return. Few people ask about Carol's experiences in Washington. In August, the second Kennicott baby is born, a girl. Dr. Kennicott and Carol are beginning to disagree in regard to discipline for little Hugh. The Kennicotts and the Clarks go duck hunting together one autumn day. For the first time, Carol willingly sits on the back seat of the car with Mrs. Clark and agrees to go to the movies the next night instead of reading a book. When a Community Day is to be planned, Carol disagrees with the Mayor, an ex-bartender, about the program, but she finally gives in. She predicts a world of many changes for her infant daughter. Carol feels that she may not have won the battle against mediocrity but that she has at least kept fighting. Her husband is occupied with storm windows and the coming snowstorm as the narrative comes to a close. | summary |
CHAPTER XXXIX
SHE wondered all the way home what her sensations would be. She wondered
about it so much that she had every sensation she had imagined. She was
excited by each familiar porch, each hearty "Well, well!" and flattered
to be, for a day, the most important news of the community. She bustled
about, making calls. Juanita Haydock bubbled over their Washington
encounter, and took Carol to her social bosom. This ancient opponent
seemed likely to be her most intimate friend, for Vida Sherwin, though
she was cordial, stood back and watched for imported heresies.
In the evening Carol went to the mill. The mystical Om-Om-Om of the
dynamos in the electric-light plant behind the mill was louder in the
darkness. Outside sat the night watchman, Champ Perry. He held up his
stringy hands and squeaked, "We've all missed you terrible."
Who in Washington would miss her?
Who in Washington could be depended upon like Guy Pollock? When she saw
him on the street, smiling as always, he seemed an eternal thing, a part
of her own self.
After a week she decided that she was neither glad nor sorry to be back.
She entered each day with the matter-of-fact attitude with which she
had gone to her office in Washington. It was her task; there would be
mechanical details and meaningless talk; what of it?
The only problem which she had approached with emotion proved
insignificant. She had, on the train, worked herself up to such devotion
that she was willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her
life with Kennicott.
He mumbled, ten minutes after she had entered the house, "Say, I've kept
your room for you like it was. I've kind of come round to your way of
thinking. Don't see why folks need to get on each other's nerves just
because they're friendly. Darned if I haven't got so I like a little
privacy and mulling things over by myself."
II
She had left a city which sat up nights to talk of universal transition;
of European revolution, guild socialism, free verse. She had fancied
that all the world was changing.
She found that it was not.
In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were prohibition, the place
in Minneapolis where you could get whisky at thirteen dollars a quart,
recipes for home-made beer, the "high cost of living," the presidential
election, Clark's new car, and not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart.
Their problems were exactly what they had been two years ago, what they
had been twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years to
come. With the world a possible volcano, the husbandmen were plowing at
the base of the mountain. A volcano does occasionally drop a river
of lava on even the best of agriculturists, to their astonishment and
considerable injury, but their cousins inherit the farms and a year or
two later go back to the plowing.
She was unable to rhapsodize much over the seven new bungalows and the
two garages which Kennicott had made to seem so important. Her intensest
thought about them was, "Oh yes, they're all right I suppose." The
change which she did heed was the erection of the schoolbuilding, with
its cheerful brick walls, broad windows, gymnasium, classrooms for
agriculture and cooking. It indicated Vida's triumph, and it stirred her
to activity--any activity. She went to Vida with a jaunty, "I think I
shall work for you. And I'll begin at the bottom."
She did. She relieved the attendant at the rest-room for an hour a
day. Her only innovation was painting the pine table a black and orange
rather shocking to the Thanatopsis. She talked to the farmwives and
soothed their babies and was happy.
Thinking of them she did not think of the ugliness of Main Street as she
hurried along it to the chatter of the Jolly Seventeen.
She wore her eye-glasses on the street now. She was beginning to ask
Kennicott and Juanita if she didn't look young, much younger than
thirty-three. The eye-glasses pinched her nose. She considered
spectacles. They would make her seem older, and hopelessly settled.
No! She would not wear spectacles yet. But she tried on a pair at
Kennicott's office. They really were much more comfortable.
III
Dr. Westlake, Sam Clark, Nat Hicks, and Del Snafflin were talking in
Del's barber shop.
"Well, I see Kennicott's wife is taking a whirl at the rest-room, now,"
said Dr. Westlake. He emphasized the "now."
Del interrupted the shaving of Sam and, with his brush dripping lather,
he observed jocularly:
"What'll she be up to next? They say she used to claim this burg wasn't
swell enough for a city girl like her, and would we please tax ourselves
about thirty-seven point nine and fix it all up pretty, with tidies on
the hydrants and statoos on the lawns----"
Sam irritably blew the lather from his lips, with milky small bubbles,
and snorted, "Be a good thing for most of us roughnecks if we did have
a smart woman to tell us how to fix up the town. Just as much to her
kicking as there was to Jim Blausser's gassing about factories. And you
can bet Mrs. Kennicott is smart, even if she is skittish. Glad to see
her back."
Dr. Westlake hastened to play safe. "So was I! So was I! She's got a
nice way about her, and she knows a good deal about books, or fiction
anyway. Of course she's like all the rest of these women--not
solidly founded--not scholarly--doesn't know anything about political
economy--falls for every new idea that some windjamming crank puts out.
But she's a nice woman. She'll probably fix up the rest-room, and the
rest-room is a fine thing, brings a lot of business to town. And now
that Mrs. Kennicott's been away, maybe she's got over some of her fool
ideas. Maybe she realizes that folks simply laugh at her when she tries
to tell us how to run everything."
"Sure. She'll take a tumble to herself," said Nat Hicks, sucking in
his lips judicially. "As far as I'm concerned, I'll say she's as nice a
looking skirt as there is in town. But yow!" His tone electrified them.
"Guess she'll miss that Swede Valborg that used to work for me! They was
a pair! Talking poetry and moonshine! If they could of got away with it,
they'd of been so darn lovey-dovey----"
Sam Clark interrupted, "Rats, they never even thought about making love,
Just talking books and all that junk. I tell you, Carrie Kennicott's
a smart woman, and these smart educated women all get funny ideas, but
they get over 'em after they've had three or four kids. You'll see her
settled down one of these days, and teaching Sunday School and helping
at sociables and behaving herself, and not trying to butt into business
and politics. Sure!"
After only fifteen minutes of conference on her stockings, her son, her
separate bedroom, her music, her ancient interest in Guy Pollock, her
probable salary in Washington, and every remark which she was known to
have made since her return, the supreme council decided that they would
permit Carol Kennicott to live, and they passed on to a consideration of
Nat Hicks's New One about the traveling salesman and the old maid.
IV
For some reason which was totally mysterious to Carol, Maud Dyer seemed
to resent her return. At the Jolly Seventeen Maud giggled nervously,
"Well, I suppose you found war-work a good excuse to stay away and have
a swell time. Juanita! Don't you think we ought to make Carrie tell us
about the officers she met in Washington?"
They rustled and stared. Carol looked at them. Their curiosity seemed
natural and unimportant.
"Oh yes, yes indeed, have to do that some day," she yawned.
She no longer took Aunt Bessie Smail seriously enough to struggle for
independence. She saw that Aunt Bessie did not mean to intrude; that
she wanted to do things for all the Kennicotts. Thus Carol hit upon the
tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth,
but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness,
so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected
with laughter. She divined that when Aunt Bessie came in with a jar of
wild-grape jelly she was waiting in hope of being asked for the recipe.
After that she could be irritated but she could not be depressed by Aunt
Bessie's simoom of questioning.
She wasn't depressed even when she heard Mrs. Bogart observe, "Now we've
got prohibition it seems to me that the next problem of the country
ain't so much abolishing cigarettes as it is to make folks observe the
Sabbath and arrest these law-breakers that play baseball and go to the
movies and all on the Lord's Day."
Only one thing bruised Carol's vanity. Few people asked her about
Washington. They who had most admiringly begged Percy Bresnahan for his
opinions were least interested in her facts. She laughed at herself when
she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned
hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as
much as ever.
Her baby, born in August, was a girl. Carol could not decide whether she
was to become a feminist leader or marry a scientist or both, but did
settle on Vassar and a tricolette suit with a small black hat for her
Freshman year.
VI
Hugh was loquacious at breakfast. He desired to give his impressions of
owls and F Street.
"Don't make so much noise. You talk too much," growled Kennicott.
Carol flared. "Don't speak to him that way! Why don't you listen to him?
He has some very interesting things to tell."
"What's the idea? Mean to say you expect me to spend all my time
listening to his chatter?"
"Why not?"
"For one thing, he's got to learn a little discipline. Time for him to
start getting educated."
"I've learned much more discipline, I've had much more education, from
him than he has from me."
"What's this? Some new-fangled idea of raising kids you got in
Washington?"
"Perhaps. Did you ever realize that children are people?"
"That's all right. I'm not going to have him monopolizing the
conversation."
"No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I'm going to bring him up
as a human being. He has just as many thoughts as we have, and I want
him to develop them, not take Gopher Prairie's version of them. That's
my biggest work now--keeping myself, keeping you, from 'educating' him."
"Well, let's not scrap about it. But I'm not going to have him spoiled."
Kennicott had forgotten it in ten minutes; and she forgot it--this time.
VII
The Kennicotts and the Sam Clarks had driven north to a duck-pass
between two lakes, on an autumn day of blue and copper.
Kennicott had given her a light twenty-gauge shotgun. She had a first
lesson in shooting, in keeping her eyes open, not wincing, understanding
that the bead at the end of the barrel really had something to do with
pointing the gun. She was radiant; she almost believed Sam when he
insisted that it was she who had shot the mallard at which they had
fired together.
She sat on the bank of the reedy lake and found rest in Mrs. Clark's
drawling comments on nothing. The brown dusk was still. Behind them were
dark marshes. The plowed acres smelled fresh. The lake was garnet and
silver. The voices of the men, waiting for the last flight, were clear
in the cool air.
"Mark left!" sang Kennicott, in a long-drawn call.
Three ducks were swooping down in a swift line. The guns banged, and
a duck fluttered. The men pushed their light boat out on the burnished
lake, disappeared beyond the reeds. Their cheerful voices and the slow
splash and clank of oars came back to Carol from the dimness. In the sky
a fiery plain sloped down to a serene harbor. It dissolved; the lake
was white marble; and Kennicott was crying, "Well, old lady, how about
hiking out for home? Supper taste pretty good, eh?"
"I'll sit back with Ethel," she said, at the car.
It was the first time she had called Mrs. Clark by her given name; the
first time she had willingly sat back, a woman of Main Street.
"I'm hungry. It's good to be hungry," she reflected, as they drove away.
She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was conscious of an
unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska, a dominion which
will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile.
Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire
and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum
inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia.
"Let's all go to the movies tomorrow night. Awfully exciting film," said
Ethel Clark.
"Well, I was going to read a new book but----All right, let's go," said
Carol.
VIII
"They're too much for me," Carol sighed to Kennicott. "I've been
thinking about getting up an annual Community Day, when the whole town
would forget feuds and go out and have sports and a picnic and a dance.
But Bert Tybee (why did you ever elect him mayor?)--he's kidnapped my
idea. He wants the Community Day, but he wants to have some politician
'give an address.' That's just the stilted sort of thing I've tried to
avoid. He asked Vida, and of course she agreed with him."
Kennicott considered the matter while he wound the clock and they
tramped up-stairs.
"Yes, it would jar you to have Bert butting in," he said amiably. "Are
you going to do much fussing over this Community stunt? Don't you ever
get tired of fretting and stewing and experimenting?"
"I haven't even started. Look!" She led him to the nursery door, pointed
at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. "Do you see that object on the
pillow? Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you
Tories were wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these
children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will
see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an
industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to
Mars."
"Yump, probably be changes all right," yawned Kennicott.
She sat on the edge of his bed while he hunted through his bureau for a
collar which ought to be there and persistently wasn't.
"I'll go on, always. And I am happy. But this Community Day makes me see
how thoroughly I'm beaten."
"That darn collar certainly is gone for keeps," muttered Kennicott and,
louder, "Yes, I guess you----I didn't quite catch what you said, dear."
She patted his pillows, turned down his sheets, as she reflected:
"But I have won in this: I've never excused my failures by sneering at
my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit
that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that
Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit
that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought
the good fight, but I have kept the faith."
"Sure. You bet you have," said Kennicott. "Well, good night. Sort of
feels to me like it might snow tomorrow. Have to be thinking about
putting up the storm-windows pretty soon. Say, did you notice whether
the girl put that screwdriver back?"
| The long, episodic, and almost plotless story of Carol Kennicott and her struggles with Gopher Prairie finally ends, with Sinclair Lewis solving hardly any of the problems which still confront his heroine. Her child, however, will see great changes if she were alive today, for the problems of today are not those of a single generation. | analysis |
CHAPTER I
I
ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago,
a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky.
She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of
skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws
and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about
her. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the
reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor
had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.
A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her
taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving
beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened
to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her
arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a
lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking
the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of
expectant youth.
It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College.
The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with
axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious
girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American
Middlewest.
II
Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a bulwark of sound
religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin,
and Robert Ingersoll. Pious families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the
Dakotas send their children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the
wickedness of the universities. But it secretes friendly girls, young
men who sing, and one lady instructress who really likes Milton and
Carlyle. So the four years which Carol spent at Blodgett were not
altogether wasted. The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals,
permitted her to experiment with her perilous versatility. She played
tennis, gave chafing-dish parties, took a graduate seminar in the drama,
went "twosing," and joined half a dozen societies for the practise of
the arts or the tense stalking of a thing called General Culture.
In her class there were two or three prettier girls, but none more
eager. She was noticeable equally in the classroom grind and at dances,
though out of the three hundred students of Blodgett, scores recited
more accurately and dozens Bostoned more smoothly. Every cell of her
body was alive--thin wrists, quince-blossom skin, ingenue eyes, black
hair.
The other girls in her dormitory marveled at the slightness of her
body when they saw her in sheer negligee, or darting out wet from a
shower-bath. She seemed then but half as large as they had supposed;
a fragile child who must be cloaked with understanding kindness.
"Psychic," the girls whispered, and "spiritual." Yet so radioactive
were her nerves, so adventurous her trust in rather vaguely conceived
sweetness and light, that she was more energetic than any of the hulking
young women who, with calves bulging in heavy-ribbed woolen stockings
beneath decorous blue serge bloomers, thuddingly galloped across the
floor of the "gym" in practise for the Blodgett Ladies' Basket-Ball
Team.
Even when she was tired her dark eyes were observant. She did not yet
know the immense ability of the world to be casually cruel and proudly
dull, but if she should ever learn those dismaying powers, her eyes
would never become sullen or heavy or rheumily amorous.
For all her enthusiasms, for all the fondness and the "crushes" which
she inspired, Carol's acquaintances were shy of her. When she was most
ardently singing hymns or planning deviltry she yet seemed gently aloof
and critical. She was credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper; yet
she did question and examine unceasingly. Whatever she might become she
would never be static.
Her versatility ensnared her. By turns she hoped to discover that she
had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the ability to act, to
write, to manage organizations. Always she was disappointed, but always
she effervesced anew--over the Student Volunteers, who intended to
become missionaries, over painting scenery for the dramatic club, over
soliciting advertisements for the college magazine.
She was on the peak that Sunday afternoon when she played in chapel.
Out of the dusk her violin took up the organ theme, and the candle-light
revealed her in a straight golden frock, her arm arched to the bow, her
lips serious. Every man fell in love then with religion and Carol.
Throughout Senior year she anxiously related all her experiments and
partial successes to a career. Daily, on the library steps or in the
hall of the Main Building, the co-eds talked of "What shall we do when
we finish college?" Even the girls who knew that they were going to be
married pretended to be considering important business positions;
even they who knew that they would have to work hinted about fabulous
suitors. As for Carol, she was an orphan; her only near relative was a
vanilla-flavored sister married to an optician in St. Paul. She had used
most of the money from her father's estate. She was not in love--that
is, not often, nor ever long at a time. She would earn her living.
But how she was to earn it, how she was to conquer the world--almost
entirely for the world's own good--she did not see. Most of the girls
who were not betrothed meant to be teachers. Of these there were two
sorts: careless young women who admitted that they intended to leave the
"beastly classroom and grubby children" the minute they had a chance to
marry; and studious, sometimes bulbous-browed and pop-eyed maidens who
at class prayer-meetings requested God to "guide their feet along the
paths of greatest usefulness." Neither sort tempted Carol. The former
seemed insincere (a favorite word of hers at this era). The earnest
virgins were, she fancied, as likely to do harm as to do good by their
faith in the value of parsing Caesar.
At various times during Senior year Carol finally decided upon studying
law, writing motion-picture scenarios, professional nursing, and
marrying an unidentified hero.
Then she found a hobby in sociology.
The sociology instructor was new. He was married, and therefore taboo,
but he had come from Boston, he had lived among poets and socialists and
Jews and millionaire uplifters at the University Settlement in New
York, and he had a beautiful white strong neck. He led a giggling class
through the prisons, the charity bureaus, the employment agencies of
Minneapolis and St. Paul. Trailing at the end of the line Carol was
indignant at the prodding curiosity of the others, their manner of
staring at the poor as at a Zoo. She felt herself a great liberator.
She put her hand to her mouth, her forefinger and thumb quite painfully
pinching her lower lip, and frowned, and enjoyed being aloof.
A classmate named Stewart Snyder, a competent bulky young man in a gray
flannel shirt, a rusty black bow tie, and the green-and-purple class
cap, grumbled to her as they walked behind the others in the muck of the
South St. Paul stockyards, "These college chumps make me tired. They're
so top-lofty. They ought to of worked on the farm, the way I have. These
workmen put it all over them."
"I just love common workmen," glowed Carol.
"Only you don't want to forget that common workmen don't think they're
common!"
"You're right! I apologize!" Carol's brows lifted in the astonishment of
emotion, in a glory of abasement. Her eyes mothered the world. Stewart
Snyder peered at her. He rammed his large red fists into his pockets,
he jerked them out, he resolutely got rid of them by clenching his hands
behind him, and he stammered:
"I know. You _get_ people. Most of these darn co-eds----Say, Carol, you
could do a lot for people."
"Oh--oh well--you know--sympathy and everything--if you were--say you
were a lawyer's wife. You'd understand his clients. I'm going to be a
lawyer. I admit I fall down in sympathy sometimes. I get so dog-gone
impatient with people that can't stand the gaff. You'd be good for
a fellow that was too serious. Make him more--more--YOU
know--sympathetic!"
His slightly pouting lips, his mastiff eyes, were begging her to beg him
to go on. She fled from the steam-roller of his sentiment. She cried,
"Oh, see those poor sheep--millions and millions of them." She darted
on.
Stewart was not interesting. He hadn't a shapely white neck, and he had
never lived among celebrated reformers. She wanted, just now, to have
a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black
robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde
of grateful poor.
The supplementary reading in sociology led her to a book on
village-improvement--tree-planting, town pageants, girls' clubs. It
had pictures of greens and garden-walls in France, New England,
Pennsylvania. She had picked it up carelessly, with a slight yawn which
she patted down with her finger-tips as delicately as a cat.
She dipped into the book, lounging on her window-seat, with her slim,
lisle-stockinged legs crossed, and her knees up under her chin.
She stroked a satin pillow while she read. About her was the clothy
exuberance of a Blodgett College room: cretonne-covered window-seat,
photographs of girls, a carbon print of the Coliseum, a chafing-dish,
and a dozen pillows embroidered or beaded or pyrographed. Shockingly out
of place was a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante. It was the only trace
of Carol in the room. She had inherited the rest from generations of
girl students.
It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she regarded the
treatise on village-improvement. But she suddenly stopped fidgeting. She
strode into the book. She had fled half-way through it before the three
o'clock bell called her to the class in English history.
She sighed, "That's what I'll do after college! I'll get my hands on
one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I
suppose I'd better become a teacher then, but--I won't be that kind of
a teacher. I won't drone. Why should they have all the garden suburbs
on Long Island? Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in the
Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries to contain the Elsie
books. I'll make 'em put in a village green, and darling cottages, and a
quaint Main Street!"
Thus she triumphed through the class, which was a typical Blodgett
contest between a dreary teacher and unwilling children of twenty, won
by the teacher because his opponents had to answer his questions, while
their treacherous queries he could counter by demanding, "Have you
looked that up in the library? Well then, suppose you do!"
The history instructor was a retired minister. He was sarcastic today.
He begged of sporting young Mr. Charley Holmberg, "Now Charles, would it
interrupt your undoubtedly fascinating pursuit of that malevolent fly
if I were to ask you to tell us that you do not know anything about King
John?" He spent three delightful minutes in assuring himself of the fact
that no one exactly remembered the date of Magna Charta.
Carol did not hear him. She was completing the roof of a half-timbered
town hall. She had found one man in the prairie village who did not
appreciate her picture of winding streets and arcades, but she had
assembled the town council and dramatically defeated him.
III
Though she was Minnesota-born Carol was not an intimate of the prairie
villages. Her father, the smiling and shabby, the learned and teasingly
kind, had come from Massachusetts, and through all her childhood he
had been a judge in Mankato, which is not a prairie town, but in its
garden-sheltered streets and aisles of elms is white and green New
England reborn. Mankato lies between cliffs and the Minnesota River,
hard by Traverse des Sioux, where the first settlers made treaties
with the Indians, and the cattle-rustlers once came galloping before
hell-for-leather posses.
As she climbed along the banks of the dark river Carol listened to its
fables about the wide land of yellow waters and bleached buffalo bones
to the West; the Southern levees and singing darkies and palm trees
toward which it was forever mysteriously gliding; and she heard again
the startled bells and thick puffing of high-stacked river steamers
wrecked on sand-reefs sixty years ago. Along the decks she saw
missionaries, gamblers in tall pot hats, and Dakota chiefs with scarlet
blankets. . . . Far off whistles at night, round the river bend,
plunking paddles reechoed by the pines, and a glow on black sliding
waters.
Carol's family were self-sufficient in their inventive life, with
Christmas a rite full of surprises and tenderness, and "dressing-up
parties" spontaneous and joyously absurd. The beasts in the Milford
hearth-mythology were not the obscene Night Animals who jump out
of closets and eat little girls, but beneficent and bright-eyed
creatures--the tam htab, who is woolly and blue and lives in the
bathroom, and runs rapidly to warm small feet; the ferruginous oil
stove, who purrs and knows stories; and the skitamarigg, who will play
with children before breakfast if they spring out of bed and close the
window at the very first line of the song about puellas which father
sings while shaving.
Judge Milford's pedagogical scheme was to let the children read whatever
they pleased, and in his brown library Carol absorbed Balzac and
Rabelais and Thoreau and Max Muller. He gravely taught them the letters
on the backs of the encyclopedias, and when polite visitors asked about
the mental progress of the "little ones," they were horrified to hear
the children earnestly repeating A-And, And-Aus, Aus-Bis, Bis-Cal,
Cal-Cha.
Carol's mother died when she was nine. Her father retired from the
judiciary when she was eleven, and took the family to Minneapolis. There
he died, two years after. Her sister, a busy proper advisory soul, older
than herself, had become a stranger to her even when they lived in the
same house.
From those early brown and silver days and from her independence of
relatives Carol retained a willingness to be different from brisk
efficient book-ignoring people; an instinct to observe and wonder
at their bustle even when she was taking part in it. But, she felt
approvingly, as she discovered her career of town-planning, she was now
roused to being brisk and efficient herself.
IV
In a month Carol's ambition had clouded. Her hesitancy about becoming a
teacher had returned. She was not, she worried, strong enough to endure
the routine, and she could not picture herself standing before grinning
children and pretending to be wise and decisive. But the desire for
the creation of a beautiful town remained. When she encountered an item
about small-town women's clubs or a photograph of a straggling Main
Street, she was homesick for it, she felt robbed of her work.
It was the advice of the professor of English which led her to study
professional library-work in a Chicago school. Her imagination carved
and colored the new plan. She saw herself persuading children to read
charming fairy tales, helping young men to find books on mechanics,
being ever so courteous to old men who were hunting for newspapers--the
light of the library, an authority on books, invited to dinners with
poets and explorers, reading a paper to an association of distinguished
scholars.
V
The last faculty reception before commencement. In five days they would
be in the cyclone of final examinations.
The house of the president had been massed with palms suggestive of
polite undertaking parlors, and in the library, a ten-foot room with a
globe and the portraits of Whittier and Martha Washington, the student
orchestra was playing "Carmen" and "Madame Butterfly." Carol was dizzy
with music and the emotions of parting. She saw the palms as a jungle,
the pink-shaded electric globes as an opaline haze, and the eye-glassed
faculty as Olympians. She was melancholy at sight of the mousey girls
with whom she had "always intended to get acquainted," and the half
dozen young men who were ready to fall in love with her.
But it was Stewart Snyder whom she encouraged. He was so much manlier
than the others; he was an even warm brown, like his new ready-made suit
with its padded shoulders. She sat with him, and with two cups of
coffee and a chicken patty, upon a pile of presidential overshoes in the
coat-closet under the stairs, and as the thin music seeped in, Stewart
whispered:
"I can't stand it, this breaking up after four years! The happiest years
of life."
She believed it. "Oh, I know! To think that in just a few days we'll be
parting, and we'll never see some of the bunch again!"
"Carol, you got to listen to me! You always duck when I try to talk
seriously to you, but you got to listen to me. I'm going to be a big
lawyer, maybe a judge, and I need you, and I'd protect you----"
His arm slid behind her shoulders. The insinuating music drained her
independence. She said mournfully, "Would you take care of me?" She
touched his hand. It was warm, solid.
"You bet I would! We'd have, Lord, we'd have bully times in Yankton,
where I'm going to settle----"
"But I want to do something with life."
"What's better than making a comfy home and bringing up some cute kids
and knowing nice homey people?"
It was the immemorial male reply to the restless woman. Thus to the
young Sappho spake the melon-venders; thus the captains to Zenobia; and
in the damp cave over gnawed bones the hairy suitor thus protested to
the woman advocate of matriarchy. In the dialect of Blodgett College but
with the voice of Sappho was Carol's answer:
"Of course. I know. I suppose that's so. Honestly, I do love children.
But there's lots of women that can do housework, but I--well, if you
HAVE got a college education, you ought to use it for the world."
"I know, but you can use it just as well in the home. And gee, Carol,
just think of a bunch of us going out on an auto picnic, some nice
spring evening."
"Yes."
"And sleigh-riding in winter, and going fishing----"
Blarrrrrrr! The orchestra had crashed into the "Soldiers' Chorus"; and
she was protesting, "No! No! You're a dear, but I want to do things.
I don't understand myself but I want--everything in the world! Maybe I
can't sing or write, but I know I can be an influence in library work.
Just suppose I encouraged some boy and he became a great artist! I
will! I will do it! Stewart dear, I can't settle down to nothing but
dish-washing!"
Two minutes later--two hectic minutes--they were disturbed by
an embarrassed couple also seeking the idyllic seclusion of the
overshoe-closet.
After graduation she never saw Stewart Snyder again. She wrote to him
once a week--for one month.
VI
A year Carol spent in Chicago. Her study of library-cataloguing,
recording, books of reference, was easy and not too somniferous. She
reveled in the Art Institute, in symphonies and violin recitals and
chamber music, in the theater and classic dancing. She almost gave up
library work to become one of the young women who dance in cheese-cloth
in the moonlight. She was taken to a certified Studio Party, with
beer, cigarettes, bobbed hair, and a Russian Jewess who sang the
Internationale. It cannot be reported that Carol had anything
significant to say to the Bohemians. She was awkward with them, and
felt ignorant, and she was shocked by the free manners which she had for
years desired. But she heard and remembered discussions of Freud, Romain
Rolland, syndicalism, the Confederation Generale du Travail, feminism
vs. haremism, Chinese lyrics, nationalization of mines, Christian
Science, and fishing in Ontario.
She went home, and that was the beginning and end of her Bohemian life.
The second cousin of Carol's sister's husband lived in Winnetka, and
once invited her out to Sunday dinner. She walked back through Wilmette
and Evanston, discovered new forms of suburban architecture, and
remembered her desire to recreate villages. She decided that she would
give up library work and, by a miracle whose nature was not very clearly
revealed to her, turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and Japanese
bungalows.
The next day in library class she had to read a theme on the use of the
Cumulative Index, and she was taken so seriously in the discussion that
she put off her career of town-planning--and in the autumn she was in
the public library of St. Paul.
VII
Carol was not unhappy and she was not exhilarated, in the St. Paul
Library. She slowly confessed that she was not visibly affecting lives.
She did, at first, put into her contact with the patrons a willingness
which should have moved worlds. But so few of these stolid worlds wanted
to be moved. When she was in charge of the magazine room the readers did
not ask for suggestions about elevated essays. They grunted, "Wanta find
the Leather Goods Gazette for last February." When she was giving
out books the principal query was, "Can you tell me of a good, light,
exciting love story to read? My husband's going away for a week."
She was fond of the other librarians; proud of their aspirations. And by
the chance of propinquity she read scores of books unnatural to her gay
white littleness: volumes of anthropology with ditches of foot-notes
filled with heaps of small dusty type, Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes
for curry, voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American
improvements, treatises upon success in the real-estate business. She
took walks, and was sensible about shoes and diet. And never did she
feel that she was living.
She went to dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances.
Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's
slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her
throat tense, as she slid down the room.
During her three years of library work several men showed diligent
interest in her--the treasurer of a fur-manufacturing firm, a teacher, a
newspaper reporter, and a petty railroad official. None of them made her
more than pause in thought. For months no male emerged from the mass.
Then, at the Marburys', she met Dr. Will Kennicott.
| Carol Milford is a senior student of Blodgett College, at Minneapolis. She misses college for an hour and stands atop a hill near the Mississippi. Locks blown by the wind, she makes a pretty picture. She looks down the mountain at the cities of Minneapolis and St.Paul and thinks about walnut fudge and the plays of Brieux. Carol is slim and beautiful. Her enthusiasm and her trust in the sweetness of life makes her more energetic than many of her athletic classmates. Men fall in love with her but they also feel shy of her because she seems to be aloof and critical. She questions and examines everything constantly. She is versatile hence she finds it difficult to master any one skill to decide upon a career. She is an orphan and most of the income from her father's estate is already spent. So she is determined to make a career for herself. She does not like to become a teacher nor does she develop any friendship serious enough to lead to marriage. She studies Sociology with tremendous interest. The visit to the prisons and charity bureaus as part of the Sociology studies kindles in her, the desire to be the liberator of the poor. She reads a book on village improvement and realizes that nothing has been done to improve the Northwest of America and dreams of adopting a prairie village and changing it into a beautiful place. Carol was born in Minnesota but brought up in Mankato where her father worked as a judge. Her family was fun loving and innovative. So their Christmas and other parties were full of fun and joy. Her father was learned and kind. He allowed his children to learn from the encyclopedias and from whatever book they liked to read. Her mother died when Carol was nine. Her father shifted his family to Minneapolis after his retirement and died when Carol was thirteen years old. Though Carol has an elder sister she grows up quite independent of all relatives. Carol has doubts about becoming a teacher, which is the only possible way she could think of, to belong to a prairie village. She fears that she is not strong enough for that routine. Nor does she like the idea of pretending to be wise in front of a class. But her desire to create a beautiful prairie village remains strong. She decides to follow her professor's advice to study library-work. Carol attends the faculty reception for senior students held before the final examinations. She feels sad at the forthcoming parting from her college mates. Stewart Snyder proposes to her. He plans to become a lawyer and hopes to provide Carol with a beautiful house and all that a woman can dream of. But Carol wants to do something useful with her life. Snyder tries to convince her that making a home and bringing up children is the best way to serve the world. Carol is convinced that she is made for better things than dishwashing. So she rejects Snyder's proposal. During her study of professional-library work in Chicago, Carol has her fill of artistic life. She attends symphonies, violin recitals and listens to chamber music. She is taken to a Bohemian party. She listens to discussions on Freud, nationalization of mines and Christian Science but feels ignorant, awkward and shy. So she stays away from such parties. She is invited to a dinner by her sister's husband's second cousin. On her walk back home through Wilmett and Evanston she admires the beautiful houses and remembers her dream to beautify a prairie village. She accepts a post in the public library of St.Paul. In the public library of St.Paul Carol discovers that she can not influence people as much as she thought she could. The readers in the library do not seek her advice. Nor does she find any willingness in the world around her to change. She is fond of her colleagues and proud of their ambitions. She reads enormously. Though many men are attracted to her, she never finds any of them interesting enough. She fears that life is slipping past and then she meets Dr.Will Kennicot. | summary |
CHAPTER II
IT was a frail and blue and lonely Carol who trotted to the flat of the
Johnson Marburys for Sunday evening supper. Mrs. Marbury was a neighbor
and friend of Carol's sister; Mr. Marbury a traveling representative of
an insurance company. They made a specialty of sandwich-salad-coffee
lap suppers, and they regarded Carol as their literary and artistic
representative. She was the one who could be depended upon to appreciate
the Caruso phonograph record, and the Chinese lantern which Mr. Marbury
had brought back as his present from San Francisco. Carol found the
Marburys admiring and therefore admirable.
This September Sunday evening she wore a net frock with a pale pink
lining. A nap had soothed away the faint lines of tiredness beside her
eyes. She was young, naive, stimulated by the coolness. She flung
her coat at the chair in the hall of the flat, and exploded into
the green-plush living-room. The familiar group were trying to be
conversational. She saw Mr. Marbury, a woman teacher of gymnastics in
a high school, a chief clerk from the Great Northern Railway offices,
a young lawyer. But there was also a stranger, a thick tall man of
thirty-six or -seven, with stolid brown hair, lips used to giving
orders, eyes which followed everything good-naturedly, and clothes which
you could never quite remember.
Mr. Marbury boomed, "Carol, come over here and meet Doc Kennicott--Dr.
Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie. He does all our insurance-examining up
in that neck of the woods, and they do say he's some doctor!"
As she edged toward the stranger and murmured nothing in particular,
Carol remembered that Gopher Prairie was a Minnesota wheat-prairie town
of something over three thousand people.
"Pleased to meet you," stated Dr. Kennicott. His hand was strong; the
palm soft, but the back weathered, showing golden hairs against firm red
skin.
He looked at her as though she was an agreeable discovery. She tugged
her hand free and fluttered, "I must go out to the kitchen and help Mrs.
Marbury." She did not speak to him again till, after she had heated
the rolls and passed the paper napkins, Mr. Marbury captured her with
a loud, "Oh, quit fussing now. Come over here and sit down and tell
us how's tricks." He herded her to a sofa with Dr. Kennicott, who was
rather vague about the eyes, rather drooping of bulky shoulder, as
though he was wondering what he was expected to do next. As their host
left them, Kennicott awoke:
"Marbury tells me you're a high mogul in the public library. I was
surprised. Didn't hardly think you were old enough. I thought you were a
girl, still in college maybe."
"Oh, I'm dreadfully old. I expect to take to a lip-stick, and to find a
gray hair any morning now."
"Huh! You must be frightfully old--prob'ly too old to be my
granddaughter, I guess!"
Thus in the Vale of Arcady nymph and satyr beguiled the hours; precisely
thus, and not in honeyed pentameters, discoursed Elaine and the worn Sir
Launcelot in the pleached alley.
"How do you like your work?" asked the doctor.
"It's pleasant, but sometimes I feel shut off from things--the steel
stacks, and the everlasting cards smeared all over with red rubber
stamps."
"Don't you get sick of the city?"
"St. Paul? Why, don't you like it? I don't know of any lovelier view
than when you stand on Summit Avenue and look across Lower Town to the
Mississippi cliffs and the upland farms beyond."
"I know but----Of course I've spent nine years around the Twin
Cities--took my B.A. and M.D. over at the U., and had my internship in a
hospital in Minneapolis, but still, oh well, you don't get to know folks
here, way you do up home. I feel I've got something to say about running
Gopher Prairie, but you take it in a big city of two-three hundred
thousand, and I'm just one flea on the dog's back. And then I like
country driving, and the hunting in the fall. Do you know Gopher Prairie
at all?"
"No, but I hear it's a very nice town."
"Nice? Say honestly----Of course I may be prejudiced, but I've seen an
awful lot of towns--one time I went to Atlantic City for the American
Medical Association meeting, and I spent practically a week in New York!
But I never saw a town that had such up-and-coming people as Gopher
Prairie. Bresnahan--you know--the famous auto manufacturer--he comes
from Gopher Prairie. Born and brought up there! And it's a darn pretty
town. Lots of fine maples and box-elders, and there's two of the
dandiest lakes you ever saw, right near town! And we've got seven miles
of cement walks already, and building more every day! Course a lot of
these towns still put up with plank walks, but not for us, you bet!"
"Really?"
(Why was she thinking of Stewart Snyder?)
"Gopher Prairie is going to have a great future. Some of the best dairy
and wheat land in the state right near there--some of it selling right
now at one-fifty an acre, and I bet it will go up to two and a quarter
in ten years!"
"Is----Do you like your profession?"
"Nothing like it. Keeps you out, and yet you have a chance to loaf in
the office for a change."
"I don't mean that way. I mean--it's such an opportunity for sympathy."
Dr. Kennicott launched into a heavy, "Oh, these Dutch farmers don't want
sympathy. All they need is a bath and a good dose of salts."
Carol must have flinched, for instantly he was urging, "What I mean
is--I don't want you to think I'm one of these old salts-and-quinine
peddlers, but I mean: so many of my patients are husky farmers that I
suppose I get kind of case-hardened."
"It seems to me that a doctor could transform a whole community, if he
wanted to--if he saw it. He's usually the only man in the neighborhood
who has any scientific training, isn't he?"
"Yes, that's so, but I guess most of us get rusty. We land in a rut of
obstetrics and typhoid and busted legs. What we need is women like you
to jump on us. It'd be you that would transform the town."
"No, I couldn't. Too flighty. I did used to think about doing just that,
curiously enough, but I seem to have drifted away from the idea. Oh, I'm
a fine one to be lecturing you!"
"No! You're just the one. You have ideas without having lost feminine
charm. Say! Don't you think there's a lot of these women that go out for
all these movements and so on that sacrifice----"
After his remarks upon suffrage he abruptly questioned her about
herself. His kindliness and the firmness of his personality enveloped
her and she accepted him as one who had a right to know what she
thought and wore and ate and read. He was positive. He had grown from a
sketched-in stranger to a friend, whose gossip was important news. She
noticed the healthy solidity of his chest. His nose, which had seemed
irregular and large, was suddenly virile.
She was jarred out of this serious sweetness when Marbury bounced over
to them and with horrible publicity yammered, "Say, what do you two
think you're doing? Telling fortunes or making love? Let me warn you
that the doc is a frisky bacheldore, Carol. Come on now, folks, shake a
leg. Let's have some stunts or a dance or something."
She did not have another word with Dr. Kennicott until their parting:
"Been a great pleasure to meet you, Miss Milford. May I see you some
time when I come down again? I'm here quite often--taking patients to
hospitals for majors, and so on."
"Why----"
"What's your address?"
"You can ask Mr. Marbury next time you come down--if you really want to
know!"
"Want to know? Say, you wait!"
II
Of the love-making of Carol and Will Kennicott there is nothing to be
told which may not be heard on every summer evening, on every shadowy
block.
They were biology and mystery; their speech was slang phrases and flares
of poetry; their silences were contentment, or shaky crises when his arm
took her shoulder. All the beauty of youth, first discovered when it
is passing--and all the commonplaceness of a well-to-do unmarried man
encountering a pretty girl at the time when she is slightly weary of her
employment and sees no glory ahead nor any man she is glad to serve.
They liked each other honestly--they were both honest. She was
disappointed by his devotion to making money, but she was sure that
he did not lie to patients, and that he did keep up with the medical
magazines. What aroused her to something more than liking was his
boyishness when they went tramping.
They walked from St. Paul down the river to Mendota, Kennicott more
elastic-seeming in a cap and a soft crepe shirt, Carol youthful in a
tam-o'-shanter of mole velvet, a blue serge suit with an absurdly and
agreeably broad turn-down linen collar, and frivolous ankles above
athletic shoes. The High Bridge crosses the Mississippi, mounting from
low banks to a palisade of cliffs. Far down beneath it on the St. Paul
side, upon mud flats, is a wild settlement of chicken-infested gardens
and shanties patched together from discarded sign-boards, sheets of
corrugated iron, and planks fished out of the river. Carol leaned
over the rail of the bridge to look down at this Yang-tse village;
in delicious imaginary fear she shrieked that she was dizzy with the
height; and it was an extremely human satisfaction to have a strong male
snatch her back to safety, instead of having a logical woman teacher or
librarian sniff, "Well, if you're scared, why don't you get away from
the rail, then?"
From the cliffs across the river Carol and Kennicott looked back at St.
Paul on its hills; an imperial sweep from the dome of the cathedral to
the dome of the state capitol.
The river road led past rocky field slopes, deep glens, woods flamboyant
now with September, to Mendota, white walls and a spire among trees
beneath a hill, old-world in its placid ease. And for this fresh land,
the place is ancient. Here is the bold stone house which General Sibley,
the king of fur-traders, built in 1835, with plaster of river mud, and
ropes of twisted grass for laths. It has an air of centuries. In its
solid rooms Carol and Kennicott found prints from other days which the
house had seen--tail-coats of robin's-egg blue, clumsy Red River carts
laden with luxurious furs, whiskered Union soldiers in slant forage caps
and rattling sabers.
It suggested to them a common American past, and it was memorable
because they had discovered it together. They talked more trustingly,
more personally, as they trudged on. They crossed the Minnesota River in
a rowboat ferry. They climbed the hill to the round stone tower of Fort
Snelling. They saw the junction of the Mississippi and the Minnesota,
and recalled the men who had come here eighty years ago--Maine
lumbermen, York traders, soldiers from the Maryland hills.
"It's a good country, and I'm proud of it. Let's make it all that those
old boys dreamed about," the unsentimental Kennicott was moved to vow.
"Let's!"
"Come on. Come to Gopher Prairie. Show us. Make the town--well--make
it artistic. It's mighty pretty, but I'll admit we aren't any too darn
artistic. Probably the lumber-yard isn't as scrumptious as all these
Greek temples. But go to it! Make us change!"
"I would like to. Some day!"
"Now! You'd love Gopher Prairie. We've been doing a lot with lawns
and gardening the past few years, and it's so homey--the big trees
and----And the best people on earth. And keen. I bet Luke Dawson----"
Carol but half listened to the names. She could not fancy their ever
becoming important to her.
"I bet Luke Dawson has got more money than most of the swells on Summit
Avenue; and Miss Sherwin in the high school is a regular wonder--reads
Latin like I do English; and Sam Clark, the hardware man, he's a
corker--not a better man in the state to go hunting with; and if
you want culture, besides Vida Sherwin there's Reverend Warren, the
Congregational preacher, and Professor Mott, the superintendent of
schools, and Guy Pollock, the lawyer--they say he writes regular poetry
and--and Raymie Wutherspoon, he's not such an awful boob when you get to
KNOW him, and he sings swell. And----And there's plenty of others. Lym
Cass. Only of course none of them have your finesse, you might call it.
But they don't make 'em any more appreciative and so on. Come on! We're
ready for you to boss us!"
They sat on the bank below the parapet of the old fort, hidden from
observation. He circled her shoulder with his arm. Relaxed after the
walk, a chill nipping her throat, conscious of his warmth and power, she
leaned gratefully against him.
"You know I'm in love with you, Carol!"
She did not answer, but she touched the back of his hand with an
exploring finger.
"You say I'm so darn materialistic. How can I help it, unless I have you
to stir me up?"
She did not answer. She could not think.
"You say a doctor could cure a town the way he does a person. Well, you
cure the town of whatever ails it, if anything does, and I'll be your
surgical kit."
She did not follow his words, only the burring resoluteness of them.
She was shocked, thrilled, as he kissed her cheek and cried, "There's
no use saying things and saying things and saying things. Don't my arms
talk to you--now?"
"Oh, please, please!" She wondered if she ought to be angry, but it was
a drifting thought, and she discovered that she was crying.
Then they were sitting six inches apart, pretending that they had never
been nearer, while she tried to be impersonal:
"I would like to--would like to see Gopher Prairie."
"Trust me! Here she is! Brought some snapshots down to show you."
Her cheek near his sleeve, she studied a dozen village pictures. They
were streaky; she saw only trees, shrubbery, a porch indistinct in leafy
shadows. But she exclaimed over the lakes: dark water reflecting wooded
bluffs, a flight of ducks, a fisherman in shirt sleeves and a wide straw
hat, holding up a string of croppies. One winter picture of the edge of
Plover Lake had the air of an etching: lustrous slide of ice, snow in
the crevices of a boggy bank, the mound of a muskrat house, reeds in
thin black lines, arches of frosty grasses. It was an impression of cool
clear vigor.
"How'd it be to skate there for a couple of hours, or go zinging along
on a fast ice-boat, and skip back home for coffee and some hot wienies?"
he demanded.
"It might be--fun."
"But here's the picture. Here's where you come in."
A photograph of a forest clearing: pathetic new furrows straggling among
stumps, a clumsy log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with hay.
In front of it a sagging woman with tight-drawn hair, and a baby
bedraggled, smeary, glorious-eyed.
"Those are the kind of folks I practise among, good share of the time.
Nels Erdstrom, fine clean young Svenska. He'll have a corking farm in
ten years, but now----I operated his wife on a kitchen table, with my
driver giving the anesthetic. Look at that scared baby! Needs some woman
with hands like yours. Waiting for you! Just look at that baby's eyes,
look how he's begging----"
"Don't! They hurt me. Oh, it would be sweet to help him--so sweet."
As his arms moved toward her she answered all her doubts with "Sweet, so
sweet."
| Carol is a regular invitee in the house of the Marburys who are her sister's friends. Mr. Marbury is a travelling insurance agent. They have mutual admiration for one another. On one of her visits, she meets Dr.Will Kenicott who does all the insurance examining for Mr. Marbury in the countryside. He belongs to Gopher Prairie, a wheat-producing town of Minnesota. He is very proud of his town and its people. Carol and Kennicott are attracted to each other. Carol believes that his profession would give him lots of scope for sympathy. Therefore she is shocked to hear him declare that the Dutch farmers need only salt and regular baths. The doctor hastens to clarify that the farmers are hardy and they do not need any sympathy. He, however admits that he is so accustomed to the broken legs and typhoid that he had become insensitive. He feels that a woman like her is what Gopher Prairie needs to change all the people like him. Carol admits that she once had such a dream. Kennicott then questions Carol about herself, and Carol starts liking him. Dr. Will Kennicott courts Carol. She finds him to be materialistic but appreciates his honesty and believes that he would never lie to his patients. She also finds out that he keeps up with the medical magazines. They go for long walks. She discovers his boyishness when they go tramping. They walk through the Old World of the pioneering days and the stone house built by General Sibley in 1835. They grow more trusting. All those historical places viewed in the company of Carol moves Kennicott to declare that they should make America what the pioneers dreamed about. He then proposes to Carol. But Carol is not sure that she would like to marry him. He then shows her photographs of Gopher Prairie, which touch a cord in her heart and slowly Carol falls in love with Kennicott. | summary |
CHAPTER III
UNDER the rolling clouds of the prairie a moving mass of steel. An
irritable clank and rattle beneath a prolonged roar. The sharp scent of
oranges cutting the soggy smell of unbathed people and ancient baggage.
Towns as planless as a scattering of pasteboard boxes on an attic floor.
The stretch of faded gold stubble broken only by clumps of willows
encircling white houses and red barns.
No. 7, the way train, grumbling through Minnesota, imperceptibly
climbing the giant tableland that slopes in a thousand-mile rise from
hot Mississippi bottoms to the Rockies.
It is September, hot, very dusty.
There is no smug Pullman attached to the train, and the day coaches of
the East are replaced by free chair cars, with each seat cut into two
adjustable plush chairs, the head-rests covered with doubtful linen
towels. Halfway down the car is a semi-partition of carved oak columns,
but the aisle is of bare, splintery, grease-blackened wood. There is no
porter, no pillows, no provision for beds, but all today and all tonight
they will ride in this long steel box-farmers with perpetually tired
wives and children who seem all to be of the same age; workmen going to
new jobs; traveling salesmen with derbies and freshly shined shoes.
They are parched and cramped, the lines of their hands filled with
grime; they go to sleep curled in distorted attitudes, heads against the
window-panes or propped on rolled coats on seat-arms, and legs thrust
into the aisle. They do not read; apparently they do not think. They
wait. An early-wrinkled, young-old mother, moving as though her joints
were dry, opens a suit-case in which are seen creased blouses, a pair
of slippers worn through at the toes, a bottle of patent medicine, a tin
cup, a paper-covered book about dreams which the news-butcher has coaxed
her into buying. She brings out a graham cracker which she feeds to a
baby lying flat on a seat and wailing hopelessly. Most of the crumbs
drop on the red plush of the seat, and the woman sighs and tries to
brush them away, but they leap up impishly and fall back on the plush.
A soiled man and woman munch sandwiches and throw the crusts on the
floor. A large brick-colored Norwegian takes off his shoes, grunts in
relief, and props his feet in their thick gray socks against the seat in
front of him.
An old woman whose toothless mouth shuts like a mud-turtle's, and whose
hair is not so much white as yellow like moldy linen, with bands of pink
skull apparent between the tresses, anxiously lifts her bag, opens it,
peers in, closes it, puts it under the seat, and hastily picks it up and
opens it and hides it all over again. The bag is full of treasures and
of memories: a leather buckle, an ancient band-concert program,
scraps of ribbon, lace, satin. In the aisle beside her is an extremely
indignant parrakeet in a cage.
Two facing seats, overflowing with a Slovene iron-miner's family,
are littered with shoes, dolls, whisky bottles, bundles wrapped in
newspapers, a sewing bag. The oldest boy takes a mouth-organ out of his
coat pocket, wipes the tobacco crumbs off, and plays "Marching through
Georgia" till every head in the car begins to ache.
The news-butcher comes through selling chocolate bars and lemon drops.
A girl-child ceaselessly trots down to the water-cooler and back to her
seat. The stiff paper envelope which she uses for cup drips in the aisle
as she goes, and on each trip she stumbles over the feet of a carpenter,
who grunts, "Ouch! Look out!"
The dust-caked doors are open, and from the smoking-car drifts back a
visible blue line of stinging tobacco smoke, and with it a crackle of
laughter over the story which the young man in the bright blue suit and
lavender tie and light yellow shoes has just told to the squat man in
garage overalls.
The smell grows constantly thicker, more stale.
II
To each of the passengers his seat was his temporary home, and most of
the passengers were slatternly housekeepers. But one seat looked clean
and deceptively cool. In it were an obviously prosperous man and a
black-haired, fine-skinned girl whose pumps rested on an immaculate
horsehide bag.
They were Dr. Will Kennicott and his bride, Carol.
They had been married at the end of a year of conversational courtship,
and they were on their way to Gopher Prairie after a wedding journey in
the Colorado mountains.
The hordes of the way-train were not altogether new to Carol. She had
seen them on trips from St. Paul to Chicago. But now that they had
become her own people, to bathe and encourage and adorn, she had an
acute and uncomfortable interest in them. They distressed her. They
were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American
peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination
and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man
working over his order-blanks. But the older people, Yankees as well
as Norwegians, Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission to
poverty. They were peasants, she groaned.
"Isn't there any way of waking them up? What would happen if they
understood scientific agriculture?" she begged of Kennicott, her hand
groping for his.
It had been a transforming honeymoon. She had been frightened to
discover how tumultuous a feeling could be roused in her. Will had been
lordly--stalwart, jolly, impressively competent in making camp, tender
and understanding through the hours when they had lain side by side in a
tent pitched among pines high up on a lonely mountain spur.
His hand swallowed hers as he started from thoughts of the practise to
which he was returning. "These people? Wake 'em up? What for? They're
happy."
"But they're so provincial. No, that isn't what I mean. They're--oh, so
sunk in the mud."
"Look here, Carrie. You want to get over your city idea that because a
man's pants aren't pressed, he's a fool. These farmers are mighty keen
and up-and-coming."
"I know! That's what hurts. Life seems so hard for them--these lonely
farms and this gritty train."
"Oh, they don't mind it. Besides, things are changing. The auto, the
telephone, rural free delivery; they're bringing the farmers in closer
touch with the town. Takes time, you know, to change a wilderness like
this was fifty years ago. But already, why, they can hop into the Ford
or the Overland and get in to the movies on Saturday evening quicker
than you could get down to 'em by trolley in St. Paul."
"But if it's these towns we've been passing that the farmers run to for
relief from their bleakness----Can't you understand? Just LOOK at them!"
Kennicott was amazed. Ever since childhood he had seen these towns from
trains on this same line. He grumbled, "Why, what's the matter with 'em?
Good hustling burgs. It would astonish you to know how much wheat and
rye and corn and potatoes they ship in a year."
"But they're so ugly."
"I'll admit they aren't comfy like Gopher Prairie. But give 'em time."
"What's the use of giving them time unless some one has desire and
training enough to plan them? Hundreds of factories trying to make
attractive motor cars, but these towns--left to chance. No! That can't
be true. It must have taken genius to make them so scrawny!"
"Oh, they're not so bad," was all he answered. He pretended that his
hand was the cat and hers the mouse. For the first time she tolerated
him rather than encouraged him. She was staring out at Schoenstrom, a
hamlet of perhaps a hundred and fifty inhabitants, at which the train
was stopping.
A bearded German and his pucker-mouthed wife tugged their enormous
imitation-leather satchel from under a seat and waddled out. The station
agent hoisted a dead calf aboard the baggage-car. There were no other
visible activities in Schoenstrom. In the quiet of the halt, Carol could
hear a horse kicking his stall, a carpenter shingling a roof.
The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block, facing
the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops covered with galvanized
iron, or with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow. The buildings
were as ill-assorted, as temporary-looking, as a mining-camp street in
the motion-pictures. The railroad station was a one-room frame box, a
mirey cattle-pen on one side and a crimson wheat-elevator on the other.
The elevator, with its cupola on the ridge of a shingled roof, resembled
a broad-shouldered man with a small, vicious, pointed head. The only
habitable structures to be seen were the florid red-brick Catholic
church and rectory at the end of Main Street.
Carol picked at Kennicott's sleeve. "You wouldn't call this a not-so-bad
town, would you?"
"These Dutch burgs ARE kind of slow. Still, at that----See that fellow
coming out of the general store there, getting into the big car? I met
him once. He owns about half the town, besides the store. Rauskukle, his
name is. He owns a lot of mortgages, and he gambles in farm-lands. Good
nut on him, that fellow. Why, they say he's worth three or four hundred
thousand dollars! Got a dandy great big yellow brick house with tiled
walks and a garden and everything, other end of town--can't see it from
here--I've gone past it when I've driven through here. Yes sir!"
"Then, if he has all that, there's no excuse whatever for this place!
If his three hundred thousand went back into the town, where it belongs,
they could burn up these shacks, and build a dream-village, a jewel! Why
do the farmers and the town-people let the Baron keep it?"
"I must say I don't quite get you sometimes, Carrie. Let him? They can't
help themselves! He's a dumm old Dutchman, and probably the priest can
twist him around his finger, but when it comes to picking good farming
land, he's a regular wiz!"
"I see. He's their symbol of beauty. The town erects him, instead of
erecting buildings."
"Honestly, don't know what you're driving at. You're kind of played out,
after this long trip. You'll feel better when you get home and have a
good bath, and put on the blue negligee. That's some vampire costume,
you witch!"
He squeezed her arm, looked at her knowingly.
They moved on from the desert stillness of the Schoenstrom station. The
train creaked, banged, swayed. The air was nauseatingly thick. Kennicott
turned her face from the window, rested her head on his shoulder. She
was coaxed from her unhappy mood. But she came out of it unwillingly,
and when Kennicott was satisfied that he had corrected all her worries
and had opened a magazine of saffron detective stories, she sat upright.
Here--she meditated--is the newest empire of the world; the Northern
Middlewest; a land of dairy herds and exquisite lakes, of new
automobiles and tar-paper shanties and silos like red towers, of clumsy
speech and a hope that is boundless. An empire which feeds a quarter of
the world--yet its work is merely begun. They are pioneers, these sweaty
wayfarers, for all their telephones and bank-accounts and automatic
pianos and co-operative leagues. And for all its fat richness, theirs is
a pioneer land. What is its future? she wondered. A future of cities
and factory smut where now are loping empty fields? Homes universal and
secure? Or placid chateaux ringed with sullen huts? Youth free to find
knowledge and laughter? Willingness to sift the sanctified lies? Or
creamy-skinned fat women, smeared with grease and chalk, gorgeous in the
skins of beasts and the bloody feathers of slain birds, playing bridge
with puffy pink-nailed jeweled fingers, women who after much expenditure
of labor and bad temper still grotesquely resemble their own flatulent
lap-dogs? The ancient stale inequalities, or something different in
history, unlike the tedious maturity of other empires? What future and
what hope?
Carol's head ached with the riddle.
She saw the prairie, flat in giant patches or rolling in long hummocks.
The width and bigness of it, which had expanded her spirit an hour ago,
began to frighten her. It spread out so; it went on so uncontrollably;
she could never know it. Kennicott was closeted in his detective story.
With the loneliness which comes most depressingly in the midst of many
people she tried to forget problems, to look at the prairie objectively.
The grass beside the railroad had been burnt over; it was a smudge
prickly with charred stalks of weeds. Beyond the undeviating barbed-wire
fences were clumps of golden rod. Only this thin hedge shut them off
from the plains-shorn wheat-lands of autumn, a hundred acres to a field,
prickly and gray near-by but in the blurred distance like tawny velvet
stretched over dipping hillocks. The long rows of wheat-shocks marched
like soldiers in worn yellow tabards. The newly plowed fields were
black banners fallen on the distant slope. It was a martial immensity,
vigorous, a little harsh, unsoftened by kindly gardens.
The expanse was relieved by clumps of oaks with patches of short wild
grass; and every mile or two was a chain of cobalt slews, with the
flicker of blackbirds' wings across them.
All this working land was turned into exuberance by the light. The
sunshine was dizzy on open stubble; shadows from immense cumulus clouds
were forever sliding across low mounds; and the sky was wider and
loftier and more resolutely blue than the sky of cities . . . she
declared.
"It's a glorious country; a land to be big in," she crooned.
Then Kennicott startled her by chuckling, "D' you realize the town after
the next is Gopher Prairie? Home!"
III
That one word--home--it terrified her. Had she really bound herself to
live, inescapably, in this town called Gopher Prairie? And this thick
man beside her, who dared to define her future, he was a stranger! She
turned in her seat, stared at him. Who was he? Why was he sitting with
her? He wasn't of her kind! His neck was heavy; his speech was heavy; he
was twelve or thirteen years older than she; and about him was none of
the magic of shared adventures and eagerness. She could not believe that
she had ever slept in his arms. That was one of the dreams which you had
but did not officially admit.
She told herself how good he was, how dependable and understanding. She
touched his ear, smoothed the plane of his solid jaw, and, turning away
again, concentrated upon liking his town. It wouldn't be like these
barren settlements. It couldn't be! Why, it had three thousand
population. That was a great many people. There would be six hundred
houses or more. And----The lakes near it would be so lovely. She'd seen
them in the photographs. They had looked charming . . . hadn't they?
As the train left Wahkeenyan she began nervously to watch for the
lakes--the entrance to all her future life. But when she discovered
them, to the left of the track, her only impression of them was that
they resembled the photographs.
A mile from Gopher Prairie the track mounts a curving low ridge, and she
could see the town as a whole. With a passionate jerk she pushed up the
window, looked out, the arched fingers of her left hand trembling on the
sill, her right hand at her breast.
And she saw that Gopher Prairie was merely an enlargement of all the
hamlets which they had been passing. Only to the eyes of a Kennicott was
it exceptional. The huddled low wooden houses broke the plains scarcely
more than would a hazel thicket. The fields swept up to it, past it.
It was unprotected and unprotecting; there was no dignity in it nor
any hope of greatness. Only the tall red grain-elevator and a few tinny
church-steeples rose from the mass. It was a frontier camp. It was not a
place to live in, not possibly, not conceivably.
The people--they'd be as drab as their houses, as flat as their fields.
She couldn't stay here. She would have to wrench loose from this man,
and flee.
She peeped at him. She was at once helpless before his mature fixity,
and touched by his excitement as he sent his magazine skittering along
the aisle, stooped for their bags, came up with flushed face, and
gloated, "Here we are!"
She smiled loyally, and looked away. The train was entering town. The
houses on the outskirts were dusky old red mansions with wooden frills,
or gaunt frame shelters like grocery boxes, or new bungalows with
concrete foundations imitating stone.
Now the train was passing the elevator, the grim storage-tanks for oil,
a creamery, a lumber-yard, a stock-yard muddy and trampled and stinking.
Now they were stopping at a squat red frame station, the platform
crowded with unshaven farmers and with loafers--unadventurous people
with dead eyes. She was here. She could not go on. It was the end--the
end of the world. She sat with closed eyes, longing to push past
Kennicott, hide somewhere in the train, flee on toward the Pacific.
Something large arose in her soul and commanded, "Stop it! Stop being a
whining baby!" She stood up quickly; she said, "Isn't it wonderful to be
here at last!"
He trusted her so. She would make herself like the place. And she was
going to do tremendous things----
She followed Kennicott and the bobbing ends of the two bags which
he carried. They were held back by the slow line of disembarking
passengers. She reminded herself that she was actually at the dramatic
moment of the bride's home-coming. She ought to feel exalted. She felt
nothing at all except irritation at their slow progress toward the door.
Kennicott stooped to peer through the windows. He shyly exulted:
"Look! Look! There's a bunch come down to welcome us! Sam Clark and the
missus and Dave Dyer and Jack Elder, and, yes sir, Harry Haydock and
Juanita, and a whole crowd! I guess they see us now. Yuh, yuh sure, they
see us! See 'em waving!"
She obediently bent her head to look out at them. She had hold of
herself. She was ready to love them. But she was embarrassed by the
heartiness of the cheering group. From the vestibule she waved to them,
but she clung a second to the sleeve of the brakeman who helped her down
before she had the courage to dive into the cataract of hand-shaking
people, people whom she could not tell apart. She had the impression
that all the men had coarse voices, large damp hands, tooth-brush
mustaches, bald spots, and Masonic watch-charms.
She knew that they were welcoming her. Their hands, their smiles, their
shouts, their affectionate eyes overcame her. She stammered, "Thank you,
oh, thank you!"
One of the men was clamoring at Kennicott, "I brought my machine down to
take you home, doc."
"Fine business, Sam!" cried Kennicott; and, to Carol, "Let's jump in.
That big Paige over there. Some boat, too, believe me! Sam can show
speed to any of these Marmons from Minneapolis!"
Only when she was in the motor car did she distinguish the three people
who were to accompany them. The owner, now at the wheel, was the essence
of decent self-satisfaction; a baldish, largish, level-eyed man, rugged
of neck but sleek and round of face--face like the back of a spoon bowl.
He was chuckling at her, "Have you got us all straight yet?"
"Course she has! Trust Carrie to get things straight and get 'em darn
quick! I bet she could tell you every date in history!" boasted her
husband.
But the man looked at her reassuringly and with a certainty that he
was a person whom she could trust she confessed, "As a matter of fact I
haven't got anybody straight."
"Course you haven't, child. Well, I'm Sam Clark, dealer in hardware,
sporting goods, cream separators, and almost any kind of heavy junk you
can think of. You can call me Sam--anyway, I'm going to call you Carrie,
seein' 's you've been and gone and married this poor fish of a bum medic
that we keep round here." Carol smiled lavishly, and wished that she
called people by their given names more easily. "The fat cranky lady
back there beside you, who is pretending that she can't hear me giving
her away, is Mrs. Sam'l Clark; and this hungry-looking squirt up here
beside me is Dave Dyer, who keeps his drug store running by not filling
your hubby's prescriptions right--fact you might say he's the guy that
put the 'shun' in 'prescription.' So! Well, leave us take the bonny
bride home. Say, doc, I'll sell you the Candersen place for three
thousand plunks. Better be thinking about building a new home for
Carrie. Prettiest Frau in G. P., if you asks me!"
Contentedly Sam Clark drove off, in the heavy traffic of three Fords and
the Minniemashie House Free 'Bus.
"I shall like Mr. Clark . . . I CAN'T call him 'Sam'! They're all so
friendly." She glanced at the houses; tried not to see what she saw;
gave way in: "Why do these stories lie so? They always make the bride's
home-coming a bower of roses. Complete trust in noble spouse. Lies about
marriage. I'm NOT changed. And this town--O my God! I can't go through
with it. This junk-heap!"
Her husband bent over her. "You look like you were in a brown study.
Scared? I don't expect you to think Gopher Prairie is a paradise, after
St. Paul. I don't expect you to be crazy about it, at first. But you'll
come to like it so much--life's so free here and best people on earth."
She whispered to him (while Mrs. Clark considerately turned away), "I
love you for understanding. I'm just--I'm beastly over-sensitive. Too
many books. It's my lack of shoulder-muscles and sense. Give me time,
dear."
"You bet! All the time you want!"
She laid the back of his hand against her cheek, snuggled near him. She
was ready for her new home.
Kennicott had told her that, with his widowed mother as housekeeper, he
had occupied an old house, "but nice and roomy, and well-heated, best
furnace I could find on the market." His mother had left Carol her love,
and gone back to Lac-qui-Meurt.
It would be wonderful, she exulted, not to have to live in Other
People's Houses, but to make her own shrine. She held his hand tightly
and stared ahead as the car swung round a corner and stopped in the
street before a prosaic frame house in a small parched lawn.
IV
A concrete sidewalk with a "parking" of grass and mud. A square smug
brown house, rather damp. A narrow concrete walk up to it. Sickly yellow
leaves in a windrow with dried wings of box-elder seeds and snags
of wool from the cotton-woods. A screened porch with pillars of thin
painted pine surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed
wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze. A lugubrious bay-window
to the right of the porch. Window curtains of starched cheap lace
revealing a pink marble table with a conch shell and a Family Bible.
"You'll find it old-fashioned--what do you call it?--Mid-Victorian. I
left it as is, so you could make any changes you felt were necessary."
Kennicott sounded doubtful for the first time since he had come back to
his own.
"It's a real home!" She was moved by his humility. She gaily motioned
good-by to the Clarks. He unlocked the door--he was leaving the choice
of a maid to her, and there was no one in the house. She jiggled while
he turned the key, and scampered in. . . . It was next day before either
of them remembered that in their honeymoon camp they had planned that he
should carry her over the sill.
In hallway and front parlor she was conscious of dinginess and
lugubriousness and airlessness, but she insisted, "I'll make it all
jolly." As she followed Kennicott and the bags up to their bedroom she
quavered to herself the song of the fat little-gods of the hearth:
I have my own home,
To do what I please with,
To do what I please with,
My den for me and my mate and my cubs,
My own!
She was close in her husband's arms; she clung to him; whatever of
strangeness and slowness and insularity she might find in him, none of
that mattered so long as she could slip her hands beneath his coat, run
her fingers over the warm smoothness of the satin back of his waistcoat,
seem almost to creep into his body, find in him strength, find in the
courage and kindness of her man a shelter from the perplexing world.
"Sweet, so sweet," she whispered.
| Dr.Will Kennicott marries Carol after courting her for a whole year. Train No 7 carries the bride and the groom to Gopher Prairie. Carol feels distressed by what she finds around her. Though the train has plush seats, it has neither beds nor any other provision to make the passengers comfortable. The passengers are poor farmers, their tired wives and their numerous children. They look unwashed and carry dirty old baggage. Carol also notices that the travelling salesmen and other workmen are better dressed than the farmers are. Carol had traveled by the same train before but the crowd now acquires a new importance. She perceives them as her people whom she would change. Their poverty and ignorance pain her. She wishes to shake them out of their meek acceptance of their situation. Dr. Kennicott is surprised by Carol's perception. He perceives them as upcoming farmers who do not mind the hardship. He informs Carol that they are better off than she thinks. They enjoy facilities like the telephone and the rural free delivery system. They can drive to the movies in their Ford cars. He does not find the prairie villages as ugly as Carol thinks they are. What matters to him is that a lot of potatoes, wheat corn and rye are exported from those prairie towns. The train halts at a small station called Schoenstorm. Carol tries to draw Kennicott's attention to the ugliness of the town. The town looks artificial because the houses are ill assorted and the shops are covered with garishly painted clapboards and the church is built of bright red bricks. Kennicott points at a man getting into a car and informs Carol that he is Rauskukle, the richest farmer who owned half the town. He also informs her that the other Dutch farmers who inhabit the town are rich enough but are too slow to change. Carol remarks that Rauskukle's money should be ploughed back into the beautifying of the town since he earned all his riches off the town. Kennicott does not comprehend her. He concludes that she talks wildly because she is tired. Carol is convinced that even if the prairie region is growing rich, it had to develop its social and cultural attitudes. She wonders if it would develop into a humane center where people would develop the questioning and the scientific spirit and aesthetic values or would choose to remain only another materialistic part of America. She is startled by Kennicot's announcement that they are nearing home. Suddenly she feels that her husband is a total stranger to her. She realizes that Gopher Prairie looks just like the other prairie towns she saw enroute. She feels the urge to run away. But she also feels touched by his enthusiasm and his excitement. She thinks about how loving and trusting he is and decides to accept Gopher Prairie as her own. Kennicott's friends Sam Clark, Dave Dyer, Jack Elder, Harry Haydock and Juanita welcome the bride to Gopher Prairie. Carol is touched by their hearty welcome, but she also feels shy because she cannot match their enthusiasm. Sam Clark drives them home. She finds him very likeable. She feels disappointed that her homecoming is not as dramatic or as beautiful as the romances she read had always made them out to be. The old fashioned house without any garden to boast of proves to be the biggest disappointment of all. However, the fact that she is to be allowed to make whatever changes she wants in the house and select the maid perks her up. She sees in her husband courage and kindness inspite of his insularity. She knows in her heart that he is the one who would shelter her from the world that perplexed her so much. | summary |
CHAPTER IV
I
"THE Clarks have invited some folks to their house to meet us, tonight,"
said Kennicott, as he unpacked his suit-case.
"Oh, that is nice of them!"
"You bet. I told you you'd like 'em. Squarest people on earth. Uh,
Carrie----Would you mind if I sneaked down to the office for an hour,
just to see how things are?"
"Why, no. Of course not. I know you're keen to get back to work."
"Sure you don't mind?"
"Not a bit. Out of my way. Let me unpack."
But the advocate of freedom in marriage was as much disappointed as
a drooping bride at the alacrity with which he took that freedom and
escaped to the world of men's affairs. She gazed about their bedroom,
and its full dismalness crawled over her: the awkward knuckly L-shape
of it; the black walnut bed with apples and spotty pears carved on the
headboard; the imitation maple bureau, with pink-daubed scent-bottles
and a petticoated pin-cushion on a marble slab uncomfortably like a
gravestone; the plain pine washstand and the garlanded water-pitcher and
bowl. The scent was of horsehair and plush and Florida Water.
"How could people ever live with things like this?" she shuddered. She
saw the furniture as a circle of elderly judges, condemning her to death
by smothering. The tottering brocade chair squeaked, "Choke her--choke
her--smother her." The old linen smelled of the tomb. She was alone in
this house, this strange still house, among the shadows of dead thoughts
and haunting repressions. "I hate it! I hate it!" she panted. "Why did I
ever----"
She remembered that Kennicott's mother had brought these family
relics from the old home in Lac-qui-Meurt. "Stop it! They're perfectly
comfortable things. They're--comfortable. Besides----Oh, they're
horrible! We'll change them, right away."
Then, "But of course he HAS to see how things are at the office----"
She made a pretense of busying herself with unpacking. The chintz-lined,
silver-fitted bag which had seemed so desirable a luxury in St. Paul was
an extravagant vanity here. The daring black chemise of frail chiffon
and lace was a hussy at which the deep-bosomed bed stiffened in disgust,
and she hurled it into a bureau drawer, hid it beneath a sensible linen
blouse.
She gave up unpacking. She went to the window, with a purely literary
thought of village charm--hollyhocks and lanes and apple-cheeked
cottagers. What she saw was the side of the Seventh-Day Adventist
Church--a plain clapboard wall of a sour liver color; the ash-pile
back of the church; an unpainted stable; and an alley in which a Ford
delivery-wagon had been stranded. This was the terraced garden below her
boudoir; this was to be her scenery for----
"I mustn't! I mustn't! I'm nervous this afternoon. Am I sick? . . . Good
Lord, I hope it isn't that! Not now! How people lie! How these stories
lie! They say the bride is always so blushing and proud and happy when
she finds that out, but--I'd hate it! I'd be scared to death! Some
day but----Please, dear nebulous Lord, not now! Bearded sniffy old
men sitting and demanding that we bear children. If THEY had to bear
them----! I wish they did have to! Not now! Not till I've got hold of
this job of liking the ash-pile out there! . . . I must shut up. I'm
mildly insane. I'm going out for a walk. I'll see the town by myself. My
first view of the empire I'm going to conquer!"
She fled from the house.
She stared with seriousness at every concrete crossing, every
hitching-post, every rake for leaves; and to each house she devoted all
her speculation. What would they come to mean? How would they look six
months from now? In which of them would she be dining? Which of these
people whom she passed, now mere arrangements of hair and clothes, would
turn into intimates, loved or dreaded, different from all the other
people in the world?
As she came into the small business-section she inspected a broad-beamed
grocer in an alpaca coat who was bending over the apples and celery on a
slanted platform in front of his store. Would she ever talk to him? What
would he say if she stopped and stated, "I am Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. Some
day I hope to confide that a heap of extremely dubious pumpkins as a
window-display doesn't exhilarate me much."
(The grocer was Mr. Frederick F. Ludelmeyer, whose market is at the
corner of Main Street and Lincoln Avenue. In supposing that only she was
observant Carol was ignorant, misled by the indifference of cities. She
fancied that she was slipping through the streets invisible; but when
she had passed, Mr. Ludelmeyer puffed into the store and coughed at his
clerk, "I seen a young woman, she come along the side street. I bet she
iss Doc Kennicott's new bride, good-looker, nice legs, but she wore a
hell of a plain suit, no style, I wonder will she pay cash, I bet she
goes to Howland & Gould's more as she does here, what you done with the
poster for Fluffed Oats?")
II
When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had completely covered
the town, east and west, north and south; and she stood at the corner of
Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired.
Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half wooden
residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle
of Fords and lumber-wagons, was too small to absorb her. The broad,
straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie
on every side. She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land.
The skeleton iron windmill on the farm a few blocks away, at the north
end of Main Street, was like the ribs of a dead cow. She thought of the
coming of the Northern winter, when the unprotected houses would crouch
together in terror of storms galloping out of that wild waste. They
were so small and weak, the little brown houses. They were shelters for
sparrows, not homes for warm laughing people.
She told herself that down the street the leaves were a splendor. The
maples were orange; the oaks a solid tint of raspberry. And the lawns
had been nursed with love. But the thought would not hold. At best the
trees resembled a thinned woodlot. There was no park to rest the eyes.
And since not Gopher Prairie but Wakamin was the county-seat, there was
no court-house with its grounds.
She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most pretentious
building in sight, the one place which welcomed strangers and
determined their opinion of the charm and luxury of Gopher Prairie--the
Minniemashie House. It was a tall lean shabby structure, three stories
of yellow-streaked wood, the corners covered with sanded pine slabs
purporting to symbolize stone. In the hotel office she could see a
stretch of bare unclean floor, a line of rickety chairs with brass
cuspidors between, a writing-desk with advertisements in mother-of-pearl
letters upon the glass-covered back. The dining-room beyond was a jungle
of stained table-cloths and catsup bottles.
She looked no more at the Minniemashie House.
A man in cuffless shirt-sleeves with pink arm-garters, wearing a linen
collar but no tie, yawned his way from Dyer's Drug Store across to the
hotel. He leaned against the wall, scratched a while, sighed, and in a
bored way gossiped with a man tilted back in a chair. A lumber-wagon,
its long green box filled with large spools of barbed-wire fencing,
creaked down the block. A Ford, in reverse, sounded as though it
were shaking to pieces, then recovered and rattled away. In the Greek
candy-store was the whine of a peanut-roaster, and the oily smell of
nuts.
There was no other sound nor sign of life.
She wanted to run, fleeing from the encroaching prairie, demanding the
security of a great city. Her dreams of creating a beautiful town were
ludicrous. Oozing out from every drab wall, she felt a forbidding spirit
which she could never conquer.
She trailed down the street on one side, back on the other, glancing
into the cross streets. It was a private Seeing Main Street tour. She
was within ten minutes beholding not only the heart of a place called
Gopher Prairie, but ten thousand towns from Albany to San Diego:
Dyer's Drug Store, a corner building of regular and unreal blocks of
artificial stone. Inside the store, a greasy marble soda-fountain with
an electric lamp of red and green and curdled-yellow mosaic
shade. Pawed-over heaps of tooth-brushes and combs and packages of
shaving-soap. Shelves of soap-cartons, teething-rings, garden-seeds,
and patent medicines in yellow "packages-nostrums" for consumption, for
"women's diseases"--notorious mixtures of opium and alcohol, in
the very shop to which her husband sent patients for the filling of
prescriptions.
From a second-story window the sign "W. P. Kennicott, Phys. & Surgeon,"
gilt on black sand.
A small wooden motion-picture theater called "The Rosebud Movie Palace."
Lithographs announcing a film called "Fatty in Love."
Howland & Gould's Grocery. In the display window, black, overripe
bananas and lettuce on which a cat was sleeping. Shelves lined with red
crepe paper which was now faded and torn and concentrically spotted.
Flat against the wall of the second story the signs of lodges--the
Knights of Pythias, the Maccabees, the Woodmen, the Masons.
Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market--a reek of blood.
A jewelry shop with tinny-looking wrist-watches for women. In front of
it, at the curb, a huge wooden clock which did not go.
A fly-buzzing saloon with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign across
the front. Other saloons down the block. From them a stink of stale
beer, and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out dirty
songs--vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull--the delicacy of a
mining-camp minus its vigor. In front of the saloons, farmwives sitting
on the seats of wagons, waiting for their husbands to become drunk and
ready to start home.
A tobacco shop called "The Smoke House," filled with young men shaking
dice for cigarettes. Racks of magazines, and pictures of coy fat
prostitutes in striped bathing-suits.
A clothing store with a display of "ox-blood-shade Oxfords with bull-dog
toes." Suits which looked worn and glossless while they were still new,
flabbily draped on dummies like corpses with painted cheeks.
The Bon Ton Store--Haydock & Simons'--the largest shop in town. The
first-story front of clear glass, the plates cleverly bound at the edges
with brass. The second story of pleasant tapestry brick. One window of
excellent clothes for men, interspersed with collars of floral pique
which showed mauve daisies on a saffron ground. Newness and an obvious
notion of neatness and service. Haydock & Simons. Haydock. She had met a
Haydock at the station; Harry Haydock; an active person of thirty-five.
He seemed great to her, now, and very like a saint. His shop was clean!
Axel Egge's General Store, frequented by Scandinavian farmers. In the
shallow dark window-space heaps of sleazy sateens, badly woven galateas,
canvas shoes designed for women with bulging ankles, steel and red glass
buttons upon cards with broken edges, a cottony blanket, a granite-ware
frying-pan reposing on a sun-faded crepe blouse.
Sam Clark's Hardware Store. An air of frankly metallic enterprise. Guns
and churns and barrels of nails and beautiful shiny butcher knives.
Chester Dashaway's House Furnishing Emporium. A vista of heavy oak
rockers with leather seats, asleep in a dismal row.
Billy's Lunch. Thick handleless cups on the wet oilcloth-covered
counter. An odor of onions and the smoke of hot lard. In the doorway a
young man audibly sucking a toothpick.
The warehouse of the buyer of cream and potatoes. The sour smell of a
dairy.
The Ford Garage and the Buick Garage, competent one-story brick
and cement buildings opposite each other. Old and new cars on
grease-blackened concrete floors. Tire advertisements. The roaring of
a tested motor; a racket which beat at the nerves. Surly young men in
khaki union-overalls. The most energetic and vital places in town.
A large warehouse for agricultural implements. An impressive barricade
of green and gold wheels, of shafts and sulky seats, belonging
to machinery of which Carol knew nothing--potato-planters,
manure-spreaders, silage-cutters, disk-harrows, breaking-plows.
A feed store, its windows opaque with the dust of bran, a patent
medicine advertisement painted on its roof.
Ye Art Shoppe, Prop. Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks, Christian Science Library
open daily free. A touching fumble at beauty. A one-room shanty of
boards recently covered with rough stucco. A show-window delicately rich
in error: vases starting out to imitate tree-trunks but running off
into blobs of gilt--an aluminum ash-tray labeled "Greetings from
Gopher Prairie"--a Christian Science magazine--a stamped sofa-cushion
portraying a large ribbon tied to a small poppy, the correct skeins of
embroidery-silk lying on the pillow. Inside the shop, a glimpse of bad
carbon prints of bad and famous pictures, shelves of phonograph records
and camera films, wooden toys, and in the midst an anxious small woman
sitting in a padded rocking chair.
A barber shop and pool room. A man in shirt sleeves, presumably Del
Snafflin the proprietor, shaving a man who had a large Adam's apple.
Nat Hicks's Tailor Shop, on a side street off Main. A one-story
building. A fashion-plate showing human pitchforks in garments which
looked as hard as steel plate.
On another side street a raw red-brick Catholic Church with a varnished
yellow door.
The post-office--merely a partition of glass and brass shutting off
the rear of a mildewed room which must once have been a shop. A tilted
writing-shelf against a wall rubbed black and scattered with official
notices and army recruiting-posters.
The damp, yellow-brick schoolbuilding in its cindery grounds.
The State Bank, stucco masking wood.
The Farmers' National Bank. An Ionic temple of marble. Pure, exquisite,
solitary. A brass plate with "Ezra Stowbody, Pres't."
A score of similar shops and establishments.
Behind them and mixed with them, the houses, meek cottages or large,
comfortable, soundly uninteresting symbols of prosperity.
In all the town not one building save the Ionic bank which gave pleasure
to Carol's eyes; not a dozen buildings which suggested that, in the
fifty years of Gopher Prairie's existence, the citizens had realized
that it was either desirable or possible to make this, their common
home, amusing or attractive.
It was not only the unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid
straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy
temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. The
street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles,
gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had built
with the most valiant disregard of all the others. Between a large
new "block" of two-story brick shops on one side, and the fire-brick
Overland garage on the other side, was a one-story cottage turned into
a millinery shop. The white temple of the Farmers' Bank was elbowed back
by a grocery of glaring yellow brick. One store-building had a patchy
galvanized iron cornice; the building beside it was crowned with
battlements and pyramids of brick capped with blocks of red sandstone.
She escaped from Main Street, fled home.
She wouldn't have cared, she insisted, if the people had been comely.
She had noted a young man loafing before a shop, one unwashed hand
holding the cord of an awning; a middle-aged man who had a way of
staring at women as though he had been married too long and too
prosaically; an old farmer, solid, wholesome, but not clean--his face
like a potato fresh from the earth. None of them had shaved for three
days.
"If they can't build shrines, out here on the prairie, surely there's
nothing to prevent their buying safety-razors!" she raged.
She fought herself: "I must be wrong. People do live here. It CAN'T be
as ugly as--as I know it is! I must be wrong. But I can't do it. I can't
go through with it."
She came home too seriously worried for hysteria; and when she found
Kennicott waiting for her, and exulting, "Have a walk? Well, like
the town? Great lawns and trees, eh?" she was able to say, with a
self-protective maturity new to her, "It's very interesting."
III
The train which brought Carol to Gopher Prairie also brought Miss Bea
Sorenson.
Miss Bea was a stalwart, corn-colored, laughing young woman, and she was
bored by farm-work. She desired the excitements of city-life, and the
way to enjoy city-life was, she had decided, to "go get a yob as hired
girl in Gopher Prairie." She contentedly lugged her pasteboard telescope
from the station to her cousin, Tina Malmquist, maid of all work in the
residence of Mrs. Luke Dawson.
"Vell, so you come to town," said Tina.
"Ya. Ay get a yob," said Bea.
"Vell. . . . You got a fella now?"
"Ya. Yim Yacobson."
"Vell. I'm glat to see you. How much you vant a veek?"
"Sex dollar."
"There ain't nobody pay dat. Vait! Dr. Kennicott, I t'ink he marry a
girl from de Cities. Maybe she pay dat. Vell. You go take a valk."
"Ya," said Bea.
So it chanced that Carol Kennicott and Bea Sorenson were viewing Main
Street at the same time.
Bea had never before been in a town larger than Scandia Crossing, which
has sixty-seven inhabitants.
As she marched up the street she was meditating that it didn't hardly
seem like it was possible there could be so many folks all in one place
at the same time. My! It would take years to get acquainted with them
all. And swell people, too! A fine big gentleman in a new pink shirt
with a diamond, and not no washed-out blue denim working-shirt. A lovely
lady in a longery dress (but it must be an awful hard dress to wash).
And the stores!
Not just three of them, like there were at Scandia Crossing, but more
than four whole blocks!
The Bon Ton Store--big as four barns--my! it would simply scare a person
to go in there, with seven or eight clerks all looking at you. And the
men's suits, on figures just like human. And Axel Egge's, like home,
lots of Swedes and Norskes in there, and a card of dandy buttons, like
rubies.
A drug store with a soda fountain that was just huge, awful long, and
all lovely marble; and on it there was a great big lamp with the biggest
shade you ever saw--all different kinds colored glass stuck together;
and the soda spouts, they were silver, and they came right out of the
bottom of the lamp-stand! Behind the fountain there were glass shelves,
and bottles of new kinds of soft drinks, that nobody ever heard of.
Suppose a fella took you THERE!
A hotel, awful high, higher than Oscar Tollefson's new red barn; three
stories, one right on top of another; you had to stick your head back
to look clear up to the top. There was a swell traveling man in
there--probably been to Chicago, lots of times.
Oh, the dandiest people to know here! There was a lady going by, you
wouldn't hardly say she was any older than Bea herself; she wore a dandy
new gray suit and black pumps. She almost looked like she was looking
over the town, too. But you couldn't tell what she thought. Bea would
like to be that way--kind of quiet, so nobody would get fresh. Kind
of--oh, elegant.
A Lutheran Church. Here in the city there'd be lovely sermons, and
church twice on Sunday, EVERY Sunday!
And a movie show!
A regular theater, just for movies. With the sign "Change of bill every
evening." Pictures every evening!
There were movies in Scandia Crossing, but only once every two weeks,
and it took the Sorensons an hour to drive in--papa was such a tightwad
he wouldn't get a Ford. But here she could put on her hat any evening,
and in three minutes' walk be to the movies, and see lovely fellows in
dress-suits and Bill Hart and everything!
How could they have so many stores? Why! There was one just for tobacco
alone, and one (a lovely one--the Art Shoppy it was) for pictures and
vases and stuff, with oh, the dandiest vase made so it looked just like
a tree trunk!
Bea stood on the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue. The roar
of the city began to frighten her. There were five automobiles on the
street all at the same time--and one of 'em was a great big car that
must of cost two thousand dollars--and the 'bus was starting for a train
with five elegant-dressed fellows, and a man was pasting up red bills
with lovely pictures of washing-machines on them, and the jeweler was
laying out bracelets and wrist-watches and EVERYTHING on real velvet.
What did she care if she got six dollars a week? Or two! It was worth
while working for nothing, to be allowed to stay here. And think how it
would be in the evening, all lighted up--and not with no lamps, but with
electrics! And maybe a gentleman friend taking you to the movies and
buying you a strawberry ice cream soda!
Bea trudged back.
"Vell? You lak it?" said Tina.
"Ya. Ay lak it. Ay t'ink maybe Ay stay here," said Bea.
IV
The recently built house of Sam Clark, in which was given the party to
welcome Carol, was one of the largest in Gopher Prairie. It had a clean
sweep of clapboards, a solid squareness, a small tower, and a large
screened porch. Inside, it was as shiny, as hard, and as cheerful as a
new oak upright piano.
Carol looked imploringly at Sam Clark as he rolled to the door and
shouted, "Welcome, little lady! The keys of the city are yourn!"
Beyond him, in the hallway and the living-room, sitting in a vast prim
circle as though they were attending a funeral, she saw the guests. They
were WAITING so! They were waiting for her! The determination to be all
one pretty flowerlet of appreciation leaked away. She begged of Sam,
"I don't dare face them! They expect so much. They'll swallow me in one
mouthful--glump!--like that!"
"Why, sister, they're going to love you--same as I would if I didn't
think the doc here would beat me up!"
"B-but----I don't dare! Faces to the right of me, faces in front of me,
volley and wonder!"
She sounded hysterical to herself; she fancied that to Sam Clark she
sounded insane. But he chuckled, "Now you just cuddle under Sam's wing,
and if anybody rubbers at you too long, I'll shoo 'em off. Here we go!
Watch my smoke--Sam'l, the ladies' delight and the bridegrooms' terror!"
His arm about her, he led her in and bawled, "Ladies and worser halves,
the bride! We won't introduce her round yet, because she'll never get
your bum names straight anyway. Now bust up this star-chamber!"
They tittered politely, but they did not move from the social security
of their circle, and they did not cease staring.
Carol had given creative energy to dressing for the event. Her hair was
demure, low on her forehead with a parting and a coiled braid. Now she
wished that she had piled it high. Her frock was an ingenue slip
of lawn, with a wide gold sash and a low square neck, which gave a
suggestion of throat and molded shoulders. But as they looked her over
she was certain that it was all wrong. She wished alternately that she
had worn a spinsterish high-necked dress, and that she had dared to
shock them with a violent brick-red scarf which she had bought in
Chicago.
She was led about the circle. Her voice mechanically produced safe
remarks:
"Oh, I'm sure I'm going to like it here ever so much," and "Yes, we did
have the best time in Colorado--mountains," and "Yes, I lived in St.
Paul several years. Euclid P. Tinker? No, I don't REMEMBER meeting him,
but I'm pretty sure I've heard of him."
Kennicott took her aside and whispered, "Now I'll introduce you to them,
one at a time."
"Tell me about them first."
"Well, the nice-looking couple over there are Harry Haydock and his
wife, Juanita. Harry's dad owns most of the Bon Ton, but it's Harry who
runs it and gives it the pep. He's a hustler. Next to him is Dave Dyer
the druggist--you met him this afternoon--mighty good duck-shot.
The tall husk beyond him is Jack Elder--Jackson Elder--owns the
planing-mill, and the Minniemashie House, and quite a share in the
Farmers' National Bank. Him and his wife are good sports--him and Sam
and I go hunting together a lot. The old cheese there is Luke Dawson,
the richest man in town. Next to him is Nat Hicks, the tailor."
"Really? A tailor?"
"Sure. Why not? Maybe we're slow, but we are democratic. I go hunting
with Nat same as I do with Jack Elder."
"I'm glad. I've never met a tailor socially. It must be charming to meet
one and not have to think about what you owe him. And do you----Would
you go hunting with your barber, too?"
"No but----No use running this democracy thing into the ground.
Besides, I've known Nat for years, and besides, he's a mighty good shot
and----That's the way it is, see? Next to Nat is Chet Dashaway. Great
fellow for chinning. He'll talk your arm off, about religion or politics
or books or anything."
Carol gazed with a polite approximation to interest at Mr. Dashaway,
a tan person with a wide mouth. "Oh, I know! He's the furniture-store
man!" She was much pleased with herself.
"Yump, and he's the undertaker. You'll like him. Come shake hands with
him."
"Oh no, no! He doesn't--he doesn't do the embalming and all
that--himself? I couldn't shake hands with an undertaker!"
"Why not? You'd be proud to shake hands with a great surgeon, just after
he'd been carving up people's bellies."
She sought to regain her afternoon's calm of maturity. "Yes. You're
right. I want--oh, my dear, do you know how much I want to like the
people you like? I want to see people as they are."
"Well, don't forget to see people as other folks see them as they are!
They have the stuff. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here?
Born and brought up here!"
"Bresnahan?"
"Yes--you know--president of the Velvet Motor Company of Boston,
Mass.--make the Velvet Twelve--biggest automobile factory in New
England."
"I think I've heard of him."
"Sure you have. Why, he's a millionaire several times over! Well, Perce
comes back here for the black-bass fishing almost every summer, and he
says if he could get away from business, he'd rather live here than
in Boston or New York or any of those places. HE doesn't mind Chet's
undertaking."
"Please! I'll--I'll like everybody! I'll be the community sunbeam!"
He led her to the Dawsons.
Luke Dawson, lender of money on mortgages, owner of Northern cut-over
land, was a hesitant man in unpressed soft gray clothes, with bulging
eyes in a milky face. His wife had bleached cheeks, bleached hair,
bleached voice, and a bleached manner. She wore her expensive green
frock, with its passementeried bosom, bead tassels, and gaps between the
buttons down the back, as though she had bought it second-hand and was
afraid of meeting the former owner. They were shy. It was "Professor"
George Edwin Mott, superintendent of schools, a Chinese mandarin turned
brown, who held Carol's hand and made her welcome.
When the Dawsons and Mr. Mott had stated that they were "pleased to meet
her," there seemed to be nothing else to say, but the conversation went
on automatically.
"Do you like Gopher Prairie?" whimpered Mrs. Dawson.
"Oh, I'm sure I'm going to be ever so happy."
"There's so many nice people." Mrs. Dawson looked to Mr. Mott for social
and intellectual aid. He lectured:
"There's a fine class of people. I don't like some of these retired
farmers who come here to spend their last days--especially the Germans.
They hate to pay school-taxes. They hate to spend a cent. But the rest
are a fine class of people. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from
here? Used to go to school right at the old building!"
"I heard he did."
"Yes. He's a prince. He and I went fishing together, last time he was
here."
The Dawsons and Mr. Mott teetered upon weary feet, and smiled at Carol
with crystallized expressions. She went on:
"Tell me, Mr. Mott: Have you ever tried any experiments with any of the
new educational systems? The modern kindergarten methods or the Gary
system?"
"Oh. Those. Most of these would-be reformers are simply
notoriety-seekers. I believe in manual training, but Latin and
mathematics always will be the backbone of sound Americanism, no matter
what these faddists advocate--heaven knows what they do want--knitting,
I suppose, and classes in wiggling the ears!"
The Dawsons smiled their appreciation of listening to a savant. Carol
waited till Kennicott should rescue her. The rest of the party waited
for the miracle of being amused.
Harry and Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons and Dr. Terry Gould--the young
smart set of Gopher Prairie. She was led to them. Juanita Haydock flung
at her in a high, cackling, friendly voice:
"Well, this is SO nice to have you here. We'll have some good
parties--dances and everything. You'll have to join the Jolly Seventeen.
We play bridge and we have a supper once a month. You play, of course?"
"N-no, I don't."
"Really? In St. Paul?"
"I've always been such a book-worm."
"We'll have to teach you. Bridge is half the fun of life." Juanita had
become patronizing, and she glanced disrespectfully at Carol's golden
sash, which she had previously admired.
Harry Haydock said politely, "How do you think you're going to like the
old burg?"
"I'm sure I shall like it tremendously."
"Best people on earth here. Great hustlers, too. Course I've had lots
of chances to go live in Minneapolis, but we like it here. Real he-town.
Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here?"
Carol perceived that she had been weakened in the biological struggle
by disclosing her lack of bridge. Roused to nervous desire to regain
her position she turned on Dr. Terry Gould, the young and pool-playing
competitor of her husband. Her eyes coquetted with him while she gushed:
"I'll learn bridge. But what I really love most is the outdoors. Can't
we all get up a boating party, and fish, or whatever you do, and have a
picnic supper afterwards?"
"Now you're talking!" Dr. Gould affirmed. He looked rather too obviously
at the cream-smooth slope of her shoulder. "Like fishing? Fishing is my
middle name. I'll teach you bridge. Like cards at all?"
"I used to be rather good at bezique."
She knew that bezique was a game of cards--or a game of something else.
Roulette, possibly. But her lie was a triumph. Juanita's handsome,
high-colored, horsey face showed doubt. Harry stroked his nose and said
humbly, "Bezique? Used to be great gambling game, wasn't it?"
While others drifted to her group, Carol snatched up the conversation.
She laughed and was frivolous and rather brittle. She could not
distinguish their eyes. They were a blurry theater-audience before which
she self-consciously enacted the comedy of being the Clever Little Bride
of Doc Kennicott:
"These-here celebrated Open Spaces, that's what I'm going out for. I'll
never read anything but the sporting-page again. Will converted me on
our Colorado trip. There were so many mousey tourists who were afraid
to get out of the motor 'bus that I decided to be Annie Oakley, the Wild
Western Wampire, and I bought oh! a vociferous skirt which revealed
my perfectly nice ankles to the Presbyterian glare of all the Ioway
schoolma'ams, and I leaped from peak to peak like the nimble chamoys,
and----You may think that Herr Doctor Kennicott is a Nimrod, but you
ought to have seen me daring him to strip to his B. V. D.'s and go
swimming in an icy mountain brook."
She knew that they were thinking of becoming shocked, but Juanita
Haydock was admiring, at least. She swaggered on:
"I'm sure I'm going to ruin Will as a respectable practitioner----Is he
a good doctor, Dr. Gould?"
Kennicott's rival gasped at this insult to professional ethics, and he
took an appreciable second before he recovered his social manner.
"I'll tell you, Mrs. Kennicott." He smiled at Kennicott, to imply that
whatever he might say in the stress of being witty was not to count
against him in the commercio-medical warfare. "There's some people
in town that say the doc is a fair to middlin' diagnostician and
prescription-writer, but let me whisper this to you--but for heaven's
sake don't tell him I said so--don't you ever go to him for anything
more serious than a pendectomy of the left ear or a strabismus of the
cardiograph."
No one save Kennicott knew exactly what this meant, but they laughed,
and Sam Clark's party assumed a glittering lemon-yellow color of brocade
panels and champagne and tulle and crystal chandeliers and sporting
duchesses. Carol saw that George Edwin Mott and the blanched Mr. and
Mrs. Dawson were not yet hypnotized. They looked as though they wondered
whether they ought to look as though they disapproved. She concentrated
on them:
"But I know whom I wouldn't have dared to go to Colorado with! Mr.
Dawson there! I'm sure he's a regular heart-breaker. When we were
introduced he held my hand and squeezed it frightfully."
"Haw! Haw! Haw!" The entire company applauded. Mr. Dawson was beatified.
He had been called many things--loan-shark, skinflint, tightwad,
pussyfoot--but he had never before been called a flirt.
"He is wicked, isn't he, Mrs. Dawson? Don't you have to lock him up?"
"Oh no, but maybe I better," attempted Mrs. Dawson, a tint on her pallid
face.
For fifteen minutes Carol kept it up. She asserted that she was going
to stage a musical comedy, that she preferred cafe parfait to beefsteak,
that she hoped Dr. Kennicott would never lose his ability to make love
to charming women, and that she had a pair of gold stockings. They gaped
for more. But she could not keep it up. She retired to a chair behind
Sam Clark's bulk. The smile-wrinkles solemnly flattened out in the faces
of all the other collaborators in having a party, and again they stood
about hoping but not expecting to be amused.
Carol listened. She discovered that conversation did not exist in Gopher
Prairie. Even at this affair, which brought out the young smart set,
the hunting squire set, the respectable intellectual set, and the solid
financial set, they sat up with gaiety as with a corpse.
Juanita Haydock talked a good deal in her rattling voice but it was
invariably of personalities: the rumor that Raymie Wutherspoon was going
to send for a pair of patent leather shoes with gray buttoned tops; the
rheumatism of Champ Perry; the state of Guy Pollock's grippe; and the
dementia of Jim Howland in painting his fence salmon-pink.
Sam Clark had been talking to Carol about motor cars, but he felt
his duties as host. While he droned, his brows popped up and down. He
interrupted himself, "Must stir 'em up." He worried at his wife, "Don't
you think I better stir 'em up?" He shouldered into the center of the
room, and cried:
"Let's have some stunts, folks."
"Yes, let's!" shrieked Juanita Haydock.
"Say, Dave, give us that stunt about the Norwegian catching a hen."
"You bet; that's a slick stunt; do that, Dave!" cheered Chet Dashaway.
Mr. Dave Dyer obliged.
All the guests moved their lips in anticipation of being called on for
their own stunts.
"Ella, come on and recite 'Old Sweetheart of Mine,' for us," demanded
Sam.
Miss Ella Stowbody, the spinster daughter of the Ionic bank, scratched
her dry palms and blushed. "Oh, you don't want to hear that old thing
again."
"Sure we do! You bet!" asserted Sam.
"My voice is in terrible shape tonight."
"Tut! Come on!"
Sam loudly explained to Carol, "Ella is our shark at elocuting. She's
had professional training. She studied singing and oratory and dramatic
art and shorthand for a year, in Milwaukee."
Miss Stowbody was reciting. As encore to "An Old Sweetheart of Mine,"
she gave a peculiarly optimistic poem regarding the value of smiles.
There were four other stunts: one Jewish, one Irish, one juvenile, and
Nat Hicks's parody of Mark Antony's funeral oration.
During the winter Carol was to hear Dave Dyer's hen-catching
impersonation seven times, "An Old Sweetheart of Mine" nine times, the
Jewish story and the funeral oration twice; but now she was ardent
and, because she did so want to be happy and simple-hearted, she was as
disappointed as the others when the stunts were finished, and the party
instantly sank back into coma.
They gave up trying to be festive; they began to talk naturally, as they
did at their shops and homes.
The men and women divided, as they had been tending to do all evening.
Carol was deserted by the men, left to a group of matrons who steadily
pattered of children, sickness, and cooks--their own shop-talk. She was
piqued. She remembered visions of herself as a smart married woman in
a drawing-room, fencing with clever men. Her dejection was relieved by
speculation as to what the men were discussing, in the corner between
the piano and the phonograph. Did they rise from these housewifely
personalities to a larger world of abstractions and affairs?
She made her best curtsy to Mrs. Dawson; she twittered, "I won't have my
husband leaving me so soon! I'm going over and pull the wretch's
ears." She rose with a jeune fille bow. She was self-absorbed and
self-approving because she had attained that quality of sentimentality.
She proudly dipped across the room and, to the interest and commendation
of all beholders, sat on the arm of Kennicott's chair.
He was gossiping with Sam Clark, Luke Dawson, Jackson Elder of the
planing-mill, Chet Dashaway, Dave Dyer, Harry Haydock, and Ezra
Stowbody, president of the Ionic bank.
Ezra Stowbody was a troglodyte. He had come to Gopher Prairie in 1865.
He was a distinguished bird of prey--swooping thin nose, turtle mouth,
thick brows, port-wine cheeks, floss of white hair, contemptuous eyes.
He was not happy in the social changes of thirty years. Three decades
ago, Dr. Westlake, Julius Flickerbaugh the lawyer, Merriman Peedy the
Congregational pastor and himself had been the arbiters. That was as
it should be; the fine arts--medicine, law, religion, and
finance--recognized as aristocratic; four Yankees democratically
chatting with but ruling the Ohioans and Illini and Swedes and Germans
who had ventured to follow them. But Westlake was old, almost retired;
Julius Flickerbaugh had lost much of his practice to livelier attorneys;
Reverend (not The Reverend) Peedy was dead; and nobody was impressed in
this rotten age of automobiles by the "spanking grays" which Ezra still
drove. The town was as heterogeneous as Chicago. Norwegians and Germans
owned stores. The social leaders were common merchants. Selling nails
was considered as sacred as banking. These upstarts--the Clarks, the
Haydocks--had no dignity. They were sound and conservative in politics,
but they talked about motor cars and pump-guns and heaven only knew
what new-fangled fads. Mr. Stowbody felt out of place with them. But
his brick house with the mansard roof was still the largest residence in
town, and he held his position as squire by occasionally appearing among
the younger men and reminding them by a wintry eye that without the
banker none of them could carry on their vulgar businesses.
As Carol defied decency by sitting down with the men, Mr. Stowbody was
piping to Mr. Dawson, "Say, Luke, when was't Biggins first settled in
Winnebago Township? Wa'n't it in 1879?"
"Why no 'twa'n't!" Mr. Dawson was indignant. "He come out from Vermont
in 1867--no, wait, in 1868, it must have been--and took a claim on the
Rum River, quite a ways above Anoka."
"He did not!" roared Mr. Stowbody. "He settled first in Blue Earth
County, him and his father!"
("What's the point at issue?") Carol whispered to Kennicott.
("Whether this old duck Biggins had an English setter or a Llewellyn.
They've been arguing it all evening!")
Dave Dyer interrupted to give tidings, "D' tell you that Clara Biggins
was in town couple days ago? She bought a hot-water bottle--expensive
one, too--two dollars and thirty cents!"
"Yaaaaaah!" snarled Mr. Stowbody. "Course. She's just like her grandad
was. Never save a cent. Two dollars and twenty--thirty, was it?--two
dollars and thirty cents for a hot-water bottle! Brick wrapped up in a
flannel petticoat just as good, anyway!"
"How's Ella's tonsils, Mr. Stowbody?" yawned Chet Dashaway.
While Mr. Stowbody gave a somatic and psychic study of them, Carol
reflected, "Are they really so terribly interested in Ella's tonsils,
or even in Ella's esophagus? I wonder if I could get them away from
personalities? Let's risk damnation and try."
"There hasn't been much labor trouble around here, has there, Mr.
Stowbody?" she asked innocently.
"No, ma'am, thank God, we've been free from that, except maybe with
hired girls and farm-hands. Trouble enough with these foreign farmers;
if you don't watch these Swedes they turn socialist or populist or some
fool thing on you in a minute. Of course, if they have loans you can
make 'em listen to reason. I just have 'em come into the bank for a
talk, and tell 'em a few things. I don't mind their being democrats,
so much, but I won't stand having socialists around. But thank God, we
ain't got the labor trouble they have in these cities. Even Jack Elder
here gets along pretty well, in the planing-mill, don't you, Jack?"
"Yep. Sure. Don't need so many skilled workmen in my place, and it's
a lot of these cranky, wage-hogging, half-baked skilled mechanics that
start trouble--reading a lot of this anarchist literature and union
papers and all."
"Do you approve of union labor?" Carol inquired of Mr. Elder.
"Me? I should say not! It's like this: I don't mind dealing with my men
if they think they've got any grievances--though Lord knows what's come
over workmen, nowadays--don't appreciate a good job. But still, if they
come to me honestly, as man to man, I'll talk things over with them. But
I'm not going to have any outsider, any of these walking delegates, or
whatever fancy names they call themselves now--bunch of rich grafters,
living on the ignorant workmen! Not going to have any of those fellows
butting in and telling ME how to run MY business!"
Mr. Elder was growing more excited, more belligerent and patriotic. "I
stand for freedom and constitutional rights. If any man don't like my
shop, he can get up and git. Same way, if I don't like him, he gits.
And that's all there is to it. I simply can't understand all these
complications and hoop-te-doodles and government reports and wage-scales
and God knows what all that these fellows are balling up the labor
situation with, when it's all perfectly simple. They like what I pay
'em, or they get out. That's all there is to it!"
"What do you think of profit-sharing?" Carol ventured.
Mr. Elder thundered his answer, while the others nodded, solemnly and
in tune, like a shop-window of flexible toys, comic mandarins and judges
and ducks and clowns, set quivering by a breeze from the open door:
"All this profit-sharing and welfare work and insurance and old-age
pension is simply poppycock. Enfeebles a workman's independence--and
wastes a lot of honest profit. The half-baked thinker that isn't dry
behind the ears yet, and these suffragettes and God knows what all
buttinskis there are that are trying to tell a business man how to run
his business, and some of these college professors are just about as
bad, the whole kit and bilin' of 'em are nothing in God's world but
socialism in disguise! And it's my bounden duty as a producer to resist
every attack on the integrity of American industry to the last ditch.
Yes--SIR!"
Mr. Elder wiped his brow.
Dave Dyer added, "Sure! You bet! What they ought to do is simply to
hang every one of these agitators, and that would settle the whole thing
right off. Don't you think so, doc?"
"You bet," agreed Kennicott.
The conversation was at last relieved of the plague of Carol's
intrusions and they settled down to the question of whether the justice
of the peace had sent that hobo drunk to jail for ten days or twelve.
It was a matter not readily determined. Then Dave Dyer communicated his
carefree adventures on the gipsy trail:
"Yep. I get good time out of the flivver. 'Bout a week ago I motored
down to New Wurttemberg. That's forty-three----No, let's see: It's
seventeen miles to Belldale, and 'bout six and three-quarters, call it
seven, to Torgenquist, and it's a good nineteen miles from there to New
Wurttemberg--seventeen and seven and nineteen, that makes, uh, let me
see: seventeen and seven 's twenty-four, plus nineteen, well say plus
twenty, that makes forty-four, well anyway, say about forty-three
or -four miles from here to New Wurttemberg. We got started about
seven-fifteen, prob'ly seven-twenty, because I had to stop and fill the
radiator, and we ran along, just keeping up a good steady gait----"
Mr. Dyer did finally, for reasons and purposes admitted and justified,
attain to New Wurttemberg.
Once--only once--the presence of the alien Carol was recognized. Chet
Dashaway leaned over and said asthmatically, "Say, uh, have you been
reading this serial 'Two Out' in Tingling Tales? Corking yarn! Gosh, the
fellow that wrote it certainly can sling baseball slang!"
The others tried to look literary. Harry Haydock offered, "Juanita is
a great hand for reading high-class stuff, like 'Mid the Magnolias' by
this Sara Hetwiggin Butts, and 'Riders of Ranch Reckless.' Books. But
me," he glanced about importantly, as one convinced that no other hero
had ever been in so strange a plight, "I'm so darn busy I don't have
much time to read."
"I never read anything I can't check against," said Sam Clark.
Thus ended the literary portion of the conversation, and for seven
minutes Jackson Elder outlined reasons for believing that the
pike-fishing was better on the west shore of Lake Minniemashie than on
the east--though it was indeed quite true that on the east shore Nat
Hicks had caught a pike altogether admirable.
The talk went on. It did go on! Their voices were monotonous,
thick, emphatic. They were harshly pompous, like men in the
smoking-compartments of Pullman cars. They did not bore Carol. They
frightened her. She panted, "They will be cordial to me, because my man
belongs to their tribe. God help me if I were an outsider!"
Smiling as changelessly as an ivory figurine she sat quiescent, avoiding
thought, glancing about the living-room and hall, noting their betrayal
of unimaginative commercial prosperity. Kennicott said, "Dandy interior,
eh? My idea of how a place ought to be furnished. Modern." She looked
polite, and observed the oiled floors, hard-wood staircase, unused
fireplace with tiles which resembled brown linoleum, cut-glass vases
standing upon doilies, and the barred, shut, forbidding unit bookcases
that were half filled with swashbuckler novels and unread-looking sets
of Dickens, Kipling, O. Henry, and Elbert Hubbard.
She perceived that even personalities were failing to hold the party.
The room filled with hesitancy as with a fog. People cleared their
throats, tried to choke down yawns. The men shot their cuffs and the
women stuck their combs more firmly into their back hair.
Then a rattle, a daring hope in every eye, the swinging of a door, the
smell of strong coffee, Dave Dyer's mewing voice in a triumphant, "The
eats!" They began to chatter. They had something to do. They could
escape from themselves. They fell upon the food--chicken sandwiches,
maple cake, drug-store ice cream. Even when the food was gone they
remained cheerful. They could go home, any time now, and go to bed!
They went, with a flutter of coats, chiffon scarfs, and good-bys.
Carol and Kennicott walked home.
"Did you like them?" he asked.
"They were terribly sweet to me."
"Uh, Carrie----You ought to be more careful about shocking folks.
Talking about gold stockings, and about showing your ankles to
schoolteachers and all!" More mildly: "You gave 'em a good time, but I'd
watch out for that, 'f I were you. Juanita Haydock is such a damn cat. I
wouldn't give her a chance to criticize me."
"My poor effort to lift up the party! Was I wrong to try to amuse them?"
"No! No! Honey, I didn't mean----You were the only up-and-coming person
in the bunch. I just mean----Don't get onto legs and all that immoral
stuff. Pretty conservative crowd."
She was silent, raw with the shameful thought that the attentive circle
might have been criticizing her, laughing at her.
"Don't, please don't worry!" he pleaded.
"Silence."
"Gosh; I'm sorry I spoke about it. I just meant----But they were crazy
about you. Sam said to me, 'That little lady of yours is the slickest
thing that ever came to this town,' he said; and Ma Dawson--I didn't
hardly know whether she'd like you or not, she's such a dried-up old
bird, but she said, 'Your bride is so quick and bright, I declare, she
just wakes me up.'"
Carol liked praise, the flavor and fatness of it, but she was so
energetically being sorry for herself that she could not taste this
commendation.
"Please! Come on! Cheer up!" His lips said it, his anxious shoulder said
it, his arm about her said it, as they halted on the obscure porch of
their house.
"Do you care if they think I'm flighty, Will?"
"Me? Why, I wouldn't care if the whole world thought you were this or
that or anything else. You're my--well, you're my soul!"
He was an undefined mass, as solid-seeming as rock. She found his
sleeve, pinched it, cried, "I'm glad! It's sweet to be wanted! You must
tolerate my frivolousness. You're all I have!"
He lifted her, carried her into the house, and with her arms about his
neck she forgot Main Street.
| Kennicott informs Carol that the Clarks invite them for dinner. Carol senses his longing to get back to work and lets him go. She finds the old-fashioned black walnut bed and the imitation maple bureau in the bedroom very stifling. She tries to unpack but feels that her clothes appear flashy and extravagant in the old fashioned house. She gives up the attempt and goes out to have her first look at the town. She looks at every construction and corner of the town carefully. Being city bred she does not know that she is also being looked at and recognized as the doctor's wife. She walks round the entire town in thirty-two minutes. The Main Street consists of two- story brick shops and one and a half storied wooden houses. The houses appear small and weak and there are no parks or beautiful grounds to relieve the monotony. She looks at the three storied structure named Minnie Mashie House and finds it to be ugly and unclean. Dave Dyer's drug store, her husbands office, the motion picture theatre and Howland and Gould's grocery look equally unattractive .She gets the reek of blood at Dahl and Oleson's Meat Market and the stink of stale beer from the saloons. She appreciates the Bon-Ton store for its neatness and cleanliness. Sam Clark's Hardware shop looks good but Chester Dashaway's Furnishing Emporium has a dismal look. From Billy's Lunch house wafts the odor of onion and lard and the sour smell of dairy advertises the warehouse. The two garages appear to be the most energetic places in the town. She looks at various other establishments-the library, the barber's shop, the church, the dismal looking post office, the damp school building and the State Bank but not one of them is attractive. The Farmer's National Bank built of marble looks beautiful but a grocery built of yellow bricks seems to elbow it out. The ugliness of the place unnerves her. But to her own surprise she finds herself telling her husband that Gopher Prairie appears to be a very interesting place. Another young lady, Miss Bea Sorenson reaches Gopher Prairie by the same train as Carol. Being bored with farm work, she wishes to find a job in the city. She too, like Carol takes a walk around to look at the city. Unlike Carol she is awed and impressed by everything she sees and decides to accept work for even two dollars a week so that she could live in the city. The dinner to welcome the newly weds is hosted by Sam Clark in his new house. Carol wears a frock with a low square neck, which reveals a little of her shoulder and neck. But after one look at the prim circle waiting to meet her, she wishes that she had worn a high-necked dress. She is given a briefing about each one of the guests, before being introduced to them by her husband. Harry Haydock-the owner of the Bon Ton store-and his wife Juanita is there. Beside them is Dave Dyer, the druggist and next to him is Jack Elder, the owner of the planing-mill and the Minnie Mashie House. Jack Elder owns a large share in the Farmer's National Bank. Seated next to Jack Elder is Luke Dawson, the richest man in the town. Next to Dawson are seated Nat Hicks, the tailor and Chet Dashaway, the undertaker and furniture-store man. Carol feels horrified that the tailor and the undertaker should be a part of her social circle. Kennicott proudly points out that the automobile baron Percy Bresnahan- born and brought up in Gopher Prairie-never minded the company of the undertaker. Carol promises to like all the people of his circle. | summary |
CHAPTER V
I
"WE'LL steal the whole day, and go hunting. I want you to see the
country round here," Kennicott announced at breakfast. "I'd take the
car--want you to see how swell she runs since I put in a new piston.
But we'll take a team, so we can get right out into the fields. Not many
prairie chickens left now, but we might just happen to run onto a small
covey."
He fussed over his hunting-kit. He pulled his hip boots out to full
length and examined them for holes. He feverishly counted his shotgun
shells, lecturing her on the qualities of smokeless powder. He drew the
new hammerless shotgun out of its heavy tan leather case and made her
peep through the barrels to see how dazzlingly free they were from rust.
The world of hunting and camping-outfits and fishing-tackle was
unfamiliar to her, and in Kennicott's interest she found something
creative and joyous. She examined the smooth stock, the carved hard
rubber butt of the gun. The shells, with their brass caps and sleek
green bodies and hieroglyphics on the wads, were cool and comfortably
heavy in her hands.
Kennicott wore a brown canvas hunting-coat with vast pockets lining
the inside, corduroy trousers which bulged at the wrinkles, peeled and
scarred shoes, a scarecrow felt hat. In this uniform he felt virile.
They clumped out to the livery buggy, they packed the kit and the box of
lunch into the back, crying to each other that it was a magnificent day.
Kennicott had borrowed Jackson Elder's red and white English setter, a
complacent dog with a waving tail of silver hair which flickered in the
sunshine. As they started, the dog yelped, and leaped at the horses'
heads, till Kennicott took him into the buggy, where he nuzzled Carol's
knees and leaned out to sneer at farm mongrels.
The grays clattered out on the hard dirt road with a pleasant song of
hoofs: "Ta ta ta rat! Ta ta ta rat!" It was early and fresh, the air
whistling, frost bright on the golden rod. As the sun warmed the world
of stubble into a welter of yellow they turned from the highroad,
through the bars of a farmer's gate, into a field, slowly bumping over
the uneven earth. In a hollow of the rolling prairie they lost sight
even of the country road. It was warm and placid. Locusts trilled among
the dry wheat-stalks, and brilliant little flies hurtled across the
buggy. A buzz of content filled the air. Crows loitered and gossiped in
the sky.
The dog had been let out and after a dance of excitement he settled down
to a steady quartering of the field, forth and back, forth and back, his
nose down.
"Pete Rustad owns this farm, and he told me he saw a small covey of
chickens in the west forty, last week. Maybe we'll get some sport after
all," Kennicott chuckled blissfully.
She watched the dog in suspense, breathing quickly every time he seemed
to halt. She had no desire to slaughter birds, but she did desire to
belong to Kennicott's world.
The dog stopped, on the point, a forepaw held up.
"By golly! He's hit a scent! Come on!" squealed Kennicott. He leaped
from the buggy, twisted the reins about the whip-socket, swung her out,
caught up his gun, slipped in two shells, stalked toward the rigid dog,
Carol pattering after him. The setter crawled ahead, his tail quivering,
his belly close to the stubble. Carol was nervous. She expected clouds
of large birds to fly up instantly. Her eyes were strained with staring.
But they followed the dog for a quarter of a mile, turning, doubling,
crossing two low hills, kicking through a swale of weeds, crawling
between the strands of a barbed-wire fence. The walking was hard on
her pavement-trained feet. The earth was lumpy, the stubble prickly and
lined with grass, thistles, abortive stumps of clover. She dragged and
floundered.
She heard Kennicott gasp, "Look!" Three gray birds were starting up
from the stubble. They were round, dumpy, like enormous bumble bees.
Kennicott was sighting, moving the barrel. She was agitated. Why didn't
he fire? The birds would be gone! Then a crash, another, and two birds
turned somersaults in the air, plumped down.
When he showed her the birds she had no sensation of blood. These heaps
of feathers were so soft and unbruised--there was about them no hint of
death. She watched her conquering man tuck them into his inside pocket,
and trudged with him back to the buggy.
They found no more prairie chickens that morning.
At noon they drove into her first farmyard, a private village, a white
house with no porches save a low and quite dirty stoop at the back,
a crimson barn with white trimmings, a glazed brick silo, an
ex-carriage-shed, now the garage of a Ford, an unpainted cow-stable, a
chicken-house, a pig-pen, a corn-crib, a granary, the galvanized-iron
skeleton tower of a wind-mill. The dooryard was of packed yellow clay,
treeless, barren of grass, littered with rusty plowshares and wheels
of discarded cultivators. Hardened trampled mud, like lava, filled the
pig-pen. The doors of the house were grime-rubbed, the corners and eaves
were rusted with rain, and the child who stared at them from the kitchen
window was smeary-faced. But beyond the barn was a clump of scarlet
geraniums; the prairie breeze was sunshine in motion; the flashing metal
blades of the windmill revolved with a lively hum; a horse neighed, a
rooster crowed, martins flew in and out of the cow-stable.
A small spare woman with flaxen hair trotted from the house. She was
twanging a Swedish patois--not in monotone, like English, but singing
it, with a lyrical whine:
"Pete he say you kom pretty soon hunting, doctor. My, dot's fine you
kom. Is dis de bride? Ohhhh! Ve yoost say las' night, ve hope maybe ve
see her som day. My, soch a pretty lady!" Mrs. Rustad was shining with
welcome. "Vell, vell! Ay hope you lak dis country! Von't you stay for
dinner, doctor?"
"No, but I wonder if you wouldn't like to give us a glass of milk?"
condescended Kennicott.
"Vell Ay should say Ay vill! You vait har a second and Ay run on de
milk-house!" She nervously hastened to a tiny red building beside the
windmill; she came back with a pitcher of milk from which Carol filled
the thermos bottle.
As they drove off Carol admired, "She's the dearest thing I ever saw.
And she adores you. You are the Lord of the Manor."
"Oh no," much pleased, "but still they do ask my advice about things.
Bully people, these Scandinavian farmers. And prosperous, too. Helga
Rustad, she's still scared of America, but her kids will be doctors and
lawyers and governors of the state and any darn thing they want to."
"I wonder----" Carol was plunged back into last night's Weltschmerz.
"I wonder if these farmers aren't bigger than we are? So simple and
hard-working. The town lives on them. We townies are parasites, and yet
we feel superior to them. Last night I heard Mr. Haydock talking about
'hicks.' Apparently he despises the farmers because they haven't reached
the social heights of selling thread and buttons."
"Parasites? Us? Where'd the farmers be without the town? Who lends them
money? Who--why, we supply them with everything!"
"Don't you find that some of the farmers think they pay too much for the
services of the towns?"
"Oh, of course there's a lot of cranks among the farmers same as there
are among any class. Listen to some of these kickers, a fellow'd
think that the farmers ought to run the state and the whole
shooting-match--probably if they had their way they'd fill up the
legislature with a lot of farmers in manure-covered boots--yes, and
they'd come tell me I was hired on a salary now, and couldn't fix my
fees! That'd be fine for you, wouldn't it!"
"But why shouldn't they?"
"Why? That bunch of----Telling ME----Oh, for heaven's sake, let's quit
arguing. All this discussing may be all right at a party but----Let's
forget it while we're hunting."
"I know. The Wonderlust--probably it's a worse affliction than the
Wanderlust. I just wonder----"
She told herself that she had everything in the world. And after each
self-rebuke she stumbled again on "I just wonder----"
They ate their sandwiches by a prairie slew: long grass reaching up out
of clear water, mossy bogs, red-winged black-birds, the scum a splash of
gold-green. Kennicott smoked a pipe while she leaned back in the buggy
and let her tired spirit be absorbed in the Nirvana of the incomparable
sky.
They lurched to the highroad and awoke from their sun-soaked drowse at
the sound of the clopping hoofs. They paused to look for partridges in a
rim of woods, little woods, very clean and shiny and gay, silver birches
and poplars with immaculate green trunks, encircling a lake of sandy
bottom, a splashing seclusion demure in the welter of hot prairie.
Kennicott brought down a fat red squirrel and at dusk he had a dramatic
shot at a flight of ducks whirling down from the upper air, skimming the
lake, instantly vanishing.
They drove home under the sunset. Mounds of straw, and wheat-stacks like
bee-hives, stood out in startling rose and gold, and the green-tufted
stubble glistened. As the vast girdle of crimson darkened, the fulfilled
land became autumnal in deep reds and browns. The black road before
the buggy turned to a faint lavender, then was blotted to uncertain
grayness. Cattle came in a long line up to the barred gates of the
farmyards, and over the resting land was a dark glow.
Carol had found the dignity and greatness which had failed her in Main
Street.
II
Till they had a maid they took noon dinner and six o'clock supper at
Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house.
Mrs. Elisha Gurrey, relict of Deacon Gurrey the dealer in hay and grain,
was a pointed-nosed, simpering woman with iron-gray hair drawn so tight
that it resembled a soiled handkerchief covering her head. But she was
unexpectedly cheerful, and her dining-room, with its thin tablecloth on
a long pine table, had the decency of clean bareness.
In the line of unsmiling, methodically chewing guests, like horses at
a manger, Carol came to distinguish one countenance: the pale, long,
spectacled face and sandy pompadour hair of Mr. Raymond P. Wutherspoon,
known as "Raymie," professional bachelor, manager and one half the
sales-force in the shoe-department of the Bon Ton Store.
"You will enjoy Gopher Prairie very much, Mrs. Kennicott," petitioned
Raymie. His eyes were like those of a dog waiting to be let in out of
the cold. He passed the stewed apricots effusively. "There are a great
many bright cultured people here. Mrs. Wilks, the Christian Science
reader, is a very bright woman--though I am not a Scientist myself,
in fact I sing in the Episcopal choir. And Miss Sherwin of the high
school--she is such a pleasing, bright girl--I was fitting her to a pair
of tan gaiters yesterday, I declare, it really was a pleasure."
"Gimme the butter, Carrie," was Kennicott's comment. She defied him by
encouraging Raymie:
"Do you have amateur dramatics and so on here?"
"Oh yes! The town's just full of talent. The Knights of Pythias put on a
dandy minstrel show last year."
"It's nice you're so enthusiastic."
"Oh, do you really think so? Lots of folks jolly me for trying to get
up shows and so on. I tell them they have more artistic gifts than they
know. Just yesterday I was saying to Harry Haydock: if he would read
poetry, like Longfellow, or if he would join the band--I get so much
pleasure out of playing the cornet, and our band-leader, Del Snafflin,
is such a good musician, I often say he ought to give up his barbering
and become a professional musician, he could play the clarinet in
Minneapolis or New York or anywhere, but--but I couldn't get Harry to
see it at all and--I hear you and the doctor went out hunting yesterday.
Lovely country, isn't it. And did you make some calls? The mercantile
life isn't inspiring like medicine. It must be wonderful to see how
patients trust you, doctor."
"Huh. It's me that's got to do all the trusting. Be damn sight more
wonderful 'f they'd pay their bills," grumbled Kennicott and, to Carol,
he whispered something which sounded like "gentleman hen."
But Raymie's pale eyes were watering at her. She helped him with, "So
you like to read poetry?"
"Oh yes, so much--though to tell the truth, I don't get much time
for reading, we're always so busy at the store and----But we had the
dandiest professional reciter at the Pythian Sisters sociable last
winter."
Carol thought she heard a grunt from the traveling salesman at the end
of the table, and Kennicott's jerking elbow was a grunt embodied. She
persisted:
"Do you get to see many plays, Mr. Wutherspoon?"
He shone at her like a dim blue March moon, and sighed, "No, but I do
love the movies. I'm a real fan. One trouble with books is that they're
not so thoroughly safeguarded by intelligent censors as the movies are,
and when you drop into the library and take out a book you never know
what you're wasting your time on. What I like in books is a wholesome,
really improving story, and sometimes----Why, once I started a novel by
this fellow Balzac that you read about, and it told how a lady wasn't
living with her husband, I mean she wasn't his wife. It went into
details, disgustingly! And the English was real poor. I spoke to the
library about it, and they took it off the shelves. I'm not narrow,
but I must say I don't see any use in this deliberately dragging in
immorality! Life itself is so full of temptations that in literature one
wants only that which is pure and uplifting."
"What's the name of that Balzac yarn? Where can I get hold of it?"
giggled the traveling salesman.
Raymie ignored him. "But the movies, they are mostly clean, and their
humor----Don't you think that the most essential quality for a person to
have is a sense of humor?"
"I don't know. I really haven't much," said Carol.
He shook his finger at her. "Now, now, you're too modest. I'm sure we
can all see that you have a perfectly corking sense of humor. Besides,
Dr. Kennicott wouldn't marry a lady that didn't have. We all know how he
loves his fun!"
"You bet. I'm a jokey old bird. Come on, Carrie; let's beat it,"
remarked Kennicott.
Raymie implored, "And what is your chief artistic interest, Mrs.
Kennicott?"
"Oh----" Aware that the traveling salesman had murmured, "Dentistry,"
she desperately hazarded, "Architecture."
"That's a real nice art. I've always said--when Haydock & Simons were
finishing the new front on the Bon Ton building, the old man came to me,
you know, Harry's father, 'D. H.,' I always call him, and he asked me
how I liked it, and I said to him, 'Look here, D. H.,' I said--you see,
he was going to leave the front plain, and I said to him, 'It's all very
well to have modern lighting and a big display-space,' I said, 'but when
you get that in, you want to have some architecture, too,' I said, and
he laughed and said he guessed maybe I was right, and so he had 'em put
on a cornice."
"Tin!" observed the traveling salesman.
Raymie bared his teeth like a belligerent mouse. "Well, what if it is
tin? That's not my fault. I told D. H. to make it polished granite. You
make me tired!"
"Leave us go! Come on, Carrie, leave us go!" from Kennicott.
Raymie waylaid them in the hall and secretly informed Carol that she
musn't mind the traveling salesman's coarseness--he belonged to the
hwa pollwa.
Kennicott chuckled, "Well, child, how about it? Do you prefer an
artistic guy like Raymie to stupid boobs like Sam Clark and me?"
"My dear! Let's go home, and play pinochle, and laugh, and be foolish,
and slip up to bed, and sleep without dreaming. It's beautiful to be
just a solid citizeness!"
III
From the Gopher Prairie Weekly Dauntless:
One of the most charming affairs of the season was held Tuesday evening
at the handsome new residence of Sam and Mrs. Clark when many of our
most prominent citizens gathered to greet the lovely new bride of our
popular local physician, Dr. Will Kennicott. All present spoke of the
many charms of the bride, formerly Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul. Games
and stunts were the order of the day, with merry talk and conversation.
At a late hour dainty refreshments were served, and the party broke up
with many expressions of pleasure at the pleasant affair. Among those
present were Mesdames Kennicott, Elder----
* * * * *
Dr. Will Kennicott, for the past several years one of our most popular
and skilful physicians and surgeons, gave the town a delightful surprise
when he returned from an extended honeymoon tour in Colorado this week
with his charming bride, nee Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul, whose
family are socially prominent in Minneapolis and Mankato. Mrs. Kennicott
is a lady of manifold charms, not only of striking charm of appearance
but is also a distinguished graduate of a school in the East and has
for the past year been prominently connected in an important position
of responsibility with the St. Paul Public Library, in which city Dr.
"Will" had the good fortune to meet her. The city of Gopher Prairie
welcomes her to our midst and prophesies for her many happy years in
the energetic city of the twin lakes and the future. The Dr. and Mrs.
Kennicott will reside for the present at the Doctor's home on Poplar
Street which his charming mother has been keeping for him who has now
returned to her own home at Lac-qui-Meurt leaving a host of friends who
regret her absence and hope to see her soon with us again.
IV
She knew that if she was ever to effect any of the "reforms" which she
had pictured, she must have a starting-place. What confused her during
the three or four months after her marriage was not lack of perception
that she must be definite, but sheer careless happiness of her first
home.
In the pride of being a housewife she loved every detail--the brocade
armchair with the weak back, even the brass water-cock on the hot-water
reservoir, when she had become familiar with it by trying to scour it to
brilliance.
She found a maid--plump radiant Bea Sorenson from Scandia Crossing. Bea
was droll in her attempt to be at once a respectful servant and a bosom
friend. They laughed together over the fact that the stove did not draw,
over the slipperiness of fish in the pan.
Like a child playing Grandma in a trailing skirt, Carol paraded uptown
for her marketing, crying greetings to housewives along the way.
Everybody bowed to her, strangers and all, and made her feel that they
wanted her, that she belonged here. In city shops she was merely A
Customer--a hat, a voice to bore a harassed clerk. Here she was Mrs. Doc
Kennicott, and her preferences in grape-fruit and manners were known
and remembered and worth discussing . . . even if they weren't worth
fulfilling.
Shopping was a delight of brisk conferences. The very merchants whose
droning she found the dullest at the two or three parties which were
given to welcome her were the pleasantest confidants of all when they
had something to talk about--lemons or cotton voile or floor-oil.
With that skip-jack Dave Dyer, the druggist, she conducted a long
mock-quarrel. She pretended that he cheated her in the price of
magazines and candy; he pretended she was a detective from the Twin
Cities. He hid behind the prescription-counter, and when she stamped
her foot he came out wailing, "Honest, I haven't done nothing crooked
today--not yet."
She never recalled her first impression of Main Street; never
had precisely the same despair at its ugliness. By the end of two
shopping-tours everything had changed proportions. As she never entered
it, the Minniemashie House ceased to exist for her. Clark's Hardware
Store, Dyer's Drug Store, the groceries of Ole Jenson and Frederick
Ludelmeyer and Howland & Gould, the meat markets, the notions
shop--they expanded, and hid all other structures. When she entered Mr.
Ludelmeyer's store and he wheezed, "Goot mornin', Mrs. Kennicott. Vell,
dis iss a fine day," she did not notice the dustiness of the shelves
nor the stupidity of the girl clerk; and she did not remember the mute
colloquy with him on her first view of Main Street.
She could not find half the kinds of food she wanted, but that made
shopping more of an adventure. When she did contrive to get sweetbreads
at Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market the triumph was so vast that she buzzed
with excitement and admired the strong wise butcher, Mr. Dahl.
She appreciated the homely ease of village life. She liked the old men,
farmers, G.A.R. veterans, who when they gossiped sometimes squatted on
their heels on the sidewalk, like resting Indians, and reflectively spat
over the curb.
She found beauty in the children.
She had suspected that her married friends exaggerated their passion
for children. But in her work in the library, children had become
individuals to her, citizens of the State with their own rights and
their own senses of humor. In the library she had not had much time
to give them, but now she knew the luxury of stopping, gravely asking
Bessie Clark whether her doll had yet recovered from its rheumatism, and
agreeing with Oscar Martinsen that it would be Good Fun to go trapping
"mushrats."
She touched the thought, "It would be sweet to have a baby of my own. I
do want one. Tiny----No! Not yet! There's so much to do. And I'm still
tired from the job. It's in my bones."
She rested at home. She listened to the village noises common to all
the world, jungle or prairie; sounds simple and charged with magic--dogs
barking, chickens making a gurgling sound of content, children at play,
a man beating a rug, wind in the cottonwood trees, a locust fiddling,
a footstep on the walk, jaunty voices of Bea and a grocer's boy in the
kitchen, a clinking anvil, a piano--not too near.
Twice a week, at least, she drove into the country with Kennicott, to
hunt ducks in lakes enameled with sunset, or to call on patients who
looked up to her as the squire's lady and thanked her for toys and
magazines. Evenings she went with her husband to the motion pictures and
was boisterously greeted by every other couple; or, till it became too
cold, they sat on the porch, bawling to passers-by in motors, or to
neighbors who were raking the leaves. The dust became golden in the low
sun; the street was filled with the fragrance of burning leaves.
V
But she hazily wanted some one to whom she could say what she thought.
On a slow afternoon when she fidgeted over sewing and wished that the
telephone would ring, Bea announced Miss Vida Sherwin.
Despite Vida Sherwin's lively blue eyes, if you had looked at her in
detail you would have found her face slightly lined, and not so much
sallow as with the bloom rubbed off; you would have found her chest
flat, and her fingers rough from needle and chalk and penholder; her
blouses and plain cloth skirts undistinguished; and her hat worn too far
back, betraying a dry forehead. But you never did look at Vida Sherwin
in detail. You couldn't. Her electric activity veiled her. She was as
energetic as a chipmunk. Her fingers fluttered; her sympathy came out
in spurts; she sat on the edge of a chair in eagerness to be near her
auditor, to send her enthusiasms and optimism across.
She rushed into the room pouring out: "I'm afraid you'll think the
teachers have been shabby in not coming near you, but we wanted to
give you a chance to get settled. I am Vida Sherwin, and I try to teach
French and English and a few other things in the high school."
"I've been hoping to know the teachers. You see, I was a librarian----"
"Oh, you needn't tell me. I know all about you! Awful how much I
know--this gossipy village. We need you so much here. It's a dear loyal
town (and isn't loyalty the finest thing in the world!) but it's a
rough diamond, and we need you for the polishing, and we're ever so
humble----" She stopped for breath and finished her compliment with a
smile.
"If I COULD help you in any way----Would I be committing the
unpardonable sin if I whispered that I think Gopher Prairie is a tiny
bit ugly?"
"Of course it's ugly. Dreadfully! Though I'm probably the only person in
town to whom you could safely say that. (Except perhaps Guy Pollock
the lawyer--have you met him?--oh, you MUST!--he's simply a
darling--intelligence and culture and so gentle.) But I don't care so
much about the ugliness. That will change. It's the spirit that gives
me hope. It's sound. Wholesome. But afraid. It needs live creatures like
you to awaken it. I shall slave-drive you!"
"Splendid. What shall I do? I've been wondering if it would be possible
to have a good architect come here to lecture."
"Ye-es, but don't you think it would be better to work with existing
agencies? Perhaps it will sound slow to you, but I was thinking----It
would be lovely if we could get you to teach Sunday School."
Carol had the empty expression of one who finds that she has been
affectionately bowing to a complete stranger. "Oh yes. But I'm afraid I
wouldn't be much good at that. My religion is so foggy."
"I know. So is mine. I don't care a bit for dogma. Though I do stick
firmly to the belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man
and the leadership of Jesus. As you do, of course."
Carol looked respectable and thought about having tea.
"And that's all you need teach in Sunday School. It's the personal
influence. Then there's the library-board. You'd be so useful on that.
And of course there's our women's study club--the Thanatopsis Club."
"Are they doing anything? Or do they read papers made out of the
Encyclopedia?"
Miss Sherwin shrugged. "Perhaps. But still, they are so earnest. They
will respond to your fresher interest. And the Thanatopsis does do a
good social work--they've made the city plant ever so many trees, and
they run the rest-room for farmers' wives. And they do take such an
interest in refinement and culture. So--in fact, so very unique."
Carol was disappointed--by nothing very tangible. She said politely,
"I'll think them all over. I must have a while to look around first."
Miss Sherwin darted to her, smoothed her hair, peered at her. "Oh,
my dear, don't you suppose I know? These first tender days of
marriage--they're sacred to me. Home, and children that need you, and
depend on you to keep them alive, and turn to you with their wrinkly
little smiles. And the hearth and----" She hid her face from Carol as
she made an activity of patting the cushion of her chair, but she went
on with her former briskness:
"I mean, you must help us when you're ready. . . . I'm afraid you'll
think I'm conservative. I am! So much to conserve. All this treasure of
American ideals. Sturdiness and democracy and opportunity. Maybe not at
Palm Beach. But, thank heaven, we're free from such social distinctions
in Gopher Prairie. I have only one good quality--overwhelming belief in
the brains and hearts of our nation, our state, our town. It's so strong
that sometimes I do have a tiny effect on the haughty ten-thousandaires.
I shake 'em up and make 'em believe in ideals--yes, in themselves. But
I get into a rut of teaching. I need young critical things like you to
punch me up. Tell me, what are you reading?"
"I've been re-reading 'The Damnation of Theron Ware.' Do you know it?"
"Yes. It was clever. But hard. Man wanted to tear down, not build up.
Cynical. Oh, I do hope I'm not a sentimentalist. But I can't see any use
in this high-art stuff that doesn't encourage us day-laborers to plod
on."
Ensued a fifteen-minute argument about the oldest topic in the world:
It's art but is it pretty? Carol tried to be eloquent regarding honesty
of observation. Miss Sherwin stood out for sweetness and a cautious use
of the uncomfortable properties of light. At the end Carol cried:
"I don't care how much we disagree. It's a relief to have somebody
talk something besides crops. Let's make Gopher Prairie rock to its
foundations: let's have afternoon tea instead of afternoon coffee."
The delighted Bea helped her bring out the ancestral folding
sewing-table, whose yellow and black top was scarred with dotted lines
from a dressmaker's tracing-wheel, and to set it with an embroidered
lunch-cloth, and the mauve-glazed Japanese tea-set which she had brought
from St. Paul. Miss Sherwin confided her latest scheme--moral motion
pictures for country districts, with light from a portable dynamo
hitched to a Ford engine. Bea was twice called to fill the hot-water
pitcher and to make cinnamon toast.
When Kennicott came home at five he tried to be courtly, as befits the
husband of one who has afternoon tea. Carol suggested that Miss Sherwin
stay for supper, and that Kennicott invite Guy Pollock, the much-praised
lawyer, the poetic bachelor.
Yes, Pollock could come. Yes, he was over the grippe which had prevented
his going to Sam Clark's party.
Carol regretted her impulse. The man would be an opinionated politician,
heavily jocular about The Bride. But at the entrance of Guy Pollock she
discovered a personality. Pollock was a man of perhaps thirty-eight,
slender, still, deferential. His voice was low. "It was very good of you
to want me," he said, and he offered no humorous remarks, and did not
ask her if she didn't think Gopher Prairie was "the livest little burg
in the state."
She fancied that his even grayness might reveal a thousand tints of
lavender and blue and silver.
At supper he hinted his love for Sir Thomas Browne, Thoreau, Agnes
Repplier, Arthur Symons, Claude Washburn, Charles Flandrau. He presented
his idols diffidently, but he expanded in Carol's bookishness, in Miss
Sherwin's voluminous praise, in Kennicott's tolerance of any one who
amused his wife.
Carol wondered why Guy Pollock went on digging at routine law-cases;
why he remained in Gopher Prairie. She had no one whom she could ask.
Neither Kennicott nor Vida Sherwin would understand that there might be
reasons why a Pollock should not remain in Gopher Prairie. She enjoyed
the faint mystery. She felt triumphant and rather literary. She already
had a Group. It would be only a while now before she provided the town
with fanlights and a knowledge of Galsworthy. She was doing things! As
she served the emergency dessert of cocoanut and sliced oranges, she
cried to Pollock, "Don't you think we ought to get up a dramatic club?"
| Kennicott takes Carol along on a hunting expedition. She does not like the idea of killing birds but she is delighted by his enthusiasm. She listens to his lecture on gunpowder willingly and looks at his equipment eagerly. They travel by a buggy and they take Jack Elder's dog along. The dog picks up a scent and they follow it. Carol feels tired and breathless. Kennicott shoots two birds. Then they drive into Pete Rustad's farm. Pete's wife welcomes them, admires Carol and gives them a pitcher of milk to drink. Carol is pleased by the devotion shown to her husband. They have lunch and a little rest near the lake. Kennicott shoots a squirrel. On their way back Carol loses herself in the vastness of the farmyards, the beauty of the setting sun and the peace that surrounds them. Carol and Kennicott are forced to eat at Mrs. Gurrey's boarding house because they have not found any maid to help in the house. They meet Mr. Raymond. P. Wutherspoon, manager of the shoe-department at the Bon Ton store. He talks about the cultured circle of Gopher Prairie, the library and the movies eagerly. Carol feels happy about his love for music. Kennicott shows marked disinterestedness in Raymies conversation. The newspaper of Gopher Prairie-dauntless-publishes an account of the party at Sam Clark's house and how the doctor's wife -Carol Kennicott-charmed everyone at the party. Carol enjoys the role of the housewife. She begins to love every aspect of the house including the moldy furniture. Bea Sorenson is hired as a domestic help but Carol treats her as a friend. They laugh together at every thing that amuses them. Carol enjoys her shopping trips and the importance given to her as the doctor's wife. Her first impression of the town is forgotten and she begins to love the shops because her friends run them. She stops to chat with the children because she considers them to be individuals. She even wishes to have a child. She goes to the movies twice a week and enjoys chatting with the couples present at the theatre. She spends the evenings sitting on the porch with Kennicott and greets neighbors and passers by. Yet she longs for a companion with whom she could talk. Vida Sherwin, the schoolteacher calls on her. Vida admits that the town is ugly but claims that it has a wholesome spirit. She declares that the town needs people like Carol to awaken it. She assures Carol that Guy Pollock-the lawyer shared her views about the town. She invites Carol to teach in the Sunday school. She also suggests that Carol could become a member of the library board. She informs her about the Thanatopsis club where the women study literature and also involve themselves in social work like planting trees and running a rest room for the farmers' wives. Carol begs to be given some time to think about it before she could commit herself to any of the activities. They start discussing the book that Carol was reading. Carol feels happy to find someone with whom she could discuss subjects that interested her. She serves tea and cinnamon toast. When Kennicott returns home, she persuades him to invite Guy Pollock to supper. She finds Guy Pollock very likeable because he never tells her how wonderful Gopher Prairie is. He talks about books and authors and Carol wonders why such an intelligent man chose to remain in Gopher Prairie. She feels elated at having formed her own group and suggests to Pollock that they should form a dramatic club. | summary |
CHAPTER VI
I
WHEN the first dubious November snow had filtered down, shading with
white the bare clods in the plowed fields, when the first small fire
had been started in the furnace, which is the shrine of a Gopher Prairie
home, Carol began to make the house her own. She dismissed the parlor
furniture--the golden oak table with brass knobs, the moldy brocade
chairs, the picture of "The Doctor." She went to Minneapolis, to scamper
through department stores and small Tenth Street shops devoted to
ceramics and high thought. She had to ship her treasures, but she wanted
to bring them back in her arms.
Carpenters had torn out the partition between front parlor and back
parlor, thrown it into a long room on which she lavished yellow and
deep blue; a Japanese obi with an intricacy of gold thread on stiff
ultramarine tissue, which she hung as a panel against the maize wall; a
couch with pillows of sapphire velvet and gold bands; chairs which, in
Gopher Prairie, seemed flippant. She hid the sacred family phonograph in
the dining-room, and replaced its stand with a square cabinet on which
was a squat blue jar between yellow candles.
Kennicott decided against a fireplace. "We'll have a new house in a
couple of years, anyway."
She decorated only one room. The rest, Kennicott hinted, she'd better
leave till he "made a ten-strike."
The brown cube of a house stirred and awakened; it seemed to be in
motion; it welcomed her back from shopping; it lost its mildewed
repression.
The supreme verdict was Kennicott's "Well, by golly, I was afraid the
new junk wouldn't be so comfortable, but I must say this divan, or
whatever you call it, is a lot better than that bumpy old sofa we had,
and when I look around----Well, it's worth all it cost, I guess."
Every one in town took an interest in the refurnishing. The carpenters
and painters who did not actually assist crossed the lawn to peer
through the windows and exclaim, "Fine! Looks swell!" Dave Dyer at
the drug store, Harry Haydock and Raymie Wutherspoon at the Bon Ton,
repeated daily, "How's the good work coming? I hear the house is getting
to be real classy."
Even Mrs. Bogart.
Mrs. Bogart lived across the alley from the rear of Carol's house. She
was a widow, and a Prominent Baptist, and a Good Influence. She had so
painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them
had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus
N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen
member of the toughest gang in Boytown.
Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She was the soft,
damp, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly
hopeful kind. There are in every large chicken-yard a number of old and
indignant hens who resemble Mrs. Bogart, and when they are served at
Sunday noon dinner, as fricasseed chicken with thick dumplings, they
keep up the resemblance.
Carol had noted that Mrs. Bogart from her side window kept an eye upon
the house. The Kennicotts and Mrs. Bogart did not move in the same
sets--which meant precisely the same in Gopher Prairie as it did on
Fifth Avenue or in Mayfair. But the good widow came calling.
She wheezed in, sighed, gave Carol a pulpy hand, sighed, glanced sharply
at the revelation of ankles as Carol crossed her legs, sighed, inspected
the new blue chairs, smiled with a coy sighing sound, and gave voice:
"I've wanted to call on you so long, dearie, you know we're neighbors,
but I thought I'd wait till you got settled, you must run in and see me,
how much did that big chair cost?"
"Seventy-seven dollars!"
"Sev----Sakes alive! Well, I suppose it's all right for them that can
afford it, though I do sometimes think----Of course as our pastor said
once, at Baptist Church----By the way, we haven't seen you there yet,
and of course your husband was raised up a Baptist, and I do hope
he won't drift away from the fold, of course we all know there isn't
anything, not cleverness or gifts of gold or anything, that can make
up for humility and the inward grace and they can say what they want to
about the P. E. church, but of course there's no church that has more
history or has stayed by the true principles of Christianity better
than the Baptist Church and----In what church were you raised, Mrs.
Kennicott?"
"W-why, I went to Congregational, as a girl in Mankato, but my college
was Universalist."
"Well----But of course as the Bible says, is it the Bible, at least I
know I have heard it in church and everybody admits it, it's proper for
the little bride to take her husband's vessel of faith, so we all hope
we shall see you at the Baptist Church and----As I was saying, of course
I agree with Reverend Zitterel in thinking that the great trouble with
this nation today is lack of spiritual faith--so few going to church,
and people automobiling on Sunday and heaven knows what all. But still
I do think that one trouble is this terrible waste of money, people
feeling that they've got to have bath-tubs and telephones in their
houses----I heard you were selling the old furniture cheap."
"Yes!"
"Well--of course you know your own mind, but I can't help thinking, when
Will's ma was down here keeping house for him--SHE used to run in to SEE
me, real OFTEN!--it was good enough furniture for her. But there, there,
I mustn't croak, I just wanted to let you know that when you find you
can't depend on a lot of these gadding young folks like the Haydocks and
the Dyers--and heaven only knows how much money Juanita Haydock blows in
in a year--why then you may be glad to know that slow old Aunty Bogart
is always right there, and heaven knows----" A portentous sigh. "--I
HOPE you and your husband won't have any of the troubles, with sickness
and quarreling and wasting money and all that so many of these young
couples do have and----But I must be running along now, dearie. It's
been such a pleasure and----Just run in and see me any time. I hope Will
is well? I thought he looked a wee mite peaked."
It was twenty minutes later when Mrs. Bogart finally oozed out of the
front door. Carol ran back into the living-room and jerked open the
windows. "That woman has left damp finger-prints in the air," she said.
II
Carol was extravagant, but at least she did not try to clear herself of
blame by going about whimpering, "I know I'm terribly extravagant but I
don't seem to be able to help it."
Kennicott had never thought of giving her an allowance. His mother had
never had one! As a wage-earning spinster Carol had asserted to her
fellow librarians that when she was married, she was going to have an
allowance and be business-like and modern. But it was too much trouble
to explain to Kennicott's kindly stubbornness that she was a practical
housekeeper as well as a flighty playmate. She bought a budget-plan
account book and made her budgets as exact as budgets are likely to be
when they lack budgets.
For the first month it was a honeymoon jest to beg prettily, to confess,
"I haven't a cent in the house, dear," and to be told, "You're an
extravagant little rabbit." But the budget book made her realize how
inexact were her finances. She became self-conscious; occasionally she
was indignant that she should always have to petition him for the money
with which to buy his food. She caught herself criticizing his belief
that, since his joke about trying to keep her out of the poorhouse had
once been accepted as admirable humor, it should continue to be his
daily bon mot. It was a nuisance to have to run down the street after
him because she had forgotten to ask him for money at breakfast.
But she couldn't "hurt his feelings," she reflected. He liked the
lordliness of giving largess.
She tried to reduce the frequency of begging by opening accounts and
having the bills sent to him. She had found that staple groceries,
sugar, flour, could be most cheaply purchased at Axel Egge's rustic
general store. She said sweetly to Axel:
"I think I'd better open a charge account here."
"I don't do no business except for cash," grunted Axel.
She flared, "Do you know who I am?"
"Yuh, sure, I know. The doc is good for it. But that's yoost a rule I
made. I make low prices. I do business for cash."
She stared at his red impassive face, and her fingers had the
undignified desire to slap him, but her reason agreed with him. "You're
quite right. You shouldn't break your rule for me."
Her rage had not been lost. It had been transferred to her husband. She
wanted ten pounds of sugar in a hurry, but she had no money. She ran up
the stairs to Kennicott's office. On the door was a sign advertising a
headache cure and stating, "The doctor is out, back at----" Naturally,
the blank space was not filled out. She stamped her foot. She ran down
to the drug store--the doctor's club.
As she entered she heard Mrs. Dyer demanding, "Dave, I've got to have
some money."
Carol saw that her husband was there, and two other men, all listening
in amusement.
Dave Dyer snapped, "How much do you want? Dollar be enough?"
"No, it won't! I've got to get some underclothes for the kids."
"Why, good Lord, they got enough now to fill the closet so I couldn't
find my hunting boots, last time I wanted them."
"I don't care. They're all in rags. You got to give me ten dollars----"
Carol perceived that Mrs. Dyer was accustomed to this indignity. She
perceived that the men, particularly Dave, regarded it as an excellent
jest. She waited--she knew what would come--it did. Dave yelped,
"Where's that ten dollars I gave you last year?" and he looked to the
other men to laugh. They laughed.
Cold and still, Carol walked up to Kennicott and commanded, "I want to
see you upstairs."
"Why--something the matter?"
"Yes!"
He clumped after her, up the stairs, into his barren office. Before he
could get out a query she stated:
"Yesterday, in front of a saloon, I heard a German farm-wife beg her
husband for a quarter, to get a toy for the baby--and he refused. Just
now I've heard Mrs. Dyer going through the same humiliation. And I--I'm
in the same position! I have to beg you for money. Daily! I have just
been informed that I couldn't have any sugar because I hadn't the money
to pay for it!"
"Who said that? By God, I'll kill any----"
"Tut. It wasn't his fault. It was yours. And mine. I now humbly beg
you to give me the money with which to buy meals for you to eat. And
hereafter to remember it. The next time, I sha'n't beg. I shall simply
starve. Do you understand? I can't go on being a slave----"
Her defiance, her enjoyment of the role, ran out. She was sobbing
against his overcoat, "How can you shame me so?" and he was blubbering,
"Dog-gone it, I meant to give you some, and I forgot it. I swear I won't
again. By golly I won't!"
He pressed fifty dollars upon her, and after that he remembered to give
her money regularly . . . sometimes.
Daily she determined, "But I must have a stated amount--be
business-like. System. I must do something about it." And daily she
didn't do anything about it.
III
Mrs. Bogart had, by the simpering viciousness of her comments on the new
furniture, stirred Carol to economy. She spoke judiciously to Bea
about left-overs. She read the cookbook again and, like a child with
a picture-book, she studied the diagram of the beef which gallantly
continues to browse though it is divided into cuts.
But she was a deliberate and joyous spendthrift in her preparations for
her first party, the housewarming. She made lists on every envelope
and laundry-slip in her desk. She sent orders to Minneapolis "fancy
grocers." She pinned patterns and sewed. She was irritated when
Kennicott was jocular about "these frightful big doings that are going
on." She regarded the affair as an attack on Gopher Prairie's timidity
in pleasure. "I'll make 'em lively, if nothing else. I'll make 'em stop
regarding parties as committee-meetings."
Kennicott usually considered himself the master of the house. At his
desire, she went hunting, which was his symbol of happiness, and she
ordered porridge for breakfast, which was his symbol of morality. But
when he came home on the afternoon before the housewarming he found
himself a slave, an intruder, a blunderer. Carol wailed, "Fix the
furnace so you won't have to touch it after supper. And for heaven's
sake take that horrible old door-mat off the porch. And put on your nice
brown and white shirt. Why did you come home so late? Would you mind
hurrying? Here it is almost suppertime, and those fiends are just as
likely as not to come at seven instead of eight. PLEASE hurry!"
She was as unreasonable as an amateur leading woman on a first night,
and he was reduced to humility. When she came down to supper, when she
stood in the doorway, he gasped. She was in a silver sheath, the calyx
of a lily, her piled hair like black glass; she had the fragility and
costliness of a Viennese goblet; and her eyes were intense. He was
stirred to rise from the table and to hold the chair for her; and all
through supper he ate his bread dry because he felt that she would think
him common if he said "Will you hand me the butter?"
IV
She had reached the calmness of not caring whether her guests liked
the party or not, and a state of satisfied suspense in regard to Bea's
technique in serving, before Kennicott cried from the bay-window in
the living-room, "Here comes somebody!" and Mr. and Mrs. Luke Dawson
faltered in, at a quarter to eight. Then in a shy avalanche arrived
the entire aristocracy of Gopher Prairie: all persons engaged in a
profession, or earning more than twenty-five hundred dollars a year, or
possessed of grandparents born in America.
Even while they were removing their overshoes they were peeping at the
new decorations. Carol saw Dave Dyer secretively turn over the gold
pillows to find a price-tag, and heard Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh, the
attorney, gasp, "Well, I'll be switched," as he viewed the vermilion
print hanging against the Japanese obi. She was amused. But her high
spirits slackened as she beheld them form in dress parade, in a long,
silent, uneasy circle clear round the living-room. She felt that she had
been magically whisked back to her first party, at Sam Clark's.
"Have I got to lift them, like so many pigs of iron? I don't know that I
can make them happy, but I'll make them hectic."
A silver flame in the darkling circle, she whirled around, drew them
with her smile, and sang, "I want my party to be noisy and undignified!
This is the christening of my house, and I want you to help me have a
bad influence on it, so that it will be a giddy house. For me, won't you
all join in an old-fashioned square dance? And Mr. Dyer will call."
She had a record on the phonograph; Dave Dyer was capering in the center
of the floor, loose-jointed, lean, small, rusty headed, pointed of nose,
clapping his hands and shouting, "Swing y' pardners--alamun lef!"
Even the millionaire Dawsons and Ezra Stowbody and "Professor" George
Edwin Mott danced, looking only slightly foolish; and by rushing about
the room and being coy and coaxing to all persons over forty-five, Carol
got them into a waltz and a Virginia Reel. But when she left them to
disenjoy themselves in their own way Harry Haydock put a one-step record
on the phonograph, the younger people took the floor, and all the elders
sneaked back to their chairs, with crystallized smiles which meant,
"Don't believe I'll try this one myself, but I do enjoy watching the
youngsters dance."
Half of them were silent; half resumed the discussions of that afternoon
in the store. Ezra Stowbody hunted for something to say, hid a yawn, and
offered to Lyman Cass, the owner of the flour-mill, "How d' you folks
like the new furnace, Lym? Huh? So."
"Oh, let them alone. Don't pester them. They must like it, or they
wouldn't do it." Carol warned herself. But they gazed at her so
expectantly when she flickered past that she was reconvinced that in
their debauches of respectability they had lost the power of play as
well as the power of impersonal thought. Even the dancers were gradually
crushed by the invisible force of fifty perfectly pure and well-behaved
and negative minds; and they sat down, two by two. In twenty minutes the
party was again elevated to the decorum of a prayer-meeting.
"We're going to do something exciting," Carol exclaimed to her new
confidante, Vida Sherwin. She saw that in the growing quiet her voice
had carried across the room. Nat Hicks, Ella Stowbody, and Dave Dyer
were abstracted, fingers and lips slightly moving. She knew with a
cold certainty that Dave was rehearsing his "stunt" about the Norwegian
catching the hen, Ella running over the first lines of "An Old
Sweetheart of Mine," and Nat thinking of his popular parody on Mark
Antony's oration.
"But I will not have anybody use the word 'stunt' in my house," she
whispered to Miss Sherwin.
"That's good. I tell you: why not have Raymond Wutherspoon sing?"
"Raymie? Why, my dear, he's the most sentimental yearner in town!"
"See here, child! Your opinions on house-decorating are sound, but your
opinions of people are rotten! Raymie does wag his tail. But the poor
dear----Longing for what he calls 'self-expression' and no training in
anything except selling shoes. But he can sing. And some day when
he gets away from Harry Haydock's patronage and ridicule, he'll do
something fine."
Carol apologized for her superciliousness. She urged Raymie, and warned
the planners of "stunts," "We all want you to sing, Mr. Wutherspoon.
You're the only famous actor I'm going to let appear on the stage
tonight."
While Raymie blushed and admitted, "Oh, they don't want to hear me," he
was clearing his throat, pulling his clean handkerchief farther out of
his breast pocket, and thrusting his fingers between the buttons of his
vest.
In her affection for Raymie's defender, in her desire to "discover
artistic talent," Carol prepared to be delighted by the recital.
Raymie sang "Fly as a Bird," "Thou Art My Dove," and "When the Little
Swallow Leaves Its Tiny Nest," all in a reasonably bad offertory tenor.
Carol was shuddering with the vicarious shame which sensitive people
feel when they listen to an "elocutionist" being humorous, or to a
precocious child publicly doing badly what no child should do at all.
She wanted to laugh at the gratified importance in Raymie's half-shut
eyes; she wanted to weep over the meek ambitiousness which clouded like
an aura his pale face, flap ears, and sandy pompadour. She tried to look
admiring, for the benefit of Miss Sherwin, that trusting admirer of all
that was or conceivably could be the good, the true, and the beautiful.
At the end of the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from
her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, "My! That was
sweet! Of course Raymond hasn't an unusually good voice, but don't you
think he puts such a lot of feeling into it?"
Carol lied blackly and magnificently, but without originality: "Oh yes,
I do think he has so much FEELING!"
She saw that after the strain of listening in a cultured manner the
audience had collapsed; had given up their last hope of being amused.
She cried, "Now we're going to play an idiotic game which I learned in
Chicago. You will have to take off your shoes, for a starter! After that
you will probably break your knees and shoulder-blades."
Much attention and incredulity. A few eyebrows indicating a verdict that
Doc Kennicott's bride was noisy and improper.
"I shall choose the most vicious, like Juanita Haydock and myself, as
the shepherds. The rest of you are wolves. Your shoes are the sheep.
The wolves go out into the hall. The shepherds scatter the sheep through
this room, then turn off all the lights, and the wolves crawl in from
the hall and in the darkness they try to get the shoes away from
the shepherds--who are permitted to do anything except bite and use
black-jacks. The wolves chuck the captured shoes out into the hall. No
one excused! Come on! Shoes off!"
Every one looked at every one else and waited for every one else to
begin.
Carol kicked off her silver slippers, and ignored the universal glance
at her arches. The embarrassed but loyal Vida Sherwin unbuttoned her
high black shoes. Ezra Stowbody cackled, "Well, you're a terror to old
folks. You're like the gals I used to go horseback-riding with, back in
the sixties. Ain't much accustomed to attending parties barefoot,
but here goes!" With a whoop and a gallant jerk Ezra snatched off his
elastic-sided Congress shoes.
The others giggled and followed.
When the sheep had been penned up, in the darkness the timorous wolves
crept into the living-room, squealing, halting, thrown out of their
habit of stolidity by the strangeness of advancing through nothingness
toward a waiting foe, a mysterious foe which expanded and grew more
menacing. The wolves peered to make out landmarks, they touched gliding
arms which did not seem to be attached to a body, they quivered with a
rapture of fear. Reality had vanished. A yelping squabble suddenly rose,
then Juanita Haydock's high titter, and Guy Pollock's astonished, "Ouch!
Quit! You're scalping me!"
Mrs. Luke Dawson galloped backward on stiff hands and knees into the
safety of the lighted hallway, moaning, "I declare, I nev' was so
upset in my life!" But the propriety was shaken out of her, and she
delightedly continued to ejaculate "Nev' in my LIFE" as she saw the
living-room door opened by invisible hands and shoes hurling through it,
as she heard from the darkness beyond the door a squawling, a bumping,
a resolute "Here's a lot of shoes. Come on, you wolves. Ow! Y' would,
would you!"
When Carol abruptly turned on the lights in the embattled living-room,
half of the company were sitting back against the walls, where they had
craftily remained throughout the engagement, but in the middle of the
floor Kennicott was wrestling with Harry Haydock--their collars torn
off, their hair in their eyes; and the owlish Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh
was retreating from Juanita Haydock, and gulping with unaccustomed
laughter. Guy Pollock's discreet brown scarf hung down his back. Young
Rita Simons's net blouse had lost two buttons, and betrayed more of her
delicious plump shoulder than was regarded as pure in Gopher Prairie.
Whether by shock, disgust, joy of combat, or physical activity, all the
party were freed from their years of social decorum. George Edwin Mott
giggled; Luke Dawson twisted his beard; Mrs. Clark insisted, "I did too,
Sam--I got a shoe--I never knew I could fight so terrible!"
Carol was certain that she was a great reformer.
She mercifully had combs, mirrors, brushes, needle and thread ready. She
permitted them to restore the divine decency of buttons.
The grinning Bea brought down-stairs a pile of soft thick sheets of
paper with designs of lotos blossoms, dragons, apes, in cobalt and
crimson and gray, and patterns of purple birds flying among sea-green
trees in the valleys of Nowhere.
"These," Carol announced, "are real Chinese masquerade costumes. I got
them from an importing shop in Minneapolis. You are to put them on over
your clothes, and please forget that you are Minnesotans, and turn into
mandarins and coolies and--and samurai (isn't it?), and anything else
you can think of."
While they were shyly rustling the paper costumes she disappeared. Ten
minutes after she gazed down from the stairs upon grotesquely ruddy
Yankee heads above Oriental robes, and cried to them, "The Princess
Winky Poo salutes her court!"
As they looked up she caught their suspense of admiration. They saw an
airy figure in trousers and coat of green brocade edged with gold; a
high gold collar under a proud chin; black hair pierced with jade pins;
a languid peacock fan in an out-stretched hand; eyes uplifted to a
vision of pagoda towers. When she dropped her pose and smiled down
she discovered Kennicott apoplectic with domestic pride--and gray Guy
Pollock staring beseechingly. For a second she saw nothing in all the
pink and brown mass of their faces save the hunger of the two men.
She shook off the spell and ran down. "We're going to have a real
Chinese concert. Messrs. Pollock, Kennicott, and, well, Stowbody are
drummers; the rest of us sing and play the fife."
The fifes were combs with tissue paper; the drums were tabourets and the
sewing-table. Loren Wheeler, editor of the Dauntless, led the orchestra,
with a ruler and a totally inaccurate sense of rhythm. The music was a
reminiscence of tom-toms heard at circus fortune-telling tents or at
the Minnesota State Fair, but the whole company pounded and puffed and
whined in a sing-song, and looked rapturous.
Before they were quite tired of the concert Carol led them in a dancing
procession to the dining-room, to blue bowls of chow mein, with Lichee
nuts and ginger preserved in syrup.
None of them save that city-rounder Harry Haydock had heard of any
Chinese dish except chop sooey. With agreeable doubt they ventured
through the bamboo shoots into the golden fried noodles of the chow
mein; and Dave Dyer did a not very humorous Chinese dance with Nat
Hicks; and there was hubbub and contentment.
Carol relaxed, and found that she was shockingly tired. She had carried
them on her thin shoulders. She could not keep it up. She longed for
her father, that artist at creating hysterical parties. She thought of
smoking a cigarette, to shock them, and dismissed the obscene thought
before it was quite formed. She wondered whether they could for five
minutes be coaxed to talk about something besides the winter top
of Knute Stamquist's Ford, and what Al Tingley had said about his
mother-in-law. She sighed, "Oh, let 'em alone. I've done enough." She
crossed her trousered legs, and snuggled luxuriously above her saucer
of ginger; she caught Pollock's congratulatory still smile, and thought
well of herself for having thrown a rose light on the pallid lawyer;
repented the heretical supposition that any male save her husband
existed; jumped up to find Kennicott and whisper, "Happy, my lord? . . .
No, it didn't cost much!"
"Best party this town ever saw. Only----Don't cross your legs in that
costume. Shows your knees too plain."
She was vexed. She resented his clumsiness. She returned to Guy Pollock
and talked of Chinese religions--not that she knew anything whatever
about Chinese religions, but he had read a book on the subject as, on
lonely evenings in his office, he had read at least one book on every
subject in the world. Guy's thin maturity was changing in her vision
to flushed youth and they were roaming an island in the yellow sea of
chatter when she realized that the guests were beginning that cough
which indicated, in the universal instinctive language, that they
desired to go home and go to bed.
While they asserted that it had been "the nicest party they'd ever
seen--my! so clever and original," she smiled tremendously, shook hands,
and cried many suitable things regarding children, and being sure to
wrap up warmly, and Raymie's singing and Juanita Haydock's prowess at
games. Then she turned wearily to Kennicott in a house filled with quiet
and crumbs and shreds of Chinese costumes.
He was gurgling, "I tell you, Carrie, you certainly are a wonder, and
guess you're right about waking folks up. Now you've showed 'em how,
they won't go on having the same old kind of parties and stunts and
everything. Here! Don't touch a thing! Done enough. Pop up to bed, and
I'll clear up."
His wise surgeon's-hands stroked her shoulder, and her irritation at his
clumsiness was lost in his strength.
V
From the Weekly Dauntless:
One of the most delightful social events of recent months was held
Wednesday evening in the housewarming of Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott, who
have completely redecorated their charming home on Poplar Street, and
is now extremely nifty in modern color scheme. The doctor and his bride
were at home to their numerous friends and a number of novelties in
diversions were held, including a Chinese orchestra in original and
genuine Oriental costumes, of which Ye Editor was leader. Dainty
refreshments were served in true Oriental style, and one and all voted a
delightful time.
VI
The week after, the Chet Dashaways gave a party. The circle of mourners
kept its place all evening, and Dave Dyer did the "stunt" of the
Norwegian and the hen.
| Carol redecorates her house. She replaces the old furniture with a cozy divan and big chairs, and the old relics-the picture of the 'Doctor' and the phonograph-with artifacts, all ordered from Minneapolis. She unites the front and the back parlor by knocking off the partition. She chooses blue and yellow colors to paint the room. A Japanese Obi with an intricacy of gold thread on ultramarine tissue and a squat blue jar between two yellow candles takes the place of the old phonograph. The divan with pillows of saffire velvet and gold bands takes the place of the old sofa. Kennicott admits that it feels more comfortable than the old sofa. However, Carol is allowed to decorate only one room because Kennicott plans to build a new house. The refurnishing of the house attracts wide attention from every corner of Gopher Prairie. Even Mrs. Bogart, who is not a part of Carol's circle, visits Carol to look at the changes. She lives in a house across the alley behind Carol's house. She is a widow with three sons, a Baptist and is considered to be a good influence. Mrs. Bogart looks around, asks about the price of the chairs and comments on Carol's extravagance. She advises Carol that a wife should follow her husband's faith and as Kennicott was brought up as a Baptist, she should attend the Baptist church. She informs that Kennicott's mother used to visit her often. She cautions that the young Haydocks and Dyers are not very dependable but adds that Carol could always turn to Aunt Bogart. She departs after expressing her hope that Kennicott and Carol will not have sickness or quarrels. Carol opens the windows to let out the melancholy sighs left behind by Mrs. Bogart. Carol had decided when she was a spinster that if she got married she would have an allowance. But after her marriage she finds it difficult to explain the need for an allowance to Kennicott especially because he loves Carol asking him for money. She discovers that the men of Gopher Prairie enjoy making their wives beg for money for the household expenditure and she finds it very humiliating. One day she forgets to take money from Kennicott and needs sugar urgently. She prefers to shop at Axel Eggs store because the prices are low in his store. So she decides to open an account with Axel Egg but he informs that he accepts only cash. She marches to her husband's office indignantly but finds him at Dave Dyer's medical store. She witnesses Dave Dyer's wife begging for ten dollars to buy underclothes for the children. She calls Kennicott up to his office and informs him about her humiliation at Axel's store. She then breaks down and a very repentant Kennicott gives her fifty dollars and promises to remember to give her money regularly. After Mrs. Bogart's visit Carol becomes more conscious about spending money. But for her house-warming party she makes extravagant and meticulous plans. She orders food from Minneapolis, stitches paper costumes for her guests to wear for the masquerade and orders Kennicott around the house to fix things. When she comes downstairs dressed for the party in close fitting silver colored dress and hair piled up, Kennicott is so impressed by her stately appearance that he pulls the chair for her at the dinner table and dares not ask her to pass the butter. The aristocracy of Gopher Prairie invited to the party consists of professionals, people earning more than 25 thousand or with grand parents born in America. They all appreciate the decor-the furniture, the wall hanging, and even the cushions. But they tend to settle down to their old routine. Carol makes them dance. Even the elders like Ezra Stowbody, Dawson and George Edwin Mott enjoy dancing. Then the youngsters -the Haydocks and others dance and the older people settle down once again to the discussion of the same old topics. Carol then calls for some entertainment. But much to the disappointment of the guests, the usual stunts are not called for. Raymond Wutherspoon is asked to sing. He sings so badly that Carol feels ashamed and the guests give up all hopes of being entertained. Only Vida Sherwin appreciates Raymie's singing. | summary |
CHAPTER VII
I
GOPHER PRAIRIE was digging in for the winter. Through late November and
all December it snowed daily; the thermometer was at zero and might
drop to twenty below, or thirty. Winter is not a season in the North
Middlewest; it is an industry. Storm sheds were erected at every door.
In every block the householders, Sam Clark, the wealthy Mr. Dawson, all
save asthmatic Ezra Stowbody who extravagantly hired a boy, were seen
perilously staggering up ladders, carrying storm windows and screwing
them to second-story jambs. While Kennicott put up his windows Carol
danced inside the bedrooms and begged him not to swallow the screws,
which he held in his mouth like an extraordinary set of external false
teeth.
The universal sign of winter was the town handyman--Miles Bjornstam, a
tall, thick, red-mustached bachelor, opinionated atheist, general-store
arguer, cynical Santa Claus. Children loved him, and he sneaked
away from work to tell them improbable stories of sea-faring and
horse-trading and bears. The children's parents either laughed at him
or hated him. He was the one democrat in town. He called both Lyman Cass
the miller and the Finn homesteader from Lost Lake by their first names.
He was known as "The Red Swede," and considered slightly insane.
Bjornstam could do anything with his hands--solder a pan, weld an
automobile spring, soothe a frightened filly, tinker a clock, carve a
Gloucester schooner which magically went into a bottle. Now, for a week,
he was commissioner general of Gopher Prairie. He was the only person
besides the repairman at Sam Clark's who understood plumbing. Everybody
begged him to look over the furnace and the water-pipes. He rushed
from house to house till after bedtime--ten o'clock. Icicles from burst
water-pipes hung along the skirt of his brown dog-skin overcoat; his
plush cap, which he never took off in the house, was a pulp of ice and
coal-dust; his red hands were cracked to rawness; he chewed the stub of
a cigar.
But he was courtly to Carol. He stooped to examine the furnace flues; he
straightened, glanced down at her, and hemmed, "Got to fix your furnace,
no matter what else I do."
The poorer houses of Gopher Prairie, where the services of Miles
Bjornstam were a luxury--which included the shanty of Miles
Bjornstam--were banked to the lower windows with earth and manure. Along
the railroad the sections of snow fence, which had been stacked all
summer in romantic wooden tents occupied by roving small boys, were set
up to prevent drifts from covering the track.
The farmers came into town in home-made sleighs, with bed-quilts and hay
piled in the rough boxes.
Fur coats, fur caps, fur mittens, overshoes buckling almost to the
knees, gray knitted scarfs ten feet long, thick woolen socks, canvas
jackets lined with fluffy yellow wool like the plumage of ducklings,
moccasins, red flannel wristlets for the blazing chapped wrists
of boys--these protections against winter were busily dug out of
moth-ball-sprinkled drawers and tar-bags in closets, and all over town
small boys were squealing, "Oh, there's my mittens!" or "Look at my
shoe-packs!" There is so sharp a division between the panting summer and
the stinging winter of the Northern plains that they rediscovered with
surprise and a feeling of heroism this armor of an Artic explorer.
Winter garments surpassed even personal gossip as the topic at parties.
It was good form to ask, "Put on your heavies yet?" There were as many
distinctions in wraps as in motor cars. The lesser sort appeared in
yellow and black dogskin coats, but Kennicott was lordly in a long
raccoon ulster and a new seal cap. When the snow was too deep for his
motor he went off on country calls in a shiny, floral, steel-tipped
cutter, only his ruddy nose and his cigar emerging from the fur.
Carol herself stirred Main Street by a loose coat of nutria. Her
finger-tips loved the silken fur.
Her liveliest activity now was organizing outdoor sports in the
motor-paralyzed town.
The automobile and bridge-whist had not only made more evident the
social divisions in Gopher Prairie but they had also enfeebled the
love of activity. It was so rich-looking to sit and drive--and so easy.
Skiing and sliding were "stupid" and "old-fashioned." In fact, the
village longed for the elegance of city recreations almost as much as
the cities longed for village sports; and Gopher Prairie took as
much pride in neglecting coasting as St. Paul--or New York--in going
coasting. Carol did inspire a successful skating-party in mid-November.
Plover Lake glistened in clear sweeps of gray-green ice, ringing to the
skates. On shore the ice-tipped reeds clattered in the wind, and oak
twigs with stubborn last leaves hung against a milky sky. Harry Haydock
did figure-eights, and Carol was certain that she had found the perfect
life. But when snow had ended the skating and she tried to get up a
moonlight sliding party, the matrons hesitated to stir away from their
radiators and their daily bridge-whist imitations of the city. She had
to nag them. They scooted down a long hill on a bob-sled, they upset
and got snow down their necks they shrieked that they would do it again
immediately--and they did not do it again at all.
She badgered another group into going skiing. They shouted and threw
snowballs, and informed her that it was SUCH fun, and they'd have
another skiing expedition right away, and they jollily returned home and
never thereafter left their manuals of bridge.
Carol was discouraged. She was grateful when Kennicott invited her to
go rabbit-hunting in the woods. She waded down stilly cloisters
between burnt stump and icy oak, through drifts marked with a million
hieroglyphics of rabbit and mouse and bird. She squealed as he leaped
on a pile of brush and fired at the rabbit which ran out. He belonged
there, masculine in reefer and sweater and high-laced boots. That night
she ate prodigiously of steak and fried potatoes; she produced electric
sparks by touching his ear with her finger-tip; she slept twelve hours;
and awoke to think how glorious was this brave land.
She rose to a radiance of sun on snow. Snug in her furs she
trotted up-town. Frosted shingles smoked against a sky colored like
flax-blossoms, sleigh-bells clinked, shouts of greeting were loud in the
thin bright air, and everywhere was a rhythmic sound of wood-sawing. It
was Saturday, and the neighbors' sons were getting up the winter fuel.
Behind walls of corded wood in back yards their sawbucks stood in
depressions scattered with canary-yellow flakes of sawdust. The frames
of their buck-saws were cherry-red, the blades blued steel, and the
fresh cut ends of the sticks--poplar, maple, iron-wood, birch--were
marked with engraved rings of growth. The boys wore shoe-packs, blue
flannel shirts with enormous pearl buttons, and mackinaws of crimson,
lemon yellow, and foxy brown.
Carol cried "Fine day!" to the boys; she came in a glow to Howland &
Gould's grocery, her collar white with frost from her breath; she bought
a can of tomatoes as though it were Orient fruit; and returned home
planning to surprise Kennicott with an omelet creole for dinner.
So brilliant was the snow-glare that when she entered the house she
saw the door-knobs, the newspaper on the table, every white surface as
dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy in the pyrotechnic dimness. When
her eyes had recovered she felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of
life. The world was so luminous that she sat down at her rickety little
desk in the living-room to make a poem. (She got no farther than "The
sky is bright, the sun is warm, there ne'er will be another storm.")
In the mid-afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called into the
country. It was Bea's evening out--her evening for the Lutheran Dance.
Carol was alone from three till midnight. She wearied of reading pure
love stories in the magazines and sat by a radiator, beginning to brood.
Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do.
II
She had, she meditated, passed through the novelty of seeing the
town and meeting people, of skating and sliding and hunting. Bea was
competent; there was no household labor except sewing and darning
and gossipy assistance to Bea in bed-making. She couldn't satisfy her
ingenuity in planning meals. At Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market you didn't
give orders--you wofully inquired whether there was anything today
besides steak and pork and ham. The cuts of beef were not cuts. They
were hacks. Lamb chops were as exotic as sharks' fins. The meat-dealers
shipped their best to the city, with its higher prices.
In all the shops there was the same lack of choice. She could not find
a glass-headed picture-nail in town; she did not hunt for the sort of
veiling she wanted--she took what she could get; and only at Howland &
Gould's was there such a luxury as canned asparagus. Routine care was
all she could devote to the house. Only by such fussing as the Widow
Bogart's could she make it fill her time.
She could not have outside employment. To the village doctor's wife it
was taboo.
She was a woman with a working brain and no work.
There were only three things which she could do: Have children; start
her career of reforming; or become so definitely a part of the town that
she would be fulfilled by the activities of church and study-club and
bridge-parties.
Children, yes, she wanted them, but----She was not quite ready. She had
been embarrassed by Kennicott's frankness, but she agreed with him
that in the insane condition of civilization, which made the rearing
of citizens more costly and perilous than any other crime, it was
inadvisable to have children till he had made more money. She was
sorry----Perhaps he had made all the mystery of love a mechanical
cautiousness but----She fled from the thought with a dubious, "Some
day."
Her "reforms," her impulses toward beauty in raw Main Street, they had
become indistinct. But she would set them going now. She would! She
swore it with soft fist beating the edges of the radiator. And at the
end of all her vows she had no notion as to when and where the crusade
was to begin.
Become an authentic part of the town? She began to think with unpleasant
lucidity. She reflected that she did not know whether the people liked
her. She had gone to the women at afternoon-coffees, to the merchants
in their stores, with so many outpouring comments and whimsies that
she hadn't given them a chance to betray their opinions of her. The men
smiled--but did they like her? She was lively among the women--but
was she one of them? She could not recall many times when she had been
admitted to the whispering of scandal which is the secret chamber of
Gopher Prairie conversation.
She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed.
Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and observed. Dave
Dyer and Sam Clark were as cordial as she had been fancying; but wasn't
there an impersonal abruptness in the "H' are yuh?" of Chet Dashaway?
Howland the grocer was curt. Was that merely his usual manner?
"It's infuriating to have to pay attention to what people think. In
St. Paul I didn't care. But here I'm spied on. They're watching
me. I mustn't let it make me self-conscious," she coaxed
herself--overstimulated by the drug of thought, and offensively on the
defensive.
III
A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a ringing iron night
when the lakes could be heard booming; a clear roistering morning. In
tam o'shanter and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior going
out to play hockey. She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run. On the
way home from shopping she yielded, as a pup would have yielded. She
galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of
slush, she gave a student "Yippee!"
She saw that in a window three old women were gasping. Their triple
glare was paralyzing. Across the street, at another window, the curtain
had secretively moved. She stopped, walked on sedately, changed from the
girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.
She never again felt quite young enough and defiant enough and free
enough to run and halloo in the public streets; and it was as a Nice
Married Woman that she attended the next weekly bridge of the Jolly
Seventeen.
IV
The Jolly Seventeen (the membership of which ranged from fourteen to
twenty-six) was the social cornice of Gopher Prairie. It was the country
club, the diplomatic set, the St. Cecilia, the Ritz oval room, the Club
de Vingt. To belong to it was to be "in." Though its membership partly
coincided with that of the Thanatopsis study club, the Jolly Seventeen
as a separate entity guffawed at the Thanatopsis, and considered it
middle-class and even "highbrow."
Most of the Jolly Seventeen were young married women, with their
husbands as associate members. Once a week they had a women's
afternoon-bridge; once a month the husbands joined them for supper and
evening-bridge; twice a year they had dances at I. O. O. F. Hall. Then
the town exploded. Only at the annual balls of the Firemen and of the
Eastern Star was there such prodigality of chiffon scarfs and tangoing
and heart-burnings, and these rival institutions were not select--hired
girls attended the Firemen's Ball, with section-hands and laborers. Ella
Stowbody had once gone to a Jolly Seventeen Soiree in the village hack,
hitherto confined to chief mourners at funerals; and Harry Haydock and
Dr. Terry Gould always appeared in the town's only specimens of evening
clothes.
The afternoon-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen which followed Carol's
lonely doubting was held at Juanita Haydock's new concrete bungalow,
with its door of polished oak and beveled plate-glass, jar of ferns in
the plastered hall, and in the living-room, a fumed oak Morris chair,
sixteen color-prints, and a square varnished table with a mat made of
cigar-ribbons on which was one Illustrated Gift Edition and one pack of
cards in a burnt-leather case.
Carol stepped into a sirocco of furnace heat. They were already playing.
Despite her flabby resolves she had not yet learned bridge. She was
winningly apologetic about it to Juanita, and ashamed that she should
have to go on being apologetic.
Mrs. Dave Dyer, a sallow woman with a thin prettiness devoted to
experiments in religious cults, illnesses, and scandal-bearing, shook
her finger at Carol and trilled, "You're a naughty one! I don't believe
you appreciate the honor, when you got into the Jolly Seventeen so
easy!"
Mrs. Chet Dashaway nudged her neighbor at the second table. But Carol
kept up the appealing bridal manner so far as possible. She twittered,
"You're perfectly right. I'm a lazy thing. I'll make Will start teaching
me this very evening." Her supplication had all the sound of birdies
in the nest, and Easter church-bells, and frosted Christmas cards.
Internally she snarled, "That ought to be saccharine enough." She sat in
the smallest rocking-chair, a model of Victorian modesty. But she saw or
she imagined that the women who had gurgled at her so welcomingly when
she had first come to Gopher Prairie were nodding at her brusquely.
During the pause after the first game she petitioned Mrs. Jackson Elder,
"Don't you think we ought to get up another bob-sled party soon?"
"It's so cold when you get dumped in the snow," said Mrs. Elder,
indifferently.
"I hate snow down my neck," volunteered Mrs. Dave Dyer, with an
unpleasant look at Carol and, turning her back, she bubbled at Rita
Simons, "Dearie, won't you run in this evening? I've got the loveliest
new Butterick pattern I want to show you."
Carol crept back to her chair. In the fervor of discussing the game they
ignored her. She was not used to being a wallflower. She struggled to
keep from oversensitiveness, from becoming unpopular by the sure method
of believing that she was unpopular; but she hadn't much reserve of
patience, and at the end of the second game, when Ella Stowbody sniffily
asked her, "Are you going to send to Minneapolis for your dress for
the next soiree--heard you were," Carol said "Don't know yet" with
unnecessary sharpness.
She was relieved by the admiration with which the jeune fille Rita
Simons looked at the steel buckles on her pumps; but she resented Mrs.
Howland's tart demand, "Don't you find that new couch of yours is too
broad to be practical?" She nodded, then shook her head, and touchily
left Mrs. Howland to get out of it any meaning she desired. Immediately
she wanted to make peace. She was close to simpering in the sweetness
with which she addressed Mrs Howland: "I think that is the prettiest
display of beef-tea your husband has in his store."
"Oh yes, Gopher Prairie isn't so much behind the times," gibed Mrs.
Howland. Some one giggled.
Their rebuffs made her haughty; her haughtiness irritated them to
franker rebuffs; they were working up to a state of painfully righteous
war when they were saved by the coming of food.
Though Juanita Haydock was highly advanced in the matters of
finger-bowls, doilies, and bath-mats, her "refreshments" were typical
of all the afternoon-coffees. Juanita's best friends, Mrs. Dyer and Mrs.
Dashaway, passed large dinner plates, each with a spoon, a fork, and a
coffee cup without saucer. They apologized and discussed the afternoon's
game as they passed through the thicket of women's feet. Then they
distributed hot buttered rolls, coffee poured from an enamel-ware pot,
stuffed olives, potato salad, and angel's-food cake. There was, even in
the most strictly conforming Gopher Prairie circles, a certain option
as to collations. The olives need not be stuffed. Doughnuts were in some
houses well thought of as a substitute for the hot buttered rolls.
But there was in all the town no heretic save Carol who omitted
angel's-food.
They ate enormously. Carol had a suspicion that the thriftier housewives
made the afternoon treat do for evening supper.
She tried to get back into the current. She edged over to Mrs. McGanum.
Chunky, amiable, young Mrs. McGanum with her breast and arms of a
milkmaid, and her loud delayed laugh which burst startlingly from
a sober face, was the daughter of old Dr. Westlake, and the wife of
Westlake's partner, Dr. McGanum. Kennicott asserted that Westlake and
McGanum and their contaminated families were tricky, but Carol had found
them gracious. She asked for friendliness by crying to Mrs. McGanum,
"How is the baby's throat now?" and she was attentive while Mrs. McGanum
rocked and knitted and placidly described symptoms.
Vida Sherwin came in after school, with Miss Ethel Villets, the
town librarian. Miss Sherwin's optimistic presence gave Carol more
confidence. She talked. She informed the circle "I drove almost down to
Wahkeenyan with Will, a few days ago. Isn't the country lovely! And I do
admire the Scandinavian farmers down there so: their big red barns and
silos and milking-machines and everything. Do you all know that lonely
Lutheran church, with the tin-covered spire, that stands out alone on
a hill? It's so bleak; somehow it seems so brave. I do think the
Scandinavians are the hardiest and best people----"
"Oh, do you THINK so?" protested Mrs. Jackson Elder. "My husband says
the Svenskas that work in the planing-mill are perfectly terrible--so
silent and cranky, and so selfish, the way they keep demanding raises.
If they had their way they'd simply ruin the business."
"Yes, and they're simply GHASTLY hired girls!" wailed Mrs. Dave Dyer.
"I swear, I work myself to skin and bone trying to please my hired
girls--when I can get them! I do everything in the world for them. They
can have their gentleman friends call on them in the kitchen any time,
and they get just the same to eat as we do, if there's, any left over,
and I practically never jump on them."
Juanita Haydock rattled, "They're ungrateful, all that class of people.
I do think the domestic problem is simply becoming awful. I don't know
what the country's coming to, with these Scandahoofian clodhoppers
demanding every cent you can save, and so ignorant and impertinent,
and on my word, demanding bath-tubs and everything--as if they weren't
mighty good and lucky at home if they got a bath in the wash-tub."
They were off, riding hard. Carol thought of Bea and waylaid them:
"But isn't it possibly the fault of the mistresses if the maids are
ungrateful? For generations we've given them the leavings of food, and
holes to live in. I don't want to boast, but I must say I don't have
much trouble with Bea. She's so friendly. The Scandinavians are sturdy
and honest----"
Mrs. Dave Dyer snapped, "Honest? Do you call it honest to hold us up for
every cent of pay they can get? I can't say that I've had any of them
steal anything (though you might call it stealing to eat so much that a
roast of beef hardly lasts three days), but just the same I don't intend
to let them think they can put anything over on ME! I always make them
pack and unpack their trunks down-stairs, right under my eyes, and then
I know they aren't being tempted to dishonesty by any slackness on MY
part!"
"How much do the maids get here?" Carol ventured.
Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker, stated in a shocked manner,
"Any place from three-fifty to five-fifty a week! I know positively that
Mrs. Clark, after swearing that she wouldn't weaken and encourage them
in their outrageous demands, went and paid five-fifty--think of it!
practically a dollar a day for unskilled work and, of course, her food
and room and a chance to do her own washing right in with the rest of
the wash. HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY, Mrs. KENNICOTT?"
"Yes! How much do you pay?" insisted half a dozen.
"W-why, I pay six a week," she feebly confessed.
They gasped. Juanita protested, "Don't you think it's hard on the rest
of us when you pay so much?" Juanita's demand was reinforced by the
universal glower.
Carol was angry. "I don't care! A maid has one of the hardest jobs on
earth. She works from ten to eighteen hours a day. She has to wash slimy
dishes and dirty clothes. She tends the children and runs to the door
with wet chapped hands and----"
Mrs. Dave Dyer broke into Carol's peroration with a furious, "That's all
very well, but believe me, I do those things myself when I'm without
a maid--and that's a good share of the time for a person that isn't
willing to yield and pay exorbitant wages!"
Carol was retorting, "But a maid does it for strangers, and all she gets
out of it is the pay----"
Their eyes were hostile. Four of them were talking at once. Vida
Sherwin's dictatorial voice cut through, took control of the revolution:
"Tut, tut, tut, tut! What angry passions--and what an idiotic
discussion! All of you getting too serious. Stop it! Carol Kennicott,
you're probably right, but you're too much ahead of the times. Juanita,
quit looking so belligerent. What is this, a card party or a hen fight?
Carol, you stop admiring yourself as the Joan of Arc of the hired girls,
or I'll spank you. You come over here and talk libraries with Ethel
Villets. Boooooo! If there's any more pecking, I'll take charge of the
hen roost myself!"
They all laughed artificially, and Carol obediently "talked libraries."
A small-town bungalow, the wives of a village doctor and a village
dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial brawl over
paying a servant a dollar more a week. Yet this insignificance echoed
cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia
and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and the orators who deemed themselves
international leaders were but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas
denouncing a million Carols, with a hundred thousand Vida Sherwins
trying to shoo away the storm.
Carol felt guilty. She devoted herself to admiring the spinsterish Miss
Villets--and immediately committed another offense against the laws of
decency.
"We haven't seen you at the library yet," Miss Villets reproved.
"I've wanted to run in so much but I've been getting settled and----I'll
probably come in so often you'll get tired of me! I hear you have such a
nice library."
"There are many who like it. We have two thousand more books than
Wakamin."
"Isn't that fine. I'm sure you are largely responsible. I've had some
experience, in St. Paul."
"So I have been informed. Not that I entirely approve of library methods
in these large cities. So careless, letting tramps and all sorts of
dirty persons practically sleep in the reading-rooms."
"I know, but the poor souls----Well, I'm sure you will agree with me in
one thing: The chief task of a librarian is to get people to read."
"You feel so? My feeling, Mrs. Kennicott, and I am merely quoting
the librarian of a very large college, is that the first duty of the
CONSCIENTIOUS librarian is to preserve the books."
"Oh!" Carol repented her "Oh." Miss Villets stiffened, and attacked:
"It may be all very well in cities, where they have unlimited funds, to
let nasty children ruin books and just deliberately tear them up, and
fresh young men take more books out than they are entitled to by the
regulations, but I'm never going to permit it in this library!"
"What if some children are destructive? They learn to read. Books are
cheaper than minds."
"Nothing is cheaper than the minds of some of these children that come
in and bother me simply because their mothers don't keep them home where
they belong. Some librarians may choose to be so wishy-washy and turn
their libraries into nursing-homes and kindergartens, but as long as I'm
in charge, the Gopher Prairie library is going to be quiet and decent,
and the books well kept!"
Carol saw that the others were listening, waiting for her to be
objectionable. She flinched before their dislike. She hastened to smile
in agreement with Miss Villets, to glance publicly at her wrist-watch,
to warble that it was "so late--have to hurry home--husband--such nice
party--maybe you were right about maids, prejudiced because Bea so
nice--such perfectly divine angel's-food, Mrs. Haydock must give me the
recipe--good-by, such happy party----"
She walked home. She reflected, "It was my fault. I was touchy. And I
opposed them so much. Only----I can't! I can't be one of them if I must
damn all the maids toiling in filthy kitchens, all the ragged hungry
children. And these women are to be my arbiters, the rest of my life!"
She ignored Bea's call from the kitchen; she ran up-stairs to the
unfrequented guest-room; she wept in terror, her body a pale arc as
she knelt beside a cumbrous black-walnut bed, beside a puffy mattress
covered with a red quilt, in a shuttered and airless room.
| Gopher Prairie is stirred into activities by the approaching winter. The men become busy fixing up the storm windows. Miles Bjornstam is a much-sought plumber in the winter season. He is the handy man who can fix anything. The poorer houses are banked to the lower windows with earth and manure. Snow fences are erected along the railroad. The farmers use home- made sleighs to travel. Winter clothes are taken out. Discussion of winter garments replaces personal gossip. The coats they wear decide the class of the wearer. The poor wear dog skin coats. Kennicott wears a raccoon Ulster and a seal cap. Carol wears a loose coat of nutria. People of Gopher Prairie love to compete with the big cities in the use of motorcar and they consider skiing and sliding to be stupid and old-fashioned. Carols group goes skating on the Ploves Lake. Then Carol tries to organize a sliding party and finds the women unwilling to leave their heaters and their bridge sessions. They, however oblige Carol once by scooting down the hill on bob sleds and by swearing that they would do it again-but they never do it again. Her attempt to get another group to go skiing meets with the same response. They go skiing once, vow that they love it, and would do it again but go back to their bridge never to try skiing again. A very discouraged Carol accompanies Dr Kennicott on his rabbit hunting trips. She goes up-town to the grocer and finds people engaged in cutting wood to stock winter fuel. She greets people merrily, buys a can of tomatoes and returns home feeling blissfully happy. But once Kennicott goes into the country to attend to a patient, and Bea takes her evening out, Carol discovers that she has nothing to do. Carol finds that her household chores and shopping trips cannot satisfy her longing for activity. She feels her scope for useful activity to be very limited. She could have children, or start her reformation campaign, or become a part of the study club, or play bridge, or participate in the activities of the church. Kennicott does not want children until they become financially better off. She decides therefore to start with her reforms. She realizes that she has to become a part of the town if she wants to reform it. She wonders about how the people react to her. She observes the way people talk to her and realizes that Chet Dashaway sounded impersonal and Howland seemed to be curt. She also feels infuriated that she has to care for what people think about her. One clear morning Carol gives in to the urge to run down the street and jump across a welter of slush and notices the disapproving glances of the ladies from behind the window curtains. She never dares to run or shout in the public again. The members of Jolly Seventeen are young married women with their husbands as associate members. Once a week the women play bridge and once a month the men and women have supper and bridge parties. Carol attends the Jolly Seventeen-bridge session at Juanita Haydock's house soon after she decides to find out what the ladies think of her. She has to apologize for not learning to play bridge. Mrs. Dave Dyer remarks that Carol did not seem to appreciate the honor of the membership to the club because she got it so easily. Carol notices Mrs. Dashaway nudge her neighbor. She also feels that she is being treated brusquely, when she tries to talk about another bobsled party. She finds that she is being ignored and she does not like it. So when Rita Simmons admires her steel buckles, she feels happy. When Mrs. Howland remarks that her new couch is too broad, she feels irritated. Her effort to make peace earns another rebuff from Mrs. Howland. Carol feels very haughty and receives more comments. | summary |
CHAPTER VIII
"DON'T I, in looking for things to do, show that I'm not attentive
enough to Will? Am I impressed enough by his work? I will be. Oh, I will
be. If I can't be one of the town, if I must be an outcast----"
When Kennicott came home she bustled, "Dear, you must tell me a lot more
about your cases. I want to know. I want to understand."
"Sure. You bet." And he went down to fix the furnace.
At supper she asked, "For instance, what did you do today?"
"Do today? How do you mean?"
"Medically. I want to understand----"
"Today? Oh, there wasn't much of anything: couple chumps with
bellyaches, and a sprained wrist, and a fool woman that thinks she wants
to kill herself because her husband doesn't like her and----Just routine
work."
"But the unhappy woman doesn't sound routine!"
"Her? Just case of nerves. You can't do much with these marriage
mix-ups."
"But dear, PLEASE, will you tell me about the next case that you do
think is interesting?"
"Sure. You bet. Tell you about anything that----Say that's pretty good
salmon. Get it at Howland's?"
II
Four days after the Jolly Seventeen debacle Vida Sherwin called and
casually blew Carol's world to pieces.
"May I come in and gossip a while?" she said, with such excess of bright
innocence that Carol was uneasy. Vida took off her furs with a bounce,
she sat down as though it were a gymnasium exercise, she flung out:
"Feel disgracefully good, this weather! Raymond Wutherspoon says if he
had my energy he'd be a grand opera singer. I always think this climate
is the finest in the world, and my friends are the dearest people in the
world, and my work is the most essential thing in the world. Probably
I fool myself. But I know one thing for certain: You're the pluckiest
little idiot in the world."
"And so you are about to flay me alive." Carol was cheerful about it.
"Am I? Perhaps. I've been wondering--I know that the third party to a
squabble is often the most to blame: the one who runs between A and B
having a beautiful time telling each of them what the other has said.
But I want you to take a big part in vitalizing Gopher Prairie and
so----Such a very unique opportunity and----Am I silly?"
"I know what you mean. I was too abrupt at the Jolly Seventeen."
"It isn't that. Matter of fact, I'm glad you told them some wholesome
truths about servants. (Though perhaps you were just a bit tactless.)
It's bigger than that. I wonder if you understand that in a secluded
community like this every newcomer is on test? People cordial to her
but watching her all the time. I remember when a Latin teacher came here
from Wellesley, they resented her broad A. Were sure it was affected. Of
course they have discussed you----"
"Have they talked about me much?"
"My dear!"
"I always feel as though I walked around in a cloud, looking out at
others but not being seen. I feel so inconspicuous and so normal--so
normal that there's nothing about me to discuss. I can't realize that
Mr. and Mrs. Haydock must gossip about me." Carol was working up a small
passion of distaste. "And I don't like it. It makes me crawly to think
of their daring to talk over all I do and say. Pawing me over! I resent
it. I hate----"
"Wait, child! Perhaps they resent some things in you. I want you to try
and be impersonal. They'd paw over anybody who came in new. Didn't you,
with newcomers in College?"
"Yes."
"Well then! Will you be impersonal? I'm paying you the compliment of
supposing that you can be. I want you to be big enough to help me make
this town worth while."
"I'll be as impersonal as cold boiled potatoes. (Not that I shall ever
be able to help you 'make the town worth while.') What do they say about
me? Really. I want to know."
"Of course the illiterate ones resent your references to anything
farther away than Minneapolis. They're so suspicious--that's it,
suspicious. And some think you dress too well."
"Oh, they do, do they! Shall I dress in gunny-sacking to suit them?"
"Please! Are you going to be a baby?"
"I'll be good," sulkily.
"You certainly will, or I won't tell you one single thing. You must
understand this: I'm not asking you to change yourself. Just want you
to know what they think. You must do that, no matter how absurd their
prejudices are, if you're going to handle them. Is it your ambition to
make this a better town, or isn't it?"
"I don't know whether it is or not!"
"Why--why----Tut, tut, now, of course it is! Why, I depend on you.
You're a born reformer."
"I am not--not any more!"
"Of course you are."
"Oh, if I really could help----So they think I'm affected?"
"My lamb, they do! Now don't say they're nervy. After all, Gopher
Prairie standards are as reasonable to Gopher Prairie as Lake Shore
Drive standards are to Chicago. And there's more Gopher Prairies than
there are Chicagos. Or Londons. And----I'll tell you the whole story:
They think you're showing off when you say 'American' instead of
'Ammurrican.' They think you're too frivolous. Life's so serious to them
that they can't imagine any kind of laughter except Juanita's snortling.
Ethel Villets was sure you were patronizing her when----"
"Oh, I was not!"
"----you talked about encouraging reading; and Mrs. Elder thought you
were patronizing when you said she had 'such a pretty little car.' She
thinks it's an enormous car! And some of the merchants say you're too
flip when you talk to them in the store and----"
"Poor me, when I was trying to be friendly!"
"----every housewife in town is doubtful about your being so chummy with
your Bea. All right to be kind, but they say you act as though she were
your cousin. (Wait now! There's plenty more.) And they think you were
eccentric in furnishing this room--they think the broad couch and that
Japanese dingus are absurd. (Wait! I know they're silly.) And I guess
I've heard a dozen criticize you because you don't go to church oftener
and----"
"I can't stand it--I can't bear to realize that they've been saying all
these things while I've been going about so happily and liking them. I
wonder if you ought to have told me? It will make me self-conscious."
"I wonder the same thing. Only answer I can get is the old saw about
knowledge being power. And some day you'll see how absorbing it is to
have power, even here; to control the town----Oh, I'm a crank. But I do
like to see things moving."
"It hurts. It makes these people seem so beastly and treacherous, when
I've been perfectly natural with them. But let's have it all. What did
they say about my Chinese house-warming party?"
"Why, uh----"
"Go on. Or I'll make up worse things than anything you can tell me."
"They did enjoy it. But I guess some of them felt you were showing
off--pretending that your husband is richer than he is."
"I can't----Their meanness of mind is beyond any horrors I could
imagine. They really thought that I----And you want to 'reform' people
like that when dynamite is so cheap? Who dared to say that? The rich or
the poor?"
"Fairly well assorted."
"Can't they at least understand me well enough to see that though I
might be affected and culturine, at least I simply couldn't commit that
other kind of vulgarity? If they must know, you may tell them, with my
compliments, that Will makes about four thousand a year, and the party
cost half of what they probably thought it did. Chinese things are not
very expensive, and I made my own costume----"
"Stop it! Stop beating me! I know all that. What they meant was: they
felt you were starting dangerous competition by giving a party such as
most people here can't afford. Four thousand is a pretty big income for
this town."
"I never thought of starting competition. Will you believe that it was
in all love and friendliness that I tried to give them the gayest party
I could? It was foolish; it was childish and noisy. But I did mean it so
well."
"I know, of course. And it certainly is unfair of them to make fun of
your having that Chinese food--chow men, was it?--and to laugh about
your wearing those pretty trousers----"
Carol sprang up, whimpering, "Oh, they didn't do that! They didn't poke
fun at my feast, that I ordered so carefully for them! And my little
Chinese costume that I was so happy making--I made it secretly, to
surprise them. And they've been ridiculing it, all this while!"
She was huddled on the couch.
Vida was stroking her hair, muttering, "I shouldn't----"
Shrouded in shame, Carol did not know when Vida slipped away. The
clock's bell, at half past five, aroused her. "I must get hold of myself
before Will comes. I hope he never knows what a fool his wife is. . . .
Frozen, sneering, horrible hearts."
Like a very small, very lonely girl she trudged up-stairs, slow step by
step, her feet dragging, her hand on the rail. It was not her husband
to whom she wanted to run for protection--it was her father, her smiling
understanding father, dead these twelve years.
III
Kennicott was yawning, stretched in the largest chair, between the
radiator and a small kerosene stove.
Cautiously, "Will dear, I wonder if the people here don't criticize me
sometimes? They must. I mean: if they ever do, you mustn't let it bother
you."
"Criticize you? Lord, I should say not. They all keep telling me you're
the swellest girl they ever saw."
"Well, I've just fancied----The merchants probably think I'm too fussy
about shopping. I'm afraid I bore Mr. Dashaway and Mr. Howland and Mr.
Ludelmeyer."
"I can tell you how that is. I didn't want to speak of it but since
you've brought it up: Chet Dashaway probably resents the fact that you
got this new furniture down in the Cities instead of here. I didn't want
to raise any objection at the time but----After all, I make my money
here and they naturally expect me to spend it here."
"If Mr. Dashaway will kindly tell me how any civilized person can
furnish a room out of the mortuary pieces that he calls----" She
remembered. She said meekly, "But I understand."
"And Howland and Ludelmeyer----Oh, you've probably handed 'em a few
roasts for the bum stocks they carry, when you just meant to jolly 'em.
But rats, what do we care! This is an independent town, not like these
Eastern holes where you have to watch your step all the time, and live
up to fool demands and social customs, and a lot of old tabbies always
busy criticizing. Everybody's free here to do what he wants to." He said
it with a flourish, and Carol perceived that he believed it. She turned
her breath of fury into a yawn.
"By the way, Carrie, while we're talking of this: Of course I like
to keep independent, and I don't believe in this business of binding
yourself to trade with the man that trades with you unless you really
want to, but same time: I'd be just as glad if you dealt with Jenson or
Ludelmeyer as much as you ran, instead of Howland & Gould, who go to Dr.
Gould every last time, and the whole tribe of 'em the same way. I don't
see why I should be paying out my good money for groceries and having
them pass it on to Terry Gould!"
"I've gone to Howland & Gould because they're better, and cleaner."
"I know. I don't mean cut them out entirely. Course Jenson is
tricky--give you short weight--and Ludelmeyer is a shiftless old Dutch
hog. But same time, I mean let's keep the trade in the family whenever
it is convenient, see how I mean?"
"I see."
"Well, guess it's about time to turn in."
He yawned, went out to look at the thermometer, slammed the door, patted
her head, unbuttoned his waistcoat, yawned, wound the clock, went down
to look at the furnace, yawned, and clumped up-stairs to bed, casually
scratching his thick woolen undershirt.
Till he bawled, "Aren't you ever coming up to bed?" she sat unmoving.
| Carol decides to take more interest in Kennicotts work. But her attempt to get Kennicott to tell her about his work draws a blank because he does not find anything interesting enough to tell. Vida calls on her after the showdown at the Jolly Seventeen. Carol feels uneasy. Vida tells her about how the people of Gopher Prairie watch the new comers closely. They have been watching and commenting about Carol too. Carol is indignant because it never occurred to her that she was being watched. Vida gives her an account of how they criticized her. Regarding her clothes, the opinion was that she was showing off. They thought that she talked in an affected manner because she said American instead of Ammurrican as they did. Because they are serious about life, her idea of life as that of fun and joy is suspect. When she speaks to the librarian about encouraging the reading habit, Miss Villets feels that Carol is being very condescending. When Carol admired Mrs. Elders pretty little car Mrs. Elder feels offended because she considered her car to be a big one. They disapprove of Carols friendliness with her maid Bea. Her way of decorating the house is considered to be odd. She is criticized for not going to the church. Carol feels very upset because she likes them all very much and considers them to be her friends. Yet she wants to know what they thought about her party. She learns that they thought that she was pretending that her husband was richer than he really was and that she was starting a competition by giving such a grand party which many of them can not afford. They had criticized the food and also the pretty trousers that she had worn. Carol collapses on the couch and does not notice Vidas departure. Feeling shamed and unhappy she wants to run to her father for comfort. When Kennicott returns, she tries to find out from him what his friends thought of her. Kennicott reveals that Chet Dashaway was unhappy because she ordered the furniture from Minneapolis instead of buying it from him. He also tells her that she should buy the provision from Ludelmeyer or Jenson because they are his patients. When Carol clarifies that Howland and Gould are better and cleaner he argues that he earned money through them so they would like to earn through him. He assures her that Gopher Prairie is an independent town and they need not watch their step and bother about what people said. Yet he would like Carol to keep his interest in mind. Carol feels very unhappy. | summary |
CHAPTER IX
I
SHE had tripped into the meadow to teach the lambs a pretty educational
dance and found that the lambs were wolves. There was no way out between
their pressing gray shoulders. She was surrounded by fangs and sneering
eyes.
She could not go on enduring the hidden derision. She wanted to flee.
She wanted to hide in the generous indifference of cities. She practised
saying to Kennicott, "Think perhaps I'll run down to St. Paul for a few
days." But she could not trust herself to say it carelessly; could not
abide his certain questioning.
Reform the town? All she wanted was to be tolerated!
She could not look directly at people. She flushed and winced before
citizens who a week ago had been amusing objects of study, and in their
good-mornings she heard a cruel sniggering.
She encountered Juanita Haydock at Ole Jenson's grocery. She besought,
"Oh, how do you do! Heavens, what beautiful celery that is!"
"Yes, doesn't it look fresh. Harry simply has to have his celery on
Sunday, drat the man!"
Carol hastened out of the shop exulting, "She didn't make fun of me. . . .
Did she?"
In a week she had recovered from consciousness of insecurity, of shame
and whispering notoriety, but she kept her habit of avoiding people. She
walked the streets with her head down. When she spied Mrs. McGanum or
Mrs. Dyer ahead she crossed over with an elaborate pretense of looking
at a billboard. Always she was acting, for the benefit of every one she
saw--and for the benefit of the ambushed leering eyes which she did not
see.
She perceived that Vida Sherwin had told the truth. Whether she entered
a store, or swept the back porch, or stood at the bay-window in the
living-room, the village peeped at her. Once she had swung along the
street triumphant in making a home. Now she glanced at each house, and
felt, when she was safely home, that she had won past a thousand
enemies armed with ridicule. She told herself that her sensitiveness
was preposterous, but daily she was thrown into panic. She saw curtains
slide back into innocent smoothness. Old women who had been entering
their houses slipped out again to stare at her--in the wintry quiet she
could hear them tiptoeing on their porches. When she had for a blessed
hour forgotten the searchlight, when she was scampering through a chill
dusk, happy in yellow windows against gray night, her heart checked
as she realized that a head covered with a shawl was thrust up over a
snow-tipped bush to watch her.
She admitted that she was taking herself too seriously; that villagers
gape at every one. She became placid, and thought well of her
philosophy. But next morning she had a shock of shame as she entered
Ludelmeyer's. The grocer, his clerk, and neurotic Mrs. Dave Dyer had been
giggling about something. They halted, looked embarrassed, babbled about
onions. Carol felt guilty. That evening when Kennicott took her to call
on the crochety Lyman Casses, their hosts seemed flustered at their
arrival. Kennicott jovially hooted, "What makes you so hang-dog, Lym?"
The Casses tittered feebly.
Except Dave Dyer, Sam Clark, and Raymie Wutherspoon, there were no
merchants of whose welcome Carol was certain. She knew that she read
mockery into greetings but she could not control her suspicion, could
not rise from her psychic collapse. She alternately raged and flinched
at the superiority of the merchants. They did not know that they
were being rude, but they meant to have it understood that they were
prosperous and "not scared of no doctor's wife." They often said, "One
man's as good as another--and a darn sight better." This motto, however,
they did not commend to farmer customers who had had crop failures. The
Yankee merchants were crabbed; and Ole Jenson, Ludelmeyer, and Gus Dahl,
from the "Old Country," wished to be taken for Yankees. James Madison
Howland, born in New Hampshire, and Ole Jenson, born in Sweden, both
proved that they were free American citizens by grunting, "I don't
know whether I got any or not," or "Well, you can't expect me to get it
delivered by noon."
It was good form for the customers to fight back. Juanita Haydock
cheerfully jabbered, "You have it there by twelve or I'll snatch that
fresh delivery-boy bald-headed." But Carol had never been able to play
the game of friendly rudeness; and now she was certain that she never
would learn it. She formed the cowardly habit of going to Axel Egge's.
Axel was not respectable and rude. He was still a foreigner, and he
expected to remain one. His manner was heavy and uninterrogative. His
establishment was more fantastic than any cross-roads store. No one save
Axel himself could find anything. A part of the assortment of children's
stockings was under a blanket on a shelf, a part in a tin ginger-snap
box, the rest heaped like a nest of black-cotton snakes upon a
flour-barrel which was surrounded by brooms, Norwegian Bibles, dried
cod for ludfisk, boxes of apricots, and a pair and a half of lumbermen's
rubber-footed boots. The place was crowded with Scandinavian farmwives,
standing aloof in shawls and ancient fawn-colored leg o' mutton jackets,
awaiting the return of their lords. They spoke Norwegian or Swedish, and
looked at Carol uncomprehendingly. They were a relief to her--they were
not whispering that she was a poseur.
But what she told herself was that Axel Egge's was "so picturesque and
romantic."
It was in the matter of clothes that she was most self-conscious.
When she dared to go shopping in her new checked suit with the
black-embroidered sulphur collar, she had as good as invited all of
Gopher Prairie (which interested itself in nothing so intimately as in
new clothes and the cost thereof) to investigate her. It was a smart
suit with lines unfamiliar to the dragging yellow and pink frocks of the
town. The Widow Bogart's stare, from her porch, indicated, "Well I
never saw anything like that before!" Mrs. McGanum stopped Carol at
the notions shop to hint, "My, that's a nice suit--wasn't it terribly
expensive?" The gang of boys in front of the drug store commented, "Hey,
Pudgie, play you a game of checkers on that dress." Carol could not
endure it. She drew her fur coat over the suit and hastily fastened the
buttons, while the boys snickered.
II
No group angered her quite so much as these staring young roues.
She had tried to convince herself that the village, with its fresh air,
its lakes for fishing and swimming, was healthier than the artificial
city. But she was sickened by glimpses of the gang of boys from fourteen
to twenty who loafed before Dyer's Drug Store, smoking cigarettes,
displaying "fancy" shoes and purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped
buttons, whistling the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, "Oh, you baby-doll"
at every passing girl.
She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind Del Snafflin's
barber shop, and shaking dice in "The Smoke House," and gathered in
a snickering knot to listen to the "juicy stories" of Bert Tybee, the
bartender of the Minniemashie House. She heard them smacking moist lips
over every love-scene at the Rosebud Movie Palace. At the counter of the
Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful messes of decayed
bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream, and gelatinous ice-cream, they
screamed to one another, "Hey, lemme 'lone," "Quit dog-gone you, looka
what you went and done, you almost spilled my glass swater," "Like hell
I did," "Hey, gol darn your hide, don't you go sticking your coffin
nail in my i-scream," "Oh you Batty, how juh like dancing with Tillie
McGuire, last night? Some squeezing, heh, kid?"
By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered that this
was the only virile and amusing manner in which boys could function;
that boys who were not compounded of the gutter and the mining-camp
were mollycoddles and unhappy. She had taken this for granted. She had
studied the boys pityingly, but impersonally. It had not occurred to her
that they might touch her.
Now she was aware that they knew all about her; that they were waiting
for some affectation over which they could guffaw. No schoolgirl passed
their observation-posts more flushingly than did Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. In
shame she knew that they glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes,
speculating about her legs. Theirs were not young eyes--there was no
youth in all the town, she agonized. They were born old, grim and old
and spying and censorious.
She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel on the day when
she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock.
Cyrus N. Bogart, son of the righteous widow who lived across the alley,
was at this time a boy of fourteen or fifteen. Carol had already seen
quite enough of Cy Bogart. On her first evening in Gopher Prairie Cy
had appeared at the head of a "charivari," banging immensely upon a
discarded automobile fender. His companions were yelping in imitation
of coyotes. Kennicott had felt rather complimented; had gone out and
distributed a dollar. But Cy was a capitalist in charivaris. He returned
with an entirely new group, and this time there were three automobile
fenders and a carnival rattle. When Kennicott again interrupted his
shaving, Cy piped, "Naw, you got to give us two dollars," and he got it.
A week later Cy rigged a tic-tac to a window of the living-room, and the
tattoo out of the darkness frightened Carol into screaming. Since
then, in four months, she had beheld Cy hanging a cat, stealing melons,
throwing tomatoes at the Kennicott house, and making ski-tracks across
the lawn, and had heard him explaining the mysteries of generation,
with great audibility and dismaying knowledge. He was, in fact, a museum
specimen of what a small town, a well-disciplined public school, a
tradition of hearty humor, and a pious mother could produce from the
material of a courageous and ingenious mind.
Carol was afraid of him. Far from protesting when he set his mongrel on
a kitten, she worked hard at not seeing him.
The Kennicott garage was a shed littered with paint-cans, tools, a
lawn-mower, and ancient wisps of hay. Above it was a loft which Cy
Bogart and Earl Haydock, young brother of Harry, used as a den, for
smoking, hiding from whippings, and planning secret societies. They
climbed to it by a ladder on the alley side of the shed.
This morning of late January, two or three weeks after Vida's
revelations, Carol had gone into the stable-garage to find a hammer.
Snow softened her step. She heard voices in the loft above her:
"Ah gee, lez--oh, lez go down the lake and swipe some mushrats out of
somebody's traps," Cy was yawning.
"And get our ears beat off!" grumbled Earl Haydock.
"Gosh, these cigarettes are dandy. 'Member when we were just kids, and
used to smoke corn-silk and hayseed?"
"Yup. Gosh!"
Spit. "Silence."
"Say Earl, ma says if you chew tobacco you get consumption."
"Aw rats, your old lady is a crank."
"Yuh, that's so." Pause. "But she says she knows a fella that did."
"Aw, gee whiz, didn't Doc Kennicott used to chew tobacco all the time
before he married this-here girl from the Cities? He used to spit---Gee!
Some shot! He could hit a tree ten feet off."
This was news to the girl from the Cities.
"Say, how is she?" continued Earl.
"Huh? How's who?"
"You know who I mean, smarty."
A tussle, a thumping of loose boards, silence, weary narration from Cy:
"Mrs. Kennicott? Oh, she's all right, I guess." Relief to Carol, below.
"She gimme a hunk o' cake, one time. But Ma says she's stuck-up as hell.
Ma's always talking about her. Ma says if Mrs. Kennicott thought as much
about the doc as she does about her clothes, the doc wouldn't look so
peaked."
Spit. Silence.
"Yuh. Juanita's always talking about her, too," from Earl. "She says
Mrs. Kennicott thinks she knows it all. Juanita says she has to laugh
till she almost busts every time she sees Mrs. Kennicott peerading along
the street with that 'take a look--I'm a swell skirt' way she's got. But
gosh, I don't pay no attention to Juanita. She's meaner 'n a crab."
"Ma was telling somebody that she heard that Mrs. Kennicott claimed she
made forty dollars a week when she was on some job in the Cities, and
Ma says she knows posolutely that she never made but eighteen a week--Ma
says that when she's lived here a while she won't go round making a fool
of herself, pulling that bighead stuff on folks that know a whole lot
more than she does. They're all laughing up their sleeves at her."
"Say, jever notice how Mrs. Kennicott fusses around the house? Other
evening when I was coming over here, she'd forgot to pull down the
curtain, and I watched her for ten minutes. Jeeze, you'd 'a' died
laughing. She was there all alone, and she must 'a' spent five minutes
getting a picture straight. It was funny as hell the way she'd stick out
her finger to straighten the picture--deedle-dee, see my tunnin' 'ittle
finger, oh my, ain't I cute, what a fine long tail my cat's got!"
"But say, Earl, she's some good-looker, just the same, and O Ignatz! the
glad rags she must of bought for her wedding. Jever notice these low-cut
dresses and these thin shimmy-shirts she wears? I had a good squint at
'em when they were out on the line with the wash. And some ankles she's
got, heh?"
Then Carol fled.
In her innocence she had not known that the whole town could discuss
even her garments, her body. She felt that she was being dragged naked
down Main Street.
The moment it was dusk she pulled down the window-shades, all the shades
flush with the sill, but beyond them she felt moist fleering eyes.
III
She remembered, and tried to forget, and remembered more sharply the
vulgar detail of her husband's having observed the ancient customs
of the land by chewing tobacco. She would have preferred a prettier
vice--gambling or a mistress. For these she might have found a luxury
of forgiveness. She could not remember any fascinatingly wicked hero of
fiction who chewed tobacco. She asserted that it proved him to be a man
of the bold free West. She tried to align him with the hairy-chested
heroes of the motion-pictures. She curled on the couch a pallid softness
in the twilight, and fought herself, and lost the battle. Spitting did
not identify him with rangers riding the buttes; it merely bound him to
Gopher Prairie--to Nat Hicks the tailor and Bert Tybee the bartender.
"But he gave it up for me. Oh, what does it matter! We're all filthy in
some things. I think of myself as so superior, but I do eat and digest,
I do wash my dirty paws and scratch. I'm not a cool slim goddess on
a column. There aren't any! He gave it up for me. He stands by me,
believing that every one loves me. He's the Rock of Ages--in a storm of
meanness that's driving me mad . . . it will drive me mad."
All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when she noticed
that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled maternally at his
secret.
She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations
which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making
queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will
know hereafter), "Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying him?" She
quieted the doubt--without answering it.
IV
Kennicott had taken her north to Lac-qui-Meurt, in the Big Woods. It was
the entrance to a Chippewa Indian reservation, a sandy settlement among
Norway pines on the shore of a huge snow-glaring lake. She had her first
sight of his mother, except the glimpse at the wedding. Mrs. Kennicott
had a hushed and delicate breeding which dignified her woodeny
over-scrubbed cottage with its worn hard cushions in heavy rockers.
She had never lost the child's miraculous power of wonder. She asked
questions about books and cities. She murmured:
"Will is a dear hard-working boy but he's inclined to be too serious,
and you've taught him how to play. Last night I heard you both laughing
about the old Indian basket-seller, and I just lay in bed and enjoyed
your happiness."
Carol forgot her misery-hunting in this solidarity of family life.
She could depend upon them; she was not battling alone. Watching Mrs.
Kennicott flit about the kitchen she was better able to translate
Kennicott himself. He was matter-of-fact, yes, and incurably mature. He
didn't really play; he let Carol play with him. But he had his mother's
genius for trusting, her disdain for prying, her sure integrity.
From the two days at Lac-qui-Meurt Carol drew confidence in herself,
and she returned to Gopher Prairie in a throbbing calm like those golden
drugged seconds when, because he is for an instant free from pain, a
sick man revels in living.
A bright hard winter day, the wind shrill, black and silver clouds
booming across the sky, everything in panicky motion during the brief
light. They struggled against the surf of wind, through deep snow.
Kennicott was cheerful. He hailed Loren Wheeler, "Behave yourself while
I been away?" The editor bellowed, "B' gosh you stayed so long that
all your patients have got well!" and importantly took notes for the
Dauntless about their journey. Jackson Elder cried, "Hey, folks! How's
tricks up North?" Mrs. McGanum waved to them from her porch.
"They're glad to see us. We mean something here. These people are
satisfied. Why can't I be? But can I sit back all my life and be
satisfied with 'Hey, folks'? They want shouts on Main Street, and I want
violins in a paneled room. Why----?"
V
Vida Sherwin ran in after school a dozen times. She was tactful,
torrentially anecdotal. She had scuttled about town and plucked
compliments: Mrs. Dr. Westlake had pronounced Carol a "very sweet,
bright, cultured young woman," and Brad Bemis, the tinsmith at Clark's
Hardware Store, had declared that she was "easy to work for and awful
easy to look at."
But Carol could not yet take her in. She resented this outsider's
knowledge of her shame. Vida was not too long tolerant. She hinted,
"You're a great brooder, child. Buck up now. The town's quit criticizing
you, almost entirely. Come with me to the Thanatopsis Club. They
have some of the BEST papers, and current-events discussions--SO
interesting."
In Vida's demands Carol felt a compulsion, but she was too listless to
obey.
It was Bea Sorenson who was really her confidante.
However charitable toward the Lower Classes she may have thought
herself, Carol had been reared to assume that servants belong to
a distinct and inferior species. But she discovered that Bea was
extraordinarily like girls she had loved in college, and as a companion
altogether superior to the young matrons of the Jolly Seventeen. Daily
they became more frankly two girls playing at housework. Bea artlessly
considered Carol the most beautiful and accomplished lady in the
country; she was always shrieking, "My, dot's a swell hat!" or, "Ay
t'ink all dese ladies yoost die when dey see how elegant you do your
hair!" But it was not the humbleness of a servant, nor the hypocrisy of
a slave; it was the admiration of Freshman for Junior.
They made out the day's menus together. Though they began with
propriety, Carol sitting by the kitchen table and Bea at the sink or
blacking the stove, the conference was likely to end with both of them
by the table, while Bea gurgled over the ice-man's attempt to kiss her,
or Carol admitted, "Everybody knows that the doctor is lots more clever
than Dr. McGanum." When Carol came in from marketing, Bea plunged into
the hall to take off her coat, rub her frostied hands, and ask, "Vos
dere lots of folks up-town today?"
This was the welcome upon which Carol depended.
VI
Through her weeks of cowering there was no change in her surface life.
No one save Vida was aware of her agonizing. On her most despairing
days she chatted to women on the street, in stores. But without
the protection of Kennicott's presence she did not go to the Jolly
Seventeen; she delivered herself to the judgment of the town only when
she went shopping and on the ritualistic occasions of formal afternoon
calls, when Mrs. Lyman Cass or Mrs. George Edwin Mott, with clean gloves
and minute handkerchiefs and sealskin card-cases and countenances of
frozen approbation, sat on the edges of chairs and inquired, "Do you
find Gopher Prairie pleasing?" When they spent evenings of social
profit-and-loss at the Haydocks' or the Dyers' she hid behind Kennicott,
playing the simple bride.
Now she was unprotected. Kennicott had taken a patient to Rochester
for an operation. He would be away for two or three days. She had not
minded; she would loosen the matrimonial tension and be a fanciful girl
for a time. But now that he was gone the house was listeningly empty.
Bea was out this afternoon--presumably drinking coffee and talking about
"fellows" with her cousin Tina. It was the day for the monthly supper
and evening-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, but Carol dared not go.
She sat alone.
| Carol is frightened by the way people criticize her. She longs to be back in the city where she could be anonymous. She wishes to go away to St. Paul for a few days but does not know how to convey her wish to Kennicott. She feels painfully self-conscious in front of people and keeps wondering if they are laughing at her even when they greet her. She realizes that all she wants is to be accepted. Though she gets over her self-consciousness after a few days she keeps the habit of avoiding people. She keeps up the habit of acting all the time to avoid being criticized. She realizes that Vida had told her the truth about people watching her all the time. Even as she convinces herself that villagers do gape at every one she notices that as soon as she entered Ludlmeyers shop, the grocer, his Clark and Mrs. Dave Dyer who were giggling about something, stopped giggling and started talking about onions. When Carol and Kennicott called on the Casses, they appear to be agitated at their arrival. She suspects that everyone except Sam Clark, Dave Dyer and Raymie wutherspoon is laughing at her. They pointedly remark in her presence that one man is as good as another is. The merchants like Ole Jonson and Howland are bad tempered as if to prove that they are Americans, because American merchants are bad tempered. The customers are expected to fight back. Carol finds it difficult to play the friendly game of rudeness. Therefore she prefers to shop at Axel Egges. She prefers it also because Axel never bothers about her and his customers do not even know her. Carol becomes painfully conscious about even her clothes. Once when she wears a checked black suit, she finds Mrs. Boggart staring at her dress. Mrs. Mac Ganum asks her if it is very expensive. The boys comment that they could play a game of checkers on her skirt. The boys of the town loaf in front of Dave Dyers store wearing flashy clothes, smoking and teasing every passing girl. Carol feels sickened by their behavior. They play pool and dice in stinking rooms and listen to the bartenders juicy stories. They eat decayed bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream and gelatinous ice cream. Carol had read about the problems of boys and had the impression that they were unhappy. But the boys of Gopher Prairie terrified her by their behavior and comments. She knows that they make personal comments about her. She feels that they were born old and senile. She had seen Cyrus Bogart once hanging a cat. She had also seen him stealing melons and even throwing tomatoes at their house, and she is afraid of him. Kennicotts garage loft serves as a hiding place for them. Once Carol overhears Cyrus Bogart and Earl Haydock talking. They talk about how Kennicott used to chew tobacco and spit. Carol finds it difficult to believe that her husband had the habit. Then they discuss Carol. She learns that Mrs. Bogart thought that Kennicott looked sick because Carol paid more attention to her clothes than to her husband. They thought that she was showing off her beautiful clothes and that she fussed around the house. Then they start discussing her low cut dresses and her shapely ankles. Carol finds it impossible to listen to them anymore. . She never fails to pull down the window shades after listening to the boys. She feels ashamed that Kennicott once had the habit of chewing tobacco, which brought him down to the level of the loafers. She tries to find consolation in the fact that he gave up the habit for her sake even before she married him. | summary |
CHAPTER X
THE house was haunted, long before evening. Shadows slipped down the
walls and waited behind every chair.
Did that door move?
No. She wouldn't go to the Jolly Seventeen. She hadn't energy enough to
caper before them, to smile blandly at Juanita's rudeness. Not today.
But she did want a party. Now! If some one would come in this afternoon,
some one who liked her--Vida or Mrs. Sam Clark or old Mrs. Champ Perry
or gentle Mrs. Dr. Westlake. Or Guy Pollock! She'd telephone----
No. That wouldn't be it. They must come of themselves.
Perhaps they would.
Why not?
She'd have tea ready, anyway. If they came--splendid. If not--what did
she care? She wasn't going to yield to the village and let down; she was
going to keep up a belief in the rite of tea, to which she had always
looked forward as the symbol of a leisurely fine existence. And it would
be just as much fun, even if it was so babyish, to have tea by herself
and pretend that she was entertaining clever men. It would!
She turned the shining thought into action. She bustled to the kitchen,
stoked the wood-range, sang Schumann while she boiled the kettle, warmed
up raisin cookies on a newspaper spread on the rack in the oven. She
scampered up-stairs to bring down her filmiest tea-cloth. She arranged
a silver tray. She proudly carried it into the living-room and set it on
the long cherrywood table, pushing aside a hoop of embroidery, a volume
of Conrad from the library, copies of the Saturday Evening Post, the
Literary Digest, and Kennicott's National Geographic Magazine.
She moved the tray back and forth and regarded the effect. She shook
her head. She busily unfolded the sewing-table set it in the bay-window,
patted the tea-cloth to smoothness, moved the tray. "Some time I'll have
a mahogany tea-table," she said happily.
She had brought in two cups, two plates. For herself, a straight chair,
but for the guest the big wing-chair, which she pantingly tugged to the
table.
She had finished all the preparations she could think of. She sat and
waited. She listened for the door-bell, the telephone. Her eagerness was
stilled. Her hands drooped.
Surely Vida Sherwin would hear the summons.
She glanced through the bay-window. Snow was sifting over the ridge
of the Howland house like sprays of water from a hose. The wide
yards across the street were gray with moving eddies. The black trees
shivered. The roadway was gashed with ruts of ice.
She looked at the extra cup and plate. She looked at the wing-chair. It
was so empty.
The tea was cold in the pot. With wearily dipping fingertip she tested
it. Yes. Quite cold. She couldn't wait any longer.
The cup across from her was icily clean, glisteningly empty.
Simply absurd to wait. She poured her own cup of tea. She sat and stared
at it. What was it she was going to do now? Oh yes; how idiotic; take a
lump of sugar.
She didn't want the beastly tea.
She was springing up. She was on the couch, sobbing.
II
She was thinking more sharply than she had for weeks.
She reverted to her resolution to change the town--awaken it, prod it,
"reform" it. What if they were wolves instead of lambs? They'd eat her
all the sooner if she was meek to them. Fight or be eaten. It was easier
to change the town completely than to conciliate it! She could not take
their point of view; it was a negative thing; an intellectual squalor;
a swamp of prejudices and fears. She would have to make them take hers.
She was not a Vincent de Paul, to govern and mold a people. What of
that? The tiniest change in their distrust of beauty would be the
beginning of the end; a seed to sprout and some day with thickening
roots to crack their wall of mediocrity. If she could not, as she
desired, do a great thing nobly and with laughter, yet she need not be
content with village nothingness. She would plant one seed in the blank
wall.
Was she just? Was it merely a blank wall, this town which to three
thousand and more people was the center of the universe? Hadn't she,
returning from Lac-qui-Meurt, felt the heartiness of their greetings?
No. The ten thousand Gopher Prairies had no monopoly of greetings and
friendly hands. Sam Clark was no more loyal than girl librarians she
knew in St. Paul, the people she had met in Chicago. And those others
had so much that Gopher Prairie complacently lacked--the world of gaiety
and adventure, of music and the integrity of bronze, of remembered
mists from tropic isles and Paris nights and the walls of Bagdad, of
industrial justice and a God who spake not in doggerel hymns.
One seed. Which seed it was did not matter. All knowledge and freedom
were one. But she had delayed so long in finding that seed. Could she
do something with this Thanatopsis Club? Or should she make her house
so charming that it would be an influence? She'd make Kennicott like
poetry. That was it, for a beginning! She conceived so clear a picture
of their bending over large fair pages by the fire (in a non-existent
fireplace) that the spectral presences slipped away. Doors no longer
moved; curtains were not creeping shadows but lovely dark masses in the
dusk; and when Bea came home Carol was singing at the piano which she
had not touched for many days.
Their supper was the feast of two girls. Carol was in the dining-room,
in a frock of black satin edged with gold, and Bea, in blue gingham and
an apron, dined in the kitchen; but the door was open between, and
Carol was inquiring, "Did you see any ducks in Dahl's window?" and Bea
chanting, "No, ma'am. Say, ve have a svell time, dis afternoon. Tina she
have coffee and knackebrod, and her fella vos dere, and ve yoost laughed
and laughed, and her fella say he vos president and he going to make
me queen of Finland, and Ay stick a fedder in may hair and say Ay bane
going to go to var--oh, ve vos so foolish and ve LAUGH so!"
When Carol sat at the piano again she did not think of her husband but
of the book-drugged hermit, Guy Pollock. She wished that Pollock would
come calling.
"If a girl really kissed him, he'd creep out of his den and be human. If
Will were as literate as Guy, or Guy were as executive as Will, I think
I could endure even Gopher Prairie. It's so hard to mother Will. I
could be maternal with Guy. Is that what I want, something to mother, a
man or a baby or a town? I WILL have a baby. Some day. But to have him
isolated here all his receptive years----
"And so to bed.
"Have I found my real level in Bea and kitchen-gossip?
"Oh, I do miss you, Will. But it will be pleasant to turn over in bed as
often as I want to, without worrying about waking you up.
"Am I really this settled thing called a 'married woman'? I feel
so unmarried tonight. So free. To think that there was once a Mrs.
Kennicott who let herself worry over a town called Gopher Prairie when
there was a whole world outside it!
"Of course Will is going to like poetry."
III
A black February day. Clouds hewn of ponderous timber weighing down
on the earth; an irresolute dropping of snow specks upon the trampled
wastes. Gloom but no veiling of angularity. The lines of roofs and
sidewalks sharp and inescapable.
The second day of Kennicott's absence.
She fled from the creepy house for a walk. It was thirty below zero;
too cold to exhilarate her. In the spaces between houses the wind caught
her. It stung, it gnawed at nose and ears and aching cheeks, and she
hastened from shelter to shelter, catching her breath in the lee of a
barn, grateful for the protection of a billboard covered with ragged
posters showing layer under layer of paste-smeared green and streaky
red.
The grove of oaks at the end of the street suggested Indians, hunting,
snow-shoes, and she struggled past the earth-banked cottages to the
open country, to a farm and a low hill corrugated with hard snow. In
her loose nutria coat, seal toque, virginal cheeks unmarked by lines of
village jealousies, she was as out of place on this dreary hillside as
a scarlet tanager on an ice-floe. She looked down on Gopher Prairie. The
snow, stretching without break from streets to devouring prairie beyond,
wiped out the town's pretense of being a shelter. The houses were black
specks on a white sheet. Her heart shivered with that still loneliness
as her body shivered with the wind.
She ran back into the huddle of streets, all the while protesting that
she wanted a city's yellow glare of shop-windows and restaurants, or the
primitive forest with hooded furs and a rifle, or a barnyard warm and
steamy, noisy with hens and cattle, certainly not these dun houses,
these yards choked with winter ash-piles, these roads of dirty snow and
clotted frozen mud. The zest of winter was gone. Three months more, till
May, the cold might drag on, with the snow ever filthier, the weakened
body less resistent. She wondered why the good citizens insisted on
adding the chill of prejudice, why they did not make the houses of their
spirits more warm and frivolous, like the wise chatterers of Stockholm
and Moscow.
She circled the outskirts of the town and viewed the slum of "Swede
Hollow." Wherever as many as three houses are gathered there will be a
slum of at least one house. In Gopher Prairie, the Sam Clarks boasted,
"you don't get any of this poverty that you find in cities--always
plenty of work--no need of charity--man got to be blame shiftless if he
don't get ahead." But now that the summer mask of leaves and grass was
gone, Carol discovered misery and dead hope. In a shack of thin boards
covered with tar-paper she saw the washerwoman, Mrs. Steinhof, working
in gray steam. Outside, her six-year-old boy chopped wood. He had a torn
jacket, muffler of a blue like skimmed milk. His hands were covered with
red mittens through which protruded his chapped raw knuckles. He halted
to blow on them, to cry disinterestedly.
A family of recently arrived Finns were camped in an abandoned stable. A
man of eighty was picking up lumps of coal along the railroad.
She did not know what to do about it. She felt that these independent
citizens, who had been taught that they belonged to a democracy, would
resent her trying to play Lady Bountiful.
She lost her loneliness in the activity of the village industries--the
railroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the wheat-elevator,
oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks on the snow, the creamery
with the sleds of farmers and piles of milk-cans, an unexplained stone
hut labeled "Danger--Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard,
where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as
he hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's small
planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and the burr of
circular saws. Most important, the Gopher Prairie Flour and Milling
Company, Lyman Cass president. Its windows were blanketed with
flour-dust, but it was the most stirring spot in town. Workmen were
wheeling barrels of flour into a box-car; a farmer sitting on sacks of
wheat in a bobsled argued with the wheat-buyer; machinery within the
mill boomed and whined, water gurgled in the ice-freed mill-race.
The clatter was a relief to Carol after months of smug houses. She
wished that she could work in the mill; that she did not belong to the
caste of professional-man's-wife.
She started for home, through the small slum. Before a tar-paper shack,
at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown dogskin coat and black plush
cap with lappets was watching her. His square face was confident,
his foxy mustache was picaresque. He stood erect, his hands in his
side-pockets, his pipe puffing slowly. He was forty-five or -six,
perhaps.
"How do, Mrs. Kennicott," he drawled.
She recalled him--the town handyman, who had repaired their furnace at
the beginning of winter.
"Oh, how do you do," she fluttered.
"My name 's Bjornstam. 'The Red Swede' they call me. Remember? Always
thought I'd kind of like to say howdy to you again."
"Ye--yes----I've been exploring the outskirts of town."
"Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and the Lutheran
minister and the priest represent the arts and sciences. Well, thunder,
we submerged tenth down here in Swede Hollow are no worse off than you
folks. Thank God, we don't have to go and purr at Juanity Haydock at the
Jolly Old Seventeen."
The Carol who regarded herself as completely adaptable was uncomfortable
at being chosen as comrade by a pipe-reeking odd-job man. Probably he
was one of her husband's patients. But she must keep her dignity.
"Yes, even the Jolly Seventeen isn't always so exciting. It's very cold
again today, isn't it. Well----"
Bjornstam was not respectfully valedictory. He showed no signs of
pulling a forelock. His eyebrows moved as though they had a life of
their own. With a subgrin he went on:
"Maybe I hadn't ought to talk about Mrs. Haydock and her Solemcholy
Seventeen in that fresh way. I suppose I'd be tickled to death if I was
invited to sit in with that gang. I'm what they call a pariah, I guess.
I'm the town badman, Mrs. Kennicott: town atheist, and I suppose I must
be an anarchist, too. Everybody who doesn't love the bankers and the
Grand Old Republican Party is an anarchist."
Carol had unconsciously slipped from her attitude of departure into an
attitude of listening, her face full toward him, her muff lowered. She
fumbled:
"Yes, I suppose so." Her own grudges came in a flood. "I don't see why
you shouldn't criticize the Jolly Seventeen if you want to. They aren't
sacred."
"Oh yes, they are! The dollar-sign has chased the crucifix clean off
the map. But then, I've got no kick. I do what I please, and I suppose I
ought to let them do the same."
"What do you mean by saying you're a pariah?"
"I'm poor, and yet I don't decently envy the rich. I'm an old bach.
I make enough money for a stake, and then I sit around by myself, and
shake hands with myself, and have a smoke, and read history, and I don't
contribute to the wealth of Brother Elder or Daddy Cass."
"You----I fancy you read a good deal."
"Yep. In a hit-or-a-miss way. I'll tell you: I'm a lone wolf. I trade
horses, and saw wood, and work in lumber-camps--I'm a first-rate
swamper. Always wished I could go to college. Though I s'pose I'd find
it pretty slow, and they'd probably kick me out."
"You really are a curious person, Mr.----"
"Bjornstam. Miles Bjornstam. Half Yank and half Swede. Usually known as
'that damn lazy big-mouthed calamity-howler that ain't satisfied with
the way we run things.' No, I ain't curious--whatever you mean by
that! I'm just a bookworm. Probably too much reading for the amount
of digestion I've got. Probably half-baked. I'm going to get in
'half-baked' first, and beat you to it, because it's dead sure to be
handed to a radical that wears jeans!"
They grinned together. She demanded:
"You say that the Jolly Seventeen is stupid. What makes you think so?"
"Oh, trust us borers into the foundation to know about your leisure
class. Fact, Mrs. Kennicott, I'll say that far as I can make out, the
only people in this man's town that do have any brains--I don't mean
ledger-keeping brains or duck-hunting brains or baby-spanking brains,
but real imaginative brains--are you and me and Guy Pollock and the
foreman at the flour-mill. He's a socialist, the foreman. (Don't tell
Lym Cass that! Lym would fire a socialist quicker than he would a
horse-thief!)"
"Indeed no, I sha'n't tell him."
"This foreman and I have some great set-to's. He's a regular old-line
party-member. Too dogmatic. Expects to reform everything from
deforestration to nosebleed by saying phrases like 'surplus value.'
Like reading the prayer-book. But same time, he's a Plato J. Aristotle
compared with people like Ezry Stowbody or Professor Mott or Julius
Flickerbaugh."
"It's interesting to hear about him."
He dug his toe into a drift, like a schoolboy. "Rats. You mean I talk
too much. Well, I do, when I get hold of somebody like you. You probably
want to run along and keep your nose from freezing."
"Yes, I must go, I suppose. But tell me: Why did you leave Miss Sherwin,
of the high school, out of your list of the town intelligentsia?"
"I guess maybe she does belong in it. From all I can hear she's in
everything and behind everything that looks like a reform--lot more
than most folks realize. She lets Mrs. Reverend Warren, the president
of this-here Thanatopsis Club, think she's running the works, but Miss
Sherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing
something. But way I figure it out----You see, I'm not interested in
these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this
barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water.
And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want
to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that
built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keel
up."
"Yes--that--that would be better. But I must run home. My poor nose is
nearly frozen."
"Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an old bach's shack
is like."
She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard that was
littered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless wash-tub. She was
disquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her the opportunity to be
delicate. He flung out his hand in a welcoming gesture which assumed
that she was her own counselor, that she was not a Respectable Married
Woman but fully a human being. With a shaky, "Well, just a moment, to
warm my nose," she glanced down the street to make sure that she was not
spied on, and bolted toward the shanty.
She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more considerate
host than the Red Swede.
He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with
amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the
shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs--one
constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank--and a row of
books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of
gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on "The
Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle."
There was but one picture--a magazine color-plate of a steep-roofed
village in the Harz Mountains which suggested kobolds and maidens with
golden hair.
Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, "Might throw open your
coat and put your feet up on the box in front of the stove." He tossed
his dogskin coat into the bunk, lowered himself into the barrel chair,
and droned on:
"Yeh, I'm probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my independence by
doing odd jobs, and that's more 'n these polite cusses like the clerks
in the banks do. When I'm rude to some slob, it may be partly because I
don't know better (and God knows I'm not no authority on trick forks
and what pants you wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it's because I
mean something. I'm about the only man in Johnson County that remembers
the joker in the Declaration of Independence about Americans being
supposed to have the right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.'
"I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at me like he wants me
to remember he's a highmuckamuck and worth two hundred thousand dollars,
and he says, 'Uh, Bjornquist----'
"'Bjornstam's my name, Ezra,' I says. HE knows my name, all rightee.
"'Well, whatever your name is,' he says, 'I understand you have a
gasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw up four cords of maple
for me,' he says.
"'So you like my looks, eh?' I says, kind of innocent.
"'What difference does that make? Want you to saw that wood before
Saturday,' he says, real sharp. Common workman going and getting fresh
with a fifth of a million dollars all walking around in a hand-me-down
fur coat!
"'Here's the difference it makes,' I says, just to devil him. 'How do
you know I like YOUR looks?' Maybe he didn't look sore! 'Nope,' I says,
thinking it all over, 'I don't like your application for a loan. Take it
to another bank, only there ain't any,' I says, and I walks off on him.
"Sure. Probably I was surly--and foolish. But I figured there had to be
ONE man in town independent enough to sass the banker!"
He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talked
on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendliness
and half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was a
proletarian philosophy.
At the door, she hinted:
"Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought you
were affected?"
"Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over
silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals thought about my
flying?"
It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of Bjornstam's scorn
which carried her through town. She faced Juanita Haydock, cocked
her head at Maud Dyer's brief nod, and came home to Bea radiant. She
telephoned Vida Sherwin to "run over this evening." She lustily played
Tschaikowsky--the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopher
of the tar-paper shack.
(When she hinted to Vida, "Isn't there a man here who amuses himself by
being irreverent to the village gods--Bjornstam, some such a name?"
the reform-leader said "Bjornstam? Oh yes. Fixes things. He's awfully
impertinent.")
IV
Kennicott had returned at midnight. At breakfast he said four several
times that he had missed her every moment.
On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, "The top o' the mornin'
to yez! Going to stop and pass the time of day mit Sam'l? Warmer, eh?
What'd the doc's thermometer say it was? Say, you folks better come
round and visit with us, one of these evenings. Don't be so dog-gone
proud, staying by yourselves."
Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator, stopped her in
the post-office, held her hand in his withered paws, peered at her
with faded eyes, and chuckled, "You are so fresh and blooming, my dear.
Mother was saying t'other day that a sight of you was better 'n a dose
of medicine."
In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively buying a modest
gray scarf. "We haven't seen you for so long," she said. "Wouldn't you
like to come in and play cribbage, some evening?" As though he meant it,
Pollock begged, "May I, really?"
While she was purchasing two yards of malines the vocal Raymie
Wutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long sallow face bobbing, and he
besought, "You've just got to come back to my department and see a pair
of patent leather slippers I set aside for you."
In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced her boots,
tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid on the slippers. She took them.
"You're a good salesman," she said.
"I'm not a salesman at all! I just like elegant things. All this is so
inartistic." He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves of
shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in rosettes, the display of
shoe-trees and tin boxes of blacking, the lithograph of a smirking
young woman with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry of
advertising, "My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection was
till I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes."
"But sometimes," Raymie sighed, "there is a pair of dainty little shoes
like these, and I set them aside for some one who will appreciate. When
I saw these I said right away, 'Wouldn't it be nice if they fitted Mrs.
Kennicott,' and I meant to speak to you first chance I had. I haven't
forgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey's!"
That evening Guy Pollock came in and, though Kennicott instantly
impressed him into a cribbage game, Carol was happy again.
V
She did not, in recovering something of her buoyancy, forget her
determination to begin the liberalizing of Gopher Prairie by the easy
and agreeable propaganda of teaching Kennicott to enjoy reading poetry
in the lamplight. The campaign was delayed. Twice he suggested that they
call on neighbors; once he was in the country. The fourth evening
he yawned pleasantly, stretched, and inquired, "Well, what'll we do
tonight? Shall we go to the movies?"
"I know exactly what we're going to do. Now don't ask questions! Come
and sit down by the table. There, are you comfy? Lean back and forget
you're a practical man, and listen to me."
It may be that she had been influenced by the managerial Vida Sherwin;
certainly she sounded as though she was selling culture. But she dropped
it when she sat on the couch, her chin in her hands, a volume of Yeats
on her knees, and read aloud.
Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town.
She was in the world of lonely things--the flutter of twilight linnets,
the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept
out of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal
glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold,
the woful incessant chanting and the----
"Heh-cha-cha!" coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She remembered that
he was the sort of person who chewed tobacco. She glared, while he
uneasily petitioned, "That's great stuff. Study it in college? I
like poetry fine--James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow--this
'Hiawatha.' Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But
I guess I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks."
With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to giggle, she
consoled him, "Then let's try some Tennyson. You've read him?"
"Tennyson? You bet. Read him in school. There's that:
And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell
When I put out to sea,
But let the----
Well, I don't remember all of it but----Oh, sure! And there's that 'I
met a little country boy who----' I don't remember exactly how it goes,
but the chorus ends up, 'We are seven.'"
"Yes. Well----Shall we try 'The Idylls of the King?' They're so full of
color."
"Go to it. Shoot." But he hastened to shelter himself behind a cigar.
She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an eye cocked on him,
and when she saw how much he was suffering she ran to him, kissed his
forehead, cried, "You poor forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent
turnip!"
"Look here now, that ain't----"
"Anyway, I sha'n't torture you any longer."
She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great deal of
emphasis:
There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the GRAND Trunk ROAD.
He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. But
when he complimented her, "That was fine. I don't know but what you
can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody," she banged the book and
suggested that they were not too late for the nine o'clock show at the
movies.
That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine
unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon and
the sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at Ole Jenson's Grocery.
But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered herself
laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an actor who stuffed
spaghetti down a woman's evening frock. For a second she loathed her
laughter; mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippi
she had walked the battlements with queens. But the celebrated cinema
jester's conceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into
unwilling tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled
through darkness.
VI
She went to the Jolly Seventeen's afternoon bridge. She had learned
the elements of the game from the Sam Clarks. She played quietly and
reasonably badly. She had no opinions on anything more polemic than
woolen union-suits, a topic on which Mrs. Howland discoursed for five
minutes. She smiled frequently, and was the complete canary-bird in her
manner of thanking the hostess, Mrs. Dave Dyer.
Her only anxious period was during the conference on husbands.
The young matrons discussed the intimacies of domesticity with a
frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol. Juanita Haydock
communicated Harry's method of shaving, and his interest in
deer-shooting. Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation,
her husband's inappreciation of liver and bacon. Maud Dyer chronicled
Dave's digestive disorders; quoted a recent bedtime controversy with
him in regard to Christian Science, socks and the sewing of buttons
upon vests; announced that she "simply wasn't going to stand his always
pawing girls when he went and got crazy-jealous if a man just danced
with her"; and rather more than sketched Dave's varieties of kisses.
So meekly did Carol give attention, so obviously was she at last
desirous of being one of them, that they looked on her fondly, and
encouraged her to give such details of her honeymoon as might be of
interest. She was embarrassed rather than resentful. She deliberately
misunderstood. She talked of Kennicott's overshoes and medical ideals
till they were thoroughly bored. They regarded her as agreeable but
green.
Till the end she labored to satisfy the inquisition. She bubbled at
Juanita, the president of the club, that she wanted to entertain them.
"Only," she said, "I don't know that I can give you any refreshments as
nice as Mrs. Dyer's salad, or that simply delicious angel's-food we had
at your house, dear."
"Fine! We need a hostess for the seventeenth of March. Wouldn't it be
awfully original if you made it a St. Patrick's Day bridge! I'll be
tickled to death to help you with it. I'm glad you've learned to play
bridge. At first I didn't hardly know if you were going to like Gopher
Prairie. Isn't it dandy that you've settled down to being homey with us!
Maybe we aren't as highbrow as the Cities, but we do have the daisiest
times and--oh, we go swimming in summer, and dances and--oh, lots of
good times. If folks will just take us as we are, I think we're a pretty
good bunch!"
"I'm sure of it. Thank you so much for the idea about having a St.
Patrick's Day bridge."
"Oh, that's nothing. I always think the Jolly Seventeen are so good at
original ideas. If you knew these other towns Wakamin and Joralemon and
all, you'd find out and realize that G. P. is the liveliest, smartest
town in the state. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan, the famous auto
manufacturer, came from here and----Yes, I think that a St. Patrick's
Day party would be awfully cunning and original, and yet not too queer
or freaky or anything."
| Though Carol opts to stay at home to avoid the scrutiny of the ladies of the Jolly Seventeen, she longs to have a party. She hopes that Vida or Guy Pollock or Mrs. Westlake would visit her. She gets tea ready, warms up raisin cookies, sets the table and waits for someone to call on her. After a long wait she breaks down and has a good cry. Her despair gives way to clear thinking. She realizes that she can not accept the outlook of the town as hers and change herself accordingly. She decides to keep up the fight to change the intellectual squalor and the prejudice around her. She feels convinced that she has to introduce at least one idea that would appeal to the people, which would eventually change their attitude. After a lot of hard thinking, she decides to make Kennicott appreciate poetry. The vision of Kennicott reading poetry along with her cheers her up and she starts singing. Her dinner and Beas chatter cheers her further and she starts dreaming of Kennicott reading poetry and Guy Pollock calling on her. On the second day of Kennicotts absence Carol finds it unbearable to stay at home and goes for a walk. The houses look defenseless against the snow covered vast prairies. The streets look bleak with dirty snow. On the outskirts of the town she sees the poverty of the people and feels sympathetic. But she knows not how to help them. The activities in the industries cheer her up. She even wishes that she could work there but knows that her social position would not permit it. On her way back home through a slum she meets Bjornstam. She recollects that he is the town handyman. He declares that even though they have no sewage system or any street cleaning in the slum he is happy to be there because he need not attend Juanitas party. He informs Carol that he is considered to be a pariah and an anarchist. He however apologizes for talking about the Jolly Seventeen without any reverence. Carol asserts that he is free to criticize them if he wants to. He tells her that their dollar power is greater than the power of the crucifix. He explains that he is considered a pariah because he does not envy the rich. He also tells her that he earns enough money. He trades horses, saws wood, works in lumber camps and is also a good swamper. But he regrets that he could not fulfil his desire to go to college. Carol wishes to know why he considers the Jolly Seventeen to be stupid. Bjornstram answers that it is because in the whole town only himself, Carol, Guy Pollock and the foreman at the flourmill had really imaginative brains. Carol wants to know why he left Vida out of the list of intelligent people. Bjornstram admits that Vida did have brains and that she was the reason behind all the reforms in the town but he dismisses them as too small to bring any real change. He invites her to have a cup of coffee. She finds his shack neat and tidy. She inspects his collection of books - poetry, a manual of gas-engines, a treatise on poultry and cattle and similar ones. He makes her feel at home without fussing around her and talks about his opinion of the people of Gopher Prairie and about how he despised ignorance. Carol understands his proletarian philosophy and senses his need for friends. She asks him if he would worry if people thought that he was affected. He asserts that he would not care for them. She ret urns home with a new vigor and even invites Vida over. She learns that Vida considers Bjornstam to be impertinent. | summary |
CHAPTER XI
I
SHE had often been invited to the weekly meetings of the Thanatopsis,
the women's study club, but she had put it off. The Thanatopsis was,
Vida Sherwin promised, "such a cozy group, and yet it puts you in touch
with all the intellectual thoughts that are going on everywhere."
Early in March Mrs. Westlake, wife of the veteran physician, marched
into Carol's living-room like an amiable old pussy and suggested, "My
dear, you really must come to the Thanatopsis this afternoon. Mrs.
Dawson is going to be leader and the poor soul is frightened to death.
She wanted me to get you to come. She says she's sure you will brighten
up the meeting with your knowledge of books and writings. (English
poetry is our topic today.) So shoo! Put on your coat!"
"English poetry? Really? I'd love to go. I didn't realize you were
reading poetry."
"Oh, we're not so slow!"
Mrs. Luke Dawson, wife of the richest man in town, gaped at them
piteously when they appeared. Her expensive frock of beaver-colored
satin with rows, plasters, and pendants of solemn brown beads was
intended for a woman twice her size. She stood wringing her hands in
front of nineteen folding chairs, in her front parlor with its faded
photograph of Minnehaha Falls in 1890, its "colored enlargement" of
Mr. Dawson, its bulbous lamp painted with sepia cows and mountains and
standing on a mortuary marble column.
She creaked, "O Mrs. Kennicott, I'm in such a fix. I'm supposed to lead
the discussion, and I wondered would you come and help?"
"What poet do you take up today?" demanded Carol, in her library tone of
"What book do you wish to take out?"
"Why, the English ones."
"Not all of them?"
"W-why yes. We're learning all of European Literature this year.
The club gets such a nice magazine, Culture Hints, and we follow its
programs. Last year our subject was Men and Women of the Bible, and next
year we'll probably take up Furnishings and China. My, it does make a
body hustle to keep up with all these new culture subjects, but it is
improving. So will you help us with the discussion today?"
On her way over Carol had decided to use the Thanatopsis as the tool
with which to liberalize the town. She had immediately conceived
enormous enthusiasm; she had chanted, "These are the real people. When
the housewives, who bear the burdens, are interested in poetry, it means
something. I'll work with them--for them--anything!"
Her enthusiasm had become watery even before thirteen women resolutely
removed their overshoes, sat down meatily, ate peppermints, dusted their
fingers, folded their hands, composed their lower thoughts, and invited
the naked muse of poetry to deliver her most improving message. They had
greeted Carol affectionately, and she tried to be a daughter to them.
But she felt insecure. Her chair was out in the open, exposed to their
gaze, and it was a hard-slatted, quivery, slippery church-parlor chair,
likely to collapse publicly and without warning. It was impossible to
sit on it without folding the hands and listening piously.
She wanted to kick the chair and run. It would make a magnificent
clatter.
She saw that Vida Sherwin was watching her. She pinched her wrist, as
though she were a noisy child in church, and when she was decent and
cramped again, she listened.
Mrs. Dawson opened the meeting by sighing, "I'm sure I'm glad to see you
all here today, and I understand that the ladies have prepared a number
of very interesting papers, this is such an interesting subject, the
poets, they have been an inspiration for higher thought, in fact wasn't
it Reverend Benlick who said that some of the poets have been as much an
inspiration as a good many of the ministers, and so we shall be glad to
hear----"
The poor lady smiled neuralgically, panted with fright, scrabbled about
the small oak table to find her eye-glasses, and continued, "We
will first have the pleasure of hearing Mrs. Jenson on the subject
'Shakespeare and Milton.'"
Mrs. Ole Jenson said that Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died 1616. He
lived in London, England, and in Stratford-on-Avon, which many American
tourists loved to visit, a lovely town with many curios and old houses
well worth examination. Many people believed that Shakespeare was the
greatest play-wright who ever lived, also a fine poet. Not much was
known about his life, but after all that did not really make so much
difference, because they loved to read his numerous plays, several of
the best known of which she would now criticize.
Perhaps the best known of his plays was "The Merchant of Venice," having
a beautiful love story and a fine appreciation of a woman's brains,
which a woman's club, even those who did not care to commit themselves
on the question of suffrage, ought to appreciate. (Laughter.) Mrs.
Jenson was sure that she, for one, would love to be like Portia. The
play was about a Jew named Shylock, and he didn't want his daughter to
marry a Venice gentleman named Antonio----
Mrs. Leonard Warren, a slender, gray, nervous woman, president of the
Thanatopsis and wife of the Congregational pastor, reported the birth
and death dates of Byron, Scott, Moore, Burns; and wound up:
"Burns was quite a poor boy and he did not enjoy the advantages we enjoy
today, except for the advantages of the fine old Scotch kirk where he
heard the Word of God preached more fearlessly than even in the finest
big brick churches in the big and so-called advanced cities of today,
but he did not have our educational advantages and Latin and the other
treasures of the mind so richly strewn before the, alas, too ofttimes
inattentive feet of our youth who do not always sufficiently appreciate
the privileges freely granted to every American boy rich or poor. Burns
had to work hard and was sometimes led by evil companionship into low
habits. But it is morally instructive to know that he was a good
student and educated himself, in striking contrast to the loose ways and
so-called aristocratic society-life of Lord Byron, on which I have just
spoken. And certainly though the lords and earls of his day may have
looked down upon Burns as a humble person, many of us have greatly
enjoyed his pieces about the mouse and other rustic subjects, with their
message of humble beauty--I am so sorry I have not got the time to quote
some of them."
Mrs. George Edwin Mott gave ten minutes to Tennyson and Browning.
Mrs. Nat Hicks, a wry-faced, curiously sweet woman, so awed by her
betters that Carol wanted to kiss her, completed the day's grim task by
a paper on "Other Poets." The other poets worthy of consideration were
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Gray, Mrs. Hemans, and Kipling.
Miss Ella Stowbody obliged with a recital of "The Recessional" and
extracts from "Lalla Rookh." By request, she gave "An Old Sweetheart of
Mine" as encore.
Gopher Prairie had finished the poets. It was ready for the next week's
labor: English Fiction and Essays.
Mrs. Dawson besought, "Now we will have a discussion of the papers, and
I am sure we shall all enjoy hearing from one who we hope to have as a
new member, Mrs. Kennicott, who with her splendid literary training and
all should be able to give us many pointers and--many helpful pointers."
Carol had warned herself not to be so "beastly supercilious." She had
insisted that in the belated quest of these work-stained women was
an aspiration which ought to stir her tears. "But they're so
self-satisfied. They think they're doing Burns a favor. They don't
believe they have a 'belated quest.' They're sure that they have culture
salted and hung up." It was out of this stupor of doubt that Mrs.
Dawson's summons roused her. She was in a panic. How could she speak
without hurting them?
Mrs. Champ Perry leaned over to stroke her hand and whisper, "You look
tired, dearie. Don't you talk unless you want to."
Affection flooded Carol; she was on her feet, searching for words and
courtesies:
"The only thing in the way of suggestion----I know you are following
a definite program, but I do wish that now you've had such a splendid
introduction, instead of going on with some other subject next year you
could return and take up the poets more in detail. Especially actual
quotations--even though their lives are so interesting and, as Mrs.
Warren said, so morally instructive. And perhaps there are several poets
not mentioned today whom it might be worth while considering--Keats, for
instance, and Matthew Arnold and Rossetti and Swinburne. Swinburne would
be such a--well, that is, such a contrast to life as we all enjoy it in
our beautiful Middle-west----"
She saw that Mrs. Leonard Warren was not with her. She captured her by
innocently continuing:
"Unless perhaps Swinburne tends to be, uh, more outspoken than you, than
we really like. What do you think, Mrs. Warren?"
The pastor's wife decided, "Why, you've caught my very thoughts, Mrs.
Kennicott. Of course I have never READ Swinburne, but years ago, when
he was in vogue, I remember Mr. Warren saying that Swinburne (or was
it Oscar Wilde? but anyway:) he said that though many so-called
intellectual people posed and pretended to find beauty in Swinburne,
there can never be genuine beauty without the message from the heart.
But at the same time I do think you have an excellent idea, and though
we have talked about Furnishings and China as the probable subject for
next year, I believe that it would be nice if the program committee
would try to work in another day entirely devoted to English poetry! In
fact, Madame Chairman, I so move you."
When Mrs. Dawson's coffee and angel's-food had helped them to recover
from the depression caused by thoughts of Shakespeare's death they all
told Carol that it was a pleasure to have her with them. The membership
committee retired to the sitting-room for three minutes and elected her
a member.
And she stopped being patronizing.
She wanted to be one of them. They were so loyal and kind. It was they
who would carry out her aspiration. Her campaign against village sloth
was actually begun! On what specific reform should she first loose
her army? During the gossip after the meeting Mrs. George Edwin Mott
remarked that the city hall seemed inadequate for the splendid modern
Gopher Prairie. Mrs. Nat Hicks timidly wished that the young people
could have free dances there--the lodge dances were so exclusive. The
city hall. That was it! Carol hurried home.
She had not realized that Gopher Prairie was a city. From Kennicott she
discovered that it was legally organized with a mayor and city-council
and wards. She was delighted by the simplicity of voting one's self a
metropolis. Why not?
She was a proud and patriotic citizen, all evening.
II
She examined the city hall, next morning. She had remembered it only as
a bleak inconspicuousness. She found it a liver-colored frame coop half
a block from Main Street. The front was an unrelieved wall of clapboards
and dirty windows. It had an unobstructed view of a vacant lot and Nat
Hicks's tailor shop. It was larger than the carpenter shop beside it,
but not so well built.
No one was about. She walked into the corridor. On one side was the
municipal court, like a country school; on the other, the room of the
volunteer fire company, with a Ford hose-cart and the ornamental helmets
used in parades, at the end of the hall, a filthy two-cell jail, now
empty but smelling of ammonia and ancient sweat. The whole second story
was a large unfinished room littered with piles of folding chairs, a
lime-crusted mortar-mixing box, and the skeletons of Fourth of July
floats covered with decomposing plaster shields and faded red, white,
and blue bunting. At the end was an abortive stage. The room was large
enough for the community dances which Mrs. Nat Hicks advocated. But
Carol was after something bigger than dances.
In the afternoon she scampered to the public library.
The library was open three afternoons and four evenings a week. It was
housed in an old dwelling, sufficient but unattractive. Carol caught
herself picturing pleasanter reading-rooms, chairs for children, an art
collection, a librarian young enough to experiment.
She berated herself, "Stop this fever of reforming everything! I WILL be
satisfied with the library! The city hall is enough for a beginning.
And it's really an excellent library. It's--it isn't so bad. . . . Is
it possible that I am to find dishonesties and stupidity in every
human activity I encounter? In schools and business and government and
everything? Is there never any contentment, never any rest?"
She shook her head as though she were shaking off water, and hastened
into the library, a young, light, amiable presence, modest in unbuttoned
fur coat, blue suit, fresh organdy collar, and tan boots roughened from
scuffling snow. Miss Villets stared at her, and Carol purred, "I was so
sorry not to see you at the Thanatopsis yesterday. Vida said you might
come."
"Oh. You went to the Thanatopsis. Did you enjoy it?"
"So much. Such good papers on the poets." Carol lied resolutely. "But I
did think they should have had you give one of the papers on poetry!"
"Well----Of course I'm not one of the bunch that seem to have the
time to take and run the club, and if they prefer to have papers on
literature by other ladies who have no literary training--after all, why
should I complain? What am I but a city employee!"
"You're not! You're the one person that does--that does--oh, you do so
much. Tell me, is there, uh----Who are the people who control the club?"
Miss Villets emphatically stamped a date in the front of "Frank on the
Lower Mississippi" for a small flaxen boy, glowered at him as though she
were stamping a warning on his brain, and sighed:
"I wouldn't put myself forward or criticize any one for the world, and
Vida is one of my best friends, and such a splendid teacher, and there
is no one in town more advanced and interested in all movements, but I
must say that no matter who the president or the committees are, Vida
Sherwin seems to be behind them all the time, and though she is always
telling me about what she is pleased to call my 'fine work in the
library,' I notice that I'm not often called on for papers, though Mrs.
Lyman Cass once volunteered and told me that she thought my paper on
'The Cathedrals of England' was the most interesting paper we had, the
year we took up English and French travel and architecture. But----And
of course Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Warren are very important in the club, as
you might expect of the wives of the superintendent of schools and
the Congregational pastor, and indeed they are both very cultured,
but----No, you may regard me as entirely unimportant. I'm sure what I
say doesn't matter a bit!"
"You're much too modest, and I'm going to tell Vida so, and, uh, I
wonder if you can give me just a teeny bit of your time and show me
where the magazine files are kept?"
She had won. She was profusely escorted to a room like a grandmother's
attic, where she discovered periodicals devoted to house-decoration and
town-planning, with a six-year file of the National Geographic. Miss
Villets blessedly left her alone. Humming, fluttering pages with
delighted fingers, Carol sat cross-legged on the floor, the magazines in
heaps about her.
She found pictures of New England streets: the dignity of Falmouth, the
charm of Concord, Stockbridge and Farmington and Hillhouse Avenue. The
fairy-book suburb of Forest Hills on Long Island. Devonshire cottages
and Essex manors and a Yorkshire High Street and Port Sunlight. The
Arab village of Djeddah--an intricately chased jewel-box. A town in
California which had changed itself from the barren brick fronts and
slatternly frame sheds of a Main Street to a way which led the eye down
a vista of arcades and gardens.
Assured that she was not quite mad in her belief that a small American
town might be lovely, as well as useful in buying wheat and selling
plows, she sat brooding, her thin fingers playing a tattoo on her
cheeks. She saw in Gopher Prairie a Georgian city hall: warm brick walls
with white shutters, a fanlight, a wide hall and curving stair. She
saw it the common home and inspiration not only of the town but of
the country about. It should contain the court-room (she couldn't get
herself to put in a jail), public library, a collection of excellent
prints, rest-room and model kitchen for farmwives, theater, lecture
room, free community ballroom, farm-bureau, gymnasium. Forming about it
and influenced by it, as mediaeval villages gathered about the castle,
she saw a new Georgian town as graceful and beloved as Annapolis or that
bowery Alexandria to which Washington rode.
All this the Thanatopsis Club was to accomplish with no difficulty
whatever, since its several husbands were the controllers of business
and politics. She was proud of herself for this practical view.
She had taken only half an hour to change a wire-fenced potato-plot into
a walled rose-garden. She hurried out to apprize Mrs. Leonard Warren, as
president of the Thanatopsis, of the miracle which had been worked.
III
At a quarter to three Carol had left home; at half-past four she had
created the Georgian town; at a quarter to five she was in the dignified
poverty of the Congregational parsonage, her enthusiasm pattering upon
Mrs. Leonard Warren like summer rain upon an old gray roof; at two
minutes to five a town of demure courtyards and welcoming dormer windows
had been erected, and at two minutes past five the entire town was as
flat as Babylon.
Erect in a black William and Mary chair against gray and speckly-brown
volumes of sermons and Biblical commentaries and Palestine geographies
upon long pine shelves, her neat black shoes firm on a rag-rug, herself
as correct and low-toned as her background, Mrs. Warren listened without
comment till Carol was quite through, then answered delicately:
"Yes, I think you draw a very nice picture of what might easily come to
pass--some day. I have no doubt that such villages will be found on the
prairie--some day. But if I might make just the least little criticism:
it seems to me that you are wrong in supposing either that the city hall
would be the proper start, or that the Thanatopsis would be the right
instrument. After all, it's the churches, isn't it, that are the
real heart of the community. As you may possibly know, my husband
is prominent in Congregational circles all through the state for
his advocacy of church-union. He hopes to see all the evangelical
denominations joined in one strong body, opposing Catholicism and
Christian Science, and properly guiding all movements that make for
morality and prohibition. Here, the combined churches could afford
a splendid club-house, maybe a stucco and half-timber building with
gargoyles and all sorts of pleasing decorations on it, which, it seems
to me, would be lots better to impress the ordinary class of people than
just a plain old-fashioned colonial house, such as you describe. And
that would be the proper center for all educational and pleasurable
activities, instead of letting them fall into the hands of the
politicians."
"I don't suppose it will take more than thirty or forty years for the
churches to get together?" Carol said innocently.
"Hardly that long even; things are moving so rapidly. So it would be a
mistake to make any other plans."
Carol did not recover her zeal till two days after, when she tried Mrs.
George Edwin Mott, wife of the superintendent of schools.
Mrs. Mott commented, "Personally, I am terribly busy with dressmaking
and having the seamstress in the house and all, but it would be splendid
to have the other members of the Thanatopsis take up the question.
Except for one thing: First and foremost, we must have a new
schoolbuilding. Mr. Mott says they are terribly cramped."
Carol went to view the old building. The grades and the high school were
combined in a damp yellow-brick structure with the narrow windows of an
antiquated jail--a hulk which expressed hatred and compulsory training.
She conceded Mrs. Mott's demand so violently that for two days she
dropped her own campaign. Then she built the school and city hall
together, as the center of the reborn town.
She ventured to the lead-colored dwelling of Mrs. Dave Dyer. Behind the
mask of winter-stripped vines and a wide porch only a foot above the
ground, the cottage was so impersonal that Carol could never visualize
it. Nor could she remember anything that was inside it. But Mrs. Dyer
was personal enough. With Carol, Mrs. Howland, Mrs. McGanum, and Vida
Sherwin she was a link between the Jolly Seventeen and the serious
Thanatopsis (in contrast to Juanita Haydock, who unnecessarily boasted
of being a "lowbrow" and publicly stated that she would "see herself
in jail before she'd write any darned old club papers"). Mrs. Dyer was
superfeminine in the kimono in which she received Carol. Her skin was
fine, pale, soft, suggesting a weak voluptuousness. At afternoon-coffees
she had been rude but now she addressed Carol as "dear," and insisted on
being called Maud. Carol did not quite know why she was uncomfortable
in this talcum-powder atmosphere, but she hastened to get into the fresh
air of her plans.
Maud Dyer granted that the city hall wasn't "so very nice," yet, as Dave
said, there was no use doing anything about it till they received
an appropriation from the state and combined a new city hall with
a national guard armory. Dave had given verdict, "What these mouthy
youngsters that hang around the pool-room need is universal military
training. Make men of 'em."
Mrs. Dyer removed the new schoolbuilding from the city hall:
"Oh, so Mrs. Mott has got you going on her school craze! She's been
dinging at that till everybody's sick and tired. What she really wants
is a big office for her dear bald-headed Gawge to sit around and look
important in. Of course I admire Mrs. Mott, and I'm very fond of
her, she's so brainy, even if she does try to butt in and run the
Thanatopsis, but I must say we're sick of her nagging. The old building
was good enough for us when we were kids! I hate these would-be women
politicians, don't you?"
IV
The first week of March had given promise of spring and stirred Carol
with a thousand desires for lakes and fields and roads. The snow was
gone except for filthy woolly patches under trees, the thermometer
leaped in a day from wind-bitten chill to itchy warmth. As soon as Carol
was convinced that even in this imprisoned North, spring could exist
again, the snow came down as abruptly as a paper storm in a theater; the
northwest gale flung it up in a half blizzard; and with her hope of a
glorified town went hope of summer meadows.
But a week later, though the snow was everywhere in slushy heaps, the
promise was unmistakable. By the invisible hints in air and sky and
earth which had aroused her every year through ten thousand generations
she knew that spring was coming. It was not a scorching, hard, dusty day
like the treacherous intruder of a week before, but soaked with languor,
softened with a milky light. Rivulets were hurrying in each alley; a
calling robin appeared by magic on the crab-apple tree in the Howlands'
yard. Everybody chuckled, "Looks like winter is going," and "This 'll
bring the frost out of the roads--have the autos out pretty soon
now--wonder what kind of bass-fishing we'll get this summer--ought to be
good crops this year."
Each evening Kennicott repeated, "We better not take off our Heavy
Underwear or the storm windows too soon--might be 'nother spell of
cold--got to be careful 'bout catching cold--wonder if the coal will
last through?"
The expanding forces of life within her choked the desire for reforming.
She trotted through the house, planning the spring cleaning with Bea.
When she attended her second meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing
about remaking the town. She listened respectably to statistics on
Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, De
Quincey, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed, constituted the writers
of English Fiction and Essays.
Not till she inspected the rest-room did she again become a fanatic.
She had often glanced at the store-building which had been turned into
a refuge in which farmwives could wait while their husbands transacted
business. She had heard Vida Sherwin and Mrs. Warren caress the virtue
of the Thanatopsis in establishing the rest-room and in sharing with the
city council the expense of maintaining it. But she had never entered it
till this March day.
She went in impulsively; nodded at the matron, a plump worthy widow
named Nodelquist, and at a couple of farm-women who were meekly rocking.
The rest-room resembled a second-hand store. It was furnished with
discarded patent rockers, lopsided reed chairs, a scratched pine table,
a gritty straw mat, old steel engravings of milkmaids being morally
amorous under willow-trees, faded chromos of roses and fish, and a
kerosene stove for warming lunches. The front window was darkened by
torn net curtains and by a mound of geraniums and rubber-plants.
While she was listening to Mrs. Nodelquist's account of how many
thousands of farmers' wives used the rest-room every year, and how much
they "appreciated the kindness of the ladies in providing them with
this lovely place, and all free," she thought, "Kindness nothing! The
kind-ladies' husbands get the farmers' trade. This is mere commercial
accommodation. And it's horrible. It ought to be the most charming room
in town, to comfort women sick of prairie kitchens. Certainly it ought
to have a clear window, so that they can see the metropolitan life go
by. Some day I'm going to make a better rest-room--a club-room. Why!
I've already planned that as part of my Georgian town hall!"
So it chanced that she was plotting against the peace of the Thanatopsis
at her third meeting (which covered Scandinavian, Russian, and Polish
Literature, with remarks by Mrs. Leonard Warren on the sinful paganism
of the Russian so-called church). Even before the entrance of the
coffee and hot rolls Carol seized on Mrs. Champ Perry, the kind and
ample-bosomed pioneer woman who gave historic dignity to the modern
matrons of the Thanatopsis. She poured out her plans. Mrs. Perry nodded
and stroked Carol's hand, but at the end she sighed:
"I wish I could agree with you, dearie. I'm sure you're one of the
Lord's anointed (even if we don't see you at the Baptist Church as often
as we'd like to)! But I'm afraid you're too tender-hearted. When Champ
and I came here we teamed-it with an ox-cart from Sauk Centre to Gopher
Prairie, and there was nothing here then but a stockade and a few
soldiers and some log cabins. When we wanted salt pork and gunpowder, we
sent out a man on horseback, and probably he was shot dead by the
Injuns before he got back. We ladies--of course we were all farmers
at first--we didn't expect any rest-room in those days. My, we'd have
thought the one they have now was simply elegant! My house was roofed
with hay and it leaked something terrible when it rained--only dry place
was under a shelf.
"And when the town grew up we thought the new city hall was real fine.
And I don't see any need for dance-halls. Dancing isn't what it was,
anyway. We used to dance modest, and we had just as much fun as all
these young folks do now with their terrible Turkey Trots and hugging
and all. But if they must neglect the Lord's injunction that young girls
ought to be modest, then I guess they manage pretty well at the K.
P. Hall and the Oddfellows', even if some of tie lodges don't always
welcome a lot of these foreigners and hired help to all their dances.
And I certainly don't see any need of a farm-bureau or this domestic
science demonstration you talk about. In my day the boys learned to farm
by honest sweating, and every gal could cook, or her ma learned her
how across her knee! Besides, ain't there a county agent at Wakamin? He
comes here once a fortnight, maybe. That's enough monkeying with this
scientific farming--Champ says there's nothing to it anyway.
"And as for a lecture hall--haven't we got the churches? Good deal
better to listen to a good old-fashioned sermon than a lot of geography
and books and things that nobody needs to know--more 'n enough heathen
learning right here in the Thanatopsis. And as for trying to make a
whole town in this Colonial architecture you talk about----I do love
nice things; to this day I run ribbons into my petticoats, even if
Champ Perry does laugh at me, the old villain! But just the same I don't
believe any of us old-timers would like to see the town that we worked
so hard to build being tore down to make a place that wouldn't look like
nothing but some Dutch story-book and not a bit like the place we loved.
And don't you think it's sweet now? All the trees and lawns? And such
comfy houses, and hot-water heat and electric lights and telephones
and cement walks and everything? Why, I thought everybody from the Twin
Cities always said it was such a beautiful town!"
Carol forswore herself; declared that Gopher Prairie had the color of
Algiers and the gaiety of Mardi Gras.
Yet the next afternoon she was pouncing on Mrs. Lyman Cass, the
hook-nosed consort of the owner of the flour-mill.
Mrs. Cass's parlor belonged to the crammed-Victorian school, as Mrs.
Luke Dawson's belonged to the bare-Victorian. It was furnished on two
principles: First, everything must resemble something else. A rocker had
a back like a lyre, a near-leather seat imitating tufted cloth, and
arms like Scotch Presbyterian lions; with knobs, scrolls, shields, and
spear-points on unexpected portions of the chair. The second principle
of the crammed-Victorian school was that every inch of the interior must
be filled with useless objects.
The walls of Mrs. Cass's parlor were plastered with "hand-painted"
pictures, "buckeye" pictures, of birch-trees, news-boys, puppies, and
church-steeples on Christmas Eve; with a plaque depicting the Exposition
Building in Minneapolis, burnt-wood portraits of Indian chiefs of no
tribe in particular, a pansy-decked poetic motto, a Yard of Roses, and
the banners of the educational institutions attended by the Casses' two
sons--Chicopee Falls Business College and McGillicuddy University. One
small square table contained a card-receiver of painted china with a rim
of wrought and gilded lead, a Family Bible, Grant's Memoirs, the latest
novel by Mrs. Gene Stratton Porter, a wooden model of a Swiss chalet
which was also a bank for dimes, a polished abalone shell holding one
black-headed pin and one empty spool, a velvet pin-cushion in a gilded
metal slipper with "Souvenir of Troy, N. Y." stamped on the toe, and an
unexplained red glass dish which had warts.
Mrs. Cass's first remark was, "I must show you all my pretty things and
art objects."
She piped, after Carol's appeal:
"I see. You think the New England villages and Colonial houses are so
much more cunning than these Middlewestern towns. I'm glad you feel that
way. You'll be interested to know I was born in Vermont."
"And don't you think we ought to try to make Gopher Prai----"
"My gracious no! We can't afford it. Taxes are much too high as it is.
We ought to retrench, and not let the city council spend another cent.
Uh----Don't you think that was a grand paper Mrs. Westlake read about
Tolstoy? I was so glad she pointed out how all his silly socialistic
ideas failed."
What Mrs. Cass said was what Kennicott said, that evening. Not in twenty
years would the council propose or Gopher Prairie vote the funds for a
new city hall.
V
Carol had avoided exposing her plans to Vida Sherwin. She was shy of the
big-sister manner; Vida would either laugh at her or snatch the idea and
change it to suit herself. But there was no other hope. When Vida came
in to tea Carol sketched her Utopia.
Vida was soothing but decisive:
"My dear, you're all off. I would like to see it: a real gardeny place
to shut out the gales. But it can't be done. What could the clubwomen
accomplish?"
"Their husbands are the most important men in town. They ARE the town!"
"But the town as a separate unit is not the husband of the Thanatopsis.
If you knew the trouble we had in getting the city council to spend the
money and cover the pumping-station with vines! Whatever you may think
of Gopher Prairie women, they're twice as progressive as the men."
"But can't the men see the ugliness?"
"They don't think it's ugly. And how can you prove it? Matter of taste.
Why should they like what a Boston architect likes?"
"What they like is to sell prunes!"
"Well, why not? Anyway, the point is that you have to work from the
inside, with what we have, rather than from the outside, with foreign
ideas. The shell ought not to be forced on the spirit. It can't be! The
bright shell has to grow out of the spirit, and express it. That means
waiting. If we keep after the city council for another ten years they
MAY vote the bonds for a new school."
"I refuse to believe that if they saw it the big men would be too
tight-fisted to spend a few dollars each for a building--think!--dancing
and lectures and plays, all done co-operatively!"
"You mention the word 'co-operative' to the merchants and they'll
lynch you! The one thing they fear more than mail-order houses is that
farmers' co-operative movements may get started."
"The secret trails that lead to scared pocket-books! Always, in
everything! And I don't have any of the fine melodrama of fiction: the
dictagraphs and speeches by torchlight. I'm merely blocked by stupidity.
Oh, I know I'm a fool. I dream of Venice, and I live in Archangel and
scold because the Northern seas aren't tender-colored. But at least they
sha'n't keep me from loving Venice, and sometime I'll run away----All
right. No more."
She flung out her hands in a gesture of renunciation.
VI
Early May; wheat springing up in blades like grass; corn and potatoes
being planted; the land humming. For two days there had been steady
rain. Even in town the roads were a furrowed welter of mud, hideous to
view and difficult to cross. Main Street was a black swamp from curb to
curb; on residence streets the grass parking beside the walks oozed gray
water. It was prickly hot, yet the town was barren under the bleak sky.
Softened neither by snow nor by waving boughs the houses squatted and
scowled, revealed in their unkempt harshness.
As she dragged homeward Carol looked with distaste at her clay-loaded
rubbers, the smeared hem of her skirt. She passed Lyman Cass's
pinnacled, dark-red, hulking house. She waded a streaky yellow pool.
This morass was not her home, she insisted. Her home, and her beautiful
town, existed in her mind. They had already been created. The task was
done. What she really had been questing was some one to share them with
her. Vida would not; Kennicott could not.
Some one to share her refuge.
Suddenly she was thinking of Guy Pollock.
She dismissed him. He was too cautious. She needed a spirit as young and
unreasonable as her own. And she would never find it. Youth would never
come singing. She was beaten.
Yet that same evening she had an idea which solved the rebuilding of
Gopher Prairie.
Within ten minutes she was jerking the old-fashioned bell-pull of Luke
Dawson. Mrs. Dawson opened the door and peered doubtfully about the
edge of it. Carol kissed her cheek, and frisked into the lugubrious
sitting-room.
"Well, well, you're a sight for sore eyes!" chuckled Mr. Dawson,
dropping his newspaper, pushing his spectacles back on his forehead.
"You seem so excited," sighed Mrs. Dawson.
"I am! Mr. Dawson, aren't you a millionaire?"
He cocked his head, and purred, "Well, I guess if I cashed in on all my
securities and farm-holdings and my interests in iron on the Mesaba and
in Northern timber and cut-over lands, I could push two million dollars
pretty close, and I've made every cent of it by hard work and having the
sense to not go out and spend every----"
"I think I want most of it from you!"
The Dawsons glanced at each other in appreciation of the jest; and
he chirped, "You're worse than Reverend Benlick! He don't hardly ever
strike me for more than ten dollars--at a time!"
"I'm not joking. I mean it! Your children in the Cities are grown-up and
well-to-do. You don't want to die and leave your name unknown. Why not
do a big, original thing? Why not rebuild the whole town? Get a great
architect, and have him plan a town that would be suitable to the
prairie. Perhaps he'd create some entirely new form of architecture.
Then tear down all these shambling buildings----"
Mr. Dawson had decided that she really did mean it. He wailed, "Why,
that would cost at least three or four million dollars!"
"But you alone, just one man, have two of those millions!"
"Me? Spend all my hard-earned cash on building houses for a lot of
shiftless beggars that never had the sense to save their money? Not
that I've ever been mean. Mama could always have a hired girl to do the
work--when we could find one. But her and I have worked our fingers to
the bone and--spend it on a lot of these rascals----?"
"Please! Don't be angry! I just mean--I mean----Oh, not spend all of it,
of course, but if you led off the list, and the others came in, and if
they heard you talk about a more attractive town----"
"Why now, child, you've got a lot of notions. Besides what's the matter
with the town? Looks good to me. I've had people that have traveled
all over the world tell me time and again that Gopher Prairie is the
prettiest place in the Middlewest. Good enough for anybody. Certainly
good enough for Mama and me. Besides! Mama and me are planning to go
out to Pasadena and buy a bungalow and live there."
VII
She had met Miles Bjornstam on the street. For the second of welcome
encounter this workman with the bandit mustache and the muddy overalls
seemed nearer than any one else to the credulous youth which she was
seeking to fight beside her, and she told him, as a cheerful anecdote, a
little of her story.
He grunted, "I never thought I'd be agreeing with Old Man Dawson, the
penny-pinching old land-thief--and a fine briber he is, too. But you
got the wrong slant. You aren't one of the people--yet. You want to do
something for the town. I don't! I want the town to do something for
itself. We don't want old Dawson's money--not if it's a gift, with a
string. We'll take it away from him, because it belongs to us. You got
to get more iron and cussedness into you. Come join us cheerful bums,
and some day--when we educate ourselves and quit being bums--we'll take
things and run 'em straight."
He had changed from her friend to a cynical man in overalls. She could
not relish the autocracy of "cheerful bums."
She forgot him as she tramped the outskirts of town.
She had replaced the city hall project by an entirely new and highly
exhilarating thought of how little was done for these unpicturesque
poor.
VIII
The spring of the plains is not a reluctant virgin but brazen and soon
away. The mud roads of a few days ago are powdery dust and the puddles
beside them have hardened into lozenges of black sleek earth like
cracked patent leather.
Carol was panting as she crept to the meeting of the Thanatopsis program
committee which was to decide the subject for next fall and winter.
Madam Chairman (Miss Ella Stowbody in an oyster-colored blouse) asked if
there was any new business.
Carol rose. She suggested that the Thanatopsis ought to help the poor
of the town. She was ever so correct and modern. She did not, she said,
want charity for them, but a chance of self-help; an employment bureau,
direction in washing babies and making pleasing stews, possibly a
municipal fund for home-building. "What do you think of my plans, Mrs.
Warren?" she concluded.
Speaking judiciously, as one related to the church by marriage, Mrs.
Warren gave verdict:
"I'm sure we're all heartily in accord with Mrs. Kennicott in feeling
that wherever genuine poverty is encountered, it is not only noblesse
oblige but a joy to fulfil our duty to the less fortunate ones. But I
must say it seems to me we should lose the whole point of the thing by
not regarding it as charity. Why, that's the chief adornment of the true
Christian and the church! The Bible has laid it down for our guidance.
'Faith, Hope, and CHARITY,' it says, and, 'The poor ye have with ye
always,' which indicates that there never can be anything to these
so-called scientific schemes for abolishing charity, never! And isn't it
better so? I should hate to think of a world in which we were deprived
of all the pleasure of giving. Besides, if these shiftless folks realize
they're getting charity, and not something to which they have a right,
they're so much more grateful."
"Besides," snorted Miss Ella Stowbody, "they've been fooling you, Mrs.
Kennicott. There isn't any real poverty here. Take that Mrs. Steinhof
you speak of: I send her our washing whenever there's too much for our
hired girl--I must have sent her ten dollars' worth the past year alone!
I'm sure Papa would never approve of a city home-building fund. Papa
says these folks are fakers. Especially all these tenant farmers that
pretend they have so much trouble getting seed and machinery. Papa
says they simply won't pay their debts. He says he's sure he hates to
foreclose mortgages, but it's the only way to make them respect the
law."
"And then think of all the clothes we give these people!" said Mrs.
Jackson Elder.
Carol intruded again. "Oh yes. The clothes. I was going to speak of
that. Don't you think that when we give clothes to the poor, if we
do give them old ones, we ought to mend them first and make them as
presentable as we can? Next Christmas when the Thanatopsis makes its
distribution, wouldn't it be jolly if we got together and sewed on the
clothes, and trimmed hats, and made them----"
"Heavens and earth, they have more time than we have! They ought to be
mighty good and grateful to get anything, no matter what shape it's in.
I know I'm not going to sit and sew for that lazy Mrs. Vopni, with all
I've got to do!" snapped Ella Stowbody.
They were glaring at Carol. She reflected that Mrs. Vopni, whose husband
had been killed by a train, had ten children.
But Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks was smiling. Mrs. Wilks was the proprietor of
Ye Art Shoppe and Magazine and Book Store, and the reader of the small
Christian Science church. She made it all clear:
"If this class of people had an understanding of Science and that we are
the children of God and nothing can harm us, they wouldn't be in error
and poverty."
Mrs. Jackson Elder confirmed, "Besides, it strikes me the club is
already doing enough, with tree-planting and the anti-fly campaign and
the responsibility for the rest-room--to say nothing of the fact that
we've talked of trying to get the railroad to put in a park at the
station!"
"I think so too!" said Madam Chairman. She glanced uneasily at Miss
Sherwin. "But what do you think, Vida?"
Vida smiled tactfully at each of the committee, and announced, "Well, I
don't believe we'd better start anything more right now. But it's been
a privilege to hear Carol's dear generous ideas, hasn't it! Oh! There is
one thing we must decide on at once. We must get together and oppose
any move on the part of the Minneapolis clubs to elect another State
Federation president from the Twin Cities. And this Mrs. Edgar Potbury
they're putting forward--I know there are people who think she's a
bright interesting speaker, but I regard her as very shallow. What do
you say to my writing to the Lake Ojibawasha Club, telling them that if
their district will support Mrs. Warren for second vice-president, we'll
support their Mrs. Hagelton (and such a dear, lovely, cultivated woman,
too) for president."
"Yes! We ought to show up those Minneapolis folks!" Ella Stowbody
said acidly. "And oh, by the way, we must oppose this movement of Mrs.
Potbury's to have the state clubs come out definitely in favor of woman
suffrage. Women haven't any place in politics. They would lose all their
daintiness and charm if they became involved in these horried plots
and log-rolling and all this awful political stuff about scandal and
personalities and so on."
All--save one--nodded. They interrupted the formal business-meeting
to discuss Mrs. Edgar Potbury's husband, Mrs. Potbury's income, Mrs.
Potbury's sedan, Mrs. Potbury's residence, Mrs. Potbury's oratorical
style, Mrs. Potbury's mandarin evening coat, Mrs. Potbury's coiffure,
and Mrs. Potbury's altogether reprehensible influence on the State
Federation of Women's Clubs.
Before the program committee adjourned they took three minutes to
decide which of the subjects suggested by the magazine Culture Hints,
Furnishings and China, or The Bible as Literature, would be better for
the coming year. There was one annoying incident. Mrs. Dr. Kennicott
interfered and showed off again. She commented, "Don't you think that we
already get enough of the Bible in our churches and Sunday Schools?"
Mrs. Leonard Warren, somewhat out of order but much more out of temper,
cried, "Well upon my word! I didn't suppose there was any one who felt
that we could get enough of the Bible! I guess if the Grand Old Book
has withstood the attacks of infidels for these two thousand years it is
worth our SLIGHT consideration!"
"Oh, I didn't mean----" Carol begged. Inasmuch as she did mean, it was
hard to be extremely lucid. "But I wish, instead of limiting ourselves
either to the Bible, or to anecdotes about the Brothers Adam's wigs,
which Culture Hints seems to regard as the significant point about
furniture, we could study some of the really stirring ideas that are
springing up today--whether it's chemistry or anthropology or labor
problems--the things that are going to mean so terribly much."
Everybody cleared her polite throat.
Madam Chairman inquired, "Is there any other discussion? Will some
one make a motion to adopt the suggestion of Vida Sherwin--to take up
Furnishings and China?"
It was adopted, unanimously.
"Checkmate!" murmured Carol, as she held up her hand.
Had she actually believed that she could plant a seed of liberalism
in the blank wall of mediocrity? How had she fallen into the folly of
trying to plant anything whatever in a wall so smooth and sun-glazed,
and so satisfying to the happy sleepers within?
| Though Carol had been invited to the meetings of the Thanatopsis several times, she had never considered attending any. One day Mrs. Westlake invites Carol to the meeting. Mrs. Dawson has to preside over the meeting but she feels nervous. So she wants Carol to give her moral support. When Carol learns that papers on English poetry are to be read, Carols interest is kindled and she attends the meeting. Seated uncomfortably, she listens to the papers on English poets. She finds them concentrating more on their lives than on their works. Mrs. Ole Jenson informs the gathering that Shakespeares Merchant of Venice is a beautiful love story, which appreciates the fine brains of women. The story, according to Mrs. Jenson is of a Jew named Shylock, who does not want his daughter to marry a Venice gentleman named Antonio. Mrs. Leonard Warren, wife of the pastor reads a paper on Byron, Scott, Moore and Burns, informing the dates of birth and death. She highlights the misfortunes suffered by Burns and criticizes the loose ways of Lord Byron. Papers written in similar fashion about Tennyson, Browning, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Gray, Mrs.Hemans and Kipling are read by each of the members. Carol is requested to give her comments. She does not want to offend them. So she just suggests that they should read the works of Keats, Mathew Arnold, Rossetti and Swinburne. They decide to have one more reading of English poetry. Carol is elected a member of the Thanatopsis. She hears the remark that the city hall seemed inadequate and feels delighted that the town has decided to call itself a city. The next day she goes to inspect the city hall. It looks bleak and unattractive. It contains the municipal court, the volunteer Fire Company and a two-cell jail. The hall is on the second floor, cluttered with folding chairs, Fourth July floats and a stage. She visits the library, the same afternoon. She tells Miss. Villets that she should have read a paper on English poetry at the Thanatopsis meeting. Miss. Villets grumbles that Vida never asks her to read a paper. She comments that Mrs. Mott the school superintendents wife and Mrs. Warren the pastors wife are more important. Carol tells her that she is too modest about the good work she does in the library and requests her to show her the magazine section. She is escorted to the room where the magazines are kept and is left alone. She finds beautiful pictures of New England streets with gardens and arcades and beautiful architecture. She creates a mental picture of a beautiful city hall with a wide hall, a courtroom, public library, rest room, and a theater, lecture hall, a ballroom and a gymnasium. Since the husbands of the members of the Thanatopsis club are the most influential people, she believes that her dream city hall can be constructed without much ado. She describes her dream hall to Mrs. Warren, who listens to her without any comments. Then she assures Carol that her husband, the pastor was trying to unite all the churches together. Once it is done there would be a beautiful church instead of the city hall, Carol has in mind. Then the church would be the center of all activities. She informs Carol that things are moving fast and they will accomplish their dream soon. Carol recovers her zeal only after two days to approach Mrs. Mott with her dreams. Mrs. Mott agrees with Carol, but points out that a better school building had priority. Carol gets the idea of building the city hall and the school together and approches Mrs. Dyer with her plan. Maud Dyer informs Carol that her husband wanted to wait for an appropriation from the state and combine the city hall with a National Guard armory, so that the youngsters could be given military training. As for the school building she asserts that it was good enough for them when they were students, so it should be good enough for the present generation. The arrival of spring after the long winter revives everybodys spirits. Carol too is distracted from her dreams of rebuilding the town by the plans of spring cleaning her house. She listens to papers on Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Elliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, Dequincy and Mrs. Humphry Ward under the topic of English fiction and essays. | summary |
CHAPTER XII
ONE week of authentic spring, one rare sweet week of May, one tranquil
moment between the blast of winter and the charge of summer. Daily Carol
walked from town into flashing country hysteric with new life.
One enchanted hour when she returned to youth and a belief in the
possibility of beauty.
She had walked northward toward the upper shore of Plover Lake, taking
to the railroad track, whose directness and dryness make it the natural
highway for pedestrians on the plains. She stepped from tie to tie, in
long strides. At each road-crossing she had to crawl over a cattle-guard
of sharpened timbers. She walked the rails, balancing with arms
extended, cautious heel before toe. As she lost balance her body bent
over, her arms revolved wildly, and when she toppled she laughed aloud.
The thick grass beside the track, coarse and prickly with many burnings,
hid canary-yellow buttercups and the mauve petals and woolly sage-green
coats of the pasque flowers. The branches of the kinnikinic brush were
red and smooth as lacquer on a saki bowl.
She ran down the gravelly embankment, smiled at children gathering
flowers in a little basket, thrust a handful of the soft pasque flowers
into the bosom of her white blouse. Fields of springing wheat drew her
from the straight propriety of the railroad and she crawled through the
rusty barbed-wire fence. She followed a furrow between low wheat blades
and a field of rye which showed silver lights as it flowed before the
wind. She found a pasture by the lake. So sprinkled was the pasture with
rag-baby blossoms and the cottony herb of Indian tobacco that it spread
out like a rare old Persian carpet of cream and rose and delicate green.
Under her feet the rough grass made a pleasant crunching. Sweet winds
blew from the sunny lake beside her, and small waves sputtered on the
meadowy shore. She leaped a tiny creek bowered in pussy-willow buds. She
was nearing a frivolous grove of birch and poplar and wild plum trees.
The poplar foliage had the downiness of a Corot arbor; the green and
silver trunks were as candid as the birches, as slender and lustrous
as the limbs of a Pierrot. The cloudy white blossoms of the plum trees
filled the grove with a springtime mistiness which gave an illusion of
distance.
She ran into the wood, crying out for joy of freedom regained after
winter. Choke-cherry blossoms lured her from the outer sun-warmed spaces
to depths of green stillness, where a submarine light came through the
young leaves. She walked pensively along an abandoned road. She found a
moccasin-flower beside a lichen-covered log. At the end of the road she
saw the open acres--dipping rolling fields bright with wheat.
"I believe! The woodland gods still live! And out there, the great land.
It's beautiful as the mountains. What do I care for Thanatopsises?"
She came out on the prairie, spacious under an arch of boldly cut
clouds. Small pools glittered. Above a marsh red-winged blackbirds
chased a crow in a swift melodrama of the air. On a hill was silhouetted
a man following a drag. His horse bent its neck and plodded, content.
A path took her to the Corinth road, leading back to town. Dandelions
glowed in patches amidst the wild grass by the way. A stream golloped
through a concrete culvert beneath the road. She trudged in healthy
weariness.
A man in a bumping Ford rattled up beside her, hailed, "Give you a lift,
Mrs. Kennicott?"
"Thank you. It's awfully good of you, but I'm enjoying the walk."
"Great day, by golly. I seen some wheat that must of been five inches
high. Well, so long."
She hadn't the dimmest notion who he was, but his greeting warmed her.
This countryman gave her a companionship which she had never (whether
by her fault or theirs or neither) been able to find in the matrons and
commercial lords of the town.
Half a mile from town, in a hollow between hazelnut bushes and a brook,
she discovered a gipsy encampment: a covered wagon, a tent, a bunch of
pegged-out horses. A broad-shouldered man was squatted on his heels,
holding a frying-pan over a camp-fire. He looked toward her. He was
Miles Bjornstam.
"Well, well, what you doing out here?" he roared. "Come have a hunk o'
bacon. Pete! Hey, Pete!"
A tousled person came from behind the covered wagon.
"Pete, here's the one honest-to-God lady in my bum town. Come on, crawl
in and set a couple minutes, Mrs. Kennicott. I'm hiking off for all
summer."
The Red Swede staggered up, rubbed his cramped knees, lumbered to the
wire fence, held the strands apart for her. She unconsciously smiled at
him as she went through. Her skirt caught on a barb; he carefully freed
it.
Beside this man in blue flannel shirt, baggy khaki trousers, uneven
suspenders, and vile felt hat, she was small and exquisite.
The surly Pete set out an upturned bucket for her. She lounged on it,
her elbows on her knees. "Where are you going?" she asked.
"Just starting off for the summer, horse-trading." Bjornstam chuckled.
His red mustache caught the sun. "Regular hoboes and public benefactors
we are. Take a hike like this every once in a while. Sharks on horses.
Buy 'em from farmers and sell 'em to others. We're honest--frequently.
Great time. Camp along the road. I was wishing I had a chance to say
good-by to you before I ducked out but----Say, you better come along
with us."
"I'd like to."
"While you're playing mumblety-peg with Mrs. Lym Cass, Pete and me
will be rambling across Dakota, through the Bad Lands, into the butte
country, and when fall comes, we'll be crossing over a pass of the Big
Horn Mountains, maybe, and camp in a snow-storm, quarter of a mile right
straight up above a lake. Then in the morning we'll lie snug in our
blankets and look up through the pines at an eagle. How'd it strike you?
Heh? Eagle soaring and soaring all day--big wide sky----"
"Don't! Or I will go with you, and I'm afraid there might be some slight
scandal. Perhaps some day I'll do it. Good-by."
Her hand disappeared in his blackened leather glove. From the turn in
the road she waved at him. She walked on more soberly now, and she was
lonely.
But the wheat and grass were sleek velvet under the sunset; the prairie
clouds were tawny gold; and she swung happily into Main Street.
II
Through the first days of June she drove with Kennicott on his calls.
She identified him with the virile land; she admired him as she saw with
what respect the farmers obeyed him. She was out in the early chill,
after a hasty cup of coffee, reaching open country as the fresh sun came
up in that unspoiled world. Meadow larks called from the tops of thin
split fence-posts. The wild roses smelled clean.
As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was a solemnity of radial
bands, like a heavenly fan of beaten gold; the limitless circle of the
grain was a green sea rimmed with fog, and the willow wind-breaks were
palmy isles.
Before July the close heat blanketed them. The tortured earth cracked.
Farmers panted through corn-fields behind cultivators and the sweating
flanks of horses. While she waited for Kennicott in the car, before a
farmhouse, the seat burned her fingers and her head ached with the glare
on fenders and hood.
A black thunder-shower was followed by a dust storm which turned the
sky yellow with the hint of a coming tornado. Impalpable black dust
far-borne from Dakota covered the inner sills of the closed windows.
The July heat was ever more stifling. They crawled along Main Street by
day; they found it hard to sleep at night. They brought mattresses down
to the living-room, and thrashed and turned by the open window. Ten
times a night they talked of going out to soak themselves with the
hose and wade through the dew, but they were too listless to take the
trouble. On cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the gnats
appeared in swarms which peppered their faces and caught in their
throats.
She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but Kennicott declared
that it would be "kind of hard to get away, just NOW." The Health and
Improvement Committee of the Thanatopsis asked her to take part in the
anti-fly campaign, and she toiled about town persuading householders to
use the fly-traps furnished by the club, or giving out money prizes to
fly-swatting children. She was loyal enough but not ardent, and without
ever quite intending to, she began to neglect the task as heat sucked at
her strength.
Kennicott and she motored North and spent a week with his mother--that
is, Carol spent it with his mother, while he fished for bass.
The great event was their purchase of a summer cottage, down on Lake
Minniemashie.
Perhaps the most amiable feature of life in Gopher Prairie was the
summer cottages. They were merely two-room shanties, with a seepage of
broken-down chairs, peeling veneered tables, chromos pasted on wooden
walls, and inefficient kerosene stoves. They were so thin-walled and so
close together that you could--and did--hear a baby being spanked in the
fifth cottage off. But they were set among elms and lindens on a bluff
which looked across the lake to fields of ripened wheat sloping up to
green woods.
Here the matrons forgot social jealousies, and sat gossiping in gingham;
or, in old bathing-suits, surrounded by hysterical children, they
paddled for hours. Carol joined them; she ducked shrieking small boys,
and helped babies construct sand-basins for unfortunate minnows.
She liked Juanita Haydock and Maud Dyer when she helped them make
picnic-supper for the men, who came motoring out from town each evening.
She was easier and more natural with them. In the debate as to whether
there should be veal loaf or poached egg on hash, she had no chance to
be heretical and oversensitive.
They danced sometimes, in the evening; they had a minstrel show, with
Kennicott surprisingly good as end-man; always they were encircled by
children wise in the lore of woodchucks and gophers and rafts and willow
whistles.
If they could have continued this normal barbaric life Carol would have
been the most enthusiastic citizen of Gopher Prairie. She was relieved
to be assured that she did not want bookish conversation alone; that she
did not expect the town to become a Bohemia. She was content now. She
did not criticize.
But in September, when the year was at its richest, custom dictated that
it was time to return to town; to remove the children from the waste
occupation of learning the earth, and send them back to lessons about
the number of potatoes which (in a delightful world untroubled by
commission-houses or shortages in freight-cars) William sold to John.
The women who had cheerfully gone bathing all summer looked doubtful
when Carol begged, "Let's keep up an outdoor life this winter, let's
slide and skate." Their hearts shut again till spring, and the nine
months of cliques and radiators and dainty refreshments began all over.
III
Carol had started a salon.
Since Kennicott, Vida Sherwin, and Guy Pollock were her only lions,
and since Kennicott would have preferred Sam Clark to all the poets and
radicals in the entire world, her private and self-defensive clique did
not get beyond one evening dinner for Vida and Guy, on her first wedding
anniversary; and that dinner did not get beyond a controversy regarding
Raymie Wutherspoon's yearnings.
Guy Pollock was the gentlest person she had found here. He spoke of her
new jade and cream frock naturally, not jocosely; he held her chair
for her as they sat down to dinner; and he did not, like Kennicott,
interrupt her to shout, "Oh say, speaking of that, I heard a good story
today." But Guy was incurably hermit. He sat late and talked hard, and
did not come again.
Then she met Champ Perry in the post-office--and decided that in the
history of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher Prairie, for all
of America. We have lost their sturdiness, she told herself. We must
restore the last of the veterans to power and follow them on the
backward path to the integrity of Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlers
dancing in a saw-mill.
She read in the records of the Minnesota Territorial Pioneers that only
sixty years ago, not so far back as the birth of her own father, four
cabins had composed Gopher Prairie. The log stockade which Mrs. Champ
Perry was to find when she trekked in was built afterward by the
soldiers as a defense against the Sioux. The four cabins were inhabited
by Maine Yankees who had come up the Mississippi to St. Paul and driven
north over virgin prairie into virgin woods. They ground their own
corn; the men-folks shot ducks and pigeons and prairie chickens; the
new breakings yielded the turnip-like rutabagas, which they ate raw
and boiled and baked and raw again. For treat they had wild plums and
crab-apples and tiny wild strawberries.
Grasshoppers came darkening the sky, and in an hour ate the farmwife's
garden and the farmer's coat. Precious horses painfully brought from
Illinois, were drowned in bogs or stampeded by the fear of blizzards.
Snow blew through the chinks of new-made cabins, and Eastern children,
with flowery muslin dresses, shivered all winter and in summer were red
and black with mosquito bites. Indians were everywhere; they camped in
dooryards, stalked into kitchens to demand doughnuts, came with rifles
across their backs into schoolhouses and begged to see the pictures
in the geographies. Packs of timber-wolves treed the children; and the
settlers found dens of rattle-snakes, killed fifty, a hundred, in a day.
Yet it was a buoyant life. Carol read enviously in the admirable
Minnesota chronicles called "Old Rail Fence Corners" the reminiscence of
Mrs. Mahlon Black, who settled in Stillwater in 1848:
"There was nothing to parade over in those days. We took it as it came
and had happy lives. . . . We would all gather together and in about two
minutes would be having a good time--playing cards or dancing. . . . We
used to waltz and dance contra dances. None of these new jigs and not
wear any clothes to speak of. We covered our hides in those days; no
tight skirts like now. You could take three or four steps inside our
skirts and then not reach the edge. One of the boys would fiddle a while
and then some one would spell him and he could get a dance. Sometimes
they would dance and fiddle too."
She reflected that if she could not have ballrooms of gray and rose
and crystal, she wanted to be swinging across a puncheon-floor with a
dancing fiddler. This smug in-between town, which had exchanged "Money
Musk" for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic
old nor the sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet unimagined
how, turn it back to simplicity?
She herself knew two of the pioneers: the Perrys. Champ Perry was the
buyer at the grain-elevator. He weighed wagons of wheat on a rough
platform-scale, in the cracks of which the kernels sprouted every
spring. Between times he napped in the dusty peace of his office.
She called on the Perrys at their rooms above Howland & Gould's grocery.
When they were already old they had lost the money, which they had
invested in an elevator. They had given up their beloved yellow brick
house and moved into these rooms over a store, which were the Gopher
Prairie equivalent of a flat. A broad stairway led from the street
to the upper hall, along which were the doors of a lawyer's office, a
dentist's, a photographer's "studio," the lodge-rooms of the Affiliated
Order of Spartans and, at the back, the Perrys' apartment.
They received her (their first caller in a month) with aged fluttering
tenderness. Mrs. Perry confided, "My, it's a shame we got to entertain
you in such a cramped place. And there ain't any water except that ole
iron sink outside in the hall, but still, as I say to Champ, beggars
can't be choosers. 'Sides, the brick house was too big for me to sweep,
and it was way out, and it's nice to be living down here among folks.
Yes, we're glad to be here. But----Some day, maybe we can have a house
of our own again. We're saving up----Oh, dear, if we could have our own
home! But these rooms are real nice, ain't they!"
As old people will, the world over, they had moved as much as possible
of their familiar furniture into this small space. Carol had none of the
superiority she felt toward Mrs. Lyman Cass's plutocratic parlor. She
was at home here. She noted with tenderness all the makeshifts: the
darned chair-arms, the patent rocker covered with sleazy cretonne, the
pasted strips of paper mending the birch-bark napkin-rings labeled "Papa"
and "Mama."
She hinted of her new enthusiasm. To find one of the "young folks" who
took them seriously, heartened the Perrys, and she easily drew from
them the principles by which Gopher Prairie should be born again--should
again become amusing to live in.
This was their philosophy complete . . . in the era of aeroplanes and
syndicalism:
The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational,
and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordained
standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. "We don't need
all this new-fangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that's
ruining our young men in colleges. What we need is to get back to the
true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have
it preached to us."
The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the
agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs.
All socialists ought to be hanged.
"Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals
in his novels, and folks say he's made prett' near a million dollars out
of 'em."
People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred
are wicked.
Europeans are still wickeder.
It doesn't hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody
who touches wine is headed straight for hell.
Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be.
Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody.
The farmers want too much for their wheat.
The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the salaries they
pay.
There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybody
worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm.
IV
Carol's hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the nodding
dwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home with a headache.
Next day she saw Miles Bjornstam on the street.
"Just back from Montana. Great summer. Pumped my lungs chuck-full of
Rocky Mountain air. Now for another whirl at sassing the bosses of
Gopher Prairie." She smiled at him, and the Perrys faded, the pioneers
faded, till they were but daguerreotypes in a black walnut cupboard.
| Carol takes a walk along the railroad track up to the lake and the Prairie beyond to enjoy the beauty of the spring. As she trudges along a man in a Ford car offers a lift. Carol feels the warmth of companionship in that offer which she never finds in any of her acquaintances in Gopher Prairie. She comes across Bjornstam in gypsy encampment. He offers her a hunk of bacon. He is on his way to the annual horse-trading. He buys horses from the farmers and sells them to others and claims that he makes some honest profit. He invites her to join him and she says there would be a scandal if she did. It is pleasant in the month of June and Carol goes along with Kennicott on his visits. She finds the July heat stifling. They find it impossible to sleep. On cool evenings the gnats plague them when they go for a walk. The Thanatopsis club starts its anti-fly campaign. Carol distributes flytraps and gives money to the fly swatting children. But the heat drains all her energy for social work. They visit Kennicotts mother for a week. They purchase a summer cottage. The whole social circle of the Kennicotts has cottages and Carol enjoys the outdoor life. They make picnic suppers and also have dances. But with the arrival of September they move back to their town homes and life goes back to the usual routine. Carol invites Vida and Guy Pollock for the party on her first wedding anniversary. The conversation does not go beyond the discussion of Raymie Wutherspoons dreams. Carol finds Guy Pollock to be the perfect gentleman and he talks to her with ease about any topic that is interesting. But he does not call on the Kennicotts again. Her meeting Champ Perry makes her think of the pioneering days of the American Middlewest and desires to know more about it. From the records she learns about the hardships they had faced. She reads about the grasshoppers that destroyed the crops and their gardens and about the rattlesnakes they had to kill. Carol feels that for the hardships, life was more buoyant in those days. She also feels that if Gopher Prairie could go back to those pioneer days, she would be able to like it better. Carol calls on the Perrys much to their delight. The Perrys had lost their money and were compelled to live in a flat. They feel sorry that they have to entertain Carol in their cramped flat. They feel thrilled to know that Carol wants their suggestions as to how Gopher Prairie can be taken to its pioneering days. According to them, the Baptist church is the standard in music, oratory, philanthropy and ethics. They do not need science and socialism. To earn more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred is wicked. They consider the Europeans to be wickeder. People do not need wine or ice cream. They should work as hard as Champ Perry did when he was young. Carol who had come with enthusiasm to listen to their ideas ends up with a headache. On her way back she meets Bjornstam who is back from the horse- trading trip. | summary |
CHAPTER XIII
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 democracy).
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.
| Carol goes to Perrys house to pay a courtesy call. Not finding them at home she chances upon Guy Pollocks office. He invites her in. Carol hesitates remembering the way people gossip. Yet she goes in and finds that his office serves as the living quarters too. It is meagerly furnished. Guy is surprised that Carol should call on the Perrys. Carol informs him that she wanted Perrys ideas as to how Gopher Prairie could be changed. This leads to a discussion of what is wrong with Gopher Prairie. Much to Carols disappointment Guy Pollock does not find anything wrong with it. He feels that the people of Gopher Prairie are as suspicious and righteous, as the people living in any other small town. In his opinion the people of Gopher Prairie are in fact friendlier than the people of many other small towns. He tells Carol about how he was brought up in a similar small town in Ohio, which was more hostile than Gopher Prairie. He completed his education disliking the crowded, expensive New York. When he heard that Julius Flickerbaugh, the lawyer of Gopher Prairie needed a partner he came and settled down in the town ever since. He also reveals that once upon a time he had resolved to read Browning and go to the theaters at Minneapolis. But actually he had settled down to read only cheap fiction and going to Minneapolis only when his work demanded it. He also reveals how lonely and miserable he is. But Carol is interested only in getting his suggestions to change the town. He states that the troubles in Gopher Prairie are all manmade. Since they have conquered nature by growing wheat in the prairie and by keeping warm in the midst of a blizzard, people have to find their miseries in religious intolerance and professional hatred. He hints that even the wives share their husbands jealousies and interests. Carol remembers Kennicotts suggestions about being nice to Mrs. Bogart so that she would put in a nice word for him. Guy Pollock tells her to talk to him instead of allowing him to bore her. Carol remarks that the people are so savorless that there is nothing to talk about. She tells him that she is trying to develop the ability to be dull and settle down to be nothing. Guy Pollock requests her not to be so cynical. He asks her to stay and have coffee. She points out that people would gossip if she did. Guy Pollock invites Dr. Dillon-the dentist and his wife so that people will not gossip about them. The Dillons arrive, they have coffee and make polite conversation and Carol leaves for home. | summary |
CHAPTER XIV
SHE was marching home.
"No. I couldn't fall in love with him. I like him, very much. But
he's too much of a recluse. Could I kiss him? No! No! Guy Pollock at
twenty-six I could have kissed him then, maybe, even if I were married
to some one else, and probably I'd have been glib in persuading myself
that 'it wasn't really wrong.'
"The amazing thing is that I'm not more amazed at myself. I, the
virtuous young matron. Am I to be trusted? If the Prince Charming
came----
"A Gopher Prairie housewife, married a year, and yearning for a 'Prince
Charming' like a bachfisch of sixteen! They say that marriage is a magic
change. But I'm not changed. But----
"No! I wouldn't want to fall in love, even if the Prince did come. I
wouldn't want to hurt Will. I am fond of Will. I am! He doesn't stir me,
not any longer. But I depend on him. He is home and children.
"I wonder when we will begin to have children? I do want them.
"I wonder whether I remembered to tell Bea to have hominy tomorrow,
instead of oatmeal? She will have gone to bed by now. Perhaps I'll be up
early enough----
"Ever so fond of Will. I wouldn't hurt him, even if I had to lose the
mad love. If the Prince came I'd look once at him, and run. Darn fast!
Oh, Carol, you are not heroic nor fine. You are the immutable vulgar
young female.
"But I'm not the faithless wife who enjoys confiding that she's
'misunderstood.' Oh, I'm not, I'm not!
"Am I?
"At least I didn't whisper to Guy about Will's faults and his blindness
to my remarkable soul. I didn't! Matter of fact, Will probably
understands me perfectly! If only--if he would just back me up in
rousing the town.
"How many, how incredibly many wives there must be who tingle over the
first Guy Pollock who smiles at them. No! I will not be one of that
herd of yearners! The coy virgin brides. Yet probably if the Prince were
young and dared to face life----
"I'm not half as well oriented as that Mrs. Dillon. So obviously adoring
her dentist! And seeing Guy only as an eccentric fogy.
"They weren't silk, Mrs. Dillon's stockings. They were lisle. Her legs
are nice and slim. But no nicer than mine. I hate cotton tops on silk
stockings. . . . Are my ankles getting fat? I will NOT have fat ankles!
"No. I am fond of Will. His work--one farmer he pulls through diphtheria
is worth all my yammering for a castle in Spain. A castle with baths.
"This hat is so tight. I must stretch it. Guy liked it.
"There's the house. I'm awfully chilly. Time to get out the fur coat.
I wonder if I'll ever have a beaver coat? Nutria is NOT the same thing!
Beaver-glossy. Like to run my fingers over it. Guy's mustache like
beaver. How utterly absurd!
"I am, I AM fond of Will, and----Can't I ever find another word than
'fond'?
"He's home. He'll think I was out late.
"Why can't he ever remember to pull down the shades? Cy Bogart and all
the beastly boys peeping in. But the poor dear, he's absent-minded about
minute--minush--whatever the word is. He has so much worry and work,
while I do nothing but jabber to Bea.
"I MUSTN'T forget the hominy----"
She was flying into the hall. Kennicott looked up from the Journal of
the American Medical Society.
"Hello! What time did you get back?" she cried.
"About nine. You been gadding. Here it is past eleven!" Good-natured yet
not quite approving.
"Did it feel neglected?"
"Well, you didn't remember to close the lower draft in the furnace."
"Oh, I'm so sorry. But I don't often forget things like that, do I?"
She dropped into his lap and (after he had jerked back his head to save
his eye-glasses, and removed the glasses, and settled her in a position
less cramping to his legs, and casually cleared his throat) he kissed
her amiably, and remarked:
"Nope, I must say you're fairly good about things like that. I wasn't
kicking. I just meant I wouldn't want the fire to go out on us. Leave
that draft open and the fire might burn up and go out on us. And the
nights are beginning to get pretty cold again. Pretty cold on my drive.
I put the side-curtains up, it was so chilly. But the generator is
working all right now."
"Yes. It is chilly. But I feel fine after my walk."
"Go walking?"
"I went up to see the Perrys." By a definite act of will she added
the truth: "They weren't in. And I saw Guy Pollock. Dropped into his
office."
"Why, you haven't been sitting and chinning with him till eleven
o'clock?"
"Of course there were some other people there and----Will! What do you
think of Dr. Westlake?"
"Westlake? Why?"
"I noticed him on the street today."
"Was he limping? If the poor fish would have his teeth X-rayed, I'll bet
nine and a half cents he'd find an abscess there. 'Rheumatism' he calls
it. Rheumatism, hell! He's behind the times. Wonder he doesn't bleed
himself! Wellllllll----" A profound and serious yawn. "I hate to break
up the party, but it's getting late, and a doctor never knows when he'll
get routed out before morning." (She remembered that he had given this
explanation, in these words, not less than thirty times in the year.) "I
guess we better be trotting up to bed. I've wound the clock and looked
at the furnace. Did you lock the front door when you came in?"
They trailed up-stairs, after he had turned out the lights and twice
tested the front door to make sure it was fast. While they talked
they were preparing for bed. Carol still sought to maintain privacy by
undressing behind the screen of the closet door. Kennicott was not so
reticent. Tonight, as every night, she was irritated by having to push
the old plush chair out of the way before she could open the closet
door. Every time she opened the door she shoved the chair. Ten times an
hour. But Kennicott liked to have the chair in the room, and there was
no place for it except in front of the closet.
She pushed it, felt angry, hid her anger. Kennicott was yawning, more
portentously. The room smelled stale. She shrugged and became chatty:
"You were speaking of Dr. Westlake. Tell me--you've never summed him up:
Is he really a good doctor?"
"Oh yes, he's a wise old coot."
("There! You see there is no medical rivalry. Not in my house!" she said
triumphantly to Guy Pollock.)
She hung her silk petticoat on a closet hook, and went on, "Dr. Westlake
is so gentle and scholarly----"
"Well, I don't know as I'd say he was such a whale of a scholar. I've
always had a suspicion he did a good deal of four-flushing about that.
He likes to have people think he keeps up his French and Greek and Lord
knows what all; and he's always got an old Dago book lying around the
sitting-room, but I've got a hunch he reads detective stories 'bout like
the rest of us. And I don't know where he'd ever learn so dog-gone many
languages anyway! He kind of lets people assume he went to Harvard
or Berlin or Oxford or somewhere, but I looked him up in the medical
register, and he graduated from a hick college in Pennsylvania, 'way
back in 1861!"
"But this is the important thing: Is he an honest doctor?"
"How do you mean 'honest'? Depends on what you mean."
"Suppose you were sick. Would you call him in? Would you let me call him
in?"
"Not if I were well enough to cuss and bite, I wouldn't! No, SIR! I
wouldn't have the old fake in the house. Makes me tired, his everlasting
palavering and soft-soaping. He's all right for an ordinary bellyache
or holding some fool woman's hand, but I wouldn't call him in for an
honest-to-God illness, not much I wouldn't, NO-sir! You know I don't
do much back-biting, but same time----I'll tell you, Carrrie: I've never
got over being sore at Westlake for the way he treated Mrs. Jonderquist.
Nothing the matter with her, what she really needed was a rest, but
Westlake kept calling on her and calling on her for weeks, almost every
day, and he sent her a good big fat bill, too, you can bet! I never
did forgive him for that. Nice decent hard-working people like the
Jonderquists!"
In her batiste nightgown she was standing at the bureau engaged in the
invariable rites of wishing that she had a real dressing-table with a
triple mirror, of bending toward the streaky glass and raising her chin
to inspect a pin-head mole on her throat, and finally of brushing her
hair. In rhythm to the strokes she went on:
"But, Will, there isn't any of what you might call financial rivalry
between you and the partners--Westlake and McGanum--is there?"
He flipped into bed with a solemn back-somersault and a ludicrous kick
of his heels as he tucked his legs under the blankets. He snorted, "Lord
no! I never begrudge any man a nickel he can get away from me--fairly."
"But is Westlake fair? Isn't he sly?"
"Sly is the word. He's a fox, that boy!"
She saw Guy Pollock's grin in the mirror. She flushed.
Kennicott, with his arms behind his head, was yawning:
"Yump. He's smooth, too smooth. But I bet I make prett' near as much
as Westlake and McGanum both together, though I've never wanted to grab
more than my just share. If anybody wants to go to the partners instead
of to me, that's his business. Though I must say it makes me tired when
Westlake gets hold of the Dawsons. Here Luke Dawson had been coming to
me for every toeache and headache and a lot of little things that just
wasted my time, and then when his grandchild was here last summer and
had summer-complaint, I suppose, or something like that, probably--you
know, the time you and I drove up to Lac-qui-Meurt--why, Westlake got
hold of Ma Dawson, and scared her to death, and made her think the kid
had appendicitis, and, by golly, if he and McGanum didn't operate, and
holler their heads off about the terrible adhesions they found, and what
a regular Charley and Will Mayo they were for classy surgery. They let
on that if they'd waited two hours more the kid would have developed
peritonitis, and God knows what all; and then they collected a nice
fat hundred and fifty dollars. And probably they'd have charged three
hundred, if they hadn't been afraid of me! I'm no hog, but I certainly
do hate to give old Luke ten dollars' worth of advice for a dollar and a
half, and then see a hundred and fifty go glimmering. And if I can't do
a better 'pendectomy than either Westlake or McGanum, I'll eat my hat!"
As she crept into bed she was dazzled by Guy's blazing grin. She
experimented:
"But Westlake is cleverer than his son-in-law, don't you think?"
"Yes, Westlake may be old-fashioned and all that, but he's got a certain
amount of intuition, while McGanum goes into everything bull-headed, and
butts his way through like a damn yahoo, and tries to argue his patients
into having whatever he diagnoses them as having! About the best thing
Mac can do is to stick to baby-snatching. He's just about on a par with
this bone-pounding chiropractor female, Mrs. Mattie Gooch."
"Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. McGanum, though--they're nice. They've been
awfully cordial to me."
"Well, no reason why they shouldn't be, is there? Oh, they're nice
enough--though you can bet your bottom dollar they're both plugging for
their husbands all the time, trying to get the business. And I don't
know as I call it so damn cordial in Mrs. McGanum when I holler at her
on the street and she nods back like she had a sore neck. Still, she's
all right. It's Ma Westlake that makes the mischief, pussyfooting around
all the time. But I wouldn't trust any Westlake out of the whole lot,
and while Mrs. McGanum SEEMS square enough, you don't never want to
forget that she's Westlake's daughter. You bet!"
"What about Dr. Gould? Don't you think he's worse than either Westlake
or McGanum? He's so cheap--drinking, and playing pool, and always
smoking cigars in such a cocky way----"
"That's all right now! Terry Gould is a good deal of a tin-horn sport,
but he knows a lot about medicine, and don't you forget it for one
second!"
She stared down Guy's grin, and asked more cheerfully, "Is he honest,
too?"
"Ooooooooooo! Gosh I'm sleepy!" He burrowed beneath the bedclothes in
a luxurious stretch, and came up like a diver, shaking his head, as
he complained, "How's that? Who? Terry Gould honest? Don't start me
laughing--I'm too nice and sleepy! I didn't say he was honest. I said
he had savvy enough to find the index in 'Gray's Anatomy,' which is more
than McGanum can do! But I didn't say anything about his being honest.
He isn't. Terry is crooked as a dog's hind leg. He's done me more than
one dirty trick. He told Mrs. Glorbach, seventeen miles out, that I
wasn't up-to-date in obstetrics. Fat lot of good it did him! She came
right in and told me! And Terry's lazy. He'd let a pneumonia patient
choke rather than interrupt a poker game."
"Oh no. I can't believe----"
"Well now, I'm telling you!"
"Does he play much poker? Dr. Dillon told me that Dr. Gould wanted him
to play----"
"Dillon told you what? Where'd you meet Dillon? He's just come to town."
"He and his wife were at Mr. Pollock's tonight."
"Say, uh, what'd you think of them? Didn't Dillon strike you as pretty
light-waisted?"
"Why no. He seemed intelligent. I'm sure he's much more wide-awake than
our dentist."
"Well now, the old man is a good dentist. He knows his business. And
Dillon----I wouldn't cuddle up to the Dillons too close, if I were you.
All right for Pollock, and that's none of our business, but we----I
think I'd just give the Dillons the glad hand and pass 'em up."
"But why? He isn't a rival."
"That's--all--right!" Kennicott was aggressively awake now. "He'll work
right in with Westlake and McGanum. Matter of fact, I suspect they
were largely responsible for his locating here. They'll be sending him
patients, and he'll send all that he can get hold of to them. I don't
trust anybody that's too much hand-in-glove with Westlake. You give
Dillon a shot at some fellow that's just bought a farm here and drifts
into town to get his teeth looked at, and after Dillon gets through with
him, you'll see him edging around to Westlake and McGanum, every time!"
Carol reached for her blouse, which hung on a chair by the bed. She
draped it about her shoulders, and sat up studying Kennicott, her chin
in her hands. In the gray light from the small electric bulb down the
hall she could see that he was frowning.
"Will, this is--I must get this straight. Some one said to me the other
day that in towns like this, even more than in cities, all the doctors
hate each other, because of the money----"
"Who said that?"
"It doesn't matter."
"I'll bet a hat it was your Vida Sherwin. She's a brainy woman, but
she'd be a damn sight brainier if she kept her mouth shut and didn't let
so much of her brains ooze out that way."
"Will! O Will! That's horrible! Aside from the vulgarity----Some ways,
Vida is my best friend. Even if she HAD said it. Which, as a matter of
fact, she didn't." He reared up his thick shoulders, in absurd pink and
green flannelette pajamas. He sat straight, and irritatingly snapped his
fingers, and growled:
"Well, if she didn't say it, let's forget her. Doesn't make any
difference who said it, anyway. The point is that you believe it. God!
To think you don't understand me any better than that! Money!"
("This is the first real quarrel we've ever had," she was agonizing.)
He thrust out his long arm and snatched his wrinkly vest from a chair.
He took out a cigar, a match. He tossed the vest on the floor. He
lighted the cigar and puffed savagely. He broke up the match and snapped
the fragments at the foot-board.
She suddenly saw the foot-board of the bed as the foot-stone of the
grave of love.
The room was drab-colored and ill-ventilated--Kennicott did not "believe
in opening the windows so darn wide that you heat all outdoors." The
stale air seemed never to change. In the light from the hall they were
two lumps of bedclothes with shoulders and tousled heads attached.
She begged, "I didn't mean to wake you up, dear. And please don't smoke.
You've been smoking so much. Please go back to sleep. I'm sorry."
"Being sorry 's all right, but I'm going to tell you one or two things.
This falling for anybody's say-so about medical jealousy and competition
is simply part and parcel of your usual willingness to think the worst
you possibly can of us poor dubs in Gopher Prairie. Trouble with women
like you is, you always want to ARGUE. Can't take things the way they
are. Got to argue. Well, I'm not going to argue about this in any way,
shape, manner, or form. Trouble with you is, you don't make any effort
to appreciate us. You're so damned superior, and think the city is such
a hell of a lot finer place, and you want us to do what YOU want, all
the time----"
"That's not true! It's I who make the effort. It's they--it's you--who
stand back and criticize. I have to come over to the town's opinion;
I have to devote myself to their interests. They can't even SEE my
interests, to say nothing of adopting them. I get ever so excited about
their old Lake Minniemashie and the cottages, but they simply guffaw (in
that lovely friendly way you advertise so much) if I speak of wanting to
see Taormina also."
"Sure, Tormina, whatever that is--some nice expensive millionaire
colony, I suppose. Sure; that's the idea; champagne taste and beer
income; and make sure that we never will have more than a beer income,
too!"
"Are you by any chance implying that I am not economical?"
"Well, I hadn't intended to, but since you bring it up yourself, I don't
mind saying the grocery bills are about twice what they ought to be."
"Yes, they probably are. I'm not economical. I can't be. Thanks to you!"
"Where d' you get that 'thanks to you'?"
"Please don't be quite so colloquial--or shall I say VULGAR?"
"I'll be as damn colloquial as I want to. How do you get that 'thanks to
you'? Here about a year ago you jump me for not remembering to give you
money. Well, I'm reasonable. I didn't blame you, and I SAID I was to
blame. But have I ever forgotten it since--practically?"
"No. You haven't--practically! But that isn't it. I ought to have an
allowance. I will, too! I must have an agreement for a regular stated
amount, every month."
"Fine idea! Of course a doctor gets a regular stated amount! Sure! A
thousand one month--and lucky if he makes a hundred the next."
"Very well then, a percentage. Or something else. No matter how much you
vary, you can make a rough average for----"
"But what's the idea? What are you trying to get at? Mean to say I'm
unreasonable? Think I'm so unreliable and tightwad that you've got to
tie me down with a contract? By God, that hurts! I thought I'd been
pretty generous and decent, and I took a lot of pleasure--thinks I,
'she'll be tickled when I hand her over this twenty'--or fifty, or
whatever it was; and now seems you been wanting to make it a kind of
alimony. Me, like a poor fool, thinking I was liberal all the while, and
you----"
"Please stop pitying yourself! You're having a beautiful time feeling
injured. I admit all you say. Certainly. You've given me money both
freely and amiably. Quite as if I were your mistress!"
"Carrie!"
"I mean it! What was a magnificent spectacle of generosity to you was
humiliation to me. You GAVE me money--gave it to your mistress, if she
was complaisant, and then you----"
"Carrie!"
"(Don't interrupt me!)--then you felt you'd discharged all obligation.
Well, hereafter I'll refuse your money, as a gift. Either I'm your
partner, in charge of the household department of our business, with a
regular budget for it, or else I'm nothing. If I'm to be a mistress,
I shall choose my lovers. Oh, I hate it--I hate it--this smirking and
hoping for money--and then not even spending it on jewels as a mistress
has a right to, but spending it on double-boilers and socks for you!
Yes indeed! You're generous! You give me a dollar, right out--the only
proviso is that I must spend it on a tie for you! And you give it when
and as you wish. How can I be anything but uneconomical?"
"Oh well, of course, looking at it that way----"
"I can't shop around, can't buy in large quantities, have to stick to
stores where I have a charge account, good deal of the time, can't plan
because I don't know how much money I can depend on. That's what I pay
for your charming sentimentalities about giving so generously. You make
me----"
"Wait! Wait! You know you're exaggerating. You never thought about that
mistress stuff till just this minute! Matter of fact, you never have
'smirked and hoped for money.' But all the same, you may be right. You
ought to run the household as a business. I'll figure out a definite
plan tomorrow, and hereafter you'll be on a regular amount or
percentage, with your own checking account."
"Oh, that IS decent of you!" She turned toward him, trying to be
affectionate. But his eyes were pink and unlovely in the flare of the
match with which he lighted his dead and malodorous cigar. His head
drooped, and a ridge of flesh scattered with pale small bristles bulged
out under his chin.
She sat in abeyance till he croaked:
"No. 'Tisn't especially decent. It's just fair. And God knows I want
to be fair. But I expect others to be fair, too. And you're so high and
mighty about people. Take Sam Clark; best soul that ever lived, honest
and loyal and a damn good fellow----"
("Yes, and a good shot at ducks, don't forget that!")
("Well, and he is a good shot, too!) Sam drops around in the evening to
sit and visit, and by golly just because he takes a dry smoke and rolls
his cigar around in his mouth, and maybe spits a few times, you look
at him as if he was a hog. Oh, you didn't know I was onto you, and I
certainly hope Sam hasn't noticed it, but I never miss it."
"I have felt that way. Spitting--ugh! But I'm sorry you caught my
thoughts. I tried to be nice; I tried to hide them."
"Maybe I catch a whole lot more than you think I do!"
"Yes, perhaps you do."
"And d' you know why Sam doesn't light his cigar when he's here?"
"Why?"
"He's so darn afraid you'll be offended if he smokes. You scare him.
Every time he speaks of the weather you jump him because he ain't
talking about poetry or Gertie--Goethe?--or some other highbrow junk.
You've got him so leery he scarcely dares to come here."
"Oh, I AM sorry. (Though I'm sure it's you who are exaggerating now.")
"Well now, I don't know as I am! And I can tell you one thing: if you
keep on you'll manage to drive away every friend I've got."
"That would be horrible of me. You KNOW I don't mean to Will, what is it
about me that frightens Sam--if I do frighten him."
"Oh, you do, all right! 'Stead of putting his legs up on another chair,
and unbuttoning his vest, and telling a good story or maybe kidding
me about something, he sits on the edge of his chair and tries to make
conversation about politics, and he doesn't even cuss, and Sam's never
real comfortable unless he can cuss a little!"
"In other words, he isn't comfortable unless he can behave like a
peasant in a mud hut!"
"Now that'll be about enough of that! You want to know how you scare
him? First you deliberately fire some question at him that you know darn
well he can't answer--any fool could see you were experimenting with
him--and then you shock him by talking of mistresses or something, like
you were doing just now----"
"Of course the pure Samuel never speaks of such erring ladies in his
private conversations!"
"Not when there's ladies around! You can bet your life on that!"
"So the impurity lies in failing to pretend that----"
"Now we won't go into all that--eugenics or whatever damn fad you choose
to call it. As I say, first you shock him, and then you become so darn
flighty that nobody can follow you. Either you want to dance, or you
bang the piano, or else you get moody as the devil and don't want to
talk or anything else. If you must be temperamental, why can't you be
that way by yourself?"
"My dear man, there's nothing I'd like better than to be by myself
occasionally! To have a room of my own! I suppose you expect me to sit
here and dream delicately and satisfy my 'temperamentality' while you
wander in from the bathroom with lather all over your face, and shout,
'Seen my brown pants?'"
"Huh!" He did not sound impressed. He made no answer. He turned out of
bed, his feet making one solid thud on the floor. He marched from the
room, a grotesque figure in baggy union-pajamas. She heard him drawing
a drink of water at the bathroom tap. She was furious at the
contemptuousness of his exit. She snuggled down in bed, and looked
away from him as he returned. He ignored her. As he flumped into bed he
yawned, and casually stated:
"Well, you'll have plenty of privacy when we build a new house.
"When?"
"Oh, I'll build it all right, don't you fret! But of course I don't
expect any credit for it."
Now it was she who grunted "Huh!" and ignored him, and felt independent
and masterful as she shot up out of bed, turned her back on him,
fished a lone and petrified chocolate out of her glove-box in the
top right-hand drawer of the bureau, gnawed at it, found that it had
cocoanut filling, said "Damn!" wished that she had not said it, so that
she might be superior to his colloquialism, and hurled the chocolate
into the wastebasket, where it made an evil and mocking clatter among
the debris of torn linen collars and toothpaste box. Then, in great
dignity and self-dramatization, she returned to bed.
All this time he had been talking on, embroidering his assertion that
he "didn't expect any credit." She was reflecting that he was a rustic,
that she hated him, that she had been insane to marry him, that she had
married him only because she was tired of work, that she must get her
long gloves cleaned, that she would never do anything more for him,
and that she mustn't forget his hominy for breakfast. She was roused to
attention by his storming:
"I'm a fool to think about a new house. By the time I get it built
you'll probably have succeeded in your plan to get me completely in
Dutch with every friend and every patient I've got."
She sat up with a bounce. She said coldly, "Thank you very much for
revealing your real opinion of me. If that's the way you feel, if I'm
such a hindrance to you, I can't stay under this roof another minute.
And I am perfectly well able to earn my own living. I will go at once,
and you may get a divorce at your pleasure! What you want is a nice
sweet cow of a woman who will enjoy having your dear friends talk about
the weather and spit on the floor!"
"Tut! Don't be a fool!"
"You will very soon find out whether I'm a fool or not! I mean it! Do
you think I'd stay here one second after I found out that I was injuring
you? At least I have enough sense of justice not to do that."
"Please stop flying off at tangents, Carrie. This----"
"Tangents? TANGENTS! Let me tell you----"
"----isn't a theater-play; it's a serious effort to have us get together
on fundamentals. We've both been cranky, and said a lot of things we
didn't mean. I wish we were a couple o' bloomin' poets and just talked
about roses and moonshine, but we're human. All right. Let's cut out
jabbing at each other. Let's admit we both do fool things. See here: You
KNOW you feel superior to folks. You're not as bad as I say, but you're
not as good as you say--not by a long shot! What's the reason you're so
superior? Why can't you take folks as they are?"
Her preparations for stalking out of the Doll's House were not yet
visible. She mused:
"I think perhaps it's my childhood." She halted. When she went on
her voice had an artificial sound, her words the bookish quality of
emotional meditation. "My father was the tenderest man in the world, but
he did feel superior to ordinary people. Well, he was! And the Minnesota
Valley----I used to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a
time, my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to write
poems. The shiny tilted roofs below me, and the river, and beyond it the
level fields in the mist, and the rim of palisades across----It held my
thoughts in. I LIVED, in the valley. But the prairie--all my thoughts go
flying off into the big space. Do you think it might be that?"
"Um, well, maybe, but----Carrie, you always talk so much about getting
all you can out of life, and not letting the years slip by, and here you
deliberately go and deprive yourself of a lot of real good home pleasure
by not enjoying people unless they wear frock coats and trot out----"
("Morning clothes. Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean t' interrupt you.")
"----to a lot of tea-parties. Take Jack Elder. You think Jack hasn't got
any ideas about anything but manufacturing and the tariff on lumber.
But do you know that Jack is nutty about music? He'll put a grand-opera
record on the phonograph and sit and listen to it and close his
eyes----Or you take Lym Cass. Ever realize what a well-informed man he
is?"
"But IS he? Gopher Prairie calls anybody 'well-informed' who's been
through the State Capitol and heard about Gladstone."
"Now I'm telling you! Lym reads a lot--solid stuff--history. Or take
Mart Mahoney, the garageman. He's got a lot of Perry prints of famous
pictures in his office. Or old Bingham Playfair, that died here 'bout a
year ago--lived seven miles out. He was a captain in the Civil War,
and knew General Sherman, and they say he was a miner in Nevada right
alongside of Mark Twain. You'll find these characters in all these small
towns, and a pile of savvy in every single one of them, if you just dig
for it."
"I know. And I do love them. Especially people like Champ Perry. But I
can't be so very enthusiastic over the smug cits like Jack Elder."
"Then I'm a smug cit, too, whatever that is."
"No, you're a scientist. Oh, I will try and get the music out of Mr.
Elder. Only, why can't he let it COME out, instead of being ashamed of
it, and always talking about hunting dogs? But I will try. Is it all
right now?"
"Sure. But there's one other thing. You might give me some attention,
too!"
"That's unjust! You have everything I am!"
"No, I haven't. You think you respect me--you always hand out some
spiel about my being so 'useful.' But you never think of me as having
ambitions, just as much as you have----"
"Perhaps not. I think of you as being perfectly satisfied."
"Well, I'm not, not by a long shot! I don't want to be a plug general
practitioner all my life, like Westlake, and die in harness because I
can't get out of it, and have 'em say, 'He was a good fellow, but he
couldn't save a cent.' Not that I care a whoop what they say, after I've
kicked in and can't hear 'em, but I want to put enough money away so you
and I can be independent some day, and not have to work unless I feel
like it, and I want to have a good house--by golly, I'll have as good
a house as anybody in THIS town!--and if we want to travel and see your
Tormina or whatever it is, why we can do it, with enough money in our
jeans so we won't have to take anything off anybody, or fret about our
old age. You never worry about what might happen if we got sick and
didn't have a good fat wad salted away, do you!"
"I don't suppose I do."
"Well then, I have to do it for you. And if you think for one moment
I want to be stuck in this burg all my life, and not have a chance to
travel and see the different points of interest and all that, then you
simply don't get me. I want to have a squint at the world, much's you
do. Only, I'm practical about it. First place, I'm going to make the
money--I'm investing in good safe farmlands. Do you understand why now?"
"Yes."
"Will you try and see if you can't think of me as something more than
just a dollar-chasing roughneck?"
"Oh, my dear, I haven't been just! I AM difficile. And I won't call on
the Dillons! And if Dr. Dillon is working for Westlake and McGanum, I
hate him!"
| On her way back home Carol thinks about various things, about Guy Pollock, about how devoted she is to her husband, and about what should be cooked for breakfast for the next morning. When she reaches home she finds Kennicott waiting for her. He reminds her that it is past eleven and points out that she forgot to close the lower draft in the furnace. He grumbles that the fire may burn out sooner leaving them cold. She informs him that she had gone to visit the Perrys and spent her time at Guy Pollocks office because the Perrys were not at home. She casually questions Kennicott about Dr. Westlake. Kennicott is of the opinion that he has an abscess in his teeth but thinks he has rheumatism. He also tells her that a doctor has to go to bed early because he may be called up any time to attend to the patients. He winds the clock, checks the front door and the furnace and prepares to go to bed. Carol changes into her nightclothes behind the closet door. She inquires about Dr. Westlakes professional abilities. Kennicott calls him a wise old coot. Carol is sure that her husband harbors no professional jealousy. But Kennicott goes on to tell her that he knows many languages and lets people think that he must have studied at Oxford or Harvard University whereas he had studied at a college in Pennsylvania. Regarding his honesty, he asserts that he calls on the patients for longer than necessary and over charges them. He does not grudge Dr. Westlake or his son-in-law Dr. McGanum any money they can get away from him. But he calls them sly because they had performed an appendectomy on Dawsons grand child when he was away at Lac-qui-Merut and charged a hundred and fifty dollars. He asserts that Dr. Westlake has some intuition, whereas his son-in law has none. He also adds that both Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. Mc Ganum tried to get as much business for their husbands as they could by advertising their husbands skills. Dr. Kennicott has a very poor opinion of Dr. Terry Gould as well. He has knowledge but he is not very honest. He cares more for his poker game than for his patients. He believes that Dr. Westlake, Dr. Mc Ganum and Dr. Dillon promoted one another. He advises Carol not to mix with the Dillons. Carol wants to know if there is any professional jealousy between him and the other doctors. Kennicott feels very offended. Carol realizes that they are heading for a quarrel and tries to pacify Kennicott. But he accuses, that she is ready to believe the worst of him. He adds that she never made an effort to understand, nor does she ever try to appreciate him or his friends. He also tells her that she felt very superior and expected every one to do whatever she wants. Carol counters, that she is the one who tries to be what the town wants her to be. Though she admires Lake Minniemashie, people laughed at her when she wanted to see Taormina. Kennicott says that his income is too small to match her taste. He accuses her of spending too much money on grocery. Carol points out that it was because she did not get a fixed amount for household expenditure so that she could prepare a budget for her expenditure. Kennicott claims that he gave money regularly and generously. Carol remarks that he gives her money as if she were his mistress. A mistress had the privilege to spend the money on herself but in Carols case the condition was that she should spend it for him. | summary |
CHAPTER XV
THAT December she was in love with her husband.
She romanticized herself not as a great reformer but as the wife of a
country physician. The realities of the doctor's household were colored
by her pride.
Late at night, a step on the wooden porch, heard through her confusion
of sleep; the storm-door opened; fumbling over the inner door-panels;
the buzz of the electric bell. Kennicott muttering "Gol darn it," but
patiently creeping out of bed, remembering to draw the covers up to keep
her warm, feeling for slippers and bathrobe, clumping down-stairs.
From below, half-heard in her drowsiness, a colloquy in the
pidgin-German of the farmers who have forgotten the Old Country language
without learning the new:
"Hello, Barney, wass willst du?"
"Morgen, doctor. Die Frau ist ja awful sick. All night she been having
an awful pain in de belly."
"How long she been this way? Wie lang, eh?"
"I dunno, maybe two days."
"Why didn't you come for me yesterday, instead of waking me up out of a
sound sleep? Here it is two o'clock! So spat--warum, eh?"
"Nun aber, I know it, but she got soch a lot vorse last evening. I
t'ought maybe all de time it go avay, but it got a lot vorse."
"Any fever?"
"Vell ja, I t'ink she got fever."
"Which side is the pain on?"
"Huh?"
"Das Schmertz--die Weh--which side is it on? Here?"
"So. Right here it is."
"Any rigidity there?"
"Huh?"
"Is it rigid--stiff--I mean, does the belly feel hard to the fingers?"
"I dunno. She ain't said yet."
"What she been eating?"
"Vell, I t'ink about vot ve alwis eat, maybe corn beef and cabbage and
sausage, und so weiter. Doc, sie weint immer, all the time she holler
like hell. I vish you come."
"Well, all right, but you call me earlier, next time. Look here, Barney,
you better install a 'phone--telephone haben. Some of you Dutchmen will
be dying one of these days before you can fetch the doctor."
The door closing. Barney's wagon--the wheels silent in the snow, but the
wagon-body rattling. Kennicott clicking the receiver-hook to rouse the
night telephone-operator, giving a number, waiting, cursing mildly,
waiting again, and at last growling, "Hello, Gus, this is the doctor.
Say, uh, send me up a team. Guess snow's too thick for a machine. Going
eight miles south. All right. Huh? The hell I will! Don't you go back
to sleep. Huh? Well, that's all right now, you didn't wait so very darn
long. All right, Gus; shoot her along. By!"
His step on the stairs; his quiet moving about the frigid room while he
dressed; his abstracted and meaningless cough. She was supposed to be
asleep; she was too exquisitely drowsy to break the charm by speaking.
On a slip of paper laid on the bureau--she could hear the pencil
grinding against the marble slab--he wrote his destination. He went out,
hungry, chilly, unprotesting; and she, before she fell asleep again,
loved him for his sturdiness, and saw the drama of his riding by night
to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured children
standing at a window, waiting for him. He suddenly had in her eyes the
heroism of a wireless operator on a ship in a collision; of an explorer,
fever-clawed, deserted by his bearers, but going on--jungle--going----
At six, when the light faltered in as through ground glass and bleakly
identified the chairs as gray rectangles, she heard his step on the
porch; heard him at the furnace: the rattle of shaking the grate, the
slow grinding removal of ashes, the shovel thrust into the coal-bin,
the abrupt clatter of the coal as it flew into the fire-box, the fussy
regulation of drafts--the daily sounds of a Gopher Prairie life, now
first appealing to her as something brave and enduring, many-colored
and free. She visioned the fire-box: flames turned to lemon and metallic
gold as the coal-dust sifted over them; thin twisty flutters of purple,
ghost flames which gave no light, slipping up between the dark banked
coals.
It was luxurious in bed, and the house would be warm for her when
she rose, she reflected. What a worthless cat she was! What were her
aspirations beside his capability?
She awoke again as he dropped into bed.
"Seems just a few minutes ago that you started out!"
"I've been away four hours. I've operated a woman for appendicitis, in
a Dutch kitchen. Came awful close to losing her, too, but I pulled her
through all right. Close squeak. Barney says he shot ten rabbits last
Sunday."
He was instantly asleep--one hour of rest before he had to be up and
ready for the farmers who came in early. She marveled that in what was
to her but a night-blurred moment, he should have been in a distant
place, have taken charge of a strange house, have slashed a woman, saved
a life.
What wonder he detested the lazy Westlake and McGanum! How could the
easy Guy Pollock understand this skill and endurance?
Then Kennicott was grumbling, "Seven-fifteen! Aren't you ever going
to get up for breakfast?" and he was not a hero-scientist but a rather
irritable and commonplace man who needed a shave. They had coffee,
griddle-cakes, and sausages, and talked about Mrs. McGanum's atrocious
alligator-hide belt. Night witchery and morning disillusion were alike
forgotten in the march of realities and days.
II
Familiar to the doctor's wife was the man with an injured leg, driven in
from the country on a Sunday afternoon and brought to the house. He
sat in a rocker in the back of a lumber-wagon, his face pale from the
anguish of the jolting. His leg was thrust out before him, resting on
a starch-box and covered with a leather-bound horse-blanket. His drab
courageous wife drove the wagon, and she helped Kennicott support him as
he hobbled up the steps, into the house.
"Fellow cut his leg with an ax--pretty bad gash--Halvor Nelson, nine
miles out," Kennicott observed.
Carol fluttered at the back of the room, childishly excited when she was
sent to fetch towels and a basin of water. Kennicott lifted the farmer
into a chair and chuckled, "There we are, Halvor! We'll have you out
fixing fences and drinking aquavit in a month." The farmwife sat on
the couch, expressionless, bulky in a man's dogskin coat and unplumbed
layers of jackets. The flowery silk handkerchief which she had worn over
her head now hung about her seamed neck. Her white wool gloves lay in
her lap.
Kennicott drew from the injured leg the thick red "German sock," the
innumerous other socks of gray and white wool, then the spiral bandage.
The leg was of an unwholesome dead white, with the black hairs feeble
and thin and flattened, and the scar a puckered line of crimson. Surely,
Carol shuddered, this was not human flesh, the rosy shining tissue of
the amorous poets.
Kennicott examined the scar, smiled at Halvor and his wife, chanted,
"Fine, b' gosh! Couldn't be better!"
The Nelsons looked deprecating. The farmer nodded a cue to his wife and
she mourned:
"Vell, how much ve going to owe you, doctor?"
"I guess it'll be----Let's see: one drive out and two calls. I guess
it'll be about eleven dollars in all, Lena."
"I dunno ve can pay you yoost a little w'ile, doctor."
Kennicott lumbered over to her, patted her shoulder, roared, "Why, Lord
love you, sister, I won't worry if I never get it! You pay me next fall,
when you get your crop. . . . Carrie! Suppose you or Bea could shake up
a cup of coffee and some cold lamb for the Nelsons? They got a long cold
drive ahead."
III
He had been gone since morning; her eyes ached with reading; Vida
Sherwin could not come to tea. She wandered through the house, empty as
the bleary street without. The problem of "Will the doctor be home in
time for supper, or shall I sit down without him?" was important in
the household. Six was the rigid, the canonical supper-hour, but at
half-past six he had not come. Much speculation with Bea: Had the
obstetrical case taken longer than he had expected? Had he been called
somewhere else? Was the snow much heavier out in the country, so that he
should have taken a buggy, or even a cutter, instead of the car? Here in
town it had melted a lot, but still----
A honking, a shout, the motor engine raced before it was shut off.
She hurried to the window. The car was a monster at rest after furious
adventures. The headlights blazed on the clots of ice in the road so
that the tiniest lumps gave mountainous shadows, and the taillight cast
a circle of ruby on the snow behind. Kennicott was opening the door,
crying, "Here we are, old girl! Got stuck couple times, but we made it,
by golly, we made it, and here we be! Come on! Food! Eatin's!"
She rushed to him, patted his fur coat, the long hairs smooth but chilly
to her fingers. She joyously summoned Bea, "All right! He's here! We'll
sit right down!"
IV
There were, to inform the doctor's wife of his successes no clapping
audiences nor book-reviews nor honorary degrees. But there was a
letter written by a German farmer recently moved from Minnesota to
Saskatchewan:
Dear sor, as you haf bin treading mee for a fue Weaks dis Somer and
seen wat is rong wit mee so in Regarding to dat i wont to tank you. the
Doctor heir say wat shot bee rong wit mee and day give mee som Madsin
but it diten halp mee like wat you dit. Now day glaim dat i Woten Neet
aney Madsin ad all wat you tink?
Well i haven ben tacking aney ting for about one & 1/2 Mont but i dont
get better so i like to heir Wat you tink about it i feel like dis
Disconfebil feeling around the Stomac after eating and dat Pain around
Heard and down the arm and about 3 to 3 1/2 Hour after Eating i feel
weeak like and dissy and a dull Hadig. Now you gust lett mee know Wat
you tink about mee, i do Wat you say.
V
She encountered Guy Pollock at the drug store. He looked at her as
though he had a right to; he spoke softly. "I haven't see you, the last
few days."
"No. I've been out in the country with Will several times. He's so----Do
you know that people like you and me can never understand people like
him? We're a pair of hypercritical loafers, you and I, while he quietly
goes and does things."
She nodded and smiled and was very busy about purchasing boric acid. He
stared after her, and slipped away.
When she found that he was gone she was slightly disconcerted.
VI
She could--at times--agree with Kennicott that the shaving-and-corsets
familiarity of married life was not dreary vulgarity but a wholesome
frankness; that artificial reticences might merely be irritating. She
was not much disturbed when for hours he sat about the living-room in
his honest socks. But she would not listen to his theory that "all this
romance stuff is simply moonshine--elegant when you're courting, but no
use busting yourself keeping it up all your life."
She thought of surprises, games, to vary the days. She knitted an
astounding purple scarf, which she hid under his supper plate. (When
he discovered it he looked embarrassed, and gasped, "Is today an
anniversary or something? Gosh, I'd forgotten it!")
Once she filled a thermos bottle with hot coffee a corn-flakes box with
cookies just baked by Bea, and bustled to his office at three in the
afternoon. She hid her bundles in the hall and peeped in.
The office was shabby. Kennicott had inherited it from a medical
predecessor, and changed it only by adding a white enameled
operating-table, a sterilizer, a Roentgen-ray apparatus, and a small
portable typewriter. It was a suite of two rooms: a waiting-room with
straight chairs, shaky pine table, and those coverless and unknown
magazines which are found only in the offices of dentists and
doctors. The room beyond, looking on Main Street, was business-office,
consulting-room, operating-room, and, in an alcove, bacteriological
and chemical laboratory. The wooden floors of both rooms were bare; the
furniture was brown and scaly.
Waiting for the doctor were two women, as still as though they were
paralyzed, and a man in a railroad brakeman's uniform, holding his
bandaged right hand with his tanned left. They stared at Carol. She sat
modestly in a stiff chair, feeling frivolous and out of place.
Kennicott appeared at the inner door, ushering out a bleached man with
a trickle of wan beard, and consoling him, "All right, Dad. Be careful
about the sugar, and mind the diet I gave you. Gut the prescription
filled, and come in and see me next week. Say, uh, better, uh, better
not drink too much beer. All right, Dad."
His voice was artificially hearty. He looked absently at Carol. He was
a medical machine now, not a domestic machine. "What is it, Carrie?" he
droned.
"No hurry. Just wanted to say hello."
"Well----"
Self-pity because he did not divine that this was a surprise party
rendered her sad and interesting to herself, and she had the pleasure of
the martyrs in saying bravely to him, "It's nothing special. If you're
busy long I'll trot home."
While she waited she ceased to pity and began to mock herself. For the
first time she observed the waiting-room. Oh yes, the doctor's family
had to have obi panels and a wide couch and an electric percolator, but
any hole was good enough for sick tired common people who were nothing
but the one means and excuse for the doctor's existing! No. She couldn't
blame Kennicott. He was satisfied by the shabby chairs. He put up with
them as his patients did. It was her neglected province--she who had
been going about talking of rebuilding the whole town!
When the patients were gone she brought in her bundles.
"What's those?" wondered Kennicott.
"Turn your back! Look out of the window!"
He obeyed--not very much bored. When she cried "Now!" a feast of cookies
and small hard candies and hot coffee was spread on the roll-top desk in
the inner room.
His broad face lightened. "That's a new one on me! Never was more
surprised in my life! And, by golly, I believe I am hungry. Say, this is
fine."
When the first exhilaration of the surprise had declined she demanded,
"Will! I'm going to refurnish your waiting-room!"
"What's the matter with it? It's all right."
"It is not! It's hideous. We can afford to give your patients a better
place. And it would be good business." She felt tremendously politic.
"Rats! I don't worry about the business. You look here now: As I told
you----Just because I like to tuck a few dollars away, I'll be switched
if I'll stand for your thinking I'm nothing but a dollar-chasing----"
"Stop it! Quick! I'm not hurting your feelings! I'm not criticizing! I'm
the adoring least one of thy harem. I just mean----"
Two days later, with pictures, wicker chairs, a rug, she had made the
waiting-room habitable; and Kennicott admitted, "Does look a lot better.
Never thought much about it. Guess I need being bullied."
She was convinced that she was gloriously content in her career as
doctor's-wife.
VII
She tried to free herself from the speculation and disillusionment which
had been twitching at her; sought to dismiss all the opinionation of an
insurgent era. She wanted to shine upon the veal-faced bristly-bearded
Lyman Cass as much as upon Miles Bjornstam or Guy Pollock. She gave a
reception for the Thanatopsis Club. But her real acquiring of merit
was in calling upon that Mrs. Bogart whose gossipy good opinion was so
valuable to a doctor.
Though the Bogart house was next door she had entered it but three
times. Now she put on her new moleskin cap, which made her face small
and innocent, she rubbed off the traces of a lip-stick--and fled across
the alley before her admirable resolution should sneak away.
The age of houses, like the age of men, has small relation to their
years. The dull-green cottage of the good Widow Bogart was twenty years
old, but it had the antiquity of Cheops, and the smell of mummy-dust.
Its neatness rebuked the street. The two stones by the path were painted
yellow; the outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice
that it was not concealed at all; the last iron dog remaining in Gopher
Prairie stood among whitewashed conch-shells upon the lawn. The hallway
was dismayingly scrubbed; the kitchen was an exercise in mathematics,
with problems worked out in equidistant chairs.
The parlor was kept for visitors. Carol suggested, "Let's sit in the
kitchen. Please don't trouble to light the parlor stove."
"No trouble at all! My gracious, and you coming so seldom and all, and
the kitchen is a perfect sight, I try to keep it clean, but Cy will
track mud all over it, I've spoken to him about it a hundred times if
I've spoken once, no, you sit right there, dearie, and I'll make a fire,
no trouble at all, practically no trouble at all."
Mrs. Bogart groaned, rubbed her joints, and repeatedly dusted her hands
while she made the fire, and when Carol tried to help she lamented,
"Oh, it doesn't matter; guess I ain't good for much but toil and workin'
anyway; seems as though that's what a lot of folks think."
The parlor was distinguished by an expanse of rag carpet from which, as
they entered, Mrs. Bogart hastily picked one sad dead fly. In the center
of the carpet was a rug depicting a red Newfoundland dog, reclining in a
green and yellow daisy field and labeled "Our Friend." The parlor organ,
tall and thin, was adorned with a mirror partly circular, partly square,
and partly diamond-shaped, and with brackets holding a pot of geraniums,
a mouth-organ, and a copy of "The Oldtime Hymnal." On the center
table was a Sears-Roebuck mail-order catalogue, a silver frame with
photographs of the Baptist Church and of an elderly clergyman, and
an aluminum tray containing a rattlesnake's rattle and a broken
spectacle-lens.
Mrs. Bogart spoke of the eloquence of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel,
the coldness of cold days, the price of poplar wood, Dave Dyer's new
hair-cut, and Cy Bogart's essential piety. "As I said to his Sunday
School teacher, Cy may be a little wild, but that's because he's got so
much better brains than a lot of these boys, and this farmer that claims
he caught Cy stealing 'beggies, is a liar, and I ought to have the law
on him."
Mrs. Bogart went thoroughly into the rumor that the girl waiter at
Billy's Lunch was not all she might be--or, rather, was quite all she
might be.
"My lands, what can you expect when everybody knows what her mother was?
And if these traveling salesmen would let her alone she would be all
right, though I certainly don't believe she ought to be allowed to think
she can pull the wool over our eyes. The sooner she's sent to the
school for incorrigible girls down at Sauk Centre, the better for all
and----Won't you just have a cup of coffee, Carol dearie, I'm sure you
won't mind old Aunty Bogart calling you by your first name when you
think how long I've known Will, and I was such a friend of his dear
lovely mother when she lived here and--was that fur cap expensive?
But----Don't you think it's awful, the way folks talk in this town?"
Mrs. Bogart hitched her chair nearer. Her large face, with its
disturbing collection of moles and lone black hairs, wrinkled
cunningly. She showed her decayed teeth in a reproving smile, and in the
confidential voice of one who scents stale bedroom scandal she breathed:
"I just don't see how folks can talk and act like they do. You don't
know the things that go on under cover. This town--why it's only the
religious training I've given Cy that's kept him so innocent of--things.
Just the other day----I never pay no attention to stories, but I heard
it mighty good and straight that Harry Haydock is carrying on with a
girl that clerks in a store down in Minneapolis, and poor Juanita
not knowing anything about it--though maybe it's the judgment of
God, because before she married Harry she acted up with more than one
boy----Well, I don't like to say it, and maybe I ain't up-to-date, like
Cy says, but I always believed a lady shouldn't even give names to all
sorts of dreadful things, but just the same I know there was at least
one case where Juanita and a boy--well, they were just dreadful.
And--and----Then there's that Ole Jenson the grocer, that thinks he's so
plaguey smart, and I know he made up to a farmer's wife and----And this
awful man Bjornstam that does chores, and Nat Hicks and----"
There was, it seemed, no person in town who was not living a life of
shame except Mrs. Bogart, and naturally she resented it.
She knew. She had always happened to be there. Once, she whispered, she
was going by when an indiscreet window-shade had been left up a couple
of inches. Once she had noticed a man and woman holding hands, and right
at a Methodist sociable!
"Another thing----Heaven knows I never want to start trouble, but I
can't help what I see from my back steps, and I notice your hired girl
Bea carrying on with the grocery boys and all----"
"Mrs. Bogart! I'd trust Bea as I would myself!"
"Oh, dearie, you don't understand me! I'm sure she's a good girl. I mean
she's green, and I hope that none of these horrid young men that there
are around town will get her into trouble! It's their parents' fault,
letting them run wild and hear evil things. If I had my way there
wouldn't be none of them, not boys nor girls neither, allowed to know
anything about--about things till they was married. It's terrible the
bald way that some folks talk. It just shows and gives away what awful
thoughts they got inside them, and there's nothing can cure them except
coming right to God and kneeling down like I do at prayer-meeting every
Wednesday evening, and saying, 'O God, I would be a miserable sinner
except for thy grace.'
"I'd make every last one of these brats go to Sunday School and learn
to think about nice things 'stead of about cigarettes and goings-on--and
these dances they have at the lodges are the worst thing that ever
happened to this town, lot of young men squeezing girls and finding
out----Oh, it's dreadful. I've told the mayor he ought to put a stop
to them and----There was one boy in this town, I don't want to be
suspicious or uncharitable but----"
It was half an hour before Carol escaped.
She stopped on her own porch and thought viciously:
"If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I
must be on the side of the devil. But--isn't she like me? She too wants
to 'reform the town'! She too criticizes everybody! She too thinks the
men are vulgar and limited! AM I LIKE HER? This is ghastly!"
That evening she did not merely consent to play cribbage with Kennicott;
she urged him to play; and she worked up a hectic interest in land-deals
and Sam Clark.
VIII
In courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph of Nels
Erdstrom's baby and log cabin, but she had never seen the Erdstroms.
They had become merely "patients of the doctor." Kennicott telephoned
her on a mid-December afternoon, "Want to throw your coat on and drive
out to Erdstrom's with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice."
"Oh yes!" She hastened to put on woolen stockings, high boots, sweater,
muffler, cap, mittens.
The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for the motor. They
drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked over them was a blue woolen
cover, prickly to her wrists, and outside of it a buffalo robe, humble
and moth-eaten now, used ever since the bison herds had streaked the
prairie a few miles to the west.
The scattered houses between which they passed in town were small and
desolate in contrast to the expanse of huge snowy yards and wide
street. They crossed the railroad tracks, and instantly were in the farm
country. The big piebald horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to
trot. The carriage squeaked in rhythm. Kennicott drove with clucks of
"There boy, take it easy!" He was thinking. He paid no attention to
Carol. Yet it was he who commented, "Pretty nice, over there," as they
approached an oak-grove where shifty winter sunlight quivered in the
hollow between two snow-drifts.
They drove from the natural prairie to a cleared district which twenty
years ago had been forest. The country seemed to stretch unchanging to
the North Pole: low hill, brush-scraggly bottom, reedy creek, muskrat
mound, fields with frozen brown clods thrust up through the snow.
Her ears and nose were pinched; her breath frosted her collar; her
fingers ached.
"Getting colder," she said.
"Yup."
That was all their conversation for three miles. Yet she was happy.
They reached Nels Erdstrom's at four, and with a throb she recognized
the courageous venture which had lured her to Gopher Prairie: the
cleared fields, furrows among stumps, a log cabin chinked with mud and
roofed with dry hay. But Nels had prospered. He used the log cabin as a
barn; and a new house reared up, a proud, unwise, Gopher Prairie
house, the more naked and ungraceful in its glossy white paint and pink
trimmings. Every tree had been cut down. The house was so unsheltered,
so battered by the wind, so bleakly thrust out into the harsh clearing,
that Carol shivered. But they were welcomed warmly enough in the
kitchen, with its crisp new plaster, its black and nickel range, its
cream separator in a corner.
Mrs. Erdstrom begged her to sit in the parlor, where there was a
phonograph and an oak and leather davenport, the prairie farmer's
proofs of social progress, but she dropped down by the kitchen stove and
insisted, "Please don't mind me." When Mrs. Erdstrom had followed the
doctor out of the room Carol glanced in a friendly way at the grained
pine cupboard, the framed Lutheran Konfirmations Attest, the traces
of fried eggs and sausages on the dining table against the wall, and a
jewel among calendars, presenting not only a lithographic young woman
with cherry lips, and a Swedish advertisement of Axel Egge's grocery,
but also a thermometer and a match-holder.
She saw that a boy of four or five was staring at her from the hall,
a boy in gingham shirt and faded corduroy trousers, but large-eyed,
firm-mouthed, wide-browed. He vanished, then peeped in again, biting his
knuckles, turning his shoulder toward her in shyness.
Didn't she remember--what was it?--Kennicott sitting beside her at Fort
Snelling, urging, "See how scared that baby is. Needs some woman like
you."
Magic had fluttered about her then--magic of sunset and cool air and the
curiosity of lovers. She held out her hands as much to that sanctity as
to the boy.
He edged into the room, doubtfully sucking his thumb.
"Hello," she said. "What's your name?"
"Hee, hee, hee!"
"You're quite right. I agree with you. Silly people like me always ask
children their names."
"Hee, hee, hee!"
"Come here and I'll tell you the story of--well, I don't know what it
will be about, but it will have a slim heroine and a Prince Charming."
He stood stoically while she spun nonsense. His giggling ceased. She was
winning him. Then the telephone bell--two long rings, one short.
Mrs. Erdstrom galloped into the room, shrieked into the transmitter,
"Vell? Yes, yes, dis is Erdstrom's place! Heh? Oh, you vant de doctor?"
Kennicott appeared, growled into the telephone:
"Well, what do you want? Oh, hello Dave; what do you want? Which
Morgenroth's? Adolph's? All right. Amputation? Yuh, I see. Say, Dave,
get Gus to harness up and take my surgical kit down there--and have him
take some chloroform. I'll go straight down from here. May not get
home tonight. You can get me at Adolph's. Huh? No, Carrie can give the
anesthetic, I guess. G'-by. Huh? No; tell me about that tomorrow--too
damn many people always listening in on this farmers' line."
He turned to Carol. "Adolph Morgenroth, farmer ten miles southwest of
town, got his arm crushed-fixing his cow-shed and a post caved in on
him--smashed him up pretty bad--may have to amputate, Dave Dyer says.
Afraid we'll have to go right from here. Darn sorry to drag you clear
down there with me----"
"Please do. Don't mind me a bit."
"Think you could give the anesthetic? Usually have my driver do it."
"If you'll tell me how."
"All right. Say, did you hear me putting one over on these goats that
are always rubbering in on party-wires? I hope they heard me! Well. . . .
Now, Bessie, don't you worry about Nels. He's getting along all right.
Tomorrow you or one of the neighbors drive in and get this prescription
filled at Dyer's. Give him a teaspoonful every four hours. Good-by.
Hel-lo! Here's the little fellow! My Lord, Bessie, it ain't possible
this is the fellow that used to be so sickly? Why, say, he's a great big
strapping Svenska now--going to be bigger 'n his daddy!"
Kennicott's bluffness made the child squirm with a delight which Carol
could not evoke. It was a humble wife who followed the busy doctor out
to the carriage, and her ambition was not to play Rachmaninoff better,
nor to build town halls, but to chuckle at babies.
The sunset was merely a flush of rose on a dome of silver, with oak
twigs and thin poplar branches against it, but a silo on the horizon
changed from a red tank to a tower of violet misted over with gray. The
purple road vanished, and without lights, in the darkness of a world
destroyed, they swayed on--toward nothing.
It was a bumpy cold way to the Morgenroth farm, and she was asleep when
they arrived.
Here was no glaring new house with a proud phonograph, but a low
whitewashed kitchen smelling of cream and cabbage. Adolph Morgenroth was
lying on a couch in the rarely used dining-room. His heavy work-scarred
wife was shaking her hands in anxiety.
Carol felt that Kennicott would do something magnificent and startling.
But he was casual. He greeted the man, "Well, well, Adolph, have to fix
you up, eh?" Quietly, to the wife, "Hat die drug store my schwartze bag
hier geschickt? So--schon. Wie viel Uhr ist 's? Sieben? Nun, lassen uns
ein wenig supper zuerst haben. Got any of that good beer left--giebt 's
noch Bier?"
He had supped in four minutes. His coat off, his sleeves rolled up, he
was scrubbing his hands in a tin basin in the sink, using the bar of
yellow kitchen soap.
Carol had not dared to look into the farther room while she labored over
the supper of beer, rye bread, moist cornbeef and cabbage, set on the
kitchen table. The man in there was groaning. In her one glance she
had seen that his blue flannel shirt was open at a corded tobacco-brown
neck, the hollows of which were sprinkled with thin black and gray
hairs. He was covered with a sheet, like a corpse, and outside the sheet
was his right arm, wrapped in towels stained with blood.
But Kennicott strode into the other room gaily, and she followed him.
With surprising delicacy in his large fingers he unwrapped the towels
and revealed an arm which, below the elbow, was a mass of blood and raw
flesh. The man bellowed. The room grew thick about her; she was very
seasick; she fled to a chair in the kitchen. Through the haze of nausea
she heard Kennicott grumbling, "Afraid it will have to come off, Adolph.
What did you do? Fall on a reaper blade? We'll fix it right up. Carrie!
CAROL!"
She couldn't--she couldn't get up. Then she was up, her knees like
water, her stomach revolving a thousand times a second, her eyes filmed,
her ears full of roaring. She couldn't reach the dining-room. She was
going to faint. Then she was in the dining-room, leaning against the
wall, trying to smile, flushing hot and cold along her chest and sides,
while Kennicott mumbled, "Say, help Mrs. Morgenroth and me carry him
in on the kitchen table. No, first go out and shove those two tables
together, and put a blanket on them and a clean sheet."
It was salvation to push the heavy tables, to scrub them, to be exact in
placing the sheet. Her head cleared; she was able to look calmly in at
her husband and the farmwife while they undressed the wailing man, got
him into a clean nightgown, and washed his arm. Kennicott came to lay
out his instruments. She realized that, with no hospital facilities, yet
with no worry about it, her husband--HER HUSBAND--was going to perform
a surgical operation, that miraculous boldness of which one read in
stories about famous surgeons.
She helped them to move Adolph into the kitchen. The man was in such a
funk that he would not use his legs. He was heavy, and smelled of sweat
and the stable. But she put her arm about his waist, her sleek head by
his chest; she tugged at him; she clicked her tongue in imitation of
Kennicott's cheerful noises.
When Adolph was on the table Kennicott laid a hemispheric steel and
cotton frame on his face; suggested to Carol, "Now you sit here at his
head and keep the ether dripping--about this fast, see? I'll watch
his breathing. Look who's here! Real anesthetist! Ochsner hasn't got a
better one! Class, eh? . . . Now, now, Adolph, take it easy. This won't
hurt you a bit. Put you all nice and asleep and it won't hurt a bit.
Schweig' mal! Bald schlaft man grat wie ein Kind. So! So! Bald geht's
besser!"
As she let the ether drip, nervously trying to keep the rhythm that
Kennicott had indicated, Carol stared at her husband with the abandon of
hero-worship.
He shook his head. "Bad light--bad light. Here, Mrs. Morgenroth, you
stand right here and hold this lamp. Hier, und dieses--dieses lamp
halten--so!"
By that streaky glimmer he worked, swiftly, at ease. The room was still.
Carol tried to look at him, yet not look at the seeping blood, the
crimson slash, the vicious scalpel. The ether fumes were sweet, choking.
Her head seemed to be floating away from her body. Her arm was feeble.
It was not the blood but the grating of the surgical saw on the living
bone that broke her, and she knew that she had been fighting off nausea,
that she was beaten. She was lost in dizziness. She heard Kennicott's
voice--
"Sick? Trot outdoors couple minutes. Adolph will stay under now."
She was fumbling at a door-knob which whirled in insulting circles;
she was on the stoop, gasping, forcing air into her chest, her head
clearing. As she returned she caught the scene as a whole: the cavernous
kitchen, two milk-cans a leaden patch by the wall, hams dangling from a
beam, bats of light at the stove door, and in the center, illuminated
by a small glass lamp held by a frightened stout woman, Dr. Kennicott
bending over a body which was humped under a sheet--the surgeon, his
bare arms daubed with blood, his hands, in pale-yellow rubber gloves,
loosening the tourniquet, his face without emotion save when he threw
up his head and clucked at the farmwife, "Hold that light steady just a
second more--noch blos esn wenig."
"He speaks a vulgar, common, incorrect German of life and death and
birth and the soil. I read the French and German of sentimental
lovers and Christmas garlands. And I thought that it was I who had the
culture!" she worshiped as she returned to her place.
After a time he snapped, "That's enough. Don't give him any more ether."
He was concentrated on tying an artery. His gruffness seemed heroic to
her.
As he shaped the flap of flesh she murmured, "Oh, you ARE wonderful!"
He was surprised. "Why, this is a cinch. Now if it had been like last
week----Get me some more water. Now last week I had a case with an ooze
in the peritoneal cavity, and by golly if it wasn't a stomach ulcer that
I hadn't suspected and----There. Say, I certainly am sleepy. Let's turn
in here. Too late to drive home. And tastes to me like a storm coming."
IX
They slept on a feather bed with their fur coats over them; in the
morning they broke ice in the pitcher--the vast flowered and gilt
pitcher.
Kennicott's storm had not come. When they set out it was hazy and
growing warmer. After a mile she saw that he was studying a dark cloud
in the north. He urged the horses to the run. But she forgot his unusual
haste in wonder at the tragic landscape. The pale snow, the prickles of
old stubble, and the clumps of ragged brush faded into a gray obscurity.
Under the hillocks were cold shadows. The willows about a farmhouse were
agitated by the rising wind, and the patches of bare wood where the bark
had peeled away were white as the flesh of a leper. The snowy slews were
of a harsh flatness. The whole land was cruel, and a climbing cloud of
slate-edged blackness dominated the sky.
"Guess we're about in for a blizzard," speculated Kennicott "We can make
Ben McGonegal's, anyway."
"Blizzard? Really? Why----But still we used to think they were fun when
I was a girl. Daddy had to stay home from court, and we'd stand at the
window and watch the snow."
"Not much fun on the prairie. Get lost. Freeze to death. Take no
chances." He chirruped at the horses. They were flying now, the carriage
rocking on the hard ruts.
The whole air suddenly crystallized into large damp flakes. The horses
and the buffalo robe were covered with snow; her face was wet; the
thin butt of the whip held a white ridge. The air became colder. The
snowflakes were harder; they shot in level lines, clawing at her face.
She could not see a hundred feet ahead.
Kennicott was stern. He bent forward, the reins firm in his coonskin
gauntlets. She was certain that he would get through. He always got
through things.
Save for his presence, the world and all normal living disappeared. They
were lost in the boiling snow. He leaned close to bawl, "Letting the
horses have their heads. They'll get us home."
With a terrifying bump they were off the road, slanting with two wheels
in the ditch, but instantly they were jerked back as the horses fled
on. She gasped. She tried to, and did not, feel brave as she pulled the
woolen robe up about her chin.
They were passing something like a dark wall on the right. "I know that
barn!" he yelped. He pulled at the reins. Peeping from the covers she
saw his teeth pinch his lower lip, saw him scowl as he slackened and
sawed and jerked sharply again at the racing horses.
They stopped.
"Farmhouse there. Put robe around you and come on," he cried.
It was like diving into icy water to climb out of the carriage, but
on the ground she smiled at him, her face little and childish and pink
above the buffalo robe over her shoulders. In a swirl of flakes which
scratched at their eyes like a maniac darkness, he unbuckled the
harness. He turned and plodded back, a ponderous furry figure, holding
the horses' bridles, Carol's hand dragging at his sleeve.
They came to the cloudy bulk of a barn whose outer wall was directly
upon the road. Feeling along it, he found a gate, led them into a yard,
into the barn. The interior was warm. It stunned them with its languid
quiet.
He carefully drove the horses into stalls.
Her toes were coals of pain. "Let's run for the house," she said.
"Can't. Not yet. Might never find it. Might get lost ten feet away from
it. Sit over in this stall, near the horses. We'll rush for the house
when the blizzard lifts."
"I'm so stiff! I can't walk!"
He carried her into the stall, stripped off her overshoes and boots,
stopping to blow on his purple fingers as he fumbled at her laces.
He rubbed her feet, and covered her with the buffalo robe and
horse-blankets from the pile on the feed-box. She was drowsy, hemmed in
by the storm. She sighed:
"You're so strong and yet so skilful and not afraid of blood or storm
or----"
"Used to it. Only thing that's bothered me was the chance the ether
fumes might explode, last night."
"I don't understand."
"Why, Dave, the darn fool, sent me ether, instead of chloroform like I
told him, and you know ether fumes are mighty inflammable, especially
with that lamp right by the table. But I had to operate, of
course--wound chuck-full of barnyard filth that way."
"You knew all the time that----Both you and I might have been blown up?
You knew it while you were operating?"
"Sure. Didn't you? Why, what's the matter?"
| Carol feels proud of her husband. She watches with pride as her husband is woken up in the middle of the night to attend upon a German farmers wife. Kennicott goes to do his duty unmindful of his hunger and the cold. He does not wake up Carol. Though she is awake, she is reluctant to break the spell by getting up. So she watches her husband as he gets ready to leave. When he returns, he informs her that it was a case of appendicitis, and that he operated upon the patient and falls asleep immediately. Nelson with an injured leg comes for a check up. Kennicott examines the wound and finds it healing neatly. Mrs. Nelson wants to know how much they owe him but adds that they can not pay immediately. Kennicott tells her not to worry about the money. He tells Carol to give them breakfast because they have a long drive ahead. One day Kennicott leaves home in the morning and does not return even after half past six. Their suppertime is six but Carol waits for Kennicott worriedly. Kennicott returns and Carol tells Bea to serve dinner. Carol wants to surprise her husband and takes coffee and snacks to Kennicotts office. Kennicotts office contains only few things besides the medical equipment. It looks quite barren. The patients sit stiff and quiet. She finds Kennicott busy with his patients and decides to wait for him to be free, as she looks around the plain room she blames herself for having neglected his office. Kennicott fells delighted when he finds that she has brought coffee and cookies and tells Carol that he was never so surprised in all his life. Carol informs him that she would change the furniture in his office. Kennicott protests, but when Carol makes the waiting room comfortable with wicker chairs and paintings on the walls and a rug, Kennicott admits that the room looked a lot better. Carol gives a reception for the Thanatopsis club. She tries to be friendly with Lymn Cass as well as with Bjornstam and Guy Pollock. She even calls on Mrs. Bogart as Kennicott had once suggested. She finds Bogarts house well scrubbed. Though Carol prefers to sit in the kitchen Mrs. Bogart lights the parlor stove and makes Carol sit there comfortably. She complains about the people who complain against her son Cy Bogart. She gossips about the girl waiter, about Harry Haydock who is supposed to have an affair with a girl in Minneapolis, about how Juanita had affairs before marriage, about Ole Jenson, about Bjornstam, even about Nat Hick the tailor. She even warns Carol about Bea and the grocery boy. She grumbles that no one listens to her and proclaims that she would set things right if she were given the powers. She would never let any boy or girl know anything about life till they got married. She believes that only prayers would save them from becoming sinners. She would force them to attend Sunday school and put an end to dances. Carol manages to escape from her only after another half an hour. Kennicott takes Carol along to attend Nel Endstrom who is down with jaundice. They take a carriage. Kennicott had shown Carol a snapshot of Nel Endstroms baby and his log cabin when he was courting Carol. It gets colder but Carol feels very happy. When they reach the house, Carol recognizes the log cabin. But the Endstroms have prospered and built a house. The log cabin is used as a barn. The house contains all the symbols of prosperity. Carol settles down in the kitchen and finds the baby of the photograph has grown up to be a shy four year old boy. Even as she tries to talk to him Kennicott is summoned by Dave Dyer to attend on Adolph who lives ten miles away. He has a crushed arm that has to be amputated. The doctor gives instructions for medicines and tells him that Carol would give the anesthesia. Then he finds the boy and compliments him on his healthy looks. He tells him that he would grow up to be bigger than his father is. The boy squirms with delight and Carol feels that she could never get a child to laugh so and she feels very humbled. | summary |
CHAPTER XVI
KENNICOTT was heavily pleased by her Christmas presents, and he gave her
a diamond bar-pin. But she could not persuade herself that he was much
interested in the rites of the morning, in the tree she had decorated,
the three stockings she had hung, the ribbons and gilt seals and hidden
messages. He said only:
"Nice way to fix things, all right. What do you say we go down to Jack
Elder's and have a game of five hundred this afternoon?"
She remembered her father's Christmas fantasies: the sacred old rag
doll at the top of the tree, the score of cheap presents, the punch and
carols, the roast chestnuts by the fire, and the gravity with which the
judge opened the children's scrawly notes and took cognizance of demands
for sled-rides, for opinions upon the existence of Santa Claus. She
remembered him reading out a long indictment of himself for being a
sentimentalist, against the peace and dignity of the State of Minnesota.
She remembered his thin legs twinkling before their sled----
She muttered unsteadily, "Must run up and put on my shoes--slippers so
cold." In the not very romantic solitude of the locked bathroom she sat
on the slippery edge of the tub and wept.
II
Kennicott had five hobbies: medicine, land-investment, Carol, motoring,
and hunting. It is not certain in what order he preferred them. Solid
though his enthusiasms were in the matter of medicine--his admiration
of this city surgeon, his condemnation of that for tricky ways of
persuading country practitioners to bring in surgical patients,
his indignation about fee-splitting, his pride in a new X-ray
apparatus--none of these beatified him as did motoring.
He nursed his two-year-old Buick even in winter, when it was stored in
the stable-garage behind the house. He filled the grease-cups, varnished
a fender, removed from beneath the back seat the debris of gloves,
copper washers, crumpled maps, dust, and greasy rags. Winter noons he
wandered out and stared owlishly at the car. He became excited over a
fabulous "trip we might take next summer." He galloped to the station,
brought home railway maps, and traced motor-routes from Gopher Prairie
to Winnipeg or Des Moines or Grand Marais, thinking aloud and expecting
her to be effusive about such academic questions as "Now I wonder if we
could stop at Baraboo and break the jump from La Crosse to Chicago?"
To him motoring was a faith not to be questioned, a high-church cult,
with electric sparks for candles, and piston-rings possessing the
sanctity of altar-vessels. His liturgy was composed of intoned and
metrical road-comments: "They say there's a pretty good hike from Duluth
to International Falls."
Hunting was equally a devotion, full of metaphysical concepts veiled
from Carol. All winter he read sporting-catalogues, and thought about
remarkable past shots: "'Member that time when I got two ducks on a
long chance, just at sunset?" At least once a month he drew his favorite
repeating shotgun, his "pump gun," from its wrapper of greased canton
flannel; he oiled the trigger, and spent silent ecstatic moments aiming
at the ceiling. Sunday mornings Carol heard him trudging up to the
attic and there, an hour later, she found him turning over boots, wooden
duck-decoys, lunch-boxes, or reflectively squinting at old shells,
rubbing their brass caps with his sleeve and shaking his head as he
thought about their uselessness.
He kept the loading-tools he had used as a boy: a capper for shot-gun
shells, a mold for lead bullets. When once, in a housewifely frenzy for
getting rid of things, she raged, "Why don't you give these away?" he
solemnly defended them, "Well, you can't tell; they might come in handy
some day."
She flushed. She wondered if he was thinking of the child they would
have when, as he put it, they were "sure they could afford one."
Mysteriously aching, nebulously sad, she slipped away, half-convinced
but only half-convinced that it was horrible and unnatural, this
postponement of release of mother-affection, this sacrifice to her
opinionation and to his cautious desire for prosperity.
"But it would be worse if he were like Sam Clark--insisted on having
children," she considered; then, "If Will were the Prince, wouldn't I
DEMAND his child?"
Kennicott's land-deals were both financial advancement and favorite
game. Driving through the country, he noticed which farms had good
crops; he heard the news about the restless farmer who was "thinking
about selling out here and pulling his freight for Alberta." He asked
the veterinarian about the value of different breeds of stock; he
inquired of Lyman Cass whether or not Einar Gyseldson really had had a
yield of forty bushels of wheat to the acre. He was always consulting
Julius Flickerbaugh, who handled more real estate than law, and more law
than justice. He studied township maps, and read notices of auctions.
Thus he was able to buy a quarter-section of land for one hundred and
fifty dollars an acre, and to sell it in a year or two, after installing
a cement floor in the barn and running water in the house, for one
hundred and eighty or even two hundred.
He spoke of these details to Sam Clark . . . rather often.
In all his games, cars and guns and land, he expected Carol to take an
interest. But he did not give her the facts which might have created
interest. He talked only of the obvious and tedious aspects; never of
his aspirations in finance, nor of the mechanical principles of motors.
This month of romance she was eager to understand his hobbies. She
shivered in the garage while he spent half an hour in deciding whether
to put alcohol or patent non-freezing liquid into the radiator, or to
drain out the water entirely. "Or no, then I wouldn't want to take
her out if it turned warm--still, of course, I could fill the
radiator again--wouldn't take so awful long--just take a few pails
of water--still, if it turned cold on me again before I drained
it----Course there's some people that put in kerosene, but they say it
rots the hose-connections and----Where did I put that lug-wrench?"
It was at this point that she gave up being a motorist and retired to
the house.
In their new intimacy he was more communicative about his practise;
he informed her, with the invariable warning not to tell, that Mrs.
Sunderquist had another baby coming, that the "hired girl at Howland's
was in trouble." But when she asked technical questions he did not know
how to answer; when she inquired, "Exactly what is the method of taking
out the tonsils?" he yawned, "Tonsilectomy? Why you just----If there's
pus, you operate. Just take 'em out. Seen the newspaper? What the devil
did Bea do with it?"
She did not try again.
III
They had gone to the "movies." The movies were almost as vital
to Kennicott and the other solid citizens of Gopher Prairie as
land-speculation and guns and automobiles.
The feature film portrayed a brave young Yankee who conquered a South
American republic. He turned the natives from their barbarous habits of
singing and laughing to the vigorous sanity, the Pep and Punch and
Go, of the North; he taught them to work in factories, to wear Klassy
Kollege Klothes, and to shout, "Oh, you baby doll, watch me gather
in the mazuma." He changed nature itself. A mountain which had borne
nothing but lilies and cedars and loafing clouds was by his Hustle so
inspirited that it broke out in long wooden sheds, and piles of iron
ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore to be converted into
steamers to carry iron ore.
The intellectual tension induced by the master film was relieved by a
livelier, more lyric and less philosophical drama: Mack Schnarken and
the Bathing Suit Babes in a comedy of manners entitled "Right on the
Coco." Mr. Schnarken was at various high moments a cook, a life-guard,
a burlesque actor, and a sculptor. There was a hotel hallway up which
policemen charged, only to be stunned by plaster busts hurled upon them
from the innumerous doors. If the plot lacked lucidity, the dual motif
of legs and pie was clear and sure. Bathing and modeling were equally
sound occasions for legs; the wedding-scene was but an approach to the
thunderous climax when Mr. Schnarken slipped a piece of custard pie into
the clergyman's rear pocket.
The audience in the Rosebud Movie Palace squealed and wiped their eyes;
they scrambled under the seats for overshoes, mittens, and mufflers,
while the screen announced that next week Mr. Schnarken might be seen
in a new, riproaring, extra-special superfeature of the Clean Comedy
Corporation entitled, "Under Mollie's Bed."
"I'm glad," said Carol to Kennicott as they stooped before the northwest
gale which was torturing the barren street, "that this is a moral
country. We don't allow any of these beastly frank novels."
"Yump. Vice Society and Postal Department won't stand for them. The
American people don't like filth."
"Yes. It's fine. I'm glad we have such dainty romances as 'Right on the
Coco' instead."
"Say what in heck do you think you're trying to do? Kid me?"
He was silent. She awaited his anger. She meditated upon his gutter
patois, the Boeotian dialect characteristic of Gopher Prairie. He
laughed puzzlingly. When they came into the glow of the house he laughed
again. He condescended:
"I've got to hand it to you. You're consistent, all right. I'd of
thought that after getting this look-in at a lot of good decent farmers,
you'd get over this high-art stuff, but you hang right on."
"Well----" To herself: "He takes advantage of my trying to be good."
"Tell you, Carrie: There's just three classes of people: folks that
haven't got any ideas at all; and cranks that kick about everything; and
Regular Guys, the fellows with sticktuitiveness, that boost and get the
world's work done."
"Then I'm probably a crank." She smiled negligently.
"No. I won't admit it. You do like to talk, but at a show-down you'd
prefer Sam Clark to any damn long-haired artist."
"Oh--well----"
"Oh well!" mockingly. "My, we're just going to change everything, aren't
we! Going to tell fellows that have been making movies for ten years
how to direct 'em; and tell architects how to build towns; and make the
magazines publish nothing but a lot of highbrow stories about old maids,
and about wives that don't know what they want. Oh, we're a terror! . . .
Come on now, Carrie; come out of it; wake up! You've got a fine nerve,
kicking about a movie because it shows a few legs! Why, you're always
touting these Greek dancers, or whatever they are, that don't even wear
a shimmy!"
"But, dear, the trouble with that film--it wasn't that it got in so many
legs, but that it giggled coyly and promised to show more of them, and
then didn't keep the promise. It was Peeping Tom's idea of humor."
"I don't get you. Look here now----"
She lay awake, while he rumbled with sleep
"I must go on. My 'crank ideas;' he calls them. I thought that adoring
him, watching him operate, would be enough. It isn't. Not after the
first thrill.
"I don't want to hurt him. But I must go on.
"It isn't enough, to stand by while he fills an automobile radiator and
chucks me bits of information.
"If I stood by and admired him long enough, I would be content. I would
become a 'nice little woman.' The Village Virus. Already----I'm not
reading anything. I haven't touched the piano for a week. I'm letting
the days drown in worship of 'a good deal, ten plunks more per acre.' I
won't! I won't succumb!
"How? I've failed at everything: the Thanatopsis, parties, pioneers,
city hall, Guy and Vida. But----It doesn't MATTER! I'm not trying to
'reform the town' now. I'm not trying to organize Browning Clubs,
and sit in clean white kids yearning up at lecturers with ribbony
eyeglasses. I am trying to save my soul.
"Will Kennicott, asleep there, trusting me, thinking he holds me. And
I'm leaving him. All of me left him when he laughed at me. It wasn't
enough for him that I admired him; I must change myself and grow like
him. He takes advantage. No more. It's finished. I will go on."
IV
Her violin lay on top of the upright piano. She picked it up. Since she
had last touched it the dried strings had snapped, and upon it lay a
gold and crimson cigar-band.
V
She longed to see Guy Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in
the faith. But Kennicott's dominance was heavy upon her. She could not
determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia--by
dislike of the emotional labor of the "scenes" which would be involved
in asserting independence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty:
not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad
breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades.
The second evening after the movies she impulsively summoned Vida
Sherwin and Guy to the house for pop-corn and cider. In the living-room
Vida and Kennicott debated "the value of manual training in grades below
the eighth," while Carol sat beside Guy at the dining table, buttering
pop-corn. She was quickened by the speculation in his eyes. She
murmured:
"Guy, do you want to help me?"
"My dear! How?"
"I don't know!"
He waited.
"I think I want you to help me find out what has made the darkness of
the women. Gray darkness and shadowy trees. We're all in it, ten million
women, young married women with good prosperous husbands, and business
women in linen collars, and grandmothers that gad out to teas, and wives
of under-paid miners, and farmwives who really like to make butter and
go to church. What is it we want--and need? Will Kennicott there would
say that we need lots of children and hard work. But it isn't that.
There's the same discontent in women with eight children and one more
coming--always one more coming! And you find it in stenographers and
wives who scrub, just as much as in girl college-graduates who wonder
how they can escape their kind parents. What do we want?"
"Essentially, I think, you are like myself, Carol; you want to go back
to an age of tranquillity and charming manners. You want to enthrone
good taste again."
"Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh--no! I believe all of us want
the same things--we're all together, the industrial workers and the
women and the farmers and the negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and
even a few of the Respectables. It's all the same revolt, in all the
classes that have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a
more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying.
We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're
tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired
of hearing the politicians and priests and cautious reformers (and the
husbands!) coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a
Utopia already made; just give us a bit more time and we'll produce it;
trust us; we're wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said
that. We want our Utopia NOW--and we're going to try our hands at it.
All we want is--everything for all of us! For every housewife and every
longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want
everything. We shatn't get it. So we shatn't ever be content----"
She wondered why he was wincing. He broke in:
"See here, my dear, I certainly hope you don't class yourself with a lot
of trouble-making labor-leaders! Democracy is all right theoretically,
and I'll admit there are industrial injustices, but I'd rather have them
than see the world reduced to a dead level of mediocrity. I refuse to
believe that you have anything in common with a lot of laboring men
rowing for bigger wages so that they can buy wretched flivvers and
hideous player-pianos and----"
At this second, in Buenos Ayres, a newspaper editor broke his routine of
being bored by exchanges to assert, "Any injustice is better than seeing
the world reduced to a gray level of scientific dullness." At this
second a clerk standing at the bar of a New York saloon stopped milling
his secret fear of his nagging office-manager long enough to growl
at the chauffeur beside him, "Aw, you socialists make me sick! I'm an
individualist. I ain't going to be nagged by no bureaus and take orders
off labor-leaders. And mean to say a hobo's as good as you and me?"
At this second Carol realized that for all Guy's love of dead elegances
his timidity was as depressing to her as the bulkiness of Sam Clark. She
realized that he was not a mystery, as she had excitedly believed; not
a romantic messenger from the World Outside on whom she could count for
escape. He belonged to Gopher Prairie, absolutely. She was snatched back
from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.
He was completing his protest, "You don't want to be mixed up in all
this orgy of meaningless discontent?"
She soothed him. "No, I don't. I'm not heroic. I'm scared by all the
fighting that's going on in the world. I want nobility and adventure,
but perhaps I want still more to curl on the hearth with some one I
love."
"Would you----"
He did not finish it. He picked up a handful of pop-corn, let it run
through his fingers, looked at her wistfully.
With the loneliness of one who has put away a possible love Carol saw
that he was a stranger. She saw that he had never been anything but
a frame on which she had hung shining garments. If she had let him
diffidently make love to her, it was not because she cared, but because
she did not care, because it did not matter.
She smiled at him with the exasperating tactfulness of a woman checking
a flirtation; a smile like an airy pat on the arm. She sighed, "You're
a dear to let me tell you my imaginary troubles." She bounced up, and
trilled, "Shall we take the pop-corn in to them now?"
Guy looked after her desolately.
While she teased Vida and Kennicott she was repeating, "I must go on."
VI
Miles Bjornstam, the pariah "Red Swede," had brought his circular saw
and portable gasoline engine to the house, to cut the cords of poplar
for the kitchen range. Kennicott had given the order; Carol knew nothing
of it till she heard the ringing of the saw, and glanced out to see
Bjornstam, in black leather jacket and enormous ragged purple
mittens, pressing sticks against the whirling blade, and flinging
the stove-lengths to one side. The red irritable motor kept up a red
irritable "tip-tip-tip-tip-tip-tip." The whine of the saw rose till it
simulated the shriek of a fire-alarm whistle at night, but always at the
end it gave a lively metallic clang, and in the stillness she heard the
flump of the cut stick falling on the pile.
She threw a motor robe over her, ran out. Bjornstam welcomed her, "Well,
well, well! Here's old Miles, fresh as ever. Well say, that's all right;
he ain't even begun to be cheeky yet; next summer he's going to take you
out on his horse-trading trip, clear into Idaho."
"Yes, and I may go!"
"How's tricks? Crazy about the town yet?"
"No, but I probably shall be, some day."
"Don't let 'em get you. Kick 'em in the face!"
He shouted at her while he worked. The pile of stove-wood grew
astonishingly. The pale bark of the poplar sticks was mottled with
lichens of sage-green and dusty gray; the newly sawed ends were
fresh-colored, with the agreeable roughness of a woolen muffler. To the
sterile winter air the wood gave a scent of March sap.
Kennicott telephoned that he was going into the country. Bjornstam had
not finished his work at noon, and she invited him to have dinner with
Bea in the kitchen. She wished that she were independent enough to dine
with these her guests. She considered their friendliness, she sneered at
"social distinctions," she raged at her own taboos--and she continued
to regard them as retainers and herself as a lady. She sat in the
dining-room and listened through the door to Bjornstam's booming and
Bea's giggles. She was the more absurd to herself in that, after the
rite of dining alone, she could go out to the kitchen, lean against the
sink, and talk to them.
They were attracted to each other; a Swedish Othello and Desdemona, more
useful and amiable than their prototypes. Bjornstam told his scapes:
selling horses in a Montana mining-camp, breaking a log-jam, being
impertinent to a "two-fisted" millionaire lumberman. Bea gurgled "Oh
my!" and kept his coffee cup filled.
He took a long time to finish the wood. He had frequently to go into the
kitchen to get warm. Carol heard him confiding to Bea, "You're a darn
nice Swede girl. I guess if I had a woman like you I wouldn't be such
a sorehead. Gosh, your kitchen is clean; makes an old bach feel sloppy.
Say, that's nice hair you got. Huh? Me fresh? Saaaay, girl, if I ever do
get fresh, you'll know it. Why, I could pick you up with one finger,
and hold you in the air long enough to read Robert J. Ingersoll clean
through. Ingersoll? Oh, he's a religious writer. Sure. You'd like him
fine."
When he drove off he waved to Bea; and Carol, lonely at the window
above, was envious of their pastoral.
"And I----But I will go on."
| It is Christmas Day and Carol decorates the Christmas tree imaginatively. Kennicott feels happy with the presents given by Carol. He presents her with a diamond bar-pin. After giving the beautiful Christmas tree a cursory glance, he suggests that they should go to Jack Elders house to play. Carol feels nostalgic about her childhood Christmas parties. In the privacy of her bathroom she sits on the edge of the bathtub and has a good cry for all the fun she misses in her adult life. Kennicott loves five things in life. They are - his work as a doctor, his wife Carol, his car, hunting and his ventures in real estate. He expects Carol to share his interests. But he gives Carol only superficial information, which cannot satisfy her natural curiosity. When he cleans his gun, she suggests that he should throw away the hunting equipment he used as a child. He says they may need it. Carol blushes thinking that he refers to the children they plan to have. She wants to have children and feels sorry that he wants to postpone it till they have enough savings to afford them. Kennicott usually finds out about farmers who wish to sell their farms. He consults Lymn Cass about the yield and Julius Flickerbaugh about the legal aspects. Then he buys the farm and sells it for a profit after installing cement floor in the barn and running water in the house. When Carol tries to understand his interest in cars, she watches him mulling over the question about what should he fill his radiator with-during the winter-because he has the option of alcohol and nonfreezing liquid. When she tries to show interest in his medical practice, he gives her news about who is expecting a baby and about who is in trouble. They watch a movie about a reformer who changes the idyllic life of a town to teach the people to mine for iron ore, which is used to make ships to carry more iron ore. There is also a picture called Right On The Coco for comic relief. It contains lots of suggestive scenes and slapstick comedy like slipping a piece of custard pie into the rear pocket of the priest. The audience enjoys it tremendously. On their way back home Carol remarks that they do not allow frank novels because it was a moral country but would have films like Right On the Coco. Kennicott comments that she is a diehard reformist. But he is convinced that if Carol had to make a choice she would prefer Sam Clark to any longhaired artist. He fails to understand her objection to films like Right on the Coco. Carol is frustrated because she has failed in all her efforts. She feels that Kennicott takes her love for granted. She feels that watching him operating and admiring him is not enough for her. She feels that she must leave Kennicott if she wants to find a purpose in life. She also knows that she will not leave Kennicott. But she knows that she has to get on with her reformation. She invites Vida and Guy Pollock to have popcorn. While Vida and Kennicott discuss education in the hall Carol sits buttering the popcorn near Guy Pollock. She tries to explain to Guy her dream of Utopia with the hope that he would help her to realize it. But Guy Pollock tells her that he would prefer to have the elegance tranquility and manners of the past. He would have the class distinctions but would not care to see the world reduced to the mediocrity of equality. Carol realizes that Guy Pollock is as ordinary as any other Gopher Prairie individual who cannot understand her dream of everything for everyone. She understands the longing in his eyes but checks him by getting up to join Vida and Kennicott. She decides to wage her war alone. Kennicott had ordered a kitchen range without Carols knowledge. So Carol is pleasantly surprised to see Bjornstam cutting poplar wood. She runs out to talk to him and he tells her that he would take her on his horse-trading trip the next year and she answers that she might go with him. When it is lunchtime, Kennicott phones to inform that he was going out to the country. So Carol invites Bjornstam to have lunch. She eats alone, while Bjornstam and Bea eat in the kitchen. She joins them after she finishes eating and enjoys chatting with them. She finds that Bjornstam and Bea are attracted to one another. She decides to continue with her crusade alone. | summary |
CHAPTER XVII
I
THEY were driving down the lake to the cottages that moonlit January
night, twenty of them in the bob-sled. They sang "Toy Land" and "Seeing
Nelly Home"; they leaped from the low back of the sled to race over the
slippery snow ruts; and when they were tired they climbed on the runners
for a lift. The moon-tipped flakes kicked up by the horses settled over
the revelers and dripped down their necks, but they laughed, yelped,
beat their leather mittens against their chests. The harness rattled,
the sleigh-bells were frantic, Jack Elder's setter sprang beside the
horses, barking.
For a time Carol raced with them. The cold air gave fictive power. She
felt that she could run on all night, leap twenty feet at a stride. But
the excess of energy tired her, and she was glad to snuggle under the
comforters which covered the hay in the sled-box.
In the midst of the babel she found enchanted quietude.
Along the road the shadows from oak-branches were inked on the snow
like bars of music. Then the sled came out on the surface of Lake
Minniemashie. Across the thick ice was a veritable road, a short-cut
for farmers. On the glaring expanse of the lake-levels of hard crust,
flashes of green ice blown clear, chains of drifts ribbed like the
sea-beach--the moonlight was overwhelming. It stormed on the snow, it
turned the woods ashore into crystals of fire. The night was tropical
and voluptuous. In that drugged magic there was no difference between
heavy heat and insinuating cold.
Carol was dream-strayed. The turbulent voices, even Guy Pollock being
connotative beside her, were nothing. She repeated:
Deep on the convent-roof the snows
Are sparkling to the moon.
The words and the light blurred into one vast indefinite happiness, and
she believed that some great thing was coming to her. She withdrew from
the clamor into a worship of incomprehensible gods. The night expanded,
she was conscious of the universe, and all mysteries stooped down to
her.
She was jarred out of her ecstasy as the bob-sled bumped up the steep
road to the bluff where stood the cottages.
They dismounted at Jack Elder's shack. The interior walls of unpainted
boards, which had been grateful in August, were forbidding in the chill.
In fur coats and mufflers tied over caps they were a strange company,
bears and walruses talking. Jack Elder lighted the shavings waiting in
the belly of a cast-iron stove which was like an enlarged bean-pot.
They piled their wraps high on a rocker, and cheered the rocker as it
solemnly tipped over backward.
Mrs. Elder and Mrs. Sam Clark made coffee in an enormous blackened tin
pot; Vida Sherwin and Mrs. McGanum unpacked doughnuts and gingerbread;
Mrs. Dave Dyer warmed up "hot dogs"--frankfurters in rolls; Dr. Terry
Gould, after announcing, "Ladies and gents, prepare to be shocked; shock
line forms on the right," produced a bottle of bourbon whisky.
The others danced, muttering "Ouch!" as their frosted feet struck the
pine planks. Carol had lost her dream. Harry Haydock lifted her by the
waist and swung her. She laughed. The gravity of the people who stood
apart and talked made her the more impatient for frolic.
Kennicott, Sam Clark, Jackson Elder, young Dr. McGanum, and James
Madison Howland, teetering on their toes near the stove, conversed
with the sedate pomposity of the commercialist. In details the men were
unlike, yet they said the same things in the same hearty monotonous
voices. You had to look at them to see which was speaking.
"Well, we made pretty good time coming up," from one--any one.
"Yump, we hit it up after we struck the good going on the lake."
"Seems kind of slow though, after driving an auto."
"Yump, it does, at that. Say, how'd you make out with that Sphinx tire
you got?"
"Seems to hold out fine. Still, I don't know's I like it any better than
the Roadeater Cord."
"Yump, nothing better than a Roadeater. Especially the cord. The cord's
lots better than the fabric."
"Yump, you said something----Roadeater's a good tire."
"Say, how'd you come out with Pete Garsheim on his payments?"
"He's paying up pretty good. That's a nice piece of land he's got."
"Yump, that's a dandy farm."
"Yump, Pete's got a good place there."
They glided from these serious topics into the jocose insults which are
the wit of Main Street. Sam Clark was particularly apt at them. "What's
this wild-eyed sale of summer caps you think you're trying to pull
off?" he clamored at Harry Haydock. "Did you steal 'em, or are you just
overcharging us, as usual? . . . Oh say, speaking about caps, d'I ever
tell you the good one I've got on Will? The doc thinks he's a pretty
good driver, fact, he thinks he's almost got human intelligence, but one
time he had his machine out in the rain, and the poor fish, he hadn't
put on chains, and thinks I----"
Carol had heard the story rather often. She fled back to the dancers,
and at Dave Dyer's masterstroke of dropping an icicle down Mrs.
McGanum's back she applauded hysterically.
They sat on the floor, devouring the food. The men giggled amiably as
they passed the whisky bottle, and laughed, "There's a real sport!" when
Juanita Haydock took a sip. Carol tried to follow; she believed that she
desired to be drunk and riotous; but the whisky choked her and as she
saw Kennicott frown she handed the bottle on repentantly. Somewhat too
late she remembered that she had given up domesticity and repentance.
"Let's play charades!" said Raymie Wutherspoon.
"Oh yes, do let us," said Ella Stowbody.
"That's the caper," sanctioned Harry Haydock.
They interpreted the word "making" as May and King. The crown was a red
flannel mitten cocked on Sam Clark's broad pink bald head. They forgot
they were respectable. They made-believe. Carol was stimulated to cry:
"Let's form a dramatic club and give a play! Shall we? It's been so much
fun tonight!"
They looked affable.
"Sure," observed Sam Clark loyally.
"Oh, do let us! I think it would be lovely to present 'Romeo and
Juliet'!" yearned Ella Stowbody.
"Be a whale of a lot of fun," Dr. Terry Gould granted.
"But if we did," Carol cautioned, "it would be awfully silly to have
amateur theatricals. We ought to paint our own scenery and everything,
and really do something fine. There'd be a lot of hard work. Would
you--would we all be punctual at rehearsals, do you suppose?"
"You bet!" "Sure." "That's the idea." "Fellow ought to be prompt at
rehearsals," they all agreed.
"Then let's meet next week and form the Gopher Prairie Dramatic
Association!" Carol sang.
She drove home loving these friends who raced through moonlit snow,
had Bohemian parties, and were about to create beauty in the theater.
Everything was solved. She would be an authentic part of the town,
yet escape the coma of the Village Virus. . . . She would be free of
Kennicott again, without hurting him, without his knowing.
She had triumphed.
The moon was small and high now, and unheeding.
II
Though they had all been certain that they longed for the privilege of
attending committee meetings and rehearsals, the dramatic association as
definitely formed consisted only of Kennicott, Carol, Guy Pollock,
Vida Sherwin, Ella Stowbody, the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, Raymie
Wutherspoon, Dr. Terry Gould, and four new candidates: flirtatious Rita
Simons, Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon and Myrtle Cass, an uncomely but
intense girl of nineteen. Of these fifteen only seven came to the first
meeting. The rest telephoned their unparalleled regrets and engagements
and illnesses, and announced that they would be present at all other
meetings through eternity.
Carol was made president and director.
She had added the Dillons. Despite Kennicott's apprehension the dentist
and his wife had not been taken up by the Westlakes but had remained
as definitely outside really smart society as Willis Woodford, who was
teller, bookkeeper, and janitor in Stowbody's bank. Carol had noted Mrs.
Dillon dragging past the house during a bridge of the Jolly Seventeen,
looking in with pathetic lips at the splendor of the accepted. She
impulsively invited the Dillons to the dramatic association meeting, and
when Kennicott was brusque to them she was unusually cordial, and felt
virtuous.
That self-approval balanced her disappointment at the smallness of the
meeting, and her embarrassment during Raymie Wutherspoon's repetitions
of "The stage needs uplifting," and "I believe that there are great
lessons in some plays."
Ella Stowbody, who was a professional, having studied elocution in
Milwaukee, disapproved of Carol's enthusiasm for recent plays. Miss
Stowbody expressed the fundamental principle of the American drama: the
only way to be artistic is to present Shakespeare. As no one listened to
her she sat back and looked like Lady Macbeth.
III
The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to American drama three
or four years later, were only in embryo. But of this fast coming revolt
Carol had premonitions. She knew from some lost magazine article that
in Dublin were innovators called The Irish Players. She knew confusedly
that a man named Gordon Craig had painted scenery--or had he written
plays? She felt that in the turbulence of the drama she was discovering
a history more important than the commonplace chronicles which dealt
with senators and their pompous puerilities. She had a sensation of
familiarity; a dream of sitting in a Brussels cafe and going afterward
to a tiny gay theater under a cathedral wall.
The advertisement in the Minneapolis paper leaped from the page to her
eyes:
The Cosmos School of Music, Oratory, and
Dramatic Art announces a program of four
one-act plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats,
and Lord Dunsany.
She had to be there! She begged Kennicott to "run down to the Cities"
with her.
"Well, I don't know. Be fun to take in a show, but why the deuce do you
want to see those darn foreign plays, given by a lot of amateurs? Why
don't you wait for a regular play, later on? There's going to be some
corkers coming: 'Lottie of Two-Gun Rancho,' and 'Cops and Crooks'--real
Broadway stuff, with the New York casts. What's this junk you want
to see? Hm. 'How He Lied to Her Husband.' That doesn't listen so bad.
Sounds racy. And, uh, well, I could go to the motor show, I suppose. I'd
like to see this new Hup roadster. Well----"
She never knew which attraction made him decide.
She had four days of delightful worry--over the hole in her one good
silk petticoat, the loss of a string of beads from her chiffon and brown
velvet frock, the catsup stain on her best georgette crepe blouse. She
wailed, "I haven't a single solitary thing that's fit to be seen in,"
and enjoyed herself very much indeed.
Kennicott went about casually letting people know that he was "going to
run down to the Cities and see some shows."
As the train plodded through the gray prairie, on a windless day with
the smoke from the engine clinging to the fields in giant cotton-rolls,
in a low and writhing wall which shut off the snowy fields, she did not
look out of the window. She closed her eyes and hummed, and did not know
that she was humming.
She was the young poet attacking fame and Paris.
In the Minneapolis station the crowd of lumberjacks, farmers, and
Swedish families with innumerous children and grandparents and paper
parcels, their foggy crowding and their clamor confused her. She felt
rustic in this once familiar city, after a year and a half of
Gopher Prairie. She was certain that Kennicott was taking the wrong
trolley-car. By dusk, the liquor warehouses, Hebraic clothing-shops,
and lodging-houses on lower Hennepin Avenue were smoky, hideous,
ill-tempered. She was battered by the noise and shuttling of the
rush-hour traffic. When a clerk in an overcoat too closely fitted at the
waist stared at her, she moved nearer to Kennicott's arm. The clerk was
flippant and urban. He was a superior person, used to this tumult. Was
he laughing at her?
For a moment she wanted the secure quiet of Gopher Prairie.
In the hotel-lobby she was self-conscious. She was not used to hotels;
she remembered with jealousy how often Juanita Haydock talked of the
famous hotels in Chicago. She could not face the traveling salesmen,
baronial in large leather chairs. She wanted people to believe that her
husband and she were accustomed to luxury and chill elegance; she was
faintly angry at him for the vulgar way in which, after signing the
register "Dr. W. P. Kennicott & wife," he bellowed at the clerk, "Got a
nice room with bath for us, old man?" She gazed about haughtily, but as
she discovered that no one was interested in her she felt foolish, and
ashamed of her irritation.
She asserted, "This silly lobby is too florid," and simultaneously she
admired it: the onyx columns with gilt capitals, the crown-embroidered
velvet curtains at the restaurant door, the silk-roped alcove where
pretty girls perpetually waited for mysterious men, the two-pound boxes
of candy and the variety of magazines at the news-stand. The hidden
orchestra was lively. She saw a man who looked like a European diplomat,
in a loose top-coat and a Homburg hat. A woman with a broadtail coat,
a heavy lace veil, pearl earrings, and a close black hat entered the
restaurant. "Heavens! That's the first really smart woman I've seen in a
year!" Carol exulted. She felt metropolitan.
But as she followed Kennicott to the elevator the coat-check girl, a
confident young woman, with cheeks powdered like lime, and a blouse
low and thin and furiously crimson, inspected her, and under that
supercilious glance Carol was shy again. She unconsciously waited
for the bellboy to precede her into the elevator. When he snorted "Go
ahead!" she was mortified. He thought she was a hayseed, she worried.
The moment she was in their room, with the bellboy safely out of the
way, she looked critically at Kennicott. For the first time in months
she really saw him.
His clothes were too heavy and provincial. His decent gray suit, made
by Nat Hicks of Gopher Prairie, might have been of sheet iron; it had
no distinction of cut, no easy grace like the diplomat's Burberry. His
black shoes were blunt and not well polished. His scarf was a stupid
brown. He needed a shave.
But she forgot her doubt as she realized the ingenuities of the room.
She ran about, turning on the taps of the bathtub, which gushed instead
of dribbling like the taps at home, snatching the new wash-rag out of
its envelope of oiled paper, trying the rose-shaded light between the
twin beds, pulling out the drawers of the kidney-shaped walnut desk to
examine the engraved stationery, planning to write on it to every one
she knew, admiring the claret-colored velvet armchair and the blue rug,
testing the ice-water tap, and squealing happily when the water really
did come out cold. She flung her arms about Kennicott, kissed him.
"Like it, old lady?"
"It's adorable. It's so amusing. I love you for bringing me. You really
are a dear!"
He looked blankly indulgent, and yawned, and condescended, "That's a
pretty slick arrangement on the radiator, so you can adjust it at any
temperature you want. Must take a big furnace to run this place. Gosh, I
hope Bea remembers to turn off the drafts tonight."
Under the glass cover of the dressing-table was a menu with the most
enchanting dishes: breast of guinea hen De Vitresse, pommes de terre a
la Russe, meringue Chantilly, gateaux Bruxelles.
"Oh, let's----I'm going to have a hot bath, and put on my new hat with
the wool flowers, and let's go down and eat for hours, and we'll have a
cocktail!" she chanted.
While Kennicott labored over ordering it was annoying to see him permit
the waiter to be impertinent, but as the cocktail elevated her to a
bridge among colored stars, as the oysters came in--not canned oysters
in the Gopher Prairie fashion, but on the half-shell--she cried, "If you
only knew how wonderful it is not to have had to plan this dinner, and
order it at the butcher's and fuss and think about it, and then
watch Bea cook it! I feel so free. And to have new kinds of food, and
different patterns of dishes and linen, and not worry about whether the
pudding is being spoiled! Oh, this is a great moment for me!"
IV
They had all the experiences of provincials in a metropolis. After
breakfast Carol bustled to a hair-dresser's, bought gloves and a blouse,
and importantly met Kennicott in front of an optician's, in accordance
with plans laid down, revised, and verified. They admired the diamonds
and furs and frosty silverware and mahogany chairs and polished morocco
sewing-boxes in shop-windows, and were abashed by the throngs in the
department-stores, and were bullied by a clerk into buying too many
shirts for Kennicott, and gaped at the "clever novelty perfumes--just
in from New York." Carol got three books on the theater, and spent
an exultant hour in warning herself that she could not afford this
rajah-silk frock, in thinking how envious it would make Juanita Haydock,
in closing her eyes, and buying it. Kennicott went from shop to shop,
earnestly hunting down a felt-covered device to keep the windshield of
his car clear of rain.
They dined extravagantly at their hotel at night, and next morning
sneaked round the corner to economize at a Childs' Restaurant. They were
tired by three in the afternoon, and dozed at the motion-pictures and
said they wished they were back in Gopher Prairie--and by eleven in the
evening they were again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant
that was frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days. They
sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and listened to a
brassy automatic piano, and were altogether cosmopolitan.
On the street they met people from home--the McGanums. They laughed,
shook hands repeatedly, and exclaimed, "Well, this is quite a
coincidence!" They asked when the McGanums had come down, and begged for
news of the town they had left two days before. Whatever the
McGanums were at home, here they stood out as so superior to all the
undistinguishable strangers absurdly hurrying past that the Kennicotts
held them as long as they could. The McGanums said good-by as though
they were going to Tibet instead of to the station to catch No. 7 north.
They explored Minneapolis. Kennicott was conversational and technical
regarding gluten and cockle-cylinders and No. I Hard, when they were
shown through the gray stone hulks and new cement elevators of the
largest flour-mills in the world. They looked across Loring Park and
the Parade to the towers of St. Mark's and the Procathedral, and the
red roofs of houses climbing Kenwood Hill. They drove about the chain of
garden-circled lakes, and viewed the houses of the millers and lumbermen
and real estate peers--the potentates of the expanding city. They
surveyed the small eccentric bungalows with pergolas, the houses of
pebbledash and tapestry brick with sleeping-porches above sun-parlors,
and one vast incredible chateau fronting the Lake of the Isles. They
tramped through a shining-new section of apartment-houses; not the tall
bleak apartments of Eastern cities but low structures of cheerful yellow
brick, in which each flat had its glass-enclosed porch with swinging
couch and scarlet cushions and Russian brass bowls. Between a waste of
tracks and a raw gouged hill they found poverty in staggering shanties.
They saw miles of the city which they had never known in their days
of absorption in college. They were distinguished explorers, and they
remarked, in great mutual esteem, "I bet Harry Haydock's never seen the
City like this! Why, he'd never have sense enough to study the machinery
in the mills, or go through all these outlying districts. Wonder folks
in Gopher Prairie wouldn't use their legs and explore, the way we do!"
They had two meals with Carol's sister, and were bored, and felt that
intimacy which beatifies married people when they suddenly admit that
they equally dislike a relative of either of them.
So it was with affection but also with weariness that they approached
the evening on which Carol was to see the plays at the dramatic school.
Kennicott suggested not going. "So darn tired from all this walking;
don't know but what we better turn in early and get rested up." It was
only from duty that Carol dragged him and herself out of the warm
hotel, into a stinking trolley, up the brownstone steps of the converted
residence which lugubriously housed the dramatic school.
V
They were in a long whitewashed hall with a clumsy draw-curtain across
the front. The folding chairs were filled with people who looked washed
and ironed: parents of the pupils, girl students, dutiful teachers.
"Strikes me it's going to be punk. If the first play isn't good, let's
beat it," said Kennicott hopefully.
"All right," she yawned. With hazy eyes she tried to read the lists of
characters, which were hidden among lifeless advertisements of pianos,
music-dealers, restaurants, candy.
She regarded the Schnitzler play with no vast interest. The actors
moved and spoke stiffly. Just as its cynicism was beginning to rouse her
village-dulled frivolity, it was over.
"Don't think a whale of a lot of that. How about taking a sneak?"
petitioned Kennicott.
"Oh, let's try the next one, 'How He Lied to Her Husband.'"
The Shaw conceit amused her, and perplexed Kennicott:
"Strikes me it's darn fresh. Thought it would be racy. Don't know as I
think much of a play where a husband actually claims he wants a fellow
to make love to his wife. No husband ever did that! Shall we shake a
leg?"
"I want to see this Yeats thing, 'Land of Heart's Desire.' I used to
love it in college." She was awake now, and urgent. "I know you didn't
care so much for Yeats when I read him aloud to you, but you just see if
you don't adore him on the stage."
Most of the cast were as unwieldy as oak chairs marching, and the
setting was an arty arrangement of batik scarfs and heavy tables, but
Maire Bruin was slim as Carol, and larger-eyed, and her voice was
a morning bell. In her, Carol lived, and on her lifting voice was
transported from this sleepy small-town husband and all the rows of
polite parents to the stilly loft of a thatched cottage where in a green
dimness, beside a window caressed by linden branches, she bent over a
chronicle of twilight women and the ancient gods.
"Well--gosh--nice kid played that girl--good-looker," said Kennicott.
"Want to stay for the last piece? Heh?"
She shivered. She did not answer.
The curtain was again drawn aside. On the stage they saw nothing but
long green curtains and a leather chair. Two young men in brown robes
like furniture-covers were gesturing vacuously and droning cryptic
sentences full of repetitions.
It was Carol's first hearing of Dunsany. She sympathized with the
restless Kennicott as he felt in his pocket for a cigar and unhappily
put it back.
Without understanding when or how, without a tangible change in the
stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was conscious of another time
and place.
Stately and aloof among vainglorious tiring-maids, a queen in robes
that murmured on the marble floor, she trod the gallery of a crumbling
palace. In the courtyard, elephants trumpeted, and swart men with beards
dyed crimson stood with blood-stained hands folded upon their hilts,
guarding the caravan from El Sharnak, the camels with Tyrian stuffs
of topaz and cinnabar. Beyond the turrets of the outer wall the jungle
glared and shrieked, and the sun was furious above drenched orchids.
A youth came striding through the steel-bossed doors, the sword-bitten
doors that were higher than ten tall men. He was in flexible mail, and
under the rim of his planished morion were amorous curls. His hand was
out to her; before she touched it she could feel its warmth----
"Gosh all hemlock! What the dickens is all this stuff about, Carrie?"
She was no Syrian queen. She was Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. She fell with a
jolt into a whitewashed hall and sat looking at two scared girls and a
young man in wrinkled tights.
Kennicott fondly rambled as they left the hall:
"What the deuce did that last spiel mean? Couldn't make head or tail of
it. If that's highbrow drama, give me a cow-puncher movie, every time!
Thank God, that's over, and we can get to bed. Wonder if we wouldn't
make time by walking over to Nicollet to take a car? One thing I will
say for that dump: they had it warm enough. Must have a big hot-air
furnace, I guess. Wonder how much coal it takes to run 'em through the
winter?"
In the car he affectionately patted her knee, and he was for a second
the striding youth in armor; then he was Doc Kennicott of Gopher
Prairie, and she was recaptured by Main Street. Never, not all her life,
would she behold jungles and the tombs of kings. There were strange
things in the world, they really existed; but she would never see them.
She would recreate them in plays!
She would make the dramatic association understand her aspiration. They
would, surely they would----
She looked doubtfully at the impenetrable reality of yawning trolley
conductor and sleepy passengers and placards advertising soap and
underwear.
| Carol and her circle go to the lake cottage in a bobsled. They are very happy as they sing and race. Carol races with them and when she feels tired, she rests under the comforters and feels blissfully happy. Once they reach the lake cottage, Jack Elder lights the stove and Mrs. Elder and Mrs. Clark make coffee. Vida and Mrs. Mc Ganum unpack the doughnuts and the gingerbread. Mrs. Dyer warms up the hot dogs and Dr. Terry Gould hands them a bottle of whisky. They dance merrily. Sam Clark teases Harry Haydock about the sale in his shop and Kennicott about his driving, affectionately. Carol feels very happy and when Dave Dyer drops an icicle down Mrs. Mc Ganum's back she cheers hysterically. They eat ravenously. When the whisky is passed around Juanita takes a sip and is cheered. Carol also takes a sip and chokes over the whisky. Kennicott looks at her disapprovingly and she passes on the bottle disappointed. They play the game called charade-a game of make-believe. Carol is so inspired by the skill of the actors that she proposes the formation of a dramatic club. Every one is willing and Carol feels that at last she was getting a chance to organize some thing important. The members of the dramatic club hold their first meeting and elect Carol as their president. They begin with a disagreement over the plays to be enacted. Carol wants the recent plays but Ella wants Shakespeare. Carol wants to watch the four one act plays to be presented in Minneapolis. Though Kennicott is not very keen to watch the plays, he agrees. They take train no. 7 to Minneapolis and check in at an expensive hotel. Carol feels childishly thrilled by the luxuries in the hotel. She enjoys ordering the food going through the menu carefully. They buy many shirts for Kennicott and a dress for Carol. They walk around the city and observe the largest flourmills with cement elevators. They see beautiful houses and also slums. Then they watch a movie but sleep through it because they are exhausted. They have meals at Carol's sister's house. They meet the Mc Ganums and talk to them eagerly like long lost friends and ask for news about Gopher Prairie. Kennicott tries to coax Carol to skip the plays. But Carol is very keen to see them. Amateurs perform the plays but Carol enjoys them because Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats and Lord Dunsany have written them. When the plays get over, Kennicott tells her that he would prefer to watch a cow boy movie any day. | summary |
CHAPTER XVIII
I
SHE hurried to the first meeting of the play-reading committee. Her
jungle romance had faded, but she retained a religious fervor, a surge
of half-formed thought about the creation of beauty by suggestion.
A Dunsany play would be too difficult for the Gopher Prairie
association. She would let them compromise on Shaw--on "Androcles and
the Lion," which had just been published.
The committee was composed of Carol, Vida Sherwin, Guy Pollock, Raymie
Wutherspoon, and Juanita Haydock. They were exalted by the picture of
themselves as being simultaneously business-like and artistic. They
were entertained by Vida in the parlor of Mrs. Elisha Gurrey's
boarding-house, with its steel engraving of Grant at Appomattox, its
basket of stereoscopic views, and its mysterious stains on the gritty
carpet.
Vida was an advocate of culture-buying and efficiency-systems. She
hinted that they ought to have (as at the committee-meetings of the
Thanatopsis) a "regular order of business," and "the reading of the
minutes," but as there were no minutes to read, and as no one knew
exactly what was the regular order of the business of being literary,
they had to give up efficiency.
Carol, as chairman, said politely, "Have you any ideas about what play
we'd better give first?" She waited for them to look abashed and vacant,
so that she might suggest "Androcles."
Guy Pollock answered with disconcerting readiness, "I'll tell you: since
we're going to try to do something artistic, and not simply fool around,
I believe we ought to give something classic. How about 'The School for
Scandal'?"
"Why----Don't you think that has been done a good deal?"
"Yes, perhaps it has."
Carol was ready to say, "How about Bernard Shaw?" when he treacherously
went on, "How would it be then to give a Greek drama--say 'Oedipus
Tyrannus'?"
"Why, I don't believe----"
Vida Sherwin intruded, "I'm sure that would be too hard for us. Now I've
brought something that I think would be awfully jolly."
She held out, and Carol incredulously took, a thin gray pamphlet
entitled "McGinerty's Mother-in-law." It was the sort of farce which is
advertised in "school entertainment" catalogues as:
Riproaring knock-out, 5 m. 3 f., time 2 hrs., interior set, popular with
churches and all high-class occasions.
Carol glanced from the scabrous object to Vida, and realized that she
was not joking.
"But this is--this is--why, it's just a----Why, Vida, I thought you
appreciated--well--appreciated art."
Vida snorted, "Oh. Art. Oh yes. I do like art. It's very nice. But after
all, what does it matter what kind of play we give as long as we get the
association started? The thing that matters is something that none of
you have spoken of, that is: what are we going to do with the money, if
we make any? I think it would be awfully nice if we presented the high
school with a full set of Stoddard's travel-lectures!"
Carol moaned, "Oh, but Vida dear, do forgive me but this farce----Now
what I'd like us to give is something distinguished. Say Shaw's
'Androcles.' Have any of you read it?"
"Yes. Good play," said Guy Pollock.
Then Raymie Wutherspoon astoundingly spoke up:
"So have I. I read through all the plays in the public library, so's
to be ready for this meeting. And----But I don't believe you grasp
the irreligious ideas in this 'Androcles,' Mrs. Kennicott. I guess the
feminine mind is too innocent to understand all these immoral writers.
I'm sure I don't want to criticize Bernard Shaw; I understand he is very
popular with the highbrows in Minneapolis; but just the same----As far
as I can make out, he's downright improper! The things he SAYS----Well,
it would be a very risky thing for our young folks to see. It seems to
me that a play that doesn't leave a nice taste in the mouth and that
hasn't any message is nothing but--nothing but----Well, whatever it may
be, it isn't art. So----Now I've found a play that is clean, and there's
some awfully funny scenes in it, too. I laughed out loud, reading it.
It's called 'His Mother's Heart,' and it's about a young man in college
who gets in with a lot of free-thinkers and boozers and everything, but
in the end his mother's influence----"
Juanita Haydock broke in with a derisive, "Oh rats, Raymie! Can the
mother's influence! I say let's give something with some class to it.
I bet we could get the rights to 'The Girl from Kankakee,' and that's a
real show. It ran for eleven months in New York!"
"That would be lots of fun, if it wouldn't cost too much," reflected
Vida.
Carol's was the only vote cast against "The Girl from Kankakee."
II
She disliked "The Girl from Kankakee" even more than she had expected.
It narrated the success of a farm-lassie in clearing her brother of a
charge of forgery. She became secretary to a New York millionaire and
social counselor to his wife; and after a well-conceived speech on the
discomfort of having money, she married his son.
There was also a humorous office-boy.
Carol discerned that both Juanita Haydock and Ella Stowbody wanted the
lead. She let Juanita have it. Juanita kissed her and in the exuberant
manner of a new star presented to the executive committee her theory,
"What we want in a play is humor and pep. There's where American
playwrights put it all over these darn old European glooms."
As selected by Carol and confirmed by the committee, the persons of the
play were:
John Grimm, a millionaire . . . . Guy Pollock
His wife. . . . . . . . . Miss Vida Sherwin
His son . . . . . . . . . Dr. Harvey Dillon
His business rival. . . . . . . Raymond T. Wutherspoon
Friend of Mrs. Grimm . . . . . . Miss Ella Stowbody
The girl from Kankakee . . . . . Mrs. Harold C. Haydock
Her brother. . . . . . . . Dr. Terence Gould
Her mother . . . . . . . . Mrs. David Dyer
Stenographer . . . . . . . . Miss Rita Simons
Office-boy . . . . . . . . Miss Myrtle Cass
Maid in the Grimms' home . . . . Mrs. W. P. Kennicott
Direction of Mrs. Kennicott
Among the minor lamentations was Maud Dyer's "Well of course I suppose I
look old enough to be Juanita's mother, even if Juanita is eight months
older than I am, but I don't know as I care to have everybody noticing
it and----"
Carol pleaded, "Oh, my DEAR! You two look exactly the same age. I chose
you because you have such a darling complexion, and you know with powder
and a white wig, anybody looks twice her age, and I want the mother to
be sweet, no matter who else is."
Ella Stowbody, the professional, perceiving that it was because of a
conspiracy of jealousy that she had been given a small part, alternated
between lofty amusement and Christian patience.
Carol hinted that the play would be improved by cutting, but as every
actor except Vida and Guy and herself wailed at the loss of a single
line, she was defeated. She told herself that, after all, a great deal
could be done with direction and settings.
Sam Clark had boastfully written about the dramatic association to his
schoolmate, Percy Bresnahan, president of the Velvet Motor Company
of Boston. Bresnahan sent a check for a hundred dollars; Sam added
twenty-five and brought the fund to Carol, fondly crying, "There!
That'll give you a start for putting the thing across swell!"
She rented the second floor of the city hall for two months. All through
the spring the association thrilled to its own talent in that dismal
room. They cleared out the bunting, ballot-boxes, handbills, legless
chairs. They attacked the stage. It was a simple-minded stage. It was
raised above the floor, and it did have a movable curtain, painted with
the advertisement of a druggist dead these ten years, but otherwise
it might not have been recognized as a stage. There were two
dressing-rooms, one for men, one for women, on either side. The
dressing-room doors were also the stage-entrances, opening from the
house, and many a citizen of Gopher Prairie had for his first glimpse of
romance the bare shoulders of the leading woman.
There were three sets of scenery: a woodland, a Poor Interior, and a
Rich Interior, the last also useful for railway stations, offices, and
as a background for the Swedish Quartette from Chicago. There were three
gradations of lighting: full on, half on, and entirely off.
This was the only theater in Gopher Prairie. It was known as the "op'ra
house." Once, strolling companies had used it for performances of "The
Two Orphans," and "Nellie the Beautiful Cloak Model," and "Othello" with
specialties between acts, but now the motion-pictures had ousted the
gipsy drama.
Carol intended to be furiously modern in constructing the office-set,
the drawing-room for Mr. Grimm, and the Humble Home near Kankakee.
It was the first time that any one in Gopher Prairie had been so
revolutionary as to use enclosed scenes with continuous side-walls. The
rooms in the op'ra house sets had separate wing-pieces for sides, which
simplified dramaturgy, as the villain could always get out of the hero's
way by walking out through the wall.
The inhabitants of the Humble Home were supposed to be amiable and
intelligent. Carol planned for them a simple set with warm color. She
could see the beginning of the play: all dark save the high settles and
the solid wooden table between them, which were to be illuminated by a
ray from offstage. The high light was a polished copper pot filled with
primroses. Less clearly she sketched the Grimm drawing-room as a series
of cool high white arches.
As to how she was to produce these effects she had no notion.
She discovered that, despite the enthusiastic young writers, the
drama was not half so native and close to the soil as motor cars and
telephones. She discovered that simple arts require sophisticated
training. She discovered that to produce one perfect stage-picture would
be as difficult as to turn all of Gopher Prairie into a Georgian garden.
She read all she could find regarding staging, she bought paint and
light wood; she borrowed furniture and drapes unscrupulously; she made
Kennicott turn carpenter. She collided with the problem of lighting.
Against the protest of Kennicott and Vida she mortgaged the association
by sending to Minneapolis for a baby spotlight, a strip light, a dimming
device, and blue and amber bulbs; and with the gloating rapture of
a born painter first turned loose among colors, she spent absorbed
evenings in grouping, dimming-painting with lights.
Only Kennicott, Guy, and Vida helped her. They speculated as to how
flats could be lashed together to form a wall; they hung crocus-yellow
curtains at the windows; they blacked the sheet-iron stove; they put on
aprons and swept. The rest of the association dropped into the theater
every evening, and were literary and superior. They had borrowed
Carol's manuals of play-production and had become extremely stagey in
vocabulary.
Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons, and Raymie Wutherspoon sat on a sawhorse,
watching Carol try to get the right position for a picture on the wall
in the first scene.
"I don't want to hand myself anything but I believe I'll give a swell
performance in this first act," confided Juanita. "I wish Carol wasn't
so bossy though. She doesn't understand clothes. I want to wear, oh,
a dandy dress I have--all scarlet--and I said to her, 'When I enter
wouldn't it knock their eyes out if I just stood there at the door in
this straight scarlet thing?' But she wouldn't let me."
Young Rita agreed, "She's so much taken up with her old details and
carpentering and everything that she can't see the picture as a whole.
Now I thought it would be lovely if we had an office-scene like the one
in 'Little, But Oh My!' Because I SAW that, in Duluth. But she simply
wouldn't listen at all."
Juanita sighed, "I wanted to give one speech like Ethel Barrymore would,
if she was in a play like this. (Harry and I heard her one time in
Minneapolis--we had dandy seats, in the orchestra--I just know I could
imitate her.) Carol didn't pay any attention to my suggestion. I don't
want to criticize but I guess Ethel knows more about acting than Carol
does!"
"Say, do you think Carol has the right dope about using a strip light
behind the fireplace in the second act? I told her I thought we ought to
use a bunch," offered Raymie. "And I suggested it would be lovely if we
used a cyclorama outside the window in the first act, and what do you
think she said? 'Yes, and it would be lovely to have Eleanora Duse play
the lead,' she said, 'and aside from the fact that it's evening in the
first act, you're a great technician,' she said. I must say I think she
was pretty sarcastic. I've been reading up, and I know I could build a
cyclorama, if she didn't want to run everything."
"Yes, and another thing, I think the entrance in the first act ought to
be L. U. E., not L. 3 E.," from Juanita.
"And why does she just use plain white tormenters?"
"What's a tormenter?" blurted Rita Simons.
The savants stared at her ignorance.
III
Carol did not resent their criticisms, she didn't very much resent
their sudden knowledge, so long as they let her make pictures. It was at
rehearsals that the quarrrels broke. No one understood that rehearsals
were as real engagements as bridge-games or sociables at the Episcopal
Church. They gaily came in half an hour late, or they vociferously came
in ten minutes early, and they were so hurt that they whispered about
resigning when Carol protested. They telephoned, "I don't think I'd
better come out; afraid the dampness might start my toothache," or
"Guess can't make it tonight; Dave wants me to sit in on a poker game."
When, after a month of labor, as many as nine-elevenths of the cast were
often present at a rehearsal; when most of them had learned their parts
and some of them spoke like human beings, Carol had a new shock in the
realization that Guy Pollock and herself were very bad actors, and that
Raymie Wutherspoon was a surprisingly good one. For all her visions
she could not control her voice, and she was bored by the fiftieth
repetition of her few lines as maid. Guy pulled his soft mustache,
looked self-conscious, and turned Mr. Grimm into a limp dummy. But
Raymie, as the villain, had no repressions. The tilt of his head was
full of character; his drawl was admirably vicious.
There was an evening when Carol hoped she was going to make a play; a
rehearsal during which Guy stopped looking abashed.
From that evening the play declined.
They were weary. "We know our parts well enough now; what's the use of
getting sick of them?" they complained. They began to skylark; to play
with the sacred lights; to giggle when Carol was trying to make the
sentimental Myrtle Cass into a humorous office-boy; to act everything
but "The Girl from Kankakee." After loafing through his proper part
Dr. Terry Gould had great applause for his burlesque of "Hamlet." Even
Raymie lost his simple faith, and tried to show that he could do a
vaudeville shuffle.
Carol turned on the company. "See here, I want this nonsense to stop.
We've simply got to get down to work."
Juanita Haydock led the mutiny: "Look here, Carol, don't be so bossy.
After all, we're doing this play principally for the fun of it, and if
we have fun out of a lot of monkey-shines, why then----"
"Ye-es," feebly.
"You said one time that folks in G. P. didn't get enough fun out of
life. And now we are having a circus, you want us to stop!"
Carol answered slowly: "I wonder if I can explain what I mean? It's the
difference between looking at the comic page and looking at Manet. I
want fun out of this, of course. Only----I don't think it would be
less fun, but more, to produce as perfect a play as we can." She was
curiously exalted; her voice was strained; she stared not at the company
but at the grotesques scrawled on the backs of wing-pieces by forgotten
stage-hands. "I wonder if you can understand the 'fun' of making a
beautiful thing, the pride and satisfaction of it, and the holiness!"
The company glanced doubtfully at one another. In Gopher Prairie it
is not good form to be holy except at a church, between ten-thirty and
twelve on Sunday.
"But if we want to do it, we've got to work; we must have
self-discipline."
They were at once amused and embarrassed. They did not want to affront
this mad woman. They backed off and tried to rehearse. Carol did not
hear Juanita, in front, protesting to Maud Dyer, "If she calls it fun
and holiness to sweat over her darned old play--well, I don't!"
IV
Carol attended the only professional play which came to Gopher Prairie
that spring. It was a "tent show, presenting snappy new dramas under
canvas." The hard-working actors doubled in brass, and took tickets;
and between acts sang about the moon in June, and sold Dr. Wintergreen's
Surefire Tonic for Ills of the Heart, Lungs, Kidneys, and Bowels. They
presented "Sunbonnet Nell: A Dramatic Comedy of the Ozarks," with J.
Witherbee Boothby wringing the soul by his resonant "Yuh ain't done
right by mah little gal, Mr. City Man, but yer a-goin' to find that back
in these-yere hills there's honest folks and good shots!"
The audience, on planks beneath the patched tent, admired Mr. Boothby's
beard and long rifle; stamped their feet in the dust at the spectacle
of his heroism; shouted when the comedian aped the City Lady's use of a
lorgnon by looking through a doughnut stuck on a fork; wept visibly over
Mr. Boothby's Little Gal Nell, who was also Mr. Boothby's legal wife
Pearl, and when the curtain went down, listened respectfully to Mr.
Boothby's lecture on Dr. Wintergreen's Tonic as a cure for tape-worms,
which he illustrated by horrible pallid objects curled in bottles of
yellowing alcohol.
Carol shook her head. "Juanita is right. I'm a fool. Holiness of the
drama! Bernard Shaw! The only trouble with 'The Girl from Kankakee' is
that it's too subtle for Gopher Prairie!"
She sought faith in spacious banal phrases, taken from books: "the
instinctive nobility of simple souls," "need only the opportunity, to
appreciate fine things," and "sturdy exponents of democracy." But these
optimisms did not sound so loud as the laughter of the audience at the
funny-man's line, "Yes, by heckelum, I'm a smart fella." She wanted to
give up the play, the dramatic association, the town. As she came out
of the tent and walked with Kennicott down the dusty spring street, she
peered at this straggling wooden village and felt that she could not
possibly stay here through all of tomorrow.
It was Miles Bjornstam who gave her strength--he and the fact that every
seat for "The Girl from Kankakee" had been sold.
Bjornstam was "keeping company" with Bea. Every night he was sitting on
the back steps. Once when Carol appeared he grumbled, "Hope you're going
to give this burg one good show. If you don't, reckon nobody ever will."
V
It was the great night; it was the night of the play. The two
dressing-rooms were swirling with actors, panting, twitchy pale. Del
Snafflin the barber, who was as much a professional as Ella, having once
gone on in a mob scene at a stock-company performance in Minneapolis,
was making them up, and showing his scorn for amateurs with, "Stand
still! For the love o' Mike, how do you expect me to get your eyelids
dark if you keep a-wigglin'?" The actors were beseeching, "Hey, Del, put
some red in my nostrils--you put some in Rita's--gee, you didn't hardly
do anything to my face."
They were enormously theatric. They examined Del's makeup box, they
sniffed the scent of grease-paint, every minute they ran out to peep
through the hole in the curtain, they came back to inspect their wigs
and costumes, they read on the whitewashed walls of the dressing-rooms
the pencil inscriptions: "The Flora Flanders Comedy Company," and "This
is a bum theater," and felt that they were companions of these vanished
troupers.
Carol, smart in maid's uniform, coaxed the temporary stage-hands to
finish setting the first act, wailed at Kennicott, the electrician, "Now
for heaven's sake remember the change in cue for the ambers in Act Two,"
slipped out to ask Dave Dyer, the ticket-taker, if he could get some
more chairs, warned the frightened Myrtle Cass to be sure to upset the
waste-basket when John Grimm called, "Here you, Reddy."
Del Snafflin's orchestra of piano, violin, and cornet began to tune up
and every one behind the magic line of the proscenic arch was frightened
into paralysis. Carol wavered to the hole in the curtain. There were so
many people out there, staring so hard----
In the second row she saw Miles Bjornstam, not with Bea but alone.
He really wanted to see the play! It was a good omen. Who could tell?
Perhaps this evening would convert Gopher Prairie to conscious beauty.
She darted into the women's dressing-room, roused Maud Dyer from her
fainting panic, pushed her to the wings, and ordered the curtain up.
It rose doubtfully, it staggered and trembled, but it did get up without
catching--this time. Then she realized that Kennicott had forgotten to
turn off the houselights. Some one out front was giggling.
She galloped round to the left wing, herself pulled the switch, looked
so ferociously at Kennicott that he quaked, and fled back.
Mrs. Dyer was creeping out on the half-darkened stage. The play was
begun.
And with that instant Carol realized that it was a bad play abominably
acted.
Encouraging them with lying smiles, she watched her work go to pieces.
The settings seemed flimsy, the lighting commonplace. She watched
Guy Pollock stammer and twist his mustache when he should have been a
bullying magnate; Vida Sherwin, as Grimm's timid wife, chatter at the
audience as though they were her class in high-school English; Juanita,
in the leading role, defy Mr. Grimm as though she were repeating a list
of things she had to buy at the grocery this morning; Ella Stowbody
remark "I'd like a cup of tea" as though she were reciting "Curfew Shall
Not Ring Tonight"; and Dr. Gould, making love to Rita Simons, squeak,
"My--my--you--are--a--won'erful--girl."
Myrtle Cass, as the office-boy, was so much pleased by the applause of
her relatives, then so much agitated by the remarks of Cy Bogart, in the
back row, in reference to her wearing trousers, that she could hardly
be got off the stage. Only Raymie was so unsociable as to devote himself
entirely to acting.
That she was right in her opinion of the play Carol was certain when
Miles Bjornstam went out after the first act, and did not come back.
VI
Between the second and third acts she called the company together,
and supplicated, "I want to know something, before we have a chance to
separate. Whether we're doing well or badly tonight, it is a beginning.
But will we take it as merely a beginning? How many of you will pledge
yourselves to start in with me, right away, tomorrow, and plan for
another play, to be given in September?"
They stared at her; they nodded at Juanita's protest: "I think
one's enough for a while. It's going elegant tonight, but another
play----Seems to me it'll be time enough to talk about that next fall.
Carol! I hope you don't mean to hint and suggest we're not doing fine
tonight? I'm sure the applause shows the audience think it's just
dandy!"
Then Carol knew how completely she had failed.
As the audience seeped out she heard B. J. Gougerling the banker say to
Howland the grocer, "Well, I think the folks did splendid; just as good
as professionals. But I don't care much for these plays. What I like is
a good movie, with auto accidents and hold-ups, and some git to it, and
not all this talky-talk."
Then Carol knew how certain she was to fail again.
She wearily did not blame them, company nor audience. Herself she blamed
for trying to carve intaglios in good wholesome jack-pine.
"It's the worst defeat of all. I'm beaten. By Main Street. 'I must go
on.' But I can't!"
She was not vastly encouraged by the Gopher Prairie Dauntless:
. . . would be impossible to distinguish among the actors when all gave
such fine account of themselves in difficult roles of this well-known
New York stage play. Guy Pollock as the old millionaire could not have
been bettered for his fine impersonation of the gruff old millionaire;
Mrs. Harry Haydock as the young lady from the West who so easily showed
the New York four-flushers where they got off was a vision of loveliness
and with fine stage presence. Miss Vida Sherwin the ever popular teacher
in our high school pleased as Mrs. Grimm, Dr. Gould was well suited in
the role of young lover--girls you better look out, remember the doc is a
bachelor. The local Four Hundred also report that he is a great hand at
shaking the light fantastic tootsies in the dance. As the stenographer
Rita Simons was pretty as a picture, and Miss Ella Stowbody's long and
intensive study of the drama and kindred arts in Eastern schools was
seen in the fine finish of her part.
. . . to no one is greater credit to be given than to Mrs. Will Kennicott
on whose capable shoulders fell the burden of directing.
"So kindly," Carol mused, "so well meant, so neighborly--and so
confoundedly untrue. Is it really my failure, or theirs?"
She sought to be sensible; she elaborately explained to herself that it
was hysterical to condemn Gopher Prairie because it did not foam over
the drama. Its justification was in its service as a market-town for
farmers. How bravely and generously it did its work, forwarding the
bread of the world, feeding and healing the farmers!
Then, on the corner below her husband's office, she heard a farmer
holding forth:
"Sure. Course I was beaten. The shipper and the grocers here wouldn't
pay us a decent price for our potatoes, even though folks in the cities
were howling for 'em. So we says, well, we'll get a truck and ship 'em
right down to Minneapolis. But the commission merchants there were in
cahoots with the local shipper here; they said they wouldn't pay us
a cent more than he would, not even if they was nearer to the market.
Well, we found we could get higher prices in Chicago, but when we tried
to get freight cars to ship there, the railroads wouldn't let us have
'em--even though they had cars standing empty right here in the yards.
There you got it--good market, and these towns keeping us from it. Gus,
that's the way these towns work all the time. They pay what they want
to for our wheat, but we pay what they want us to for their clothes.
Stowbody and Dawson foreclose every mortgage they can, and put in tenant
farmers. The Dauntless lies to us about the Nonpartisan League, the
lawyers sting us, the machinery-dealers hate to carry us over bad years,
and then their daughters put on swell dresses and look at us as if we
were a bunch of hoboes. Man, I'd like to burn this town!"
Kennicott observed, "There's that old crank Wes Brannigan shooting off
his mouth again. Gosh, but he loves to hear himself talk! They ought to
run that fellow out of town!"
VII
She felt old and detached through high-school commencement week, which
is the fete of youth in Gopher Prairie; through baccalaureate sermon,
senior Parade, junior entertainment, commencement address by an Iowa
clergyman who asserted that he believed in the virtue of virtuousness,
and the procession of Decoration Day, when the few Civil War veterans
followed Champ Perry, in his rusty forage-cap, along the spring-powdered
road to the cemetery. She met Guy; she found that she had nothing to
say to him. Her head ached in an aimless way. When Kennicott rejoiced,
"We'll have a great time this summer; move down to the lake early and
wear old clothes and act natural," she smiled, but her smile creaked.
In the prairie heat she trudged along unchanging ways, talked about
nothing to tepid people, and reflected that she might never escape from
them.
She was startled to find that she was using the word "escape."
Then, for three years which passed like one curt paragraph, she ceased
to find anything interesting save the Bjornstams and her baby.
| A meeting of the dramatic club is held to select the play to be staged. Carol is ready to suggest Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion. Guy Pollock suggests The School for Scandal. Vida wants the farce Mc Ginerty's Mother-in-law while Raymie wants His Mother's Heart. Juanita chooses The Girl from Kankakee. Every one except Carol votes for The Girl from Kankakee. Choosing the actors proves to be an equally tough task because both Juanita and Ella Stowbody want the lead role. Carol offends Ella Stowbody by letting Juanita have it. Maud Dyer is unhappy to get the mother's role. Guy Pollock is the millionaire, Dr. Harvey Dillon his son and Vida his timid wife. Ella Stowbody is her friend while Raymie is the business rival who is the villain. Dr. Terry Gould plays the brother of the girl from Kankakee and Rita Simmons plays the role of the office secretary and Myrtle Cass, the office boy. The story is that of the girl from Kankakee who goes to the city to rescue her brother who is falsely accused in a forgery case. She becomes the secretary of the millionaire and marries his son. When Sam Clark writes to Percy Bresnahan about the play he sends one hundred dollars to which Sam Clark adds twenty-five to fund the venture. The dramatic club hires the town hall and starts with the rehearsal. Carol decides to have different lighting to create the proper ambience of the humble house of the girl from Kankakee and the millionaire's abode. She gets the different light bulbs from Minneapolis. Only Kennicott, Vida and Guy Pollock help her to get the stage ready. The others sit around and criticize. Juanita complains that Carol would not allow her to wear her scarlet dress in the first act. Rita complains that the office scene was not as it was in the play Little, But oh, My. Raymie's complaint is that he suggested the use of a cyclorama outside the window and that Carol was very sarcastic about it. They all agree that Ella Stowbody knows more about acting and that Carol tries to run everything. All the actors do not attend rehearsals regularly. After rehearsing for a month Carol discovers that she cannot act. Even Guy Pollock is a bad actor but Raymie acts the part of the villain very well. Everybody gets tired of the play and complains. Even Carol is tired of repeating her few lines. They become fidgety and play with the lights and laugh at the other actors as Carol tries to teach them. Carol watches a professional play Sun bonnet Nell; A dramatic comedy of the Ozarks. She finds the audience of Gopher Prairie enjoying even such a banal comedy and doubts if it is worthwhile to go through all the trouble to present a play. She gets some confidence when all the tickets for the play are sold and when Bjornstam tells her that she is the only one who can present a good play. On the day of the staging of the play everything goes wrong. The lighting doesn't work as Carol has planned. The actors become nervous. Vida behaves as if the entire audience is her class. Only Raymie concentrates on his acting. Bjornstam leaves the hall after the first act. Carol calls the actors together and wants to know if they would work hard to present another play in September. They do not wish to commit themselves. She hears the banker, Mr. Gougerling tell Howland, the grocer that though the play was good he would prefer to watch a movie. Carol knows that it was the end of her dramatic club. But the Dauntless gives a favorable report of the play praising the actors and the director. She tries to draw comfort from the fact that Gopher Prairie was a market town to help the farmers and one should not expect it to have highbrow taste. Then she hears Wes Brannign assert that the town exploited the farmers by forcing them to sell for whatever price they want to pay. They prevented them from selling their produce in markets outside the town so as to get a better profit. She loses all her faith in Gopher Prairie and life becomes monotonous. The two interests in her life are her baby and her friends-the Bjornstams. | summary |
CHAPTER XIX
I
IN three years of exile from herself Carol had certain experiences
chronicled as important by the Dauntless, or discussed by the Jolly
Seventeen, but the event unchronicled, undiscussed, and supremely
controlling, was her slow admission of longing to find her own people.
II
Bea and Miles Bjornstam were married in June, a month after "The Girl
from Kankakee." Miles had turned respectable. He had renounced his
criticisms of state and society; he had given up roving as horse-trader,
and wearing red mackinaws in lumber-camps; he had gone to work as
engineer in Jackson Elder's planing-mill; he was to be seen upon the
streets endeavoring to be neighborly with suspicious men whom he had
taunted for years.
Carol was the patroness and manager of the wedding. Juanita Haydock
mocked, "You're a chump to let a good hired girl like Bea go. Besides!
How do you know it's a good thing, her marrying a sassy bum like this
awful Red Swede person? Get wise! Chase the man off with a mop, and
hold onto your Svenska while the holding's good. Huh? Me go to their
Scandahoofian wedding? Not a chance!"
The other matrons echoed Juanita. Carol was dismayed by the casualness
of their cruelty, but she persisted. Miles had exclaimed to her, "Jack
Elder says maybe he'll come to the wedding! Gee, it would be nice to
have Bea meet the Boss as a reg'lar married lady. Some day I'll be so
well off that Bea can play with Mrs. Elder--and you! Watch us!"
There was an uneasy knot of only nine guests at the service in the
unpainted Lutheran Church--Carol, Kennicott, Guy Pollock, and the Champ
Perrys, all brought by Carol; Bea's frightened rustic parents, her
cousin Tina, and Pete, Miles's ex-partner in horse-trading, a surly,
hairy man who had bought a black suit and come twelve hundred miles from
Spokane for the event.
Miles continuously glanced back at the church door. Jackson Elder did
not appear. The door did not once open after the awkward entrance of the
first guests. Miles's hand closed on Bea's arm.
He had, with Carol's help, made his shanty over into a cottage with
white curtains and a canary and a chintz chair.
Carol coaxed the powerful matrons to call on Bea. They half scoffed,
half promised to go.
Bea's successor was the oldish, broad, silent Oscarina, who was
suspicious of her frivolous mistress for a month, so that Juanita
Haydock was able to crow, "There, smarty, I told you you'd run into the
Domestic Problem!" But Oscarina adopted Carol as a daughter, and with
her as faithful to the kitchen as Bea had been, there was nothing
changed in Carol's life.
III
She was unexpectedly appointed to the town library-board by Ole Jenson,
the new mayor. The other members were Dr. Westlake, Lyman Cass, Julius
Flickerbaugh the attorney, Guy Pollock, and Martin Mahoney, former
livery-stable keeper and now owner of a garage. She was delighted. She
went to the first meeting rather condescendingly, regarding herself
as the only one besides Guy who knew anything about books or library
methods. She was planning to revolutionize the whole system.
Her condescension was ruined and her humility wholesomely increased when
she found the board, in the shabby room on the second floor of the house
which had been converted into the library, not discussing the weather
and longing to play checkers, but talking about books. She discovered
that amiable old Dr. Westlake read everything in verse and "light
fiction"; that Lyman Cass, the veal-faced, bristly-bearded owner of the
mill, had tramped through Gibbon, Hume, Grote, Prescott, and the other
thick historians; that he could repeat pages from them--and did. When
Dr. Westlake whispered to her, "Yes, Lym is a very well-informed man,
but he's modest about it," she felt uninformed and immodest, and scolded
at herself that she had missed the human potentialities in this vast
Gopher Prairie. When Dr. Westlake quoted the "Paradiso," "Don Quixote,"
"Wilhelm Meister," and the Koran, she reflected that no one she knew,
not even her father, had read all four.
She came diffidently to the second meeting of the board. She did not
plan to revolutionize anything. She hoped that the wise elders might be
so tolerant as to listen to her suggestions about changing the shelving
of the juveniles.
Yet after four sessions of the library-board she was where she had been
before the first session. She had found that for all their pride in
being reading men, Westlake and Cass and even Guy had no conception of
making the library familiar to the whole town. They used it, they passed
resolutions about it, and they left it as dead as Moses. Only the Henty
books and the Elsie books and the latest optimisms by moral female
novelists and virile clergymen were in general demand, and the board
themselves were interested only in old, stilted volumes. They had no
tenderness for the noisiness of youth discovering great literature.
If she was egotistic about her tiny learning, they were at least as much
so regarding theirs. And for all their talk of the need of additional
library-tax none of them was willing to risk censure by battling for it,
though they now had so small a fund that, after paying for rent, heat,
light, and Miss Villets's salary, they had only a hundred dollars a year
for the purchase of books.
The Incident of the Seventeen Cents killed her none too enduring
interest.
She had come to the board-meeting singing with a plan. She had made
a list of thirty European novels of the past ten years, with twenty
important books on psychology, education, and economics which the
library lacked. She had made Kennicott promise to give fifteen dollars.
If each of the board would contribute the same, they could have the
books.
Lym Cass looked alarmed, scratched himself, and protested, "I think
it would be a bad precedent for the board-members to contribute
money--uh--not that I mind, but it wouldn't be fair--establish
precedent. Gracious! They don't pay us a cent for our services!
Certainly can't expect us to pay for the privilege of serving!"
Only Guy looked sympathetic, and he stroked the pine table and said
nothing.
The rest of the meeting they gave to a bellicose investigation of the
fact that there was seventeen cents less than there should be in the
Fund. Miss Villets was summoned; she spent half an hour in explosively
defending herself; the seventeen cents were gnawed over, penny by penny;
and Carol, glancing at the carefully inscribed list which had been
so lovely and exciting an hour before, was silent, and sorry for Miss
Villets, and sorrier for herself.
She was reasonably regular in attendance till her two years were up and
Vida Sherwin was appointed to the board in her place, but she did not
try to be revolutionary. In the plodding course of her life there was
nothing changed, and nothing new.
IV
Kennicott made an excellent land-deal, but as he told her none of the
details, she was not greatly exalted or agitated. What did agitate her
was his announcement, half whispered and half blurted, half tender and
half coldly medical, that they "ought to have a baby, now they could
afford it." They had so long agreed that "perhaps it would be just as
well not to have any children for a while yet," that childlessness had
come to be natural. Now, she feared and longed and did not know; she
hesitatingly assented, and wished that she had not assented.
As there appeared no change in their drowsy relations, she forgot all
about it, and life was planless.
V
Idling on the porch of their summer cottage at the lake, on afternoons
when Kennicott was in town, when the water was glazed and the whole air
languid, she pictured a hundred escapes: Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm,
with limousines, golden shops, a cathedral spire. A reed hut on
fantastic piles above the mud of a jungle river. A suite in Paris,
immense high grave rooms, with lambrequins and a balcony. The Enchanted
Mesa. An ancient stone mill in Maryland, at the turn of the road,
between rocky brook and abrupt hills. An upland moor of sheep and
flitting cool sunlight. A clanging dock where steel cranes unloaded
steamers from Buenos Ayres and Tsing-tao. A Munich concert-hall, and a
famous 'cellist playing--playing to her.
One scene had a persistent witchery:
She stood on a terrace overlooking a boulevard by the warm sea. She was
certain, though she had no reason for it, that the place was Mentone.
Along the drive below her swept barouches, with a mechanical tlot-tlot,
tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, and great cars with polished black hoods and
engines quiet as the sigh of an old man. In them were women erect,
slender, enameled, and expressionless as marionettes, their small hands
upon parasols, their unchanging eyes always forward, ignoring the men
beside them, tall men with gray hair and distinguished faces. Beyond the
drive were painted sea and painted sands, and blue and yellow pavilions.
Nothing moved except the gliding carriages, and the people were small
and wooden, spots in a picture drenched with gold and hard bright blues.
There was no sound of sea or winds; no softness of whispers nor of
falling petals; nothing but yellow and cobalt and staring light, and the
never-changing tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot----
She startled. She whimpered. It was the rapid ticking of the clock which
had hypnotized her into hearing the steady hoofs. No aching color of the
sea and pride of supercilious people, but the reality of a round-bellied
nickel alarm-clock on a shelf against a fuzzy unplaned pine wall, with
a stiff gray wash-rag hanging above it and a kerosene-stove standing
below.
A thousand dreams governed by the fiction she had read, drawn from the
pictures she had envied, absorbed her drowsy lake afternoons, but
always in the midst of them Kennicott came out from town, drew on khaki
trousers which were plastered with dry fish-scales, asked, "Enjoying
yourself?" and did not listen to her answer.
And nothing was changed, and there was no reason to believe that there
ever would be change.
VI
Trains!
At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She realized
that in town she had depended upon them for assurance that there
remained a world beyond.
The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie.
It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel,
and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he
might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated
and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories,
colleges, army.
The East remembered generations when there had been no railroad, and had
no awe of it; but here the railroads had been before time was. The towns
had been staked out on barren prairie as convenient points for future
train-halts; and back in 1860 and 1870 there had been much profit, much
opportunity to found aristocratic families, in the possession of advance
knowledge as to where the towns would arise.
If a town was in disfavor, the railroad could ignore it, cut it off from
commerce, slay it. To Gopher Prairie the tracks were eternal verities,
and boards of railroad directors an omnipotence. The smallest boy or the
most secluded grandam could tell you whether No. 32 had a hot-box last
Tuesday, whether No. 7 was going to put on an extra day-coach; and the
name of the president of the road was familiar to every breakfast table.
Even in this new era of motors the citizens went down to the station
to see the trains go through. It was their romance; their only mystery
besides mass at the Catholic Church; and from the trains came lords of
the outer world--traveling salesmen with piping on their waistcoats, and
visiting cousins from Milwaukee.
Gopher Prairie had once been a "division-point." The roundhouse and
repair-shops were gone, but two conductors still retained residence,
and they were persons of distinction, men who traveled and talked to
strangers, who wore uniforms with brass buttons, and knew all about
these crooked games of con-men. They were a special caste, neither above
nor below the Haydocks, but apart, artists and adventurers.
The night telegraph-operator at the railroad station was the most
melodramatic figure in town: awake at three in the morning, alone in a
room hectic with clatter of the telegraph key. All night he "talked"
to operators twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away. It was always to be
expected that he would be held up by robbers. He never was, but round
him was a suggestion of masked faces at the window, revolvers, cords
binding him to a chair, his struggle to crawl to the key before he
fainted.
During blizzards everything about the railroad was melodramatic. There
were days when the town was completely shut off, when they had no mail,
no express, no fresh meat, no newspapers. At last the rotary snow-plow
came through, bucking the drifts, sending up a geyser, and the way to
the Outside was open again. The brakemen, in mufflers and fur caps,
running along the tops of ice-coated freight-cars; the engineers
scratching frost from the cab windows and looking out, inscrutable,
self-contained, pilots of the prairie sea--they were heroism, they were
to Carol the daring of the quest in a world of groceries and sermons.
To the small boys the railroad was a familiar playground. They climbed
the iron ladders on the sides of the box-cars; built fires behind piles
of old ties; waved to favorite brakemen. But to Carol it was magic.
She was motoring with Kennicott, the car lumping through darkness, the
lights showing mud-puddles and ragged weeds by the road. A train coming!
A rapid chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck. It was hurling
past--the Pacific Flyer, an arrow of golden flame. Light from the
fire-box splashed the under side of the trailing smoke. Instantly the
vision was gone; Carol was back in the long darkness; and Kennicott was
giving his version of that fire and wonder: "No. 19. Must be 'bout ten
minutes late."
In town, she listened from bed to the express whistling in the cut a
mile north. Uuuuuuu!--faint, nervous, distrait, horn of the free night
riders journeying to the tall towns where were laughter and
banners and the sound of bells--Uuuuu! Uuuuu!--the world going
by--Uuuuuuu!--fainter, more wistful, gone.
Down here there were no trains. The stillness was very great. The
prairie encircled the lake, lay round her, raw, dusty, thick. Only the
train could cut it. Some day she would take a train; and that would be a
great taking.
VII
She turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the dramatic
association, to the library-board.
Besides the permanent Mother Chautauqua, in New York, there are, all
over these States, commercial Chautauqua companies which send out to
every smallest town troupes of lecturers and "entertainers" to give a
week of culture under canvas. Living in Minneapolis, Carol had never
encountered the ambulant Chautauqua, and the announcement of its coming
to Gopher Prairie gave her hope that others might be doing the vague
things which she had attempted. She pictured a condensed university
course brought to the people. Mornings when she came in from the lake
with Kennicott she saw placards in every shop-window, and strung on
a cord across Main Street, a line of pennants alternately worded
"The Boland Chautauqua COMING!" and "A solid week of inspiration and
enjoyment!" But she was disappointed when she saw the program. It did
not seem to be a tabloid university; it did not seem to be any kind of
a university; it seemed to be a combination of vaudeville performance Y.
M. C. A. lecture, and the graduation exercises of an elocution class.
She took her doubt to Kennicott. He insisted, "Well, maybe it won't be
so awful darn intellectual, the way you and I might like it, but it's
a whole lot better than nothing." Vida Sherwin added, "They have
some splendid speakers. If the people don't carry off so much actual
information, they do get a lot of new ideas, and that's what counts."
During the Chautauqua Carol attended three evening meetings, two
afternoon meetings, and one in the morning. She was impressed by the
audience: the sallow women in skirts and blouses, eager to be made to
think, the men in vests and shirt-sleeves, eager to be allowed to laugh,
and the wriggling children, eager to sneak away. She liked the plain
benches, the portable stage under its red marquee, the great tent over
all, shadowy above strings of incandescent bulbs at night and by day
casting an amber radiance on the patient crowd. The scent of dust
and trampled grass and sun-baked wood gave her an illusion of Syrian
caravans; she forgot the speakers while she listened to noises outside
the tent: two farmers talking hoarsely, a wagon creaking down Main
Street, the crow of a rooster. She was content. But it was the
contentment of the lost hunter stopping to rest.
For from the Chautauqua itself she got nothing but wind and chaff and
heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and
primitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm.
These were the several instructors in the condensed university's
seven-day course:
Nine lecturers, four of them ex-ministers, and one an ex-congressman,
all of them delivering "inspirational addresses." The only facts or
opinions which Carol derived from them were: Lincoln was a celebrated
president of the United States, but in his youth extremely poor. James
J. Hill was the best-known railroad-man of the West, and in his youth
extremely poor. Honesty and courtesy in business are preferable
to boorishness and exposed trickery, but this is not to be taken
personally, since all persons in Gopher Prairie are known to be honest
and courteous. London is a large city. A distinguished statesman once
taught Sunday School.
Four "entertainers" who told Jewish stories, Irish stories, German
stories, Chinese stories, and Tennessee mountaineer stories, most of
which Carol had heard.
A "lady elocutionist" who recited Kipling and imitated children.
A lecturer with motion-pictures of an Andean exploration; excellent
pictures and a halting narrative.
Three brass-bands, a company of six opera-singers, a Hawaiian sextette,
and four youths who played saxophones and guitars disguised as
wash-boards. The most applauded pieces were those, such as the "Lucia"
inevitability, which the audience had heard most often.
The local superintendent, who remained through the week while the other
enlighteners went to other Chautauquas for their daily performances. The
superintendent was a bookish, underfed man who worked hard at rousing
artificial enthusiasm, at trying to make the audience cheer by dividing
them into competitive squads and telling them that they were intelligent
and made splendid communal noises. He gave most of the morning lectures,
droning with equal unhappy facility about poetry, the Holy Land, and the
injustice to employers in any system of profit-sharing.
The final item was a man who neither lectured, inspired, nor
entertained; a plain little man with his hands in his pockets. All the
other speakers had confessed, "I cannot keep from telling the citizens
of your beautiful city that none of the talent on this circuit have
found a more charming spot or more enterprising and hospitable people."
But the little man suggested that the architecture of Gopher Prairie was
haphazard, and that it was sottish to let the lake-front be monopolized
by the cinder-heaped wall of the railroad embankment. Afterward the
audience grumbled, "Maybe that guy's got the right dope, but what's the
use of looking on the dark side of things all the time? New ideas are
first-rate, but not all this criticism. Enough trouble in life without
looking for it!"
Thus the Chautauqua, as Carol saw it. After it, the town felt proud and
educated.
VIII
Two weeks later the Great War smote Europe.
For a month Gopher Prairie had the delight of shuddering, then, as the
war settled down to a business of trench-fighting, they forgot.
When Carol talked about the Balkans, and the possibility of a German
revolution, Kennicott yawned, "Oh yes, it's a great old scrap, but it's
none of our business. Folks out here are too busy growing corn to monkey
with any fool war that those foreigners want to get themselves into."
It was Miles Bjornstam who said, "I can't figure it out. I'm opposed to
wars, but still, seems like Germany has got to be licked because them
Junkers stands in the way of progress."
She was calling on Miles and Bea, early in autumn. They had received
her with cries, with dusting of chairs, and a running to fetch water for
coffee. Miles stood and beamed at her. He fell often and joyously into
his old irreverence about the lords of Gopher Prairie, but always--with
a certain difficulty--he added something decorous and appreciative.
"Lots of people have come to see you, haven't they?" Carol hinted.
"Why, Bea's cousin Tina comes in right along, and the foreman at the
mill, and----Oh, we have good times. Say, take a look at that Bea!
Wouldn't you think she was a canary-bird, to listen to her, and to see
that Scandahoofian tow-head of hers? But say, know what she is? She's
a mother hen! Way she fusses over me--way she makes old Miles wear a
necktie! Hate to spoil her by letting her hear it, but she's one pretty
darn nice--nice----Hell! What do we care if none of the dirty snobs come
and call? We've got each other."
Carol worried about their struggle, but she forgot it in the stress of
sickness and fear. For that autumn she knew that a baby was coming,
that at last life promised to be interesting in the peril of the great
change.
| Bjornstam marries Bea Sorenson. Though Carol persuades all her friends to attend Bjornstam 's wedding none of them do it. Though Jackson Elder promises Bjornstam that he will attend the wedding he does not do so. The Kennicotts, Guy Pollock, and the Perry's are the only people who attend the wedding. Bjornstam takes up a job as an engineer in the planning mill. His ambition is to see Bea acquire status equal to that of Carol and Mrs. Elder. Juanita and the others laugh at Carol for letting such a good maid like Bea to go away. But Carol manages to get another maid called Oscarina, who loves Carol as her own daughter. Ole Jenson, who is the mayor, appoints Carol as a member of the library board. Dr. Westlake, Lym Cass, Julius Flickerbaugh and Guy Pollock are the other members. Carol who goes to the first meeting to educate them feels humble when she discovers how learned they are. Lym Cass has read historians like Gibbon, and Hume, and has through knowledge. Dr. Westlake quotes from Paradiso, Donquixote, Wilhelm Meister and the Koran. Carol feels quite diffident in their presence. But after a few meetings she realizes that they had no idea about how to make the library more useful to the whole town. The library did not have enough books. Nor did it have enough funds. She makes a list of twenty books and submits it to the board along with the proposal that each member should contribute fifteen dollars to buy the books. The members reject the proposal on the grounds that it would set bad precedent. They grill Miss. Villets about the shortage of the seventeen cents in the account. Carol gives up all hopes of improving the library. When Kennicott decides that it is the right time to have a baby, she feels frightened of the accompanying problems but she agrees to have one. She longs to get away from the town. She is fascinated by the trains and considers them to be the means by which she will get away. The entire town holds the railways and its employees in high esteem. A Chatauqua is to be held in Gopher Prairie and she feels very enthusiastic. She believes it to be a part of the university that would deliver lectures and enact plays. She is disappointed to find it to be a combination of Y.M.C. A. lectures, Vaudeville comedies and elocution classes. The lectures inform her that Abraham Lincoln, who was a great president, was a poor man in his youth and James. J. Hill, the railroad man was also poor in his youth. The brass bands play popular songs and the audience cheers them lustily. All the members of the Chatauqua praise Gopher Prairie as the most beautiful town but the architect who gives the last lecture points out that the plan of the town is haphazard and that the railway embankment spoilt the beautiful view of the lake. The people of Gopher Prairie consider the architect to be a crank. The war starts in Europe but the people of Gopher Prairie do not take it seriously. Kennicott finds it boring to discuss the war though Carol wants to discuss it. Only Bjornstam agrees with Carol that the Germans should not be allowed to advance. He feels sad that none of the matrons called on Bea. But their life is quite comfortable and they are very happy. | summary |
CHAPTER XX
I
THE baby was coming. Each morning she was nauseated, chilly, bedraggled,
and certain that she would never again be attractive; each twilight
she was afraid. She did not feel exalted, but unkempt and furious. The
period of daily sickness crawled into an endless time of boredom. It
became difficult for her to move about, and she raged that she, who
had been slim and light-footed, should have to lean on a stick, and be
heartily commented upon by street gossips. She was encircled by greasy
eyes. Every matron hinted, "Now that you're going to be a mother,
dearie, you'll get over all these ideas of yours and settle down."
She felt that willy-nilly she was being initiated into the assembly
of housekeepers; with the baby for hostage, she would never escape;
presently she would be drinking coffee and rocking and talking about
diapers.
"I could stand fighting them. I'm used to that. But this being taken in,
being taken as a matter of course, I can't stand it--and I must stand
it!"
She alternately detested herself for not appreciating the kindly women,
and detested them for their advice: lugubrious hints as to how much she
would suffer in labor, details of baby-hygiene based on long experience
and total misunderstanding, superstitious cautions about the things she
must eat and read and look at in prenatal care for the baby's soul, and
always a pest of simpering baby-talk. Mrs. Champ Perry bustled in to
lend "Ben Hur," as a preventive of future infant immorality. The Widow
Bogart appeared trailing pinkish exclamations, "And how is our lovely
'ittle muzzy today! My, ain't it just like they always say: being in
a Family Way does make the girlie so lovely, just like a Madonna. Tell
me--" Her whisper was tinged with salaciousness--"does oo feel the dear
itsy one stirring, the pledge of love? I remember with Cy, of course he
was so big----"
"I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogart. My complexion is rotten, and my hair
is coming out, and I look like a potato-bag, and I think my arches are
falling, and he isn't a pledge of love, and I'm afraid he WILL look like
us, and I don't believe in mother-devotion, and the whole business is a
confounded nuisance of a biological process," remarked Carol.
Then the baby was born, without unusual difficulty: a boy with straight
back and strong legs. The first day she hated him for the tides of pain
and hopeless fear he had caused; she resented his raw ugliness. After
that she loved him with all the devotion and instinct at which she
had scoffed. She marveled at the perfection of the miniature hands as
noisily as did Kennicott, she was overwhelmed by the trust with
which the baby turned to her; passion for him grew with each unpoetic
irritating thing she had to do for him.
He was named Hugh, for her father.
Hugh developed into a thin healthy child with a large head and straight
delicate hair of a faint brown. He was thoughtful and casual--a
Kennicott.
For two years nothing else existed. She did not, as the cynical matrons
had prophesied, "give up worrying about the world and other folks'
babies soon as she got one of her own to fight for." The barbarity of
that willingness to sacrifice other children so that one child might
have too much was impossible to her. But she would sacrifice herself.
She understood consecration--she who answered Kennicott's hints about
having Hugh christened: "I refuse to insult my baby and myself by asking
an ignorant young man in a frock coat to sanction him, to permit me
to have him! I refuse to subject him to any devil-chasing rites! If I
didn't give my baby--MY BABY--enough sanctification in those nine hours
of hell, then he can't get any more out of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel!"
"Well, Baptists hardly ever christen kids. I was kind of thinking more
about Reverend Warren," said Kennicott.
Hugh was her reason for living, promise of accomplishment in the future,
shrine of adoration--and a diverting toy. "I thought I'd be a dilettante
mother, but I'm as dismayingly natural as Mrs. Bogart," she boasted.
For two--years Carol was a part of the town; as much one of Our Young
Mothers as Mrs. McGanum. Her opinionation seemed dead; she had no
apparent desire for escape; her brooding centered on Hugh. While she
wondered at the pearl texture of his ear she exulted, "I feel like an
old woman, with a skin like sandpaper, beside him, and I'm glad of it!
He is perfect. He shall have everything. He sha'n't always stay here in
Gopher Prairie. . . . I wonder which is really the best, Harvard or Yale
or Oxford?"
II
The people who hemmed her in had been brilliantly reinforced by Mr. and
Mrs. Whittier N. Smail--Kennicott's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie.
The true Main Streetite defines a relative as a person to whose house
you go uninvited, to stay as long as you like. If you hear that Lym Cass
on his journey East has spent all his time "visiting" in Oyster Center,
it does not mean that he prefers that village to the rest of New
England, but that he has relatives there. It does not mean that he has
written to the relatives these many years, nor that they have ever given
signs of a desire to look upon him. But "you wouldn't expect a man to
go and spend good money at a hotel in Boston, when his own third cousins
live right in the same state, would you?"
When the Smails sold their creamery in North Dakota they visited Mr.
Smail's sister, Kennicott's mother, at Lac-qui-Meurt, then plodded on
to Gopher Prairie to stay with their nephew. They appeared unannounced,
before the baby was born, took their welcome for granted, and
immediately began to complain of the fact that their room faced north.
Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie assumed that it was their privilege as
relatives to laugh at Carol, and their duty as Christians to let her
know how absurd her "notions" were. They objected to the food, to
Oscarina's lack of friendliness, to the wind, the rain, and the
immodesty of Carol's maternity gowns. They were strong and enduring; for
an hour at a time they could go on heaving questions about her father's
income, about her theology, and about the reason why she had not put on
her rubbers when she had gone across the street. For fussy discussion
they had a rich, full genius, and their example developed in Kennicott a
tendency to the same form of affectionate flaying.
If Carol was so indiscreet as to murmur that she had a small headache,
instantly the two Smails and Kennicott were at it. Every five minutes,
every time she sat down or rose or spoke to Oscarina, they twanged, "Is
your head better now? Where does it hurt? Don't you keep hartshorn in
the house? Didn't you walk too far today? Have you tried hartshorn?
Don't you keep some in the house so it will be handy? Does it feel
better now? How does it feel? Do your eyes hurt, too? What time do you
usually get to bed? As late as THAT? Well! How does it feel now?"
In her presence Uncle Whittier snorted at Kennicott, "Carol get these
headaches often? Huh? Be better for her if she didn't go gadding around
to all these bridge-whist parties, and took some care of herself once in
a while!"
They kept it up, commenting, questioning, commenting, questioning,
till her determination broke and she bleated, "For heaven's SAKE, don't
dis-CUSS it! My head 's all RIGHT!"
She listened to the Smails and Kennicott trying to determine by
dialectics whether the copy of the Dauntless, which Aunt Bessie wanted
to send to her sister in Alberta, ought to have two or four cents
postage on it. Carol would have taken it to the drug store and weighed
it, but then she was a dreamer, while they were practical people (as
they frequently admitted). So they sought to evolve the postal rate from
their inner consciousnesses, which, combined with entire frankness in
thinking aloud, was their method of settling all problems.
The Smails did not "believe in all this nonsense" about privacy and
reticence. When Carol left a letter from her sister on the table, she
was astounded to hear from Uncle Whittier, "I see your sister says her
husband is doing fine. You ought to go see her oftener. I asked Will
and he says you don't go see her very often. My! You ought to go see her
oftener!"
If Carol was writing a letter to a classmate, or planning the week's
menus, she could be certain that Aunt Bessie would pop in and titter,
"Now don't let me disturb you, I just wanted to see where you were,
don't stop, I'm not going to stay only a second. I just wondered if
you could possibly have thought that I didn't eat the onions this noon
because I didn't think they were properly cooked, but that wasn't the
reason at all, it wasn't because I didn't think they were well cooked,
I'm sure that everything in your house is always very dainty and nice,
though I do think that Oscarina is careless about some things, she
doesn't appreciate the big wages you pay her, and she is so cranky, all
these Swedes are so cranky, I don't really see why you have a Swede,
but----But that wasn't it, I didn't eat them not because I didn't think
they weren't cooked proper, it was just--I find that onions don't agree
with me, it's very strange, ever since I had an attack of biliousness
one time, I have found that onions, either fried onions or raw ones, and
Whittier does love raw onions with vinegar and sugar on them----"
It was pure affection.
Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more disconcerting
than intelligent hatred is demanding love.
She supposed that she was being gracefully dull and standardized in
the Smails' presence, but they scented the heretic, and with
forward-stooping delight they sat and tried to drag out her ludicrous
concepts for their amusement. They were like the Sunday-afternoon mob
starting at monkeys in the Zoo, poking fingers and making faces and
giggling at the resentment of the more dignified race.
With a loose-lipped, superior, village smile Uncle Whittier hinted,
"What's this I hear about your thinking Gopher Prairie ought to be
all tore down and rebuilt, Carrie? I don't know where folks get these
new-fangled ideas. Lots of farmers in Dakota getting 'em these days.
About co-operation. Think they can run stores better 'n storekeepers!
Huh!"
"Whit and I didn't need no co-operation as long as we was farming!"
triumphed Aunt Bessie. "Carrie, tell your old auntie now: don't you ever
go to church on Sunday? You do go sometimes? But you ought to go every
Sunday! When you're as old as I am, you'll learn that no matter how
smart folks think they are, God knows a whole lot more than they do, and
then you'll realize and be glad to go and listen to your pastor!"
In the manner of one who has just beheld a two-headed calf they repeated
that they had "never HEARD such funny ideas!" They were staggered to
learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married
to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that
divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not
bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical
authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet
not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and
the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden; that
mushrooms are as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word "dude" is
no longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel
who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence and
business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight; that
it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy flannels next the skin
in winter; that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel
organ; that some poets do not have long hair; and that Jews are not
always pedlers or pants-makers.
"Where does she get all them the'ries?" marveled Uncle Whittier Smail;
while Aunt Bessie inquired, "Do you suppose there's many folks got
notions like hers? My! If there are," and her tone settled the fact that
there were not, "I just don't know what the world's coming to!"
Patiently--more or less--Carol awaited the exquisite day when they would
announce departure. After three weeks Uncle Whittier remarked, "We kinda
like Gopher Prairie. Guess maybe we'll stay here. We'd been wondering
what we'd do, now we've sold the creamery and my farms. So I had a talk
with Ole Jenson about his grocery, and I guess I'll buy him out and
storekeep for a while."
He did.
Carol rebelled. Kennicott soothed her: "Oh, we won't see much of them.
They'll have their own house."
She resolved to be so chilly that they would stay away. But she had no
talent for conscious insolence. They found a house, but Carol was never
safe from their appearance with a hearty, "Thought we'd drop in this
evening and keep you from being lonely. Why, you ain't had them curtains
washed yet!" Invariably, whenever she was touched by the realization
that it was they who were lonely, they wrecked her pitying affection by
comments--questions--comments--advice.
They immediately became friendly with all of their own race, with the
Luke Dawsons, the Deacon Piersons, and Mrs. Bogart; and brought them
along in the evening. Aunt Bessie was a bridge over whom the older
women, bearing gifts of counsel and the ignorance of experience, poured
into Carol's island of reserve. Aunt Bessie urged the good Widow Bogart,
"Drop in and see Carrie real often. Young folks today don't understand
housekeeping like we do."
Mrs. Bogart showed herself perfectly willing to be an associate
relative.
Carol was thinking up protective insults when Kennicott's mother came
down to stay with Brother Whittier for two months. Carol was fond of
Mrs. Kennicott. She could not carry out her insults.
She felt trapped.
She had been kidnaped by the town. She was Aunt Bessie's niece, and she
was to be a mother. She was expected, she almost expected herself, to
sit forever talking of babies, cooks, embroidery stitches, the price of
potatoes, and the tastes of husbands in the matter of spinach.
She found a refuge in the Jolly Seventeen. She suddenly understood that
they could be depended upon to laugh with her at Mrs. Bogart, and she
now saw Juanita Haydock's gossip not as vulgarity but as gaiety and
remarkable analysis.
Her life had changed, even before Hugh appeared. She looked forward to
the next bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, and the security of whispering
with her dear friends Maud Dyer and Juanita and Mrs. McGanum.
She was part of the town. Its philosophy and its feuds dominated her.
III
She was no longer irritated by the cooing of the matrons, nor by their
opinion that diet didn't matter so long as the Little Ones had plenty of
lace and moist kisses, but she concluded that in the care of babies as
in politics, intelligence was superior to quotations about pansies. She
liked best to talk about Hugh to Kennicott, Vida, and the Bjornstams.
She was happily domestic when Kennicott sat by her on the floor, to
watch baby make faces. She was delighted when Miles, speaking as one man
to another, admonished Hugh, "I wouldn't stand them skirts if I was you.
Come on. Join the union and strike. Make 'em give you pants."
As a parent, Kennicott was moved to establish the first child-welfare
week held in Gopher Prairie. Carol helped him weigh babies and
examine their throats, and she wrote out the diets for mute German and
Scandinavian mothers.
The aristocracy of Gopher Prairie, even the wives of the rival doctors,
took part, and for several days there was community spirit and much
uplift. But this reign of love was overthrown when the prize for Best
Baby was awarded not to decent parents but to Bea and Miles Bjornstam!
The good matrons glared at Olaf Bjornstam, with his blue eyes, his
honey-colored hair, and magnificent back, and they remarked, "Well, Mrs.
Kennicott, maybe that Swede brat is as healthy as your husband says he
is, but let me tell you I hate to think of the future that awaits any
boy with a hired girl for a mother and an awful irreligious socialist
for a pa!"
She raged, but so violent was the current of their respectability, so
persistent was Aunt Bessie in running to her with their blabber, that
she was embarrassed when she took Hugh to play with Olaf. She hated
herself for it, but she hoped that no one saw her go into the Bjornstam
shanty. She hated herself and the town's indifferent cruelty when she
saw Bea's radiant devotion to both babies alike; when she saw Miles
staring at them wistfully.
He had saved money, had quit Elder's planing-mill and started a dairy
on a vacant lot near his shack. He was proud of his three cows and sixty
chickens, and got up nights to nurse them.
"I'll be a big farmer before you can bat an eye! I tell you that young
fellow Olaf is going to go East to college along with the Haydock kids.
Uh----Lots of folks dropping in to chin with Bea and me now. Say! Ma
Bogart come in one day! She was----I liked the old lady fine. And the
mill foreman comes in right along. Oh, we got lots of friends. You bet!"
IV
Though the town seemed to Carol to change no more than the surrounding
fields, there was a constant shifting, these three years. The citizen of
the prairie drifts always westward. It may be because he is the heir of
ancient migrations--and it may be because he finds within his own
spirit so little adventure that he is driven to seek it by changing his
horizon. The towns remain unvaried, yet the individual faces alter
like classes in college. The Gopher Prairie jeweler sells out, for no
discernible reason, and moves on to Alberta or the state of Washington,
to open a shop precisely like his former one, in a town precisely like
the one he has left. There is, except among professional men and the
wealthy, small permanence either of residence or occupation. A man
becomes farmer, grocer, town policeman, garageman, restaurant-owner,
postmaster, insurance-agent, and farmer all over again, and the
community more or less patiently suffers from his lack of knowledge in
each of his experiments.
Ole Jenson the grocer and Dahl the butcher moved on to South Dakota
and Idaho. Luke and Mrs. Dawson picked up ten thousand acres of prairie
soil, in the magic portable form of a small check book, and went to
Pasadena, to a bungalow and sunshine and cafeterias. Chet Dashaway sold
his furniture and undertaking business and wandered to Los Angeles,
where, the Dauntless reported, "Our good friend Chester has accepted a
fine position with a real-estate firm, and his wife has in the charming
social circles of the Queen City of the Southwestland that same
popularity which she enjoyed in our own society sets."
Rita Simons was married to Terry Gould, and rivaled Juanita Haydock as
the gayest of the Young Married Set. But Juanita also acquired merit.
Harry's father died, Harry became senior partner in the Bon Ton Store,
and Juanita was more acidulous and shrewd and cackling than ever. She
bought an evening frock, and exposed her collar-bone to the wonder of
the Jolly Seventeen, and talked of moving to Minneapolis.
To defend her position against the new Mrs. Terry Gould she sought to
attach Carol to her faction by giggling that "SOME folks might call Rita
innocent, but I've got a hunch that she isn't half as ignorant of things
as brides are supposed to be--and of course Terry isn't one-two-three as
a doctor alongside of your husband."
Carol herself would gladly have followed Mr. Ole Jenson, and migrated
even to another Main Street; flight from familiar tedium to new tedium
would have for a time the outer look and promise of adventure. She
hinted to Kennicott of the probable medical advantages of Montana and
Oregon. She knew that he was satisfied with Gopher Prairie, but it gave
her vicarious hope to think of going, to ask for railroad folders at the
station, to trace the maps with a restless forefinger.
Yet to the casual eye she was not discontented, she was not an abnormal
and distressing traitor to the faith of Main Street.
The settled citizen believes that the rebel is constantly in a stew of
complaining and, hearing of a Carol Kennicott, he gasps, "What an
awful person! She must be a Holy Terror to live with! Glad MY folks are
satisfied with things way they are!" Actually, it was not so much as
five minutes a day that Carol devoted to lonely desires. It is
probable that the agitated citizen has within his circle at least one
inarticulate rebel with aspirations as wayward as Carol's.
The presence of the baby had made her take Gopher Prairie and the brown
house seriously, as natural places of residence. She pleased Kennicott
by being friendly with the complacent maturity of Mrs. Clark and Mrs.
Elder, and when she had often enough been in conference upon the Elders'
new Cadillac car, or the job which the oldest Clark boy had taken in
the office of the flour-mill, these topics became important, things to
follow up day by day.
With nine-tenths of her emotion concentrated upon Hugh, she did not
criticize shops, streets, acquaintances . . . this year or two. She
hurried to Uncle Whittier's store for a package of corn-flakes, she
abstractedly listened to Uncle Whittier's denunciation of Martin
Mahoney for asserting that the wind last Tuesday had been south and not
southwest, she came back along streets that held no surprises nor the
startling faces of strangers. Thinking of Hugh's teething all the way,
she did not reflect that this store, these drab blocks, made up all her
background. She did her work, and she triumphed over winning from the
Clarks at five hundred.
The most considerable event of the two years after the birth of Hugh
occurred when Vida Sherwin resigned from the high school and was
married. Carol was her attendant, and as the wedding was at the
Episcopal Church, all the women wore new kid slippers and long white kid
gloves, and looked refined.
For years Carol had been little sister to Vida, and had never in the
least known to what degree Vida loved her and hated her and in curious
strained ways was bound to her.
| Carol is furious about the inconveniences of pregnancy. She suffers from nausea. All the matrons of Gopher Prairie give her voluntary advice based on ignorance. Carol feels bad for disliking them. She is used to fighting them. Hence she feels sorry for herself for having to listen to them patiently. When her son is born she does not feel any overwhelming love, but only dislike for all the trouble he had caused. But from the second day the boy-named Hugh-becomes the center of her universe. Kennicott is proud of his son. He wants his son to be christened in the church. Carol does not allow it. Her new status makes her acceptable to young and old matrons alike. Kennicott's uncle Whittier Smail and Aunt Bessie come to visit them. Having sold their creamery in North Dakota they decide to settle in Gopher Prairie. Uncle Whittier buys Ole Jenson's grocery business. They prove a constant source of vexation to Carol. They take the privilege to laugh at her ideas and fuss about her and flay her with their affectionate questions. Kennicott also acquires their habit. Even a slight headache of Carol's makes them question her, give suggestions, inquire about her headache and question her again and drive her crazy. Aunt Bessie invites all the matrons to call on Carol and give advice, which they do too willingly. Carol decides to be rude to them so that they would stop interfering. Kennicott's mother comes to visit her brother Whittier. So Carol is unable to tell them anything. She finds her escape in the meetings of Jolly Seventeen. She waits for the bridge sessions and happily whispers along with Juanita, Maud and Mrs. Mc Ganum. Carol's happiest pass time is to talk about Hugh to Kennicott, Vida and the Bjornstams. Kennicott initiates a child-welfare week. Carol helps him to weigh the babies and write out the diets. Every one comes together in the concern for the health of the babies. But when Bjornstam's son Olaf is awarded the prize for the best baby every one except Carol and Kennicott feels jealous. Carol loves taking Hugh to play with Olaf. But the constant nagging of Aunt Bessie and her friends makes her feel a little ashamed to go to their shanty. She also feels ashamed of herself for giving in to their opinion. Bjornstam gives up his job in the mill and goes into poultry and cattle raising. He is happy that Mrs. Bogart had called on Bea. He boasts that his son would go to college with Haydock's sons. Many people leave Gopher Prairie and many others move in to take their place. Ole Jenson sells his grocery business and goes to settle down in North Dakota. Uncle Whittier sells his creamery in South Dakota and moves into Gopher Prairie and buys Ole Jenson's business to settle down as the grocer. Dhal the butcher sells his meat business and moves to Idaho. The Dawsons settle in Pasadena. Chet Dashaway moves to Los Angeles. Rita Simmons marries Dr. Terry Gould. Harry Haydock's father dies and Harry becomes senior partner of the Bon Ton store. Vida also gets married. Carol concentrates on Hugh totally. | summary |
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