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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."
| Vida Sherwin was born in the hilly Wisconsin village, where her father was a preacher. She taught in an iron-range town before she came to Gopher Prairie. Hence she considers Gopher Prairie, with its trees and the wheat prairies, to be a paradise. She is thirty-six years old and looks small and thin and sallow. But she is a very active woman with lively blue eyes. She is a capable teacher. She has the patience to toil for four years to hold a debate in the school. She takes a very active part in all the activities of the town. She fears sex and is very devoted to Jesus. Even if she feels the slightest stirrings in her mind she spends hours on prayers for forgiveness and guidance. Kennicott had tried once to woo her before his marriage to Carol. But she had discouraged him - hoping secretly that he would return to her. She had despaired when she learnt that he was to marry a city girl. She had imagined that she was mysteriously linked to Carol. Once Carol had come to live in Gopher Prairie she started imagining her to be the child of Kennicott and herself. Some times she used to wonder why Kennicott had chosen Carol when she herself was as beautiful-and then agonize over the fact that she was not as beautiful or young as Carol. In course of time she starts imagining that she is a part of Kennicott and becomes impatient of Carol's childish behavior. She tries to build on what is already there. Hence she dislikes Carol's revolutionary ideas of tearing everything down to build a better place. She hates Carol's assumption that every thing can be changed overnight. She starts comparing Carol with the two women who disliked Gopher Prairie. One was the rector's wife who was forced to leave Gopher Prairie. The other was the mysterious woman, who had borrowed money from many men had left town without paying it back. Vida and Raymie Wutherspoon become friends when Vida shifts to Mrs. Gurrey's boarding house. They admire one another and share many interests. They often discuss Carol and talk about Sam Clark and Kennicott. Vida boosts Raymie's confidence. One day in the course of their discussions Vida informs Raymie that she is planning to resign her job and leave Gopher Prairie. She abruptly leaves the place and a very distressed Raymie runs behind her to console her. He finds her in tears and they become engaged. They get married in the month of June. They move into the house vacated by Ole Jenson. She does not hire domestic help. She has a passion for housework She resigns from school but retains her English class. She continues with her communal work. She tells Harry Haydock that if he did not make Raymie a partner they would open their own shop because they had some one to back them. Raymie is given a one sixth partnership and is also promoted as the floorwalker | 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 wonders about the way Vida spent her time. She herself had her hands full with attending to the baby, and handling Kennicott's phone calls, yet she read every thing, whereas Vida seemed to be happy with reading only the headlines. Vida had spent most of her life in boarding houses. Hence she enjoyed every bit of housework. But Carol can never feel contentment with all the work she has and envies Vida for feeling so satisfied with life. She keeps up her habit of buying books. Kennicott initially wonders about her need to buy books when she had free access to all the books in the library. But he gives up the worry later on because he is convinced that it is one of her compulsions, which she picked up during her life as a librarian. She reads the books written by authors like Anatole France, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser and such writers. She looks at Gopher Prairie through their eyes and forms her own opinions about the drawbacks of the town. Vida comes to stay in Carol's house for one night because Kennicott and Raymie have gone to inaugurate a new chapter at Wakamin. Carol expresses all her opinions to Vida. Vida does not agree with Carol's opinions. But she listens to her patiently. In Carol's opinion there are two traditions expressed in the popular fiction of America. One is that the American village is the center of honesty and friendship and clean sweet girls. Men who find success in some other part of the country or abroad find those places vicious and always return to their villages and marry their childhood sweethearts and live happily ever after. The other tradition is the projection of the iron dogs on the lawn, gold bricks and checkers as the permanent features of a village. But Carol feels that the real symbols are cheap motor cars and unread sets of Mark Twain and oil-stocks. Carol also asserts that in reality the background is so standardized that every one talks and thinks alike. She describes it as a dead contentment only people like Kennicott or Champ Perry can enjoy. She asserts that there are people who find the situation very stifling and that they revolt. She also claims that those who revolt are the living people. The rest, who accept the standardization, are mechanical and that they have an effect on the people, who settle down in America. She points out as example the Norwegian fair that she had attended. The Scandinavian girls at the fair looked beautiful in their traditional clothes and served wonderful Scandinavian food. But now those girls have exchanged that elegance for the standard food and clothes of America. The citizens of such small villages feel virtuous about their ignorance and consider anyone with better knowledge to be priggish and of doubtful virtue. If at all any venture based on knowledge or courage takes place the West and the Middle West, it is only because of the farmers and the doctors, the teachers and the lawyers and the people like Bjornstam who support them. She asserts that such people are condemned as cranks. She admits that other countries also possess dullness, meanness and bitterness. She points out that they are isolated and therefore, no threat to the world. The problem with the small American village is that it tries to dominate the rest of the world. Carol points out how the American salesman puts up cigarette advertisements in China over the arches dedicated to the sayings of Confusius. She declares that such societies do not find satisfaction until the entire world has becomes dull like them. According to Carol, Gopher Prairie is a typical American small- town. The people there compare their town to great places like Rome and Vienna. Instead of acquiring the scientific spirit, they aim to get cheap labor for the kitchen and hope for an increase in the price of land. She is sure that things can still be better if such places were to be run by kind people like Sam Clark and Champ Perry. But unfortunately people like Haydock and the Elders who are more interested in cash and comic movies controlled them. | 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.
| America enters the Great European War. Raymie enrolls in the army, becomes a first lieutenant of infantry and is sent abroad. The sons of Lymn Cass, Sam Clark and Nat Hicks join the army. Both Dr. Terry Gould and Dr. Mc Ganum join the army and become captains. They are stationed at Iowa and Georgia. Kennicott too is eager to join the army. But the doctor's council decides that one young doctor should remain in town to take care of the town's health. Carol knows his longing and she respects him all the more for it. Cy Bogart keeps bragging that he would enroll in the army even without his mother's permission. The people admire him for beating up a German farmer's son. Only Carol cares to remember the boy when he gets killed in the war while trying to bring his Yankee captain's body back to the lines. The ladies give up their bridge parties and sugar. They help in making bandages for the Red Cross. They talk about Bjornstam's impudence and Dr. Terry Gould's affair with a farmer's daughter four years ago. Carol does her work efficiently but she is unable to bear the way Mrs. Cass and Mrs. Bogart fill the bandages with hatred for the enemies. She mentions this to Vida and Vida admonishes her and makes her cry. Carol wishes that Prussian autocracy should be defeated. She watches with thrill the troops embarking in New York at the motion pictures. Bjornstam tells her that he had bought two more cows. He scorns the war and the soldiers who have gone to fight. He asserts that he is wise enough to know that he knows nothing about the war. Carol feels terrified that people like Bjornstam are capable of taking care of themselves because she will not be able to play 'Lady Bountiful' to them. Percy Bresnahan visits Gopher Prairie. The Haydocks, the Kennicott's, the Elders, Nat Hicks and Julius Flickerbaugh go to the station to receive him. Bresnahan shakes Carol's hand warmly. He decides to walk home. Harry carries his leather bag and Jack Elder carries his over coat. He calls on the Kennicotts to see Hugh. He puts his hand around Carol's waist. Carol does not like the liberty he takes. She does not tell Hugh to thank Uncle Bresnahan when he gives her a toy. He keeps complimenting Carol and tells Kennicott to arrange for a fishing trip. The Kennicotts, the Elders, the Clarks and Bresnahan go fishing to Red Squaw Lake. The men go floating and the women cook lunch. They spend a long time eating and talking. Carol discovers that Bresnahan is indeed very rich and that his love for his friends is genuine. The government had invited him to advise about carburetors. He informs them that Spain would join America in the war. He also tells them that the Germans are loyal to the Kaiser and that he will be back in power. Carol asks him about Russia and he assures her that the Czar would return to power. Carol is sorry to hear that. The others ask him about motor cars, about investment in Texas oil-wells. Carol is conscious of his eyes on her, feels irritated and does not join them in the game of Cribbage. Yet when she sees Juanita leaning out of her window to look at them she feels proud of the attention Bresnahan pays them. Nat Hicks narrates how Bresnahan ticked off Bjornstam. The latter walked up to him and said that he wanted to see the person who is so useful that he would get paid a million dollars. Bresnahan retorted that he was looking for a man to sweep the floor. He would pay 4 dollars a day if Bjornstam would take up the job. | 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.
| Carol becomes more critical of Kennicott - especially after Bresnahan's visit. She finds that he does not bother to dress very well. She observes his mannerisms. She realizes that he is very boyish and that she has to manage him the way she manages Hugh. He is very homely and very dependable. Though the days are very hot they are unable to go to the lake cottage because the other doctors are away. The unbearable heat makes every one very touchy. She snaps at the clerk who tries to make suggestions. She feels vexed by Uncle Whittier's comments and does not laugh at Dave Dyers clownish tricks. She listens wearily to Sam's comments about her hat and Kennicott's story about the minister. She snaps at Kennicott when he wants to know the reason for Hugh's crying. She finds him dressed sloppily and his table manners to be very uncouth. He has not shaved for three days and his nails are ill shaped. She remembers the way he had tried to impress her during their courtship days. He casually informs her that his friends were coming over to play poker and he would like her to get some snacks for them. Sam Clark, Dave Dyer, Jack Elder and Howland come to play. They do not include Carol even in their conversation. She fumes about being taken for granted. After they leave she tells Kennicott that his friends have manners more appropriate for the bar room. Kennicott protests that even Bresnahan considered them to be the best people. She retorts that she is sick of Bresnahan. Kennicott tells her that she feared that America would become militaristic. She mocks his patriotism because she had heard him discussing the ways to avoid paying the tax. Kennicott feels hurt that she should doubt his patriotism. He points out that he pays his tax willingly but he does not want to pay more than he has to. He calls her a neurotic. They fail to make up their quarrel. She decides to have a separate room and Kennicott says that it would not be a bad idea. She clears a spare room and makes it comfortable with a cot, dressing table and a bookshelf. Kennicott feels unhappy about Carol's decision and Carol feels sad that she could forget. Kennicott, by just shutting the door. Aunt Bessie tells her that married people should sleep together. But Mrs. Westlake tells her that wives need their own space and Carol feels happy about her decision. Mrs. Westlake tells her that she told her husband that he was a romantic fool. Carol remarks that Kennicott is not romantic enough. She also tells Mrs. Westlake her opinion about Vida and Aunt Bessie. Oscarina leaves the Kennicotts to go back to the farm. Maids come and go and Carol is forced to do most of the work most of the time. Carol has to endure the jibes of the members of the Jolly Seventeen. Aunt Bessie keeps instructing her on housework and Carol feels exhausted. She goes to the maid's room while cleaning the house. She finds it to be a disgrace. It is situated above the kitchen and is poorly ventilated. The heating is poor and the furnishing is very shabby. She feels ashamed that she permitted her friends Bea and Oscarina to live in such a hole. Kennicott asserts that it was much better than the houses they lived in, in their own farms. Kennicott decides that they should build their new house. Carol is dismayed to learn that his dream house looked like Sam Clark's house. When she tries to make suggestions, he laughs at her. He invites Uncle Whittier's and Aunt Bessie's comments about Carol's suggestions. Annoyed Carol marches off to her room. She repents her rudeness and returns after a while. She watches Uncle Whittier cutting short Aunt Bessie to talk to Kennicott, apologizes and retreats to her bedroom. She fears that if Kennicott were to build the house according to his plan, her one last refuge, the dream of a beautiful house would be taken away from her. She longs to get away for a holiday. But Kennicott is unable to because of his work. However, in the month of July he offers to take her along to Joralemon, a neighboring prairie town. He has some work with Dr. Calibre there and the Beavers were holding a convention along with a street fair there. They leave Hugh with Aunt Bessie and travel by a freight train. Carol enjoys the train ride. Joralemon turns out to be another Gopher Prairie and Dr. Calibre ignores her totally. Mrs. Calibre is not a very joyful company. She has to deny herself even a ride on the merry - go-round. They return home the same evening. Kennicott calls Joralemon an enterprising town and Carol calls it an ant-heap. | 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."
| Kennicott wonders about how long Carol would take to get over her highbrow attitude. He broods over the fact that Carol wants him to become a poet. He knows that some women still find him attractive and wonders why he never felt tempted to go to the girls who would accept him as he is. He feels sorry that Carol who thinks she can understand everything does not even know that he can have a good time if he wanted to. But he knows that Carol is the most beautiful girl in Gopher Prairie and even in the whole of Minneapolis. Maud Dyer comes to his office complaining of a backache. Kennicott is conscious of her delicious milky white skin. He tells her that her troubles are imaginary. Maud tells him to be scientific and he points out that if he gave advice like a specialist they would laugh at him. If he told her to travel and be away from Dave for some time, he would want to skin him alive. Maud complains that Dave is very stingy and that she has to nag him to get money. Kennicott tells her that she has to manage it because Dave would never like his interference. He pats her back sympathetically and she presses his hands to her cheeks. She says that Dave is mean and noisy. She begs Kennicott to come to her house in the evening and make her be good and sensible. Kennicott points out that if he went to her house, he would have to play cards with Dave. Maud tells him that Dave would be at the shop till midnight. She makes Kennicott promise that he will call on her. Kennicott feels upset about the promise. He feels that Maud tricked him but decides to drop in just for a minute. He leaves for home. He finds refuge in his duties at home. As he sprinkles water on the road before his house, he sees Dave Dyer going to the shop. Dave invites him to the shop to have a cigar. Kennicott goes up to the baby's room and finds Carol singing. He plays with Hugh. After supper he sits on the front steps and Nat Hicks, the tailor comes to talk to him. He tells Kennicott that Harry and himself were taking the new dressmaker, Mrs. Swiftwaite and the girl who works at the Bon Ton store, to Harry's farmhouse. Nat wants to know if Kennicott would like to join them because Mrs. Swiftwaite had a good-looking friend. Kennicott refuses. Nat points out that he used to be a good sport before he got married. Kennicott does not change his mind. Nat leaves. Carol comes down but she sits on the porch. When Kennicott invites her to go to the movies she refuses. She does not care to go for a walk or for a swim in the lake because she wants to go to sleep. He asks her to sleep downstairs to keep him company. But Carol prefers to sleep in her room. He informs her that he would go to call on the Perrys and goes to Dave Dyer's house. Aunt Besse and Mrs. Bogart call on Carol. Mrs. Bogart elaborates on the shady things going on in Mrs. Swiftwaite's house. She warns Carol to be careful because the scheming woman may tempt Kennicott. Carol tells them that she hoped that Kennicott would be spirited enough to tempt the woman. Aunt Bessie says that it was wicked of Carol to say that. Carol asks Mrs. Bogart if she knew what Kennicott was thinking about when he was silent at the breakfast table. Mrs. Bogart trembles with anticipation and Carol tells her that he was probably pondering if the grass needed cutting. | 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 takes Hugh for a walk. Hugh's interest in nature makes her forget her boredom when she is with him. They both love to go to Bea's house. Carol finds companionship in the Bjornstams. Hugh admires Bjornstam and loves Olaf. Carol feels that Olaf looks regal like a king and that Hugh appears like a common businessman in his presence. Hugh suggests the game and Olaf condescends to play. Bjornstam makes a chariot for them out of a starch box and four red spools. Bea treats the children equally and loves to be hospitable. Bjornstam is prosperous. He now has six cows, two hundred chickens and a ford truck. He has added two more rooms to his shack. Hugh loves every activity of Bjornstam -like chasing the pigs and slaughtering the chicken. Hugh loves to watch his tools. Bjornstam allows him to touch the tools, the thing, which he is never allowed to do in his father's office. Bjornstam tells Carol that as long as they lived in Gopher Prairie he will not be respected. Bea loves to entertain so he feels sad to see that her desire is not fulfilled. He tells her how Bea had taken him to the church once. But even there he was being ignored. So he knows that his reputation as a bad man is permanent. He also tells her that he does not mind it as long as he has Olaf to play with. He buys a phonograph for Bea. Bea is a hard working woman and she enjoys the work. Carol goes to their house to tell them all about Joralemon and finds both Bea and Olaf sick with fever. She learns from Bjornstam that he used to get water from Oscar Eklund's well. Since he kept teasing Bjornstam constantly about being too stingy to dig his own well, he offered him money. But Oscar refused to accept it so he had to take water from Mrs. Fageros's which was not good. Dr. Kennicott comes and diagnoses their ailment as typhoid. Bea's cousin Tina is away at the country. So Carol starts nursing Bea and Olaf from eight in the morning till midnight. She feeds them, bathes them, and takes their temperature and smoothes their bed sheet. Bjornstam does the cooking and the sweeping. Dr. Kennicott attends them three times a day and is tender and hopeful to the patients and polite to Bjornstam. The condition of the patients worsens steadily and Bea even becomes delirious. Carol hardly sleeps for three hours and runs back to nurse them. In the second week of the illness Vida, Maud Dyer and Mrs. Zitterel call bearing grapes and women's magazines. They tell Bjornstam that they came to see if there was anything they could do for Bea. He tells them that it was too late to do anything for her. He also tells them that when she was well she eagerly waited for them to call, to make friends with them. He adds that they never came and shuts the door. They go away feeling insulted. Olaf dies that afternoon. Bea dies the next morning. Bjornstam, Kennicott and Carol wash the bodies. Bjornstam tells Carol to go home and sleep. She says she will be back for the funeral. But the next morning she lies too exhausted to get up. Through the window she sees Bjornstam walking alone behind the bodies of Bea and Olaf. That afternoon Juanita calls on Carol and tells her that Bea and Olaf died because Bjornstam drank too much and ill-treated them. | 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.
| Raymie Wutherspoon is promoted to the rank of a captain. Bjornstam sells his farm and leaves Gopher Prairie to settle in North Alberta. Many people opine that Bjornstam should have been sent to the prison. Even Kennicott believes that Bjornstam was bad. Mrs. Westlake talks sweetly and Carol tells the old Matron Bea's story. One day Mrs. Flickerbaugh invites her for tea. Carol listens with surprise that the lawyer's wife hated the town. She wanted to be a businesswoman. But her husband did not allow her to start her own business. So Mrs. Flickerbaugh had turned eccentric and this frightens Carol because she fears the same fate for herself. She sits alone on the porch because Kennicott had gone to make a professional call on Maud Dyer. She watches Cy Bogart and Myrtle Cass walk down the road hand in hand. She gets the sensation that something ardent is going on around her, which she is unable to see. | 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.
| Notes This brief chapter describes Carol's state of mind after Bea's death. She is shocked into silence. Bjornstam's going away is pathetic. Carol feels that his gait has lost its spring and that his shoulders slumped. She remains silent when people, even Kennicott, speak ill of him. She pours out her innermost sorrow at Bea's death only into the sympathetic ears of Mrs. Westlake because she believes that she is the only dependable friend she has. How wrong Carol is in trusting the pussyfooted Mrs. Westlake is revealed in the chapters to follow. Her meeting with Mrs. Flickerbaugh starts a new line of thinking in her mind. She finds her dressed in a very odd manner. She finds that Mrs. Flickerbaugh feels as restless as she herself does and feels uneasy to think that she might become as eccentric as Mrs. Flickerbaugh is. She trusts Kennicott so much that she does not suspect Kennicott when he goes off to call on Maud Dyer. The writer uses dramatic irony very effectively when he says that she felt everywhere in the darkness 'panted an ardent quest' which she did not understand. | analysis |
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 finds Maud to be very friendly. She feels proud of Kennicott's sympathy when he tells her that he feels sorry for Maud because Dave is very rude to her. She also learns through Maud that Nat Hicks has a new assistant who looks so feminine that he is nick named Elizabeth. He dressed up in a coat and necktie and talked in a very refined manner but he earned hardly eighteen dollars a week. The ladies laugh at him and the men also make fun of him. The boys tease him by dropping a decaying perch into his pocket. Carol attends church because Mr. Zitterel's topic for the day was- America-Face Your Problems. He condemns Mormonism and advocates prohibition. Carol who expected to be enlightened on problems like the Great War and the Russian Revolution feels disappointed. When she looks around to divert herself, she finds a stranger looking at the preacher amusedly. He looks like a poet. But Carol resents the fact that a stranger should find the people of her town amusing. She wants to talk to him. She feels disappointed when she learns that the stranger is Erik Valborg nicknamed Elizabeth. Carol learns that Valborg is a Swede and he is a farmer's son. He learnt tailoring in Minneapolis. He had read many books on his own. Uncle Whittier comments that he should be in the war. Kennicott informs them that he had applied but had been disqualified. Fern Mullins the new English, French and gymnastics teacher also attracts Carol's attention. She appears to be lonely so Carol goes to talk to her. She is twenty-two and looks pretty and also rakish. Like Carol she too loves the big cities and feels trapped in Gopher Prairie. She loves dramatics, dancing and basketball. She tells Carol that she knew very well that she would be considered a bad influence if she did any of the things that she liked. She informs Carol that if she got a job in the city she would resign and leave Gopher Prairie. Carol tells her that she too felt the same way. They have so much to talk about that Kennicott has to come out to call Carol to go to bed. Carol feels very happy to have found a good friend. Carol comes across Valborg many times and chides herself for her longing to talk to him. One Friday she takes Kennicott's trousers to the shop to be pressed. When she gives her name he tells her that he wanted to meet her and talk to her. He had heard about her play and he tells her that his ambition was to act in a play. Carol notes that he mispronounced many words. He tells her that he had had to work hard and he was a self-taught man. He believes that with a good director he would be able to give a good performance. Carol tells him that she would consult Fern and see if they could present another play. Erik also has the ambition to go east and become a dress designer. He knows that many people consider dress designing to be lady's work and they made fun of his ambition. He informs Carol that he hated tailoring and did not care to become a salesman. He asks for Carol's opinion about what he should do. She tells him that as a stranger she had no right to advise him. He tells her that she is no stranger to him because he had heard a lot about her. She invites him to come to her house at eight-o clock so that they could discuss restarting the dramatic club. Carol is full of sympathy for Erik. She feels that he has no sense of humor, though he looked like John Keats. Kennicott talks to Fern very jovially but is aloof with Eric. He does not participate in their discussion but sits watching them amiably. Fern airs her grievances. Carol sulks every time The Girl from Kankakee is mentioned. Erik makes some suggestions. He wants to stage Suppressed Desires. He even suggests the settings. He also suggests The Black Mask, which, according to him has a glorious ending. He describes the woman in the story looking at the face of the man with the black mask. His face is blown away and she screams. At this Kennicott laughs and Fern moans and Erik looks bewildered. They part without deciding anything. | 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."
| Carol takes Hugh for a walk. They meet Erik. Hugh goes hunting engines. Carol and Erik sit down to talk. He tells her about all the books that he had read and asks her for advice. She advises him to consult a dictionary for pronunciation. He tells her about his childhood. His father is a farmer. When Erik wanted to study drawing, his father sent him to a tailor as an apprentice. His father's cousin was a tailor and he had made a lot of money and he had told his father that tailoring was like drawing. But Erik has no interest in the job. He wants to go to the East to become a dress designer. He is also afraid that if he could not become a successful dress designer he would have to become a salesman. Carol advises him to have his adventure because doing what one wants to do is more important than anything else is. He feels that when he had so much work to do in his father's farm to go to Europe to do something that they have been doing for so many years may not be a very good idea. Carol repeats that he should do what he wants to do. Suddenly Erik asks Carol the reason for her unhappiness. She is startled and tells him that he should be impersonal. She also has fears about meddling with other people's destinies. She suggests that they should return. Erik looks at her and wonders about how could anyone hurt her. He tells Carol that he would work for one year and save money to go to the East, and find out what he is really good at. On their way back he tells Carol that he is aware that the boys tease him for not being in the army. They pass Aunt Bessie's house and find Mrs. Bogart and Aunt Bessie staring at them and return their wave with a stiff hand. Mrs. Westlake also keeps looking at them. Carol takes leave of Erik and goes in to meet Mrs. Westlake. Even though she had decided not to give any explanation, she tells her about Erik's interest in books. Mrs. Westlake wants to know if Erik is interested in Myrtle Cass and Carol replies that Myrtle is still a baby. Carol keeps thinking about Erik and wants to help him. At the same time she does not wish to interfere. She feels responsible for him yet she does not like the initiative he takes to organize a tennis match. He writes the names of the people who agree to play and begs Carol to bring more people. She agrees. He wants Haydock to be the president. Haydock encourages him to make the arrangements for the match. Erik feels happy that he now belongs to Gopher Prairie. On the day of the match, Kennicott tells Carol that he does not want to go to the match but he does not mind Carol going. When Carol reaches the court, she finds Erik alone. Then come, the Woodfords followed by the Dillons. The match is scheduled to start at three but nobody turns up even at three thirty. They start practicing. Kennicott drives up and informs Carol that the match was to be held at the court near the lake and asks Carol to join him. Erik says that he was not informed of the change of the venue of the match. Carol realizes that Erik, the Woodfords and the Dillons were deliberately being left out. She defiantly tells Kennicott that she would play where the match was originally supposed to be held. She also asserts that she considered Haydock to be very rude. Kennicott leaves and they start playing. But they play slowly and painfully on the rough earth. When they walk back home Carol holds Erik's hand. | 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----"
| Carol, the Dyers, Erik, Cy Bogart and Fern Mullins go to Lake Minniemashie. Dave plays the clown. Cy also becomes very playful. They go for a swim. Carol remains very quiet. She is dressed like how she used to dress when she was a college girl and feels very conscious. She admires Erik's Greek dance and feels that Dave and Cy did not have good taste. The Dyers are very pleased with Erik. Maud calls him to sit near her. She tells Erik that she had become very sensitive and that the doctor had advised her to have nice people around her. She asks him to go with her to see the minnies. Carol does not like Erik paying attention to Maud. She is left alone with Dave and he tries to amuse her. Then Erik comes to Carol and asks her to go for a boat ride. She hesitates but goes with him and feels very conscious of his presence. They reach another part of the shore. Erik wants to stop there for a while. When they sit down he tells her that she looks innocent and defenseless. Carol likes to hear that. She doesn't want sit there for long and insists on returning. But she feels content to be in his company because he is being himself. When they return she realizes that it is very late and feels very embarrassed. Kennicott however, does not say anything when she reaches home late. The next day Mrs. Bogart tries to grill Carol about the picnic and their boat ride. She tells her that people in Gopher Prairie can not enjoy such clean fun. However, she feels very conscious of herself when she is at the Jolly Seventeen. She meets Erik again at the Baptist church supper. He is busy helping Myrtle Cass to fill the coffee cups. She hates Erik for talking to so many people. Then she realizes that he wants to be accepted and feels sorry for him. She notices Mrs. Bogart watching her and feels frightened. She knows that her emotions are impossible and wishes to escape from it all. She tells Kennicott to take her to Chicago but he is too busy. She then begs him to let her go alone but he does not agree. She wakes up in the middle of the night and feels sorry for herself for being in love with a pretentious young man. Harry Haydock gives the lawn-festival of the season. Erik is also invited and Carol feels happy to see him in the company of the Dyers, the Elders, Guy Pollock and Myrtle Cass. Carol is invited to join them and Myrtle takes Erik away to meet the girl from Wakamin. Carol remarks to Mrs. Westlake that Myrtle and Erik make a good pair. Mrs. Westlake looks at her curiously and Carol gets worried. Erik meets her alone and tells her that Lymn Cass wanted him to work in the flourmill and learn the business and one day he might become the general manager. He waits for Carol's advice. She points out that he would also become like Lymn Cass and asks him to decide. He says that he does not know and she calls him unstable. He tells her that he wants her and if he is ready to take Myrtle it was only to forget her. He asserts that he would be happy even to be a ditch digger if only she would accept him. Carol tells him that she is a wife and a mother. But Erik says that he will make her love him. She walks away from him. When Kennicott remarks that she seemed to be very friendly with him, she lies that he was telling her about Myrtle. She detests herself for the lie and begs Kennicott to let her go to St.Paul. But once again Kennicott tells her that he cannot go and will not let her go alone. She is unable to sleep the whole night. | 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.
| On a cool night, when Kennicott is out on a country call, Erik walks into Carol's porch. Carol tells him that he cannot stay for more than five minutes. She invites him into the house because she does not want Mrs. Howland and Mrs. Bogart to watch them. She tells him to have some cake and then go home. But he wants to see Hugh. When they stand looking at the sleeping Hugh, she feels the sense of friendliness. He wants to see her bedroom. She tells him that he cannot stay and that he should be good. She watches him looking at her books. He kisses her on the eyelids. She asks him to stop and requests him not to spoil the friendship she has for him. Erik tells her that millions of women say that and that it made it all the more glorifying. But Carol is unyielding. She tells him that she might have loved him but it is too late now. She tells him to go away. But when he leaves, she feels disappointed because he didn't stay long enough for her to explain what she meant by being good friends. When she looks out of the bay window she sees Mrs. Westlake walking past her house and looking at her porch and the windows. Carol drops the curtains and stands paralyzed Two days later Kennicott appears restless and comes straight to the point. He wants to know what Carol had told Mrs. Westlake. He tells her that he had already warned her to be careful with the Westlakes and how Mrs. Westlake has spread throughout the town the gossip that Carol hates Aunt Bessie and that she had her own room because Kennicott snored. She has also spread the rumors that in Carol's opinion Bea was too good for Bjornstam and also that she was angry with the town because they did not invite Erik for dinner. Carol protests that Mrs. Westlake had twisted everything that she had said. Kennicott tells her that he understands that everybody gets angry and they need to blow off steam. But the safest way to do it would be to advertise it in the Dauntless or to holler it out with a megaphone than telling Mrs. Westlake about it. Carol tells him that she has no friends. Kennicott pats her hand and says nothing more. But Carol feels desolate. She wishes to run to Erik to seek consolation. She worries about what rumors, Mrs. Westlake might have spread about her. Vida calls on her. She wants to know about Carol's interest in Erik. She says that she is convinced of Carol's innocence. She says that she suspects that Carol has some fondness for Erik. She worries that Carol does not know what innocent fondness may develop into. Carol sarcastically asks her if she thought that Erik would think about making love to her. Vida starts crying and tells Carol that she does not know what it is to suffer. She confesses to her that she was fond of Will Kennicott and that once they held hands at a party. She informs Carol that she had let Kennicott go because she thought that she did not suit him. She wants Carol to realize that she looked at the situation through Kennicott's eyes. She also tells Carol that Kennicott is a good man who never strayed from the path of rectitude. Carol understands that Vida imagined that she was confessing about an intimate love and was struggling to cover her shame. So she runs to her and consoles her and proclaims that she would never do anything to hurt Will. Then Vida tells her that if she wanted to reform people, she should live a spotless life, otherwise she would not be effective. After Vida's departure Carol is full of self-pity. She feels that the tragedy of her life is that there is no tragedy. She could at the most hope to have complications that would turn out to be a farce. She knows that she is not innocent as Vida imagines. Aunt Bessie calls to warn Carol that Kennicott might have his own affairs. Carol asserts that he is too safe. In the seclusion of her room she considers leaving Kennicott. Then she imagines a number of mishaps - like an accident or a patient falsely accusing him of malpractice and wrecking him. Unable to bear the morbid thoughts she runs to his room. When Kennicott holds her by the waist she tells him that she thought that she heard him moan and wishes him good night and returns to her room. Once when she goes to Nat Hick's shop to discuss Kennicott's suit. Nat chuckles unnecessarily and touches her arm needlessly. He looks from Erik to Carol and she feels that every man in town might be talking about her. She believes that Kennicott must be the only person who knows nothing about what they talked. Before the beginning of school Fern wants to attend the barn dance and she requests Carol to go as a chaperon. Carol is unable to go with her. | 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.
| On the Sunday after the barn dance, Carol hears Mrs. Bogarts screeching voice. She presumes that she had a row with her son. Then she sees Fern Mullins carrying a suitcase, walking up the street with her head bent low. She hears Mrs. Bogart telling her not to show her face and contaminate her house. Carol watches her go from house to house. Mrs. Bogart reaches Kennicott's house at suppertime. She tells them that she considers it her duty to warn them but she doesn't expect to be thanked for it. After elaborating upon Fern's eating habits, she gives them a detailed account of what happened after the barn dance. According to Mrs. Bogart, Fern had given Cy a pint of whisky. But, according to Fern, Cy had stolen it from a farmer's pocket. He had got drunk and Fern had driven him home retching. Mrs. Bogart asserts that Cy never drank but when Kennicott grunts, she admits that he did drink sometimes. She informs them that Cy had confessed in the morning that Fern had dared him to take a drink. She also admits that Fern had denied doing that. But she goes on to elaborate on the number of lustful things that Fern might have done, which makes Carol feel too sick to interfere. Kennicott stops her to tell her that she had not shown them any proof of Fern's misconduct. Mrs. Bogart points out that Fern had admitted to having taken a sip of whisky because Cy had forced her to. Carol points out that a sip of whisky can not make her a bad woman because she herself had tasted whisky. Mrs. Bogart claims that a teacher drinking with her student was certainly wrong. She asserts that Fern would corrupt Cy. When Carol tells her that Cy was corrupted five years ago. Mrs. Bogart tries to defend him. She keeps repeating that she is not fit to be a teacher. She adds that she had already informed the school board. Carol feels shocked and frightened by the Fern episode. Maud phones to confirm the scandal. She hears voices analyzing and adding to the story. She wonders what connection her interest in Erik had with this affair and realizes that the scandalmongers are unable to hound her on account of her belonging to the elite class. She finds out that Fern is put up in Minnie Mashie house. She goes there and finds Fern cowed down and weeping. She tries to comfort Fern. Fern tells Carol that she had gone to the dance mainly because she wanted to escape Mrs. Bogart's moral comments and because Cy had promised to be good. She saw Cy steal a bottle from a farmer's coat pocket. Cy had forced her to take a sip. She tells Carol that she had a nice time dancing with a young, strong intelligent farmer but worried about Cy's condition. While she was talking to a girl who had taken the university agricultural course she saw Cy staggering towards her. She wanted to return home but Cy kissed her. A farmer helped her to harness the buggy. She drove him home. Cy kept trying to make love to her but she had strength enough to resist him because of her athletic training. When she reached home, Mrs. Bogart started yelling at her. Still she drove the buggy back to the stable and returned to the house. Even after she got into her room and closed the door, Mrs. Bogart kept shouting at her. She never cared to listen to her side of the story but turned her out of the house. Fern worries about how she would face her class. Carol goes to the Clarks and tells them Fern's side of the story. They believe Fern and feel sorry for her. Carol asks Sam to fight for Fern. Sam points out that half the board would support Mrs. Bogart and they will consider Fern to be unfit to teach in the school. Carol points out to Sam that a fine girl like Fern should not be sent out into the world with a stain. She begs Sam to make a minority report even if the others would not agree with him. Sam tells her that no reports are made in such cases and only a decision, unanimous or otherwise is announced. Carol asks Sam to threaten to resign if the board decides to fire Fern. Sam becomes uneasy and promises that he will do all that he can. She meets the superintendent of the school-George Edwin Mot, Ezra Stowbody and Rev. Mr. Zitterel and gets only the promise that they will do whatever they can. | 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 is unable to meet Erik and feels depressed about Fern. She suddenly feels convinced that she loves Erik. She tries to remember his looks and the things he used to say. Once, when Kennicott is away in the country, Erik comes to Carol's house and asks her to go for a walk. She dresses up in her tweed coat and rubber shoes and goes to the grain elevator where he waits for her. They go for a long walk. Erik tells her about the tailor's shop at Minneapolis where he had worked. He tells her about how they made fun of him and of how he would dream of being a marquis in Italy. He shows her the poem he had written for her. It is a badly written verse yet she feels greatful. She insists that they should go home but he wants to stay for some time. He wants to build a fire and makes her sit near it. As they stand talking a car comes towards them. Kennicott calls out to them from the car. He tells Erik to sit in front and Carol is left to sit by herself at the back. Kennicott talks to Erik about hunting. He stops the car when they reach the main street. Erik shakes hands with Carol and leaves. Once they reach home Carol wants to tell Kennicott everything. But he busies himself with his usual chores in the house. Then he settles down and tells Carol that he would not act the part of the outraged husband. He likes her and he respects her. He adds that he cannot be dramatic. He tells her that she should stop going around with Erik before she gets into trouble like Fern Mullins did. Carol is shocked that he knew about Carol's interest in Erik all along. Kennicott tells her gently that Gopher Prairie was not a place where anyone could do anything without everyone finding it out. He is sure that Carol is so colds that she would not bear to let him even touch her. She tells Kennicott that she admires Erik because he is an artist. Kennicott talks about his work as a doctor and how he has to attend to the patients day and night-hot or cold weather or even through blizzards. He tells her how much he loves her and how the thought of her waiting for him makes him forget all his discomfort. Carol tells him about how much she dislikes the town and how she hates the criticisms of Uncle Whittier, Aunt Bessie, Juanita and the others. She asserts that Erik with her help would become successful and vindicate her stand. Kennicott points out that Erik had not done anything worthwhile with his life till now and it was not possible that he would work wonders in future. He paints a dismal picture of how he would end up in a small tailor's shop. He also tells her that his relatives would come and be rude to her. She would have one child every year and she would have to help him by pressing clothes everyday. He adds that Erik would blame it all on her and say that he would have become a famous man if he had gone to the east. Kennicott asks her if he himself is so bad that she cannot love him anymore. Carol admits that she never thought of leaving. She asserts that marriage weaves people together and that it cannot be broken even when it has to be. He carries her upstairs and puts her on her bed and leaves her alone. The next evening he gives Carol a letter from Erik, which informs her briefly that he is going away to Minneapolis. She rushes into Kennicott's arms and once again they become lovers. A week after Erik's departure his father comes to Kennicott's house and blames Carol for his son's disappearance. He abuses her. Carol accuses him of exploiting Erik and threatens to call the police. He calls her names before leaving. When Kennicott returns she tells him that she wants to go away to California. He promises to take her and tells her that running away would give people chance to talk. She should face them to silence them. He would take her out after three weeks. When Aunt Beside tries to needle her, Kennicott tells her that Carol and himself had taken Erik out for a walk and that Erik had got a good job offer in Minneapolis and he himself had advised Erik to take it. Guy Pollock talks to her about books when he meets her on the crowded street. Vida takes her to Jolly Seventeen. Carol disappoints the matrons of the club by talking about their plans to go to California and asking for their suggestions. The Smails are requested to stay in Kennicott's house and take care of Hugh. Kennicott wants to know if Carol wanted to buy clothes at Minneapolis. She has no wish to stop but wants to get as far away as possible. They take a train. Carol feels as if the gray fields were closing in on 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 Kennicotts travel for three and a half months and visit the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, Pasadena and many other places. They meet the Dawsons who have settled in a bungalow at Pasadena. They return to Gopher Prairie in the first week of April. Since they had not informed anyone of their arrival and it is icy, nobody meets them at the station. Having missed the bus they decide to walk. They find it difficult to walk on the cold icy road with their suitcases. They stop at Haydock's house and talk about their vacation. Kennicott phones for a taxicab but before reaching them it skids and crashes into a tree. The Haydocks reluctantly offer to take out their car but the Kennicotts firmly refuse and start for home. Kennicott is delighted to be back home but Carol is not very enthusiastic. They meet Sam Clarke and he greets them very enthusiastically. Carol feels that she has lost the habit of lying. She can't display as much affection as Sam Clarke does. In her love for Hugh she forgets everything else. She is even able to ignore Aunt Bessie's comments. She promises Hugh that she would never go away from him. She finds him spoilt by Aunt Bessie. She listens to the familiar conversation between Kennicott and Mrs. Bogart about the weather and the other familiar noises of the house. She cannot remember that she had ever been away from home. She finds it unbearable to live in the house. When she seeks Kennicott to tell him she finds him examining the furnace. He appears to be happy to be back. She finds it difficult to break his heart. She looks at the pencil mark she made while planning picnics with Fern. She feels very lonely. When the Clarks call on them and tell them how happy they are to see them, she feels nice to be needed. | 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?"
| Notes Carol has a wonderful holiday. They jog, bathe in the surf, climb foothills and dance. They watch a polo game and the making of a motion picture. She meets an artist and talks to him. She feels touched when Kennicott takes her to an art gallery and tries to enjoy looking at the pictures. But she feels dismayed at the way people belonging to small towns like Gopher Prairie seek each other to talk about the same old things. Kennicott too seeks out his kind and revels in talking about motorcars and crops and politics. When they return home Carol finds it even more difficult to whip up any enthusiasm for the town or for their friends. Her homecoming is as full of misgivings as was her first homecoming as a bride. It is indeed surprising that all the years and friendships and her child fail to create any attachment for the town. Characteristically Kennicott observes all the additions-the new fences and the new signboards, when Carol notices how they have let the refuse accumulate behind their houses. She fails to find any attraction in the town. The only attachment she finds in the place is, her son Hugh. Kennicott too enjoys every minute of their holiday and is happier to be back home. The way the Haydocks interrupt the Kennicotts to talk about their own holidays is universal behavior. | analysis |
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 endure Gopher Prairie silently. She devotes herself to the housework, to Hugh, to the Red Cross work and she listens silently to Vida raging against the Germans. She helps as a volunteer nurse, when Mrs. Perry catches pneumonia. Mrs. Perry dies and the eleven remaining pioneers in Gopher Prairie attend her funeral. Champ Perry is heart broken and weak with rheumatism. He is unable to continue his work as the buyer at the Elevator Company. He is retired but does not get a pension. Carol tries to get him the post-mastership but Mr. Bert Tybee wants it. Because of Carol's efforts, Lymn gives Perry the job of the night watchman at his flourmill. Raymie Wutherspoon returns as a major. In his uniform he appears to be very handsome and very stern. Vida is unable to leave his side even for a second. Raymie tells the Kennicotts that Paris is not half as beautiful as Minneapolis and that the American soldiers were models of virtuous behavior. He is made full manager of the Bon Ton stores. When Carol sees him in his civil clothes he appears to be the same old Raymie and Carol feels disappointed. With the increase in the price of wheat, the merchants, milers and those who deal in real estate make a lot of money. Kennicott earns seven thousand dollars in three months. A campaign to make Gopher Prairie a city of industries is started. Mr. Blausser is made to take charge of the campaign. He is a noisy humorous man with narrow eyes and pays more attention to women. He keeps touching Carol's arms and shoulder and she hates him. Kennicott and the others tell her that he is a brilliant man. He boasts that he would move the mountains to Gopher Prairie. Mr. Blausser is the guest of honor at the Commercial Club Banquet at the Minnie Mashie House. Harry Haydock introduces him as a personal friend and as a man who knows how to achieve. Blausser has ambitious schemes to transform Gopher Prairie into a St. Paul or Minneapolis. He claims that Gopher Prairie is as good as London or Paris. According to him, the only live thing in Europe is the American soldier and London is but a city of fog and old buildings. He asserts that Gopher Prairie as it is, is the best place to live in. Gopher Prairie sees progress. The band is reorganized. The baseball team gets a coach. The citizens of Gopher Prairie go loyally wherever the team goes, to cheer the team. The Dauntless, praises them loyally. The town acquires the white way, so called because it is composed of ornamented lampposts with clusters of light bulbs along two or three blocks on Main Street. The commercial club appoints a writer from an advertising agency to write a booklet about Gopher Prairie. Carol is surprised to read the exaggerated account of Gopher Prairie and comments that she would like to see the Gopher Prairie mentioned in the booklet. For all its troubles the Commercial Club gets a small factory to make wooden automobile wheels. She is unable to endure the Gopher Prairie that has become egomaniac. During their courtship days Kennicott had begged her to make Gopher Prairie beautiful. Now that Mr. Blausser and the Dauntless claimed Gopher Prairie to be the most beautiful town, Carol feels that she is free to leave it. | 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.
| Kennicott feels hurt that Carol does not show any interest in the town boosting campaign and that she did not appreciate Mr. Blausser. They have an argument over an organizer for the National Non Partisan League who had announced that he would address a farmer's meeting in spite of the ban on such meetings. He was caught by a mob of a hundred businessmen and the sheriff and put in a freight train, with the warning never to return. When Kennicott, Sam Clark and Dave Dyer are happy that the organizer was thus got rid of, Carol does not show any happiness. Kennicott accuses Carol of not being capable of appreciating good people. He declares that he will not tolerate his wife making seditious remarks. He condemns all radicals and declares that the people of Gopher Prairie will make them all become patriotic. Carol wants to know if she is considered to be pro-German because she does not applaud Mr. Blausser. She tells Kennicott that she did not belong to Gopher Prairie and so she was going to leave it. Kennicott sarcastically asks her if she expected him to settle down in Paris and study arts. Carol tells him that she will leave Kennicott and take Hugh with her. She says that she wants to find out her work. He tells her that if she had five children and had to work like a farmer's wife she would not feel discontent. She points out that she had done a lot of housework, cared for Hugh and did the Red Cross work too. She says that she cannot be satisfied with mechanical work. She would like to teach children or run an office or a library. Kennicott asks her what would she do if he refused to let her take Hugh with her. She says that he will not refuse. He points out that she was running away from problems. She retorts that she is not afraid of being called such names and that she had a right to her own life. They discuss it for a month, hurting each other in the process. Finally he agrees to let her go. They inform their friends that she wants to go and see what the east was like in the wartime. She decides to go to Washington because she feels that it is less intimidating than New York and also because she will be able to find work there. When the train leaves Gopher Prairie, she sees Kennicott looking forlorn at the station. Hugh wants to see Aunt Bogart. He tells her that she gives him cookies and tells him about the Dear Lord. He asks Carol why she never tells him anything about the Dear Lord? He asks her if he can become a preacher when he grew up? She tells him that where they go they will find elephants and maharanis with necklaces of rubies. He wants to know if they will have cookies. She tells him that they will have cookies till they get sick of it. Hugh believes that it would be foolish. Carol realizes that Hugh is just like Kennicott. Dauntless of Gopher Prairie informs its readers that Carol Kennicott went to Washington to work in the war office and calls her another shining star in the service of the nation. The Dyers, Mrs. Dyer's sister and Kennicott go for a picnic to the lake. | 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 finds employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance in Washington. It is not very elevating work but she feels that her contact with the anxieties of men and women all over the country was a part of vast affairs. She realizes that she can do the office work and her housework as well. She also feels that without interference housework, took very little time. She enjoys looking at the buildings in Washington. Vida's letter helps her to make the acquaintance of the Tincomb Methodist Church members. She finds the church to be another Main Street with the Sunday school, Sunday service and the church suppers of scalloped potatoes and gingerbread. They give advice just as the matrons did back home. Carol considers joining the militant suffrage organization and going to jail. Guy Pollock's cousin who is a temporary Army Captain takes Carol to tea dances. He introduces her to the secretary of a congressman. Through her Carol gets to meet commanders, newspapermen, fiscal experts and a teacher who knows the people in the suffrage movement headquarters. Through her, Carol gets the task of addressing envelopes of the suffrage movement and the friendly women include her in their group. They sometimes get mobbed and arrested. They also take dancing lessons and go for picnics and discuss politics when they are free. Through her friends Carol finds a house and a good nurse for Hugh. She takes him for walks, plays with him and reads to him. She is able to mix with people who talk a lot. She finds the young girls in Washington more fashionable and more knowledgeable than she was at their age. She admires the men who are very easy going and confidant. They accept the company of women naturally, without the embarrassed banter as the men did in Gopher Prairie. She finds a group of ladies who think and feel like her. They too consider towns like Gopher Prairie to be boring and make a comfortable living in Washington. They even find time to read. Through them she learns about many prairie towns and realizes that in comparison Gopher Prairie appeared to be more colorful and intellectual. She also gets the perception that Gopher Prairie is not as important as it thought itself to be and that it was she who gave the Vidas and the Bogarts the power, of which she was so afraid. She realizes that she had been as personal as Maud Dyer was. She understands that her war was with the institutions like the church and the country and that she could defend herself by laughing at them without any contempt for them. | 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 one year's stay in Washington, Carol gets tired of her office work. One day, while having tea, she notices the young girls. They talk about bedroom farce and running up to New York and Carol feels very old and rustic. When one of the girls gives orders to the chauffeur, Carol realizes that she herself is only a Government clerk from a small place called Gopher Prairie. Then she sees Juanita and Harry Haydock walking down the road and runs to them with joy. She clings to them and gives them dinner at St. Marks. She listens to all the gossip about Gopher Prairie eagerly and feels sorry to let them go. Once she goes out with the captain to a restaurant. She notices Bresnahan entertaining two ladies. The captain informs Carol that though Bresnahan is good sales man of motor cars, he is a nuisance in the aeronautic section. She watches a movie and is shocked to see Erik Valborg appear in a minor role. She feels very sorry for him. She receives Kennicott's letter and finds that Kennicott has a personality, which Erik can never have. Kennicott comes to Washington to see her. She is touched to see him in a new soft gray suit and a new tie. His shoes are polished to a shine and he had shaved perhaps before getting off the train. She takes two days leave from her office to be with him. Kennicott spends half an hour in her flat with Hugh. She takes him around Washington. She feels moved when she finds that he is slightly balder and his fingernails are as roughly treated as ever. He gives her news of Gopher Prairie. They had started the construction of the new school building. Vida made him tired by the way she looked at her Maje. Chet Dashaway had been killed in a motor accident. But he never tells her to like him or return to him. He wants to know if they are still married but he never asks any questions. He shows her photographs of Gopher Prairie. She looks at them and remembers his first wooing. She informs him that he will have to stay at a hotel but he does not get angry or hurt. He wants to go to her flat to see Hugh and meet her friends. He makes friends easily with her housemates and suggests remedies for red eyes and inoculation for cold. The next day he comes to the flat for breakfast and washes the dishes. They go sight seeing. He tells her how he had to earn while he was studying. He regrets the fact that his friends in college did nothing but loaf around and cause nuisance. He feels that he should have attended concerts at that age so that she would have thought of him as intelligent. He asks her if she liked the photos and if she would like to see Gopher Prairie. She tells him that if she did she would retain the right to criticize it. She admits that she must have been tiresome to live with and likes the way he grins when she says that. Kennicott feels thrilled to see the old Negro coachman, the admirals, the building to which his income tax went and the place where Lincoln died. Carol takes him to the green cottages and the Georgian houses. He admits that they looked very pretty. At dinner he tells her that she could plan the house, leaving the furnace and the garage to him if she liked to go back. He tells her that he would not ask her to love him or go back with him. He wants her to return only if she really wanted to return. He tells her that he loved her as much as he loved her before. He did not go to the lake cottage because he could not bear to be there without her. He also tells her how he waits at the porch hoping that she would come back and how many times he fell asleep there. He tries to confess about Maud but she does not want him to confess anything. She tells Kennicott that she does not know, what to think. | 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 is happy to return home. She is given a warm welcome. Juanita accepts her as a friend, while Vida cautiously watches her for her old ideas. At the mill, Champ Perry tells her that he missed her very much. She feels happy to have been missed. She is happy to see the friendly Guy Pollock. She is even ready to give up her separate room. But Kennicott tells her that he understands her need for privacy and that he too would like to be by himself sometimes in his own room. Carol finds that her friends discuss the same topics that they were happy to discuss two years back. The new school building looks cheerful. Carol relieves the attendant at the rest room for one hour every day. She talks to the farmer's wives and soothes their babies. She even starts wearing her eyeglasses on the streets. The men of Gopher Prairie discuss Carol in the barber's shop. Sam points out that they need a smart woman like her to fix up the town. Dr. Westlake says that though she knows lots about books, her ideas of political economy are not sound. He hopes that she would not try to tell them how to run the town. Nat Hicks adds that she was very friendly with Erik Valborg and that he would miss him. Sam Clark tells him that they never thought about making love but only discussed books. After analyzing every aspect of her personality they decide to let her live. Carol is surprised to find that Maud resents her return. She asks Carol to tell them about the officers she met at Washington. They all look at her eagerly. Carol pats down a yarn and tells them that she would tell them about the officers some other time. She understands that Aunt Bessie interferes only because she needs her love. She is able to tolerate Mrs. Bogart's declaration that they need to prohibit cigarettes. She feels hurt that nobody asked her for her opinions about Washington. Carol's second baby is a girl. She is unable to decide if her daughter would be a feminist or marry a scientist. They have an argument about Hugh's discipline. Kennicott claims that he monopolized the conversation. Carol argues that Hugh had his own ideas and insists that they should listen to him. She goes for a ride with the Clarks and willingly sits at the back with Mrs. Clark. Kennicott gives her a light gun and she learns to shoot. Mrs. Clark suggests going to a movie and Carol agrees. Carol feels upset when her idea of a community day is highjacked by Mr. Bert Tybee-the mayor. He wants to invite a politician to address the meeting. She complains to Kennicott that Vida agreed without protest. Kennicott sympathizes with her and wonders at her energy to fuss about such things. Carol tells him that she has not even started anything but her daughter would blow up their smugness. She is certain that her daughter would see many changes. She tells Kennicott with satisfaction that she had won her war by keeping up the fight and by keeping her faith. He agrees with her and wonders if the maid kept the screwdriver back in its place. | 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.
| Carol Milford, a student at Blodgett College in Minneapolis, walks to a hill overlooking the Mississippi River. The narrator uses the opportunity to observe that the spirit of rebellious youth locked inside this girl is all that remains of the pioneers that once ventured across the prairie. Blodgett College is small and conservative but Carol excelled and was driven to join progressive societies, play sports and participate in dances. She is pretty with dark hair, flashing eyes and conspicuously slim compared to her stocky classmates. Though she tried her hand at everything from music to writing she was forced to admit that she had no innate talent for anything in particular. As graduation loomed she anticipated earning her living. Her parents were dead, her father's inheritance was spent and her only relative was a dull sister married to an optician in St. Paul. A course in Sociology with a handsome professor convinces her to become a reformer. On a class trip to a stockyard one of her classmates, Steward Snyder, hints that she would make him a good wife because her natural inclination toward sympathy would bolster his law career. Instead, Carol resolves to find a little prairie town and improve it with culture and beauty. Carol's father was from New England and she had enjoyed a joyous and whimsical childhood in Mankato near the Minnesota River - an area that resembled a New England village. Her father let her read whatever she wished. Her mother died when she was nine. Her father moved the family to Minneapolis where he died two years later. Carol, raised by her older sister, wanted to be different from the people she observed hustling through life. Though she is invigorated by the thought of reforming a small town she believes that like many of her classmates she will need to earn her living by teaching. An English professor, however, advises her to study library-work. At the final soiree of the year, Steward Snyder pleads with Carol to marry him and become the perfect housewife. She protests that she needs bigger things in life. She spends a year in Chicago studying library work. While in the big city she brushes up against the bohemian lifestyle that both thrills and discomfits her. She obtains a job with the public library of St. Paul where she is not unhappy but not stimulated. During the three years that Carol works at the library many suitors try but fail to capture her attention until 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 meets Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, a solid man in his mid-thirties, at an informal dinner party given by a friend of her sister's. He admits that though he studied in the Twin Cities and has visited New York he prefers life in a small town where he can hold some sway and know the people. He encourages her to express herself and asks about her life. Before they part he asks permission to see her again and she assents. During their courtship, Carol finds his boyishness attractive. On a trip to Mendota, the old mansion of General Sibley, they discover their common American past and vow to make the country everything past generations had dreamed. He extols the values of Gopher Prairie and its residents and beseeches her to come to the town and give it some culture. We're ready for you to boss us," he states. He pulls her close and proclaims his love for her. He shows her some photographs of Gopher Prairie - a lucid lake that impresses her and another of a poor farmer's wife holding a baby. He embraces her | 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.
| Carol and Will Kennicott marry and, after a honeymoon camping in the mountains of Colorado, take a train to Gopher Prairie. On the way Carol notices the tired and uninspired people - farm families, salesmen, workmen - who ride in the unfurnished cars. She despairs that these people are peasants with no inclination toward culture or beauty; Will counters that the advances of the age - the auto, the railway, the cinema - are bringing the country together. Carol wonders if the prairie will always be a land of uncouth pioneers but, looking at the landscape, she decides that there is hope. Carol becomes apprehensive as the train draws near her new home. She reminds herself that Will is a good man and Gopher Prairie, with a population of three thousand, must be better than the smaller towns they've passed. When the town comes into view, however, she realizes that it is merely a larger version - low wooden houses, a red grain elevator and some church spires are the only things that separate it from the vast prairie. She is seized by a sudden urge to flee. A large group of Will's friends are at the station to meet them and overwhelm Carol with their clamor. One of the men, Sam Clark the hardware dealer, gives them a ride home. As they drive Carol looks at the ugly little town and Will, catching her thoughts, assures her that life is free in Gopher Prairie is free and the people are wonderful. She thanks him for understanding. The house is simple and sad and crudely furnished. Neither one of them remembers that he intended to carry her over the threshold. She resolves to improve the house and takes comfort in her husband's strength and confidence | 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 soon departs to check on his office and Carol is disappointed at the speed with which he reenters the world of men's affairs. Overcome by the dismal house, Carol goes to the bedroom window hoping for a picturesque view. Instead she sees the clapboard side of a church and a broken Ford delivery wagon. Feeling mildly insane she flees the house. As she walks, she wonders which of the ugly houses will mean something to her in six months and she ponders over a grocer's poor display of pumpkins. Parenthetically the narrator tells us that the grocer, Mr. Frederick F. Ludelmeyer, observes her, knows who she is, likes her legs but thinks her suit is too plain. It takes Carol only thirty-two minutes to see the whole town; the dearth of greenery and the town's exposure to the prairie saddens her. She sees Dyer's Drug Store, her husband's second story office, The Rosebud Movie Palace, Howland & Gould's Grocery, Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market, a saloon, a tobacco shop, The Bon Ton Store Haydock & Simmons', Axel Egge's General Store, Sam Clarke's Hardware Store, and other shops that similarly fail to impress her. She notices that the two auto garages are the busiest places in town. Depressed by the shabby, haphazard town she quickly returns home where she tells her husband that she finds the town interesting. A young farm girl named Bea Sorenson arrives in Gopher Prairie on the same train as Carol. She is looking for work as a maid. After visiting her cousin - who tells her that she will never earn six dollars a week unless Dr. Kennicott's new bride is willing to pay it - Bea walks around the town and finds everything exciting and beautiful. She decides to stay no matter what wages she earns. At a welcome party is held at the large house of Sam Clark and his wife Carol fears the group's scrutiny but Sam, boisterous and affable, takes her under his wing. Will introduces her to the group - Harry and Juanita Haydock, Dave Dyer, Jack Elder, Luke Dawson, Nat Hicks, Chet Dashaway and their wives. Will also makes it a point to mention that the president of Velvet Motor Company in New England, Percy Bresnahan, is from Gopher Prairie. During her conversations with the group Carol claims that she will like the town very much. Several people remind her that Percy Bresnahan grew up there. Juanita Haydock invites her to join the Jolly Seventeen, a ladies bridge group, and is surprised to learn that Carol has never played bridge. Carol tries to be witty and shocking and succeeds in winning over most of the group. Soon, however, dullness settles over the party that Carol realizes in the norm in Gopher Prairie. Petty gossip among the women and sports and cars among the men dominates the conversation until Sam Clark, feeling his duty as host, calls for some stunts. Everyone, it seems, can do something; recite a poem or singing a song but, as Carol soon learns, that's all they can do. Over the course of her first year in town she hears each person's stunt many times over. Soon the party divides into men and women and Carol, bored by the homemaking talk of the matrons, boldly joins the men. The ancient bank president, Ezra Stowbody, is holding forth on the problems with the Scandanavian immigrants. Carol finds the men's talk as boring as that of the women. Carol ventures to ask Stowbody about labor unions and receives a vitriolic opinion from all the men. Everyone leaves after the meal. On the way home Will cautions her against shocking topics and, noticing that she is hurt, tells her that she was well liked. When she asks if he cares that the group thinks her flighty he says no because she is his soul. He carries her over the threshold of the house | 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?"
| Early the next morning Will takes Carol on a prairie chicken hunt in order to show her the countryside. Instead of his beloved car they take a horse and buggy - so they can go out in the fields. As Carol watches her husband lovingly prepare his hunting equipment she realizes with pleasure that he has a keen and creative interest something. They drive far out into the prairie until the dog hits a scent at which point they abandon the buggy to tromp through the fields. After Kennicott bags two birds they continue to the Rustad farm where they are given milk. After they leave Carol wonders aloud if the Scandinavian farmers aren't better off than the people who live in town who subsist on them. Will takes exception and points out that the farmers depend on the town but Carol counters that the farmers pay too much for the services they receive. Will is flabbergasted by Carol's contention that a farmer could run the state as well as a city man. The rest of the day is idyllic; in the beauty of the prairie Carol finds the dignity sorely lacking on Main Street. Without a maid, Carol and Will take their meals at Mrs. Gurrey's boarding house where Carol meets Raymond P. Wutherspoon, known as "Raymie. He explains that Gopher Prairie benefits from a great many cultured people. Carol gleans that Kennicott and the traveling salesman at the end of the table think little of the effeminate, simpering, artistically-minded Raymie, but she encourages him. A brief announcement in the Gopher Prairie Weekly Dauntless describes Carol's welcoming party as "one of the most charming affairs of the season". A few months into her marriage Carol is surprised to find how much she enjoys having her own home. She hires Bea Sorenson as a maid and the two quickly become friends. In town, she takes pleasure from her status as "Mrs. Doc Kennicott" and she feels welcome at every store. She enjoys the challenges of small town grocery shopping and interacting with the town children. She and Kennicott take drives in the country, go to movies and sit on the porch until the sun sets. Still, Carol wishes for a true friend. One day Miss Vida Sherwin, the school teacher, visits. She is past her bloom and plain looking but full of energy. Vida tells her that the town needs her and Carol is quickly swept up in her reforming spirit. When Carol suggests inviting an architect to lecture Vida suggests she start with something more approachable, like teaching Sunday school. Vida also mentions the Thanatopsis Club - the women's study club. Vida explains that the members, whatever their intellectual shortcomings, are earnest. They discuss a recent book and though they disagree, Carol is relieved to find someone with which to discuss such things. Carol suggests they have tea in lieu of coffee. Carol invites Vida to supper and at Vida's suggestion extends the invitation to Guy Pollock, the town's cultured lawyer, as well. Pollack is a slender man in his late thirties who, unlike the other men in town, does not annoy Carol. She wonders why he stays in Gopher Prairie. She suggests that they form a drama 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.
| In November, Carol has the parlor partition removed and refurnishes the large space with Oriental touches. Everyone in town takes an interest. During this time Carol makes the acquaintance of Mrs. Bogart, her backyard neighbor, who is the town's Baptist busybody and self-appointed arbiter of morality. Her fourteen year old son, Cyrus, is the toughest member of the toughest gang in town. Mrs. Bogart visits Carol and questions her on everything from her religious faith to the cost of her new furniture. Carol is relieved when she finally leaves. It was normal for husband's to give their wives money as they needed it but after Carol observes other wives asking their husband's for money she tells Kennicott that unless he remembers to give her money regularly she will starve rather than beg. From then on he remembers, most of the time, to give her money and Carol puts off insisting upon a regular allowance. Although she exercises thrift in managing the household she doesn't hesitate to spend money on fancy food from the city and decorations for her housewarming party - she wants to sweep Gopher Prairie out of its malaise. She is disheartened to see how readily her guests form into the stolid formation of a committee doing business. She resolves to stir them up. She gets the group to dance and, prodded by Vida, Carol insists that Raymie sing. As he sings, however, she realizes that he isn't any good. Next, she announces a game she learned in Chicago called "Sheeps and Wolves. To the group's disbelief she makes them all remove their shoes and search about the darkened house on the hands and knees. When the lights come back on the sight of the disheveled participants convinces Carol that she is making progress. She distributes Chinese robes and leads them through a mock musical recital with combs and drums followed by a meal of exotic Chinese dishes. She notices that Guy Pollock, the drab but cultured lawyer, is paying special attention to her. Eventually the group returns to its mundane chit-chat but Carol, exhausted by the effort of keeping the party going, allows them to follow their nature. After the group leaves, Kennicott congratulates her on the best party the town has seen and the Weekly Dauntless reports it a great success. The following week the Dashaways give a party where the usual stunts are performed. | 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.
| . Here we meet Carol, a high-minded daughter of the American mid-west. Her nave but genuine desire to improve the world first manifests itself during her years at Blodgett where she first develops a desultory passion for social reform. Her desire to makeover a prairie town not only foreshadows her eventual efforts in Gopher Prairie, they make them possible. During a period in which she is disillusioned by her work in the library Will Kennicott is able to successfully woo her where others have failed because he unwittingly touches upon the desire of her college days - to mold a town, to help people and to be someone who can effect change. Having tried Chicago and St. Paul, Carol believes that all these things are possible in a small town like Gopher Prairie. The capriciousness she displayed in college continues when Carol becomes a wife. On the train ride to advertisement Gopher Prairie she vacillates between foreboding and hope and once ensconced in her new home she rejects the town but shows every sign of wanting to be accepted as "Doc Kennicott's" bride. As a romantic Carol tries to convince herself that Gopher Prairie is a frontier town imbued with the spirit of the pioneers. As a naturalist, however, she recognizes that it is a "junk heap" sorely in need of refinement. These chapters establish the basic struggle between Carol, who can never be still and satisfied, and Gopher Prairie, which values stasis and satisfaction above all else | analysis |
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.
| Winter comes and the town digs in for the season. Miles Bjornstam, the jack-of-all-trades handyman, hires himself out to anyone who needed help. Most people in town either laugh at Miles or hate him; he is a true democrat who calls everyone by their first names. He is known as "The Red Swede" due to his suspected communist leanings. Although many of the inhabitants eschewed winter sports as "old fashioned" in the age of autos, Carol manages to organize a mid-November skating party but a bobsled expedition proves less successful. A skiing party also fails to inspire a follow-up. Still, she enjoys tramping through the countryside with Will on his hunting trips and she glories in the pristine beauty of the season. One night while Will is out on a house call and Bea is off she discovers that she has nothing really to do. It is taboo for a doctor's wife to have a job, but Carol is a woman with a working brain and nothing to do with it. She had three choices: children, reform the town, or become part of the town by joining a church and all the societies. She wants children someday but not yet, the reforms are on hold but she vows to renew her efforts and, as for becoming part of the town, she isn't sure if the people really like her. She resolves to attend a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen - the female social center of Gopher Prairie - bridge once a week, supper and bridge with husbands once a month, a dance twice a year. She attends a bridge game at Juanita Haydock's but, unable to play the game, she is marginalized. When she proffers her opinion that the Swede farmers are hard working and brave people the icy derision of the group is immediate. They are shocked to learn that she pays Bea six-dollars a week. Carol meets the town librarian whom she realizes is more interested in preserving the books than lending them. At home she runs to the bedroom and weeps in terror of the matrons | 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 an interest in her husband's business, but when she questions him at dinner she finds him uncommunicative and uninspired by his cases. Several days later Vida Sherwin explains, with good intentions, that the town perceives Carol as patronizing and showy. Carol is deeply affected and offended by the realization and barely appreciates Vida's assertion that the town would react the same way to anyone new. That evening Carol cautiously questions her husband as to whether or not she is accepted and he suggests that she should temper her critiques. Also, after proclaiming that in a small town a person is free to do what they want suggests, he suggests that she concentrate her business on his clients | 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.
| In the days that follow Carol realizes that the town is watching her. She unconsciously alters her behavior to please them. She dresses more conservatively. The boys who linger outside the drug store, smoking cigarettes and catcalling girls, anger her more than anyone else. They play pool and shoot dice, eat too many sweets and hoot at the romantic parts of movies. They are loud and surly and they are aware of her. Cy Bogart, the worst of the lot, frightens her the most. One evening she hears him and a friend discussing her husband and realizes that Will chewed tobacco before he married. She also learns that the widow Bogart and Juanita Haydock dislike her. Most horrifying she hears the boys discussing her clothes and her body and Cy tells his friend that he once watched her arrange a picture through the window of her house. She flees to her home and closes the drapes. She resolves to forgive Will for having once been a tobacco chewer and is amused to notice that he chews on the end of his cigar. She briefly wonders if it was a mistake to marry him. After a brief but happy visit to Will's mother in Lac-qui-Mert, Carol is somewhat renewed and ready to face the denizens of Main Street. She wonders how they can all be so satisfied with the status-quo. Carol comes to increasingly rely upon Bea as a friend. Without disrupting the servant/employer relationship they become close and Bea's admiration for Carol is like that of a freshman for a junior. Carol socializes only minimally. When Kennicott leaves for three days to perform an operation Carol refuses to budge from her lonely house on the evening of the Jolly Seventeen. She decides to prepare a tea party in case someone visits. After the tea gets cold she lies upon the couch sobbing from loneliness. That evening she resolves to take up the aborted plan to reform Gopher Prairie, she muses that Guy Pollack might be less drab if a girl kissed him and wishes she could combine Pollack's artistic impulses with her husband's confidence. She decides to begin reading poetry to Will. The second day of Will's absence Carol takes a walk in the frigid weather. She hikes to a hillside and looks down on the lonely, snowbound town. She wishes there were whimsical lights and wise chatter. She starts home through the slum part of town known as "Swede Hollow" where Miles Bjornstam, who sits in front of his tarpaper shack smoking a pipe, hails her. He criticizes the Jolly Seventeen and explains that he is the town pariah because he is poor and doesn't envy the rich. She accepts his invitation to warm up inside his shack and she is flattered by his assumption that she can do whatever she wants. She stays an hour in his simple but cozy dwelling. He tells her how he recently turned down the rich banker Ezra Stowbody's order to saw some woo. Miles admits that he is foolish but he's proud of his independence. Renewed by Bjornstam's suggestion that she kick the town in the face, Carol returns home and plays Tschaikowsky loudly on the piano. Kennicott returns that night and the next day the townspeople are nice. Raymie sells her a dainty pair of patent leather slippers he had saved especially for her. Guy Pollack stops by that evening for a cribbage game. Carol is happy again. Several nights later she tries to read poetry to her husband but when she notices him suffering she relents and suggests they go to the movies where she laughs heartily and honestly with the rest of the crowd at the buffoonery on the screen. She learns bridge and returns to the Jolly Seventeen | 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?
| Carol attends a meeting of the Thanatopsis Society and is disappointed to find that the women, instead of exploring English poetry as promised, do nothing more than offer opinionated summaries of the poet's lives. Carol does her best not to be patronizing and, after offering some suggestions, is elected a member. At the meeting she realizes that Gopher Prairie has a City Hall and decides that that edifice will be the basis of her reform movement. The next day she examines the dilapidated City Hall and then goes to the small library where she flatters the librarian, Miss Villets, into showing her the magazines. She pores through the magazines for images of beautiful small towns. Her plan is to use the Thanatopsis society to reform the appearance of the town beginning with the City Hall. Carol enthusiastically presents her idea to Mrs. Leonared Warren the Congregational Church's minister's wife and influential member of the Thanatopsis Club. Mrs. Warren suggests that a new church building as a more worthy project. Two days later Carol presents the idea to the school superintendent's wife, Mrs. George Edwin Mott, who suggests that a new school building would be best. Carol admits that the town needs a new school building but Maud Dyer shoots down the idea in favor of her husband's scheme for an armory. One spring day Carol visits the poorly furnished room maintained by the Thanatopsis club for the wives of farmers to use while their husband's conduct business in town. She is horrified and her reforming zeal returns. At the next Thanatopsis meeting she approaches Mrs. Champ Perry who explains the hardships that she and her husband endured crossing the prairie. Mrs. Perry declares that the town is fine the way it is. Mrs. Lyman Cass, the wife of the flour-mill owner, observes that the town has no money for a new town hall and taxes are already too high. Spring brings rain and mud. Carol approaches the Dawsons, the richest people in town, and suggests that they put up the money for a new town hall. They are, of course, not interested. She meets Miles Bjornstam on the street and he agrees that the town needs improvements. He explains, however, that he doesn't want any of Dawson's money as a gift since it rightfully belongs to the workmen who have made him rich. At the next Thanatopsis meeting the group ridicules Carol's suggestion that the club should do something for the poor | 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.
| One pleasant day Carol walks into the countryside and encounters Miles Bjornstam cooking over a fire at a gipsy camp. Miles and his partner Pete are leaving for a summer of horse trading to the west and Miles humorously extends an invitation for her to join them. She says goodbye and returns to town. The summer arrives with stifling heat and Carol and Will escape to their newly purchased summer cottage by the lake. Carol swims and gossips with the ladies by day and in the evenings their husband's motor out from the town. Carol is happy that summer but in September the families return to the drab town. Carol develops an enthusiasm for the spirit of the pioneers and decides that if she can't push the town into the future perhaps she can resurrect some of its noble past. She calls on the two pioneers that she knows - Mr. and Mrs. Champ Perry. She is initially charmed but their opinionated proselytizing about society's problems wears thin. Miles Bjornstam returns from Montana. | 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.
| . These chapters alternatively chronicle Carol's failed attempts to change Gopher Prairie - whether trying to convince her husband to like poetry, erecting a new city hall, uplifting the women's study group or trying to convince the matrons to engage in winter sport - which backfire when Vida Sherwin exposes the town's disdain for her impulsiveness. Her subsequent attempt to adopt the personae of the Nice Married Woman backfires when she realizes that her views are at loggerheads with those of the town's matrons. Her attempt to retreat from the town leaves her feeling lonely. She interviews the Perry's hoping to reinvigorate her passion by discovering the town's past but finds their perspective as biased and petty as the rest of the town. Though Carol is unable to commit to the radicalism of Miles Bjornstam's socialism she recognizes in him a true, unbiased friendship. During this section the narrator lambasts the denizens of Gopher Prairie for the abhorrence of change as expressed through a thinly veiled cynicism of civic improvement, the working class and aesthetic improvement. advertisement Ironically, the town folk readily embrace technology such as the telephone and practically enshrine the automobile even as they eschew "old fashioned" pursuits like skiing and ice skating. During the course of these chapters Carol begins to feel isolated and recognizes the dreadful presence of death in the moral poverty of the small town. Here too are the her first allusions to escape, particularly when Miles Bjornstam facetiously invites her to travel with him that summer and she replies that one day she just might do it | analysis |
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.
| Time passes: Miles Bjornstam gets a job at the mill and marries Bea. Carol organizes their small wedding but none of the town's matriarchs attend or call on the new couple. An older woman named Oscarina replaces Bea and soon becomes a mother figure to Carol. Carol becomes a member of the library board and though she is surprised to find that the other members are well-read she soon discerns that they have no interest in making the library more vital; she placidly serves for two years. Kennicott makes some money on a land deal and hints that they can now afford to have a child. Carol hesitantly agrees, but they take no action. That summer at the cottage she dreams of exotic places. Living at the lake she finds that she misses the sound of the trains which are the town's link to the outside world. She dreams of the day when she can escape on a train. The Chautauqua comes to town and Carol is disappointed to find that instead of being a traveling University it is more of a vaudeville-styled entertainment spectacle. Only one of the many lecturers suggests that Gopher Prairie's appearance could use some improvement. That summer Gopher Prairie is briefly excited by news of war in Europe but the distant events fail to hold the town's attention. Carol visits Bea and Miles and finds that they are happy though the town treats them as pariahs. That autumn Carol realizes she is 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 dislikes being pregnant and when the baby is born she initially hates it. The next day, however, she finds that she loves it with all her heart. It is a boy and they name him Hugh. For two years Carol devotes herself entirely to being a mother. During the later stages of her pregnancy, Will's relatives - Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie - sold their creamery in North Dakota and came to Gopher Prairie for a visit of indeterminate length. They moved into the Kennicott house, were fussy, intrusive and mocking but they were family and Carol had to bear them. Eventually they purchased a grocery store in Gopher Prairie and moved into their own house but thereafter they visit often and without warning. The Jolly Seventeen's gossip proves to be a viable outlet for Carol's frustrations. Kennicott organizes a child-welfare week and for a brief period everyone in town feels community spirit and pride. This good feeling ends, however, when Miles and Bea's son Olaf wins the prize for healthiest baby. Carol takes Hugh to play with Olaf often even though the town looks down upon Miles and his former servant girl wife. One day, two years after Hugh's birth, Vida Sherwin resigns from the school and gets married | 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."
| At the age of thirty-six, Vida Sherwin had given up ever being married. Will Kennicott had flirted with her before he met Carol, but she had suspected his motives and dissuaded him, though she secretly hoped that he would renew his advances. After Will married Carol, Vida loved her as a sister and hated her as a rival. She found felt that Carol took Will for granted. When Vida moves into the boarding house she and Raymie Wutherspoon develop a close friendship that develops into a halting and unspoken romance. Vida encourages Raymie to stand up for himself and to demand more responsibility and respect from Harry Haydock, his manager at the Bon Ton. They are married in June. Afterward, Vida bullies Harry Haydock who makes Ray a partner. Vida is secretly upset when she sees Ray and Will together and suspects that people suppose Will superior to her husband. | 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."
| . This middle trio of chapters centers around Carol's pregnancy and the birth of Hugh who arrives at the exact middle of the novel in chapter 20. Through the activities of motherhood Carol persists in her attempts to improve Gopher Prairie but she is ready to concede to defeat much more readily than before. advertisement Instead, she begins to daydream of escape, exemplified by her long afternoons at the lake, her desire to one day take a train away from the town and her conviction that change, even if it meant simply moving to another Main Street in another small town, would be an improvement. These chapters are also noteworthy in that they provide a glimpse of Vida Sherwin's psyche and sexual frustrations which explain her critical yet loving attitude toward Carol. With a war raging in Europe and a new baby at home, Carol fights to maintain her sense of self | analysis |
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's reading increases her world-view and she marvels at the simple contentment of the people in small towns like Gopher Prairie where dullness is made God. Vida counters that Carol's standards are too high. Vida brags that a new school building is in the works and though it took a long time and Carol didn't help at all she, Vida, persevered. Carol is glad for Vida and somewhat ashamed but wonders whether they will inculcate the same old dullness in the new building. Carol submits to Vida's guidance and takes on more civic responsibilities. Carol feels, however, that she must do something more with her life when she considers that she is growing older | 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.
| America enters the Great War, and Vida sends Raymie to officers' training school. He graduates a lieutenant and is among the first troops sent abroad. Other people from Gopher Prairie join the Army, most of them the sons of the poor farming families. Cy Bogart talks a great deal about joining the Army but never does. In June, Percy Bresnahan, the millionaire president of the Velvet Car Company in Boston and Gopher Prairie's most famous son, returns for a fishing trip. He greets Will warmly and insists on seeing Hugh. Carol decides that he is friendly but she feels threatened by his forward manner. A small group, including Carol and Will, take Bresnahan fishing and Carol is alternatively thrilled and disgusted by the man's worldliness and bold familiarity. Soon afterward Bresnahan convinces Carol to take a ride with him. He admits that she has him figured out but tells her that he has her figured out as well. He theorizes that all her posture of reform is simply her identity - her need to be different. She accuses him of proliferating small town dullness by defending it to his peers. Unlike the other men of Gopher Prairie, he counters her arguments with substantive rhetoric rather than dismissing what she says out of hand. He flirts with her and tells her she is pretty. After he leaves she begins to examine her life more closely | 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.
| Carol begins to notices her husband's slovenliness and lack of imagination. She contrasts his awkward but endearing attempts to refine himself in the early days of their marriage fwith his present state of disregard. One hot evening he has his friends over to play poker. Afterward she and Will quarrel and go to bed without making up. The next day Carol begins turning the spare room into her own bedroom. Kennicott is uneasy when he realizes she really means to have a room of her own. Aunt Bessie criticizes the plan but Mrs. Dr. Westlake encourages her and Carol confides her opinion of Aunt Bessie, Vida Sherwin and Raymie, the Library Board, and several other troubling subjects to the old woman before she leaves. Oscarina resigns and bereft of domestic help Carol must do the housework which makes her tired and sore; she feels independent and somewhat surly. Kennicott hints that they should start thinking about building a new house and Carol is initially excited - she dreams of a stone rose cottage - but she soon realizes that her husband wants a standard square house. She stops mentioning the project and he soon stops talking about it as well. Carol had long dreamed of a trip to the East and though Will was unable to take her he recognized that his wife needed an outing that summer so he suggested they go to the town of Joralemon, where the United and Fraternal Order of Beavers were holding a street fair. He also had the idea of visiting a colleague, Dr. Calibree, while there. Carol, desperate for any diversion, warms to the plan. Her enthusiasm soon wanes, however, when she discovers that Dr. Calibree and his wife are as boring as the inhabitants of Gopher Prairie and that Joralemon is a carbon copy of her own miserable town. That night she tells her husband that she thinks Jorelemon is an "ash heap | 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."
| Alone in his office, Will broods over his wife's expectations. Sometimes he wishes he could be with a more sympathetic woman. He muses that Carol would be shocked to learn how many married men in Gopher Prairie are able to clandestinely see other women. Maud Dyer comes to the office and suggestively discusses her back pain. Will tells her that her troubles are imaginary and that she should get away from her penny-pinching husband, Dave, for awhile. She asks Will to come by her house to keep her company that evening while Dave is out working late. After some equivocation he agrees to visit but regrets his promise as soon as she leaves. That afternoon he wrestles with the idea. At home he watches his wife reading a story to his son. That evening Nat Hicks, the tailor, comes by the house and invites Will to join him and Harry Haydock and some willing young ladies, including Miss Swiftwaite, out for a drive and drink later that night. Kennicott demurs. Later he invites Carol to sit on the porch with him but she doesn't respond to his cheerfulness or his suggestions, romantic and otherwise, of things they could do that evening. She goes to bed and, claiming a house call, he goes to see Maude Dyer. The next day Aunt Bessie and Mrs. Bogart call on Carol to complain about Miss Swiftwaite and the rumored parties at her house. When Mrs. Bogart intimates that not even Will is immune to carnal temptations, Carol explodes in indignation and anger and tells the surprised ladies that she knows every thought in her husband's head. She explains that her husband thinks only of mundane matters | 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 and Hugh spend many happy hours at the shack of Bea, Miles and Olaf Bjornstam. Hugh is thoroughly enchanted with the large Swede. Carol notes that Olaf is a patient, noble and beautiful child. Miles has established a thriving creamery on his land but he confides to Carol that he will never overcome his bad reputation in town. One day Carol finds both Olaf and Bea sick. She immediately sends for Will who diagnoses typhoid. As Carol nurses them she watches her friends slowly lose strength. After lingering in pain and illness for several weeks both Bea and Olaf die. Nobody attends their funeral | 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.
| Miles Bjornstam sells his dairy and leaves town to go to Alberta a broken man. The town blames him for his wife and child's death and bids him good riddance. Carol is depressed and, after talking to old Mrs. Flickerbaugh, who has always hated the town, she is afraid she will simply become a bitter old woman in Gopher Prairie. | 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.
| . During this section, Carol realizes that though she loves her child she is completely disengaged from her husband. During this portion of the novel Carol, now thirty years old, scrutinizes her appearance in the mirror and laments her fading youth. Perce Bresnahan, whom she dislikes, makes her feel attractive something her husband no longer provides. Whereas Will finds illicit solace in the arms of Maude Dyer, Carol takes comfort, disapproved of by the town, at Miles and Bea Bjornstam's shack. Carol's insistence that their sons should play together despite the censure of the town is in keeping with her rebellious nature but the tinge of embarrassment she suffers at their friendship indicates the degree advertisement to which she has become assimilated to the life of Gopher Prairie. She begins to form a conviction, however, that the American dream has become mired in the pursuit of wealth and status; she longs for a noble, artistic pursuits which she realizes are anathema to the land speculation and conformity of Main Street. As she famously quips of small town life: "It is dullness made God. Before the section ends Carol suggestively jokes to an unsympathetic Kennicott that one day she and her baby might just go East without him | analysis |
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 overhears the Jolly Seventeen talking about a new young man working at Nat Hick's tailor shop. The boys in town call him "Elizabeth" because he dresses in fine clothes and puts on airs though he is only a Swedish farmer's son. Carol first sees the boy, whose real name is Erik Valborg, on a rare visit to church and she is immediately taken with him. Carol associates his refined manner and Grecian good looks with the soul of a poet. She discovers that Erik learned his trade in Minneapolis. She muses that she is thirty and the boy probably twenty-five. Soon afterward she meets Fern Mullins, a young girl fresh out of college who has moved to Gopher Prairie to teach school. Fern is boarding at the widow Bogart's and she and Carol become fast friends. Fern confides that she misses the city life, especially dancing. When Carol finally meets Erik Valborg it turns out that he has heard of her and asks if they could start another dramatic club. She invites Ferd and Erik to the house to discuss a new play production. That evening Kennicott, amused and slightly offended that a mere work boy would be in his home, listens as Carol encourages him to pursue his dreams. Erik, has read much but learned little, and mispronounces every tenth word | 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."
| While on a walk with Hugh by the railroad tracks Carol encounters Erik and they sit down to talk. He tells her of his unstructured but vigilant reading and is happy when she encourages him to pursue his dream to study drawing. He wants to create something beautiful and, reminded of herself, Carol tells him that she understands. He boldly asks her why she isn't happy with her husband. She is shocked by his effrontery. He promises to behave. On the way into town Carol notices that the matrons are staring as she walks with Erik. Erik organizes a tennis tournament to promote a new tennis association on the abandoned court just outside of town. Carol agrees to help and Harry Haydock agrees to be president of the association if Erik will put it all together. On the day of the match, however, Carol, Erik and a few other unpopular members of the town are stood up when the Haydocks hold their own tournament at their lake cottage. When Carol next sees the Haydocks she insists that they apologize to Erik and Juanita senses Carol's affection for the young man. Later that week, Carol visits Erik in the tailor shop where he shows her a rude sketch of an original dress design. On the way home she is surprised to find that Erik has evoked memories of her father, something Will has never inspired. In the following weeks she fantasizes about a life lived with a young artist whom she admits to herself resembles Erik. Desperate for new clothes, Carol visits the controversial milliner Mrs. Swiftwaite and is disappointed to find that the notorious woman is merely a 40 something divorc with the bad taste to pretend to be thirty. Carol hurries home and, evaluating herself in the mirror, and agonizes over her spinsterish, unstylish appearance. She realizes that she used to be the fashionable city girl but now she merely imitates them | 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----"
| One day in September, Fern, Erik, Cy Bogart, Carol and the Dyers go for a picnic by the lake. Carol is jealous when she observes Maud Dyer flirting with Erik. When Erik asks Carol to go for a boat ride she accepts to spite Maude. Erik professes his affection for her; she doesn't yield to his advances nor does she resist. They return very late to the rest of the group. The next day Mrs. Bogart arrives and second-handedly questions Carol about Erik and Carol knows that the nosy woman's suspicions have been aroused. At a church dinner the following week Carol is relieved to see that Maud Dyer talks to Will instead of Erik and then she is discomfited to see Mrs. Bogart watching her watch Erik. Carol begins to confuse wanting youth with wanting Erik. She reasons that Main Street's dullness has driven her to desire an escape. Erik tells her that Myrtle Cass' father has offered him a position at the flour mill. Carol asserts that Myrtle Cass is trying to snare him. Erik claims to be interested in Carol, not Myrtle Cass. Carol begins to doubt her marriage | 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.
| One night while Will is on a house-call, Erik comes to see Carol. She lets him kiss her on her eyelid and then realizes that a romance with him is not possible. He leaves and Carol notices Mrs. Westlake watching from her home across the street. The next day Kennicott tells her that Ma Westlake has been spreading confidences that Carol told her. Vida visits and tries to convice her to desist in her attentions to Erik by confessing her own feelings, now long past, for Carol's husband. Carol realizes that that tragedy of her own life is that she will never have real tragedy, only Main Street melodrama. She feels guilty and begins to believe that all the men in town suspect her of being morally loose. Only Fern remains her devoted friend | 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.
| One morning Carol hears an argument coming from the Bogart home. Soon Fern emerges, downcast and carrying a suitcase. The widow Bogart follows shouting denunciations. That evening Mrs. Bogart arrives at the Kennicott's and after a great deal of self-righteous pity blurts out the story: Fern and Cy had gone to a barn dance and when they returned Cyrus was drunk. When Mrs. Bogart accused the girl of trying to corrupt her son Fern replied: "What purpose could I have in wanting the filthy pup to get drunk. Fern also asserted that Cy had stolen a bottle of whiskey from a farmer's coat pocket. This had enraged Mrs. Bogart who threw the girl out of the house after she admitted that Cy had forced her to have a drink of the whiskey. Mrs. Bogart hinted that nobody could account for Fern's behavior on the ride home. Furthermore, Mrs. Bogart had gone to all the members of the school board to complain. Carol rushes to see Fern who has fled to the only hotel, the Minniemashie House, and finds the girl distraught. She pours out her story - that she was having a great time at the dance, Cy got drunk on stolen liquor and then she had to drive home and fight him off the whole way. When they returned Mrs. Bogart said nasty things to her while Cy was sick and then he accused her of getting him drunk on purpose. Carol goes to the various members of the school board to plead Fern's case. They believe her and have no illusions about Cy's character but they claim that the stain of the gossip won't wash out. Carol tells them that the girl will be ruined if she is summarily dismissed. The next day Carol overhears inflated gossip about Fern around town and wonders when she will suffer the same fate for her burgeoning relationship with Erik. The next day the board decides to accept Fern's resignation without making any formal charges. Carol walks the trembling girl to the train and is disgusted to observe Cy Bogart bragging to some men on the street. A week later she receives a letter from Fern: Her parents have rejected her and she can't find another job. She thanks Carol for her kindness | 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.
| A month later Erik comes Carol's house one night when Will is out and demands that she accompany him on a walk in the country. She readily assents. As they walk they hold hands. He recites two lines of a poem he has written for her and she is flattered by what she knows to be his bad verse. A vehicle approaches and stops. From the glare of the lights Carol hears her husband's annoyed voice call to her. He offers them a ride back into town. At home, Kennicott lectures and commands her to quit carrying on with Valborg. He asserts that though she is too romantically frigid to have an affair the town gossips will nevertheless destroy her just as they did Fern Mullins. When Carol defends Erik, Kennicott asserts that the boy will never amount to anything more than a tailor. She succumbs and comes to believe that she needs her husband more than anything. She promises to give up Erik. The next day he sends a note to say he's taking the train to Minneapolis and then to bigger cities. That evening she and Will are lovers for the first time in a long time. One week later, Erik's father knocks on the door and angrily accuses Carol of ruining his son. She faints and when Will arrives home she is supine on the couch; she begs him to take her on a trip to California. He agrees. Before they leave many of the women in town make allusions to Erik in Carol's presence. At a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen she steers the topic away from Erik by asking about Raymie. Vida informs the group that he was gassed in the trenches, has recovered and been promoted to major. Carol and Will leave Hugh with Aunt Bessie and leave on a train for California. | 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.
| . These chapters chronicle Carol's attraction and subsequent romantically tinged relationship with Erik Valborg. Carol is at her most hypocritical during this portion of the novel - she recognizes that Erik is really just a farm boy whose reading and good looks have given him the impression of a poet but she defends him to Will and advertisement believes that she can teach him to become something more. Thus, she postures herself as his teacher knowing all the while that he has no desire to be treated like a school boy. Carol's relationship with Erik is enhanced by the sad story of Fern Mullins and her downfall as a result of going to a dance with Cy Bogart. Fern is in fact Cy's teacher just as Carol desires to be Erik's teacher. When the town turns on Fern for allowing herself to be compromised by an unchaperoned trip with her student Carol realizes that it is herself the town is judging | analysis |
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?"
| Carol and Will travel for three and a half months. Carol manages to escape the Gopher Prairie malaise but eventually she longs for her son and they return. They leave Monterrey California on a beautiful sunny day and arrive in Gopher Prairie during a sleet storm. While they wait for a cab at the Haydock's, Juanita relates the latest gossip which is not very different from the gossip extant at their departure. When their cab comically wrecks against a tree, they elect to walk home. Kennicott observes all the small improvements about the town but Carol sees only its brute ugliness. She is happy to see Hugh but quickly despairs when her old dissatisfaction returns. Soon afterward Old Mrs. Perry dies of illness and Carol observes how the town turns its back on poor old Champ Perry who loses his job without a pension. She convinces Lyman Cass to give him an easy job as a night watchman. Major Raymond Wutherspoon returns from the war and for a time the town moons over him. Many people, including Will Kennicott, make a good deal of money on the rising wheat prices and land speculation and one speculator, James Blausser convinces the town to engage in a booster campaign. Everyone in town loves Honest Jim but Carol hates his obvious, crude mannerisms. At Jim's behest the town gears up to attract industry and government and puts in a White Way. Carol is disgusted by the town's new egomania. Kennicott is annoyed and angry that Carol does not share his enthusiasm for the boosting. One night an argument between Carol and Will erupts and Carol tells her husband that she is leaving until she can discover her work - that which will satisfy her; she doesn't know how long she will be gone and she intends to take Hugh. Kennicott protests that he needs her and she retorts: "You have a right to me if you can keep me. Can you. He has no reply. After a month of arguing she departs with Hugh for Washington, D. C. to find war-work. When she leaves on the train she feels lonely and empty but free | 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.
| In Washington she finds office work at the Bureau of War Risk Management. She discovers that business women have freedom without losing domesticity and she loves the city's element of mystery. Through it all, however, she recognizes a streak of Main Street in the transplanted people from town's like Gopher Prairie who cleave together in the cities and shut out anything that does not remind them of home. She becomes friendly with a group of suffragettes. Though she never officially joins the group they adopt her and take her on their picnics and social gatherings. Most of her salary goes to a nurse for Hugh but she is happy in her small flat that she shares with other working girls whose open manners pleasantly shock her and knowledgeable conversation makes her wish to be younger. From these girls she learns of towns all over the country much worse than Gopher Prairie. Washington imbues Carol with poise and a comfortably impersonal attitude that allows her to rise above the pettiness of her former state of mind. She learns that laughter, not disgust or anger, is the best defense | 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.
| A year passes. She sees the Haydocks in town on business and is genuinely glad to see friends from Gopher Prairie, though she is equally glad to meet someone at the flat just in from Finland that night. Later, while speaking with a captain, she sees Percy Bresnahan. In the captain's opinion, Bresnahan is a nice enough fellow but a hopeless bother. She sees a rather bad motion-picture and is startled to see Erik Valborg in a small and poorly acted part. After thirteen months Will comes for a visit that is both awkward and a relief. While sightseeing and going to restaurants and talking of inconsequential matters they cautiously negotiate their relationship. Carol finds that she is not ready to return to Gopher Prairie. He confesses that he misses her terribly but doesn't expect her to return until she is ready of her own accord. He begins to confess his adultery but she stops him and tells him to forget it. He asks her to take two weeks off of work to go to Charleston and Savannah with him - not a second honeymoon, he insists, but rather a second wooing. In Charleston she thinks she might return to him but he tells her to wait until she is ready. She finds a new respect for her husband and considers that his life, like hers, is something of a story. Sometime after Will returns to Gopher Prairie, Carol dines with a senior member of the suffragette movement. She asks the older woman's advice on whether she should return to her husband and the small town. The woman tells her that if she returns she should always question things and never expect change to come quickly. The woman tells her to think in terms of thousands of years. Carol believes she is ready to face Main Street. She realizes that she no longer hates the town - rather, she sympathizes with it and understands it and is ready to tolerate it. After five more precious months in Washington she returns to Gopher Prairie pregnant with her second child | 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?"
| Comforted by Gopher Prairie's familiarity Carol is neither glad nor sorry to be back. It is simply her task, like going to work, to live there. She resolves to help Vida Sherwin and takes a shift at the rest room for the farmer's wives. She begins to wear spectacles in public. In general, the town accepts her and she accepts the town. In August she gives birth to a daughter. She realizes, with some satisfaction, that though she hasn't always fought the good fight she's maintained her faith despite Main Street. | 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 takes two important trips during this final section. The first trip is set in motion in order to get away from Gopher Prairie and the potential scandal, such as that which ruined Fern Mullins, resulting from her relationship with Erik. As the Kennicott's travel through the American West, Lewis cynically observes that the dynamic of their relationship has not changed: Carol is caught up in the beauty and wonderment of their surrounding and except for her son would be perfectly happy never seeing Gopher Prairie again. Will, on the other hand, spends most the trip seeking out people from other small towns and comparing notes. When he does engage in their surroundings it is only to itemize the dimensions of a mission or take stock of their progress. Nothing epitomizes the separation between the two more than their reaction to Gopher Prairie upon their advertisement return. Will sees improvements and Carol sees only a sty. That this alienation is visible only to Carol only serves to convince her that she must escape Gopher Prairie to "discover her work". The time that she and Hugh spend in Washington, D. C. allows her the opportunity to gain what Lewis refers to as "poise" but what is really the ability to understand that her role in Gopher Prairie is not to overcome it but to exist as a member and thusly effect change from within. At the conclusion of her story, Carol is not content but she is not unhappy | analysis |
Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons
it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will
assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns,
great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on
a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as
it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of
the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is
prefixed to the head of this chapter.
For a long time after it was ushered into this world of sorrow and
trouble, by the parish surgeon, it remained a matter of considerable
doubt whether the child would survive to bear any name at all; in which
case it is somewhat more than probable that these memoirs would never
have appeared; or, if they had, that being comprised within a couple of
pages, they would have possessed the inestimable merit of being the
most concise and faithful specimen of biography, extant in the
literature of any age or country.
Although I am not disposed to maintain that the being born in a
workhouse, is in itself the most fortunate and enviable circumstance
that can possibly befall a human being, I do mean to say that in this
particular instance, it was the best thing for Oliver Twist that could
by possibility have occurred. The fact is, that there was considerable
difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of
respiration,--a troublesome practice, but one which custom has rendered
necessary to our easy existence; and for some time he lay gasping on a
little flock mattress, rather unequally poised between this world and
the next: the balance being decidedly in favour of the latter. Now,
if, during this brief period, Oliver had been surrounded by careful
grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of
profound wisdom, he would most inevitably and indubitably have been
killed in no time. There being nobody by, however, but a pauper old
woman, who was rendered rather misty by an unwonted allowance of beer;
and a parish surgeon who did such matters by contract; Oliver and
Nature fought out the point between them. The result was, that, after
a few struggles, Oliver breathed, sneezed, and proceeded to advertise
to the inmates of the workhouse the fact of a new burden having been
imposed upon the parish, by setting up as loud a cry as could
reasonably have been expected from a male infant who had not been
possessed of that very useful appendage, a voice, for a much longer
space of time than three minutes and a quarter.
As Oliver gave this first proof of the free and proper action of his
lungs, the patchwork coverlet which was carelessly flung over the iron
bedstead, rustled; the pale face of a young woman was raised feebly
from the pillow; and a faint voice imperfectly articulated the words,
'Let me see the child, and die.'
The surgeon had been sitting with his face turned towards the fire:
giving the palms of his hands a warm and a rub alternately. As the
young woman spoke, he rose, and advancing to the bed's head, said, with
more kindness than might have been expected of him:
'Oh, you must not talk about dying yet.'
'Lor bless her dear heart, no!' interposed the nurse, hastily
depositing in her pocket a green glass bottle, the contents of which
she had been tasting in a corner with evident satisfaction.
'Lor bless her dear heart, when she has lived as long as I have, sir,
and had thirteen children of her own, and all on 'em dead except two,
and them in the wurkus with me, she'll know better than to take on in
that way, bless her dear heart! Think what it is to be a mother,
there's a dear young lamb do.'
Apparently this consolatory perspective of a mother's prospects failed
in producing its due effect. The patient shook her head, and stretched
out her hand towards the child.
The surgeon deposited it in her arms. She imprinted her cold white
lips passionately on its forehead; passed her hands over her face;
gazed wildly round; shuddered; fell back--and died. They chafed her
breast, hands, and temples; but the blood had stopped forever. They
talked of hope and comfort. They had been strangers too long.
'It's all over, Mrs. Thingummy!' said the surgeon at last.
'Ah, poor dear, so it is!' said the nurse, picking up the cork of the
green bottle, which had fallen out on the pillow, as she stooped to
take up the child. 'Poor dear!'
'You needn't mind sending up to me, if the child cries, nurse,' said
the surgeon, putting on his gloves with great deliberation. 'It's very
likely it _will_ be troublesome. Give it a little gruel if it is.' He
put on his hat, and, pausing by the bed-side on his way to the door,
added, 'She was a good-looking girl, too; where did she come from?'
'She was brought here last night,' replied the old woman, 'by the
overseer's order. She was found lying in the street. She had walked
some distance, for her shoes were worn to pieces; but where she came
from, or where she was going to, nobody knows.'
The surgeon leaned over the body, and raised the left hand. 'The old
story,' he said, shaking his head: 'no wedding-ring, I see. Ah!
Good-night!'
The medical gentleman walked away to dinner; and the nurse, having once
more applied herself to the green bottle, sat down on a low chair
before the fire, and proceeded to dress the infant.
What an excellent example of the power of dress, young Oliver Twist
was! Wrapped in the blanket which had hitherto formed his only
covering, he might have been the child of a nobleman or a beggar; it
would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have assigned him
his proper station in society. But now that he was enveloped in the
old calico robes which had grown yellow in the same service, he was
badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once--a parish
child--the orphan of a workhouse--the humble, half-starved drudge--to
be cuffed and buffeted through the world--despised by all, and pitied
by none.
Oliver cried lustily. If he could have known that he was an orphan,
left to the tender mercies of church-wardens and overseers, perhaps he
would have cried the louder.
| It's a short first chapter, and gets right to the point: the scene is a small town in England, and the novel opens in the early nineteenth century . Oliver is born in a workhouse in a town called Mudfog , and is described as a "new burden upon the parish" . . After kissing Oliver with "cold white lips," Oliver's mother dies, leaving her son all alone and at the mercy of the parish authorities. All we learn about his mother at this point is that a) she was found lying in the street after having walked a long way, but nobody knows where she'd come from, and b) she wasn't wearing a wedding ring, so the doctor assumes that she was unmarried and that Oliver is illegitimate, and c) she was a "good-looking girl." Dickens hints ominously at the fate awaiting Oliver as "a parish child" in the closing sentences of the first chapter. | summary |
For the next eight or ten months, Oliver was the victim of a systematic
course of treachery and deception. He was brought up by hand. The
hungry and destitute situation of the infant orphan was duly reported
by the workhouse authorities to the parish authorities. The parish
authorities inquired with dignity of the workhouse authorities, whether
there was no female then domiciled in 'the house' who was in a
situation to impart to Oliver Twist, the consolation and nourishment of
which he stood in need. The workhouse authorities replied with
humility, that there was not. Upon this, the parish authorities
magnanimously and humanely resolved, that Oliver should be 'farmed,'
or, in other words, that he should be dispatched to a branch-workhouse
some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders
against the poor-laws, rolled about the floor all day, without the
inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the parental
superintendence of an elderly female, who received the culprits at and
for the consideration of sevenpence-halfpenny per small head per week.
Sevenpence-halfpenny's worth per week is a good round diet for a child;
a great deal may be got for sevenpence-halfpenny, quite enough to
overload its stomach, and make it uncomfortable. The elderly female was
a woman of wisdom and experience; she knew what was good for children;
and she had a very accurate perception of what was good for herself.
So, she appropriated the greater part of the weekly stipend to her own
use, and consigned the rising parochial generation to even a shorter
allowance than was originally provided for them. Thereby finding in
the lowest depth a deeper still; and proving herself a very great
experimental philosopher.
Everybody knows the story of another experimental philosopher who had a
great theory about a horse being able to live without eating, and who
demonstrated it so well, that he had got his own horse down to a straw
a day, and would unquestionably have rendered him a very spirited and
rampacious animal on nothing at all, if he had not died,
four-and-twenty hours before he was to have had his first comfortable
bait of air. Unfortunately for, the experimental philosophy of the
female to whose protecting care Oliver Twist was delivered over, a
similar result usually attended the operation of _her_ system; for at
the very moment when the child had contrived to exist upon the smallest
possible portion of the weakest possible food, it did perversely happen
in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it sickened from want
and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by
accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable little being was
usually summoned into another world, and there gathered to the fathers
it had never known in this.
Occasionally, when there was some more than usually interesting inquest
upon a parish child who had been overlooked in turning up a bedstead,
or inadvertently scalded to death when there happened to be a
washing--though the latter accident was very scarce, anything
approaching to a washing being of rare occurrence in the farm--the jury
would take it into their heads to ask troublesome questions, or the
parishioners would rebelliously affix their signatures to a
remonstrance. But these impertinences were speedily checked by the
evidence of the surgeon, and the testimony of the beadle; the former of
whom had always opened the body and found nothing inside (which was
very probable indeed), and the latter of whom invariably swore whatever
the parish wanted; which was very self-devotional. Besides, the board
made periodical pilgrimages to the farm, and always sent the beadle the
day before, to say they were going. The children were neat and clean
to behold, when _they_ went; and what more would the people have!
It cannot be expected that this system of farming would produce any
very extraordinary or luxuriant crop. Oliver Twist's ninth birthday
found him a pale thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and
decidedly small in circumference. But nature or inheritance had
implanted a good sturdy spirit in Oliver's breast. It had had plenty
of room to expand, thanks to the spare diet of the establishment; and
perhaps to this circumstance may be attributed his having any ninth
birth-day at all. Be this as it may, however, it was his ninth
birthday; and he was keeping it in the coal-cellar with a select party
of two other young gentleman, who, after participating with him in a
sound thrashing, had been locked up for atrociously presuming to be
hungry, when Mrs. Mann, the good lady of the house, was unexpectedly
startled by the apparition of Mr. Bumble, the beadle, striving to undo
the wicket of the garden-gate.
'Goodness gracious! Is that you, Mr. Bumble, sir?' said Mrs. Mann,
thrusting her head out of the window in well-affected ecstasies of joy.
'(Susan, take Oliver and them two brats upstairs, and wash 'em
directly.)--My heart alive! Mr. Bumble, how glad I am to see you,
sure-ly!'
Now, Mr. Bumble was a fat man, and a choleric; so, instead of
responding to this open-hearted salutation in a kindred spirit, he gave
the little wicket a tremendous shake, and then bestowed upon it a kick
which could have emanated from no leg but a beadle's.
'Lor, only think,' said Mrs. Mann, running out,--for the three boys had
been removed by this time,--'only think of that! That I should have
forgotten that the gate was bolted on the inside, on account of them
dear children! Walk in sir; walk in, pray, Mr. Bumble, do, sir.'
Although this invitation was accompanied with a curtsey that might have
softened the heart of a church-warden, it by no means mollified the
beadle.
'Do you think this respectful or proper conduct, Mrs. Mann,' inquired
Mr. Bumble, grasping his cane, 'to keep the parish officers a waiting
at your garden-gate, when they come here upon porochial business with
the porochial orphans? Are you aweer, Mrs. Mann, that you are, as I
may say, a porochial delegate, and a stipendiary?'
'I'm sure Mr. Bumble, that I was only a telling one or two of the dear
children as is so fond of you, that it was you a coming,' replied Mrs.
Mann with great humility.
Mr. Bumble had a great idea of his oratorical powers and his
importance. He had displayed the one, and vindicated the other. He
relaxed.
'Well, well, Mrs. Mann,' he replied in a calmer tone; 'it may be as you
say; it may be. Lead the way in, Mrs. Mann, for I come on business,
and have something to say.'
Mrs. Mann ushered the beadle into a small parlour with a brick floor;
placed a seat for him; and officiously deposited his cocked hat and
cane on the table before him. Mr. Bumble wiped from his forehead the
perspiration which his walk had engendered, glanced complacently at the
cocked hat, and smiled. Yes, he smiled. Beadles are but men: and Mr.
Bumble smiled.
'Now don't you be offended at what I'm a going to say,' observed Mrs.
Mann, with captivating sweetness. 'You've had a long walk, you know,
or I wouldn't mention it. Now, will you take a little drop of
somethink, Mr. Bumble?'
'Not a drop. Nor a drop,' said Mr. Bumble, waving his right hand in a
dignified, but placid manner.
'I think you will,' said Mrs. Mann, who had noticed the tone of the
refusal, and the gesture that had accompanied it. 'Just a leetle drop,
with a little cold water, and a lump of sugar.'
Mr. Bumble coughed.
'Now, just a leetle drop,' said Mrs. Mann persuasively.
'What is it?' inquired the beadle.
'Why, it's what I'm obliged to keep a little of in the house, to put
into the blessed infants' Daffy, when they ain't well, Mr. Bumble,'
replied Mrs. Mann as she opened a corner cupboard, and took down a
bottle and glass. 'It's gin. I'll not deceive you, Mr. B. It's gin.'
'Do you give the children Daffy, Mrs. Mann?' inquired Bumble, following
with his eyes the interesting process of mixing.
'Ah, bless 'em, that I do, dear as it is,' replied the nurse. 'I
couldn't see 'em suffer before my very eyes, you know sir.'
'No'; said Mr. Bumble approvingly; 'no, you could not. You are a
humane woman, Mrs. Mann.' (Here she set down the glass.) 'I shall
take a early opportunity of mentioning it to the board, Mrs. Mann.'
(He drew it towards him.) 'You feel as a mother, Mrs. Mann.' (He
stirred the gin-and-water.) 'I--I drink your health with cheerfulness,
Mrs. Mann'; and he swallowed half of it.
'And now about business,' said the beadle, taking out a leathern
pocket-book. 'The child that was half-baptized Oliver Twist, is nine
year old to-day.'
'Bless him!' interposed Mrs. Mann, inflaming her left eye with the
corner of her apron.
'And notwithstanding a offered reward of ten pound, which was
afterwards increased to twenty pound. Notwithstanding the most
superlative, and, I may say, supernat'ral exertions on the part of this
parish,' said Bumble, 'we have never been able to discover who is his
father, or what was his mother's settlement, name, or condition.'
Mrs. Mann raised her hands in astonishment; but added, after a moment's
reflection, 'How comes he to have any name at all, then?'
The beadle drew himself up with great pride, and said, 'I inwented it.'
'You, Mr. Bumble!'
'I, Mrs. Mann. We name our fondlings in alphabetical order. The last
was a S,--Swubble, I named him. This was a T,--Twist, I named _him_.
The next one comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got
names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it
again, when we come to Z.'
'Why, you're quite a literary character, sir!' said Mrs. Mann.
'Well, well,' said the beadle, evidently gratified with the compliment;
'perhaps I may be. Perhaps I may be, Mrs. Mann.' He finished the
gin-and-water, and added, 'Oliver being now too old to remain here, the
board have determined to have him back into the house. I have come out
myself to take him there. So let me see him at once.'
'I'll fetch him directly,' said Mrs. Mann, leaving the room for that
purpose. Oliver, having had by this time as much of the outer coat of
dirt which encrusted his face and hands, removed, as could be scrubbed
off in one washing, was led into the room by his benevolent protectress.
'Make a bow to the gentleman, Oliver,' said Mrs. Mann.
Oliver made a bow, which was divided between the beadle on the chair,
and the cocked hat on the table.
'Will you go along with me, Oliver?' said Mr. Bumble, in a majestic
voice.
Oliver was about to say that he would go along with anybody with great
readiness, when, glancing upward, he caught sight of Mrs. Mann, who had
got behind the beadle's chair, and was shaking her fist at him with a
furious countenance. He took the hint at once, for the fist had been
too often impressed upon his body not to be deeply impressed upon his
recollection.
'Will she go with me?' inquired poor Oliver.
'No, she can't,' replied Mr. Bumble. 'But she'll come and see you
sometimes.'
This was no very great consolation to the child. Young as he was,
however, he had sense enough to make a feint of feeling great regret at
going away. It was no very difficult matter for the boy to call tears
into his eyes. Hunger and recent ill-usage are great assistants if you
want to cry; and Oliver cried very naturally indeed. Mrs. Mann gave
him a thousand embraces, and what Oliver wanted a great deal more, a
piece of bread and butter, less he should seem too hungry when he got
to the workhouse. With the slice of bread in his hand, and the little
brown-cloth parish cap on his head, Oliver was then led away by Mr.
Bumble from the wretched home where one kind word or look had never
lighted the gloom of his infant years. And yet he burst into an agony
of childish grief, as the cottage-gate closed after him. Wretched as
were the little companions in misery he was leaving behind, they were
the only friends he had ever known; and a sense of his loneliness in
the great wide world, sank into the child's heart for the first time.
Mr. Bumble walked on with long strides; little Oliver, firmly grasping
his gold-laced cuff, trotted beside him, inquiring at the end of every
quarter of a mile whether they were 'nearly there.' To these
interrogations Mr. Bumble returned very brief and snappish replies; for
the temporary blandness which gin-and-water awakens in some bosoms had
by this time evaporated; and he was once again a beadle.
Oliver had not been within the walls of the workhouse a quarter of an
hour, and had scarcely completed the demolition of a second slice of
bread, when Mr. Bumble, who had handed him over to the care of an old
woman, returned; and, telling him it was a board night, informed him
that the board had said he was to appear before it forthwith.
Not having a very clearly defined notion of what a live board was,
Oliver was rather astounded by this intelligence, and was not quite
certain whether he ought to laugh or cry. He had no time to think
about the matter, however; for Mr. Bumble gave him a tap on the head,
with his cane, to wake him up: and another on the back to make him
lively: and bidding him to follow, conducted him into a large
white-washed room, where eight or ten fat gentlemen were sitting round
a table. At the top of the table, seated in an arm-chair rather higher
than the rest, was a particularly fat gentleman with a very round, red
face.
'Bow to the board,' said Bumble. Oliver brushed away two or three
tears that were lingering in his eyes; and seeing no board but the
table, fortunately bowed to that.
'What's your name, boy?' said the gentleman in the high chair.
Oliver was frightened at the sight of so many gentlemen, which made him
tremble: and the beadle gave him another tap behind, which made him
cry. These two causes made him answer in a very low and hesitating
voice; whereupon a gentleman in a white waistcoat said he was a fool.
Which was a capital way of raising his spirits, and putting him quite
at his ease.
'Boy,' said the gentleman in the high chair, 'listen to me. You know
you're an orphan, I suppose?'
'What's that, sir?' inquired poor Oliver.
'The boy _is_ a fool--I thought he was,' said the gentleman in the
white waistcoat.
'Hush!' said the gentleman who had spoken first. 'You know you've got
no father or mother, and that you were brought up by the parish, don't
you?'
'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver, weeping bitterly.
'What are you crying for?' inquired the gentleman in the white
waistcoat. And to be sure it was very extraordinary. What _could_ the
boy be crying for?
'I hope you say your prayers every night,' said another gentleman in a
gruff voice; 'and pray for the people who feed you, and take care of
you--like a Christian.'
'Yes, sir,' stammered the boy. The gentleman who spoke last was
unconsciously right. It would have been very like a Christian, and a
marvellously good Christian too, if Oliver had prayed for the people
who fed and took care of _him_. But he hadn't, because nobody had
taught him.
'Well! You have come here to be educated, and taught a useful trade,'
said the red-faced gentleman in the high chair.
'So you'll begin to pick oakum to-morrow morning at six o'clock,' added
the surly one in the white waistcoat.
For the combination of both these blessings in the one simple process
of picking oakum, Oliver bowed low by the direction of the beadle, and
was then hurried away to a large ward; where, on a rough, hard bed, he
sobbed himself to sleep. What a novel illustration of the tender laws
of England! They let the paupers go to sleep!
Poor Oliver! He little thought, as he lay sleeping in happy
unconsciousness of all around him, that the board had that very day
arrived at a decision which would exercise the most material influence
over all his future fortunes. But they had. And this was it:
The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and
when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out
at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered--the poor
people liked it! It was a regular place of public entertainment for
the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public
breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all the year round; a brick and
mortar elysium, where it was all play and no work. 'Oho!' said the
board, looking very knowing; 'we are the fellows to set this to rights;
we'll stop it all, in no time.' So, they established the rule, that
all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel
nobody, not they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house,
or by a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the
water-works to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a
corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and
issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and
half a roll of Sundays. They made a great many other wise and humane
regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary
to repeat; kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in
consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctors' Commons; and,
instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had
theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a
bachelor! There is no saying how many applicants for relief, under
these last two heads, might have started up in all classes of society,
if it had not been coupled with the workhouse; but the board were
long-headed men, and had provided for this difficulty. The relief was
inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened
people.
For the first six months after Oliver Twist was removed, the system was
in full operation. It was rather expensive at first, in consequence of
the increase in the undertaker's bill, and the necessity of taking in
the clothes of all the paupers, which fluttered loosely on their
wasted, shrunken forms, after a week or two's gruel. But the number of
workhouse inmates got thin as well as the paupers; and the board were
in ecstasies.
The room in which the boys were fed, was a large stone hall, with a
copper at one end: out of which the master, dressed in an apron for the
purpose, and assisted by one or two women, ladled the gruel at
mealtimes. Of this festive composition each boy had one porringer, and
no more--except on occasions of great public rejoicing, when he had two
ounces and a quarter of bread besides.
The bowls never wanted washing. The boys polished them with their
spoons till they shone again; and when they had performed this
operation (which never took very long, the spoons being nearly as large
as the bowls), they would sit staring at the copper, with such eager
eyes, as if they could have devoured the very bricks of which it was
composed; employing themselves, meanwhile, in sucking their fingers
most assiduously, with the view of catching up any stray splashes of
gruel that might have been cast thereon. Boys have generally excellent
appetites. Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of
slow starvation for three months: at last they got so voracious and
wild with hunger, that one boy, who was tall for his age, and hadn't
been used to that sort of thing (for his father had kept a small
cook-shop), hinted darkly to his companions, that unless he had another
basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he might some night happen to
eat the boy who slept next him, who happened to be a weakly youth of
tender age. He had a wild, hungry eye; and they implicitly believed
him. A council was held; lots were cast who should walk up to the
master after supper that evening, and ask for more; and it fell to
Oliver Twist.
The evening arrived; the boys took their places. The master, in his
cook's uniform, stationed himself at the copper; his pauper assistants
ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was served out; and a long
grace was said over the short commons. The gruel disappeared; the boys
whispered each other, and winked at Oliver; while his next neighbors
nudged him. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and
reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the
master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own
temerity:
'Please, sir, I want some more.'
The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in
stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then
clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralysed with
wonder; the boys with fear.
'What!' said the master at length, in a faint voice.
'Please, sir,' replied Oliver, 'I want some more.'
The master aimed a blow at Oliver's head with the ladle; pinioned him
in his arm; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.
The board were sitting in solemn conclave, when Mr. Bumble rushed into
the room in great excitement, and addressing the gentleman in the high
chair, said,
'Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for
more!'
There was a general start. Horror was depicted on every countenance.
'For _more_!' said Mr. Limbkins. 'Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer
me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had
eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?'
'He did, sir,' replied Bumble.
'That boy will be hung,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. 'I
know that boy will be hung.'
Nobody controverted the prophetic gentleman's opinion. An animated
discussion took place. Oliver was ordered into instant confinement;
and a bill was next morning pasted on the outside of the gate, offering
a reward of five pounds to anybody who would take Oliver Twist off the
hands of the parish. In other words, five pounds and Oliver Twist were
offered to any man or woman who wanted an apprentice to any trade,
business, or calling.
'I never was more convinced of anything in my life,' said the gentleman
in the white waistcoat, as he knocked at the gate and read the bill
next morning: 'I never was more convinced of anything in my life, than
I am that that boy will come to be hung.'
As I purpose to show in the sequel whether the white waistcoated
gentleman was right or not, I should perhaps mar the interest of this
narrative (supposing it to possess any at all), if I ventured to hint
just yet, whether the life of Oliver Twist had this violent termination
or no.
| Oliver gets sent out to be "farmed" because there isn't a wet nurse to be found at the workhouse after his mother dies. Dickens treats us to a scathingly ironic description of the wretched conditions at the baby farm run by Mrs. Mann. Now, allow us to interrupt our scheduled program for a Historical Context Lesson: "baby farms" like Mrs. Mann's actually existed, and the worst ones had mortality rates as high as 90%. Put differently, that would mean that only 1 baby in 10 would survive infancy at a baby farm like Mrs. Mann's. But back to the story: Oliver survives infancy, if he doesn't thrive. He's now eight years old and he's a "pale, thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and decidedly small in circumference" . Apparently, Mrs. Mann doesn't feed the babies very much; she pockets the extra money she should have been spending on their food and clothing. Sounds like a fun lady. Mr. Bumble, the Beadle, comes to inspect the baby farm. Time for another Historical Context Lesson : in the Church of England, a beadle was somebody who worked for the parish and was in charge of charity . In Judaism, beadles were assistants at the synagogue . Mr. Bumble plans to take Oliver back to the workhouse with him because, at age eight, he's old enough to start working. Oliver is cleaned up and is taken before the parish board and questioned about his religion, and we learn that he's never been taught any religion at all, even though he's been brought up by the parish and associated with the Church of England his whole life . He'll start learning how to pick oakum the next morning at the workhouse. Oliver and the other young boys in the workhouse are close to starvation, because they're given only one ounce of watery gruel for each meal. The boys draw straws to decide who's going to ask for more to eat. Oliver gets the short end of that stick, and we get the famous scene of Oliver asking for more. This is also the first illustration by George Cruikshank. If you're using an edition that doesn't include the illustrations, we recommend looking them up online , or in another edition--they're part of what made the novel so famous. Apparently asking for more to eat is an unforgivable offense--the man in the white waistcoat is so shocked that he prophesies that Oliver "will be hung I know that boy will be hung" . | summary |
For a week after the commission of the impious and profane offence of
asking for more, Oliver remained a close prisoner in the dark and
solitary room to which he had been consigned by the wisdom and mercy of
the board. It appears, at first sight not unreasonable to suppose,
that, if he had entertained a becoming feeling of respect for the
prediction of the gentleman in the white waistcoat, he would have
established that sage individual's prophetic character, once and for
ever, by tying one end of his pocket-handkerchief to a hook in the
wall, and attaching himself to the other. To the performance of this
feat, however, there was one obstacle: namely, that
pocket-handkerchiefs being decided articles of luxury, had been, for
all future times and ages, removed from the noses of paupers by the
express order of the board, in council assembled: solemnly given and
pronounced under their hands and seals. There was a still greater
obstacle in Oliver's youth and childishness. He only cried bitterly
all day; and, when the long, dismal night came on, spread his little
hands before his eyes to shut out the darkness, and crouching in the
corner, tried to sleep: ever and anon waking with a start and tremble,
and drawing himself closer and closer to the wall, as if to feel even
its cold hard surface were a protection in the gloom and loneliness
which surrounded him.
Let it not be supposed by the enemies of 'the system,' that, during the
period of his solitary incarceration, Oliver was denied the benefit of
exercise, the pleasure of society, or the advantages of religious
consolation. As for exercise, it was nice cold weather, and he was
allowed to perform his ablutions every morning under the pump, in a
stone yard, in the presence of Mr. Bumble, who prevented his catching
cold, and caused a tingling sensation to pervade his frame, by repeated
applications of the cane. As for society, he was carried every other
day into the hall where the boys dined, and there sociably flogged as a
public warning and example. And so far from being denied the
advantages of religious consolation, he was kicked into the same
apartment every evening at prayer-time, and there permitted to listen
to, and console his mind with, a general supplication of the boys,
containing a special clause, therein inserted by authority of the
board, in which they entreated to be made good, virtuous, contented,
and obedient, and to be guarded from the sins and vices of Oliver
Twist: whom the supplication distinctly set forth to be under the
exclusive patronage and protection of the powers of wickedness, and an
article direct from the manufactory of the very Devil himself.
It chanced one morning, while Oliver's affairs were in this auspicious
and comfortable state, that Mr. Gamfield, chimney-sweep, went his way
down the High Street, deeply cogitating in his mind his ways and means
of paying certain arrears of rent, for which his landlord had become
rather pressing. Mr. Gamfield's most sanguine estimate of his finances
could not raise them within full five pounds of the desired amount;
and, in a species of arithmetical desperation, he was alternately
cudgelling his brains and his donkey, when passing the workhouse, his
eyes encountered the bill on the gate.
'Wo--o!' said Mr. Gamfield to the donkey.
The donkey was in a state of profound abstraction: wondering, probably,
whether he was destined to be regaled with a cabbage-stalk or two when
he had disposed of the two sacks of soot with which the little cart was
laden; so, without noticing the word of command, he jogged onward.
Mr. Gamfield growled a fierce imprecation on the donkey generally, but
more particularly on his eyes; and, running after him, bestowed a blow
on his head, which would inevitably have beaten in any skull but a
donkey's. Then, catching hold of the bridle, he gave his jaw a sharp
wrench, by way of gentle reminder that he was not his own master; and
by these means turned him round. He then gave him another blow on the
head, just to stun him till he came back again. Having completed these
arrangements, he walked up to the gate, to read the bill.
The gentleman with the white waistcoat was standing at the gate with
his hands behind him, after having delivered himself of some profound
sentiments in the board-room. Having witnessed the little dispute
between Mr. Gamfield and the donkey, he smiled joyously when that
person came up to read the bill, for he saw at once that Mr. Gamfield
was exactly the sort of master Oliver Twist wanted. Mr. Gamfield
smiled, too, as he perused the document; for five pounds was just the
sum he had been wishing for; and, as to the boy with which it was
encumbered, Mr. Gamfield, knowing what the dietary of the workhouse
was, well knew he would be a nice small pattern, just the very thing
for register stoves. So, he spelt the bill through again, from
beginning to end; and then, touching his fur cap in token of humility,
accosted the gentleman in the white waistcoat.
'This here boy, sir, wot the parish wants to 'prentis,' said Mr.
Gamfield.
'Ay, my man,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat, with a
condescending smile. 'What of him?'
'If the parish vould like him to learn a right pleasant trade, in a
good 'spectable chimbley-sweepin' bisness,' said Mr. Gamfield, 'I wants
a 'prentis, and I am ready to take him.'
'Walk in,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. Mr. Gamfield
having lingered behind, to give the donkey another blow on the head,
and another wrench of the jaw, as a caution not to run away in his
absence, followed the gentleman with the white waistcoat into the room
where Oliver had first seen him.
'It's a nasty trade,' said Mr. Limbkins, when Gamfield had again stated
his wish.
'Young boys have been smothered in chimneys before now,' said another
gentleman.
'That's acause they damped the straw afore they lit it in the chimbley
to make 'em come down again,' said Gamfield; 'that's all smoke, and no
blaze; vereas smoke ain't o' no use at all in making a boy come down,
for it only sinds him to sleep, and that's wot he likes. Boys is wery
obstinit, and wery lazy, Gen'l'men, and there's nothink like a good hot
blaze to make 'em come down vith a run. It's humane too, gen'l'men,
acause, even if they've stuck in the chimbley, roasting their feet
makes 'em struggle to hextricate theirselves.'
The gentleman in the white waistcoat appeared very much amused by this
explanation; but his mirth was speedily checked by a look from Mr.
Limbkins. The board then proceeded to converse among themselves for a
few minutes, but in so low a tone, that the words 'saving of
expenditure,' 'looked well in the accounts,' 'have a printed report
published,' were alone audible. These only chanced to be heard,
indeed, or account of their being very frequently repeated with great
emphasis.
At length the whispering ceased; and the members of the board, having
resumed their seats and their solemnity, Mr. Limbkins said:
'We have considered your proposition, and we don't approve of it.'
'Not at all,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.
'Decidedly not,' added the other members.
As Mr. Gamfield did happen to labour under the slight imputation of
having bruised three or four boys to death already, it occurred to him
that the board had, perhaps, in some unaccountable freak, taken it into
their heads that this extraneous circumstance ought to influence their
proceedings. It was very unlike their general mode of doing business,
if they had; but still, as he had no particular wish to revive the
rumour, he twisted his cap in his hands, and walked slowly from the
table.
'So you won't let me have him, gen'l'men?' said Mr. Gamfield, pausing
near the door.
'No,' replied Mr. Limbkins; 'at least, as it's a nasty business, we
think you ought to take something less than the premium we offered.'
Mr. Gamfield's countenance brightened, as, with a quick step, he
returned to the table, and said,
'What'll you give, gen'l'men? Come! Don't be too hard on a poor man.
What'll you give?'
'I should say, three pound ten was plenty,' said Mr. Limbkins.
'Ten shillings too much,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.
'Come!' said Gamfield; 'say four pound, gen'l'men. Say four pound, and
you've got rid of him for good and all. There!'
'Three pound ten,' repeated Mr. Limbkins, firmly.
'Come! I'll split the diff'erence, gen'l'men,' urged Gamfield. 'Three
pound fifteen.'
'Not a farthing more,' was the firm reply of Mr. Limbkins.
'You're desperate hard upon me, gen'l'men,' said Gamfield, wavering.
'Pooh! pooh! nonsense!' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.
'He'd be cheap with nothing at all, as a premium. Take him, you silly
fellow! He's just the boy for you. He wants the stick, now and then:
it'll do him good; and his board needn't come very expensive, for he
hasn't been overfed since he was born. Ha! ha! ha!'
Mr. Gamfield gave an arch look at the faces round the table, and,
observing a smile on all of them, gradually broke into a smile himself.
The bargain was made. Mr. Bumble, was at once instructed that Oliver
Twist and his indentures were to be conveyed before the magistrate, for
signature and approval, that very afternoon.
In pursuance of this determination, little Oliver, to his excessive
astonishment, was released from bondage, and ordered to put himself
into a clean shirt. He had hardly achieved this very unusual gymnastic
performance, when Mr. Bumble brought him, with his own hands, a basin
of gruel, and the holiday allowance of two ounces and a quarter of
bread. At this tremendous sight, Oliver began to cry very piteously:
thinking, not unnaturally, that the board must have determined to kill
him for some useful purpose, or they never would have begun to fatten
him up in that way.
'Don't make your eyes red, Oliver, but eat your food and be thankful,'
said Mr. Bumble, in a tone of impressive pomposity. 'You're a going to
be made a 'prentice of, Oliver.'
'A prentice, sir!' said the child, trembling.
'Yes, Oliver,' said Mr. Bumble. 'The kind and blessed gentleman which
is so many parents to you, Oliver, when you have none of your own: are
a going to 'prentice' you: and to set you up in life, and make a man of
you: although the expense to the parish is three pound ten!--three
pound ten, Oliver!--seventy shillins--one hundred and forty
sixpences!--and all for a naughty orphan which nobody can't love.'
As Mr. Bumble paused to take breath, after delivering this address in
an awful voice, the tears rolled down the poor child's face, and he
sobbed bitterly.
'Come,' said Mr. Bumble, somewhat less pompously, for it was gratifying
to his feelings to observe the effect his eloquence had produced;
'Come, Oliver! Wipe your eyes with the cuffs of your jacket, and don't
cry into your gruel; that's a very foolish action, Oliver.' It
certainly was, for there was quite enough water in it already.
On their way to the magistrate, Mr. Bumble instructed Oliver that all
he would have to do, would be to look very happy, and say, when the
gentleman asked him if he wanted to be apprenticed, that he should like
it very much indeed; both of which injunctions Oliver promised to obey:
the rather as Mr. Bumble threw in a gentle hint, that if he failed in
either particular, there was no telling what would be done to him. When
they arrived at the office, he was shut up in a little room by himself,
and admonished by Mr. Bumble to stay there, until he came back to fetch
him.
There the boy remained, with a palpitating heart, for half an hour. At
the expiration of which time Mr. Bumble thrust in his head, unadorned
with the cocked hat, and said aloud:
'Now, Oliver, my dear, come to the gentleman.' As Mr. Bumble said
this, he put on a grim and threatening look, and added, in a low voice,
'Mind what I told you, you young rascal!'
Oliver stared innocently in Mr. Bumble's face at this somewhat
contradictory style of address; but that gentleman prevented his
offering any remark thereupon, by leading him at once into an adjoining
room: the door of which was open. It was a large room, with a great
window. Behind a desk, sat two old gentleman with powdered heads: one
of whom was reading the newspaper; while the other was perusing, with
the aid of a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles, a small piece of
parchment which lay before him. Mr. Limbkins was standing in front of
the desk on one side; and Mr. Gamfield, with a partially washed face,
on the other; while two or three bluff-looking men, in top-boots, were
lounging about.
The old gentleman with the spectacles gradually dozed off, over the
little bit of parchment; and there was a short pause, after Oliver had
been stationed by Mr. Bumble in front of the desk.
'This is the boy, your worship,' said Mr. Bumble.
The old gentleman who was reading the newspaper raised his head for a
moment, and pulled the other old gentleman by the sleeve; whereupon,
the last-mentioned old gentleman woke up.
'Oh, is this the boy?' said the old gentleman.
'This is him, sir,' replied Mr. Bumble. 'Bow to the magistrate, my
dear.'
Oliver roused himself, and made his best obeisance. He had been
wondering, with his eyes fixed on the magistrates' powder, whether all
boards were born with that white stuff on their heads, and were boards
from thenceforth on that account.
'Well,' said the old gentleman, 'I suppose he's fond of
chimney-sweeping?'
'He doats on it, your worship,' replied Bumble; giving Oliver a sly
pinch, to intimate that he had better not say he didn't.
'And he _will_ be a sweep, will he?' inquired the old gentleman.
'If we was to bind him to any other trade to-morrow, he'd run away
simultaneous, your worship,' replied Bumble.
'And this man that's to be his master--you, sir--you'll treat him well,
and feed him, and do all that sort of thing, will you?' said the old
gentleman.
'When I says I will, I means I will,' replied Mr. Gamfield doggedly.
'You're a rough speaker, my friend, but you look an honest,
open-hearted man,' said the old gentleman: turning his spectacles in
the direction of the candidate for Oliver's premium, whose villainous
countenance was a regular stamped receipt for cruelty. But the
magistrate was half blind and half childish, so he couldn't reasonably
be expected to discern what other people did.
'I hope I am, sir,' said Mr. Gamfield, with an ugly leer.
'I have no doubt you are, my friend,' replied the old gentleman: fixing
his spectacles more firmly on his nose, and looking about him for the
inkstand.
It was the critical moment of Oliver's fate. If the inkstand had been
where the old gentleman thought it was, he would have dipped his pen
into it, and signed the indentures, and Oliver would have been
straightway hurried off. But, as it chanced to be immediately under
his nose, it followed, as a matter of course, that he looked all over
his desk for it, without finding it; and happening in the course of his
search to look straight before him, his gaze encountered the pale and
terrified face of Oliver Twist: who, despite all the admonitory looks
and pinches of Bumble, was regarding the repulsive countenance of his
future master, with a mingled expression of horror and fear, too
palpable to be mistaken, even by a half-blind magistrate.
The old gentleman stopped, laid down his pen, and looked from Oliver to
Mr. Limbkins; who attempted to take snuff with a cheerful and
unconcerned aspect.
'My boy!' said the old gentleman, 'you look pale and alarmed. What is
the matter?'
'Stand a little away from him, Beadle,' said the other magistrate:
laying aside the paper, and leaning forward with an expression of
interest. 'Now, boy, tell us what's the matter: don't be afraid.'
Oliver fell on his knees, and clasping his hands together, prayed that
they would order him back to the dark room--that they would starve
him--beat him--kill him if they pleased--rather than send him away with
that dreadful man.
'Well!' said Mr. Bumble, raising his hands and eyes with most
impressive solemnity. 'Well! of all the artful and designing orphans
that ever I see, Oliver, you are one of the most bare-facedest.'
'Hold your tongue, Beadle,' said the second old gentleman, when Mr.
Bumble had given vent to this compound adjective.
'I beg your worship's pardon,' said Mr. Bumble, incredulous of having
heard aright. 'Did your worship speak to me?'
'Yes. Hold your tongue.'
Mr. Bumble was stupefied with astonishment. A beadle ordered to hold
his tongue! A moral revolution!
The old gentleman in the tortoise-shell spectacles looked at his
companion, he nodded significantly.
'We refuse to sanction these indentures,' said the old gentleman:
tossing aside the piece of parchment as he spoke.
'I hope,' stammered Mr. Limbkins: 'I hope the magistrates will not
form the opinion that the authorities have been guilty of any improper
conduct, on the unsupported testimony of a child.'
'The magistrates are not called upon to pronounce any opinion on the
matter,' said the second old gentleman sharply. 'Take the boy back to
the workhouse, and treat him kindly. He seems to want it.'
That same evening, the gentleman in the white waistcoat most positively
and decidedly affirmed, not only that Oliver would be hung, but that he
would be drawn and quartered into the bargain. Mr. Bumble shook his
head with gloomy mystery, and said he wished he might come to good;
whereunto Mr. Gamfield replied, that he wished he might come to him;
which, although he agreed with the beadle in most matters, would seem
to be a wish of a totally opposite description.
The next morning, the public were once informed that Oliver Twist was
again To Let, and that five pounds would be paid to anybody who would
take possession of him.
| Oliver's punishment for asking for more is to be locked in a dark room for a week. Dickens suggests that Oliver is so depressed by his solitary confinement that the "gentleman in the white waistcoat" could have been proven right if Oliver had had a pocket-handkerchief with which to hang himself. Of course he doesn't have one, because they're considered a luxury item. Then we skip scenes. Mr. Gamfield, a chimney-sweep, is coming down the road in front of the workhouse with his donkey, trying to figure out a way to pay his rent, and "alternately cudgelling his brains and his donkey" . We'd like to point out that this sentence uses an uncommon literary device: zeugma . If you want to impress your teacher, just point this out. Using a verb to mean two different things in the same sentence is called zeugma. We love the word zeugma. It's also very fun to say. But back to Mr. Gamfield. He stops his donkey in front of the workhouse to read a notice posted on the gate, and the man with the white waistcoat is happy to see him look at it, because the notice is advertising that the workhouse has an unwanted orphan who will be given, along with five pounds, to anyone willing to sign him up as an apprentice. Mr. Gamfield happens to need exactly five pounds to pay his rent, so he tells the gentleman in the white waistcoat that he needs an apprentice. Now, just to make this all very clear, here's another Historical Context Lesson: young boys didn't usually survive long as chimney-sweeps. They had a bad habit of smothering in ashes, falling out of chimneys or off of roofs, or being starved to death by their masters. Back to the story: Mr. Limbkins, another of the parish officials, knows all this about chimney-sweeps, so after a whispered conversation with the man in the white waistcoat, and other parish board members, they tell Mr. Gamfield that because Oliver is not likely to survive very long as a chimney-sweep, Mr. G. can't have the full five pounds. They offer three pound ten, and after some debate, Mr. Gamfield agrees. Mr. Bumble goes to release Oliver from his solitary confinement, and gives him extra gruel and even some bread. Oliver assumes "that the board must have determined to kill him for some useful purpose, or they never would have begun to fatten him up in this way" . Fortunately for Oliver, becoming someone's apprentice required that some paperwork be signed by the local magistrate. And the magistrate, although oblivious to most things, can't quite ignore the look of abject terror on Oliver's face as he is about to sign the indentures. So, Oliver is spared the fate of becoming a chimney-sweep, and the notice advertising that an orphan is available as an apprentice is posted again on the workhouse gate. | summary |
In great families, when an advantageous place cannot be obtained,
either in possession, reversion, remainder, or expectancy, for the
young man who is growing up, it is a very general custom to send him to
sea. The board, in imitation of so wise and salutary an example, took
counsel together on the expediency of shipping off Oliver Twist, in
some small trading vessel bound to a good unhealthy port. This
suggested itself as the very best thing that could possibly be done
with him: the probability being, that the skipper would flog him to
death, in a playful mood, some day after dinner, or would knock his
brains out with an iron bar; both pastimes being, as is pretty
generally known, very favourite and common recreations among gentleman
of that class. The more the case presented itself to the board, in
this point of view, the more manifold the advantages of the step
appeared; so, they came to the conclusion that the only way of
providing for Oliver effectually, was to send him to sea without delay.
Mr. Bumble had been despatched to make various preliminary inquiries,
with the view of finding out some captain or other who wanted a
cabin-boy without any friends; and was returning to the workhouse to
communicate the result of his mission; when he encountered at the gate,
no less a person than Mr. Sowerberry, the parochial undertaker.
Mr. Sowerberry was a tall gaunt, large-jointed man, attired in a suit
of threadbare black, with darned cotton stockings of the same colour,
and shoes to answer. His features were not naturally intended to wear
a smiling aspect, but he was in general rather given to professional
jocosity. His step was elastic, and his face betokened inward
pleasantry, as he advanced to Mr. Bumble, and shook him cordially by
the hand.
'I have taken the measure of the two women that died last night, Mr.
Bumble,' said the undertaker.
'You'll make your fortune, Mr. Sowerberry,' said the beadle, as he
thrust his thumb and forefinger into the proffered snuff-box of the
undertaker: which was an ingenious little model of a patent coffin. 'I
say you'll make your fortune, Mr. Sowerberry,' repeated Mr. Bumble,
tapping the undertaker on the shoulder, in a friendly manner, with his
cane.
'Think so?' said the undertaker in a tone which half admitted and half
disputed the probability of the event. 'The prices allowed by the
board are very small, Mr. Bumble.'
'So are the coffins,' replied the beadle: with precisely as near an
approach to a laugh as a great official ought to indulge in.
Mr. Sowerberry was much tickled at this: as of course he ought to be;
and laughed a long time without cessation. 'Well, well, Mr. Bumble,'
he said at length, 'there's no denying that, since the new system of
feeding has come in, the coffins are something narrower and more
shallow than they used to be; but we must have some profit, Mr. Bumble.
Well-seasoned timber is an expensive article, sir; and all the iron
handles come, by canal, from Birmingham.'
'Well, well,' said Mr. Bumble, 'every trade has its drawbacks. A fair
profit is, of course, allowable.'
'Of course, of course,' replied the undertaker; 'and if I don't get a
profit upon this or that particular article, why, I make it up in the
long-run, you see--he! he! he!'
'Just so,' said Mr. Bumble.
'Though I must say,' continued the undertaker, resuming the current of
observations which the beadle had interrupted: 'though I must say, Mr.
Bumble, that I have to contend against one very great disadvantage:
which is, that all the stout people go off the quickest. The people
who have been better off, and have paid rates for many years, are the
first to sink when they come into the house; and let me tell you, Mr.
Bumble, that three or four inches over one's calculation makes a great
hole in one's profits: especially when one has a family to provide for,
sir.'
As Mr. Sowerberry said this, with the becoming indignation of an
ill-used man; and as Mr. Bumble felt that it rather tended to convey a
reflection on the honour of the parish; the latter gentleman thought it
advisable to change the subject. Oliver Twist being uppermost in his
mind, he made him his theme.
'By the bye,' said Mr. Bumble, 'you don't know anybody who wants a boy,
do you? A porochial 'prentis, who is at present a dead-weight; a
millstone, as I may say, round the porochial throat? Liberal terms,
Mr. Sowerberry, liberal terms?' As Mr. Bumble spoke, he raised his
cane to the bill above him, and gave three distinct raps upon the words
'five pounds': which were printed thereon in Roman capitals of
gigantic size.
'Gadso!' said the undertaker: taking Mr. Bumble by the gilt-edged
lappel of his official coat; 'that's just the very thing I wanted to
speak to you about. You know--dear me, what a very elegant button this
is, Mr. Bumble! I never noticed it before.'
'Yes, I think it rather pretty,' said the beadle, glancing proudly
downwards at the large brass buttons which embellished his coat. 'The
die is the same as the porochial seal--the Good Samaritan healing the
sick and bruised man. The board presented it to me on Newyear's
morning, Mr. Sowerberry. I put it on, I remember, for the first time,
to attend the inquest on that reduced tradesman, who died in a doorway
at midnight.'
'I recollect,' said the undertaker. 'The jury brought it in, "Died from
exposure to the cold, and want of the common necessaries of life,"
didn't they?'
Mr. Bumble nodded.
'And they made it a special verdict, I think,' said the undertaker, 'by
adding some words to the effect, that if the relieving officer had--'
'Tush! Foolery!' interposed the beadle. 'If the board attended to all
the nonsense that ignorant jurymen talk, they'd have enough to do.'
'Very true,' said the undertaker; 'they would indeed.'
'Juries,' said Mr. Bumble, grasping his cane tightly, as was his wont
when working into a passion: 'juries is ineddicated, vulgar, grovelling
wretches.'
'So they are,' said the undertaker.
'They haven't no more philosophy nor political economy about 'em than
that,' said the beadle, snapping his fingers contemptuously.
'No more they have,' acquiesced the undertaker.
'I despise 'em,' said the beadle, growing very red in the face.
'So do I,' rejoined the undertaker.
'And I only wish we'd a jury of the independent sort, in the house for
a week or two,' said the beadle; 'the rules and regulations of the
board would soon bring their spirit down for 'em.'
'Let 'em alone for that,' replied the undertaker. So saying, he
smiled, approvingly: to calm the rising wrath of the indignant parish
officer.
Mr Bumble lifted off his cocked hat; took a handkerchief from the
inside of the crown; wiped from his forehead the perspiration which his
rage had engendered; fixed the cocked hat on again; and, turning to the
undertaker, said in a calmer voice:
'Well; what about the boy?'
'Oh!' replied the undertaker; 'why, you know, Mr. Bumble, I pay a good
deal towards the poor's rates.'
'Hem!' said Mr. Bumble. 'Well?'
'Well,' replied the undertaker, 'I was thinking that if I pay so much
towards 'em, I've a right to get as much out of 'em as I can, Mr.
Bumble; and so--I think I'll take the boy myself.'
Mr. Bumble grasped the undertaker by the arm, and led him into the
building. Mr. Sowerberry was closeted with the board for five minutes;
and it was arranged that Oliver should go to him that evening 'upon
liking'--a phrase which means, in the case of a parish apprentice, that
if the master find, upon a short trial, that he can get enough work out
of a boy without putting too much food into him, he shall have him for
a term of years, to do what he likes with.
When little Oliver was taken before 'the gentlemen' that evening; and
informed that he was to go, that night, as general house-lad to a
coffin-maker's; and that if he complained of his situation, or ever
came back to the parish again, he would be sent to sea, there to be
drowned, or knocked on the head, as the case might be, he evinced so
little emotion, that they by common consent pronounced him a hardened
young rascal, and ordered Mr. Bumble to remove him forthwith.
Now, although it was very natural that the board, of all people in the
world, should feel in a great state of virtuous astonishment and horror
at the smallest tokens of want of feeling on the part of anybody, they
were rather out, in this particular instance. The simple fact was,
that Oliver, instead of possessing too little feeling, possessed rather
too much; and was in a fair way of being reduced, for life, to a state
of brutal stupidity and sullenness by the ill usage he had received.
He heard the news of his destination, in perfect silence; and, having
had his luggage put into his hand--which was not very difficult to
carry, inasmuch as it was all comprised within the limits of a brown
paper parcel, about half a foot square by three inches deep--he pulled
his cap over his eyes; and once more attaching himself to Mr. Bumble's
coat cuff, was led away by that dignitary to a new scene of suffering.
For some time, Mr. Bumble drew Oliver along, without notice or remark;
for the beadle carried his head very erect, as a beadle always should:
and, it being a windy day, little Oliver was completely enshrouded by
the skirts of Mr. Bumble's coat as they blew open, and disclosed to
great advantage his flapped waistcoat and drab plush knee-breeches. As
they drew near to their destination, however, Mr. Bumble thought it
expedient to look down, and see that the boy was in good order for
inspection by his new master: which he accordingly did, with a fit and
becoming air of gracious patronage.
'Oliver!' said Mr. Bumble.
'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver, in a low, tremulous voice.
'Pull that cap off your eyes, and hold up your head, sir.'
Although Oliver did as he was desired, at once; and passed the back of
his unoccupied hand briskly across his eyes, he left a tear in them
when he looked up at his conductor. As Mr. Bumble gazed sternly upon
him, it rolled down his cheek. It was followed by another, and another.
The child made a strong effort, but it was an unsuccessful one.
Withdrawing his other hand from Mr. Bumble's he covered his face with
both; and wept until the tears sprung out from between his chin and
bony fingers.
'Well!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble, stopping short, and darting at his little
charge a look of intense malignity. 'Well! Of _all_ the
ungratefullest, and worst-disposed boys as ever I see, Oliver, you are
the--'
'No, no, sir,' sobbed Oliver, clinging to the hand which held the
well-known cane; 'no, no, sir; I will be good indeed; indeed, indeed I
will, sir! I am a very little boy, sir; and it is so--so--'
'So what?' inquired Mr. Bumble in amazement.
'So lonely, sir! So very lonely!' cried the child. 'Everybody hates
me. Oh! sir, don't, don't pray be cross to me!' The child beat his
hand upon his heart; and looked in his companion's face, with tears of
real agony.
Mr. Bumble regarded Oliver's piteous and helpless look, with some
astonishment, for a few seconds; hemmed three or four times in a husky
manner; and after muttering something about 'that troublesome cough,'
bade Oliver dry his eyes and be a good boy. Then once more taking his
hand, he walked on with him in silence.
The undertaker, who had just put up the shutters of his shop, was
making some entries in his day-book by the light of a most appropriate
dismal candle, when Mr. Bumble entered.
'Aha!' said the undertaker; looking up from the book, and pausing in
the middle of a word; 'is that you, Bumble?'
'No one else, Mr. Sowerberry,' replied the beadle. 'Here! I've brought
the boy.' Oliver made a bow.
'Oh! that's the boy, is it?' said the undertaker: raising the candle
above his head, to get a better view of Oliver. 'Mrs. Sowerberry, will
you have the goodness to come here a moment, my dear?'
Mrs. Sowerberry emerged from a little room behind the shop, and
presented the form of a short, then, squeezed-up woman, with a vixenish
countenance.
'My dear,' said Mr. Sowerberry, deferentially, 'this is the boy from
the workhouse that I told you of.' Oliver bowed again.
'Dear me!' said the undertaker's wife, 'he's very small.'
'Why, he _is_ rather small,' replied Mr. Bumble: looking at Oliver as
if it were his fault that he was no bigger; 'he is small. There's no
denying it. But he'll grow, Mrs. Sowerberry--he'll grow.'
'Ah! I dare say he will,' replied the lady pettishly, 'on our victuals
and our drink. I see no saving in parish children, not I; for they
always cost more to keep, than they're worth. However, men always think
they know best. There! Get downstairs, little bag o' bones.' With
this, the undertaker's wife opened a side door, and pushed Oliver down
a steep flight of stairs into a stone cell, damp and dark: forming the
ante-room to the coal-cellar, and denominated 'kitchen'; wherein sat a
slatternly girl, in shoes down at heel, and blue worsted stockings very
much out of repair.
'Here, Charlotte,' said Mr. Sowerberry, who had followed Oliver down,
'give this boy some of the cold bits that were put by for Trip. He
hasn't come home since the morning, so he may go without 'em. I dare
say the boy isn't too dainty to eat 'em--are you, boy?'
Oliver, whose eyes had glistened at the mention of meat, and who was
trembling with eagerness to devour it, replied in the negative; and a
plateful of coarse broken victuals was set before him.
I wish some well-fed philosopher, whose meat and drink turn to gall
within him; whose blood is ice, whose heart is iron; could have seen
Oliver Twist clutching at the dainty viands that the dog had neglected.
I wish he could have witnessed the horrible avidity with which Oliver
tore the bits asunder with all the ferocity of famine. There is only
one thing I should like better; and that would be to see the
Philosopher making the same sort of meal himself, with the same relish.
'Well,' said the undertaker's wife, when Oliver had finished his
supper: which she had regarded in silent horror, and with fearful
auguries of his future appetite: 'have you done?'
There being nothing eatable within his reach, Oliver replied in the
affirmative.
'Then come with me,' said Mrs. Sowerberry: taking up a dim and dirty
lamp, and leading the way upstairs; 'your bed's under the counter. You
don't mind sleeping among the coffins, I suppose? But it doesn't much
matter whether you do or don't, for you can't sleep anywhere else.
Come; don't keep me here all night!'
Oliver lingered no longer, but meekly followed his new mistress.
| The parish board decides to send Oliver to sea as a cabin boy; "the probability being, that the skipper would either flog him to death, in a playful mood, some day after dinner, or knock his brains out with an iron bar" . Sounds like a blast. On his way back from asking about possible places for Oliver on a ship, Mr. Bumble runs into Mr. Sowerberry, the parish's undertaker and coffin-maker. After a brief discussion of how business is doing , Mr. Bumble asks Mr. Sowerberry if he knows anyone who might need an orphan as an apprentice. Mr. Sowerberry, as it turns out, needs an apprentice himself, and agrees to take Oliver starting that evening for a trial period--after which he could sign real legal indentures, if he should "find, upon a short trial, that he can get enough work out of the boy without putting too much food in him" . When Oliver is told that he's heading to a coffin-maker's, he accepts it with remarkably little emotion, not because he's "a hardened rascal," as the board members declare, but because he is in danger of "being reduced to a state of brutal stupidity and sullenness for life, by the ill usage he had received" . Poor Oliver. So then, when Mr. Bumble is taking Oliver to Mr. Sowerberry's house, Oliver actually starts bawling and, before Mr. Bumble can smack him with his cane, Oliver cries out that he's "lonely," because "everybody hates me I feel as if I had been cut here, sir, and it was all bleeding away," and he beats himself on the heart . Even Mr. Bumble isn't so hard-hearted as to be unaffected by a scene like that, but instead of comforting Oliver, he clears his throat and walks on. At least he doesn't smack him with his cane. Mr. Bumble delivers Oliver to the Sowerberry house and, after complaining at how small Oliver is , Mrs. Sowerberry sends Oliver to the basement to eat the scraps of meat that the family dog had rejected. Oliver's hungry enough that he devours every morsel. Oliver's introduction to the Sowerberry house and the coffin business closes the chapter, when he's sent to sleep under a counter in the workshop, surrounded by empty coffins. | summary |
Oliver, being left to himself in the undertaker's shop, set the lamp
down on a workman's bench, and gazed timidly about him with a feeling
of awe and dread, which many people a good deal older than he will be
at no loss to understand. An unfinished coffin on black tressels,
which stood in the middle of the shop, looked so gloomy and death-like
that a cold tremble came over him, every time his eyes wandered in the
direction of the dismal object: from which he almost expected to see
some frightful form slowly rear its head, to drive him mad with terror.
Against the wall were ranged, in regular array, a long row of elm
boards cut in the same shape: looking in the dim light, like
high-shouldered ghosts with their hands in their breeches pockets.
Coffin-plates, elm-chips, bright-headed nails, and shreds of black
cloth, lay scattered on the floor; and the wall behind the counter was
ornamented with a lively representation of two mutes in very stiff
neckcloths, on duty at a large private door, with a hearse drawn by
four black steeds, approaching in the distance. The shop was close and
hot. The atmosphere seemed tainted with the smell of coffins. The
recess beneath the counter in which his flock mattress was thrust,
looked like a grave.
Nor were these the only dismal feelings which depressed Oliver. He was
alone in a strange place; and we all know how chilled and desolate the
best of us will sometimes feel in such a situation. The boy had no
friends to care for, or to care for him. The regret of no recent
separation was fresh in his mind; the absence of no loved and
well-remembered face sank heavily into his heart.
But his heart was heavy, notwithstanding; and he wished, as he crept
into his narrow bed, that that were his coffin, and that he could be
lain in a calm and lasting sleep in the churchyard ground, with the
tall grass waving gently above his head, and the sound of the old deep
bell to soothe him in his sleep.
Oliver was awakened in the morning, by a loud kicking at the outside of
the shop-door: which, before he could huddle on his clothes, was
repeated, in an angry and impetuous manner, about twenty-five times.
When he began to undo the chain, the legs desisted, and a voice began.
'Open the door, will yer?' cried the voice which belonged to the legs
which had kicked at the door.
'I will, directly, sir,' replied Oliver: undoing the chain, and turning
the key.
'I suppose yer the new boy, ain't yer?' said the voice through the
key-hole.
'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver.
'How old are yer?' inquired the voice.
'Ten, sir,' replied Oliver.
'Then I'll whop yer when I get in,' said the voice; 'you just see if I
don't, that's all, my work'us brat!' and having made this obliging
promise, the voice began to whistle.
Oliver had been too often subjected to the process to which the very
expressive monosyllable just recorded bears reference, to entertain the
smallest doubt that the owner of the voice, whoever he might be, would
redeem his pledge, most honourably. He drew back the bolts with a
trembling hand, and opened the door.
For a second or two, Oliver glanced up the street, and down the street,
and over the way: impressed with the belief that the unknown, who had
addressed him through the key-hole, had walked a few paces off, to warm
himself; for nobody did he see but a big charity-boy, sitting on a post
in front of the house, eating a slice of bread and butter: which he cut
into wedges, the size of his mouth, with a clasp-knife, and then
consumed with great dexterity.
'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Oliver at length: seeing that no other
visitor made his appearance; 'did you knock?'
'I kicked,' replied the charity-boy.
'Did you want a coffin, sir?' inquired Oliver, innocently.
At this, the charity-boy looked monstrous fierce; and said that Oliver
would want one before long, if he cut jokes with his superiors in that
way.
'Yer don't know who I am, I suppose, Work'us?' said the charity-boy, in
continuation: descending from the top of the post, meanwhile, with
edifying gravity.
'No, sir,' rejoined Oliver.
'I'm Mister Noah Claypole,' said the charity-boy, 'and you're under me.
Take down the shutters, yer idle young ruffian!' With this, Mr.
Claypole administered a kick to Oliver, and entered the shop with a
dignified air, which did him great credit. It is difficult for a
large-headed, small-eyed youth, of lumbering make and heavy
countenance, to look dignified under any circumstances; but it is more
especially so, when superadded to these personal attractions are a red
nose and yellow smalls.
Oliver, having taken down the shutters, and broken a pane of glass in
his effort to stagger away beneath the weight of the first one to a
small court at the side of the house in which they were kept during the
day, was graciously assisted by Noah: who having consoled him with the
assurance that 'he'd catch it,' condescended to help him. Mr.
Sowerberry came down soon after. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Sowerberry
appeared. Oliver having 'caught it,' in fulfilment of Noah's
prediction, followed that young gentleman down the stairs to breakfast.
'Come near the fire, Noah,' said Charlotte. 'I saved a nice little bit
of bacon for you from master's breakfast. Oliver, shut that door at
Mister Noah's back, and take them bits that I've put out on the cover
of the bread-pan. There's your tea; take it away to that box, and
drink it there, and make haste, for they'll want you to mind the shop.
D'ye hear?'
'D'ye hear, Work'us?' said Noah Claypole.
'Lor, Noah!' said Charlotte, 'what a rum creature you are! Why don't
you let the boy alone?'
'Let him alone!' said Noah. 'Why everybody lets him alone enough, for
the matter of that. Neither his father nor his mother will ever
interfere with him. All his relations let him have his own way pretty
well. Eh, Charlotte? He! he! he!'
'Oh, you queer soul!' said Charlotte, bursting into a hearty laugh, in
which she was joined by Noah; after which they both looked scornfully
at poor Oliver Twist, as he sat shivering on the box in the coldest
corner of the room, and ate the stale pieces which had been specially
reserved for him.
Noah was a charity-boy, but not a workhouse orphan. No chance-child
was he, for he could trace his genealogy all the way back to his
parents, who lived hard by; his mother being a washerwoman, and his
father a drunken soldier, discharged with a wooden leg, and a diurnal
pension of twopence-halfpenny and an unstateable fraction. The
shop-boys in the neighbourhood had long been in the habit of branding
Noah in the public streets, with the ignominious epithets of
'leathers,' 'charity,' and the like; and Noah had bourne them without
reply. But, now that fortune had cast in his way a nameless orphan, at
whom even the meanest could point the finger of scorn, he retorted on
him with interest. This affords charming food for contemplation. It
shows us what a beautiful thing human nature may be made to be; and how
impartially the same amiable qualities are developed in the finest lord
and the dirtiest charity-boy.
Oliver had been sojourning at the undertaker's some three weeks or a
month. Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry--the shop being shut up--were taking
their supper in the little back-parlour, when Mr. Sowerberry, after
several deferential glances at his wife, said,
'My dear--' He was going to say more; but, Mrs. Sowerberry looking up,
with a peculiarly unpropitious aspect, he stopped short.
'Well,' said Mrs. Sowerberry, sharply.
'Nothing, my dear, nothing,' said Mr. Sowerberry.
'Ugh, you brute!' said Mrs. Sowerberry.
'Not at all, my dear,' said Mr. Sowerberry humbly. 'I thought you
didn't want to hear, my dear. I was only going to say--'
'Oh, don't tell me what you were going to say,' interposed Mrs.
Sowerberry. 'I am nobody; don't consult me, pray. _I_ don't want to
intrude upon your secrets.' As Mrs. Sowerberry said this, she gave an
hysterical laugh, which threatened violent consequences.
'But, my dear,' said Sowerberry, 'I want to ask your advice.'
'No, no, don't ask mine,' replied Mrs. Sowerberry, in an affecting
manner: 'ask somebody else's.' Here, there was another hysterical
laugh, which frightened Mr. Sowerberry very much. This is a very
common and much-approved matrimonial course of treatment, which is
often very effective. It at once reduced Mr. Sowerberry to begging, as
a special favour, to be allowed to say what Mrs. Sowerberry was most
curious to hear. After a short duration, the permission was most
graciously conceded.
'It's only about young Twist, my dear,' said Mr. Sowerberry. 'A very
good-looking boy, that, my dear.'
'He need be, for he eats enough,' observed the lady.
'There's an expression of melancholy in his face, my dear,' resumed Mr.
Sowerberry, 'which is very interesting. He would make a delightful
mute, my love.'
Mrs. Sowerberry looked up with an expression of considerable
wonderment. Mr. Sowerberry remarked it and, without allowing time for
any observation on the good lady's part, proceeded.
'I don't mean a regular mute to attend grown-up people, my dear, but
only for children's practice. It would be very new to have a mute in
proportion, my dear. You may depend upon it, it would have a superb
effect.'
Mrs. Sowerberry, who had a good deal of taste in the undertaking way,
was much struck by the novelty of this idea; but, as it would have been
compromising her dignity to have said so, under existing circumstances,
she merely inquired, with much sharpness, why such an obvious
suggestion had not presented itself to her husband's mind before? Mr.
Sowerberry rightly construed this, as an acquiescence in his
proposition; it was speedily determined, therefore, that Oliver should
be at once initiated into the mysteries of the trade; and, with this
view, that he should accompany his master on the very next occasion of
his services being required.
The occasion was not long in coming. Half an hour after breakfast next
morning, Mr. Bumble entered the shop; and supporting his cane against
the counter, drew forth his large leathern pocket-book: from which he
selected a small scrap of paper, which he handed over to Sowerberry.
'Aha!' said the undertaker, glancing over it with a lively countenance;
'an order for a coffin, eh?'
'For a coffin first, and a porochial funeral afterwards,' replied Mr.
Bumble, fastening the strap of the leathern pocket-book: which, like
himself, was very corpulent.
'Bayton,' said the undertaker, looking from the scrap of paper to Mr.
Bumble. 'I never heard the name before.'
Bumble shook his head, as he replied, 'Obstinate people, Mr.
Sowerberry; very obstinate. Proud, too, I'm afraid, sir.'
'Proud, eh?' exclaimed Mr. Sowerberry with a sneer. 'Come, that's too
much.'
'Oh, it's sickening,' replied the beadle. 'Antimonial, Mr. Sowerberry!'
'So it is,' acquiesced the undertaker.
'We only heard of the family the night before last,' said the beadle;
'and we shouldn't have known anything about them, then, only a woman
who lodges in the same house made an application to the porochial
committee for them to send the porochial surgeon to see a woman as was
very bad. He had gone out to dinner; but his 'prentice (which is a
very clever lad) sent 'em some medicine in a blacking-bottle, offhand.'
'Ah, there's promptness,' said the undertaker.
'Promptness, indeed!' replied the beadle. 'But what's the consequence;
what's the ungrateful behaviour of these rebels, sir? Why, the husband
sends back word that the medicine won't suit his wife's complaint, and
so she shan't take it--says she shan't take it, sir! Good, strong,
wholesome medicine, as was given with great success to two Irish
labourers and a coal-heaver, only a week before--sent 'em for nothing,
with a blackin'-bottle in,--and he sends back word that she shan't take
it, sir!'
As the atrocity presented itself to Mr. Bumble's mind in full force, he
struck the counter sharply with his cane, and became flushed with
indignation.
'Well,' said the undertaker, 'I ne--ver--did--'
'Never did, sir!' ejaculated the beadle. 'No, nor nobody never did;
but now she's dead, we've got to bury her; and that's the direction;
and the sooner it's done, the better.'
Thus saying, Mr. Bumble put on his cocked hat wrong side first, in a
fever of parochial excitement; and flounced out of the shop.
'Why, he was so angry, Oliver, that he forgot even to ask after you!'
said Mr. Sowerberry, looking after the beadle as he strode down the
street.
'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver, who had carefully kept himself out of
sight, during the interview; and who was shaking from head to foot at
the mere recollection of the sound of Mr. Bumble's voice.
He needn't haven taken the trouble to shrink from Mr. Bumble's glance,
however; for that functionary, on whom the prediction of the gentleman
in the white waistcoat had made a very strong impression, thought that
now the undertaker had got Oliver upon trial the subject was better
avoided, until such time as he should be firmly bound for seven years,
and all danger of his being returned upon the hands of the parish
should be thus effectually and legally overcome.
'Well,' said Mr. Sowerberry, taking up his hat, 'the sooner this job is
done, the better. Noah, look after the shop. Oliver, put on your cap,
and come with me.' Oliver obeyed, and followed his master on his
professional mission.
They walked on, for some time, through the most crowded and densely
inhabited part of the town; and then, striking down a narrow street
more dirty and miserable than any they had yet passed through, paused
to look for the house which was the object of their search. The houses
on either side were high and large, but very old, and tenanted by
people of the poorest class: as their neglected appearance would have
sufficiently denoted, without the concurrent testimony afforded by the
squalid looks of the few men and women who, with folded arms and bodies
half doubled, occasionally skulked along. A great many of the
tenements had shop-fronts; but these were fast closed, and mouldering
away; only the upper rooms being inhabited. Some houses which had
become insecure from age and decay, were prevented from falling into
the street, by huge beams of wood reared against the walls, and firmly
planted in the road; but even these crazy dens seemed to have been
selected as the nightly haunts of some houseless wretches, for many of
the rough boards which supplied the place of door and window, were
wrenched from their positions, to afford an aperture wide enough for
the passage of a human body. The kennel was stagnant and filthy. The
very rats, which here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness, were
hideous with famine.
There was neither knocker nor bell-handle at the open door where Oliver
and his master stopped; so, groping his way cautiously through the dark
passage, and bidding Oliver keep close to him and not be afraid the
undertaker mounted to the top of the first flight of stairs. Stumbling
against a door on the landing, he rapped at it with his knuckles.
It was opened by a young girl of thirteen or fourteen. The undertaker
at once saw enough of what the room contained, to know it was the
apartment to which he had been directed. He stepped in; Oliver
followed him.
There was no fire in the room; but a man was crouching, mechanically,
over the empty stove. An old woman, too, had drawn a low stool to the
cold hearth, and was sitting beside him. There were some ragged
children in another corner; and in a small recess, opposite the door,
there lay upon the ground, something covered with an old blanket.
Oliver shuddered as he cast his eyes toward the place, and crept
involuntarily closer to his master; for though it was covered up, the
boy felt that it was a corpse.
The man's face was thin and very pale; his hair and beard were grizzly;
his eyes were bloodshot. The old woman's face was wrinkled; her two
remaining teeth protruded over her under lip; and her eyes were bright
and piercing. Oliver was afraid to look at either her or the man.
They seemed so like the rats he had seen outside.
'Nobody shall go near her,' said the man, starting fiercely up, as the
undertaker approached the recess. 'Keep back! Damn you, keep back, if
you've a life to lose!'
'Nonsense, my good man,' said the undertaker, who was pretty well used
to misery in all its shapes. 'Nonsense!'
'I tell you,' said the man: clenching his hands, and stamping
furiously on the floor,--'I tell you I won't have her put into the
ground. She couldn't rest there. The worms would worry her--not eat
her--she is so worn away.'
The undertaker offered no reply to this raving; but producing a tape
from his pocket, knelt down for a moment by the side of the body.
'Ah!' said the man: bursting into tears, and sinking on his knees at
the feet of the dead woman; 'kneel down, kneel down--kneel round her,
every one of you, and mark my words! I say she was starved to death.
I never knew how bad she was, till the fever came upon her; and then
her bones were starting through the skin. There was neither fire nor
candle; she died in the dark--in the dark! She couldn't even see her
children's faces, though we heard her gasping out their names. I begged
for her in the streets: and they sent me to prison. When I came back,
she was dying; and all the blood in my heart has dried up, for they
starved her to death. I swear it before the God that saw it! They
starved her!' He twined his hands in his hair; and, with a loud
scream, rolled grovelling upon the floor: his eyes fixed, and the foam
covering his lips.
The terrified children cried bitterly; but the old woman, who had
hitherto remained as quiet as if she had been wholly deaf to all that
passed, menaced them into silence. Having unloosened the cravat of the
man who still remained extended on the ground, she tottered towards the
undertaker.
'She was my daughter,' said the old woman, nodding her head in the
direction of the corpse; and speaking with an idiotic leer, more
ghastly than even the presence of death in such a place. 'Lord, Lord!
Well, it _is_ strange that I who gave birth to her, and was a woman
then, should be alive and merry now, and she lying there: so cold and
stiff! Lord, Lord!--to think of it; it's as good as a play--as good as
a play!'
As the wretched creature mumbled and chuckled in her hideous merriment,
the undertaker turned to go away.
'Stop, stop!' said the old woman in a loud whisper. 'Will she be
buried to-morrow, or next day, or to-night? I laid her out; and I must
walk, you know. Send me a large cloak: a good warm one: for it is
bitter cold. We should have cake and wine, too, before we go! Never
mind; send some bread--only a loaf of bread and a cup of water. Shall
we have some bread, dear?' she said eagerly: catching at the
undertaker's coat, as he once more moved towards the door.
'Yes, yes,' said the undertaker,'of course. Anything you like!' He
disengaged himself from the old woman's grasp; and, drawing Oliver
after him, hurried away.
The next day, (the family having been meanwhile relieved with a
half-quartern loaf and a piece of cheese, left with them by Mr. Bumble
himself,) Oliver and his master returned to the miserable abode; where
Mr. Bumble had already arrived, accompanied by four men from the
workhouse, who were to act as bearers. An old black cloak had been
thrown over the rags of the old woman and the man; and the bare coffin
having been screwed down, was hoisted on the shoulders of the bearers,
and carried into the street.
'Now, you must put your best leg foremost, old lady!' whispered
Sowerberry in the old woman's ear; 'we are rather late; and it won't
do, to keep the clergyman waiting. Move on, my men,--as quick as you
like!'
Thus directed, the bearers trotted on under their light burden; and the
two mourners kept as near them, as they could. Mr. Bumble and
Sowerberry walked at a good smart pace in front; and Oliver, whose legs
were not so long as his master's, ran by the side.
There was not so great a necessity for hurrying as Mr. Sowerberry had
anticipated, however; for when they reached the obscure corner of the
churchyard in which the nettles grew, and where the parish graves were
made, the clergyman had not arrived; and the clerk, who was sitting by
the vestry-room fire, seemed to think it by no means improbable that it
might be an hour or so, before he came. So, they put the bier on the
brink of the grave; and the two mourners waited patiently in the damp
clay, with a cold rain drizzling down, while the ragged boys whom the
spectacle had attracted into the churchyard played a noisy game at
hide-and-seek among the tombstones, or varied their amusements by
jumping backwards and forwards over the coffin. Mr. Sowerberry and
Bumble, being personal friends of the clerk, sat by the fire with him,
and read the paper.
At length, after a lapse of something more than an hour, Mr. Bumble,
and Sowerberry, and the clerk, were seen running towards the grave.
Immediately afterwards, the clergyman appeared: putting on his surplice
as he came along. Mr. Bumble then thrashed a boy or two, to keep up
appearances; and the reverend gentleman, having read as much of the
burial service as could be compressed into four minutes, gave his
surplice to the clerk, and walked away again.
'Now, Bill!' said Sowerberry to the grave-digger. 'Fill up!'
It was no very difficult task, for the grave was so full, that the
uppermost coffin was within a few feet of the surface. The
grave-digger shovelled in the earth; stamped it loosely down with his
feet: shouldered his spade; and walked off, followed by the boys, who
murmured very loud complaints at the fun being over so soon.
'Come, my good fellow!' said Bumble, tapping the man on the back. 'They
want to shut up the yard.'
The man who had never once moved, since he had taken his station by the
grave side, started, raised his head, stared at the person who had
addressed him, walked forward for a few paces; and fell down in a
swoon. The crazy old woman was too much occupied in bewailing the loss
of her cloak (which the undertaker had taken off), to pay him any
attention; so they threw a can of cold water over him; and when he came
to, saw him safely out of the churchyard, locked the gate, and departed
on their different ways.
'Well, Oliver,' said Sowerberry, as they walked home, 'how do you like
it?'
'Pretty well, thank you, sir' replied Oliver, with considerable
hesitation. 'Not very much, sir.'
'Ah, you'll get used to it in time, Oliver,' said Sowerberry. 'Nothing
when you _are_ used to it, my boy.'
Oliver wondered, in his own mind, whether it had taken a very long time
to get Mr. Sowerberry used to it. But he thought it better not to ask
the question; and walked back to the shop: thinking over all he had
seen and heard.
| Oliver is understandably depressed in his new surroundings--he's in the dark and surrounded by coffins in a strange place--but he does finally go to sleep. He's woken up by kicking at the shop door. The owner of the kicking feet promises to "whop" Oliver when he comes in, and introduces himself as "Mister Noah Claypole." Noah is another apprentice in the undertaker's shop and, as a charity boy himself , he's used to being at the bottom of the ladder. So Noah's pretty psyched to have Oliver around to beat up on. We think Noah has some repressed anger issues. Noah and Charlotte, the "slatternly" servant girl introduced at the end of the previous chapter, are apparently good friends: Charlotte saves Noah the best pieces of bacon for his breakfast, while Oliver again gets the scraps, and has to eat them in the coldest corner of the kitchen. After Oliver's been there for about a month, Mr. Sowerberry comes up with the great idea of using Oliver as a "mute" in children's funerals--in other words, they'd dress him up in black and have him go along with the funeral procession to make it all look more "interesting." After all, as Mr. Sowerberry points out, "there's an expression of melancholy in his face which is very interesting" . Mr. Bumble comes by to order a funeral for some poor person who had the audacity to die at the workhouse . He ignores Oliver entirely, to Oliver's great relief. Oliver has to go along with Mr. Sowerberry to measure the corpse for the coffin. He discovers that the person who died was a wife and mother, and her bereaved husband is almost crazy with grief. The children are half-starved, and the dead woman's mother can't talk about anything but having a new cloak and some cake for the funeral. The husband goes on a long rant about how his wife had starved to death, and he blames the whole workhouse/poor-law system. All in all, it doesn't make Oliver all that enthusiastic about the funeral profession--especially since Mr. Sowerberry seems to take it all in stride. The funeral itself is even more depressing: Oliver, the husband, and the mother are the only people there . The minister is over an hour late, and keeps them waiting in the rain in the graveyard. Once he arrives, he babbles out the funeral service in four minutes, and then runs off again without trying to comfort the husband or offer to help his family. Cemetery space was at a premium in those days, so poor people had to share graves--the coffin was plopped into a grave that was already so full of other coffins that hers was only a couple of feet below the surface. When Oliver admits to Mr. Sowerberry that he didn't like the funeral at all, Mr. Sowerberry assures him that he'll get used to it in time. Oliver isn't so sure. | summary |
The month's trial over, Oliver was formally apprenticed. It was a nice
sickly season just at this time. In commercial phrase, coffins were
looking up; and, in the course of a few weeks, Oliver acquired a great
deal of experience. The success of Mr. Sowerberry's ingenious
speculation, exceeded even his most sanguine hopes. The oldest
inhabitants recollected no period at which measles had been so
prevalent, or so fatal to infant existence; and many were the mournful
processions which little Oliver headed, in a hat-band reaching down to
his knees, to the indescribable admiration and emotion of all the
mothers in the town. As Oliver accompanied his master in most of his
adult expeditions too, in order that he might acquire that equanimity
of demeanour and full command of nerve which was essential to a
finished undertaker, he had many opportunities of observing the
beautiful resignation and fortitude with which some strong-minded
people bear their trials and losses.
For instance; when Sowerberry had an order for the burial of some rich
old lady or gentleman, who was surrounded by a great number of nephews
and nieces, who had been perfectly inconsolable during the previous
illness, and whose grief had been wholly irrepressible even on the most
public occasions, they would be as happy among themselves as need
be--quite cheerful and contented--conversing together with as much
freedom and gaiety, as if nothing whatever had happened to disturb
them. Husbands, too, bore the loss of their wives with the most heroic
calmness. Wives, again, put on weeds for their husbands, as if, so far
from grieving in the garb of sorrow, they had made up their minds to
render it as becoming and attractive as possible. It was observable,
too, that ladies and gentlemen who were in passions of anguish during
the ceremony of interment, recovered almost as soon as they reached
home, and became quite composed before the tea-drinking was over. All
this was very pleasant and improving to see; and Oliver beheld it with
great admiration.
That Oliver Twist was moved to resignation by the example of these good
people, I cannot, although I am his biographer, undertake to affirm
with any degree of confidence; but I can most distinctly say, that for
many months he continued meekly to submit to the domination and
ill-treatment of Noah Claypole: who used him far worse than before, now
that his jealousy was roused by seeing the new boy promoted to the
black stick and hatband, while he, the old one, remained stationary in
the muffin-cap and leathers. Charlotte treated him ill, because Noah
did; and Mrs. Sowerberry was his decided enemy, because Mr. Sowerberry
was disposed to be his friend; so, between these three on one side, and
a glut of funerals on the other, Oliver was not altogether as
comfortable as the hungry pig was, when he was shut up, by mistake, in
the grain department of a brewery.
And now, I come to a very important passage in Oliver's history; for I
have to record an act, slight and unimportant perhaps in appearance,
but which indirectly produced a material change in all his future
prospects and proceedings.
One day, Oliver and Noah had descended into the kitchen at the usual
dinner-hour, to banquet upon a small joint of mutton--a pound and a
half of the worst end of the neck--when Charlotte being called out of
the way, there ensued a brief interval of time, which Noah Claypole,
being hungry and vicious, considered he could not possibly devote to a
worthier purpose than aggravating and tantalising young Oliver Twist.
Intent upon this innocent amusement, Noah put his feet on the
table-cloth; and pulled Oliver's hair; and twitched his ears; and
expressed his opinion that he was a 'sneak'; and furthermore announced
his intention of coming to see him hanged, whenever that desirable
event should take place; and entered upon various topics of petty
annoyance, like a malicious and ill-conditioned charity-boy as he was.
But, making Oliver cry, Noah attempted to be more facetious still; and
in his attempt, did what many sometimes do to this day, when they want
to be funny. He got rather personal.
'Work'us,' said Noah, 'how's your mother?'
'She's dead,' replied Oliver; 'don't you say anything about her to me!'
Oliver's colour rose as he said this; he breathed quickly; and there
was a curious working of the mouth and nostrils, which Mr. Claypole
thought must be the immediate precursor of a violent fit of crying.
Under this impression he returned to the charge.
'What did she die of, Work'us?' said Noah.
'Of a broken heart, some of our old nurses told me,' replied Oliver:
more as if he were talking to himself, than answering Noah. 'I think I
know what it must be to die of that!'
'Tol de rol lol lol, right fol lairy, Work'us,' said Noah, as a tear
rolled down Oliver's cheek. 'What's set you a snivelling now?'
'Not _you_,' replied Oliver, sharply. 'There; that's enough. Don't say
anything more to me about her; you'd better not!'
'Better not!' exclaimed Noah. 'Well! Better not! Work'us, don't be
impudent. _Your_ mother, too! She was a nice 'un she was. Oh, Lor!'
And here, Noah nodded his head expressively; and curled up as much of
his small red nose as muscular action could collect together, for the
occasion.
'Yer know, Work'us,' continued Noah, emboldened by Oliver's silence,
and speaking in a jeering tone of affected pity: of all tones the most
annoying: 'Yer know, Work'us, it can't be helped now; and of course yer
couldn't help it then; and I am very sorry for it; and I'm sure we all
are, and pity yer very much. But yer must know, Work'us, yer mother
was a regular right-down bad 'un.'
'What did you say?' inquired Oliver, looking up very quickly.
'A regular right-down bad 'un, Work'us,' replied Noah, coolly. 'And
it's a great deal better, Work'us, that she died when she did, or else
she'd have been hard labouring in Bridewell, or transported, or hung;
which is more likely than either, isn't it?'
Crimson with fury, Oliver started up; overthrew the chair and table;
seized Noah by the throat; shook him, in the violence of his rage, till
his teeth chattered in his head; and collecting his whole force into
one heavy blow, felled him to the ground.
A minute ago, the boy had looked the quiet child, mild, dejected
creature that harsh treatment had made him. But his spirit was roused
at last; the cruel insult to his dead mother had set his blood on fire.
His breast heaved; his attitude was erect; his eye bright and vivid;
his whole person changed, as he stood glaring over the cowardly
tormentor who now lay crouching at his feet; and defied him with an
energy he had never known before.
'He'll murder me!' blubbered Noah. 'Charlotte! missis! Here's the
new boy a murdering of me! Help! help! Oliver's gone mad!
Char--lotte!'
Noah's shouts were responded to, by a loud scream from Charlotte, and a
louder from Mrs. Sowerberry; the former of whom rushed into the kitchen
by a side-door, while the latter paused on the staircase till she was
quite certain that it was consistent with the preservation of human
life, to come further down.
'Oh, you little wretch!' screamed Charlotte: seizing Oliver with her
utmost force, which was about equal to that of a moderately strong man
in particularly good training. 'Oh, you little un-grate-ful,
mur-de-rous, hor-rid villain!' And between every syllable, Charlotte
gave Oliver a blow with all her might: accompanying it with a scream,
for the benefit of society.
Charlotte's fist was by no means a light one; but, lest it should not
be effectual in calming Oliver's wrath, Mrs. Sowerberry plunged into
the kitchen, and assisted to hold him with one hand, while she
scratched his face with the other. In this favourable position of
affairs, Noah rose from the ground, and pommelled him behind.
This was rather too violent exercise to last long. When they were all
wearied out, and could tear and beat no longer, they dragged Oliver,
struggling and shouting, but nothing daunted, into the dust-cellar, and
there locked him up. This being done, Mrs. Sowerberry sunk into a
chair, and burst into tears.
'Bless her, she's going off!' said Charlotte. 'A glass of water, Noah,
dear. Make haste!'
'Oh! Charlotte,' said Mrs. Sowerberry: speaking as well as she could,
through a deficiency of breath, and a sufficiency of cold water, which
Noah had poured over her head and shoulders. 'Oh! Charlotte, what a
mercy we have not all been murdered in our beds!'
'Ah! mercy indeed, ma'am,' was the reply. I only hope this'll teach
master not to have any more of these dreadful creatures, that are born
to be murderers and robbers from their very cradle. Poor Noah! He was
all but killed, ma'am, when I come in.'
'Poor fellow!' said Mrs. Sowerberry: looking piteously on the
charity-boy.
Noah, whose top waistcoat-button might have been somewhere on a level
with the crown of Oliver's head, rubbed his eyes with the inside of his
wrists while this commiseration was bestowed upon him, and performed
some affecting tears and sniffs.
'What's to be done!' exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry. 'Your master's not at
home; there's not a man in the house, and he'll kick that door down in
ten minutes.' Oliver's vigorous plunges against the bit of timber in
question, rendered this occurance highly probable.
'Dear, dear! I don't know, ma'am,' said Charlotte, 'unless we send for
the police-officers.'
'Or the millingtary,' suggested Mr. Claypole.
'No, no,' said Mrs. Sowerberry: bethinking herself of Oliver's old
friend. 'Run to Mr. Bumble, Noah, and tell him to come here directly,
and not to lose a minute; never mind your cap! Make haste! You can
hold a knife to that black eye, as you run along. It'll keep the
swelling down.'
Noah stopped to make no reply, but started off at his fullest speed;
and very much it astonished the people who were out walking, to see a
charity-boy tearing through the streets pell-mell, with no cap on his
head, and a clasp-knife at his eye.
| Business is good for Mr. Sowerberry. Of course, this means that a lot of people are dying, which isn't really a good thing. But Oliver is getting a lot of experience attending funerals, because Mr. Sowerberry wants Oliver to "acquire that equanimity of demeanor so essential to a finished undertaker" . In other words, he wants Oliver to become as cold and business-like as he is, himself. Oliver observes a lot of hypocrisy in his new role as an undertaker's apprentice: he sees how people who have just lost a family member will act inconsolable in public, but will chat cheerfully with friends behind closed doors. Of course, Oliver never uses the word "hypocritical"--Dickens describes these scenes from Oliver's point of view, and Oliver's still too innocent to judge people. In fact, Dickens says that Oliver sees all of this "with great admiration." Noah, in the last month, has become more jealous of Oliver than ever, and Charlotte treats him badly because Noah does. And because Oliver is a favorite of Mr. Sowerberry, Mrs. Sowerberry mistreats him, as well. At this point, Dickens stops filling us in on how things are going in general, and gets down to a specific incident: Noah starts tormenting Oliver one day when they're alone in the kitchen, and he chooses to make fun of Oliver's mother. Big mistake. When Noah calls Oliver's mother "a right-down bad 'un," Oliver goes nuts on him, overturns a table, starts throttling him, and finishes by punching him in the face. Unsurprisingly, Noah's too big a wimp to stand up to Oliver , and starts whimpering for Charlotte and Mrs. Sowerberry to come to his rescue. Charlotte arrives and starts beating on Oliver from one side, while Mrs. Sowerberry holds his other arm and scratches at his face. Now that reinforcements have arrived, Noah plucks up the courage to start punching Oliver in the back. This scene is another one of the illustrations by Cruikshank--check it out. Once his assailants have worn themselves out, they lock Oliver in the cellar, and Mrs. Sowerberry goes into hysterics. Since Mr. Sowerberry isn't at home, Mrs. Sowerberry sends Noah off to fetch Mr. Bumble. | summary |
Noah Claypole ran along the streets at his swiftest pace, and paused
not once for breath, until he reached the workhouse-gate. Having rested
here, for a minute or so, to collect a good burst of sobs and an
imposing show of tears and terror, he knocked loudly at the wicket; and
presented such a rueful face to the aged pauper who opened it, that
even he, who saw nothing but rueful faces about him at the best of
times, started back in astonishment.
'Why, what's the matter with the boy!' said the old pauper.
'Mr. Bumble! Mr. Bumble!' cried Noah, with well-affected dismay: and
in tones so loud and agitated, that they not only caught the ear of Mr.
Bumble himself, who happened to be hard by, but alarmed him so much
that he rushed into the yard without his cocked hat,--which is a very
curious and remarkable circumstance: as showing that even a beadle,
acted upon a sudden and powerful impulse, may be afflicted with a
momentary visitation of loss of self-possession, and forgetfulness of
personal dignity.
'Oh, Mr. Bumble, sir!' said Noah: 'Oliver, sir,--Oliver has--'
'What? What?' interposed Mr. Bumble: with a gleam of pleasure in his
metallic eyes. 'Not run away; he hasn't run away, has he, Noah?'
'No, sir, no. Not run away, sir, but he's turned wicious,' replied
Noah. 'He tried to murder me, sir; and then he tried to murder
Charlotte; and then missis. Oh! what dreadful pain it is!
Such agony, please, sir!' And here, Noah writhed and twisted his body
into an extensive variety of eel-like positions; thereby giving Mr.
Bumble to understand that, from the violent and sanguinary onset of
Oliver Twist, he had sustained severe internal injury and damage, from
which he was at that moment suffering the acutest torture.
When Noah saw that the intelligence he communicated perfectly paralysed
Mr. Bumble, he imparted additional effect thereunto, by bewailing his
dreadful wounds ten times louder than before; and when he observed a
gentleman in a white waistcoat crossing the yard, he was more tragic in
his lamentations than ever: rightly conceiving it highly expedient to
attract the notice, and rouse the indignation, of the gentleman
aforesaid.
The gentleman's notice was very soon attracted; for he had not walked
three paces, when he turned angrily round, and inquired what that young
cur was howling for, and why Mr. Bumble did not favour him with
something which would render the series of vocular exclamations so
designated, an involuntary process?
'It's a poor boy from the free-school, sir,' replied Mr. Bumble, 'who
has been nearly murdered--all but murdered, sir,--by young Twist.'
'By Jove!' exclaimed the gentleman in the white waistcoat, stopping
short. 'I knew it! I felt a strange presentiment from the very first,
that that audacious young savage would come to be hung!'
'He has likewise attempted, sir, to murder the female servant,' said
Mr. Bumble, with a face of ashy paleness.
'And his missis,' interposed Mr. Claypole.
'And his master, too, I think you said, Noah?' added Mr. Bumble.
'No! he's out, or he would have murdered him,' replied Noah. 'He said
he wanted to.'
'Ah! Said he wanted to, did he, my boy?' inquired the gentleman in the
white waistcoat.
'Yes, sir,' replied Noah. 'And please, sir, missis wants to know
whether Mr. Bumble can spare time to step up there, directly, and flog
him--'cause master's out.'
'Certainly, my boy; certainly,' said the gentleman in the white
waistcoat: smiling benignly, and patting Noah's head, which was about
three inches higher than his own. 'You're a good boy--a very good boy.
Here's a penny for you. Bumble, just step up to Sowerberry's with your
cane, and see what's best to be done. Don't spare him, Bumble.'
'No, I will not, sir,' replied the beadle. And the cocked hat and cane
having been, by this time, adjusted to their owner's satisfaction, Mr.
Bumble and Noah Claypole betook themselves with all speed to the
undertaker's shop.
Here the position of affairs had not at all improved. Sowerberry had
not yet returned, and Oliver continued to kick, with undiminished
vigour, at the cellar-door. The accounts of his ferocity as related by
Mrs. Sowerberry and Charlotte, were of so startling a nature, that Mr.
Bumble judged it prudent to parley, before opening the door. With this
view he gave a kick at the outside, by way of prelude; and, then,
applying his mouth to the keyhole, said, in a deep and impressive tone:
'Oliver!'
'Come; you let me out!' replied Oliver, from the inside.
'Do you know this here voice, Oliver?' said Mr. Bumble.
'Yes,' replied Oliver.
'Ain't you afraid of it, sir? Ain't you a-trembling while I speak,
sir?' said Mr. Bumble.
'No!' replied Oliver, boldly.
An answer so different from the one he had expected to elicit, and was
in the habit of receiving, staggered Mr. Bumble not a little. He
stepped back from the keyhole; drew himself up to his full height; and
looked from one to another of the three bystanders, in mute
astonishment.
'Oh, you know, Mr. Bumble, he must be mad,' said Mrs. Sowerberry.
'No boy in half his senses could venture to speak so to you.'
'It's not Madness, ma'am,' replied Mr. Bumble, after a few moments of
deep meditation. 'It's Meat.'
'What?' exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.
'Meat, ma'am, meat,' replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. 'You've
over-fed him, ma'am. You've raised a artificial soul and spirit in
him, ma'am unbecoming a person of his condition: as the board, Mrs.
Sowerberry, who are practical philosophers, will tell you. What have
paupers to do with soul or spirit? It's quite enough that we let 'em
have live bodies. If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma'am, this would
never have happened.'
'Dear, dear!' ejaculated Mrs. Sowerberry, piously raising her eyes to
the kitchen ceiling: 'this comes of being liberal!'
The liberality of Mrs. Sowerberry to Oliver, had consisted of a profuse
bestowal upon him of all the dirty odds and ends which nobody else
would eat; so there was a great deal of meekness and self-devotion in
her voluntarily remaining under Mr. Bumble's heavy accusation. Of
which, to do her justice, she was wholly innocent, in thought, word, or
deed.
'Ah!' said Mr. Bumble, when the lady brought her eyes down to earth
again; 'the only thing that can be done now, that I know of, is to
leave him in the cellar for a day or so, till he's a little starved
down; and then to take him out, and keep him on gruel all through the
apprenticeship. He comes of a bad family. Excitable natures, Mrs.
Sowerberry! Both the nurse and doctor said, that that mother of his
made her way here, against difficulties and pain that would have killed
any well-disposed woman, weeks before.'
At this point of Mr. Bumble's discourse, Oliver, just hearing enough to
know that some allusion was being made to his mother, recommenced
kicking, with a violence that rendered every other sound inaudible.
Sowerberry returned at this juncture. Oliver's offence having been
explained to him, with such exaggerations as the ladies thought best
calculated to rouse his ire, he unlocked the cellar-door in a
twinkling, and dragged his rebellious apprentice out, by the collar.
Oliver's clothes had been torn in the beating he had received; his face
was bruised and scratched; and his hair scattered over his forehead.
The angry flush had not disappeared, however; and when he was pulled
out of his prison, he scowled boldly on Noah, and looked quite
undismayed.
'Now, you are a nice young fellow, ain't you?' said Sowerberry; giving
Oliver a shake, and a box on the ear.
'He called my mother names,' replied Oliver.
'Well, and what if he did, you little ungrateful wretch?' said Mrs.
Sowerberry. 'She deserved what he said, and worse.'
'She didn't' said Oliver.
'She did,' said Mrs. Sowerberry.
'It's a lie!' said Oliver.
Mrs. Sowerberry burst into a flood of tears.
This flood of tears left Mr. Sowerberry no alternative. If he had
hesitated for one instant to punish Oliver most severely, it must be
quite clear to every experienced reader that he would have been,
according to all precedents in disputes of matrimony established, a
brute, an unnatural husband, an insulting creature, a base imitation of
a man, and various other agreeable characters too numerous for recital
within the limits of this chapter. To do him justice, he was, as far
as his power went--it was not very extensive--kindly disposed towards
the boy; perhaps, because it was his interest to be so; perhaps,
because his wife disliked him. The flood of tears, however, left him no
resource; so he at once gave him a drubbing, which satisfied even Mrs.
Sowerberry herself, and rendered Mr. Bumble's subsequent application of
the parochial cane, rather unnecessary. For the rest of the day, he
was shut up in the back kitchen, in company with a pump and a slice of
bread; and at night, Mrs. Sowerberry, after making various remarks
outside the door, by no means complimentary to the memory of his
mother, looked into the room, and, amidst the jeers and pointings of
Noah and Charlotte, ordered him upstairs to his dismal bed.
It was not until he was left alone in the silence and stillness of the
gloomy workshop of the undertaker, that Oliver gave way to the feelings
which the day's treatment may be supposed likely to have awakened in a
mere child. He had listened to their taunts with a look of contempt;
he had borne the lash without a cry: for he felt that pride swelling in
his heart which would have kept down a shriek to the last, though they
had roasted him alive. But now, when there were none to see or hear
him, he fell upon his knees on the floor; and, hiding his face in his
hands, wept such tears as, God send for the credit of our nature, few
so young may ever have cause to pour out before him!
For a long time, Oliver remained motionless in this attitude. The
candle was burning low in the socket when he rose to his feet. Having
gazed cautiously round him, and listened intently, he gently undid the
fastenings of the door, and looked abroad.
It was a cold, dark night. The stars seemed, to the boy's eyes,
farther from the earth than he had ever seen them before; there was no
wind; and the sombre shadows thrown by the trees upon the ground,
looked sepulchral and death-like, from being so still. He softly
reclosed the door. Having availed himself of the expiring light of the
candle to tie up in a handkerchief the few articles of wearing apparel
he had, sat himself down upon a bench, to wait for morning.
With the first ray of light that struggled through the crevices in the
shutters, Oliver arose, and again unbarred the door. One timid look
around--one moment's pause of hesitation--he had closed it behind him,
and was in the open street.
He looked to the right and to the left, uncertain whither to fly.
He remembered to have seen the waggons, as they went out, toiling up
the hill. He took the same route; and arriving at a footpath across
the fields: which he knew, after some distance, led out again into the
road; struck into it, and walked quickly on.
Along this same footpath, Oliver well-remembered he had trotted beside
Mr. Bumble, when he first carried him to the workhouse from the farm.
His way lay directly in front of the cottage. His heart beat quickly
when he bethought himself of this; and he half resolved to turn back.
He had come a long way though, and should lose a great deal of time by
doing so. Besides, it was so early that there was very little fear of
his being seen; so he walked on.
He reached the house. There was no appearance of its inmates stirring
at that early hour. Oliver stopped, and peeped into the garden. A
child was weeding one of the little beds; as he stopped, he raised his
pale face and disclosed the features of one of his former companions.
Oliver felt glad to see him, before he went; for, though younger than
himself, he had been his little friend and playmate. They had been
beaten, and starved, and shut up together, many and many a time.
'Hush, Dick!' said Oliver, as the boy ran to the gate, and thrust his
thin arm between the rails to greet him. 'Is any one up?'
'Nobody but me,' replied the child.
'You musn't say you saw me, Dick,' said Oliver. 'I am running away.
They beat and ill-use me, Dick; and I am going to seek my fortune, some
long way off. I don't know where. How pale you are!'
'I heard the doctor tell them I was dying,' replied the child with a
faint smile. 'I am very glad to see you, dear; but don't stop, don't
stop!'
'Yes, yes, I will, to say good-b'ye to you,' replied Oliver. 'I shall
see you again, Dick. I know I shall! You will be well and happy!'
'I hope so,' replied the child. 'After I am dead, but not before. I
know the doctor must be right, Oliver, because I dream so much of
Heaven, and Angels, and kind faces that I never see when I am awake.
Kiss me,' said the child, climbing up the low gate, and flinging his
little arms round Oliver's neck. 'Good-b'ye, dear! God bless you!'
The blessing was from a young child's lips, but it was the first that
Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through the struggles
and sufferings, and troubles and changes, of his after life, he never
once forgot it.
| Noah arrives at the workhouse and dramatically complains to Mr. Bumble that Oliver has almost murdered him. When he sees the gentleman in the white waistcoat walk by, he starts wailing even louder. Noah gets the foul called: the gentleman in the white waistcoat repeats his prophecy that Oliver will grow up to be hanged, and sends Mr. Bumble to the Sowerberrys' house to beat Oliver into submission. When Mr. Bumble arrives, Oliver's still so angry that he's not even afraid of Mr. Bumble. Mr. Bumble tells Mrs. Sowerberry that she's overfed Oliver, and that's why he's plucked up the courage to stand up to Noah and is unafraid of Mr. Bumble. His solution is to starve Oliver for a few days so that he won't have the energy to fight back when they let him out of the cellar. When Mr. Sowerberry gets back, his wife's exaggerations of Oliver's crimes force him to punish the boy, even though he probably wouldn't have wanted to without his wife's pushing. Oliver spends the rest of the day shut up in the back kitchen, and finally is ordered up to bed. After crying for a while, Oliver stands up and leaves the house. He's not sure where he's going to go, but his first stop is Mrs. Mann's baby farm. Oliver stops in front of the gate and sees one of his former playmates and fellow-sufferer, Dick. Since Dick is the only one up, Oliver risks staying for a few minutes to say goodbye before leaving "to seek my fortune some long way off." Oliver tries to assure Dick that they'll meet again sometime, but Dick says no--they'll only meet again after he's dead. What an optimistic guy. Apparently the doctor thinks that poor little Dick won't be long for this world, and Dick hugs Oliver, blesses him, and sends him on his way. | summary |
Oliver reached the stile at which the by-path terminated; and once more
gained the high-road. It was eight o'clock now. Though he was nearly
five miles away from the town, he ran, and hid behind the hedges, by
turns, till noon: fearing that he might be pursued and overtaken. Then
he sat down to rest by the side of the milestone, and began to think,
for the first time, where he had better go and try to live.
The stone by which he was seated, bore, in large characters, an
intimation that it was just seventy miles from that spot to London. The
name awakened a new train of ideas in the boy's mind.
London!--that great place!--nobody--not even Mr. Bumble--could ever
find him there! He had often heard the old men in the workhouse, too,
say that no lad of spirit need want in London; and that there were ways
of living in that vast city, which those who had been bred up in
country parts had no idea of. It was the very place for a homeless
boy, who must die in the streets unless some one helped him. As these
things passed through his thoughts, he jumped upon his feet, and again
walked forward.
He had diminished the distance between himself and London by full four
miles more, before he recollected how much he must undergo ere he could
hope to reach his place of destination. As this consideration forced
itself upon him, he slackened his pace a little, and meditated upon his
means of getting there. He had a crust of bread, a coarse shirt, and
two pairs of stockings, in his bundle. He had a penny too--a gift of
Sowerberry's after some funeral in which he had acquitted himself more
than ordinarily well--in his pocket. 'A clean shirt,' thought Oliver,
'is a very comfortable thing; and so are two pairs of darned stockings;
and so is a penny; but they are small helps to a sixty-five miles' walk
in winter time.' But Oliver's thoughts, like those of most other
people, although they were extremely ready and active to point out his
difficulties, were wholly at a loss to suggest any feasible mode of
surmounting them; so, after a good deal of thinking to no particular
purpose, he changed his little bundle over to the other shoulder, and
trudged on.
Oliver walked twenty miles that day; and all that time tasted nothing
but the crust of dry bread, and a few draughts of water, which he
begged at the cottage-doors by the road-side. When the night came, he
turned into a meadow; and, creeping close under a hay-rick, determined
to lie there, till morning. He felt frightened at first, for the wind
moaned dismally over the empty fields: and he was cold and hungry, and
more alone than he had ever felt before. Being very tired with his
walk, however, he soon fell asleep and forgot his troubles.
He felt cold and stiff, when he got up next morning, and so hungry that
he was obliged to exchange the penny for a small loaf, in the very
first village through which he passed. He had walked no more than
twelve miles, when night closed in again. His feet were sore, and his
legs so weak that they trembled beneath him. Another night passed in
the bleak damp air, made him worse; when he set forward on his journey
next morning he could hardly crawl along.
He waited at the bottom of a steep hill till a stage-coach came up, and
then begged of the outside passengers; but there were very few who took
any notice of him: and even those told him to wait till they got to the
top of the hill, and then let them see how far he could run for a
halfpenny. Poor Oliver tried to keep up with the coach a little way,
but was unable to do it, by reason of his fatigue and sore feet. When
the outsides saw this, they put their halfpence back into their pockets
again, declaring that he was an idle young dog, and didn't deserve
anything; and the coach rattled away and left only a cloud of dust
behind.
In some villages, large painted boards were fixed up: warning all
persons who begged within the district, that they would be sent to
jail. This frightened Oliver very much, and made him glad to get out
of those villages with all possible expedition. In others, he would
stand about the inn-yards, and look mournfully at every one who passed:
a proceeding which generally terminated in the landlady's ordering one
of the post-boys who were lounging about, to drive that strange boy out
of the place, for she was sure he had come to steal something. If he
begged at a farmer's house, ten to one but they threatened to set the
dog on him; and when he showed his nose in a shop, they talked about
the beadle--which brought Oliver's heart into his mouth,--very often
the only thing he had there, for many hours together.
In fact, if it had not been for a good-hearted turnpike-man, and a
benevolent old lady, Oliver's troubles would have been shortened by the
very same process which had put an end to his mother's; in other words,
he would most assuredly have fallen dead upon the king's highway. But
the turnpike-man gave him a meal of bread and cheese; and the old lady,
who had a shipwrecked grandson wandering barefoot in some distant part
of the earth, took pity upon the poor orphan, and gave him what little
she could afford--and more--with such kind and gentle words, and such
tears of sympathy and compassion, that they sank deeper into Oliver's
soul, than all the sufferings he had ever undergone.
Early on the seventh morning after he had left his native place, Oliver
limped slowly into the little town of Barnet. The window-shutters were
closed; the street was empty; not a soul had awakened to the business
of the day. The sun was rising in all its splendid beauty; but the
light only served to show the boy his own lonesomeness and desolation,
as he sat, with bleeding feet and covered with dust, upon a door-step.
By degrees, the shutters were opened; the window-blinds were drawn up;
and people began passing to and fro. Some few stopped to gaze at
Oliver for a moment or two, or turned round to stare at him as they
hurried by; but none relieved him, or troubled themselves to inquire
how he came there. He had no heart to beg. And there he sat.
He had been crouching on the step for some time: wondering at the great
number of public-houses (every other house in Barnet was a tavern,
large or small), gazing listlessly at the coaches as they passed
through, and thinking how strange it seemed that they could do, with
ease, in a few hours, what it had taken him a whole week of courage and
determination beyond his years to accomplish: when he was roused by
observing that a boy, who had passed him carelessly some minutes
before, had returned, and was now surveying him most earnestly from the
opposite side of the way. He took little heed of this at first; but
the boy remained in the same attitude of close observation so long,
that Oliver raised his head, and returned his steady look. Upon this,
the boy crossed over; and walking close up to Oliver, said,
'Hullo, my covey! What's the row?'
The boy who addressed this inquiry to the young wayfarer, was about his
own age: but one of the queerest looking boys that Oliver had even
seen. He was a snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy enough; and
as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had about him all
the airs and manners of a man. He was short of his age: with rather
bow-legs, and little, sharp, ugly eyes. His hat was stuck on the top
of his head so lightly, that it threatened to fall off every
moment--and would have done so, very often, if the wearer had not had a
knack of every now and then giving his head a sudden twitch, which
brought it back to its old place again. He wore a man's coat, which
reached nearly to his heels. He had turned the cuffs back, half-way up
his arm, to get his hands out of the sleeves: apparently with the
ultimate view of thrusting them into the pockets of his corduroy
trousers; for there he kept them. He was, altogether, as roystering
and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six, or
something less, in the bluchers.
'Hullo, my covey! What's the row?' said this strange young gentleman
to Oliver.
'I am very hungry and tired,' replied Oliver: the tears standing in his
eyes as he spoke. 'I have walked a long way. I have been walking these
seven days.'
'Walking for sivin days!' said the young gentleman. 'Oh, I see. Beak's
order, eh? But,' he added, noticing Oliver's look of surprise, 'I
suppose you don't know what a beak is, my flash com-pan-i-on.'
Oliver mildly replied, that he had always heard a bird's mouth
described by the term in question.
'My eyes, how green!' exclaimed the young gentleman. 'Why, a beak's a
madgst'rate; and when you walk by a beak's order, it's not straight
forerd, but always agoing up, and niver a coming down agin. Was you
never on the mill?'
'What mill?' inquired Oliver.
'What mill! Why, _the_ mill--the mill as takes up so little room that
it'll work inside a Stone Jug; and always goes better when the wind's
low with people, than when it's high; acos then they can't get workmen.
But come,' said the young gentleman; 'you want grub, and you shall have
it. I'm at low-water-mark myself--only one bob and a magpie; but, as
far as it goes, I'll fork out and stump. Up with you on your pins.
There! Now then! 'Morrice!'
Assisting Oliver to rise, the young gentleman took him to an adjacent
chandler's shop, where he purchased a sufficiency of ready-dressed ham
and a half-quartern loaf, or, as he himself expressed it, 'a fourpenny
bran!' the ham being kept clean and preserved from dust, by the
ingenious expedient of making a hole in the loaf by pulling out a
portion of the crumb, and stuffing it therein. Taking the bread under
his arm, the young gentlman turned into a small public-house, and led
the way to a tap-room in the rear of the premises. Here, a pot of beer
was brought in, by direction of the mysterious youth; and Oliver,
falling to, at his new friend's bidding, made a long and hearty meal,
during the progress of which the strange boy eyed him from time to time
with great attention.
'Going to London?' said the strange boy, when Oliver had at length
concluded.
'Yes.'
'Got any lodgings?'
'No.'
'Money?'
'No.'
The strange boy whistled; and put his arms into his pockets, as far as
the big coat-sleeves would let them go.
'Do you live in London?' inquired Oliver.
'Yes. I do, when I'm at home,' replied the boy. 'I suppose you want
some place to sleep in to-night, don't you?'
'I do, indeed,' answered Oliver. 'I have not slept under a roof since I
left the country.'
'Don't fret your eyelids on that score,' said the young gentleman.
'I've got to be in London to-night; and I know a 'spectable old
gentleman as lives there, wot'll give you lodgings for nothink, and
never ask for the change--that is, if any genelman he knows interduces
you. And don't he know me? Oh, no! Not in the least! By no means.
Certainly not!'
The young gentleman smiled, as if to intimate that the latter fragments
of discourse were playfully ironical; and finished the beer as he did
so.
This unexpected offer of shelter was too tempting to be resisted;
especially as it was immediately followed up, by the assurance that the
old gentleman referred to, would doubtless provide Oliver with a
comfortable place, without loss of time. This led to a more friendly
and confidential dialogue; from which Oliver discovered that his
friend's name was Jack Dawkins, and that he was a peculiar pet and
protege of the elderly gentleman before mentioned.
Mr. Dawkin's appearance did not say a vast deal in favour of the
comforts which his patron's interest obtained for those whom he took
under his protection; but, as he had a rather flightly and dissolute
mode of conversing, and furthermore avowed that among his intimate
friends he was better known by the sobriquet of 'The Artful Dodger,'
Oliver concluded that, being of a dissipated and careless turn, the
moral precepts of his benefactor had hitherto been thrown away upon
him. Under this impression, he secretly resolved to cultivate the good
opinion of the old gentleman as quickly as possible; and, if he found
the Dodger incorrigible, as he more than half suspected he should, to
decline the honour of his farther acquaintance.
As John Dawkins objected to their entering London before nightfall, it
was nearly eleven o'clock when they reached the turnpike at Islington.
They crossed from the Angel into St. John's Road; struck down the small
street which terminates at Sadler's Wells Theatre; through Exmouth
Street and Coppice Row; down the little court by the side of the
workhouse; across the classic ground which once bore the name of
Hockley-in-the-Hole; thence into Little Saffron Hill; and so into
Saffron Hill the Great: along which the Dodger scudded at a rapid pace,
directing Oliver to follow close at his heels.
Although Oliver had enough to occupy his attention in keeping sight of
his leader, he could not help bestowing a few hasty glances on either
side of the way, as he passed along. A dirtier or more wretched place
he had never seen. The street was very narrow and muddy, and the air
was impregnated with filthy odours.
There were a good many small shops; but the only stock in trade
appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were
crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from the inside. The
sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the
place, were the public-houses; and in them, the lowest orders of Irish
were wrangling with might and main. Covered ways and yards, which here
and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of
houses, where drunken men and women were positively wallowing in filth;
and from several of the door-ways, great ill-looking fellows were
cautiously emerging, bound, to all appearance, on no very well-disposed
or harmless errands.
Oliver was just considering whether he hadn't better run away, when
they reached the bottom of the hill. His conductor, catching him by
the arm, pushed open the door of a house near Field Lane; and drawing
him into the passage, closed it behind them.
'Now, then!' cried a voice from below, in reply to a whistle from the
Dodger.
'Plummy and slam!' was the reply.
This seemed to be some watchword or signal that all was right; for the
light of a feeble candle gleamed on the wall at the remote end of the
passage; and a man's face peeped out, from where a balustrade of the
old kitchen staircase had been broken away.
'There's two on you,' said the man, thrusting the candle farther out,
and shielding his eyes with his hand. 'Who's the t'other one?'
'A new pal,' replied Jack Dawkins, pulling Oliver forward.
'Where did he come from?'
'Greenland. Is Fagin upstairs?'
'Yes, he's a sortin' the wipes. Up with you!' The candle was drawn
back, and the face disappeared.
Oliver, groping his way with one hand, and having the other firmly
grasped by his companion, ascended with much difficulty the dark and
broken stairs: which his conductor mounted with an ease and expedition
that showed he was well acquainted with them.
He threw open the door of a back-room, and drew Oliver in after him.
The walls and ceiling of the room were perfectly black with age and
dirt. There was a deal table before the fire: upon which were a
candle, stuck in a ginger-beer bottle, two or three pewter pots, a loaf
and butter, and a plate. In a frying-pan, which was on the fire, and
which was secured to the mantelshelf by a string, some sausages were
cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was
a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face
was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a
greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare; and seemed to be dividing
his attention between the frying-pan and the clothes-horse, over which
a great number of silk handkerchiefs were hanging. Several rough beds
made of old sacks, were huddled side by side on the floor. Seated round
the table were four or five boys, none older than the Dodger, smoking
long clay pipes, and drinking spirits with the air of middle-aged men.
These all crowded about their associate as he whispered a few words to
the Jew; and then turned round and grinned at Oliver. So did the Jew
himself, toasting-fork in hand.
'This is him, Fagin,' said Jack Dawkins;'my friend Oliver Twist.'
The Jew grinned; and, making a low obeisance to Oliver, took him by the
hand, and hoped he should have the honour of his intimate acquaintance.
Upon this, the young gentleman with the pipes came round him, and shook
both his hands very hard--especially the one in which he held his
little bundle. One young gentleman was very anxious to hang up his cap
for him; and another was so obliging as to put his hands in his
pockets, in order that, as he was very tired, he might not have the
trouble of emptying them, himself, when he went to bed. These
civilities would probably be extended much farther, but for a liberal
exercise of the Jew's toasting-fork on the heads and shoulders of the
affectionate youths who offered them.
'We are very glad to see you, Oliver, very,' said the Jew. 'Dodger,
take off the sausages; and draw a tub near the fire for Oliver. Ah,
you're a-staring at the pocket-handkerchiefs! eh, my dear. There are a
good many of 'em, ain't there? We've just looked 'em out, ready for the
wash; that's all, Oliver; that's all. Ha! ha! ha!'
The latter part of this speech, was hailed by a boisterous shout from
all the hopeful pupils of the merry old gentleman. In the midst of
which they went to supper.
Oliver ate his share, and the Jew then mixed him a glass of hot
gin-and-water: telling him he must drink it off directly, because
another gentleman wanted the tumbler. Oliver did as he was desired.
Immediately afterwards he felt himself gently lifted on to one of the
sacks; and then he sunk into a deep sleep.
| Oliver is at the very edge of town, and it is now eight in the morning. He's so afraid of being caught by the parish authorities or the Sowerberrys that he runs, dodging between hedges, until noon. Oliver stops to rest by a milestone that says that he is seventy miles from London. Oliver remembers having heard about London from the old men at the workhouse, and decides it's "the very place for a homeless boy, who must die in the streets unless some one helped him" . Oliver walks five miles before stopping to take stock of his supplies: he only has a crust of bread, an extra shirt, two spare pairs of stockings , and a penny, and he now has sixty-five miles more to go. He walks twenty miles that day, and only eats the crust of bread he has with him, and spends the night under a hay-rick in a meadow. He wakes up so hungry that he has to spend his only penny on a loaf of bread, and he's so tired from the events of the last few days that he's only able to walk twelve miles that day. He tries to beg from some people on the outside of a stagecoach . But they ignore him. Some folks threaten to set their dogs on him for begging, some assume he's planning to steal from them, and some towns have signs up saying that anyone begging within the city limits will be sent to jail. The only two people who have any compassion on poor Oliver are two poor people who can't really afford to--a turnpike-man , and an old lady who is reminded of her own lost grandson when she sees Oliver. After a week of walking from his hometown, Oliver arrives at the town of Barnet . He arrives at sunrise, but "the light only seemed to show the boy his own lonesomeness and desolation as he sat with bleeding feet and covered with dust upon a cold door-step" . As the town wakes up, passersby seem suspicious of him, but don't offer him any help. A boy notices Oliver sitting there, and after looking at him for a while, comes over and says, "Hullo! My covey, what's the row?" Before translating this odd speech for his readers, Dickens backs up to describe the boy: he's about Oliver's age, but swaggers around like a full-grown man, and wears grown-up clothes with the sleeves and legs turned up. He asks Oliver some more questions that Oliver doesn't understand and his explanations aren't much more clear than the original. For now, suffice to say that all the novelists who were writing about crime liked to work some criminal slang into their novels to spice things up a bit, and make it seem like they really knew how criminals communicated. Did criminals really talk like that in the nineteenth century? Hard to say-- you'll hear different answers from different people. In any case, the mix of Oliver's innocence and the Dodger's slang is pretty hilarious. Back to the story. After some more misunderstandings, the young man offers to buy Oliver some food, which Oliver obviously accepts. As he eats, he tells the boy that he's going to London. The boy asks if he knows where he's going to stay, or if he has any money. When Oliver answers "no" to both, the boy says that he knows of a "genelman" in London who will give Oliver a place to stay "for nothink," so long as Oliver is introduced by this boy. Of course Oliver can't say no to an offer like this--he's been sleeping outside for a week, and it's the middle of winter. The boy introduces himself as "Jack Dawkins," but he's more often known as "the Artful Dodger" . Oliver decides that the Dodger is probably not a very moral person, and decides that he'll avoid spending much time with him in the future if that turns out to be true. They arrive in London after eleven o'clock at night, and pass through a dirty neighborhood to a tiny alley called Field-Lane . Okay, back to the story. Besides Fagin, the room is full of various other young boys. There are a whole lot of pocket handkerchiefs spread out around the room, which Fagin tells Oliver are being sorted for the laundry. All the boys seem to find this hilarious. After giving him a dinner of sausage, they give him a tumbler of gin and water. Even watered down, you can imagine the effect that much liquor has on a small boy: he drops right off to sleep. | summary |
It was late next morning when Oliver awoke, from a sound, long sleep.
There was no other person in the room but the old Jew, who was boiling
some coffee in a saucepan for breakfast, and whistling softly to
himself as he stirred it round and round, with an iron spoon. He would
stop every now and then to listen when there was the least noise below:
and when he had satisfied himself, he would go on whistling and
stirring again, as before.
Although Oliver had roused himself from sleep, he was not thoroughly
awake. There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you
dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half
conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in
five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in
perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of
what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its
mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space,
when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.
Oliver was precisely in this condition. He saw the Jew with his
half-closed eyes; heard his low whistling; and recognised the sound of
the spoon grating against the saucepan's sides: and yet the self-same
senses were mentally engaged, at the same time, in busy action with
almost everybody he had ever known.
When the coffee was done, the Jew drew the saucepan to the hob.
Standing, then in an irresolute attitude for a few minutes, as if he
did not well know how to employ himself, he turned round and looked at
Oliver, and called him by his name. He did not answer, and was to all
appearances asleep.
After satisfying himself upon this head, the Jew stepped gently to the
door: which he fastened. He then drew forth: as it seemed to Oliver,
from some trap in the floor: a small box, which he placed carefully on
the table. His eyes glistened as he raised the lid, and looked in.
Dragging an old chair to the table, he sat down; and took from it a
magnificent gold watch, sparkling with jewels.
'Aha!' said the Jew, shrugging up his shoulders, and distorting every
feature with a hideous grin. 'Clever dogs! Clever dogs! Staunch to the
last! Never told the old parson where they were. Never poached upon old
Fagin! And why should they? It wouldn't have loosened the knot, or kept
the drop up, a minute longer. No, no, no! Fine fellows! Fine fellows!'
With these, and other muttered reflections of the like nature, the Jew
once more deposited the watch in its place of safety. At least half a
dozen more were severally drawn forth from the same box, and surveyed
with equal pleasure; besides rings, brooches, bracelets, and other
articles of jewellery, of such magnificent materials, and costly
workmanship, that Oliver had no idea, even of their names.
Having replaced these trinkets, the Jew took out another: so small that
it lay in the palm of his hand. There seemed to be some very minute
inscription on it; for the Jew laid it flat upon the table, and shading
it with his hand, pored over it, long and earnestly. At length he put
it down, as if despairing of success; and, leaning back in his chair,
muttered:
'What a fine thing capital punishment is! Dead men never repent; dead
men never bring awkward stories to light. Ah, it's a fine thing for the
trade! Five of 'em strung up in a row, and none left to play booty, or
turn white-livered!'
As the Jew uttered these words, his bright dark eyes, which had been
staring vacantly before him, fell on Oliver's face; the boy's eyes were
fixed on his in mute curiousity; and although the recognition was only
for an instant--for the briefest space of time that can possibly be
conceived--it was enough to show the old man that he had been observed.
He closed the lid of the box with a loud crash; and, laying his hand on
a bread knife which was on the table, started furiously up. He trembled
very much though; for, even in his terror, Oliver could see that the
knife quivered in the air.
'What's that?' said the Jew. 'What do you watch me for? Why are you
awake? What have you seen? Speak out, boy! Quick--quick! for your life.
'I wasn't able to sleep any longer, sir,' replied Oliver, meekly. 'I am
very sorry if I have disturbed you, sir.'
'You were not awake an hour ago?' said the Jew, scowling fiercely on
the boy.
'No! No, indeed!' replied Oliver.
'Are you sure?' cried the Jew: with a still fiercer look than before:
and a threatening attitude.
'Upon my word I was not, sir,' replied Oliver, earnestly. 'I was not,
indeed, sir.'
'Tush, tush, my dear!' said the Jew, abruptly resuming his old manner,
and playing with the knife a little, before he laid it down; as if to
induce the belief that he had caught it up, in mere sport. 'Of course I
know that, my dear. I only tried to frighten you. You're a brave boy.
Ha! ha! you're a brave boy, Oliver.' The Jew rubbed his hands with a
chuckle, but glanced uneasily at the box, notwithstanding.
'Did you see any of these pretty things, my dear?' said the Jew, laying
his hand upon it after a short pause.
'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver.
'Ah!' said the Jew, turning rather pale. 'They--they're mine, Oliver;
my little property. All I have to live upon, in my old age. The folks
call me a miser, my dear. Only a miser; that's all.'
Oliver thought the old gentleman must be a decided miser to live in
such a dirty place, with so many watches; but, thinking that perhaps
his fondness for the Dodger and the other boys, cost him a good deal of
money, he only cast a deferential look at the Jew, and asked if he
might get up.
'Certainly, my dear, certainly,' replied the old gentleman. 'Stay.
There's a pitcher of water in the corner by the door. Bring it here;
and I'll give you a basin to wash in, my dear.'
Oliver got up; walked across the room; and stooped for an instant to
raise the pitcher. When he turned his head, the box was gone.
He had scarcely washed himself, and made everything tidy, by emptying
the basin out of the window, agreeably to the Jew's directions, when
the Dodger returned: accompanied by a very sprightly young friend, whom
Oliver had seen smoking on the previous night, and who was now formally
introduced to him as Charley Bates. The four sat down, to breakfast, on
the coffee, and some hot rolls and ham which the Dodger had brought
home in the crown of his hat.
'Well,' said the Jew, glancing slyly at Oliver, and addressing himself
to the Dodger, 'I hope you've been at work this morning, my dears?'
'Hard,' replied the Dodger.
'As nails,' added Charley Bates.
'Good boys, good boys!' said the Jew. 'What have you got, Dodger?'
'A couple of pocket-books,' replied that young gentlman.
'Lined?' inquired the Jew, with eagerness.
'Pretty well,' replied the Dodger, producing two pocket-books; one
green, and the other red.
'Not so heavy as they might be,' said the Jew, after looking at the
insides carefully; 'but very neat and nicely made. Ingenious workman,
ain't he, Oliver?'
'Very indeed, sir,' said Oliver. At which Mr. Charles Bates laughed
uproariously; very much to the amazement of Oliver, who saw nothing to
laugh at, in anything that had passed.
'And what have you got, my dear?' said Fagin to Charley Bates.
'Wipes,' replied Master Bates; at the same time producing four
pocket-handkerchiefs.
'Well,' said the Jew, inspecting them closely; 'they're very good ones,
very. You haven't marked them well, though, Charley; so the marks shall
be picked out with a needle, and we'll teach Oliver how to do it. Shall
us, Oliver, eh? Ha! ha! ha!'
'If you please, sir,' said Oliver.
'You'd like to be able to make pocket-handkerchiefs as easy as Charley
Bates, wouldn't you, my dear?' said the Jew.
'Very much, indeed, if you'll teach me, sir,' replied Oliver.
Master Bates saw something so exquisitely ludicrous in this reply, that
he burst into another laugh; which laugh, meeting the coffee he was
drinking, and carrying it down some wrong channel, very nearly
terminated in his premature suffocation.
'He is so jolly green!' said Charley when he recovered, as an apology
to the company for his unpolite behaviour.
The Dodger said nothing, but he smoothed Oliver's hair over his eyes,
and said he'd know better, by and by; upon which the old gentleman,
observing Oliver's colour mounting, changed the subject by asking
whether there had been much of a crowd at the execution that morning?
This made him wonder more and more; for it was plain from the replies
of the two boys that they had both been there; and Oliver naturally
wondered how they could possibly have found time to be so very
industrious.
When the breakfast was cleared away; the merry old gentlman and the two
boys played at a very curious and uncommon game, which was performed in
this way. The merry old gentleman, placing a snuff-box in one pocket of
his trousers, a note-case in the other, and a watch in his waistcoat
pocket, with a guard-chain round his neck, and sticking a mock diamond
pin in his shirt: buttoned his coat tight round him, and putting his
spectacle-case and handkerchief in his pockets, trotted up and down the
room with a stick, in imitation of the manner in which old gentlemen
walk about the streets any hour in the day. Sometimes he stopped at
the fire-place, and sometimes at the door, making believe that he was
staring with all his might into shop-windows. At such times, he would
look constantly round him, for fear of thieves, and would keep slapping
all his pockets in turn, to see that he hadn't lost anything, in such a
very funny and natural manner, that Oliver laughed till the tears ran
down his face. All this time, the two boys followed him closely about:
getting out of his sight, so nimbly, every time he turned round, that
it was impossible to follow their motions. At last, the Dodger trod
upon his toes, or ran upon his boot accidently, while Charley Bates
stumbled up against him behind; and in that one moment they took from
him, with the most extraordinary rapidity, snuff-box, note-case,
watch-guard, chain, shirt-pin, pocket-handkerchief, even the
spectacle-case. If the old gentlman felt a hand in any one of his
pockets, he cried out where it was; and then the game began all over
again.
When this game had been played a great many times, a couple of young
ladies called to see the young gentleman; one of whom was named Bet,
and the other Nancy. They wore a good deal of hair, not very neatly
turned up behind, and were rather untidy about the shoes and stockings.
They were not exactly pretty, perhaps; but they had a great deal of
colour in their faces, and looked quite stout and hearty. Being
remarkably free and agreeable in their manners, Oliver thought them
very nice girls indeed. As there is no doubt they were.
The visitors stopped a long time. Spirits were produced, in consequence
of one of the young ladies complaining of a coldness in her inside; and
the conversation took a very convivial and improving turn. At length,
Charley Bates expressed his opinion that it was time to pad the hoof.
This, it occurred to Oliver, must be French for going out; for directly
afterwards, the Dodger, and Charley, and the two young ladies, went
away together, having been kindly furnished by the amiable old Jew with
money to spend.
'There, my dear,' said Fagin. 'That's a pleasant life, isn't it? They
have gone out for the day.'
'Have they done work, sir?' inquired Oliver.
'Yes,' said the Jew; 'that is, unless they should unexpectedly come
across any, when they are out; and they won't neglect it, if they do,
my dear, depend upon it. Make 'em your models, my dear. Make 'em your
models,' tapping the fire-shovel on the hearth to add force to his
words; 'do everything they bid you, and take their advice in all
matters--especially the Dodger's, my dear. He'll be a great man
himself, and will make you one too, if you take pattern by him.--Is my
handkerchief hanging out of my pocket, my dear?' said the Jew, stopping
short.
'Yes, sir,' said Oliver.
'See if you can take it out, without my feeling it; as you saw them do,
when we were at play this morning.'
Oliver held up the bottom of the pocket with one hand, as he had seen
the Dodger hold it, and drew the handkerchief lightly out of it with
the other.
'Is it gone?' cried the Jew.
'Here it is, sir,' said Oliver, showing it in his hand.
'You're a clever boy, my dear,' said the playful old gentleman, patting
Oliver on the head approvingly. 'I never saw a sharper lad. Here's a
shilling for you. If you go on, in this way, you'll be the greatest man
of the time. And now come here, and I'll show you how to take the marks
out of the handkerchiefs.'
Oliver wondered what picking the old gentleman's pocket in play, had to
do with his chances of being a great man. But, thinking that the Jew,
being so much his senior, must know best, he followed him quietly to
the table, and was soon deeply involved in his new study.
| Oliver wakes up the next morning to find that he's alone in the room with Fagin. Fagin's making coffee for breakfast, and seems to be nervous about something--he's continually looking around to make sure that he's alone, besides the Oliver. Oliver's only half awake, so Fagin thinks he's still sleeping. After checking, Fagin opens a trap door in the floor of the room and pulls out a box. He pulls various jewels and fancy watches out of the box to admire and then put back, talking to himself all the while . When he realizes that Oliver's awake and has seen him, he flies into a rage, asking Oliver what he's seen. When Oliver answers innocently that he's only seen the pretty things in the box, Fagin pretends that his rage was all a joke, and puts down the bread knife he's been threatening Oliver with. Just then the Dodger comes back with one of the other boys, who is introduced as Charley Bates. The four of them sit down to a breakfast of hot rolls and coffee. Fagin asks the Dodger and "Master Bates" if they'd been working that morning, and the Dodger produces a couple of wallets, and Charley comes up with four handkerchiefs. Oliver assumes that the boys have made the things they show to Fagin, and Charley laughs and calls him "green." After breakfast, Fagin , Charley, and the Dodger play a "game"--or so Dickens calls it, because that's what it looks like to Oliver. The boys are practicing picking Fagin's pockets . Two young ladies arrive, named Bet and Nancy. They're described from Oliver's point of view as "free and agreeable in their manners," and "stout and hearty," so Oliver assumes that they are "very nice girls indeed" . After drinking some liquor , Fagin gives the girls some money, and they go out, accompanied by the Dodger and Charley. Fagin tells Oliver to "make 'em your models," and then plays the pickpocket game with Oliver. The chapter ends with Oliver learning how to "take the marks out of the handkerchiefs"--in other words, he's learning how to pull the embroidered initials out of handkerchiefs so that they can be resold at a pawnshop . | summary |
For many days, Oliver remained in the Jew's room, picking the marks out
of the pocket-handkerchief, (of which a great number were brought
home,) and sometimes taking part in the game already described: which
the two boys and the Jew played, regularly, every morning. At length,
he began to languish for fresh air, and took many occasions of
earnestly entreating the old gentleman to allow him to go out to work
with his two companions.
Oliver was rendered the more anxious to be actively employed, by what
he had seen of the stern morality of the old gentleman's character.
Whenever the Dodger or Charley Bates came home at night, empty-handed,
he would expatiate with great vehemence on the misery of idle and lazy
habits; and would enforce upon them the necessity of an active life, by
sending them supperless to bed. On one occasion, indeed, he even went
so far as to knock them both down a flight of stairs; but this was
carrying out his virtuous precepts to an unusual extent.
At length, one morning, Oliver obtained the permission he had so
eagerly sought. There had been no handkerchiefs to work upon, for two
or three days, and the dinners had been rather meagre. Perhaps these
were reasons for the old gentleman's giving his assent; but, whether
they were or no, he told Oliver he might go, and placed him under the
joint guardianship of Charley Bates, and his friend the Dodger.
The three boys sallied out; the Dodger with his coat-sleeves tucked up,
and his hat cocked, as usual; Master Bates sauntering along with his
hands in his pockets; and Oliver between them, wondering where they
were going, and what branch of manufacture he would be instructed in,
first.
The pace at which they went, was such a very lazy, ill-looking saunter,
that Oliver soon began to think his companions were going to deceive
the old gentleman, by not going to work at all. The Dodger had a
vicious propensity, too, of pulling the caps from the heads of small
boys and tossing them down areas; while Charley Bates exhibited some
very loose notions concerning the rights of property, by pilfering
divers apples and onions from the stalls at the kennel sides, and
thrusting them into pockets which were so surprisingly capacious, that
they seemed to undermine his whole suit of clothes in every direction.
These things looked so bad, that Oliver was on the point of declaring
his intention of seeking his way back, in the best way he could; when
his thoughts were suddenly directed into another channel, by a very
mysterious change of behaviour on the part of the Dodger.
They were just emerging from a narrow court not far from the open
square in Clerkenwell, which is yet called, by some strange perversion
of terms, 'The Green': when the Dodger made a sudden stop; and, laying
his finger on his lip, drew his companions back again, with the
greatest caution and circumspection.
'What's the matter?' demanded Oliver.
'Hush!' replied the Dodger. 'Do you see that old cove at the
book-stall?'
'The old gentleman over the way?' said Oliver. 'Yes, I see him.'
'He'll do,' said the Dodger.
'A prime plant,' observed Master Charley Bates.
Oliver looked from one to the other, with the greatest surprise; but he
was not permitted to make any inquiries; for the two boys walked
stealthily across the road, and slunk close behind the old gentleman
towards whom his attention had been directed. Oliver walked a few paces
after them; and, not knowing whether to advance or retire, stood
looking on in silent amazement.
The old gentleman was a very respectable-looking personage, with a
powdered head and gold spectacles. He was dressed in a bottle-green
coat with a black velvet collar; wore white trousers; and carried a
smart bamboo cane under his arm. He had taken up a book from the stall,
and there he stood, reading away, as hard as if he were in his
elbow-chair, in his own study. It is very possible that he fancied
himself there, indeed; for it was plain, from his abstraction, that he
saw not the book-stall, nor the street, nor the boys, nor, in short,
anything but the book itself: which he was reading straight through:
turning over the leaf when he got to the bottom of a page, beginning at
the top line of the next one, and going regularly on, with the greatest
interest and eagerness.
What was Oliver's horror and alarm as he stood a few paces off, looking
on with his eyelids as wide open as they would possibly go, to see the
Dodger plunge his hand into the old gentleman's pocket, and draw from
thence a handkerchief! To see him hand the same to Charley Bates; and
finally to behold them, both running away round the corner at full
speed!
In an instant the whole mystery of the hankerchiefs, and the watches,
and the jewels, and the Jew, rushed upon the boy's mind.
He stood, for a moment, with the blood so tingling through all his
veins from terror, that he felt as if he were in a burning fire; then,
confused and frightened, he took to his heels; and, not knowing what he
did, made off as fast as he could lay his feet to the ground.
This was all done in a minute's space. In the very instant when Oliver
began to run, the old gentleman, putting his hand to his pocket, and
missing his handkerchief, turned sharp round. Seeing the boy scudding
away at such a rapid pace, he very naturally concluded him to be the
depredator; and shouting 'Stop thief!' with all his might, made off
after him, book in hand.
But the old gentleman was not the only person who raised the
hue-and-cry. The Dodger and Master Bates, unwilling to attract public
attention by running down the open street, had merely retired into the
very first doorway round the corner. They no sooner heard the cry, and
saw Oliver running, than, guessing exactly how the matter stood, they
issued forth with great promptitude; and, shouting 'Stop thief!' too,
joined in the pursuit like good citizens.
Although Oliver had been brought up by philosophers, he was not
theoretically acquainted with the beautiful axiom that
self-preservation is the first law of nature. If he had been, perhaps
he would have been prepared for this. Not being prepared, however, it
alarmed him the more; so away he went like the wind, with the old
gentleman and the two boys roaring and shouting behind him.
'Stop thief! Stop thief!' There is a magic in the sound. The tradesman
leaves his counter, and the car-man his waggon; the butcher throws down
his tray; the baker his basket; the milkman his pail; the errand-boy
his parcels; the school-boy his marbles; the paviour his pickaxe; the
child his battledore. Away they run, pell-mell, helter-skelter,
slap-dash: tearing, yelling, screaming, knocking down the passengers as
they turn the corners, rousing up the dogs, and astonishing the fowls:
and streets, squares, and courts, re-echo with the sound.
'Stop thief! Stop thief!' The cry is taken up by a hundred voices, and
the crowd accumulate at every turning. Away they fly, splashing through
the mud, and rattling along the pavements: up go the windows, out run
the people, onward bear the mob, a whole audience desert Punch in the
very thickest of the plot, and, joining the rushing throng, swell the
shout, and lend fresh vigour to the cry, 'Stop thief! Stop thief!'
'Stop thief! Stop thief!' There is a passion FOR _hunting_ _something_
deeply implanted in the human breast. One wretched breathless child,
panting with exhaustion; terror in his looks; agony in his eyes; large
drops of perspiration streaming down his face; strains every nerve to
make head upon his pursuers; and as they follow on his track, and gain
upon him every instant, they hail his decreasing strength with joy.
'Stop thief!' Ay, stop him for God's sake, were it only in mercy!
Stopped at last! A clever blow. He is down upon the pavement; and the
crowd eagerly gather round him: each new comer, jostling and
struggling with the others to catch a glimpse. 'Stand aside!' 'Give
him a little air!' 'Nonsense! he don't deserve it.' 'Where's the
gentleman?' 'Here his is, coming down the street.' 'Make room there
for the gentleman!' 'Is this the boy, sir!' 'Yes.'
Oliver lay, covered with mud and dust, and bleeding from the mouth,
looking wildly round upon the heap of faces that surrounded him, when
the old gentleman was officiously dragged and pushed into the circle by
the foremost of the pursuers.
'Yes,' said the gentleman, 'I am afraid it is the boy.'
'Afraid!' murmured the crowd. 'That's a good 'un!'
'Poor fellow!' said the gentleman, 'he has hurt himself.'
'_I_ did that, sir,' said a great lubberly fellow, stepping forward;
'and preciously I cut my knuckle agin' his mouth. I stopped him, sir.'
The fellow touched his hat with a grin, expecting something for his
pains; but, the old gentleman, eyeing him with an expression of
dislike, look anxiously round, as if he contemplated running away
himself: which it is very possible he might have attempted to do, and
thus have afforded another chase, had not a police officer (who is
generally the last person to arrive in such cases) at that moment made
his way through the crowd, and seized Oliver by the collar.
'Come, get up,' said the man, roughly.
'It wasn't me indeed, sir. Indeed, indeed, it was two other boys,'
said Oliver, clasping his hands passionately, and looking round. 'They
are here somewhere.'
'Oh no, they ain't,' said the officer. He meant this to be ironical,
but it was true besides; for the Dodger and Charley Bates had filed off
down the first convenient court they came to.
'Come, get up!'
'Don't hurt him,' said the old gentleman, compassionately.
'Oh no, I won't hurt him,' replied the officer, tearing his jacket half
off his back, in proof thereof. 'Come, I know you; it won't do. Will
you stand upon your legs, you young devil?'
Oliver, who could hardly stand, made a shift to raise himself on his
feet, and was at once lugged along the streets by the jacket-collar, at
a rapid pace. The gentleman walked on with them by the officer's side;
and as many of the crowd as could achieve the feat, got a little ahead,
and stared back at Oliver from time to time. The boys shouted in
triumph; and on they went.
| Oliver spends the next eight or ten days shut up in Fagin's room --picking the marks out of the handkerchiefs that the other boys bring back, and sometimes joining the "game" of practicing picking pockets . Oliver is getting cabin fever--he wants to go outside with the others. Of course, he doesn't know what they're up to. All he knows is that Fagin seems to value hard work: whenever one of the boys comes back empty-handed, Fagin totally loses it, and Oliver still doesn't realize that the boys aren't making the stuff they bring back, they're stealing it. His innocence would be kind of funny if it weren't so sad--after all, he's only eight or nine years old at this point . Finally Fagin allows Oliver to go out with the Dodger and "Master Bates." Oliver still thinks they're going to be teaching him how to make things: he wonders "what branch of manufacture he would be instructed in first" . Oliver notices that the Dodger has a bad habit of pulling little kids' hats over their eyes and pushing them over, and that Charley keeps stealing apples from fruit vendors. He's about to say something about their bad behavior when they stop and point at an "old cove" by a book-seller. The "old cove" is a "respectable-looking" "old gentleman" who is totally absorbed in the book he's reading at the bookseller's stand. He's totally oblivious to anything going on around him. Oliver stares at Charley and the Dodger in shocked silence, basically with his mouth hanging open, while the Dodger and Charley sidle up to him and slip his handkerchief out of his pocket, and then slip around the corner. This is another one of the totally awesome illustrations by Cruikshank. Check it out if you haven't already. Everything strikes Oliver at once, and suddenly he realizes where all the handkerchiefs have been coming from. His automatic response is to run away, and he hightails it down the street. But Oliver runs away more noisily than the other boys, and it snaps the old guy out of his book. He immediately notices that his handkerchief is gone . The old guy immediately and instinctively assumes that it was Oliver who stole it, since it's Oliver who's noisily running away, and he yells, "Stop, thief!" And the whole street scene suddenly shifts its collective attention to the little boy running away down the street, and everyone joins in , chasing Oliver and yelling "stop, thief!" Someone finally tackles Oliver to the ground, and the old gentleman gets dragged to the front of the crowd to identify Oliver as the suspected culprit. But he clearly feels sorry for Oliver, and calls him a "poor fellow," and is disgusted by the "great lubberly fellow" who proudly tells him that he's the one who knocked Oliver to the ground by punching him in the mouth. A police officer arrives and drags Oliver to his feet. Oliver tries to tell him that he was innocent, and that two other boys had done it, but the police officer doesn't believe him, since the Dodger and Charley had, well, "dodged." The old gentleman follows along as the police officer drags Oliver along, and seems curious about Oliver for some reason. | summary |
The offence had been committed within the district, and indeed in the
immediate neighborhood of, a very notorious metropolitan police office.
The crowd had only the satisfaction of accompanying Oliver through two
or three streets, and down a place called Mutton Hill, when he was led
beneath a low archway, and up a dirty court, into this dispensary of
summary justice, by the back way. It was a small paved yard into which
they turned; and here they encountered a stout man with a bunch of
whiskers on his face, and a bunch of keys in his hand.
'What's the matter now?' said the man carelessly.
'A young fogle-hunter,' replied the man who had Oliver in charge.
'Are you the party that's been robbed, sir?' inquired the man with the
keys.
'Yes, I am,' replied the old gentleman; 'but I am not sure that this
boy actually took the handkerchief. I--I would rather not press the
case.'
'Must go before the magistrate now, sir,' replied the man. 'His worship
will be disengaged in half a minute. Now, young gallows!'
This was an invitation for Oliver to enter through a door which he
unlocked as he spoke, and which led into a stone cell. Here he was
searched; and nothing being found upon him, locked up.
This cell was in shape and size something like an area cellar, only not
so light. It was most intolerably dirty; for it was Monday morning;
and it had been tenanted by six drunken people, who had been locked up,
elsewhere, since Saturday night. But this is little. In our
station-houses, men and women are every night confined on the most
trivial charges--the word is worth noting--in dungeons, compared with
which, those in Newgate, occupied by the most atrocious felons, tried,
found guilty, and under sentence of death, are palaces. Let any one who
doubts this, compare the two.
The old gentleman looked almost as rueful as Oliver when the key grated
in the lock. He turned with a sigh to the book, which had been the
innocent cause of all this disturbance.
'There is something in that boy's face,' said the old gentleman to
himself as he walked slowly away, tapping his chin with the cover of
the book, in a thoughtful manner; 'something that touches and interests
me. _Can_ he be innocent? He looked like--Bye the bye,' exclaimed the
old gentleman, halting very abruptly, and staring up into the sky,
'Bless my soul!--where have I seen something like that look before?'
After musing for some minutes, the old gentleman walked, with the same
meditative face, into a back anteroom opening from the yard; and there,
retiring into a corner, called up before his mind's eye a vast
amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had hung for many
years. 'No,' said the old gentleman, shaking his head; 'it must be
imagination.'
He wandered over them again. He had called them into view, and it was
not easy to replace the shroud that had so long concealed them. There
were the faces of friends, and foes, and of many that had been almost
strangers peering intrusively from the crowd; there were the faces of
young and blooming girls that were now old women; there were faces that
the grave had changed and closed upon, but which the mind, superior to
its power, still dressed in their old freshness and beauty, calling
back the lustre of the eyes, the brightness of the smile, the beaming
of the soul through its mask of clay, and whispering of beauty beyond
the tomb, changed but to be heightened, and taken from earth only to be
set up as a light, to shed a soft and gentle glow upon the path to
Heaven.
But the old gentleman could recall no one countenance of which Oliver's
features bore a trace. So, he heaved a sigh over the recollections he
awakened; and being, happily for himself, an absent old gentleman,
buried them again in the pages of the musty book.
He was roused by a touch on the shoulder, and a request from the man
with the keys to follow him into the office. He closed his book
hastily; and was at once ushered into the imposing presence of the
renowned Mr. Fang.
The office was a front parlour, with a panelled wall. Mr. Fang sat
behind a bar, at the upper end; and on one side the door was a sort of
wooden pen in which poor little Oliver was already deposited; trembling
very much at the awfulness of the scene.
Mr. Fang was a lean, long-backed, stiff-necked, middle-sized man, with
no great quantity of hair, and what he had, growing on the back and
sides of his head. His face was stern, and much flushed. If he were
really not in the habit of drinking rather more than was exactly good
for him, he might have brought action against his countenance for
libel, and have recovered heavy damages.
The old gentleman bowed respectfully; and advancing to the magistrate's
desk, said, suiting the action to the word, 'That is my name and
address, sir.' He then withdrew a pace or two; and, with another
polite and gentlemanly inclination of the head, waited to be questioned.
Now, it so happened that Mr. Fang was at that moment perusing a leading
article in a newspaper of the morning, adverting to some recent
decision of his, and commending him, for the three hundred and fiftieth
time, to the special and particular notice of the Secretary of State
for the Home Department. He was out of temper; and he looked up with
an angry scowl.
'Who are you?' said Mr. Fang.
The old gentleman pointed, with some surprise, to his card.
'Officer!' said Mr. Fang, tossing the card contemptuously away with the
newspaper. 'Who is this fellow?'
'My name, sir,' said the old gentleman, speaking _like_ a gentleman,
'my name, sir, is Brownlow. Permit me to inquire the name of the
magistrate who offers a gratuitous and unprovoked insult to a
respectable person, under the protection of the bench.' Saying this,
Mr. Brownlow looked around the office as if in search of some person
who would afford him the required information.
'Officer!' said Mr. Fang, throwing the paper on one side, 'what's this
fellow charged with?'
'He's not charged at all, your worship,' replied the officer. 'He
appears against this boy, your worship.'
His worship knew this perfectly well; but it was a good annoyance, and
a safe one.
'Appears against the boy, does he?' said Mr. Fang, surveying Mr.
Brownlow contemptuously from head to foot. 'Swear him!'
'Before I am sworn, I must beg to say one word,' said Mr. Brownlow;
'and that is, that I really never, without actual experience, could
have believed--'
'Hold your tongue, sir!' said Mr. Fang, peremptorily.
'I will not, sir!' replied the old gentleman.
'Hold your tongue this instant, or I'll have you turned out of the
office!' said Mr. Fang. 'You're an insolent impertinent fellow. How
dare you bully a magistrate!'
'What!' exclaimed the old gentleman, reddening.
'Swear this person!' said Fang to the clerk. 'I'll not hear another
word. Swear him.'
Mr. Brownlow's indignation was greatly roused; but reflecting perhaps,
that he might only injure the boy by giving vent to it, he suppressed
his feelings and submitted to be sworn at once.
'Now,' said Fang, 'what's the charge against this boy? What have you
got to say, sir?'
'I was standing at a bookstall--' Mr. Brownlow began.
'Hold your tongue, sir,' said Mr. Fang. 'Policeman! Where's the
policeman? Here, swear this policeman. Now, policeman, what is this?'
The policeman, with becoming humility, related how he had taken the
charge; how he had searched Oliver, and found nothing on his person;
and how that was all he knew about it.
'Are there any witnesses?' inquired Mr. Fang.
'None, your worship,' replied the policeman.
Mr. Fang sat silent for some minutes, and then, turning round to the
prosecutor, said in a towering passion.
'Do you mean to state what your complaint against this boy is, man, or
do you not? You have been sworn. Now, if you stand there, refusing to
give evidence, I'll punish you for disrespect to the bench; I will,
by--'
By what, or by whom, nobody knows, for the clerk and jailor coughed
very loud, just at the right moment; and the former dropped a heavy
book upon the floor, thus preventing the word from being
heard--accidently, of course.
With many interruptions, and repeated insults, Mr. Brownlow contrived
to state his case; observing that, in the surprise of the moment, he
had run after the boy because he had saw him running away; and
expressing his hope that, if the magistrate should believe him,
although not actually the thief, to be connected with the thieves, he
would deal as leniently with him as justice would allow.
'He has been hurt already,' said the old gentleman in conclusion. 'And
I fear,' he added, with great energy, looking towards the bar, 'I
really fear that he is ill.'
'Oh! yes, I dare say!' said Mr. Fang, with a sneer. 'Come, none of
your tricks here, you young vagabond; they won't do. What's your name?'
Oliver tried to reply but his tongue failed him. He was deadly pale;
and the whole place seemed turning round and round.
'What's your name, you hardened scoundrel?' demanded Mr. Fang.
'Officer, what's his name?'
This was addressed to a bluff old fellow, in a striped waistcoat, who
was standing by the bar. He bent over Oliver, and repeated the
inquiry; but finding him really incapable of understanding the
question; and knowing that his not replying would only infuriate the
magistrate the more, and add to the severity of his sentence; he
hazarded a guess.
'He says his name's Tom White, your worship,' said the kind-hearted
thief-taker.
'Oh, he won't speak out, won't he?' said Fang. 'Very well, very well.
Where does he live?'
'Where he can, your worship,' replied the officer; again pretending to
receive Oliver's answer.
'Has he any parents?' inquired Mr. Fang.
'He says they died in his infancy, your worship,' replied the officer:
hazarding the usual reply.
At this point of the inquiry, Oliver raised his head; and, looking
round with imploring eyes, murmured a feeble prayer for a draught of
water.
'Stuff and nonsense!' said Mr. Fang: 'don't try to make a fool of me.'
'I think he really is ill, your worship,' remonstrated the officer.
'I know better,' said Mr. Fang.
'Take care of him, officer,' said the old gentleman, raising his hands
instinctively; 'he'll fall down.'
'Stand away, officer,' cried Fang; 'let him, if he likes.'
Oliver availed himself of the kind permission, and fell to the floor in
a fainting fit. The men in the office looked at each other, but no one
dared to stir.
'I knew he was shamming,' said Fang, as if this were incontestable
proof of the fact. 'Let him lie there; he'll soon be tired of that.'
'How do you propose to deal with the case, sir?' inquired the clerk in
a low voice.
'Summarily,' replied Mr. Fang. 'He stands committed for three
months--hard labour of course. Clear the office.'
The door was opened for this purpose, and a couple of men were
preparing to carry the insensible boy to his cell; when an elderly man
of decent but poor appearance, clad in an old suit of black, rushed
hastily into the office, and advanced towards the bench.
'Stop, stop! don't take him away! For Heaven's sake stop a moment!'
cried the new comer, breathless with haste.
Although the presiding Genii in such an office as this, exercise a
summary and arbitrary power over the liberties, the good name, the
character, almost the lives, of Her Majesty's subjects, expecially of
the poorer class; and although, within such walls, enough fantastic
tricks are daily played to make the angels blind with weeping; they are
closed to the public, save through the medium of the daily
press.[Footnote: Or were virtually, then.] Mr. Fang was consequently
not a little indignant to see an unbidden guest enter in such
irreverent disorder.
'What is this? Who is this? Turn this man out. Clear the office!'
cried Mr. Fang.
'I _will_ speak,' cried the man; 'I will not be turned out. I saw it
all. I keep the book-stall. I demand to be sworn. I will not be put
down. Mr. Fang, you must hear me. You must not refuse, sir.'
The man was right. His manner was determined; and the matter was
growing rather too serious to be hushed up.
'Swear the man,' growled Mr. Fang, with a very ill grace. 'Now, man,
what have you got to say?'
'This,' said the man: 'I saw three boys: two others and the prisoner
here: loitering on the opposite side of the way, when this gentleman
was reading. The robbery was committed by another boy. I saw it done;
and I saw that this boy was perfectly amazed and stupified by it.'
Having by this time recovered a little breath, the worthy book-stall
keeper proceeded to relate, in a more coherent manner the exact
circumstances of the robbery.
'Why didn't you come here before?' said Fang, after a pause.
'I hadn't a soul to mind the shop,' replied the man. 'Everybody who
could have helped me, had joined in the pursuit. I could get nobody
till five minutes ago; and I've run here all the way.'
'The prosecutor was reading, was he?' inquired Fang, after another
pause.
'Yes,' replied the man. 'The very book he has in his hand.'
'Oh, that book, eh?' said Fang. 'Is it paid for?'
'No, it is not,' replied the man, with a smile.
'Dear me, I forgot all about it!' exclaimed the absent old gentleman,
innocently.
'A nice person to prefer a charge against a poor boy!' said Fang, with
a comical effort to look humane. 'I consider, sir, that you have
obtained possession of that book, under very suspicious and
disreputable circumstances; and you may think yourself very fortunate
that the owner of the property declines to prosecute. Let this be a
lesson to you, my man, or the law will overtake you yet. The boy is
discharged. Clear the office!'
'D--n me!' cried the old gentleman, bursting out with the rage he had
kept down so long, 'd--n me! I'll--'
'Clear the office!' said the magistrate. 'Officers, do you hear? Clear
the office!'
The mandate was obeyed; and the indignant Mr. Brownlow was conveyed
out, with the book in one hand, and the bamboo cane in the other: in a
perfect phrenzy of rage and defiance. He reached the yard; and his
passion vanished in a moment. Little Oliver Twist lay on his back on
the pavement, with his shirt unbuttoned, and his temples bathed with
water; his face a deadly white; and a cold tremble convulsing his whole
frame.
'Poor boy, poor boy!' said Mr. Brownlow, bending over him. 'Call a
coach, somebody, pray. Directly!'
A coach was obtained, and Oliver having been carefully laid on the
seat, the old gentleman got in and sat himself on the other.
'May I accompany you?' said the book-stall keeper, looking in.
'Bless me, yes, my dear sir,' said Mr. Brownlow quickly. 'I forgot
you. Dear, dear! I have this unhappy book still! Jump in. Poor
fellow! There's no time to lose.'
The book-stall keeper got into the coach; and away they drove.
| Oliver is dragged to the magistrate, who is basically just a guy who administers justice without the inconvenience of a jury. Or fairness. Even though the old gentleman says he'd rather not press charges , the police officer says the magistrate has to see him. He gets thrown into a cell at the station house . Dickens says the cell is "most intolerably dirty" because it was Monday morning, and the cell was filled with drunken people all weekend. So, basically, the police officer just threw Oliver into a cell that was covered in other people's urine and vomit. Meanwhile, the old gentleman is talking to himself, wondering whether Oliver might possibly be innocent, hoping that he is, and asking himself why Oliver looks so darned familiar. The old gentleman is called into the presence of the magistrate, Mr. Fang. Mr. Fang is very, very rude. He seems to enjoy getting respectable people all riled up by treating them badly, and that's just what he does with this old gentleman. But the old gentleman doesn't want to get Oliver into more trouble, so he tries not to lose his temper. He introduces himself, and we learn his name for the first time: Mr. Brownlow. Mr. Brownlow tells the story of how Oliver was chased, and says that he thinks he might very well be innocent. When Fang turns to Oliver; Oliver's too weak to answer, but the officer leaning over Oliver to hear his response makes up answers to repeat back to Fang. Needless to say, the officer's made-up answers aren't very flattering. Oliver faints on the floor. Mr. Fang says he's faking, and commits him to three months of hard labor. Things are looking pretty grim for poor Oliver, when the bookseller, who saw the whole thing, comes running in, demanding to be sworn in. The bookseller swears that he saw the robbery committed by another boy. Mr. Fang realizes that he's coming off as a total jerk, so he pretends the whole thing is Mr. Brownlow's fault, and orders the office to be cleared before Mr. Brownlow can get a word in edgewise. They get cleared out of the court, and Oliver's lying there on the pavement looking half-dead, so Mr. Brownlow orders a coach to carry Oliver away. | summary |
The coach rattled away, over nearly the same ground as that which
Oliver had traversed when he first entered London in company with the
Dodger; and, turning a different way when it reached the Angel at
Islington, stopped at length before a neat house, in a quiet shady
street near Pentonville. Here, a bed was prepared, without loss of
time, in which Mr. Brownlow saw his young charge carefully and
comfortably deposited; and here, he was tended with a kindness and
solicitude that knew no bounds.
But, for many days, Oliver remained insensible to all the goodness of
his new friends. The sun rose and sank, and rose and sank again, and
many times after that; and still the boy lay stretched on his uneasy
bed, dwindling away beneath the dry and wasting heat of fever. The
worm does not work more surely on the dead body, than does this slow
creeping fire upon the living frame.
Weak, and thin, and pallid, he awoke at last from what seemed to have
been a long and troubled dream. Feebly raising himself in the bed,
with his head resting on his trembling arm, he looked anxiously around.
'What room is this? Where have I been brought to?' said Oliver. 'This
is not the place I went to sleep in.'
He uttered these words in a feeble voice, being very faint and weak;
but they were overheard at once. The curtain at the bed's head was
hastily drawn back, and a motherly old lady, very neatly and precisely
dressed, rose as she undrew it, from an arm-chair close by, in which
she had been sitting at needle-work.
'Hush, my dear,' said the old lady softly. 'You must be very quiet, or
you will be ill again; and you have been very bad,--as bad as bad could
be, pretty nigh. Lie down again; there's a dear!' With those words,
the old lady very gently placed Oliver's head upon the pillow; and,
smoothing back his hair from his forehead, looked so kindly and loving
in his face, that he could not help placing his little withered hand in
hers, and drawing it round his neck.
'Save us!' said the old lady, with tears in her eyes. 'What a grateful
little dear it is. Pretty creetur! What would his mother feel if she
had sat by him as I have, and could see him now!'
'Perhaps she does see me,' whispered Oliver, folding his hands
together; 'perhaps she has sat by me. I almost feel as if she had.'
'That was the fever, my dear,' said the old lady mildly.
'I suppose it was,' replied Oliver, 'because heaven is a long way off;
and they are too happy there, to come down to the bedside of a poor
boy. But if she knew I was ill, she must have pitied me, even there;
for she was very ill herself before she died. She can't know anything
about me though,' added Oliver after a moment's silence. 'If she had
seen me hurt, it would have made her sorrowful; and her face has always
looked sweet and happy, when I have dreamed of her.'
The old lady made no reply to this; but wiping her eyes first, and her
spectacles, which lay on the counterpane, afterwards, as if they were
part and parcel of those features, brought some cool stuff for Oliver
to drink; and then, patting him on the cheek, told him he must lie very
quiet, or he would be ill again.
So, Oliver kept very still; partly because he was anxious to obey the
kind old lady in all things; and partly, to tell the truth, because he
was completely exhausted with what he had already said. He soon fell
into a gentle doze, from which he was awakened by the light of a
candle: which, being brought near the bed, showed him a gentleman with
a very large and loud-ticking gold watch in his hand, who felt his
pulse, and said he was a great deal better.
'You _are_ a great deal better, are you not, my dear?' said the
gentleman.
'Yes, thank you, sir,' replied Oliver.
'Yes, I know you are,' said the gentleman: 'You're hungry too, an't
you?'
'No, sir,' answered Oliver.
'Hem!' said the gentleman. 'No, I know you're not. He is not hungry,
Mrs. Bedwin,' said the gentleman: looking very wise.
The old lady made a respectful inclination of the head, which seemed to
say that she thought the doctor was a very clever man. The doctor
appeared much of the same opinion himself.
'You feel sleepy, don't you, my dear?' said the doctor.
'No, sir,' replied Oliver.
'No,' said the doctor, with a very shrewd and satisfied look. 'You're
not sleepy. Nor thirsty. Are you?'
'Yes, sir, rather thirsty,' answered Oliver.
'Just as I expected, Mrs. Bedwin,' said the doctor. 'It's very natural
that he should be thirsty. You may give him a little tea, ma'am, and
some dry toast without any butter. Don't keep him too warm, ma'am; but
be careful that you don't let him be too cold; will you have the
goodness?'
The old lady dropped a curtsey. The doctor, after tasting the cool
stuff, and expressing a qualified approval of it, hurried away: his
boots creaking in a very important and wealthy manner as he went
downstairs.
Oliver dozed off again, soon after this; when he awoke, it was nearly
twelve o'clock. The old lady tenderly bade him good-night shortly
afterwards, and left him in charge of a fat old woman who had just
come: bringing with her, in a little bundle, a small Prayer Book and a
large nightcap. Putting the latter on her head and the former on the
table, the old woman, after telling Oliver that she had come to sit up
with him, drew her chair close to the fire and went off into a series
of short naps, chequered at frequent intervals with sundry tumblings
forward, and divers moans and chokings. These, however, had no worse
effect than causing her to rub her nose very hard, and then fall asleep
again.
And thus the night crept slowly on. Oliver lay awake for some time,
counting the little circles of light which the reflection of the
rushlight-shade threw upon the ceiling; or tracing with his languid
eyes the intricate pattern of the paper on the wall. The darkness and
the deep stillness of the room were very solemn; as they brought into
the boy's mind the thought that death had been hovering there, for many
days and nights, and might yet fill it with the gloom and dread of his
awful presence, he turned his face upon the pillow, and fervently
prayed to Heaven.
Gradually, he fell into that deep tranquil sleep which ease from recent
suffering alone imparts; that calm and peaceful rest which it is pain
to wake from. Who, if this were death, would be roused again to all
the struggles and turmoils of life; to all its cares for the present;
its anxieties for the future; more than all, its weary recollections of
the past!
It had been bright day, for hours, when Oliver opened his eyes; he felt
cheerful and happy. The crisis of the disease was safely past. He
belonged to the world again.
In three days' time he was able to sit in an easy-chair, well propped
up with pillows; and, as he was still too weak to walk, Mrs. Bedwin had
him carried downstairs into the little housekeeper's room, which
belonged to her. Having him set, here, by the fire-side, the good old
lady sat herself down too; and, being in a state of considerable
delight at seeing him so much better, forthwith began to cry most
violently.
'Never mind me, my dear,' said the old lady; 'I'm only having a regular
good cry. There; it's all over now; and I'm quite comfortable.'
'You're very, very kind to me, ma'am,' said Oliver.
'Well, never you mind that, my dear,' said the old lady; 'that's got
nothing to do with your broth; and it's full time you had it; for the
doctor says Mr. Brownlow may come in to see you this morning; and we
must get up our best looks, because the better we look, the more he'll
be pleased.' And with this, the old lady applied herself to warming
up, in a little saucepan, a basin full of broth: strong enough, Oliver
thought, to furnish an ample dinner, when reduced to the regulation
strength, for three hundred and fifty paupers, at the lowest
computation.
'Are you fond of pictures, dear?' inquired the old lady, seeing that
Oliver had fixed his eyes, most intently, on a portrait which hung
against the wall; just opposite his chair.
'I don't quite know, ma'am,' said Oliver, without taking his eyes from
the canvas; 'I have seen so few that I hardly know. What a beautiful,
mild face that lady's is!'
'Ah!' said the old lady, 'painters always make ladies out prettier than
they are, or they wouldn't get any custom, child. The man that invented
the machine for taking likenesses might have known that would never
succeed; it's a deal too honest. A deal,' said the old lady, laughing
very heartily at her own acuteness.
'Is--is that a likeness, ma'am?' said Oliver.
'Yes,' said the old lady, looking up for a moment from the broth;
'that's a portrait.'
'Whose, ma'am?' asked Oliver.
'Why, really, my dear, I don't know,' answered the old lady in a
good-humoured manner. 'It's not a likeness of anybody that you or I
know, I expect. It seems to strike your fancy, dear.'
'It is so pretty,' replied Oliver.
'Why, sure you're not afraid of it?' said the old lady: observing in
great surprise, the look of awe with which the child regarded the
painting.
'Oh no, no,' returned Oliver quickly; 'but the eyes look so sorrowful;
and where I sit, they seem fixed upon me. It makes my heart beat,'
added Oliver in a low voice, 'as if it was alive, and wanted to speak
to me, but couldn't.'
'Lord save us!' exclaimed the old lady, starting; 'don't talk in that
way, child. You're weak and nervous after your illness. Let me wheel
your chair round to the other side; and then you won't see it. There!'
said the old lady, suiting the action to the word; 'you don't see it
now, at all events.'
Oliver _did_ see it in his mind's eye as distinctly as if he had not
altered his position; but he thought it better not to worry the kind
old lady; so he smiled gently when she looked at him; and Mrs. Bedwin,
satisfied that he felt more comfortable, salted and broke bits of
toasted bread into the broth, with all the bustle befitting so solemn a
preparation. Oliver got through it with extraordinary expedition. He
had scarcely swallowed the last spoonful, when there came a soft rap at
the door. 'Come in,' said the old lady; and in walked Mr. Brownlow.
Now, the old gentleman came in as brisk as need be; but, he had no
sooner raised his spectacles on his forehead, and thrust his hands
behind the skirts of his dressing-gown to take a good long look at
Oliver, than his countenance underwent a very great variety of odd
contortions. Oliver looked very worn and shadowy from sickness, and
made an ineffectual attempt to stand up, out of respect to his
benefactor, which terminated in his sinking back into the chair again;
and the fact is, if the truth must be told, that Mr. Brownlow's heart,
being large enough for any six ordinary old gentlemen of humane
disposition, forced a supply of tears into his eyes, by some hydraulic
process which we are not sufficiently philosophical to be in a
condition to explain.
'Poor boy, poor boy!' said Mr. Brownlow, clearing his throat. 'I'm
rather hoarse this morning, Mrs. Bedwin. I'm afraid I have caught
cold.'
'I hope not, sir,' said Mrs. Bedwin. 'Everything you have had, has
been well aired, sir.'
'I don't know, Bedwin. I don't know,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'I rather
think I had a damp napkin at dinner-time yesterday; but never mind
that. How do you feel, my dear?'
'Very happy, sir,' replied Oliver. 'And very grateful indeed, sir, for
your goodness to me.'
'Good by,' said Mr. Brownlow, stoutly. 'Have you given him any
nourishment, Bedwin? Any slops, eh?'
'He has just had a basin of beautiful strong broth, sir,' replied Mrs.
Bedwin: drawing herself up slightly, and laying strong emphasis on the
last word: to intimate that between slops, and broth will compounded,
there existed no affinity or connection whatsoever.
'Ugh!' said Mr. Brownlow, with a slight shudder; 'a couple of glasses
of port wine would have done him a great deal more good. Wouldn't they,
Tom White, eh?'
'My name is Oliver, sir,' replied the little invalid: with a look of
great astonishment.
'Oliver,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'Oliver what? Oliver White, eh?'
'No, sir, Twist, Oliver Twist.'
'Queer name!' said the old gentleman. 'What made you tell the
magistrate your name was White?'
'I never told him so, sir,' returned Oliver in amazement.
This sounded so like a falsehood, that the old gentleman looked
somewhat sternly in Oliver's face. It was impossible to doubt him;
there was truth in every one of its thin and sharpened lineaments.
'Some mistake,' said Mr. Brownlow. But, although his motive for
looking steadily at Oliver no longer existed, the old idea of the
resemblance between his features and some familiar face came upon him
so strongly, that he could not withdraw his gaze.
'I hope you are not angry with me, sir?' said Oliver, raising his eyes
beseechingly.
'No, no,' replied the old gentleman. 'Why! what's this? Bedwin, look
there!'
As he spoke, he pointed hastily to the picture over Oliver's head, and
then to the boy's face. There was its living copy. The eyes, the head,
the mouth; every feature was the same. The expression was, for the
instant, so precisely alike, that the minutest line seemed copied with
startling accuracy!
Oliver knew not the cause of this sudden exclamation; for, not being
strong enough to bear the start it gave him, he fainted away. A
weakness on his part, which affords the narrative an opportunity of
relieving the reader from suspense, in behalf of the two young pupils
of the Merry Old Gentleman; and of recording--
That when the Dodger, and his accomplished friend Master Bates, joined
in the hue-and-cry which was raised at Oliver's heels, in consequence
of their executing an illegal conveyance of Mr. Brownlow's personal
property, as has been already described, they were actuated by a very
laudable and becoming regard for themselves; and forasmuch as the
freedom of the subject and the liberty of the individual are among the
first and proudest boasts of a true-hearted Englishman, so, I need
hardly beg the reader to observe, that this action should tend to exalt
them in the opinion of all public and patriotic men, in almost as great
a degree as this strong proof of their anxiety for their own
preservation and safety goes to corroborate and confirm the little code
of laws which certain profound and sound-judging philosophers have laid
down as the main-springs of all Nature's deeds and actions: the said
philosophers very wisely reducing the good lady's proceedings to
matters of maxim and theory: and, by a very neat and pretty compliment
to her exalted wisdom and understanding, putting entirely out of sight
any considerations of heart, or generous impulse and feeling. For,
these are matters totally beneath a female who is acknowledged by
universal admission to be far above the numerous little foibles and
weaknesses of her sex.
If I wanted any further proof of the strictly philosophical nature of
the conduct of these young gentlemen in their very delicate
predicament, I should at once find it in the fact (also recorded in a
foregoing part of this narrative), of their quitting the pursuit, when
the general attention was fixed upon Oliver; and making immediately for
their home by the shortest possible cut. Although I do not mean to
assert that it is usually the practice of renowned and learned sages,
to shorten the road to any great conclusion (their course indeed being
rather to lengthen the distance, by various circumlocutions and
discursive staggerings, like unto those in which drunken men under the
pressure of a too mighty flow of ideas, are prone to indulge); still, I
do mean to say, and do say distinctly, that it is the invariable
practice of many mighty philosophers, in carrying out their theories,
to evince great wisdom and foresight in providing against every
possible contingency which can be supposed at all likely to affect
themselves. Thus, to do a great right, you may do a little wrong; and
you may take any means which the end to be attained, will justify; the
amount of the right, or the amount of the wrong, or indeed the
distinction between the two, being left entirely to the philosopher
concerned, to be settled and determined by his clear, comprehensive,
and impartial view of his own particular case.
It was not until the two boys had scoured, with great rapidity, through
a most intricate maze of narrow streets and courts, that they ventured
to halt beneath a low and dark archway. Having remained silent here,
just long enough to recover breath to speak, Master Bates uttered an
exclamation of amusement and delight; and, bursting into an
uncontrollable fit of laughter, flung himself upon a doorstep, and
rolled thereon in a transport of mirth.
'What's the matter?' inquired the Dodger.
'Ha! ha! ha!' roared Charley Bates.
'Hold your noise,' remonstrated the Dodger, looking cautiously round.
'Do you want to be grabbed, stupid?'
'I can't help it,' said Charley, 'I can't help it! To see him
splitting away at that pace, and cutting round the corners, and
knocking up again' the posts, and starting on again as if he was made
of iron as well as them, and me with the wipe in my pocket, singing out
arter him--oh, my eye!' The vivid imagination of Master Bates presented
the scene before him in too strong colours. As he arrived at this
apostrophe, he again rolled upon the door-step, and laughed louder than
before.
'What'll Fagin say?' inquired the Dodger; taking advantage of the next
interval of breathlessness on the part of his friend to propound the
question.
'What?' repeated Charley Bates.
'Ah, what?' said the Dodger.
'Why, what should he say?' inquired Charley: stopping rather suddenly
in his merriment; for the Dodger's manner was impressive. 'What should
he say?'
Mr. Dawkins whistled for a couple of minutes; then, taking off his hat,
scratched his head, and nodded thrice.
'What do you mean?' said Charley.
'Toor rul lol loo, gammon and spinnage, the frog he wouldn't, and high
cockolorum,' said the Dodger: with a slight sneer on his intellectual
countenance.
This was explanatory, but not satisfactory. Master Bates felt it so;
and again said, 'What do you mean?'
The Dodger made no reply; but putting his hat on again, and gathering
the skirts of his long-tailed coat under his arm, thrust his tongue
into his cheek, slapped the bridge of his nose some half-dozen times in
a familiar but expressive manner, and turning on his heel, slunk down
the court. Master Bates followed, with a thoughtful countenance.
The noise of footsteps on the creaking stairs, a few minutes after the
occurrence of this conversation, roused the merry old gentleman as he
sat over the fire with a saveloy and a small loaf in his hand; a
pocket-knife in his right; and a pewter pot on the trivet. There was a
rascally smile on his white face as he turned round, and looking
sharply out from under his thick red eyebrows, bent his ear towards the
door, and listened.
'Why, how's this?' muttered the Jew: changing countenance; 'only two
of 'em? Where's the third? They can't have got into trouble. Hark!'
The footsteps approached nearer; they reached the landing. The door was
slowly opened; and the Dodger and Charley Bates entered, closing it
behind them.
| Oliver is taken to Mr. Brownlow's house, up in the suburb of Pentonville. The poor kid is so sick that he's unconscious for days. At least he's being taken care of for a change. He finally wakes up, and asks where he is. A motherly old lady immediately checks up on him, and tells him to be quiet, because he's been really sick and needs to take it easy. Oliver's so grateful that he pulls affectionately on her hand, and the old lady is astonished at how grateful he is. Oliver muses out loud to the old lady about whether or not his mother could see him from heaven, because he dreamed about her while he was sick. He offhandedly mentions that he's been beaten a lot, and he hopes that it didn't make his dead mother sad to see him get smacked around, because people shouldn't be sad in heaven. So obviously the old lady starts tearing up. It's tearjerker stuff. A doctor comes to check on him, and is really nice; and then the old lady is there and gives him tea, and then a different lady comes in to sit up in a chair next to his bed during the night. Everyone's being so nice Oliver gradually recovers. After another three days, he's doing so well that the kind old lady starts crying with joy. Oliver notices a portrait hanging in the room opposite his chair, and asks the old lady about it. She doesn't seem to know anything about it--even who the lady is. Oliver clearly feels some kind of deep connection to the portrait: "it makes my heart beat as if it was alive, and wanted to speak to me, but couldn't" . That remark strikes the kind old lady as pretty creepy, so she moves the portrait so that it's hanging behind him, instead of across from him. Clearly it was wreaking havoc on his young, fevered imagination. Because, come on, hearts don't talk. Especially not to portraits of random ladies. Mr. Brownlow comes to visit Oliver, and we learn that the nice old lady who's been taking care of him is named Mrs. Bedwin, and is Mr. Brownlow's housekeeper. And speaking of hearts, we learn that Mr. Brownlow's heart is "large enough for any six ordinary old gentlemen of humane disposition," so he tears up and has to pretend it's a cold when he sees how well Oliver's doing . Mr. Brownlow learns for the first time that Oliver's name is Oliver, and not "Tom White," as the officer at the magistrate's office had claimed. Just when Oliver is asking him why he looks perplexed, Brownlow notices a strong and striking resemblance between Oliver and the portrait that is now hanging above Oliver's head. Oliver can't take the excitement of Mr. Brownlow's exclamation, so he faints, and the chapter ends along with Oliver's consciousness. | summary |
'Where's Oliver?' said the Jew, rising with a menacing look. 'Where's
the boy?'
The young thieves eyed their preceptor as if they were alarmed at his
violence; and looked uneasily at each other. But they made no reply.
'What's become of the boy?' said the Jew, seizing the Dodger tightly by
the collar, and threatening him with horrid imprecations. 'Speak out,
or I'll throttle you!'
Mr. Fagin looked so very much in earnest, that Charley Bates, who
deemed it prudent in all cases to be on the safe side, and who
conceived it by no means improbable that it might be his turn to be
throttled second, dropped upon his knees, and raised a loud,
well-sustained, and continuous roar--something between a mad bull and a
speaking trumpet.
'Will you speak?' thundered the Jew: shaking the Dodger so much that
his keeping in the big coat at all, seemed perfectly miraculous.
'Why, the traps have got him, and that's all about it,' said the
Dodger, sullenly. 'Come, let go o' me, will you!' And, swinging
himself, at one jerk, clean out of the big coat, which he left in the
Jew's hands, the Dodger snatched up the toasting fork, and made a pass
at the merry old gentleman's waistcoat; which, if it had taken effect,
would have let a little more merriment out than could have been easily
replaced.
The Jew stepped back in this emergency, with more agility than could
have been anticipated in a man of his apparent decrepitude; and,
seizing up the pot, prepared to hurl it at his assailant's head. But
Charley Bates, at this moment, calling his attention by a perfectly
terrific howl, he suddenly altered its destination, and flung it full
at that young gentleman.
'Why, what the blazes is in the wind now!' growled a deep voice. 'Who
pitched that 'ere at me? It's well it's the beer, and not the pot, as
hit me, or I'd have settled somebody. I might have know'd, as nobody
but an infernal, rich, plundering, thundering old Jew could afford to
throw away any drink but water--and not that, unless he done the River
Company every quarter. Wot's it all about, Fagin? D--me, if my
neck-handkercher an't lined with beer! Come in, you sneaking warmint;
wot are you stopping outside for, as if you was ashamed of your master!
Come in!'
The man who growled out these words, was a stoutly-built fellow of
about five-and-thirty, in a black velveteen coat, very soiled drab
breeches, lace-up half boots, and grey cotton stockings which inclosed
a bulky pair of legs, with large swelling calves;--the kind of legs,
which in such costume, always look in an unfinished and incomplete
state without a set of fetters to garnish them. He had a brown hat on
his head, and a dirty belcher handkerchief round his neck: with the
long frayed ends of which he smeared the beer from his face as he
spoke. He disclosed, when he had done so, a broad heavy countenance
with a beard of three days' growth, and two scowling eyes; one of which
displayed various parti-coloured symptoms of having been recently
damaged by a blow.
'Come in, d'ye hear?' growled this engaging ruffian.
A white shaggy dog, with his face scratched and torn in twenty
different places, skulked into the room.
'Why didn't you come in afore?' said the man. 'You're getting too
proud to own me afore company, are you? Lie down!'
This command was accompanied with a kick, which sent the animal to the
other end of the room. He appeared well used to it, however; for he
coiled himself up in a corner very quietly, without uttering a sound,
and winking his very ill-looking eyes twenty times in a minute,
appeared to occupy himself in taking a survey of the apartment.
'What are you up to? Ill-treating the boys, you covetous, avaricious,
in-sa-ti-a-ble old fence?' said the man, seating himself deliberately.
'I wonder they don't murder you! I would if I was them. If I'd been
your 'prentice, I'd have done it long ago, and--no, I couldn't have
sold you afterwards, for you're fit for nothing but keeping as a
curiousity of ugliness in a glass bottle, and I suppose they don't blow
glass bottles large enough.'
'Hush! hush! Mr. Sikes,' said the Jew, trembling; 'don't speak so loud!'
'None of your mistering,' replied the ruffian; 'you always mean
mischief when you come that. You know my name: out with it! I shan't
disgrace it when the time comes.'
'Well, well, then--Bill Sikes,' said the Jew, with abject humility.
'You seem out of humour, Bill.'
'Perhaps I am,' replied Sikes; 'I should think you was rather out of
sorts too, unless you mean as little harm when you throw pewter pots
about, as you do when you blab and--'
'Are you mad?' said the Jew, catching the man by the sleeve, and
pointing towards the boys.
Mr. Sikes contented himself with tying an imaginary knot under his left
ear, and jerking his head over on the right shoulder; a piece of dumb
show which the Jew appeared to understand perfectly. He then, in cant
terms, with which his whole conversation was plentifully besprinkled,
but which would be quite unintelligible if they were recorded here,
demanded a glass of liquor.
'And mind you don't poison it,' said Mr. Sikes, laying his hat upon the
table.
This was said in jest; but if the speaker could have seen the evil leer
with which the Jew bit his pale lip as he turned round to the cupboard,
he might have thought the caution not wholly unnecessary, or the wish
(at all events) to improve upon the distiller's ingenuity not very far
from the old gentleman's merry heart.
After swallowing two of three glasses of spirits, Mr. Sikes
condescended to take some notice of the young gentlemen; which gracious
act led to a conversation, in which the cause and manner of Oliver's
capture were circumstantially detailed, with such alterations and
improvements on the truth, as to the Dodger appeared most advisable
under the circumstances.
'I'm afraid,' said the Jew, 'that he may say something which will get
us into trouble.'
'That's very likely,' returned Sikes with a malicious grin. 'You're
blowed upon, Fagin.'
'And I'm afraid, you see,' added the Jew, speaking as if he had not
noticed the interruption; and regarding the other closely as he did
so,--'I'm afraid that, if the game was up with us, it might be up with
a good many more, and that it would come out rather worse for you than
it would for me, my dear.'
The man started, and turned round upon the Jew. But the old
gentleman's shoulders were shrugged up to his ears; and his eyes were
vacantly staring on the opposite wall.
There was a long pause. Every member of the respectable coterie
appeared plunged in his own reflections; not excepting the dog, who by
a certain malicious licking of his lips seemed to be meditating an
attack upon the legs of the first gentleman or lady he might encounter
in the streets when he went out.
'Somebody must find out wot's been done at the office,' said Mr. Sikes
in a much lower tone than he had taken since he came in.
The Jew nodded assent.
'If he hasn't peached, and is committed, there's no fear till he comes
out again,' said Mr. Sikes, 'and then he must be taken care on. You
must get hold of him somehow.'
Again the Jew nodded.
The prudence of this line of action, indeed, was obvious; but,
unfortunately, there was one very strong objection to its being
adopted. This was, that the Dodger, and Charley Bates, and Fagin, and
Mr. William Sikes, happened, one and all, to entertain a violent and
deeply-rooted antipathy to going near a police-office on any ground or
pretext whatever.
How long they might have sat and looked at each other, in a state of
uncertainty not the most pleasant of its kind, it is difficult to
guess. It is not necessary to make any guesses on the subject,
however; for the sudden entrance of the two young ladies whom Oliver
had seen on a former occasion, caused the conversation to flow afresh.
'The very thing!' said the Jew. 'Bet will go; won't you, my dear?'
'Wheres?' inquired the young lady.
'Only just up to the office, my dear,' said the Jew coaxingly.
It is due to the young lady to say that she did not positively affirm
that she would not, but that she merely expressed an emphatic and
earnest desire to be 'blessed' if she would; a polite and delicate
evasion of the request, which shows the young lady to have been
possessed of that natural good breeding which cannot bear to inflict
upon a fellow-creature, the pain of a direct and pointed refusal.
The Jew's countenance fell. He turned from this young lady, who was
gaily, not to say gorgeously attired, in a red gown, green boots, and
yellow curl-papers, to the other female.
'Nancy, my dear,' said the Jew in a soothing manner, 'what do YOU say?'
'That it won't do; so it's no use a-trying it on, Fagin,' replied Nancy.
'What do you mean by that?' said Mr. Sikes, looking up in a surly
manner.
'What I say, Bill,' replied the lady collectedly.
'Why, you're just the very person for it,' reasoned Mr. Sikes: 'nobody
about here knows anything of you.'
'And as I don't want 'em to, neither,' replied Nancy in the same
composed manner, 'it's rather more no than yes with me, Bill.'
'She'll go, Fagin,' said Sikes.
'No, she won't, Fagin,' said Nancy.
'Yes, she will, Fagin,' said Sikes.
And Mr. Sikes was right. By dint of alternate threats, promises, and
bribes, the lady in question was ultimately prevailed upon to undertake
the commission. She was not, indeed, withheld by the same
considerations as her agreeable friend; for, having recently removed
into the neighborhood of Field Lane from the remote but genteel suburb
of Ratcliffe, she was not under the same apprehension of being
recognised by any of her numerous acquaintances.
Accordingly, with a clean white apron tied over her gown, and her
curl-papers tucked up under a straw bonnet,--both articles of dress
being provided from the Jew's inexhaustible stock,--Miss Nancy prepared
to issue forth on her errand.
'Stop a minute, my dear,' said the Jew, producing, a little covered
basket. 'Carry that in one hand. It looks more respectable, my dear.'
'Give her a door-key to carry in her t'other one, Fagin,' said Sikes;
'it looks real and genivine like.'
'Yes, yes, my dear, so it does,' said the Jew, hanging a large
street-door key on the forefinger of the young lady's right hand.
'There; very good! Very good indeed, my dear!' said the Jew, rubbing
his hands.
'Oh, my brother! My poor, dear, sweet, innocent little brother!'
exclaimed Nancy, bursting into tears, and wringing the little basket
and the street-door key in an agony of distress. 'What has become of
him! Where have they taken him to! Oh, do have pity, and tell me
what's been done with the dear boy, gentlemen; do, gentlemen, if you
please, gentlemen!'
Having uttered those words in a most lamentable and heart-broken tone:
to the immeasurable delight of her hearers: Miss Nancy paused, winked
to the company, nodded smilingly round, and disappeared.
'Ah, she's a clever girl, my dears,' said the Jew, turning round to his
young friends, and shaking his head gravely, as if in mute admonition
to them to follow the bright example they had just beheld.
'She's a honour to her sex,' said Mr. Sikes, filling his glass, and
smiting the table with his enormous fist. 'Here's her health, and
wishing they was all like her!'
While these, and many other encomiums, were being passed on the
accomplished Nancy, that young lady made the best of her way to the
police-office; whither, notwithstanding a little natural timidity
consequent upon walking through the streets alone and unprotected, she
arrived in perfect safety shortly afterwards.
Entering by the back way, she tapped softly with the key at one of the
cell-doors, and listened. There was no sound within: so she coughed
and listened again. Still there was no reply: so she spoke.
'Nolly, dear?' murmured Nancy in a gentle voice; 'Nolly?'
There was nobody inside but a miserable shoeless criminal, who had been
taken up for playing the flute, and who, the offence against society
having been clearly proved, had been very properly committed by Mr.
Fang to the House of Correction for one month; with the appropriate and
amusing remark that since he had so much breath to spare, it would be
more wholesomely expended on the treadmill than in a musical
instrument. He made no answer: being occupied mentally bewailing the
loss of the flute, which had been confiscated for the use of the
county: so Nancy passed on to the next cell, and knocked there.
'Well!' cried a faint and feeble voice.
'Is there a little boy here?' inquired Nancy, with a preliminary sob.
'No,' replied the voice; 'God forbid.'
This was a vagrant of sixty-five, who was going to prison for _not_
playing the flute; or, in other words, for begging in the streets, and
doing nothing for his livelihood. In the next cell was another man,
who was going to the same prison for hawking tin saucepans without
license; thereby doing something for his living, in defiance of the
Stamp-office.
But, as neither of these criminals answered to the name of Oliver, or
knew anything about him, Nancy made straight up to the bluff officer in
the striped waistcoat; and with the most piteous wailings and
lamentations, rendered more piteous by a prompt and efficient use of
the street-door key and the little basket, demanded her own dear
brother.
'I haven't got him, my dear,' said the old man.
'Where is he?' screamed Nancy, in a distracted manner.
'Why, the gentleman's got him,' replied the officer.
'What gentleman! Oh, gracious heavens! What gentleman?' exclaimed
Nancy.
In reply to this incoherent questioning, the old man informed the
deeply affected sister that Oliver had been taken ill in the office,
and discharged in consequence of a witness having proved the robbery to
have been committed by another boy, not in custody; and that the
prosecutor had carried him away, in an insensible condition, to his own
residence: of and concerning which, all the informant knew was, that
it was somewhere in Pentonville, he having heard that word mentioned in
the directions to the coachman.
In a dreadful state of doubt and uncertainty, the agonised young woman
staggered to the gate, and then, exchanging her faltering walk for a
swift run, returned by the most devious and complicated route she could
think of, to the domicile of the Jew.
Mr. Bill Sikes no sooner heard the account of the expedition delivered,
than he very hastily called up the white dog, and, putting on his hat,
expeditiously departed: without devoting any time to the formality of
wishing the company good-morning.
'We must know where he is, my dears; he must be found,' said the Jew
greatly excited. 'Charley, do nothing but skulk about, till you bring
home some news of him! Nancy, my dear, I must have him found. I trust
to you, my dear,--to you and the Artful for everything! Stay, stay,'
added the Jew, unlocking a drawer with a shaking hand; 'there's money,
my dears. I shall shut up this shop to-night. You'll know where to
find me! Don't stop here a minute. Not an instant, my dears!'
With these words, he pushed them from the room: and carefully
double-locking and barring the door behind them, drew from its place of
concealment the box which he had unintentionally disclosed to Oliver.
Then, he hastily proceeded to dispose the watches and jewellery beneath
his clothing.
A rap at the door startled him in this occupation. 'Who's there?' he
cried in a shrill tone.
'Me!' replied the voice of the Dodger, through the key-hole.
'What now?' cried the Jew impatiently.
'Is he to be kidnapped to the other ken, Nancy says?' inquired the
Dodger.
'Yes,' replied the Jew, 'wherever she lays hands on him. Find him,
find him out, that's all. I shall know what to do next; never fear.'
The boy murmured a reply of intelligence: and hurried downstairs after
his companions.
'He has not peached so far,' said the Jew as he pursued his occupation.
'If he means to blab us among his new friends, we may stop his mouth
yet.'
| Now we're back with the Dodger and Charley Bates. Charley thinks that the whole incident with Oliver was hilarious, and he can't stop laughing about it, but the Dodger's worried about what Fagin will say. The Dodger was right to worry--as soon as they tell Fagin what happened, he begins to shake the Dodger violently while Charley howls. Fortunately, the Dodger wears a coat about ten sizes too big, so he just slips out of it. The Dodger grabs the long toasting fork that they use to toast sausages in the fire and takes a swing at Fagin with it--but misses. Fagin throws a big jug of ale at the Dodger, and also misses . But Fagin hits a newcomer, by mistake, as he's coming in the door. And the newcomer is Not Happy. The newcomer is Bill Sikes, who growls that the way Fagin treats the boys, he wouldn't blame them if they murdered him . Meanwhile, despite great verbal and physical abuse from Sikes, a shaggy and scarred-up white dog slinks into the room after him. Fagin doesn't much care for Sikes, saying that he's a "covetous, avaricious, in-sa-ti-a-ble old fence" . And for mentioning that he occasionally "blabs" on his gang-members, so he interrupts Sikes, and gives him a drink . Fagin says that he's afraid Oliver will say something that will get them all in trouble. Sikes agrees, and looks rather pleased at the thought of Fagin getting into trouble. Fagin comes back by telling Sikes that if he ever got taken, Sikes would have the worst of it. Everyone is dismal at the thought of Oliver ratting them out, so they decide that someone will have to go and ask where he is. But obviously none of them wants to march up to the police office. Then Nancy walks in. They ask her to do it, since the police don't know her in this neighborhood. She's reluctant, but with some persuading from Bill, she agrees. Nancy puts on a respectable-looking outfit, and goes to the police station to ask about her "poor little brother." Her costume and act are convincing enough that she gets the officer in the striped waistcoat to tell her that he'd gone off with Mr. Brownlow, and that he lives somewhere in Pentonville. Nancy goes back to Fagin's den with the news, and Bill and the Dodger immediately set out to do something about it. | summary |
Oliver soon recovering from the fainting-fit into which Mr. Brownlow's
abrupt exclamation had thrown him, the subject of the picture was
carefully avoided, both by the old gentleman and Mrs. Bedwin, in the
conversation that ensued: which indeed bore no reference to Oliver's
history or prospects, but was confined to such topics as might amuse
without exciting him. He was still too weak to get up to breakfast;
but, when he came down into the housekeeper's room next day, his first
act was to cast an eager glance at the wall, in the hope of again
looking on the face of the beautiful lady. His expectations were
disappointed, however, for the picture had been removed.
'Ah!' said the housekeeper, watching the direction of Oliver's eyes.
'It is gone, you see.'
'I see it is ma'am,' replied Oliver. 'Why have they taken it away?'
'It has been taken down, child, because Mr. Brownlow said, that as it
seemed to worry you, perhaps it might prevent your getting well, you
know,' rejoined the old lady.
'Oh, no, indeed. It didn't worry me, ma'am,' said Oliver. 'I liked to
see it. I quite loved it.'
'Well, well!' said the old lady, good-humouredly; 'you get well as fast
as ever you can, dear, and it shall be hung up again. There! I promise
you that! Now, let us talk about something else.'
This was all the information Oliver could obtain about the picture at
that time. As the old lady had been so kind to him in his illness, he
endeavoured to think no more of the subject just then; so he listened
attentively to a great many stories she told him, about an amiable and
handsome daughter of hers, who was married to an amiable and handsome
man, and lived in the country; and about a son, who was clerk to a
merchant in the West Indies; and who was, also, such a good young man,
and wrote such dutiful letters home four times a-year, that it brought
the tears into her eyes to talk about them. When the old lady had
expatiated, a long time, on the excellences of her children, and the
merits of her kind good husband besides, who had been dead and gone,
poor dear soul! just six-and-twenty years, it was time to have tea.
After tea she began to teach Oliver cribbage: which he learnt as
quickly as she could teach: and at which game they played, with great
interest and gravity, until it was time for the invalid to have some
warm wine and water, with a slice of dry toast, and then to go cosily
to bed.
They were happy days, those of Oliver's recovery. Everything was so
quiet, and neat, and orderly; everybody so kind and gentle; that after
the noise and turbulence in the midst of which he had always lived, it
seemed like Heaven itself. He was no sooner strong enough to put his
clothes on, properly, than Mr. Brownlow caused a complete new suit, and
a new cap, and a new pair of shoes, to be provided for him. As Oliver
was told that he might do what he liked with the old clothes, he gave
them to a servant who had been very kind to him, and asked her to sell
them to a Jew, and keep the money for herself. This she very readily
did; and, as Oliver looked out of the parlour window, and saw the Jew
roll them up in his bag and walk away, he felt quite delighted to think
that they were safely gone, and that there was now no possible danger
of his ever being able to wear them again. They were sad rags, to tell
the truth; and Oliver had never had a new suit before.
One evening, about a week after the affair of the picture, as he was
sitting talking to Mrs. Bedwin, there came a message down from Mr.
Brownlow, that if Oliver Twist felt pretty well, he should like to see
him in his study, and talk to him a little while.
'Bless us, and save us! Wash your hands, and let me part your hair
nicely for you, child,' said Mrs. Bedwin. 'Dear heart alive! If we
had known he would have asked for you, we would have put you a clean
collar on, and made you as smart as sixpence!'
Oliver did as the old lady bade him; and, although she lamented
grievously, meanwhile, that there was not even time to crimp the little
frill that bordered his shirt-collar; he looked so delicate and
handsome, despite that important personal advantage, that she went so
far as to say: looking at him with great complacency from head to
foot, that she really didn't think it would have been possible, on the
longest notice, to have made much difference in him for the better.
Thus encouraged, Oliver tapped at the study door. On Mr. Brownlow
calling to him to come in, he found himself in a little back room,
quite full of books, with a window, looking into some pleasant little
gardens. There was a table drawn up before the window, at which Mr.
Brownlow was seated reading. When he saw Oliver, he pushed the book
away from him, and told him to come near the table, and sit down.
Oliver complied; marvelling where the people could be found to read
such a great number of books as seemed to be written to make the world
wiser. Which is still a marvel to more experienced people than Oliver
Twist, every day of their lives.
'There are a good many books, are there not, my boy?' said Mr.
Brownlow, observing the curiosity with which Oliver surveyed the
shelves that reached from the floor to the ceiling.
'A great number, sir,' replied Oliver. 'I never saw so many.'
'You shall read them, if you behave well,' said the old gentleman
kindly; 'and you will like that, better than looking at the
outsides,--that is, some cases; because there are books of which the
backs and covers are by far the best parts.'
'I suppose they are those heavy ones, sir,' said Oliver, pointing to
some large quartos, with a good deal of gilding about the binding.
'Not always those,' said the old gentleman, patting Oliver on the head,
and smiling as he did so; 'there are other equally heavy ones, though
of a much smaller size. How should you like to grow up a clever man,
and write books, eh?'
'I think I would rather read them, sir,' replied Oliver.
'What! wouldn't you like to be a book-writer?' said the old gentleman.
Oliver considered a little while; and at last said, he should think it
would be a much better thing to be a book-seller; upon which the old
gentleman laughed heartily, and declared he had said a very good thing.
Which Oliver felt glad to have done, though he by no means knew what it
was.
'Well, well,' said the old gentleman, composing his features. 'Don't be
afraid! We won't make an author of you, while there's an honest trade
to be learnt, or brick-making to turn to.'
'Thank you, sir,' said Oliver. At the earnest manner of his reply, the
old gentleman laughed again; and said something about a curious
instinct, which Oliver, not understanding, paid no very great attention
to.
'Now,' said Mr. Brownlow, speaking if possible in a kinder, but at the
same time in a much more serious manner, than Oliver had ever known him
assume yet, 'I want you to pay great attention, my boy, to what I am
going to say. I shall talk to you without any reserve; because I am
sure you are well able to understand me, as many older persons would
be.'
'Oh, don't tell you are going to send me away, sir, pray!' exclaimed
Oliver, alarmed at the serious tone of the old gentleman's
commencement! 'Don't turn me out of doors to wander in the streets
again. Let me stay here, and be a servant. Don't send me back to the
wretched place I came from. Have mercy upon a poor boy, sir!'
'My dear child,' said the old gentleman, moved by the warmth of
Oliver's sudden appeal; 'you need not be afraid of my deserting you,
unless you give me cause.'
'I never, never will, sir,' interposed Oliver.
'I hope not,' rejoined the old gentleman. 'I do not think you ever
will. I have been deceived, before, in the objects whom I have
endeavoured to benefit; but I feel strongly disposed to trust you,
nevertheless; and I am more interested in your behalf than I can well
account for, even to myself. The persons on whom I have bestowed my
dearest love, lie deep in their graves; but, although the happiness and
delight of my life lie buried there too, I have not made a coffin of my
heart, and sealed it up, forever, on my best affections. Deep
affliction has but strengthened and refined them.'
As the old gentleman said this in a low voice: more to himself than to
his companion: and as he remained silent for a short time afterwards:
Oliver sat quite still.
'Well, well!' said the old gentleman at length, in a more cheerful
tone, 'I only say this, because you have a young heart; and knowing
that I have suffered great pain and sorrow, you will be more careful,
perhaps, not to wound me again. You say you are an orphan, without a
friend in the world; all the inquiries I have been able to make,
confirm the statement. Let me hear your story; where you come from;
who brought you up; and how you got into the company in which I found
you. Speak the truth, and you shall not be friendless while I live.'
Oliver's sobs checked his utterance for some minutes; when he was on
the point of beginning to relate how he had been brought up at the
farm, and carried to the workhouse by Mr. Bumble, a peculiarly
impatient little double-knock was heard at the street-door: and the
servant, running upstairs, announced Mr. Grimwig.
'Is he coming up?' inquired Mr. Brownlow.
'Yes, sir,' replied the servant. 'He asked if there were any muffins
in the house; and, when I told him yes, he said he had come to tea.'
Mr. Brownlow smiled; and, turning to Oliver, said that Mr. Grimwig was
an old friend of his, and he must not mind his being a little rough in
his manners; for he was a worthy creature at bottom, as he had reason
to know.
'Shall I go downstairs, sir?' inquired Oliver.
'No,' replied Mr. Brownlow, 'I would rather you remained here.'
At this moment, there walked into the room: supporting himself by a
thick stick: a stout old gentleman, rather lame in one leg, who was
dressed in a blue coat, striped waistcoat, nankeen breeches and
gaiters, and a broad-brimmed white hat, with the sides turned up with
green. A very small-plaited shirt frill stuck out from his waistcoat;
and a very long steel watch-chain, with nothing but a key at the end,
dangled loosely below it. The ends of his white neckerchief were
twisted into a ball about the size of an orange; the variety of shapes
into which his countenance was twisted, defy description. He had a
manner of screwing his head on one side when he spoke; and of looking
out of the corners of his eyes at the same time: which irresistibly
reminded the beholder of a parrot. In this attitude, he fixed himself,
the moment he made his appearance; and, holding out a small piece of
orange-peel at arm's length, exclaimed, in a growling, discontented
voice.
'Look here! do you see this! Isn't it a most wonderful and
extraordinary thing that I can't call at a man's house but I find a
piece of this poor surgeon's friend on the staircase? I've been lamed
with orange-peel once, and I know orange-peel will be my death, or I'll
be content to eat my own head, sir!'
This was the handsome offer with which Mr. Grimwig backed and confirmed
nearly every assertion he made; and it was the more singular in his
case, because, even admitting for the sake of argument, the possibility
of scientific improvements being brought to that pass which will enable
a gentleman to eat his own head in the event of his being so disposed,
Mr. Grimwig's head was such a particularly large one, that the most
sanguine man alive could hardly entertain a hope of being able to get
through it at a sitting--to put entirely out of the question, a very
thick coating of powder.
'I'll eat my head, sir,' repeated Mr. Grimwig, striking his stick upon
the ground. 'Hallo! what's that!' looking at Oliver, and retreating a
pace or two.
'This is young Oliver Twist, whom we were speaking about,' said Mr.
Brownlow.
Oliver bowed.
'You don't mean to say that's the boy who had the fever, I hope?' said
Mr. Grimwig, recoiling a little more. 'Wait a minute! Don't speak!
Stop--' continued Mr. Grimwig, abruptly, losing all dread of the fever
in his triumph at the discovery; 'that's the boy who had the orange!
If that's not the boy, sir, who had the orange, and threw this bit of
peel upon the staircase, I'll eat my head, and his too.'
'No, no, he has not had one,' said Mr. Brownlow, laughing. 'Come! Put
down your hat; and speak to my young friend.'
'I feel strongly on this subject, sir,' said the irritable old
gentleman, drawing off his gloves. 'There's always more or less
orange-peel on the pavement in our street; and I _know_ it's put there
by the surgeon's boy at the corner. A young woman stumbled over a bit
last night, and fell against my garden-railings; directly she got up I
saw her look towards his infernal red lamp with the pantomime-light.
"Don't go to him," I called out of the window, "he's an assassin! A
man-trap!" So he is. If he is not--' Here the irascible old
gentleman gave a great knock on the ground with his stick; which was
always understood, by his friends, to imply the customary offer,
whenever it was not expressed in words. Then, still keeping his stick
in his hand, he sat down; and, opening a double eye-glass, which he
wore attached to a broad black riband, took a view of Oliver: who,
seeing that he was the object of inspection, coloured, and bowed again.
'That's the boy, is it?' said Mr. Grimwig, at length.
'That's the boy,' replied Mr. Brownlow.
'How are you, boy?' said Mr. Grimwig.
'A great deal better, thank you, sir,' replied Oliver.
Mr. Brownlow, seeming to apprehend that his singular friend was about
to say something disagreeable, asked Oliver to step downstairs and tell
Mrs. Bedwin they were ready for tea; which, as he did not half like the
visitor's manner, he was very happy to do.
'He is a nice-looking boy, is he not?' inquired Mr. Brownlow.
'I don't know,' replied Mr. Grimwig, pettishly.
'Don't know?'
'No. I don't know. I never see any difference in boys. I only knew
two sort of boys. Mealy boys, and beef-faced boys.'
'And which is Oliver?'
'Mealy. I know a friend who has a beef-faced boy; a fine boy, they
call him; with a round head, and red cheeks, and glaring eyes; a horrid
boy; with a body and limbs that appear to be swelling out of the seams
of his blue clothes; with the voice of a pilot, and the appetite of a
wolf. I know him! The wretch!'
'Come,' said Mr. Brownlow, 'these are not the characteristics of young
Oliver Twist; so he needn't excite your wrath.'
'They are not,' replied Mr. Grimwig. 'He may have worse.'
Here, Mr. Brownlow coughed impatiently; which appeared to afford Mr.
Grimwig the most exquisite delight.
'He may have worse, I say,' repeated Mr. Grimwig. 'Where does he come
from! Who is he? What is he? He has had a fever. What of that?
Fevers are not peculiar to good people; are they? Bad people have
fevers sometimes; haven't they, eh? I knew a man who was hung in
Jamaica for murdering his master. He had had a fever six times; he
wasn't recommended to mercy on that account. Pooh! nonsense!'
Now, the fact was, that in the inmost recesses of his own heart, Mr.
Grimwig was strongly disposed to admit that Oliver's appearance and
manner were unusually prepossessing; but he had a strong appetite for
contradiction, sharpened on this occasion by the finding of the
orange-peel; and, inwardly determining that no man should dictate to
him whether a boy was well-looking or not, he had resolved, from the
first, to oppose his friend. When Mr. Brownlow admitted that on no one
point of inquiry could he yet return a satisfactory answer; and that he
had postponed any investigation into Oliver's previous history until he
thought the boy was strong enough to hear it; Mr. Grimwig chuckled
maliciously. And he demanded, with a sneer, whether the housekeeper
was in the habit of counting the plate at night; because if she didn't
find a table-spoon or two missing some sunshiny morning, why, he would
be content to--and so forth.
All this, Mr. Brownlow, although himself somewhat of an impetuous
gentleman: knowing his friend's peculiarities, bore with great good
humour; as Mr. Grimwig, at tea, was graciously pleased to express his
entire approval of the muffins, matters went on very smoothly; and
Oliver, who made one of the party, began to feel more at his ease than
he had yet done in the fierce old gentleman's presence.
'And when are you going to hear a full, true, and particular account of
the life and adventures of Oliver Twist?' asked Grimwig of Mr.
Brownlow, at the conclusion of the meal; looking sideways at Oliver, as
he resumed his subject.
'To-morrow morning,' replied Mr. Brownlow. 'I would rather he was
alone with me at the time. Come up to me to-morrow morning at ten
o'clock, my dear.'
'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver. He answered with some hesitation, because
he was confused by Mr. Grimwig's looking so hard at him.
'I'll tell you what,' whispered that gentleman to Mr. Brownlow; 'he
won't come up to you to-morrow morning. I saw him hesitate. He is
deceiving you, my good friend.'
'I'll swear he is not,' replied Mr. Brownlow, warmly.
'If he is not,' said Mr. Grimwig, 'I'll--' and down went the stick.
'I'll answer for that boy's truth with my life!' said Mr. Brownlow,
knocking the table.
'And I for his falsehood with my head!' rejoined Mr. Grimwig, knocking
the table also.
'We shall see,' said Mr. Brownlow, checking his rising anger.
'We will,' replied Mr. Grimwig, with a provoking smile; 'we will.'
As fate would have it, Mrs. Bedwin chanced to bring in, at this moment,
a small parcel of books, which Mr. Brownlow had that morning purchased
of the identical bookstall-keeper, who has already figured in this
history; having laid them on the table, she prepared to leave the room.
'Stop the boy, Mrs. Bedwin!' said Mr. Brownlow; 'there is something to
go back.'
'He has gone, sir,' replied Mrs. Bedwin.
'Call after him,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'it's particular. He is a poor
man, and they are not paid for. There are some books to be taken back,
too.'
The street-door was opened. Oliver ran one way; and the girl ran
another; and Mrs. Bedwin stood on the step and screamed for the boy;
but there was no boy in sight. Oliver and the girl returned, in a
breathless state, to report that there were no tidings of him.
'Dear me, I am very sorry for that,' exclaimed Mr. Brownlow; 'I
particularly wished those books to be returned to-night.'
'Send Oliver with them,' said Mr. Grimwig, with an ironical smile; 'he
will be sure to deliver them safely, you know.'
'Yes; do let me take them, if you please, sir,' said Oliver. 'I'll run
all the way, sir.'
The old gentleman was just going to say that Oliver should not go out
on any account; when a most malicious cough from Mr. Grimwig determined
him that he should; and that, by his prompt discharge of the
commission, he should prove to him the injustice of his suspicions: on
this head at least: at once.
'You _shall_ go, my dear,' said the old gentleman. 'The books are on a
chair by my table. Fetch them down.'
Oliver, delighted to be of use, brought down the books under his arm in
a great bustle; and waited, cap in hand, to hear what message he was to
take.
'You are to say,' said Mr. Brownlow, glancing steadily at Grimwig; 'you
are to say that you have brought those books back; and that you have
come to pay the four pound ten I owe him. This is a five-pound note,
so you will have to bring me back, ten shillings change.'
'I won't be ten minutes, sir,' said Oliver, eagerly. Having buttoned
up the bank-note in his jacket pocket, and placed the books carefully
under his arm, he made a respectful bow, and left the room. Mrs.
Bedwin followed him to the street-door, giving him many directions
about the nearest way, and the name of the bookseller, and the name of
the street: all of which Oliver said he clearly understood. Having
superadded many injunctions to be sure and not take cold, the old lady
at length permitted him to depart.
'Bless his sweet face!' said the old lady, looking after him. 'I can't
bear, somehow, to let him go out of my sight.'
At this moment, Oliver looked gaily round, and nodded before he turned
the corner. The old lady smilingly returned his salutation, and,
closing the door, went back to her own room.
'Let me see; he'll be back in twenty minutes, at the longest,' said Mr.
Brownlow, pulling out his watch, and placing it on the table. 'It will
be dark by that time.'
'Oh! you really expect him to come back, do you?' inquired Mr. Grimwig.
'Don't you?' asked Mr. Brownlow, smiling.
The spirit of contradiction was strong in Mr. Grimwig's breast, at the
moment; and it was rendered stronger by his friend's confident smile.
'No,' he said, smiting the table with his fist, 'I do not. The boy has
a new suit of clothes on his back, a set of valuable books under his
arm, and a five-pound note in his pocket. He'll join his old friends
the thieves, and laugh at you. If ever that boy returns to this house,
sir, I'll eat my head.'
With these words he drew his chair closer to the table; and there the
two friends sat, in silent expectation, with the watch between them.
It is worthy of remark, as illustrating the importance we attach to our
own judgments, and the pride with which we put forth our most rash and
hasty conclusions, that, although Mr. Grimwig was not by any means a
bad-hearted man, and though he would have been unfeignedly sorry to see
his respected friend duped and deceived, he really did most earnestly
and strongly hope at that moment, that Oliver Twist might not come back.
It grew so dark, that the figures on the dial-plate were scarcely
discernible; but there the two old gentlemen continued to sit, in
silence, with the watch between them.
| We're back with Oliver at Mr. Brownlow's house, now. Oliver has recovered from his fainting-fit, and wakes to see that Mr. Brownlow has taken the portrait out of his room entirely. Mrs. Bedwin explains that it's because seeing the portrait got him over-excited, and Oliver doesn't argue. To avoid talking about the portrait, Mrs. Bedwin launches into a looooong description of her children, and their children, and how dutiful they all are. Then she teaches him how to play cribbage . Now that Oliver's better, Mr. Brownlow thinks it's time for Oliver to have a new suit of clothes. Oliver takes his old clothes and sells them to a used-clothing salesman , and gives the money to a servant who's been nice to him. Mr. Brownlow asks to see Oliver in his study, and after Mrs. Bedwin has fussed over his collar for a few minutes, Oliver goes. Mr. Brownlow sees how curious Oliver is about all of the books in his study, so they have a brief conversation about whether Oliver might want to read them all , or whether Oliver would want to write a book himself one day. Oliver says he'd much rather be a book-seller than an author. Mr. Brownlow then turns more serious, and basically tells Oliver that he's been disappointed in people many, many times, but that he trusts Oliver. He hopes that telling Oliver how many times he's been crushed by disappointment will keep Oliver from hurting him again. No pressure, Oliver! Just as Oliver has finished crying , and is just starting to tell his story to Mr. Brownlow, they are interrupted by a servant, who announces that Mr. Grimwig has arrived. Mr. Grimwig comes into the room and is clearly in a bad mood--he says it's because he tripped on some orange peel in the stairway, and says that orange peel will be the death of him, or he'll "eat his own head." That seems to be a favorite expression of his. Mr. Brownlow calms Mr. Grimwig down on the subject of orange peels, and introduces him to Oliver. Mr. Grimwig might have been inclined to like Oliver, but the orange peel has put him out and he refuses to acknowledge anything good about Oliver until Oliver has proven himself. An opportunity for Oliver to prove himself presents itself almost immediately: a pile of books is delivered from the bookseller we met in chapter ten, but not all of them were paid for, and some need to be returned. Mr. Brownlow is just as eager for Oliver to prove himself to Mr. Grimwig as Oliver is, so he sends Oliver out on the errand, with a stack of books to return, and a five pound note and instructions to bring back the change. Mr. Grimwig bets that Oliver won't come back, but will make off with the books and the money and go back to the thieves, and Mr. Brownlow insists that he'll be back within twenty minutes. They set the watch on the table and watch the minutes tick by, but Oliver doesn't come back. | summary |
In the obscure parlour of a low public-house, in the filthiest part of
Little Saffron Hill; a dark and gloomy den, where a flaring gas-light
burnt all day in the winter-time; and where no ray of sun ever shone in
the summer: there sat, brooding over a little pewter measure and a
small glass, strongly impregnated with the smell of liquor, a man in a
velveteen coat, drab shorts, half-boots and stockings, whom even by
that dim light no experienced agent of the police would have hesitated
to recognise as Mr. William Sikes. At his feet, sat a white-coated,
red-eyed dog; who occupied himself, alternately, in winking at his
master with both eyes at the same time; and in licking a large, fresh
cut on one side of his mouth, which appeared to be the result of some
recent conflict.
'Keep quiet, you warmint! Keep quiet!' said Mr. Sikes, suddenly
breaking silence. Whether his meditations were so intense as to be
disturbed by the dog's winking, or whether his feelings were so wrought
upon by his reflections that they required all the relief derivable
from kicking an unoffending animal to allay them, is matter for
argument and consideration. Whatever was the cause, the effect was a
kick and a curse, bestowed upon the dog simultaneously.
Dogs are not generally apt to revenge injuries inflicted upon them by
their masters; but Mr. Sikes's dog, having faults of temper in common
with his owner, and labouring, perhaps, at this moment, under a
powerful sense of injury, made no more ado but at once fixed his teeth
in one of the half-boots. Having given in a hearty shake, he retired,
growling, under a form; just escaping the pewter measure which Mr.
Sikes levelled at his head.
'You would, would you?' said Sikes, seizing the poker in one hand, and
deliberately opening with the other a large clasp-knife, which he drew
from his pocket. 'Come here, you born devil! Come here! D'ye hear?'
The dog no doubt heard; because Mr. Sikes spoke in the very harshest
key of a very harsh voice; but, appearing to entertain some
unaccountable objection to having his throat cut, he remained where he
was, and growled more fiercely than before: at the same time grasping
the end of the poker between his teeth, and biting at it like a wild
beast.
This resistance only infuriated Mr. Sikes the more; who, dropping on
his knees, began to assail the animal most furiously. The dog jumped
from right to left, and from left to right; snapping, growling, and
barking; the man thrust and swore, and struck and blasphemed; and the
struggle was reaching a most critical point for one or other; when, the
door suddenly opening, the dog darted out: leaving Bill Sikes with the
poker and the clasp-knife in his hands.
There must always be two parties to a quarrel, says the old adage. Mr.
Sikes, being disappointed of the dog's participation, at once
transferred his share in the quarrel to the new comer.
'What the devil do you come in between me and my dog for?' said Sikes,
with a fierce gesture.
'I didn't know, my dear, I didn't know,' replied Fagin, humbly; for the
Jew was the new comer.
'Didn't know, you white-livered thief!' growled Sikes. 'Couldn't you
hear the noise?'
'Not a sound of it, as I'm a living man, Bill,' replied the Jew.
'Oh no! You hear nothing, you don't,' retorted Sikes with a fierce
sneer. 'Sneaking in and out, so as nobody hears how you come or go! I
wish you had been the dog, Fagin, half a minute ago.'
'Why?' inquired the Jew with a forced smile.
'Cause the government, as cares for the lives of such men as you, as
haven't half the pluck of curs, lets a man kill a dog how he likes,'
replied Sikes, shutting up the knife with a very expressive look;
'that's why.'
The Jew rubbed his hands; and, sitting down at the table, affected to
laugh at the pleasantry of his friend. He was obviously very ill at
ease, however.
'Grin away,' said Sikes, replacing the poker, and surveying him with
savage contempt; 'grin away. You'll never have the laugh at me,
though, unless it's behind a nightcap. I've got the upper hand over
you, Fagin; and, d--me, I'll keep it. There! If I go, you go; so take
care of me.'
'Well, well, my dear,' said the Jew, 'I know all that; we--we--have a
mutual interest, Bill,--a mutual interest.'
'Humph,' said Sikes, as if he thought the interest lay rather more on
the Jew's side than on his. 'Well, what have you got to say to me?'
'It's all passed safe through the melting-pot,' replied Fagin, 'and
this is your share. It's rather more than it ought to be, my dear; but
as I know you'll do me a good turn another time, and--'
'Stow that gammon,' interposed the robber, impatiently. 'Where is it?
Hand over!'
'Yes, yes, Bill; give me time, give me time,' replied the Jew,
soothingly. 'Here it is! All safe!' As he spoke, he drew forth an
old cotton handkerchief from his breast; and untying a large knot in
one corner, produced a small brown-paper packet. Sikes, snatching it
from him, hastily opened it; and proceeded to count the sovereigns it
contained.
'This is all, is it?' inquired Sikes.
'All,' replied the Jew.
'You haven't opened the parcel and swallowed one or two as you come
along, have you?' inquired Sikes, suspiciously. 'Don't put on an
injured look at the question; you've done it many a time. Jerk the
tinkler.'
These words, in plain English, conveyed an injunction to ring the bell.
It was answered by another Jew: younger than Fagin, but nearly as vile
and repulsive in appearance.
Bill Sikes merely pointed to the empty measure. The Jew, perfectly
understanding the hint, retired to fill it: previously exchanging a
remarkable look with Fagin, who raised his eyes for an instant, as if
in expectation of it, and shook his head in reply; so slightly that the
action would have been almost imperceptible to an observant third
person. It was lost upon Sikes, who was stooping at the moment to tie
the boot-lace which the dog had torn. Possibly, if he had observed the
brief interchange of signals, he might have thought that it boded no
good to him.
'Is anybody here, Barney?' inquired Fagin; speaking, now that that
Sikes was looking on, without raising his eyes from the ground.
'Dot a shoul,' replied Barney; whose words: whether they came from the
heart or not: made their way through the nose.
'Nobody?' inquired Fagin, in a tone of surprise: which perhaps might
mean that Barney was at liberty to tell the truth.
'Dobody but Biss Dadsy,' replied Barney.
'Nancy!' exclaimed Sikes. 'Where? Strike me blind, if I don't honour
that 'ere girl, for her native talents.'
'She's bid havid a plate of boiled beef id the bar,' replied Barney.
'Send her here,' said Sikes, pouring out a glass of liquor. 'Send her
here.'
Barney looked timidly at Fagin, as if for permission; the Jew remaining
silent, and not lifting his eyes from the ground, he retired; and
presently returned, ushering in Nancy; who was decorated with the
bonnet, apron, basket, and street-door key, complete.
'You are on the scent, are you, Nancy?' inquired Sikes, proffering the
glass.
'Yes, I am, Bill,' replied the young lady, disposing of its contents;
'and tired enough of it I am, too. The young brat's been ill and
confined to the crib; and--'
'Ah, Nancy, dear!' said Fagin, looking up.
Now, whether a peculiar contraction of the Jew's red eye-brows, and a
half closing of his deeply-set eyes, warned Miss Nancy that she was
disposed to be too communicative, is not a matter of much importance.
The fact is all we need care for here; and the fact is, that she
suddenly checked herself, and with several gracious smiles upon Mr.
Sikes, turned the conversation to other matters. In about ten minutes'
time, Mr. Fagin was seized with a fit of coughing; upon which Nancy
pulled her shawl over her shoulders, and declared it was time to go.
Mr. Sikes, finding that he was walking a short part of her way himself,
expressed his intention of accompanying her; they went away together,
followed, at a little distant, by the dog, who slunk out of a back-yard
as soon as his master was out of sight.
The Jew thrust his head out of the room door when Sikes had left it;
looked after him as he walked up the dark passage; shook his clenched
fist; muttered a deep curse; and then, with a horrible grin, reseated
himself at the table; where he was soon deeply absorbed in the
interesting pages of the Hue-and-Cry.
Meanwhile, Oliver Twist, little dreaming that he was within so very
short a distance of the merry old gentleman, was on his way to the
book-stall. When he got into Clerkenwell, he accidently turned down a
by-street which was not exactly in his way; but not discovering his
mistake until he had got half-way down it, and knowing it must lead in
the right direction, he did not think it worth while to turn back; and
so marched on, as quickly as he could, with the books under his arm.
He was walking along, thinking how happy and contented he ought to
feel; and how much he would give for only one look at poor little Dick,
who, starved and beaten, might be weeping bitterly at that very moment;
when he was startled by a young woman screaming out very loud. 'Oh, my
dear brother!' And he had hardly looked up, to see what the matter
was, when he was stopped by having a pair of arms thrown tight round
his neck.
'Don't,' cried Oliver, struggling. 'Let go of me. Who is it? What are
you stopping me for?'
The only reply to this, was a great number of loud lamentations from
the young woman who had embraced him; and who had a little basket and a
street-door key in her hand.
'Oh my gracious!' said the young woman, 'I have found him! Oh! Oliver!
Oliver! Oh you naughty boy, to make me suffer such distress on your
account! Come home, dear, come. Oh, I've found him. Thank gracious
goodness heavins, I've found him!' With these incoherent exclamations,
the young woman burst into another fit of crying, and got so dreadfully
hysterical, that a couple of women who came up at the moment asked a
butcher's boy with a shiny head of hair anointed with suet, who was
also looking on, whether he didn't think he had better run for the
doctor. To which, the butcher's boy: who appeared of a lounging, not
to say indolent disposition: replied, that he thought not.
'Oh, no, no, never mind,' said the young woman, grasping Oliver's hand;
'I'm better now. Come home directly, you cruel boy! Come!'
'Oh, ma'am,' replied the young woman, 'he ran away, near a month ago,
from his parents, who are hard-working and respectable people; and went
and joined a set of thieves and bad characters; and almost broke his
mother's heart.'
'Young wretch!' said one woman.
'Go home, do, you little brute,' said the other.
'I am not,' replied Oliver, greatly alarmed. 'I don't know her. I
haven't any sister, or father and mother either. I'm an orphan; I live
at Pentonville.'
'Only hear him, how he braves it out!' cried the young woman.
'Why, it's Nancy!' exclaimed Oliver; who now saw her face for the first
time; and started back, in irrepressible astonishment.
'You see he knows me!' cried Nancy, appealing to the bystanders. 'He
can't help himself. Make him come home, there's good people, or he'll
kill his dear mother and father, and break my heart!'
'What the devil's this?' said a man, bursting out of a beer-shop, with
a white dog at his heels; 'young Oliver! Come home to your poor mother,
you young dog! Come home directly.'
'I don't belong to them. I don't know them. Help! help!' cried
Oliver, struggling in the man's powerful grasp.
'Help!' repeated the man. 'Yes; I'll help you, you young rascal!
What books are these? You've been a stealing 'em, have you? Give 'em
here.' With these words, the man tore the volumes from his grasp, and
struck him on the head.
'That's right!' cried a looker-on, from a garret-window. 'That's the
only way of bringing him to his senses!'
'To be sure!' cried a sleepy-faced carpenter, casting an approving look
at the garret-window.
'It'll do him good!' said the two women.
'And he shall have it, too!' rejoined the man, administering another
blow, and seizing Oliver by the collar. 'Come on, you young villain!
Here, Bull's-eye, mind him, boy! Mind him!'
Weak with recent illness; stupified by the blows and the suddenness of
the attack; terrified by the fierce growling of the dog, and the
brutality of the man; overpowered by the conviction of the bystanders
that he really was the hardened little wretch he was described to be;
what could one poor child do! Darkness had set in; it was a low
neighborhood; no help was near; resistance was useless. In another
moment he was dragged into a labyrinth of dark narrow courts, and was
forced along them at a pace which rendered the few cries he dared to
give utterance to, unintelligible. It was of little moment, indeed,
whether they were intelligible or no; for there was nobody to care for
them, had they been ever so plain.
* * * * *
The gas-lamps were lighted; Mrs. Bedwin was waiting anxiously at the
open door; the servant had run up the street twenty times to see if
there were any traces of Oliver; and still the two old gentlemen sat,
perseveringly, in the dark parlour, with the watch between them.
| The chapter opens with a lengthy digression--Dickens starts out by describing how he's not going to talk about the kinds of people who don't help the poor, and the reasons they make up to defend themselves, and he spends so much time telling us exactly what he's not going to tell us about, that by the end, he has. And then we're back in a public house with Bill Sikes and his dog. Sikes is clearly preoccupied about something, and decides to take it out on the dog, so he kicks it and swears at it. The dog grabs hold of his boot with its teeth, and so Sikes goes after it with the poker in one hand, and a pocketknife in the other. Fagin arrives just in time for the dog to make its escape out the front door. Sikes is angry that Fagin came between him and the dog, and Fagin tries to shrug it off. But then Sikes tells Fagin that he wishes Fagin had been in the dog's shoes a few minutes before. Fagin doesn't think it's a very funny joke, but then, Sikes probably wasn't joking. Sikes tells Fagin that whatever happens to him, will happen to Fagin . Fagin agrees that they "have a mutual interest," and then they get down to business . Fagin pays Sikes a share of money , and says that it's more than it ought to be. Sikes looks at the amount, and clearly disagrees. Sikes rings a bell to call for the bartender. Barney comes in to take Sikes's order. He and Fagin exchange glances and communicate something through it that Sikes isn't aware of. Fagin then asks Barney if anyone else is in the main part of the bar, and Barney tells him that no one is there but "Biss Dadsy" . Sikes asks Barney to bring Nancy into the side room where they are. He asks her how her stalking is going, and she says it's a pain--Oliver's been sick and confined to the house, so she hasn't made much headway. Fagin cuts her off in the middle of her story, as though he doesn't want Sikes to know too much about it. So Nancy changes the subject, and eventually heads out with Sikes. Oliver, meanwhile, is off on his errand to deliver the books to the bookseller, and he's taken a wrong turn. It's not a very wrong turn, though, and he knows it'll get him there eventually, so he doesn't turn around. Too bad it's a dark alley and too bad he runs into Nancy and Sikes. Nancy's still in her "respectable sister" costume, and as soon as she sees Oliver she starts crying over him and pretending that he's her little lost brother who ran away from home a month ago. She's persuasive enough that everyone on the street around them starts scolding Oliver for being a bad boy, and for running away to join thieves and worrying his family like that. What a naughty boy! Even though Oliver loudly contradicts it all, Nancy's act is better than his--everyone thinks he's just trying to lie because he's a hardened criminal and he wants to get back to his gang of thieves. So Nancy and Sikes drag Oliver back into the bad neighborhood they'd just come from, while Mrs. Bedwin, Mr. Brownlow, and Mr. Grimwig are back at the house in Pentonville wondering what's become of him. | summary |
The narrow streets and courts, at length, terminated in a large open
space; scattered about which, were pens for beasts, and other
indications of a cattle-market. Sikes slackened his pace when they
reached this spot: the girl being quite unable to support any longer,
the rapid rate at which they had hitherto walked. Turning to Oliver,
he roughly commanded him to take hold of Nancy's hand.
'Do you hear?' growled Sikes, as Oliver hesitated, and looked round.
They were in a dark corner, quite out of the track of passengers.
Oliver saw, but too plainly, that resistance would be of no avail. He
held out his hand, which Nancy clasped tight in hers.
'Give me the other,' said Sikes, seizing Oliver's unoccupied hand.
'Here, Bull's-Eye!'
The dog looked up, and growled.
'See here, boy!' said Sikes, putting his other hand to Oliver's throat;
'if he speaks ever so soft a word, hold him! D'ye mind!'
The dog growled again; and licking his lips, eyed Oliver as if he were
anxious to attach himself to his windpipe without delay.
'He's as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn't!' said
Sikes, regarding the animal with a kind of grim and ferocious approval.
'Now, you know what you've got to expect, master, so call away as quick
as you like; the dog will soon stop that game. Get on, young'un!'
Bull's-eye wagged his tail in acknowledgment of this unusually
endearing form of speech; and, giving vent to another admonitory growl
for the benefit of Oliver, led the way onward.
It was Smithfield that they were crossing, although it might have been
Grosvenor Square, for anything Oliver knew to the contrary. The night
was dark and foggy. The lights in the shops could scarecely struggle
through the heavy mist, which thickened every moment and shrouded the
streets and houses in gloom; rendering the strange place still stranger
in Oliver's eyes; and making his uncertainty the more dismal and
depressing.
They had hurried on a few paces, when a deep church-bell struck the
hour. With its first stroke, his two conductors stopped, and turned
their heads in the direction whence the sound proceeded.
'Eight o' clock, Bill,' said Nancy, when the bell ceased.
'What's the good of telling me that; I can hear it, can't I!' replied
Sikes.
'I wonder whether THEY can hear it,' said Nancy.
'Of course they can,' replied Sikes. 'It was Bartlemy time when I was
shopped; and there warn't a penny trumpet in the fair, as I couldn't
hear the squeaking on. Arter I was locked up for the night, the row
and din outside made the thundering old jail so silent, that I could
almost have beat my brains out against the iron plates of the door.'
'Poor fellow!' said Nancy, who still had her face turned towards the
quarter in which the bell had sounded. 'Oh, Bill, such fine young
chaps as them!'
'Yes; that's all you women think of,' answered Sikes. 'Fine young
chaps! Well, they're as good as dead, so it don't much matter.'
With this consolation, Mr. Sikes appeared to repress a rising tendency
to jealousy, and, clasping Oliver's wrist more firmly, told him to step
out again.
'Wait a minute!' said the girl: 'I wouldn't hurry by, if it was you
that was coming out to be hung, the next time eight o'clock struck,
Bill. I'd walk round and round the place till I dropped, if the snow
was on the ground, and I hadn't a shawl to cover me.'
'And what good would that do?' inquired the unsentimental Mr. Sikes.
'Unless you could pitch over a file and twenty yards of good stout
rope, you might as well be walking fifty mile off, or not walking at
all, for all the good it would do me. Come on, and don't stand
preaching there.'
The girl burst into a laugh; drew her shawl more closely round her; and
they walked away. But Oliver felt her hand tremble, and, looking up in
her face as they passed a gas-lamp, saw that it had turned a deadly
white.
They walked on, by little-frequented and dirty ways, for a full
half-hour: meeting very few people, and those appearing from their
looks to hold much the same position in society as Mr. Sikes himself.
At length they turned into a very filthy narrow street, nearly full of
old-clothes shops; the dog running forward, as if conscious that there
was no further occasion for his keeping on guard, stopped before the
door of a shop that was closed and apparently untenanted; the house was
in a ruinous condition, and on the door was nailed a board, intimating
that it was to let: which looked as if it had hung there for many
years.
'All right,' cried Sikes, glancing cautiously about.
Nancy stooped below the shutters, and Oliver heard the sound of a bell.
They crossed to the opposite side of the street, and stood for a few
moments under a lamp. A noise, as if a sash window were gently raised,
was heard; and soon afterwards the door softly opened. Mr. Sikes then
seized the terrified boy by the collar with very little ceremony; and
all three were quickly inside the house.
The passage was perfectly dark. They waited, while the person who had
let them in, chained and barred the door.
'Anybody here?' inquired Sikes.
'No,' replied a voice, which Oliver thought he had heard before.
'Is the old 'un here?' asked the robber.
'Yes,' replied the voice, 'and precious down in the mouth he has been.
Won't he be glad to see you? Oh, no!'
The style of this reply, as well as the voice which delivered it,
seemed familiar to Oliver's ears: but it was impossible to distinguish
even the form of the speaker in the darkness.
'Let's have a glim,' said Sikes, 'or we shall go breaking our necks, or
treading on the dog. Look after your legs if you do!'
'Stand still a moment, and I'll get you one,' replied the voice. The
receding footsteps of the speaker were heard; and, in another minute,
the form of Mr. John Dawkins, otherwise the Artful Dodger, appeared.
He bore in his right hand a tallow candle stuck in the end of a cleft
stick.
The young gentleman did not stop to bestow any other mark of
recognition upon Oliver than a humourous grin; but, turning away,
beckoned the visitors to follow him down a flight of stairs. They
crossed an empty kitchen; and, opening the door of a low
earthy-smelling room, which seemed to have been built in a small
back-yard, were received with a shout of laughter.
'Oh, my wig, my wig!' cried Master Charles Bates, from whose lungs the
laughter had proceeded: 'here he is! oh, cry, here he is! Oh, Fagin,
look at him! Fagin, do look at him! I can't bear it; it is such a
jolly game, I cant' bear it. Hold me, somebody, while I laugh it out.'
With this irrepressible ebullition of mirth, Master Bates laid himself
flat on the floor: and kicked convulsively for five minutes, in an
ectasy of facetious joy. Then jumping to his feet, he snatched the
cleft stick from the Dodger; and, advancing to Oliver, viewed him round
and round; while the Jew, taking off his nightcap, made a great number
of low bows to the bewildered boy. The Artful, meantime, who was of a
rather saturnine disposition, and seldom gave way to merriment when it
interfered with business, rifled Oliver's pockets with steady assiduity.
'Look at his togs, Fagin!' said Charley, putting the light so close to
his new jacket as nearly to set him on fire. 'Look at his togs!
Superfine cloth, and the heavy swell cut! Oh, my eye, what a game!
And his books, too! Nothing but a gentleman, Fagin!'
'Delighted to see you looking so well, my dear,' said the Jew, bowing
with mock humility. 'The Artful shall give you another suit, my dear,
for fear you should spoil that Sunday one. Why didn't you write, my
dear, and say you were coming? We'd have got something warm for
supper.'
At his, Master Bates roared again: so loud, that Fagin himself relaxed,
and even the Dodger smiled; but as the Artful drew forth the five-pound
note at that instant, it is doubtful whether the sally of the discovery
awakened his merriment.
'Hallo, what's that?' inquired Sikes, stepping forward as the Jew
seized the note. 'That's mine, Fagin.'
'No, no, my dear,' said the Jew. 'Mine, Bill, mine. You shall have
the books.'
'If that ain't mine!' said Bill Sikes, putting on his hat with a
determined air; 'mine and Nancy's that is; I'll take the boy back
again.'
The Jew started. Oliver started too, though from a very different
cause; for he hoped that the dispute might really end in his being
taken back.
'Come! Hand over, will you?' said Sikes.
'This is hardly fair, Bill; hardly fair, is it, Nancy?' inquired the
Jew.
'Fair, or not fair,' retorted Sikes, 'hand over, I tell you! Do you
think Nancy and me has got nothing else to do with our precious time
but to spend it in scouting arter, and kidnapping, every young boy as
gets grabbed through you? Give it here, you avaricious old skeleton,
give it here!'
With this gentle remonstrance, Mr. Sikes plucked the note from between
the Jew's finger and thumb; and looking the old man coolly in the face,
folded it up small, and tied it in his neckerchief.
'That's for our share of the trouble,' said Sikes; 'and not half
enough, neither. You may keep the books, if you're fond of reading.
If you ain't, sell 'em.'
'They're very pretty,' said Charley Bates: who, with sundry grimaces,
had been affecting to read one of the volumes in question; 'beautiful
writing, isn't is, Oliver?' At sight of the dismayed look with which
Oliver regarded his tormentors, Master Bates, who was blessed with a
lively sense of the ludicrous, fell into another ectasy, more
boisterous than the first.
'They belong to the old gentleman,' said Oliver, wringing his hands;
'to the good, kind, old gentleman who took me into his house, and had
me nursed, when I was near dying of the fever. Oh, pray send them back;
send him back the books and money. Keep me here all my life long; but
pray, pray send them back. He'll think I stole them; the old lady:
all of them who were so kind to me: will think I stole them. Oh, do
have mercy upon me, and send them back!'
With these words, which were uttered with all the energy of passionate
grief, Oliver fell upon his knees at the Jew's feet; and beat his hands
together, in perfect desperation.
'The boy's right,' remarked Fagin, looking covertly round, and knitting
his shaggy eyebrows into a hard knot. 'You're right, Oliver, you're
right; they WILL think you have stolen 'em. Ha! ha!' chuckled the Jew,
rubbing his hands, 'it couldn't have happened better, if we had chosen
our time!'
'Of course it couldn't,' replied Sikes; 'I know'd that, directly I see
him coming through Clerkenwell, with the books under his arm. It's all
right enough. They're soft-hearted psalm-singers, or they wouldn't
have taken him in at all; and they'll ask no questions after him, fear
they should be obliged to prosecute, and so get him lagged. He's safe
enough.'
Oliver had looked from one to the other, while these words were being
spoken, as if he were bewildered, and could scarecely understand what
passed; but when Bill Sikes concluded, he jumped suddenly to his feet,
and tore wildly from the room: uttering shrieks for help, which made
the bare old house echo to the roof.
'Keep back the dog, Bill!' cried Nancy, springing before the door, and
closing it, as the Jew and his two pupils darted out in pursuit. 'Keep
back the dog; he'll tear the boy to pieces.'
'Serve him right!' cried Sikes, struggling to disengage himself from
the girl's grasp. 'Stand off from me, or I'll split your head against
the wall.'
'I don't care for that, Bill, I don't care for that,' screamed the
girl, struggling violently with the man, 'the child shan't be torn down
by the dog, unless you kill me first.'
'Shan't he!' said Sikes, setting his teeth. 'I'll soon do that, if you
don't keep off.'
The housebreaker flung the girl from him to the further end of the
room, just as the Jew and the two boys returned, dragging Oliver among
them.
'What's the matter here!' said Fagin, looking round.
'The girl's gone mad, I think,' replied Sikes, savagely.
'No, she hasn't,' said Nancy, pale and breathless from the scuffle;
'no, she hasn't, Fagin; don't think it.'
'Then keep quiet, will you?' said the Jew, with a threatening look.
'No, I won't do that, neither,' replied Nancy, speaking very loud.
'Come! What do you think of that?'
Mr. Fagin was sufficiently well acquainted with the manners and customs
of that particular species of humanity to which Nancy belonged, to feel
tolerably certain that it would be rather unsafe to prolong any
conversation with her, at present. With the view of diverting the
attention of the company, he turned to Oliver.
'So you wanted to get away, my dear, did you?' said the Jew, taking up
a jagged and knotted club which law in a corner of the fireplace; 'eh?'
Oliver made no reply. But he watched the Jew's motions, and breathed
quickly.
'Wanted to get assistance; called for the police; did you?' sneered the
Jew, catching the boy by the arm. 'We'll cure you of that, my young
master.'
The Jew inflicted a smart blow on Oliver's shoulders with the club; and
was raising it for a second, when the girl, rushing forward, wrested it
from his hand. She flung it into the fire, with a force that brought
some of the glowing coals whirling out into the room.
'I won't stand by and see it done, Fagin,' cried the girl. 'You've got
the boy, and what more would you have?--Let him be--let him be--or I
shall put that mark on some of you, that will bring me to the gallows
before my time.'
The girl stamped her foot violently on the floor as she vented this
threat; and with her lips compressed, and her hands clenched, looked
alternately at the Jew and the other robber: her face quite colourless
from the passion of rage into which she had gradually worked herself.
'Why, Nancy!' said the Jew, in a soothing tone; after a pause, during
which he and Mr. Sikes had stared at one another in a disconcerted
manner; 'you,--you're more clever than ever to-night. Ha! ha! my dear,
you are acting beautifully.'
'Am I!' said the girl. 'Take care I don't overdo it. You will be the
worse for it, Fagin, if I do; and so I tell you in good time to keep
clear of me.'
There is something about a roused woman: especially if she add to all
her other strong passions, the fierce impulses of recklessness and
despair; which few men like to provoke. The Jew saw that it would be
hopeless to affect any further mistake regarding the reality of Miss
Nancy's rage; and, shrinking involuntarily back a few paces, cast a
glance, half imploring and half cowardly, at Sikes: as if to hint that
he was the fittest person to pursue the dialogue.
Mr. Sikes, thus mutely appealed to; and possibly feeling his personal
pride and influence interested in the immediate reduction of Miss Nancy
to reason; gave utterance to about a couple of score of curses and
threats, the rapid production of which reflected great credit on the
fertility of his invention. As they produced no visible effect on the
object against whom they were discharged, however, he resorted to more
tangible arguments.
'What do you mean by this?' said Sikes; backing the inquiry with a very
common imprecation concerning the most beautiful of human features:
which, if it were heard above, only once out of every fifty thousand
times that it is uttered below, would render blindness as common a
disorder as measles: 'what do you mean by it? Burn my body! Do you
know who you are, and what you are?'
'Oh, yes, I know all about it,' replied the girl, laughing
hysterically; and shaking her head from side to side, with a poor
assumption of indifference.
'Well, then, keep quiet,' rejoined Sikes, with a growl like that he was
accustomed to use when addressing his dog, 'or I'll quiet you for a
good long time to come.'
The girl laughed again: even less composedly than before; and, darting
a hasty look at Sikes, turned her face aside, and bit her lip till the
blood came.
'You're a nice one,' added Sikes, as he surveyed her with a
contemptuous air, 'to take up the humane and gen--teel side! A pretty
subject for the child, as you call him, to make a friend of!'
'God Almighty help me, I am!' cried the girl passionately; 'and I wish
I had been struck dead in the street, or had changed places with them
we passed so near to-night, before I had lent a hand in bringing him
here. He's a thief, a liar, a devil, all that's bad, from this night
forth. Isn't that enough for the old wretch, without blows?'
'Come, come, Sikes,' said the Jew appealing to him in a remonstratory
tone, and motioning towards the boys, who were eagerly attentive to all
that passed; 'we must have civil words; civil words, Bill.'
'Civil words!' cried the girl, whose passion was frightful to see.
'Civil words, you villain! Yes, you deserve 'em from me. I thieved for
you when I was a child not half as old as this!' pointing to Oliver.
'I have been in the same trade, and in the same service, for twelve
years since. Don't you know it? Speak out! Don't you know it?'
'Well, well,' replied the Jew, with an attempt at pacification; 'and,
if you have, it's your living!'
'Aye, it is!' returned the girl; not speaking, but pouring out the
words in one continuous and vehement scream. 'It is my living; and the
cold, wet, dirty streets are my home; and you're the wretch that drove
me to them long ago, and that'll keep me there, day and night, day and
night, till I die!'
'I shall do you a mischief!' interposed the Jew, goaded by these
reproaches; 'a mischief worse than that, if you say much more!'
The girl said nothing more; but, tearing her hair and dress in a
transport of passion, made such a rush at the Jew as would probably
have left signal marks of her revenge upon him, had not her wrists been
seized by Sikes at the right moment; upon which, she made a few
ineffectual struggles, and fainted.
'She's all right now,' said Sikes, laying her down in a corner. 'She's
uncommon strong in the arms, when she's up in this way.'
The Jew wiped his forehead: and smiled, as if it were a relief to have
the disturbance over; but neither he, nor Sikes, nor the dog, nor the
boys, seemed to consider it in any other light than a common occurance
incidental to business.
'It's the worst of having to do with women,' said the Jew, replacing
his club; 'but they're clever, and we can't get on, in our line,
without 'em. Charley, show Oliver to bed.'
'I suppose he'd better not wear his best clothes tomorrow, Fagin, had
he?' inquired Charley Bates.
'Certainly not,' replied the Jew, reciprocating the grin with which
Charley put the question.
Master Bates, apparently much delighted with his commission, took the
cleft stick: and led Oliver into an adjacent kitchen, where there were
two or three of the beds on which he had slept before; and here, with
many uncontrollable bursts of laughter, he produced the identical old
suit of clothes which Oliver had so much congratulated himself upon
leaving off at Mr. Brownlow's; and the accidental display of which, to
Fagin, by the Jew who purchased them, had been the very first clue
received, of his whereabout.
'Put off the smart ones,' said Charley, 'and I'll give 'em to Fagin to
take care of. What fun it is!'
Poor Oliver unwillingly complied. Master Bates rolling up the new
clothes under his arm, departed from the room, leaving Oliver in the
dark, and locking the door behind him.
The noise of Charley's laughter, and the voice of Miss Betsy, who
opportunely arrived to throw water over her friend, and perform other
feminine offices for the promotion of her recovery, might have kept
many people awake under more happy circumstances than those in which
Oliver was placed. But he was sick and weary; and he soon fell sound
asleep.
| Oliver, Sikes, and Nancy arrive in an open court, and Sikes tells Oliver to take Nancy's hand on one side, and his on the other. Then Sikes tells the dog to go for Oliver's throat if he makes any sound at all. The dog looks like it's tempted to jump on him whether he makes a sound or not. Oliver decides not to risk it. Oliver has no idea where they're going. Turns out they're in Smithfield , and Smithfield is right by Newgate, the main prison for felons. The clock tolls 8 p.m., and Nancy stops to listen. Sikes tries to hurry her on, but she seems transfixed by the idea of what's going on inside the walls of Newgate--people she probably knows are in there and condemned to die. Sikes is jealous of her sympathy for the guys in the prison, and tries to hurry her on again, saying that the people in there were as good as dead, anyway. Nancy tells him that if it were him in there, awaiting execution, she'd walk round and round the place and never leave it. Nancy's trying to be romantic, but that's not Sikes's style: he says that walking around the place wouldn't do any good, and that if he were locked up in there, all he'd want her to do would be to smuggle him a file and a rope so that he could break out. Nancy pretends to laugh, but Oliver sees that her face is very pale. They eventually arrive in another narrow little street full of used-clothing stores. They signal with a bell outside a house that looks empty from the outside, and a voice Oliver recognizes tells them from the window that Fagin's there. Of course, it's the Artful Dodger who lets them in and fetches a candle. Charley's there, too, and finds Oliver's appearance in his fancy new clothes to be just too funny for words. While Charley's laughing, the Dodger is going through Oliver's pockets, and eventually comes up with the five-pound note. Fagin and Sikes argue over it briefly, and Sikes ends up with it--after all, he and Nancy are the ones who found the kid. Oliver begs them to give the money and the books back to Mr. Brownlow, because he's afraid Brownlow will think he stole them. Fagin agrees: that's exactly what Brownlow will think, and he couldn't have planned it any better himself. Oliver is so desperate that he makes a break for it, shrieking. Fagin, Charley, and the Dodger run out after him, but Nancy, unexpectedly, hangs onto Sikes and begs him to keep the dog off of Oliver. By the time Sikes manages to throw Nancy off, Fagin and the two boys have come back, dragging Oliver. When they ask Nancy what the matter is, she's clearly peeved about something. Fagin pretends to think she's faking it, and turns his attention back to Oliver, and is about to smack him good, when Nancy races forward to stop him. She actually throws his club into the fire. She defends him, and says "Let him be--let him be, or I shall put that mark on some of you that will bring me to the gallows before my time!" . Fagin can no longer pretend that Nancy's not really mad, and looks to Sikes to calm her down. Sikes threatens and curses her, and asks her if she knows "who you are, and what you are?" . . Then Nancy goes off on how Fagin turned her into a thief when she was half Oliver's age, and has kept her at it for twelve years . She's gotten herself so hopping mad at Fagin, now, that she attacks him--but Sikes steps in, struggles with her a bit, and then she faints. Sikes, Charley, Fagin, and the Dodger seem to think that scenes like that one, although not all that fun to watch or be a part of, are just a natural part of business. Charley takes Oliver to his bed, with instructions to make him change out of his good clothes. Oliver's sad to see his old set of clothes, which he thought he'd parted with forever, on the bed waiting for him--apparently Fagin bought them off of the used clothing guy. | summary |
It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to
present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as
the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon. The hero sinks
upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; in the
next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience
with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in
the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike
in danger, drawing forth her dagger to preserve the one at the cost of
the other; and just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest
pitch, a whistle is heard, and we are straightway transported to the
great hall of the castle; where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny
chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of
places, from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company,
carolling perpetually.
Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would
seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread
boards to death-beds, and from mourning-weeds to holiday garments, are
not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of
passive lookers-on, which makes a vast difference. The actors in the
mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt
impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of
mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous.
As sudden shiftings of the scene, and rapid changes of time and place,
are not only sanctioned in books by long usage, but are by many
considered as the great art of authorship: an author's skill in his
craft being, by such critics, chiefly estimated with relation to the
dilemmas in which he leaves his characters at the end of every chapter:
this brief introduction to the present one may perhaps be deemed
unnecessary. If so, let it be considered a delicate intimation on the
part of the historian that he is going back to the town in which Oliver
Twist was born; the reader taking it for granted that there are good
and substantial reasons for making the journey, or he would not be
invited to proceed upon such an expedition.
Mr. Bumble emerged at early morning from the workhouse-gate, and walked
with portly carriage and commanding steps, up the High Street. He was
in the full bloom and pride of beadlehood; his cocked hat and coat were
dazzling in the morning sun; he clutched his cane with the vigorous
tenacity of health and power. Mr. Bumble always carried his head high;
but this morning it was higher than usual. There was an abstraction in
his eye, an elevation in his air, which might have warned an observant
stranger that thoughts were passing in the beadle's mind, too great for
utterance.
Mr. Bumble stopped not to converse with the small shopkeepers and
others who spoke to him, deferentially, as he passed along. He merely
returned their salutations with a wave of his hand, and relaxed not in
his dignified pace, until he reached the farm where Mrs. Mann tended
the infant paupers with parochial care.
'Drat that beadle!' said Mrs. Mann, hearing the well-known shaking at
the garden-gate. 'If it isn't him at this time in the morning! Lauk,
Mr. Bumble, only think of its being you! Well, dear me, it IS a
pleasure, this is! Come into the parlour, sir, please.'
The first sentence was addressed to Susan; and the exclamations of
delight were uttered to Mr. Bumble: as the good lady unlocked the
garden-gate: and showed him, with great attention and respect, into the
house.
'Mrs. Mann,' said Mr. Bumble; not sitting upon, or dropping himself
into a seat, as any common jackanapes would: but letting himself
gradually and slowly down into a chair; 'Mrs. Mann, ma'am, good
morning.'
'Well, and good morning to _you_, sir,' replied Mrs. Mann, with many
smiles; 'and hoping you find yourself well, sir!'
'So-so, Mrs. Mann,' replied the beadle. 'A porochial life is not a bed
of roses, Mrs. Mann.'
'Ah, that it isn't indeed, Mr. Bumble,' rejoined the lady. And all the
infant paupers might have chorussed the rejoinder with great propriety,
if they had heard it.
'A porochial life, ma'am,' continued Mr. Bumble, striking the table
with his cane, 'is a life of worrit, and vexation, and hardihood; but
all public characters, as I may say, must suffer prosecution.'
Mrs. Mann, not very well knowing what the beadle meant, raised her
hands with a look of sympathy, and sighed.
'Ah! You may well sigh, Mrs. Mann!' said the beadle.
Finding she had done right, Mrs. Mann sighed again: evidently to the
satisfaction of the public character: who, repressing a complacent
smile by looking sternly at his cocked hat, said,
'Mrs. Mann, I am going to London.'
'Lauk, Mr. Bumble!' cried Mrs. Mann, starting back.
'To London, ma'am,' resumed the inflexible beadle, 'by coach. I and
two paupers, Mrs. Mann! A legal action is a coming on, about a
settlement; and the board has appointed me--me, Mrs. Mann--to dispose
to the matter before the quarter-sessions at Clerkinwell.
And I very much question,' added Mr. Bumble, drawing himself up,
'whether the Clerkinwell Sessions will not find themselves in the wrong
box before they have done with me.'
'Oh! you mustn't be too hard upon them, sir,' said Mrs. Mann, coaxingly.
'The Clerkinwell Sessions have brought it upon themselves, ma'am,'
replied Mr. Bumble; 'and if the Clerkinwell Sessions find that they
come off rather worse than they expected, the Clerkinwell Sessions have
only themselves to thank.'
There was so much determination and depth of purpose about the menacing
manner in which Mr. Bumble delivered himself of these words, that Mrs.
Mann appeared quite awed by them. At length she said,
'You're going by coach, sir? I thought it was always usual to send
them paupers in carts.'
'That's when they're ill, Mrs. Mann,' said the beadle. 'We put the
sick paupers into open carts in the rainy weather, to prevent their
taking cold.'
'Oh!' said Mrs. Mann.
'The opposition coach contracts for these two; and takes them cheap,'
said Mr. Bumble. 'They are both in a very low state, and we find it
would come two pound cheaper to move 'em than to bury 'em--that is, if
we can throw 'em upon another parish, which I think we shall be able to
do, if they don't die upon the road to spite us. Ha! ha! ha!'
When Mr. Bumble had laughed a little while, his eyes again encountered
the cocked hat; and he became grave.
'We are forgetting business, ma'am,' said the beadle; 'here is your
porochial stipend for the month.'
Mr. Bumble produced some silver money rolled up in paper, from his
pocket-book; and requested a receipt: which Mrs. Mann wrote.
'It's very much blotted, sir,' said the farmer of infants; 'but it's
formal enough, I dare say. Thank you, Mr. Bumble, sir, I am very much
obliged to you, I'm sure.'
Mr. Bumble nodded, blandly, in acknowledgment of Mrs. Mann's curtsey;
and inquired how the children were.
'Bless their dear little hearts!' said Mrs. Mann with emotion, 'they're
as well as can be, the dears! Of course, except the two that died last
week. And little Dick.'
'Isn't that boy no better?' inquired Mr. Bumble.
Mrs. Mann shook her head.
'He's a ill-conditioned, wicious, bad-disposed porochial child that,'
said Mr. Bumble angrily. 'Where is he?'
'I'll bring him to you in one minute, sir,' replied Mrs. Mann. 'Here,
you Dick!'
After some calling, Dick was discovered. Having had his face put under
the pump, and dried upon Mrs. Mann's gown, he was led into the awful
presence of Mr. Bumble, the beadle.
The child was pale and thin; his cheeks were sunken; and his eyes large
and bright. The scanty parish dress, the livery of his misery, hung
loosely on his feeble body; and his young limbs had wasted away, like
those of an old man.
Such was the little being who stood trembling beneath Mr. Bumble's
glance; not daring to lift his eyes from the floor; and dreading even
to hear the beadle's voice.
'Can't you look at the gentleman, you obstinate boy?' said Mrs. Mann.
The child meekly raised his eyes, and encountered those of Mr. Bumble.
'What's the matter with you, porochial Dick?' inquired Mr. Bumble, with
well-timed jocularity.
'Nothing, sir,' replied the child faintly.
'I should think not,' said Mrs. Mann, who had of course laughed very
much at Mr. Bumble's humour.
'You want for nothing, I'm sure.'
'I should like--' faltered the child.
'Hey-day!' interposed Mr. Mann, 'I suppose you're going to say that you
DO want for something, now? Why, you little wretch--'
'Stop, Mrs. Mann, stop!' said the beadle, raising his hand with a show
of authority. 'Like what, sir, eh?'
'I should like,' faltered the child, 'if somebody that can write, would
put a few words down for me on a piece of paper, and fold it up and
seal it, and keep it for me, after I am laid in the ground.'
'Why, what does the boy mean?' exclaimed Mr. Bumble, on whom the
earnest manner and wan aspect of the child had made some impression:
accustomed as he was to such things. 'What do you mean, sir?'
'I should like,' said the child, 'to leave my dear love to poor Oliver
Twist; and to let him know how often I have sat by myself and cried to
think of his wandering about in the dark nights with nobody to help
him. And I should like to tell him,' said the child pressing his small
hands together, and speaking with great fervour, 'that I was glad to
die when I was very young; for, perhaps, if I had lived to be a man,
and had grown old, my little sister who is in Heaven, might forget me,
or be unlike me; and it would be so much happier if we were both
children there together.'
Mr. Bumble surveyed the little speaker, from head to foot, with
indescribable astonishment; and, turning to his companion, said,
'They're all in one story, Mrs. Mann. That out-dacious Oliver had
demogalized them all!'
'I couldn't have believed it, sir' said Mrs Mann, holding up her hands,
and looking malignantly at Dick. 'I never see such a hardened little
wretch!'
'Take him away, ma'am!' said Mr. Bumble imperiously. 'This must be
stated to the board, Mrs. Mann.
'I hope the gentleman will understand that it isn't my fault, sir?'
said Mrs. Mann, whimpering pathetically.
'They shall understand that, ma'am; they shall be acquainted with the
true state of the case,' said Mr. Bumble. 'There; take him away, I
can't bear the sight on him.'
Dick was immediately taken away, and locked up in the coal-cellar. Mr.
Bumble shortly afterwards took himself off, to prepare for his journey.
At six o'clock next morning, Mr. Bumble: having exchanged his cocked
hat for a round one, and encased his person in a blue great-coat with a
cape to it: took his place on the outside of the coach, accompanied by
the criminals whose settlement was disputed; with whom, in due course
of time, he arrived in London.
He experienced no other crosses on the way, than those which originated
in the perverse behaviour of the two paupers, who persisted in
shivering, and complaining of the cold, in a manner which, Mr. Bumble
declared, caused his teeth to chatter in his head, and made him feel
quite uncomfortable; although he had a great-coat on.
Having disposed of these evil-minded persons for the night, Mr. Bumble
sat himself down in the house at which the coach stopped; and took a
temperate dinner of steaks, oyster sauce, and porter. Putting a glass
of hot gin-and-water on the chimney-piece, he drew his chair to the
fire; and, with sundry moral reflections on the too-prevalent sin of
discontent and complaining, composed himself to read the paper.
The very first paragraph upon which Mr. Bumble's eye rested, was the
following advertisement.
'FIVE GUINEAS REWARD
'Whereas a young boy, named Oliver Twist, absconded, or was enticed, on
Thursday evening last, from his home, at Pentonville; and has not since
been heard of. The above reward will be paid to any person who will
give such information as will lead to the discovery of the said Oliver
Twist, or tend to throw any light upon his previous history, in which
the advertiser is, for many reasons, warmly interested.'
And then followed a full description of Oliver's dress, person,
appearance, and disappearance: with the name and address of Mr.
Brownlow at full length.
Mr. Bumble opened his eyes; read the advertisement, slowly and
carefully, three several times; and in something more than five minutes
was on his way to Pentonville: having actually, in his excitement, left
the glass of hot gin-and-water, untasted.
'Is Mr. Brownlow at home?' inquired Mr. Bumble of the girl who opened
the door.
To this inquiry the girl returned the not uncommon, but rather evasive
reply of 'I don't know; where do you come from?'
Mr. Bumble no sooner uttered Oliver's name, in explanation of his
errand, than Mrs. Bedwin, who had been listening at the parlour door,
hastened into the passage in a breathless state.
'Come in, come in,' said the old lady: 'I knew we should hear of him.
Poor dear! I knew we should! I was certain of it. Bless his heart!
I said so all along.'
Having heard this, the worthy old lady hurried back into the parlour
again; and seating herself on a sofa, burst into tears. The girl, who
was not quite so susceptible, had run upstairs meanwhile; and now
returned with a request that Mr. Bumble would follow her immediately:
which he did.
He was shown into the little back study, where sat Mr. Brownlow and his
friend Mr. Grimwig, with decanters and glasses before them. The latter
gentleman at once burst into the exclamation:
'A beadle. A parish beadle, or I'll eat my head.'
'Pray don't interrupt just now,' said Mr. Brownlow. 'Take a seat, will
you?'
Mr. Bumble sat himself down; quite confounded by the oddity of Mr.
Grimwig's manner. Mr. Brownlow moved the lamp, so as to obtain an
uninterrupted view of the beadle's countenance; and said, with a little
impatience,
'Now, sir, you come in consequence of having seen the advertisement?'
'Yes, sir,' said Mr. Bumble.
'And you ARE a beadle, are you not?' inquired Mr. Grimwig.
'I am a porochial beadle, gentlemen,' rejoined Mr. Bumble proudly.
'Of course,' observed Mr. Grimwig aside to his friend, 'I knew he was.
A beadle all over!'
Mr. Brownlow gently shook his head to impose silence on his friend, and
resumed:
'Do you know where this poor boy is now?'
'No more than nobody,' replied Mr. Bumble.
'Well, what DO you know of him?' inquired the old gentleman. 'Speak
out, my friend, if you have anything to say. What DO you know of him?'
'You don't happen to know any good of him, do you?' said Mr. Grimwig,
caustically; after an attentive perusal of Mr. Bumble's features.
Mr. Bumble, catching at the inquiry very quickly, shook his head with
portentous solemnity.
'You see?' said Mr. Grimwig, looking triumphantly at Mr. Brownlow.
Mr. Brownlow looked apprehensively at Mr. Bumble's pursed-up
countenance; and requested him to communicate what he knew regarding
Oliver, in as few words as possible.
Mr. Bumble put down his hat; unbuttoned his coat; folded his arms;
inclined his head in a retrospective manner; and, after a few moments'
reflection, commenced his story.
It would be tedious if given in the beadle's words: occupying, as it
did, some twenty minutes in the telling; but the sum and substance of
it was, that Oliver was a foundling, born of low and vicious parents.
That he had, from his birth, displayed no better qualities than
treachery, ingratitude, and malice. That he had terminated his brief
career in the place of his birth, by making a sanguinary and cowardly
attack on an unoffending lad, and running away in the night-time from
his master's house. In proof of his really being the person he
represented himself, Mr. Bumble laid upon the table the papers he had
brought to town. Folding his arms again, he then awaited Mr. Brownlow's
observations.
'I fear it is all too true,' said the old gentleman sorrowfully, after
looking over the papers. 'This is not much for your intelligence; but
I would gladly have given you treble the money, if it had been
favourable to the boy.'
It is not improbable that if Mr. Bumble had been possessed of this
information at an earlier period of the interview, he might have
imparted a very different colouring to his little history. It was too
late to do it now, however; so he shook his head gravely, and,
pocketing the five guineas, withdrew.
Mr. Brownlow paced the room to and fro for some minutes; evidently so
much disturbed by the beadle's tale, that even Mr. Grimwig forbore to
vex him further.
At length he stopped, and rang the bell violently.
'Mrs. Bedwin,' said Mr. Brownlow, when the housekeeper appeared; 'that
boy, Oliver, is an imposter.'
'It can't be, sir. It cannot be,' said the old lady energetically.
'I tell you he is,' retorted the old gentleman. 'What do you mean by
can't be? We have just heard a full account of him from his birth; and
he has been a thorough-paced little villain, all his life.'
'I never will believe it, sir,' replied the old lady, firmly. 'Never!'
'You old women never believe anything but quack-doctors, and lying
story-books,' growled Mr. Grimwig. 'I knew it all along. Why didn't
you take my advise in the beginning; you would if he hadn't had a
fever, I suppose, eh? He was interesting, wasn't he? Interesting!
Bah!' And Mr. Grimwig poked the fire with a flourish.
'He was a dear, grateful, gentle child, sir,' retorted Mrs. Bedwin,
indignantly. 'I know what children are, sir; and have done these forty
years; and people who can't say the same, shouldn't say anything about
them. That's my opinion!'
This was a hard hit at Mr. Grimwig, who was a bachelor. As it extorted
nothing from that gentleman but a smile, the old lady tossed her head,
and smoothed down her apron preparatory to another speech, when she was
stopped by Mr. Brownlow.
'Silence!' said the old gentleman, feigning an anger he was far from
feeling. 'Never let me hear the boy's name again. I rang to tell you
that. Never. Never, on any pretence, mind! You may leave the room,
Mrs. Bedwin. Remember! I am in earnest.'
There were sad hearts at Mr. Brownlow's that night.
Oliver's heart sank within him, when he thought of his good friends; it
was well for him that he could not know what they had heard, or it
might have broken outright.
| This chapter opens with another digression like the one starting Chapter Fifteen, but this time, Dickens is explaining that going back and forth from tragedy and suspense to comedy and more mundane stuff is just part of good story-telling, and that real life is like that, anyway. So the real action of the chapter begins a few paragraphs in, with Mr. Bumble arriving at Mrs. Mann's baby farm. Mrs. Mann asks him how he's doing, just to be polite, and Mr. Bumble is conceited enough to think that she actually cares, so he tells her: "A porochial life is a life of worry, and vexation, and hardihood; but all public characters, as I may say, must suffer prosecution " . After more pompous speechifying, Mr. Bumble tells Mrs. Mann that he has to travel to London to deal with a "legal action" that is "coming on about a settlement," and he'll need to "depose to the matter before the quarter-sessions at Clerkinwell" . Okay, that wasn't at all clear--basically, there are a couple of paupers who want to be supported by Mr. Bumble's parish, but there's some argument as to whose parish they belong to . So Mr. Bumble has to travel to London to prove in court that his parish won't have to take care of these two poor people. Mrs. Mann seems shocked that Mr. Bumble's planning on traveling by coach instead of an open cart, since he's traveling with the two paupers . But apparently the rival parish is paying for the coach, because the two paupers are close to dying, and they've calculated that it will be cheaper to move them than to bury them. Mr. Bumble then pays Mrs. Mann her salary, and asks how the orphans are. She says they're all just fine--except the two who died last week, and little Dick who still isn't well. Mr. Bumble seems to feel insulted that Dick is sick, as though it's an insult to the whole parish. Dick comes into the room, and asks if someone can write down a note for him, to be given to Oliver after he dies. Mr. Bumble is astonished, and asks for an explanation. Dick says he wants to tell Oliver how much he's thought of him, and cried at the idea of poor Oliver wandering around in the cold by himself, and how he's happy to die young because then he and his dead sister will get to be children together in heaven. Mr. Bumble is shocked at this depressing speech from someone who has, he thinks, so much cause for gratitude, and blames it all on Oliver for "demoralizing" the other kids. So of course Dick gets locked in the coal cellar as punishment. Mr. Bumble goes on to London, and when they've stopped for the night, he notices an advertisement in the paper, asking for information about Oliver Twist and offering a reward of five guineas. Five guineas is a lot of money. Mr. Bumble runs away to Pentonville and knocks on Mr. Brownlow's door, eager to tell him all that he knows about Oliver. Mr. Grimwig immediately can tell that Mr. Bumble is a beadle--something about the cut of his coat gave it away. Mr. Brownlow asks him what he knows about Oliver, and Mr. Grimwig cuts in, saying, "you don't happen to know any good of him, do you?" Mr. Bumble takes his cue from Grimwig, and tells Oliver's story in no very flattering terms to Oliver--how he was "born of low and vicious parents who had terminated his brief career by making a sanguinary and cowardly attack on an unoffending lad," etc., etc. . Mr. Brownlow is sad about it, but is afraid it must be true. He gives Mr. Bumble the five guineas, and says he'd have happily paid three times that much if the news had been more favorable to Oliver. Mr. Bumble wishes he'd known that before, but it's too late now--he leaves the house. Mrs. Bedwin still doesn't believe it when they tell her. She says she knows children better than either of the men could. Mr. Brownlow says he never wants to hear Oliver's name mentioned again. | summary |
About noon next day, when the Dodger and Master Bates had gone out to
pursue their customary avocations, Mr. Fagin took the opportunity of
reading Oliver a long lecture on the crying sin of ingratitude; of
which he clearly demonstrated he had been guilty, to no ordinary
extent, in wilfully absenting himself from the society of his anxious
friends; and, still more, in endeavouring to escape from them after so
much trouble and expense had been incurred in his recovery. Mr. Fagin
laid great stress on the fact of his having taken Oliver in, and
cherished him, when, without his timely aid, he might have perished
with hunger; and he related the dismal and affecting history of a young
lad whom, in his philanthropy, he had succoured under parallel
circumstances, but who, proving unworthy of his confidence and evincing
a desire to communicate with the police, had unfortunately come to be
hanged at the Old Bailey one morning. Mr. Fagin did not seek to
conceal his share in the catastrophe, but lamented with tears in his
eyes that the wrong-headed and treacherous behaviour of the young
person in question, had rendered it necessary that he should become the
victim of certain evidence for the crown: which, if it were not
precisely true, was indispensably necessary for the safety of him (Mr.
Fagin) and a few select friends. Mr. Fagin concluded by drawing a
rather disagreeable picture of the discomforts of hanging; and, with
great friendliness and politeness of manner, expressed his anxious
hopes that he might never be obliged to submit Oliver Twist to that
unpleasant operation.
Little Oliver's blood ran cold, as he listened to the Jew's words, and
imperfectly comprehended the dark threats conveyed in them. That it
was possible even for justice itself to confound the innocent with the
guilty when they were in accidental companionship, he knew already; and
that deeply-laid plans for the destruction of inconveniently knowing or
over-communicative persons, had been really devised and carried out by
the Jew on more occasions than one, he thought by no means unlikely,
when he recollected the general nature of the altercations between that
gentleman and Mr. Sikes: which seemed to bear reference to some
foregone conspiracy of the kind. As he glanced timidly up, and met the
Jew's searching look, he felt that his pale face and trembling limbs
were neither unnoticed nor unrelished by that wary old gentleman.
The Jew, smiling hideously, patted Oliver on the head, and said, that
if he kept himself quiet, and applied himself to business, he saw they
would be very good friends yet. Then, taking his hat, and covering
himself with an old patched great-coat, he went out, and locked the
room-door behind him.
And so Oliver remained all that day, and for the greater part of many
subsequent days, seeing nobody, between early morning and midnight, and
left during the long hours to commune with his own thoughts. Which,
never failing to revert to his kind friends, and the opinion they must
long ago have formed of him, were sad indeed.
After the lapse of a week or so, the Jew left the room-door unlocked;
and he was at liberty to wander about the house.
It was a very dirty place. The rooms upstairs had great high wooden
chimney-pieces and large doors, with panelled walls and cornices to the
ceiling; which, although they were black with neglect and dust, were
ornamented in various ways. From all of these tokens Oliver concluded
that a long time ago, before the old Jew was born, it had belonged to
better people, and had perhaps been quite gay and handsome: dismal and
dreary as it looked now.
Spiders had built their webs in the angles of the walls and ceilings;
and sometimes, when Oliver walked softly into a room, the mice would
scamper across the floor, and run back terrified to their holes. With
these exceptions, there was neither sight nor sound of any living
thing; and often, when it grew dark, and he was tired of wandering from
room to room, he would crouch in the corner of the passage by the
street-door, to be as near living people as he could; and would remain
there, listening and counting the hours, until the Jew or the boys
returned.
In all the rooms, the mouldering shutters were fast closed: the bars
which held them were screwed tight into the wood; the only light which
was admitted, stealing its way through round holes at the top: which
made the rooms more gloomy, and filled them with strange shadows.
There was a back-garret window with rusty bars outside, which had no
shutter; and out of this, Oliver often gazed with a melancholy face for
hours together; but nothing was to be descried from it but a confused
and crowded mass of housetops, blackened chimneys, and gable-ends.
Sometimes, indeed, a grizzly head might be seen, peering over the
parapet-wall of a distant house; but it was quickly withdrawn again;
and as the window of Oliver's observatory was nailed down, and dimmed
with the rain and smoke of years, it was as much as he could do to make
out the forms of the different objects beyond, without making any
attempt to be seen or heard,--which he had as much chance of being, as
if he had lived inside the ball of St. Paul's Cathedral.
One afternoon, the Dodger and Master Bates being engaged out that
evening, the first-named young gentleman took it into his head to
evince some anxiety regarding the decoration of his person (to do him
justice, this was by no means an habitual weakness with him); and, with
this end and aim, he condescendingly commanded Oliver to assist him in
his toilet, straightway.
Oliver was but too glad to make himself useful; too happy to have some
faces, however bad, to look upon; too desirous to conciliate those
about him when he could honestly do so; to throw any objection in the
way of this proposal. So he at once expressed his readiness; and,
kneeling on the floor, while the Dodger sat upon the table so that he
could take his foot in his laps, he applied himself to a process which
Mr. Dawkins designated as 'japanning his trotter-cases.' The phrase,
rendered into plain English, signifieth, cleaning his boots.
Whether it was the sense of freedom and independence which a rational
animal may be supposed to feel when he sits on a table in an easy
attitude smoking a pipe, swinging one leg carelessly to and fro, and
having his boots cleaned all the time, without even the past trouble of
having taken them off, or the prospective misery of putting them on, to
disturb his reflections; or whether it was the goodness of the tobacco
that soothed the feelings of the Dodger, or the mildness of the beer
that mollified his thoughts; he was evidently tinctured, for the nonce,
with a spice of romance and enthusiasm, foreign to his general nature.
He looked down on Oliver, with a thoughtful countenance, for a brief
space; and then, raising his head, and heaving a gentle sign, said,
half in abstraction, and half to Master Bates:
'What a pity it is he isn't a prig!'
'Ah!' said Master Charles Bates; 'he don't know what's good for him.'
The Dodger sighed again, and resumed his pipe: as did Charley Bates.
They both smoked, for some seconds, in silence.
'I suppose you don't even know what a prig is?' said the Dodger
mournfully.
'I think I know that,' replied Oliver, looking up. 'It's a the--;
you're one, are you not?' inquired Oliver, checking himself.
'I am,' replied the Dodger. 'I'd scorn to be anything else.' Mr.
Dawkins gave his hat a ferocious cock, after delivering this sentiment,
and looked at Master Bates, as if to denote that he would feel obliged
by his saying anything to the contrary.
'I am,' repeated the Dodger. 'So's Charley. So's Fagin. So's Sikes.
So's Nancy. So's Bet. So we all are, down to the dog. And he's the
downiest one of the lot!'
'And the least given to peaching,' added Charley Bates.
'He wouldn't so much as bark in a witness-box, for fear of committing
himself; no, not if you tied him up in one, and left him there without
wittles for a fortnight,' said the Dodger.
'Not a bit of it,' observed Charley.
'He's a rum dog. Don't he look fierce at any strange cove that laughs
or sings when he's in company!' pursued the Dodger. 'Won't he growl at
all, when he hears a fiddle playing! And don't he hate other dogs as
ain't of his breed! Oh, no!'
'He's an out-and-out Christian,' said Charley.
This was merely intended as a tribute to the animal's abilities, but it
was an appropriate remark in another sense, if Master Bates had only
known it; for there are a good many ladies and gentlemen, claiming to
be out-and-out Christians, between whom, and Mr. Sikes' dog, there
exist strong and singular points of resemblance.
'Well, well,' said the Dodger, recurring to the point from which they
had strayed: with that mindfulness of his profession which influenced
all his proceedings. 'This hasn't go anything to do with young Green
here.'
'No more it has,' said Charley. 'Why don't you put yourself under
Fagin, Oliver?'
'And make your fortun' out of hand?' added the Dodger, with a grin.
'And so be able to retire on your property, and do the gen-teel: as I
mean to, in the very next leap-year but four that ever comes, and the
forty-second Tuesday in Trinity-week,' said Charley Bates.
'I don't like it,' rejoined Oliver, timidly; 'I wish they would let me
go. I--I--would rather go.'
'And Fagin would RATHER not!' rejoined Charley.
Oliver knew this too well; but thinking it might be dangerous to
express his feelings more openly, he only sighed, and went on with his
boot-cleaning.
'Go!' exclaimed the Dodger. 'Why, where's your spirit?' Don't you take
any pride out of yourself? Would you go and be dependent on your
friends?'
'Oh, blow that!' said Master Bates: drawing two or three silk
handkerchiefs from his pocket, and tossing them into a cupboard,
'that's too mean; that is.'
'_I_ couldn't do it,' said the Dodger, with an air of haughty disgust.
'You can leave your friends, though,' said Oliver with a half smile;
'and let them be punished for what you did.'
'That,' rejoined the Dodger, with a wave of his pipe, 'That was all out
of consideration for Fagin, 'cause the traps know that we work
together, and he might have got into trouble if we hadn't made our
lucky; that was the move, wasn't it, Charley?'
Master Bates nodded assent, and would have spoken, but the recollection
of Oliver's flight came so suddenly upon him, that the smoke he was
inhaling got entangled with a laugh, and went up into his head, and
down into his throat: and brought on a fit of coughing and stamping,
about five minutes long.
'Look here!' said the Dodger, drawing forth a handful of shillings and
halfpence. 'Here's a jolly life! What's the odds where it comes from?
Here, catch hold; there's plenty more where they were took from. You
won't, won't you? Oh, you precious flat!'
'It's naughty, ain't it, Oliver?' inquired Charley Bates. 'He'll come
to be scragged, won't he?'
'I don't know what that means,' replied Oliver.
'Something in this way, old feller,' said Charly. As he said it,
Master Bates caught up an end of his neckerchief; and, holding it erect
in the air, dropped his head on his shoulder, and jerked a curious
sound through his teeth; thereby indicating, by a lively pantomimic
representation, that scragging and hanging were one and the same thing.
'That's what it means,' said Charley. 'Look how he stares, Jack!
I never did see such prime company as that 'ere boy; he'll be the death
of me, I know he will.' Master Charley Bates, having laughed heartily
again, resumed his pipe with tears in his eyes.
'You've been brought up bad,' said the Dodger, surveying his boots with
much satisfaction when Oliver had polished them. 'Fagin will make
something of you, though, or you'll be the first he ever had that
turned out unprofitable. You'd better begin at once; for you'll come
to the trade long before you think of it; and you're only losing time,
Oliver.'
Master Bates backed this advice with sundry moral admonitions of his
own: which, being exhausted, he and his friend Mr. Dawkins launched
into a glowing description of the numerous pleasures incidental to the
life they led, interspersed with a variety of hints to Oliver that the
best thing he could do, would be to secure Fagin's favour without more
delay, by the means which they themselves had employed to gain it.
'And always put this in your pipe, Nolly,' said the Dodger, as the Jew
was heard unlocking the door above, 'if you don't take fogels and
tickers--'
'What's the good of talking in that way?' interposed Master Bates; 'he
don't know what you mean.'
'If you don't take pocket-handkechers and watches,' said the Dodger,
reducing his conversation to the level of Oliver's capacity, 'some
other cove will; so that the coves that lose 'em will be all the worse,
and you'll be all the worse, too, and nobody half a ha'p'orth the
better, except the chaps wot gets them--and you've just as good a right
to them as they have.'
'To be sure, to be sure!' said the Jew, who had entered unseen by
Oliver. 'It all lies in a nutshell my dear; in a nutshell, take the
Dodger's word for it. Ha! ha! ha! He understands the catechism of his
trade.'
The old man rubbed his hands gleefully together, as he corroborated the
Dodger's reasoning in these terms; and chuckled with delight at his
pupil's proficiency.
The conversation proceeded no farther at this time, for the Jew had
returned home accompanied by Miss Betsy, and a gentleman whom Oliver
had never seen before, but who was accosted by the Dodger as Tom
Chitling; and who, having lingered on the stairs to exchange a few
gallantries with the lady, now made his appearance.
Mr. Chitling was older in years than the Dodger: having perhaps
numbered eighteen winters; but there was a degree of deference in his
deportment towards that young gentleman which seemed to indicate that
he felt himself conscious of a slight inferiority in point of genius
and professional aquirements. He had small twinkling eyes, and a
pock-marked face; wore a fur cap, a dark corduroy jacket, greasy
fustian trousers, and an apron. His wardrobe was, in truth, rather out
of repair; but he excused himself to the company by stating that his
'time' was only out an hour before; and that, in consequence of having
worn the regimentals for six weeks past, he had not been able to bestow
any attention on his private clothes. Mr. Chitling added, with strong
marks of irritation, that the new way of fumigating clothes up yonder
was infernal unconstitutional, for it burnt holes in them, and there
was no remedy against the County. The same remark he considered to
apply to the regulation mode of cutting the hair: which he held to be
decidedly unlawful. Mr. Chitling wound up his observations by stating
that he had not touched a drop of anything for forty-two moral long
hard-working days; and that he 'wished he might be busted if he warn't
as dry as a lime-basket.'
'Where do you think the gentleman has come from, Oliver?' inquired the
Jew, with a grin, as the other boys put a bottle of spirits on the
table.
'I--I--don't know, sir,' replied Oliver.
'Who's that?' inquired Tom Chitling, casting a contemptuous look at
Oliver.
'A young friend of mine, my dear,' replied the Jew.
'He's in luck, then,' said the young man, with a meaning look at Fagin.
'Never mind where I came from, young 'un; you'll find your way there,
soon enough, I'll bet a crown!'
At this sally, the boys laughed. After some more jokes on the same
subject, they exchanged a few short whispers with Fagin; and withdrew.
After some words apart between the last comer and Fagin, they drew
their chairs towards the fire; and the Jew, telling Oliver to come and
sit by him, led the conversation to the topics most calculated to
interest his hearers. These were, the great advantages of the trade,
the proficiency of the Dodger, the amiability of Charley Bates, and the
liberality of the Jew himself. At length these subjects displayed
signs of being thoroughly exhausted; and Mr. Chitling did the same:
for the house of correction becomes fatiguing after a week or two.
Miss Betsy accordingly withdrew; and left the party to their repose.
From this day, Oliver was seldom left alone; but was placed in almost
constant communication with the two boys, who played the old game with
the Jew every day: whether for their own improvement or Oliver's, Mr.
Fagin best knew. At other times the old man would tell them stories of
robberies he had committed in his younger days: mixed up with so much
that was droll and curious, that Oliver could not help laughing
heartily, and showing that he was amused in spite of all his better
feelings.
In short, the wily old Jew had the boy in his toils. Having prepared
his mind, by solitude and gloom, to prefer any society to the
companionship of his own sad thoughts in such a dreary place, he was
now slowly instilling into his soul the poison which he hoped would
blacken it, and change its hue for ever.
| The next day, the Dodger and Charley go out on "business," and Fagin gives Oliver a long lecture on ingratitude, winding up by telling him stories about all the other boys who had taken it into their heads to run away, and somehow ended up getting hanged for crimes they didn't commit. Oliver is understandably alarmed. Oliver spends the rest of the day by himself, locked up in the room with the spiders and mice. He spends days and days like that. He's very lonely. One day, the Dodger and Charley decide to hang out with Oliver a bit in the afternoon. They make him polish their boots, and chat with him about how great it is to be a "prig" . Oliver says he'd still rather not be one, thank you very much. The Dodger and Charley keep trying to talk it up--as a prig, you don't have to be dependent on anybody because you make your own money, and you're free to do what you want, etc. They tell him that he'll end up one in any case, so he might as well just resign himself to it and get started, because he's wasting time. The Dodger tries to justify it by saying that there will always be pickpockets, and it might as well be them. Fagin comes in just then, and is pleased as can be that the Dodger and Charley have been teaching Oliver to appreciate the fine art of prigging. A new guy comes in: Tom Chitling. He's about eighteen years old, and just got out of jail. Oliver doesn't quite understand where Chitling's been, because he hasn't come out and said it. Chitling tells Oliver not to worry about it--he'll find his own way there sooner or later. After this day, Oliver is rarely left alone anymore. He's almost always with the boys, who play the old pickpocketing game with Fagin everyday for Oliver to watch, and Fagin tells funny stories about thefts he committed in younger days. The chapter ends on an ominous note: the narrator insinuates that the Fagin is slowly poisoning Oliver's soul with all these stories to make thieving seem fun. Uh oh. | summary |
It was a chill, damp, windy night, when the Jew: buttoning his
great-coat tight round his shrivelled body, and pulling the collar up
over his ears so as completely to obscure the lower part of his face:
emerged from his den. He paused on the step as the door was locked and
chained behind him; and having listened while the boys made all secure,
and until their retreating footsteps were no longer audible, slunk down
the street as quickly as he could.
The house to which Oliver had been conveyed, was in the neighborhood of
Whitechapel. The Jew stopped for an instant at the corner of the
street; and, glancing suspiciously round, crossed the road, and struck
off in the direction of the Spitalfields.
The mud lay thick upon the stones, and a black mist hung over the
streets; the rain fell sluggishly down, and everything felt cold and
clammy to the touch. It seemed just the night when it befitted such a
being as the Jew to be abroad. As he glided stealthily along, creeping
beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man
seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and
darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of
some rich offal for a meal.
He kept on his course, through many winding and narrow ways, until he
reached Bethnal Green; then, turning suddenly off to the left, he soon
became involved in a maze of the mean and dirty streets which abound in
that close and densely-populated quarter.
The Jew was evidently too familiar with the ground he traversed to be
at all bewildered, either by the darkness of the night, or the
intricacies of the way. He hurried through several alleys and streets,
and at length turned into one, lighted only by a single lamp at the
farther end. At the door of a house in this street, he knocked; having
exchanged a few muttered words with the person who opened it, he walked
upstairs.
A dog growled as he touched the handle of a room-door; and a man's
voice demanded who was there.
'Only me, Bill; only me, my dear,' said the Jew looking in.
'Bring in your body then,' said Sikes. 'Lie down, you stupid brute!
Don't you know the devil when he's got a great-coat on?'
Apparently, the dog had been somewhat deceived by Mr. Fagin's outer
garment; for as the Jew unbuttoned it, and threw it over the back of a
chair, he retired to the corner from which he had risen: wagging his
tail as he went, to show that he was as well satisfied as it was in his
nature to be.
'Well!' said Sikes.
'Well, my dear,' replied the Jew.--'Ah! Nancy.'
The latter recognition was uttered with just enough of embarrassment to
imply a doubt of its reception; for Mr. Fagin and his young friend had
not met, since she had interfered in behalf of Oliver. All doubts upon
the subject, if he had any, were speedily removed by the young lady's
behaviour. She took her feet off the fender, pushed back her chair,
and bade Fagin draw up his, without saying more about it: for it was a
cold night, and no mistake.
'It is cold, Nancy dear,' said the Jew, as he warmed his skinny hands
over the fire. 'It seems to go right through one,' added the old man,
touching his side.
'It must be a piercer, if it finds its way through your heart,' said
Mr. Sikes. 'Give him something to drink, Nancy. Burn my body, make
haste! It's enough to turn a man ill, to see his lean old carcase
shivering in that way, like a ugly ghost just rose from the grave.'
Nancy quickly brought a bottle from a cupboard, in which there were
many: which, to judge from the diversity of their appearance, were
filled with several kinds of liquids. Sikes pouring out a glass of
brandy, bade the Jew drink it off.
'Quite enough, quite, thankye, Bill,' replied the Jew, putting down the
glass after just setting his lips to it.
'What! You're afraid of our getting the better of you, are you?'
inquired Sikes, fixing his eyes on the Jew. 'Ugh!'
With a hoarse grunt of contempt, Mr. Sikes seized the glass, and threw
the remainder of its contents into the ashes: as a preparatory ceremony
to filling it again for himself: which he did at once.
The Jew glanced round the room, as his companion tossed down the second
glassful; not in curiousity, for he had seen it often before; but in a
restless and suspicious manner habitual to him. It was a meanly
furnished apartment, with nothing but the contents of the closet to
induce the belief that its occupier was anything but a working man; and
with no more suspicious articles displayed to view than two or three
heavy bludgeons which stood in a corner, and a 'life-preserver' that
hung over the chimney-piece.
'There,' said Sikes, smacking his lips. 'Now I'm ready.'
'For business?' inquired the Jew.
'For business,' replied Sikes; 'so say what you've got to say.'
'About the crib at Chertsey, Bill?' said the Jew, drawing his chair
forward, and speaking in a very low voice.
'Yes. Wot about it?' inquired Sikes.
'Ah! you know what I mean, my dear,' said the Jew. 'He knows what I
mean, Nancy; don't he?'
'No, he don't,' sneered Mr. Sikes. 'Or he won't, and that's the same
thing. Speak out, and call things by their right names; don't sit
there, winking and blinking, and talking to me in hints, as if you
warn't the very first that thought about the robbery. Wot d'ye mean?'
'Hush, Bill, hush!' said the Jew, who had in vain attempted to stop
this burst of indignation; 'somebody will hear us, my dear. Somebody
will hear us.'
'Let 'em hear!' said Sikes; 'I don't care.' But as Mr. Sikes DID care,
on reflection, he dropped his voice as he said the words, and grew
calmer.
'There, there,' said the Jew, coaxingly. 'It was only my caution,
nothing more. Now, my dear, about that crib at Chertsey; when is it to
be done, Bill, eh? When is it to be done? Such plate, my dear, such
plate!' said the Jew: rubbing his hands, and elevating his eyebrows in
a rapture of anticipation.
'Not at all,' replied Sikes coldly.
'Not to be done at all!' echoed the Jew, leaning back in his chair.
'No, not at all,' rejoined Sikes. 'At least it can't be a put-up job,
as we expected.'
'Then it hasn't been properly gone about,' said the Jew, turning pale
with anger. 'Don't tell me!'
'But I will tell you,' retorted Sikes. 'Who are you that's not to be
told? I tell you that Toby Crackit has been hanging about the place
for a fortnight, and he can't get one of the servants in line.'
'Do you mean to tell me, Bill,' said the Jew: softening as the other
grew heated: 'that neither of the two men in the house can be got
over?'
'Yes, I do mean to tell you so,' replied Sikes. 'The old lady has had
'em these twenty years; and if you were to give 'em five hundred pound,
they wouldn't be in it.'
'But do you mean to say, my dear,' remonstrated the Jew, 'that the
women can't be got over?'
'Not a bit of it,' replied Sikes.
'Not by flash Toby Crackit?' said the Jew incredulously. 'Think what
women are, Bill,'
'No; not even by flash Toby Crackit,' replied Sikes. 'He says he's
worn sham whiskers, and a canary waistcoat, the whole blessed time he's
been loitering down there, and it's all of no use.'
'He should have tried mustachios and a pair of military trousers, my
dear,' said the Jew.
'So he did,' rejoined Sikes, 'and they warn't of no more use than the
other plant.'
The Jew looked blank at this information. After ruminating for some
minutes with his chin sunk on his breast, he raised his head and said,
with a deep sigh, that if flash Toby Crackit reported aright, he feared
the game was up.
'And yet,' said the old man, dropping his hands on his knees, 'it's a
sad thing, my dear, to lose so much when we had set our hearts upon it.'
'So it is,' said Mr. Sikes. 'Worse luck!'
A long silence ensued; during which the Jew was plunged in deep
thought, with his face wrinkled into an expression of villainy
perfectly demoniacal. Sikes eyed him furtively from time to time.
Nancy, apparently fearful of irritating the housebreaker, sat with her
eyes fixed upon the fire, as if she had been deaf to all that passed.
'Fagin,' said Sikes, abruptly breaking the stillness that prevailed;
'is it worth fifty shiners extra, if it's safely done from the outside?'
'Yes,' said the Jew, as suddenly rousing himself.
'Is it a bargain?' inquired Sikes.
'Yes, my dear, yes,' rejoined the Jew; his eyes glistening, and every
muscle in his face working, with the excitement that the inquiry had
awakened.
'Then,' said Sikes, thrusting aside the Jew's hand, with some disdain,
'let it come off as soon as you like. Toby and me were over the
garden-wall the night afore last, sounding the panels of the door and
shutters. The crib's barred up at night like a jail; but there's one
part we can crack, safe and softly.'
'Which is that, Bill?' asked the Jew eagerly.
'Why,' whispered Sikes, 'as you cross the lawn--'
'Yes?' said the Jew, bending his head forward, with his eyes almost
starting out of it.
'Umph!' cried Sikes, stopping short, as the girl, scarcely moving her
head, looked suddenly round, and pointed for an instant to the Jew's
face. 'Never mind which part it is. You can't do it without me, I
know; but it's best to be on the safe side when one deals with you.'
'As you like, my dear, as you like' replied the Jew. 'Is there no help
wanted, but yours and Toby's?'
'None,' said Sikes. 'Cept a centre-bit and a boy. The first we've
both got; the second you must find us.'
'A boy!' exclaimed the Jew. 'Oh! then it's a panel, eh?'
'Never mind wot it is!' replied Sikes. 'I want a boy, and he musn't be
a big 'un. Lord!' said Mr. Sikes, reflectively, 'if I'd only got that
young boy of Ned, the chimbley-sweeper's! He kept him small on
purpose, and let him out by the job. But the father gets lagged; and
then the Juvenile Delinquent Society comes, and takes the boy away from
a trade where he was earning money, teaches him to read and write, and
in time makes a 'prentice of him. And so they go on,' said Mr. Sikes,
his wrath rising with the recollection of his wrongs, 'so they go on;
and, if they'd got money enough (which it's a Providence they haven't,)
we shouldn't have half a dozen boys left in the whole trade, in a year
or two.'
'No more we should,' acquiesced the Jew, who had been considering
during this speech, and had only caught the last sentence. 'Bill!'
'What now?' inquired Sikes.
The Jew nodded his head towards Nancy, who was still gazing at the
fire; and intimated, by a sign, that he would have her told to leave
the room. Sikes shrugged his shoulders impatiently, as if he thought
the precaution unnecessary; but complied, nevertheless, by requesting
Miss Nancy to fetch him a jug of beer.
'You don't want any beer,' said Nancy, folding her arms, and retaining
her seat very composedly.
'I tell you I do!' replied Sikes.
'Nonsense,' rejoined the girl coolly, 'Go on, Fagin. I know what he's
going to say, Bill; he needn't mind me.'
The Jew still hesitated. Sikes looked from one to the other in some
surprise.
'Why, you don't mind the old girl, do you, Fagin?' he asked at length.
'You've known her long enough to trust her, or the Devil's in it. She
ain't one to blab. Are you Nancy?'
'_I_ should think not!' replied the young lady: drawing her chair up
to the table, and putting her elbows upon it.
'No, no, my dear, I know you're not,' said the Jew; 'but--' and again
the old man paused.
'But wot?' inquired Sikes.
'I didn't know whether she mightn't p'r'aps be out of sorts, you know,
my dear, as she was the other night,' replied the Jew.
At this confession, Miss Nancy burst into a loud laugh; and, swallowing
a glass of brandy, shook her head with an air of defiance, and burst
into sundry exclamations of 'Keep the game a-going!' 'Never say die!'
and the like. These seemed to have the effect of re-assuring both
gentlemen; for the Jew nodded his head with a satisfied air, and
resumed his seat: as did Mr. Sikes likewise.
'Now, Fagin,' said Nancy with a laugh. 'Tell Bill at once, about
Oliver!'
'Ha! you're a clever one, my dear: the sharpest girl I ever saw!' said
the Jew, patting her on the neck. 'It WAS about Oliver I was going to
speak, sure enough. Ha! ha! ha!'
'What about him?' demanded Sikes.
'He's the boy for you, my dear,' replied the Jew in a hoarse whisper;
laying his finger on the side of his nose, and grinning frightfully.
'He!' exclaimed Sikes.
'Have him, Bill!' said Nancy. 'I would, if I was in your place. He
mayn't be so much up, as any of the others; but that's not what you
want, if he's only to open a door for you. Depend upon it he's a safe
one, Bill.'
'I know he is,' rejoined Fagin. 'He's been in good training these last
few weeks, and it's time he began to work for his bread. Besides, the
others are all too big.'
'Well, he is just the size I want,' said Mr. Sikes, ruminating.
'And will do everything you want, Bill, my dear,' interposed the Jew;
'he can't help himself. That is, if you frighten him enough.'
'Frighten him!' echoed Sikes. 'It'll be no sham frightening, mind you.
If there's anything queer about him when we once get into the work; in
for a penny, in for a pound. You won't see him alive again, Fagin.
Think of that, before you send him. Mark my words!' said the robber,
poising a crowbar, which he had drawn from under the bedstead.
'I've thought of it all,' said the Jew with energy. 'I've--I've had my
eye upon him, my dears, close--close. Once let him feel that he is one
of us; once fill his mind with the idea that he has been a thief; and
he's ours! Ours for his life. Oho! It couldn't have come about
better! The old man crossed his arms upon his breast; and, drawing his
head and shoulders into a heap, literally hugged himself for joy.
'Ours!' said Sikes. 'Yours, you mean.'
'Perhaps I do, my dear,' said the Jew, with a shrill chuckle. 'Mine, if
you like, Bill.'
'And wot,' said Sikes, scowling fiercely on his agreeable friend, 'wot
makes you take so much pains about one chalk-faced kid, when you know
there are fifty boys snoozing about Common Garden every night, as you
might pick and choose from?'
'Because they're of no use to me, my dear,' replied the Jew, with some
confusion, 'not worth the taking. Their looks convict 'em when they
get into trouble, and I lose 'em all. With this boy, properly managed,
my dears, I could do what I couldn't with twenty of them. Besides,'
said the Jew, recovering his self-possession, 'he has us now if he
could only give us leg-bail again; and he must be in the same boat with
us. Never mind how he came there; it's quite enough for my power over
him that he was in a robbery; that's all I want. Now, how much better
this is, than being obliged to put the poor leetle boy out of the
way--which would be dangerous, and we should lose by it besides.'
'When is it to be done?' asked Nancy, stopping some turbulent
exclamation on the part of Mr. Sikes, expressive of the disgust with
which he received Fagin's affectation of humanity.
'Ah, to be sure,' said the Jew; 'when is it to be done, Bill?'
'I planned with Toby, the night arter to-morrow,' rejoined Sikes in a
surly voice, 'if he heerd nothing from me to the contrairy.'
'Good,' said the Jew; 'there's no moon.'
'No,' rejoined Sikes.
'It's all arranged about bringing off the swag, is it?' asked the Jew.
Sikes nodded.
'And about--'
'Oh, ah, it's all planned,' rejoined Sikes, interrupting him. 'Never
mind particulars. You'd better bring the boy here to-morrow night. I
shall get off the stone an hour arter daybreak. Then you hold your
tongue, and keep the melting-pot ready, and that's all you'll have to
do.'
After some discussion, in which all three took an active part, it was
decided that Nancy should repair to the Jew's next evening when the
night had set in, and bring Oliver away with her; Fagin craftily
observing, that, if he evinced any disinclination to the task, he would
be more willing to accompany the girl who had so recently interfered in
his behalf, than anybody else. It was also solemnly arranged that poor
Oliver should, for the purposes of the contemplated expedition, be
unreservedly consigned to the care and custody of Mr. William Sikes;
and further, that the said Sikes should deal with him as he thought
fit; and should not be held responsible by the Jew for any mischance or
evil that might be necessary to visit him: it being understood that, to
render the compact in this respect binding, any representations made by
Mr. Sikes on his return should be required to be confirmed and
corroborated, in all important particulars, by the testimony of flash
Toby Crackit.
These preliminaries adjusted, Mr. Sikes proceeded to drink brandy at a
furious rate, and to flourish the crowbar in an alarming manner;
yelling forth, at the same time, most unmusical snatches of song,
mingled with wild execrations. At length, in a fit of professional
enthusiasm, he insisted upon producing his box of housebreaking tools:
which he had no sooner stumbled in with, and opened for the purpose of
explaining the nature and properties of the various implements it
contained, and the peculiar beauties of their construction, than he
fell over the box upon the floor, and went to sleep where he fell.
'Good-night, Nancy,' said the Jew, muffling himself up as before.
'Good-night.'
Their eyes met, and the Jew scrutinised her, narrowly. There was no
flinching about the girl. She was as true and earnest in the matter as
Toby Crackit himself could be.
The Jew again bade her good-night, and, bestowing a sly kick upon the
prostrate form of Mr. Sikes while her back was turned, groped
downstairs.
'Always the way!' muttered the Jew to himself as he turned homeward.
'The worst of these women is, that a very little thing serves to call
up some long-forgotten feeling; and, the best of them is, that it never
lasts. Ha! ha! The man against the child, for a bag of gold!'
Beguiling the time with these pleasant reflections, Mr. Fagin wended
his way, through mud and mire, to his gloomy abode: where the Dodger
was sitting up, impatiently awaiting his return.
'Is Oliver a-bed? I want to speak to him,' was his first remark as
they descended the stairs.
'Hours ago,' replied the Dodger, throwing open a door. 'Here he is!'
The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale
with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he
looked like death; not death as it shows in shroud and coffin, but in
the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle
spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven, and the gross air of the
world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed.
'Not now,' said the Jew, turning softly away. 'To-morrow. To-morrow.'
| Fagin is walking through the streets in a seedy neighborhood of London, and walks up the steps to a house there. Bill Sikes meets him at the door, along with the growling dog. Fagin seems nervous when he sees Nancy--he's afraid she'll still be mad about Oliver, and he hasn't seen her since. Sikes offers Fagin a drink, but Fagin hardly touches it. Sikes assumes it's because Fagin doesn't want to be tipsy when they talk business, because that could give Sikes the upper hand. Sikes glugs the brandy for him, and declares that he, at least, is now ready to talk shop. Fagin wants to know if everything's all set to rob a house in Chertsey . Sikes says sorry, but nope. Fagin's shocked--he assumes they haven't gone about it properly. Sikes explains that Toby Crackit has been hanging around the place for two weeks wearing fancy clothes, trying to seduce one of the servants, but it hasn't worked. He even tried wearing a fake mustache and military trousers. No dice. Fagin's disappointed, and says so. After a few minutes' pause, Sikes says that there's still a way to break into the house from the outside , but he'd need to borrow a small boy. Fagin guesses at the method Sikes has in mind--there must be some panel that's easily lifted off the outside of the house, through which a small boy could fit and then open up the house for the men. It's on the tip of his tongue to suggest Oliver, but then Fagin remembers how upset Nancy got the last time she was around for part of Oliver's "miseducation." Nancy insists that she's fine with it, and glugs a glass of brandy and laughs really loudly to prove it. Sikes isn't so sure about Oliver, since he's so inexperienced, but he is just the right size . Fagin is excited--he thinks Oliver's ready, and that helping to commit this one crime will make him "ours--ours for his life!" . Nancy and Sikes wonder why Fagin is so obsessed with corrupting Oliver, when there are so many boys out there who would be easier to corrupt. Fagin seems "confused" at how to answer this question--he stammers out that other boys' "looks convict 'em when they get in trouble, and I lose 'em all" . Fagin quickly gets himself together, and insists that Oliver's in it for good, now, because if he got caught in the act while robbing the house, he'd be in the same boat with the rest of them. Nancy asks when it's to be done, and Sikes says the day after tomorrow. Fagin asks a few more logistical questions about how they're going to carry off the swag, and Sikes reassures him that it's all taken care of. It's agreed upon that Nancy will be the one to pick Oliver up before his mission, because he's more likely to trust her. It's also agreed upon that Sikes will be in total control of Oliver during the robbery, and if he decides to shoot Oliver, or if Oliver gets "lost" on the way, well, that's his call. Now that it's all arranged, Sikes starts drinking hard. Fagin says good night to Nancy, and gives her a hard look--he clearly doesn't trust her, but she seems in perfect earnest. Fagin heads home, and asks if Oliver is in bed--he is, and Fagin decides not to wake him up, and the chapter ends ominously, as usual, with Fagin standing creepily over the sleeping Oliver. | summary |
When Oliver awoke in the morning, he was a good deal surprised to find
that a new pair of shoes, with strong thick soles, had been placed at
his bedside; and that his old shoes had been removed. At first, he was
pleased with the discovery: hoping that it might be the forerunner of
his release; but such thoughts were quickly dispelled, on his sitting
down to breakfast along with the Jew, who told him, in a tone and
manner which increased his alarm, that he was to be taken to the
residence of Bill Sikes that night.
'To--to--stop there, sir?' asked Oliver, anxiously.
'No, no, my dear. Not to stop there,' replied the Jew. 'We shouldn't
like to lose you. Don't be afraid, Oliver, you shall come back to us
again. Ha! ha! ha! We won't be so cruel as to send you away, my dear.
Oh no, no!'
The old man, who was stooping over the fire toasting a piece of bread,
looked round as he bantered Oliver thus; and chuckled as if to show
that he knew he would still be very glad to get away if he could.
'I suppose,' said the Jew, fixing his eyes on Oliver, 'you want to know
what you're going to Bill's for---eh, my dear?'
Oliver coloured, involuntarily, to find that the old thief had been
reading his thoughts; but boldly said, Yes, he did want to know.
'Why, do you think?' inquired Fagin, parrying the question.
'Indeed I don't know, sir,' replied Oliver.
'Bah!' said the Jew, turning away with a disappointed countenance from
a close perusal of the boy's face. 'Wait till Bill tells you, then.'
The Jew seemed much vexed by Oliver's not expressing any greater
curiosity on the subject; but the truth is, that, although Oliver felt
very anxious, he was too much confused by the earnest cunning of
Fagin's looks, and his own speculations, to make any further inquiries
just then. He had no other opportunity: for the Jew remained very
surly and silent till night: when he prepared to go abroad.
'You may burn a candle,' said the Jew, putting one upon the table.
'And here's a book for you to read, till they come to fetch you.
Good-night!'
'Good-night!' replied Oliver, softly.
The Jew walked to the door: looking over his shoulder at the boy as he
went. Suddenly stopping, he called him by his name.
Oliver looked up; the Jew, pointing to the candle, motioned him to
light it. He did so; and, as he placed the candlestick upon the table,
saw that the Jew was gazing fixedly at him, with lowering and
contracted brows, from the dark end of the room.
'Take heed, Oliver! take heed!' said the old man, shaking his right
hand before him in a warning manner. 'He's a rough man, and thinks
nothing of blood when his own is up. Whatever falls out, say nothing;
and do what he bids you. Mind!' Placing a strong emphasis on the last
word, he suffered his features gradually to resolve themselves into a
ghastly grin, and, nodding his head, left the room.
Oliver leaned his head upon his hand when the old man disappeared, and
pondered, with a trembling heart, on the words he had just heard. The
more he thought of the Jew's admonition, the more he was at a loss to
divine its real purpose and meaning.
He could think of no bad object to be attained by sending him to Sikes,
which would not be equally well answered by his remaining with Fagin;
and after meditating for a long time, concluded that he had been
selected to perform some ordinary menial offices for the housebreaker,
until another boy, better suited for his purpose could be engaged. He
was too well accustomed to suffering, and had suffered too much where
he was, to bewail the prospect of change very severely. He remained
lost in thought for some minutes; and then, with a heavy sigh, snuffed
the candle, and, taking up the book which the Jew had left with him,
began to read.
He turned over the leaves. Carelessly at first; but, lighting on a
passage which attracted his attention, he soon became intent upon the
volume. It was a history of the lives and trials of great criminals;
and the pages were soiled and thumbed with use. Here, he read of
dreadful crimes that made the blood run cold; of secret murders that
had been committed by the lonely wayside; of bodies hidden from the eye
of man in deep pits and wells: which would not keep them down, deep as
they were, but had yielded them up at last, after many years, and so
maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had
confessed their guilt, and yelled for the gibbet to end their agony.
Here, too, he read of men who, lying in their beds at dead of night,
had been tempted (so they said) and led on, by their own bad thoughts,
to such dreadful bloodshed as it made the flesh creep, and the limbs
quail, to think of. The terrible descriptions were so real and vivid,
that the sallow pages seemed to turn red with gore; and the words upon
them, to be sounded in his ears, as if they were whispered, in hollow
murmurs, by the spirits of the dead.
In a paroxysm of fear, the boy closed the book, and thrust it from him.
Then, falling upon his knees, he prayed Heaven to spare him from such
deeds; and rather to will that he should die at once, than be reserved
for crimes, so fearful and appalling. By degrees, he grew more calm,
and besought, in a low and broken voice, that he might be rescued from
his present dangers; and that if any aid were to be raised up for a
poor outcast boy who had never known the love of friends or kindred, it
might come to him now, when, desolate and deserted, he stood alone in
the midst of wickedness and guilt.
He had concluded his prayer, but still remained with his head buried in
his hands, when a rustling noise aroused him.
'What's that!' he cried, starting up, and catching sight of a figure
standing by the door. 'Who's there?'
'Me. Only me,' replied a tremulous voice.
Oliver raised the candle above his head: and looked towards the door.
It was Nancy.
'Put down the light,' said the girl, turning away her head. 'It hurts
my eyes.'
Oliver saw that she was very pale, and gently inquired if she were ill.
The girl threw herself into a chair, with her back towards him: and
wrung her hands; but made no reply.
'God forgive me!' she cried after a while, 'I never thought of this.'
'Has anything happened?' asked Oliver. 'Can I help you? I will if I
can. I will, indeed.'
She rocked herself to and fro; caught her throat; and, uttering a
gurgling sound, gasped for breath.
'Nancy!' cried Oliver, 'What is it?'
The girl beat her hands upon her knees, and her feet upon the ground;
and, suddenly stopping, drew her shawl close round her: and shivered
with cold.
Oliver stirred the fire. Drawing her chair close to it, she sat there,
for a little time, without speaking; but at length she raised her head,
and looked round.
'I don't know what comes over me sometimes,' said she, affecting to
busy herself in arranging her dress; 'it's this damp dirty room, I
think. Now, Nolly, dear, are you ready?'
'Am I to go with you?' asked Oliver.
'Yes. I have come from Bill,' replied the girl. 'You are to go with
me.'
'What for?' asked Oliver, recoiling.
'What for?' echoed the girl, raising her eyes, and averting them again,
the moment they encountered the boy's face. 'Oh! For no harm.'
'I don't believe it,' said Oliver: who had watched her closely.
'Have it your own way,' rejoined the girl, affecting to laugh. 'For no
good, then.'
Oliver could see that he had some power over the girl's better
feelings, and, for an instant, thought of appealing to her compassion
for his helpless state. But, then, the thought darted across his mind
that it was barely eleven o'clock; and that many people were still in
the streets: of whom surely some might be found to give credence to
his tale. As the reflection occured to him, he stepped forward: and
said, somewhat hastily, that he was ready.
Neither his brief consideration, nor its purport, was lost on his
companion. She eyed him narrowly, while he spoke; and cast upon him a
look of intelligence which sufficiently showed that she guessed what
had been passing in his thoughts.
'Hush!' said the girl, stooping over him, and pointing to the door as
she looked cautiously round. 'You can't help yourself. I have tried
hard for you, but all to no purpose. You are hedged round and round.
If ever you are to get loose from here, this is not the time.'
Struck by the energy of her manner, Oliver looked up in her face with
great surprise. She seemed to speak the truth; her countenance was
white and agitated; and she trembled with very earnestness.
'I have saved you from being ill-used once, and I will again, and I do
now,' continued the girl aloud; 'for those who would have fetched you,
if I had not, would have been far more rough than me. I have promised
for your being quiet and silent; if you are not, you will only do harm
to yourself and me too, and perhaps be my death. See here! I have
borne all this for you already, as true as God sees me show it.'
She pointed, hastily, to some livid bruises on her neck and arms; and
continued, with great rapidity:
'Remember this! And don't let me suffer more for you, just now. If I
could help you, I would; but I have not the power. They don't mean to
harm you; whatever they make you do, is no fault of yours. Hush!
Every word from you is a blow for me. Give me your hand. Make haste!
Your hand!'
She caught the hand which Oliver instinctively placed in hers, and,
blowing out the light, drew him after her up the stairs. The door was
opened, quickly, by some one shrouded in the darkness, and was as
quickly closed, when they had passed out. A hackney-cabriolet was in
waiting; with the same vehemence which she had exhibited in addressing
Oliver, the girl pulled him in with her, and drew the curtains close.
The driver wanted no directions, but lashed his horse into full speed,
without the delay of an instant.
The girl still held Oliver fast by the hand, and continued to pour into
his ear, the warnings and assurances she had already imparted. All was
so quick and hurried, that he had scarcely time to recollect where he
was, or how he came there, when the carriage stopped at the house to
which the Jew's steps had been directed on the previous evening.
For one brief moment, Oliver cast a hurried glance along the empty
street, and a cry for help hung upon his lips. But the girl's voice
was in his ear, beseeching him in such tones of agony to remember her,
that he had not the heart to utter it. While he hesitated, the
opportunity was gone; he was already in the house, and the door was
shut.
'This way,' said the girl, releasing her hold for the first time.
'Bill!'
'Hallo!' replied Sikes: appearing at the head of the stairs, with a
candle. 'Oh! That's the time of day. Come on!'
This was a very strong expression of approbation, an uncommonly hearty
welcome, from a person of Mr. Sikes' temperament. Nancy, appearing
much gratified thereby, saluted him cordially.
'Bull's-eye's gone home with Tom,' observed Sikes, as he lighted them
up. 'He'd have been in the way.'
'That's right,' rejoined Nancy.
'So you've got the kid,' said Sikes when they had all reached the room:
closing the door as he spoke.
'Yes, here he is,' replied Nancy.
'Did he come quiet?' inquired Sikes.
'Like a lamb,' rejoined Nancy.
'I'm glad to hear it,' said Sikes, looking grimly at Oliver; 'for the
sake of his young carcase: as would otherways have suffered for it.
Come here, young 'un; and let me read you a lectur', which is as well
got over at once.'
Thus addressing his new pupil, Mr. Sikes pulled off Oliver's cap and
threw it into a corner; and then, taking him by the shoulder, sat
himself down by the table, and stood the boy in front of him.
'Now, first: do you know wot this is?' inquired Sikes, taking up a
pocket-pistol which lay on the table.
Oliver replied in the affirmative.
'Well, then, look here,' continued Sikes. 'This is powder; that 'ere's
a bullet; and this is a little bit of a old hat for waddin'.'
Oliver murmured his comprehension of the different bodies referred to;
and Mr. Sikes proceeded to load the pistol, with great nicety and
deliberation.
'Now it's loaded,' said Mr. Sikes, when he had finished.
'Yes, I see it is, sir,' replied Oliver.
'Well,' said the robber, grasping Oliver's wrist, and putting the
barrel so close to his temple that they touched; at which moment the
boy could not repress a start; 'if you speak a word when you're out
o'doors with me, except when I speak to you, that loading will be in
your head without notice. So, if you _do_ make up your mind to speak
without leave, say your prayers first.'
Having bestowed a scowl upon the object of this warning, to increase
its effect, Mr. Sikes continued.
'As near as I know, there isn't anybody as would be asking very
partickler arter you, if you _was_ disposed of; so I needn't take this
devil-and-all of trouble to explain matters to you, if it warn't for
your own good. D'ye hear me?'
'The short and the long of what you mean,' said Nancy: speaking very
emphatically, and slightly frowning at Oliver as if to bespeak his
serious attention to her words: 'is, that if you're crossed by him in
this job you have on hand, you'll prevent his ever telling tales
afterwards, by shooting him through the head, and will take your chance
of swinging for it, as you do for a great many other things in the way
of business, every month of your life.'
'That's it!' observed Mr. Sikes, approvingly; 'women can always put
things in fewest words.--Except when it's blowing up; and then they
lengthens it out. And now that he's thoroughly up to it, let's have
some supper, and get a snooze before starting.'
In pursuance of this request, Nancy quickly laid the cloth;
disappearing for a few minutes, she presently returned with a pot of
porter and a dish of sheep's heads: which gave occasion to several
pleasant witticisms on the part of Mr. Sikes, founded upon the singular
coincidence of 'jemmies' being a can name, common to them, and also to
an ingenious implement much used in his profession. Indeed, the worthy
gentleman, stimulated perhaps by the immediate prospect of being on
active service, was in great spirits and good humour; in proof whereof,
it may be here remarked, that he humourously drank all the beer at a
draught, and did not utter, on a rough calculation, more than
four-score oaths during the whole progress of the meal.
Supper being ended--it may be easily conceived that Oliver had no great
appetite for it--Mr. Sikes disposed of a couple of glasses of spirits
and water, and threw himself on the bed; ordering Nancy, with many
imprecations in case of failure, to call him at five precisely. Oliver
stretched himself in his clothes, by command of the same authority, on
a mattress upon the floor; and the girl, mending the fire, sat before
it, in readiness to rouse them at the appointed time.
For a long time Oliver lay awake, thinking it not impossible that Nancy
might seek that opportunity of whispering some further advice; but the
girl sat brooding over the fire, without moving, save now and then to
trim the light. Weary with watching and anxiety, he at length fell
asleep.
When he awoke, the table was covered with tea-things, and Sikes was
thrusting various articles into the pockets of his great-coat, which
hung over the back of a chair. Nancy was busily engaged in preparing
breakfast. It was not yet daylight; for the candle was still burning,
and it was quite dark outside. A sharp rain, too, was beating against
the window-panes; and the sky looked black and cloudy.
'Now, then!' growled Sikes, as Oliver started up; 'half-past five!
Look sharp, or you'll get no breakfast; for it's late as it is.'
Oliver was not long in making his toilet; having taken some breakfast,
he replied to a surly inquiry from Sikes, by saying that he was quite
ready.
Nancy, scarcely looking at the boy, threw him a handkerchief to tie
round his throat; Sikes gave him a large rough cape to button over his
shoulders. Thus attired, he gave his hand to the robber, who, merely
pausing to show him with a menacing gesture that he had that same
pistol in a side-pocket of his great-coat, clasped it firmly in his,
and, exchanging a farewell with Nancy, led him away.
Oliver turned, for an instant, when they reached the door, in the hope
of meeting a look from the girl. But she had resumed her old seat in
front of the fire, and sat, perfectly motionless before it.
| The next morning Oliver finds that he's been given a new pair of boots, and wonders why--he hopes that it's because they're going to let him go. At breakfast, Fagin tells him it's because he's going to Bill Sikes's house, but not permanently. Oliver asks why he's going, and Fagin won't tell him. Fagin stays quiet the rest of the day until he goes out. On his way out the door, he warns Oliver not to make Sikes angry, but to do as he says. And then he leaves Oliver a book to read while waiting for them to come and fetch him. Oliver has no idea why he's being sent to Sikes--he thinks it's just to be a servant and run errands or something. He starts to read the book Fagin's left him, and is soon engrossed--it's a history of the lives and trials of great criminals . The stories of crime are so vivid and dreadful that he throws the book away and prays that he might be spared from such crimes. Just as he's calmed himself down a bit, Nancy comes in, and she's clearly upset about something. Oliver offers to help her, and she makes a gurgling noise and then starts laughing loudly. She pretends it was just a passing weird mood, and tells Oliver he's supposed to go with her to Bill Sikes. When Oliver asks why, she says it's no harm, but she can't make eye contact with him as she says it, and he doesn't believe her. Oliver considers appealing to Nancy's sympathy , but then reconsiders-- it's not that late yet, and there might be people in the street who could help him. Nancy seems to read his mind, and tells him that if he ever does manage to escape, it won't be tonight, and that she's already been beaten for taking his side, but it hasn't done any good. She promises that she'll try to help him, but that if he runs away tonight they'd kill her, and that whatever they make him do, it won't be his fault. So Oliver gives up thinking about escape for the time being, puts his hand in hers, and away they go. Outside, they jump into a carriage, and drive off. Nancy warns Oliver about Sikes just as Fagin had. When they get to Sikes's house, he's tempted to call for help in the street, but he remembers that Nancy will get beaten and maybe killed if he does. When Nancy tells Sikes that Oliver came along without complaining or trying to run away, Sikes says it's a good thing, or he'd have smacked him around. Then Sikes gives him a lecture with a pistol as a visual aid--he tells Oliver that when they're out, Oliver had better not speak unless he's spoken to, or he'll get a bullet in the head. Nancy steps out and brings back dinner . Maybe it's the porter, and maybe it's because he's about to go break into a house, but Sikes seems to be in a good mood for a change. After dinner, Sikes goes to bed, telling Nancy to wake him up at 5 a.m. Oliver goes to sleep on the floor. The next morning Nancy wakes them both up, and they grab a quick breakfast before heading out. Sikes gives Oliver a cloak to throw over his clothes. As they leave, Oliver looks back to Nancy for some parting look or word of advice, but she's just sitting motionless by the fire. | summary |
It was a cheerless morning when they got into the street; blowing and
raining hard; and the clouds looking dull and stormy. The night had
been very wet: large pools of water had collected in the road: and the
kennels were overflowing. There was a faint glimmering of the coming
day in the sky; but it rather aggravated than relieved the gloom of the
scene: the sombre light only serving to pale that which the street
lamps afforded, without shedding any warmer or brighter tints upon the
wet house-tops, and dreary streets. There appeared to be nobody
stirring in that quarter of the town; the windows of the houses were
all closely shut; and the streets through which they passed, were
noiseless and empty.
By the time they had turned into the Bethnal Green Road, the day had
fairly begun to break. Many of the lamps were already extinguished; a
few country waggons were slowly toiling on, towards London; now and
then, a stage-coach, covered with mud, rattled briskly by: the driver
bestowing, as he passed, an admonitory lash upon the heavy waggoner
who, by keeping on the wrong side of the road, had endangered his
arriving at the office, a quarter of a minute after his time. The
public-houses, with gas-lights burning inside, were already open. By
degrees, other shops began to be unclosed, and a few scattered people
were met with. Then, came straggling groups of labourers going to
their work; then, men and women with fish-baskets on their heads;
donkey-carts laden with vegetables; chaise-carts filled with live-stock
or whole carcasses of meat; milk-women with pails; an unbroken
concourse of people, trudging out with various supplies to the eastern
suburbs of the town. As they approached the City, the noise and
traffic gradually increased; when they threaded the streets between
Shoreditch and Smithfield, it had swelled into a roar of sound and
bustle. It was as light as it was likely to be, till night came on
again, and the busy morning of half the London population had begun.
Turning down Sun Street and Crown Street, and crossing Finsbury square,
Mr. Sikes struck, by way of Chiswell Street, into Barbican: thence into
Long Lane, and so into Smithfield; from which latter place arose a
tumult of discordant sounds that filled Oliver Twist with amazement.
It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with
filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking
bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest
upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre
of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into
the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the
gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep.
Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and
vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the
whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of
the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs,
the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides;
the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every
public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and
yelling; the hideous and discordant dim that resounded from every
corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty
figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the
throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite
confounded the senses.
Mr. Sikes, dragging Oliver after him, elbowed his way through the
thickest of the crowd, and bestowed very little attention on the
numerous sights and sounds, which so astonished the boy. He nodded,
twice or thrice, to a passing friend; and, resisting as many
invitations to take a morning dram, pressed steadily onward, until they
were clear of the turmoil, and had made their way through Hosier Lane
into Holborn.
'Now, young 'un!' said Sikes, looking up at the clock of St. Andrew's
Church, 'hard upon seven! you must step out. Come, don't lag behind
already, Lazy-legs!'
Mr. Sikes accompanied this speech with a jerk at his little companion's
wrist; Oliver, quickening his pace into a kind of trot between a fast
walk and a run, kept up with the rapid strides of the house-breaker as
well as he could.
They held their course at this rate, until they had passed Hyde Park
corner, and were on their way to Kensington: when Sikes relaxed his
pace, until an empty cart which was at some little distance behind,
came up. Seeing 'Hounslow' written on it, he asked the driver with as
much civility as he could assume, if he would give them a lift as far
as Isleworth.
'Jump up,' said the man. 'Is that your boy?'
'Yes; he's my boy,' replied Sikes, looking hard at Oliver, and putting
his hand abstractedly into the pocket where the pistol was.
'Your father walks rather too quick for you, don't he, my man?'
inquired the driver: seeing that Oliver was out of breath.
'Not a bit of it,' replied Sikes, interposing. 'He's used to it.
Here, take hold of my hand, Ned. In with you!'
Thus addressing Oliver, he helped him into the cart; and the driver,
pointing to a heap of sacks, told him to lie down there, and rest
himself.
As they passed the different mile-stones, Oliver wondered, more and
more, where his companion meant to take him. Kensington, Hammersmith,
Chiswick, Kew Bridge, Brentford, were all passed; and yet they went on
as steadily as if they had only just begun their journey. At length,
they came to a public-house called the Coach and Horses; a little way
beyond which, another road appeared to run off. And here, the cart
stopped.
Sikes dismounted with great precipitation, holding Oliver by the hand
all the while; and lifting him down directly, bestowed a furious look
upon him, and rapped the side-pocket with his fist, in a significant
manner.
'Good-bye, boy,' said the man.
'He's sulky,' replied Sikes, giving him a shake; 'he's sulky. A young
dog! Don't mind him.'
'Not I!' rejoined the other, getting into his cart. 'It's a fine day,
after all.' And he drove away.
Sikes waited until he had fairly gone; and then, telling Oliver he
might look about him if he wanted, once again led him onward on his
journey.
They turned round to the left, a short way past the public-house; and
then, taking a right-hand road, walked on for a long time: passing many
large gardens and gentlemen's houses on both sides of the way, and
stopping for nothing but a little beer, until they reached a town.
Here against the wall of a house, Oliver saw written up in pretty large
letters, 'Hampton.' They lingered about, in the fields, for some
hours. At length they came back into the town; and, turning into an
old public-house with a defaced sign-board, ordered some dinner by the
kitchen fire.
The kitchen was an old, low-roofed room; with a great beam across the
middle of the ceiling, and benches, with high backs to them, by the
fire; on which were seated several rough men in smock-frocks, drinking
and smoking. They took no notice of Oliver; and very little of Sikes;
and, as Sikes took very little notice of them, he and his young comrade
sat in a corner by themselves, without being much troubled by their
company.
They had some cold meat for dinner, and sat so long after it, while Mr.
Sikes indulged himself with three or four pipes, that Oliver began to
feel quite certain they were not going any further. Being much tired
with the walk, and getting up so early, he dozed a little at first;
then, quite overpowered by fatigue and the fumes of the tobacco, fell
asleep.
It was quite dark when he was awakened by a push from Sikes. Rousing
himself sufficiently to sit up and look about him, he found that worthy
in close fellowship and communication with a labouring man, over a pint
of ale.
'So, you're going on to Lower Halliford, are you?' inquired Sikes.
'Yes, I am,' replied the man, who seemed a little the worse--or better,
as the case might be--for drinking; 'and not slow about it neither. My
horse hasn't got a load behind him going back, as he had coming up in
the mornin'; and he won't be long a-doing of it. Here's luck to him.
Ecod! he's a good 'un!'
'Could you give my boy and me a lift as far as there?' demanded Sikes,
pushing the ale towards his new friend.
'If you're going directly, I can,' replied the man, looking out of the
pot. 'Are you going to Halliford?'
'Going on to Shepperton,' replied Sikes.
'I'm your man, as far as I go,' replied the other. 'Is all paid,
Becky?'
'Yes, the other gentleman's paid,' replied the girl.
'I say!' said the man, with tipsy gravity; 'that won't do, you know.'
'Why not?' rejoined Sikes. 'You're a-going to accommodate us, and
wot's to prevent my standing treat for a pint or so, in return?'
The stranger reflected upon this argument, with a very profound face;
having done so, he seized Sikes by the hand: and declared he was a
real good fellow. To which Mr. Sikes replied, he was joking; as, if he
had been sober, there would have been strong reason to suppose he was.
After the exchange of a few more compliments, they bade the company
good-night, and went out; the girl gathering up the pots and glasses as
they did so, and lounging out to the door, with her hands full, to see
the party start.
The horse, whose health had been drunk in his absence, was standing
outside: ready harnessed to the cart. Oliver and Sikes got in without
any further ceremony; and the man to whom he belonged, having lingered
for a minute or two 'to bear him up,' and to defy the hostler and the
world to produce his equal, mounted also. Then, the hostler was told
to give the horse his head; and, his head being given him, he made a
very unpleasant use of it: tossing it into the air with great disdain,
and running into the parlour windows over the way; after performing
those feats, and supporting himself for a short time on his hind-legs,
he started off at great speed, and rattled out of the town right
gallantly.
The night was very dark. A damp mist rose from the river, and the
marshy ground about; and spread itself over the dreary fields. It was
piercing cold, too; all was gloomy and black. Not a word was spoken;
for the driver had grown sleepy; and Sikes was in no mood to lead him
into conversation. Oliver sat huddled together, in a corner of the
cart; bewildered with alarm and apprehension; and figuring strange
objects in the gaunt trees, whose branches waved grimly to and fro, as
if in some fantastic joy at the desolation of the scene.
As they passed Sunbury Church, the clock struck seven. There was a
light in the ferry-house window opposite: which streamed across the
road, and threw into more sombre shadow a dark yew-tree with graves
beneath it. There was a dull sound of falling water not far off; and
the leaves of the old tree stirred gently in the night wind. It seemed
like quiet music for the repose of the dead.
Sunbury was passed through, and they came again into the lonely road.
Two or three miles more, and the cart stopped. Sikes alighted, took
Oliver by the hand, and they once again walked on.
They turned into no house at Shepperton, as the weary boy had expected;
but still kept walking on, in mud and darkness, through gloomy lanes
and over cold open wastes, until they came within sight of the lights
of a town at no great distance. On looking intently forward, Oliver
saw that the water was just below them, and that they were coming to
the foot of a bridge.
Sikes kept straight on, until they were close upon the bridge; then
turned suddenly down a bank upon the left.
'The water!' thought Oliver, turning sick with fear. 'He has brought
me to this lonely place to murder me!'
He was about to throw himself on the ground, and make one struggle for
his young life, when he saw that they stood before a solitary house:
all ruinous and decayed. There was a window on each side of the
dilapidated entrance; and one story above; but no light was visible.
The house was dark, dismantled: and the all appearance, uninhabited.
Sikes, with Oliver's hand still in his, softly approached the low
porch, and raised the latch. The door yielded to the pressure, and
they passed in together.
| It's rainy at 5 a.m. when Sikes and Oliver set out, and the "kennels" are overflowing . London is just starting to wake up now. Farmers are coming in with their vegetables and things, and laborers are going to work. As they approach the main part of the city, everything is bustling. They cut across Smithfield , and it's market day, so Smithfield is particularly gross--it's full of farm animals, blood, filth, and general nastiness. And it's really, really noisy, as you can imagine. They pass west across the city towards Hyde Park and finally hitch a ride on the back of somebody's cart. They continue west-southwest through London and pass outside of the city on the cart, and then hop off at a pub near a crossroads. They keep on walking, with only the occasional break for beer. Finally they take a dinner break, and stay long enough that Oliver falls asleep at the table. He's woken up by a shove from Sikes, because they're going to catch a ride for the next leg of their trip from a guy with a horse and cart who's going their direction. It's seven o'clock, and already cold and dark when they're in the cart. They finally arrive at a dilapidated old house outside the small town of Shepperton, and they go in. | summary |
'Hallo!' cried a loud, hoarse voice, as soon as they set foot in the
passage.
'Don't make such a row,' said Sikes, bolting the door. 'Show a glim,
Toby.'
'Aha! my pal!' cried the same voice. 'A glim, Barney, a glim! Show the
gentleman in, Barney; wake up first, if convenient.'
The speaker appeared to throw a boot-jack, or some such article, at the
person he addressed, to rouse him from his slumbers: for the noise of
a wooden body, falling violently, was heard; and then an indistinct
muttering, as of a man between sleep and awake.
'Do you hear?' cried the same voice. 'There's Bill Sikes in the
passage with nobody to do the civil to him; and you sleeping there, as
if you took laudanum with your meals, and nothing stronger. Are you
any fresher now, or do you want the iron candlestick to wake you
thoroughly?'
A pair of slipshod feet shuffled, hastily, across the bare floor of the
room, as this interrogatory was put; and there issued, from a door on
the right hand; first, a feeble candle: and next, the form of the same
individual who has been heretofore described as labouring under the
infirmity of speaking through his nose, and officiating as waiter at
the public-house on Saffron Hill.
'Bister Sikes!' exclaimed Barney, with real or counterfeit joy; 'cub
id, sir; cub id.'
'Here! you get on first,' said Sikes, putting Oliver in front of him.
'Quicker! or I shall tread upon your heels.'
Muttering a curse upon his tardiness, Sikes pushed Oliver before him;
and they entered a low dark room with a smoky fire, two or three broken
chairs, a table, and a very old couch: on which, with his legs much
higher than his head, a man was reposing at full length, smoking a long
clay pipe. He was dressed in a smartly-cut snuff-coloured coat, with
large brass buttons; an orange neckerchief; a coarse, staring,
shawl-pattern waistcoat; and drab breeches. Mr. Crackit (for he it
was) had no very great quantity of hair, either upon his head or face;
but what he had, was of a reddish dye, and tortured into long corkscrew
curls, through which he occasionally thrust some very dirty fingers,
ornamented with large common rings. He was a trifle above the middle
size, and apparently rather weak in the legs; but this circumstance by
no means detracted from his own admiration of his top-boots, which he
contemplated, in their elevated situation, with lively satisfaction.
'Bill, my boy!' said this figure, turning his head towards the door,
'I'm glad to see you. I was almost afraid you'd given it up: in which
case I should have made a personal wentur. Hallo!'
Uttering this exclamation in a tone of great surprise, as his eyes
rested on Oliver, Mr. Toby Crackit brought himself into a sitting
posture, and demanded who that was.
'The boy. Only the boy!' replied Sikes, drawing a chair towards the
fire.
'Wud of Bister Fagid's lads,' exclaimed Barney, with a grin.
'Fagin's, eh!' exclaimed Toby, looking at Oliver. 'Wot an inwalable
boy that'll make, for the old ladies' pockets in chapels! His mug is a
fortin' to him.'
'There--there's enough of that,' interposed Sikes, impatiently; and
stooping over his recumbant friend, he whispered a few words in his
ear: at which Mr. Crackit laughed immensely, and honoured Oliver with
a long stare of astonishment.
'Now,' said Sikes, as he resumed his seat, 'if you'll give us something
to eat and drink while we're waiting, you'll put some heart in us; or
in me, at all events. Sit down by the fire, younker, and rest
yourself; for you'll have to go out with us again to-night, though not
very far off.'
Oliver looked at Sikes, in mute and timid wonder; and drawing a stool
to the fire, sat with his aching head upon his hands, scarecely knowing
where he was, or what was passing around him.
'Here,' said Toby, as the young Jew placed some fragments of food, and
a bottle upon the table, 'Success to the crack!' He rose to honour
the toast; and, carefully depositing his empty pipe in a corner,
advanced to the table, filled a glass with spirits, and drank off its
contents. Mr. Sikes did the same.
'A drain for the boy,' said Toby, half-filling a wine-glass. 'Down with
it, innocence.'
'Indeed,' said Oliver, looking piteously up into the man's face;
'indeed, I--'
'Down with it!' echoed Toby. 'Do you think I don't know what's good
for you? Tell him to drink it, Bill.'
'He had better!' said Sikes clapping his hand upon his pocket. 'Burn my
body, if he isn't more trouble than a whole family of Dodgers. Drink
it, you perwerse imp; drink it!'
Frightened by the menacing gestures of the two men, Oliver hastily
swallowed the contents of the glass, and immediately fell into a
violent fit of coughing: which delighted Toby Crackit and Barney, and
even drew a smile from the surly Mr. Sikes.
This done, and Sikes having satisfied his appetite (Oliver could eat
nothing but a small crust of bread which they made him swallow), the
two men laid themselves down on chairs for a short nap. Oliver
retained his stool by the fire; Barney wrapped in a blanket, stretched
himself on the floor: close outside the fender.
They slept, or appeared to sleep, for some time; nobody stirring but
Barney, who rose once or twice to throw coals on the fire. Oliver fell
into a heavy doze: imagining himself straying along the gloomy lanes,
or wandering about the dark churchyard, or retracing some one or other
of the scenes of the past day: when he was roused by Toby Crackit
jumping up and declaring it was half-past one.
In an instant, the other two were on their legs, and all were actively
engaged in busy preparation. Sikes and his companion enveloped their
necks and chins in large dark shawls, and drew on their great-coats;
Barney, opening a cupboard, brought forth several articles, which he
hastily crammed into the pockets.
'Barkers for me, Barney,' said Toby Crackit.
'Here they are,' replied Barney, producing a pair of pistols. 'You
loaded them yourself.'
'All right!' replied Toby, stowing them away. 'The persuaders?'
'I've got 'em,' replied Sikes.
'Crape, keys, centre-bits, darkies--nothing forgotten?' inquired Toby:
fastening a small crowbar to a loop inside the skirt of his coat.
'All right,' rejoined his companion. 'Bring them bits of timber,
Barney. That's the time of day.'
With these words, he took a thick stick from Barney's hands, who,
having delivered another to Toby, busied himself in fastening on
Oliver's cape.
'Now then!' said Sikes, holding out his hand.
Oliver: who was completely stupified by the unwonted exercise, and the
air, and the drink which had been forced upon him: put his hand
mechanically into that which Sikes extended for the purpose.
'Take his other hand, Toby,' said Sikes. 'Look out, Barney.'
The man went to the door, and returned to announce that all was quiet.
The two robbers issued forth with Oliver between them. Barney, having
made all fast, rolled himself up as before, and was soon asleep again.
It was now intensely dark. The fog was much heavier than it had been
in the early part of the night; and the atmosphere was so damp, that,
although no rain fell, Oliver's hair and eyebrows, within a few minutes
after leaving the house, had become stiff with the half-frozen moisture
that was floating about. They crossed the bridge, and kept on towards
the lights which he had seen before. They were at no great distance
off; and, as they walked pretty briskly, they soon arrived at Chertsey.
'Slap through the town,' whispered Sikes; 'there'll be nobody in the
way, to-night, to see us.'
Toby acquiesced; and they hurried through the main street of the little
town, which at that late hour was wholly deserted. A dim light shone
at intervals from some bed-room window; and the hoarse barking of dogs
occasionally broke the silence of the night. But there was nobody
abroad. They had cleared the town, as the church-bell struck two.
Quickening their pace, they turned up a road upon the left hand. After
walking about a quarter of a mile, they stopped before a detached house
surrounded by a wall: to the top of which, Toby Crackit, scarcely
pausing to take breath, climbed in a twinkling.
'The boy next,' said Toby. 'Hoist him up; I'll catch hold of him.'
Before Oliver had time to look round, Sikes had caught him under the
arms; and in three or four seconds he and Toby were lying on the grass
on the other side. Sikes followed directly. And they stole cautiously
towards the house.
And now, for the first time, Oliver, well-nigh mad with grief and
terror, saw that housebreaking and robbery, if not murder, were the
objects of the expedition. He clasped his hands together, and
involuntarily uttered a subdued exclamation of horror. A mist came
before his eyes; the cold sweat stood upon his ashy face; his limbs
failed him; and he sank upon his knees.
'Get up!' murmured Sikes, trembling with rage, and drawing the pistol
from his pocket; 'Get up, or I'll strew your brains upon the grass.'
'Oh! for God's sake let me go!' cried Oliver; 'let me run away and die
in the fields. I will never come near London; never, never! Oh! pray
have mercy on me, and do not make me steal. For the love of all the
bright Angels that rest in Heaven, have mercy upon me!'
The man to whom this appeal was made, swore a dreadful oath, and had
cocked the pistol, when Toby, striking it from his grasp, placed his
hand upon the boy's mouth, and dragged him to the house.
'Hush!' cried the man; 'it won't answer here. Say another word, and
I'll do your business myself with a crack on the head. That makes no
noise, and is quite as certain, and more genteel. Here, Bill, wrench
the shutter open. He's game enough now, I'll engage. I've seen older
hands of his age took the same way, for a minute or two, on a cold
night.'
Sikes, invoking terrific imprecations upon Fagin's head for sending
Oliver on such an errand, plied the crowbar vigorously, but with little
noise. After some delay, and some assistance from Toby, the shutter to
which he had referred, swung open on its hinges.
It was a little lattice window, about five feet and a half above the
ground, at the back of the house: which belonged to a scullery, or
small brewing-place, at the end of the passage. The aperture was so
small, that the inmates had probably not thought it worth while to
defend it more securely; but it was large enough to admit a boy of
Oliver's size, nevertheless. A very brief exercise of Mr. Sike's art,
sufficed to overcome the fastening of the lattice; and it soon stood
wide open also.
'Now listen, you young limb,' whispered Sikes, drawing a dark lantern
from his pocket, and throwing the glare full on Oliver's face; 'I'm a
going to put you through there. Take this light; go softly up the
steps straight afore you, and along the little hall, to the street
door; unfasten it, and let us in.'
'There's a bolt at the top, you won't be able to reach,' interposed
Toby. 'Stand upon one of the hall chairs. There are three there, Bill,
with a jolly large blue unicorn and gold pitchfork on 'em: which is
the old lady's arms.'
'Keep quiet, can't you?' replied Sikes, with a threatening look. 'The
room-door is open, is it?'
'Wide,' replied Toby, after peeping in to satisfy himself. 'The game of
that is, that they always leave it open with a catch, so that the dog,
who's got a bed in here, may walk up and down the passage when he feels
wakeful. Ha! ha! Barney 'ticed him away to-night. So neat!'
Although Mr. Crackit spoke in a scarcely audible whisper, and laughed
without noise, Sikes imperiously commanded him to be silent, and to get
to work. Toby complied, by first producing his lantern, and placing it
on the ground; then by planting himself firmly with his head against
the wall beneath the window, and his hands upon his knees, so as to
make a step of his back. This was no sooner done, than Sikes, mounting
upon him, put Oliver gently through the window with his feet first;
and, without leaving hold of his collar, planted him safely on the
floor inside.
'Take this lantern,' said Sikes, looking into the room. 'You see the
stairs afore you?'
Oliver, more dead than alive, gasped out, 'Yes.' Sikes, pointing to
the street-door with the pistol-barrel, briefly advised him to take
notice that he was within shot all the way; and that if he faltered, he
would fall dead that instant.
'It's done in a minute,' said Sikes, in the same low whisper. 'Directly
I leave go of you, do your work. Hark!'
'What's that?' whispered the other man.
They listened intently.
'Nothing,' said Sikes, releasing his hold of Oliver. 'Now!'
In the short time he had had to collect his senses, the boy had firmly
resolved that, whether he died in the attempt or not, he would make one
effort to dart upstairs from the hall, and alarm the family. Filled
with this idea, he advanced at once, but stealthily.
'Come back!' suddenly cried Sikes aloud. 'Back! back!'
Scared by the sudden breaking of the dead stillness of the place, and
by a loud cry which followed it, Oliver let his lantern fall, and knew
not whether to advance or fly.
The cry was repeated--a light appeared--a vision of two terrified
half-dressed men at the top of the stairs swam before his eyes--a
flash--a loud noise--a smoke--a crash somewhere, but where he knew
not,--and he staggered back.
Sikes had disappeared for an instant; but he was up again, and had him
by the collar before the smoke had cleared away. He fired his own
pistol after the men, who were already retreating; and dragged the boy
up.
'Clasp your arm tighter,' said Sikes, as he drew him through the
window. 'Give me a shawl here. They've hit him. Quick! How the boy
bleeds!'
Then came the loud ringing of a bell, mingled with the noise of
fire-arms, and the shouts of men, and the sensation of being carried
over uneven ground at a rapid pace. And then, the noises grew confused
in the distance; and a cold deadly feeling crept over the boy's heart;
and he saw or heard no more.
| Bill Sikes and Oliver walk into the old house, and are greeted in the dark by Toby Crackit, who throws things at the sleeping Barney until he wakes up enough to light a candle. Toby is wearing fancy-looking but cheaply-made clothes, and is stretched out on a table, smoking a long pipe. Oliver is quickly introduced to Toby. The men sit down to a small supper, and have a drink of some liquor to toast success to their plan. Toby and Sikes make Oliver have half a glass, too, which makes him cough terribly. The three men stretch out for a short nap before they go to work, but Oliver can't really sleep. They get up at about 1:30 a.m., and put on heavy, long coats and shawls that partially hide their faces, and load up their gear--most of which is listed in thieves' can't, so it's hard to tell exactly what they're taking. Some of it Dickens translates, though--"barkers" are the pistols, and "bits of timber" are thick sticks. Oliver's pretty out of it with the all the walking and the booze they made him drink, so he hardly knows what's going on as they take him out between them. They hurry through the main street of the town, even though it's unlikely anyone would be awake to see them . They go up to a house about a quarter mile outside of the town. Toby climbs over the wall quickly, and then Sikes hands Oliver over the wall before climbing over himself. Now Oliver realizes for the first time that they're about to rob the house, if not murder people. Oliver's horrified, and cries out to Sikes to let him run off, and promises that he'll never go back to London. Sikes is about to shoot him, when Toby knocks the pistol out of his hand and slaps a hand over Oliver's mouth to keep him quiet, and tells him to hush, or he'll kill him by bopping him on the head, which is a quieter way to do the same thing. Most of the windows of the house are barred, but there's one in a back kitchen that isn't--Sikes and Toby pull off its shutter with the crowbar, and then the lattice so that the window is wide open. Sikes gives Oliver a "dark lantern" , and tells Oliver what he has to do: go straight up the stairs in the room, down the hall to the front door, and unlock it. They pass him through the window, and Sikes points the pistol at Oliver's head. They think they hear something, but Sikes sends Oliver ahead anyway. Oliver's decided that he's going to make an effort to wake the family up to warn them, so he starts sneaking forward. Just then, Sikes calls him to come back. Oliver drops his lantern, and another light appears in the hallway ahead of him. There's a loud noise and a flash and he staggers backward. Sikes shoots his pistol from the window after the men , and then drags Oliver back out the window. He realizes that Oliver's been hit, so he wraps him in a shawl and runs off with him. | summary |
The night was bitter cold. The snow lay on the ground, frozen into a
hard thick crust, so that only the heaps that had drifted into byways
and corners were affected by the sharp wind that howled abroad: which,
as if expending increased fury on such prey as it found, caught it
savagely up in clouds, and, whirling it into a thousand misty eddies,
scattered it in air. Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night
for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire and thank God
they were at home; and for the homeless, starving wretch to lay him
down and die. Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare
streets, at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may,
can hardly open them in a more bitter world.
Such was the aspect of out-of-doors affairs, when Mrs. Corney, the
matron of the workhouse to which our readers have been already
introduced as the birthplace of Oliver Twist, sat herself down before a
cheerful fire in her own little room, and glanced, with no small degree
of complacency, at a small round table: on which stood a tray of
corresponding size, furnished with all necessary materials for the most
grateful meal that matrons enjoy. In fact, Mrs. Corney was about to
solace herself with a cup of tea. As she glanced from the table to the
fireplace, where the smallest of all possible kettles was singing a
small song in a small voice, her inward satisfaction evidently
increased,--so much so, indeed, that Mrs. Corney smiled.
'Well!' said the matron, leaning her elbow on the table, and looking
reflectively at the fire; 'I'm sure we have all on us a great deal to
be grateful for! A great deal, if we did but know it. Ah!'
Mrs. Corney shook her head mournfully, as if deploring the mental
blindness of those paupers who did not know it; and thrusting a silver
spoon (private property) into the inmost recesses of a two-ounce tin
tea-caddy, proceeded to make the tea.
How slight a thing will disturb the equanimity of our frail minds! The
black teapot, being very small and easily filled, ran over while Mrs.
Corney was moralising; and the water slightly scalded Mrs. Corney's
hand.
'Drat the pot!' said the worthy matron, setting it down very hastily on
the hob; 'a little stupid thing, that only holds a couple of cups!
What use is it of, to anybody! Except,' said Mrs. Corney, pausing,
'except to a poor desolate creature like me. Oh dear!'
With these words, the matron dropped into her chair, and, once more
resting her elbow on the table, thought of her solitary fate. The
small teapot, and the single cup, had awakened in her mind sad
recollections of Mr. Corney (who had not been dead more than
five-and-twenty years); and she was overpowered.
'I shall never get another!' said Mrs. Corney, pettishly; 'I shall
never get another--like him.'
Whether this remark bore reference to the husband, or the teapot, is
uncertain. It might have been the latter; for Mrs. Corney looked at it
as she spoke; and took it up afterwards. She had just tasted her first
cup, when she was disturbed by a soft tap at the room-door.
'Oh, come in with you!' said Mrs. Corney, sharply. 'Some of the old
women dying, I suppose. They always die when I'm at meals. Don't stand
there, letting the cold air in, don't. What's amiss now, eh?'
'Nothing, ma'am, nothing,' replied a man's voice.
'Dear me!' exclaimed the matron, in a much sweeter tone, 'is that Mr.
Bumble?'
'At your service, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble, who had been stopping
outside to rub his shoes clean, and to shake the snow off his coat; and
who now made his appearance, bearing the cocked hat in one hand and a
bundle in the other. 'Shall I shut the door, ma'am?'
The lady modestly hesitated to reply, lest there should be any
impropriety in holding an interview with Mr. Bumble, with closed doors.
Mr. Bumble taking advantage of the hesitation, and being very cold
himself, shut it without permission.
'Hard weather, Mr. Bumble,' said the matron.
'Hard, indeed, ma'am,' replied the beadle. 'Anti-porochial weather
this, ma'am. We have given away, Mrs. Corney, we have given away a
matter of twenty quartern loaves and a cheese and a half, this very
blessed afternoon; and yet them paupers are not contented.'
'Of course not. When would they be, Mr. Bumble?' said the matron,
sipping her tea.
'When, indeed, ma'am!' rejoined Mr. Bumble. 'Why here's one man that,
in consideration of his wife and large family, has a quartern loaf and
a good pound of cheese, full weight. Is he grateful, ma'am? Is he
grateful? Not a copper farthing's worth of it! What does he do,
ma'am, but ask for a few coals; if it's only a pocket handkerchief
full, he says! Coals! What would he do with coals? Toast his cheese
with 'em and then come back for more. That's the way with these
people, ma'am; give 'em a apron full of coals to-day, and they'll come
back for another, the day after to-morrow, as brazen as alabaster.'
The matron expressed her entire concurrence in this intelligible
simile; and the beadle went on.
'I never,' said Mr. Bumble, 'see anything like the pitch it's got to.
The day afore yesterday, a man--you have been a married woman, ma'am,
and I may mention it to you--a man, with hardly a rag upon his back
(here Mrs. Corney looked at the floor), goes to our overseer's door
when he has got company coming to dinner; and says, he must be
relieved, Mrs. Corney. As he wouldn't go away, and shocked the company
very much, our overseer sent him out a pound of potatoes and half a
pint of oatmeal. "My heart!" says the ungrateful villain, "what's the
use of _this_ to me? You might as well give me a pair of iron
spectacles!" "Very good," says our overseer, taking 'em away again,
"you won't get anything else here." "Then I'll die in the streets!"
says the vagrant. "Oh no, you won't," says our overseer.'
'Ha! ha! That was very good! So like Mr. Grannett, wasn't it?'
interposed the matron. 'Well, Mr. Bumble?'
'Well, ma'am,' rejoined the beadle, 'he went away; and he _did_ die in
the streets. There's a obstinate pauper for you!'
'It beats anything I could have believed,' observed the matron
emphatically. 'But don't you think out-of-door relief a very bad
thing, any way, Mr. Bumble? You're a gentleman of experience, and
ought to know. Come.'
'Mrs. Corney,' said the beadle, smiling as men smile who are conscious
of superior information, 'out-of-door relief, properly managed:
properly managed, ma'am: is the porochial safeguard. The great
principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what
they don't want; and then they get tired of coming.'
'Dear me!' exclaimed Mrs. Corney. 'Well, that is a good one, too!'
'Yes. Betwixt you and me, ma'am,' returned Mr. Bumble, 'that's the
great principle; and that's the reason why, if you look at any cases
that get into them owdacious newspapers, you'll always observe that
sick families have been relieved with slices of cheese. That's the
rule now, Mrs. Corney, all over the country. But, however,' said the
beadle, stopping to unpack his bundle, 'these are official secrets,
ma'am; not to be spoken of; except, as I may say, among the porochial
officers, such as ourselves. This is the port wine, ma'am, that the
board ordered for the infirmary; real, fresh, genuine port wine; only
out of the cask this forenoon; clear as a bell, and no sediment!'
Having held the first bottle up to the light, and shaken it well to
test its excellence, Mr. Bumble placed them both on top of a chest of
drawers; folded the handkerchief in which they had been wrapped; put it
carefully in his pocket; and took up his hat, as if to go.
'You'll have a very cold walk, Mr. Bumble,' said the matron.
'It blows, ma'am,' replied Mr. Bumble, turning up his coat-collar,
'enough to cut one's ears off.'
The matron looked, from the little kettle, to the beadle, who was
moving towards the door; and as the beadle coughed, preparatory to
bidding her good-night, bashfully inquired whether--whether he wouldn't
take a cup of tea?
Mr. Bumble instantaneously turned back his collar again; laid his hat
and stick upon a chair; and drew another chair up to the table. As he
slowly seated himself, he looked at the lady. She fixed her eyes upon
the little teapot. Mr. Bumble coughed again, and slightly smiled.
Mrs. Corney rose to get another cup and saucer from the closet. As she
sat down, her eyes once again encountered those of the gallant beadle;
she coloured, and applied herself to the task of making his tea. Again
Mr. Bumble coughed--louder this time than he had coughed yet.
'Sweet? Mr. Bumble?' inquired the matron, taking up the sugar-basin.
'Very sweet, indeed, ma'am,' replied Mr. Bumble. He fixed his eyes on
Mrs. Corney as he said this; and if ever a beadle looked tender, Mr.
Bumble was that beadle at that moment.
The tea was made, and handed in silence. Mr. Bumble, having spread a
handkerchief over his knees to prevent the crumbs from sullying the
splendour of his shorts, began to eat and drink; varying these
amusements, occasionally, by fetching a deep sigh; which, however, had
no injurious effect upon his appetite, but, on the contrary, rather
seemed to facilitate his operations in the tea and toast department.
'You have a cat, ma'am, I see,' said Mr. Bumble, glancing at one who,
in the centre of her family, was basking before the fire; 'and kittens
too, I declare!'
'I am so fond of them, Mr. Bumble, you can't think,' replied the
matron. 'They're _so_ happy, _so_ frolicsome, and _so_ cheerful, that
they are quite companions for me.'
'Very nice animals, ma'am,' replied Mr. Bumble, approvingly; 'so very
domestic.'
'Oh, yes!' rejoined the matron with enthusiasm; 'so fond of their home
too, that it's quite a pleasure, I'm sure.'
'Mrs. Corney, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble, slowly, and marking the time
with his teaspoon, 'I mean to say this, ma'am; that any cat, or kitten,
that could live with you, ma'am, and _not_ be fond of its home, must be
a ass, ma'am.'
'Oh, Mr. Bumble!' remonstrated Mrs. Corney.
'It's of no use disguising facts, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble, slowly
flourishing the teaspoon with a kind of amorous dignity which made him
doubly impressive; 'I would drown it myself, with pleasure.'
'Then you're a cruel man,' said the matron vivaciously, as she held out
her hand for the beadle's cup; 'and a very hard-hearted man besides.'
'Hard-hearted, ma'am?' said Mr. Bumble. 'Hard?' Mr. Bumble resigned
his cup without another word; squeezed Mrs. Corney's little finger as
she took it; and inflicting two open-handed slaps upon his laced
waistcoat, gave a mighty sigh, and hitched his chair a very little
morsel farther from the fire.
It was a round table; and as Mrs. Corney and Mr. Bumble had been
sitting opposite each other, with no great space between them, and
fronting the fire, it will be seen that Mr. Bumble, in receding from
the fire, and still keeping at the table, increased the distance
between himself and Mrs. Corney; which proceeding, some prudent readers
will doubtless be disposed to admire, and to consider an act of great
heroism on Mr. Bumble's part: he being in some sort tempted by time,
place, and opportunity, to give utterance to certain soft nothings,
which however well they may become the lips of the light and
thoughtless, do seem immeasurably beneath the dignity of judges of the
land, members of parliament, ministers of state, lord mayors, and other
great public functionaries, but more particularly beneath the
stateliness and gravity of a beadle: who (as is well known) should be
the sternest and most inflexible among them all.
Whatever were Mr. Bumble's intentions, however (and no doubt they were
of the best): it unfortunately happened, as has been twice before
remarked, that the table was a round one; consequently Mr. Bumble,
moving his chair by little and little, soon began to diminish the
distance between himself and the matron; and, continuing to travel
round the outer edge of the circle, brought his chair, in time, close
to that in which the matron was seated.
Indeed, the two chairs touched; and when they did so, Mr. Bumble
stopped.
Now, if the matron had moved her chair to the right, she would have
been scorched by the fire; and if to the left, she must have fallen
into Mr. Bumble's arms; so (being a discreet matron, and no doubt
foreseeing these consequences at a glance) she remained where she was,
and handed Mr. Bumble another cup of tea.
'Hard-hearted, Mrs. Corney?' said Mr. Bumble, stirring his tea, and
looking up into the matron's face; 'are _you_ hard-hearted, Mrs.
Corney?'
'Dear me!' exclaimed the matron, 'what a very curious question from a
single man. What can you want to know for, Mr. Bumble?'
The beadle drank his tea to the last drop; finished a piece of toast;
whisked the crumbs off his knees; wiped his lips; and deliberately
kissed the matron.
'Mr. Bumble!' cried that discreet lady in a whisper; for the fright was
so great, that she had quite lost her voice, 'Mr. Bumble, I shall
scream!' Mr. Bumble made no reply; but in a slow and dignified manner,
put his arm round the matron's waist.
As the lady had stated her intention of screaming, of course she would
have screamed at this additional boldness, but that the exertion was
rendered unnecessary by a hasty knocking at the door: which was no
sooner heard, than Mr. Bumble darted, with much agility, to the wine
bottles, and began dusting them with great violence: while the matron
sharply demanded who was there.
It is worthy of remark, as a curious physical instance of the efficacy
of a sudden surprise in counteracting the effects of extreme fear, that
her voice had quite recovered all its official asperity.
'If you please, mistress,' said a withered old female pauper, hideously
ugly: putting her head in at the door, 'Old Sally is a-going fast.'
'Well, what's that to me?' angrily demanded the matron. 'I can't keep
her alive, can I?'
'No, no, mistress,' replied the old woman, 'nobody can; she's far
beyond the reach of help. I've seen a many people die; little babes
and great strong men; and I know when death's a-coming, well enough.
But she's troubled in her mind: and when the fits are not on her,--and
that's not often, for she is dying very hard,--she says she has got
something to tell, which you must hear. She'll never die quiet till
you come, mistress.'
At this intelligence, the worthy Mrs. Corney muttered a variety of
invectives against old women who couldn't even die without purposely
annoying their betters; and, muffling herself in a thick shawl which
she hastily caught up, briefly requested Mr. Bumble to stay till she
came back, lest anything particular should occur. Bidding the
messenger walk fast, and not be all night hobbling up the stairs, she
followed her from the room with a very ill grace, scolding all the way.
Mr. Bumble's conduct on being left to himself, was rather inexplicable.
He opened the closet, counted the teaspoons, weighed the sugar-tongs,
closely inspected a silver milk-pot to ascertain that it was of the
genuine metal, and, having satisfied his curiosity on these points, put
on his cocked hat corner-wise, and danced with much gravity four
distinct times round the table.
Having gone through this very extraordinary performance, he took off
the cocked hat again, and, spreading himself before the fire with his
back towards it, seemed to be mentally engaged in taking an exact
inventory of the furniture.
| The second book opens with Mrs. Corney , the matron at the workhouse where Oliver was born, making herself a comfortable cup of tea on a cold and bitter night. She's in the middle of reflecting on how lonely she is when there's a knock at the door. She assumes it's one of the workhouse paupers, come to tell her that someone or other is dying, and she's annoyed by it: "they always die when I'm at meals," she complains . But it's not a pauper, it's Mr. Bumble. Mrs. Corney quickly changes her tone of voice. Mr. Bumble complains about how demanding the poor people all are--even after being given bread and cheese, a man with a large family asked if he could have "a pocket-handkerchief full" of coals to make a fire . He tells another story of a man who came looking for relief at the overseer's house when the overseer was having a dinner party--the man hardly had any clothes on , and the overseer offered him a pound of potatoes and some oatmeal. The man said that the food wouldn't save him, and that he'd go die in the streets. And that's exactly what he did. Mr. Bumble thinks that shows how "obstinate" paupers are. Even as he finishes telling Mrs. Corney about the man who died in the street of the cold, he pulls out two bottles of good port wine that he's brought with him, "for the infirmary," and puts on his hat as though to go. But then he stays when Mrs. Corney invites him to a cup of tea. Mrs. Corney gets him a cup of tea, and asks him if he wants it sweet. He says he wants it "very sweet," and gives her a tender look . He eats his toast and drinks his tea in silence, until he comments on her cat and kittens. She says that they make good companions, because they are "so happy, so frolicsome, and so cheerful" . Mr. Bumble uses this as an awkward way to hit on her: he says that "any cat or kitten that could live with you, ma'am, and not be fond of its home, must be an ass, ma'am," and that he would himself "drown" any cat so ungrateful . Mrs. Corney tells him that drowning cats is "cruel" and "hard-hearted" . Mr. Bumble doesn't argue with "cruel" but objects to "hard-hearted." He scoots his chair away from the fire . And then he scoots it again--and again--until he's quite close to her again on the other side. Mrs. Corney is now pinned between the fire and Mr. Bumble . Mr. Bumble asks Mrs. Corney if she is "hard-hearted," and when she wants to know why he asks, he kisses her. She threatens to scream, but then there's a knock at the door. This time it is a pauper, letting Mrs. Corney know that "old Sally" is dying, and has something she wants to tell Mrs. Corney before she dies. Mrs. Corney is very put out about all this, but does get up to go, and asks Mr. Bumble to wait until she gets back. While she's out, Mr. Bumble goes around her room weighing and counting her silver sugar-tongs, milk pot, spoons, and examining all her furniture. | summary |
It was no unfit messenger of death, who had disturbed the quiet of the
matron's room. Her body was bent by age; her limbs trembled with
palsy; her face, distorted into a mumbling leer, resembled more the
grotesque shaping of some wild pencil, than the work of Nature's hand.
Alas! How few of Nature's faces are left alone to gladden us with
their beauty! The cares, and sorrows, and hungerings, of the world,
change them as they change hearts; and it is only when those passions
sleep, and have lost their hold for ever, that the troubled clouds pass
off, and leave Heaven's surface clear. It is a common thing for the
countenances of the dead, even in that fixed and rigid state, to
subside into the long-forgotten expression of sleeping infancy, and
settle into the very look of early life; so calm, so peaceful, do they
grow again, that those who knew them in their happy childhood, kneel by
the coffin's side in awe, and see the Angel even upon earth.
The old crone tottered along the passages, and up the stairs, muttering
some indistinct answers to the chidings of her companion; being at
length compelled to pause for breath, she gave the light into her hand,
and remained behind to follow as she might: while the more nimble
superior made her way to the room where the sick woman lay.
It was a bare garret-room, with a dim light burning at the farther end.
There was another old woman watching by the bed; the parish
apothecary's apprentice was standing by the fire, making a toothpick
out of a quill.
'Cold night, Mrs. Corney,' said this young gentleman, as the matron
entered.
'Very cold, indeed, sir,' replied the mistress, in her most civil
tones, and dropping a curtsey as she spoke.
'You should get better coals out of your contractors,' said the
apothecary's deputy, breaking a lump on the top of the fire with the
rusty poker; 'these are not at all the sort of thing for a cold night.'
'They're the board's choosing, sir,' returned the matron. 'The least
they could do, would be to keep us pretty warm: for our places are
hard enough.'
The conversation was here interrupted by a moan from the sick woman.
'Oh!' said the young mag, turning his face towards the bed, as if he
had previously quite forgotten the patient, 'it's all U.P. there, Mrs.
Corney.'
'It is, is it, sir?' asked the matron.
'If she lasts a couple of hours, I shall be surprised,' said the
apothecary's apprentice, intent upon the toothpick's point. 'It's a
break-up of the system altogether. Is she dozing, old lady?'
The attendant stooped over the bed, to ascertain; and nodded in the
affirmative.
'Then perhaps she'll go off in that way, if you don't make a row,' said
the young man. 'Put the light on the floor. She won't see it there.'
The attendant did as she was told: shaking her head meanwhile, to
intimate that the woman would not die so easily; having done so, she
resumed her seat by the side of the other nurse, who had by this time
returned. The mistress, with an expression of impatience, wrapped
herself in her shawl, and sat at the foot of the bed.
The apothecary's apprentice, having completed the manufacture of the
toothpick, planted himself in front of the fire and made good use of it
for ten minutes or so: when apparently growing rather dull, he wished
Mrs. Corney joy of her job, and took himself off on tiptoe.
When they had sat in silence for some time, the two old women rose from
the bed, and crouching over the fire, held out their withered hands to
catch the heat. The flame threw a ghastly light on their shrivelled
faces, and made their ugliness appear terrible, as, in this position,
they began to converse in a low voice.
'Did she say any more, Anny dear, while I was gone?' inquired the
messenger.
'Not a word,' replied the other. 'She plucked and tore at her arms for
a little time; but I held her hands, and she soon dropped off. She
hasn't much strength in her, so I easily kept her quiet. I ain't so
weak for an old woman, although I am on parish allowance; no, no!'
'Did she drink the hot wine the doctor said she was to have?' demanded
the first.
'I tried to get it down,' rejoined the other. 'But her teeth were
tight set, and she clenched the mug so hard that it was as much as I
could do to get it back again. So I drank it; and it did me good!'
Looking cautiously round, to ascertain that they were not overheard,
the two hags cowered nearer to the fire, and chuckled heartily.
'I mind the time,' said the first speaker, 'when she would have done
the same, and made rare fun of it afterwards.'
'Ay, that she would,' rejoined the other; 'she had a merry heart. 'A
many, many, beautiful corpses she laid out, as nice and neat as
waxwork. My old eyes have seen them--ay, and those old hands touched
them too; for I have helped her, scores of times.'
Stretching forth her trembling fingers as she spoke, the old creature
shook them exultingly before her face, and fumbling in her pocket,
brought out an old time-discoloured tin snuff-box, from which she shook
a few grains into the outstretched palm of her companion, and a few
more into her own. While they were thus employed, the matron, who had
been impatiently watching until the dying woman should awaken from her
stupor, joined them by the fire, and sharply asked how long she was to
wait?
'Not long, mistress,' replied the second woman, looking up into her
face. 'We have none of us long to wait for Death. Patience, patience!
He'll be here soon enough for us all.'
'Hold your tongue, you doting idiot!' said the matron sternly. 'You,
Martha, tell me; has she been in this way before?'
'Often,' answered the first woman.
'But will never be again,' added the second one; 'that is, she'll never
wake again but once--and mind, mistress, that won't be for long!'
'Long or short,' said the matron, snappishly, 'she won't find me here
when she does wake; take care, both of you, how you worry me again for
nothing. It's no part of my duty to see all the old women in the house
die, and I won't--that's more. Mind that, you impudent old harridans.
If you make a fool of me again, I'll soon cure you, I warrant you!'
She was bouncing away, when a cry from the two women, who had turned
towards the bed, caused her to look round. The patient had raised
herself upright, and was stretching her arms towards them.
'Who's that?' she cried, in a hollow voice.
'Hush, hush!' said one of the women, stooping over her. 'Lie down, lie
down!'
'I'll never lie down again alive!' said the woman, struggling. 'I
_will_ tell her! Come here! Nearer! Let me whisper in your ear.'
She clutched the matron by the arm, and forcing her into a chair by the
bedside, was about to speak, when looking round, she caught sight of
the two old women bending forward in the attitude of eager listeners.
'Turn them away,' said the woman, drowsily; 'make haste! make haste!'
The two old crones, chiming in together, began pouring out many piteous
lamentations that the poor dear was too far gone to know her best
friends; and were uttering sundry protestations that they would never
leave her, when the superior pushed them from the room, closed the
door, and returned to the bedside. On being excluded, the old ladies
changed their tone, and cried through the keyhole that old Sally was
drunk; which, indeed, was not unlikely; since, in addition to a
moderate dose of opium prescribed by the apothecary, she was labouring
under the effects of a final taste of gin-and-water which had been
privily administered, in the openness of their hearts, by the worthy
old ladies themselves.
'Now listen to me,' said the dying woman aloud, as if making a great
effort to revive one latent spark of energy. 'In this very room--in
this very bed--I once nursed a pretty young creetur', that was brought
into the house with her feet cut and bruised with walking, and all
soiled with dust and blood. She gave birth to a boy, and died. Let me
think--what was the year again!'
'Never mind the year,' said the impatient auditor; 'what about her?'
'Ay,' murmured the sick woman, relapsing into her former drowsy state,
'what about her?--what about--I know!' she cried, jumping fiercely up:
her face flushed, and her eyes starting from her head--'I robbed her,
so I did! She wasn't cold--I tell you she wasn't cold, when I stole
it!'
'Stole what, for God's sake?' cried the matron, with a gesture as if
she would call for help.
'_It_!' replied the woman, laying her hand over the other's mouth. 'The
only thing she had. She wanted clothes to keep her warm, and food to
eat; but she had kept it safe, and had it in her bosom. It was gold, I
tell you! Rich gold, that might have saved her life!'
'Gold!' echoed the matron, bending eagerly over the woman as she fell
back. 'Go on, go on--yes--what of it? Who was the mother? When was
it?'
'She charged me to keep it safe,' replied the woman with a groan, 'and
trusted me as the only woman about her. I stole it in my heart when
she first showed it me hanging round her neck; and the child's death,
perhaps, is on me besides! They would have treated him better, if they
had known it all!'
'Known what?' asked the other. 'Speak!'
'The boy grew so like his mother,' said the woman, rambling on, and not
heeding the question, 'that I could never forget it when I saw his
face. Poor girl! poor girl! She was so young, too! Such a gentle
lamb! Wait; there's more to tell. I have not told you all, have I?'
'No, no,' replied the matron, inclining her head to catch the words, as
they came more faintly from the dying woman. 'Be quick, or it may be
too late!'
'The mother,' said the woman, making a more violent effort than before;
'the mother, when the pains of death first came upon her, whispered in
my ear that if her baby was born alive, and thrived, the day might come
when it would not feel so much disgraced to hear its poor young mother
named. "And oh, kind Heaven!" she said, folding her thin hands
together, "whether it be boy or girl, raise up some friends for it in
this troubled world, and take pity upon a lonely desolate child,
abandoned to its mercy!"'
'The boy's name?' demanded the matron.
'They _called_ him Oliver,' replied the woman, feebly. 'The gold I
stole was--'
'Yes, yes--what?' cried the other.
She was bending eagerly over the woman to hear her reply; but drew
back, instinctively, as she once again rose, slowly and stiffly, into a
sitting posture; then, clutching the coverlid with both hands, muttered
some indistinct sounds in her throat, and fell lifeless on the bed.
* * * * *
'Stone dead!' said one of the old women, hurrying in as soon as the
door was opened.
'And nothing to tell, after all,' rejoined the matron, walking
carelessly away.
The two crones, to all appearance, too busily occupied in the
preparations for their dreadful duties to make any reply, were left
alone, hovering about the body.
| The old lady who came to get Mrs. Corney is withered and ugly, but Dickens launches into a long explanation of why so many people are withered and ugly--it's because they have so much to stress about, but no worries--everyone's face looks better when they're dead! When Mrs. Corney gets to the room where the sick woman is, she meets with a young man who is the apothecary's apprentice --they called the apothecary's apprentice. He's not even licensed yet.]. Mrs. Corney and the apothecary's apprentice exchange pleasantries - they seem to know each other well. They hear the old lady moan, which reminds them to check on her. The apothecary's apprentice thinks she's almost dead, and Mrs. Corney sits on the foot of the bed to wait it out. The apothecary's apprentice, meanwhile, has been making a toothpick, and starts using it. Then he gets bored, and leaves. The old lady who had gone to get Mrs. Corney starts speaking in a low voice with the other old woman--who was also helping with the sick woman--about how "old Sally" was doing. Mrs. Corney gets impatient, and tells the two old women not to bother her for nothing. Just as she's about to leave, old Sally sits up in bed and grabs hold of her arm, and says she has to tell her something, and that it's for her ears alone . Old Sally confesses that, many years ago , she had attended a sick pretty young woman who had given birth to a baby and then died, and that she had robbed the woman of some gold ornament she'd had hanging around her neck. Old Sally said that the mother told her that a day might come when her baby wouldn't be ashamed to hear her name mentioned, and would find some friends in the world. Mrs. Corney of course wants to know the boy's name, and old Sally says that they called him Oliver. And old Sally dies before she can say what the gold was, or any more about it. Mrs. Corney leaves casually, without indicating to the two old women that old Sally had said anything at all important. | summary |
While these things were passing in the country workhouse, Mr. Fagin sat
in the old den--the same from which Oliver had been removed by the
girl--brooding over a dull, smoky fire. He held a pair of bellows upon
his knee, with which he had apparently been endeavouring to rouse it
into more cheerful action; but he had fallen into deep thought; and
with his arms folded on them, and his chin resting on his thumbs, fixed
his eyes, abstractedly, on the rusty bars.
At a table behind him sat the Artful Dodger, Master Charles Bates, and
Mr. Chitling: all intent upon a game of whist; the Artful taking dummy
against Master Bates and Mr. Chitling. The countenance of the
first-named gentleman, peculiarly intelligent at all times, acquired
great additional interest from his close observance of the game, and
his attentive perusal of Mr. Chitling's hand; upon which, from time to
time, as occasion served, he bestowed a variety of earnest glances:
wisely regulating his own play by the result of his observations upon
his neighbour's cards. It being a cold night, the Dodger wore his hat,
as, indeed, was often his custom within doors. He also sustained a
clay pipe between his teeth, which he only removed for a brief space
when he deemed it necessary to apply for refreshment to a quart pot
upon the table, which stood ready filled with gin-and-water for the
accommodation of the company.
Master Bates was also attentive to the play; but being of a more
excitable nature than his accomplished friend, it was observable that
he more frequently applied himself to the gin-and-water, and moreover
indulged in many jests and irrelevant remarks, all highly unbecoming a
scientific rubber. Indeed, the Artful, presuming upon their close
attachment, more than once took occasion to reason gravely with his
companion upon these improprieties; all of which remonstrances, Master
Bates received in extremely good part; merely requesting his friend to
be 'blowed,' or to insert his head in a sack, or replying with some
other neatly-turned witticism of a similar kind, the happy application
of which, excited considerable admiration in the mind of Mr. Chitling.
It was remarkable that the latter gentleman and his partner invariably
lost; and that the circumstance, so far from angering Master Bates,
appeared to afford him the highest amusement, inasmuch as he laughed
most uproariously at the end of every deal, and protested that he had
never seen such a jolly game in all his born days.
'That's two doubles and the rub,' said Mr. Chitling, with a very long
face, as he drew half-a-crown from his waistcoat-pocket. 'I never see
such a feller as you, Jack; you win everything. Even when we've good
cards, Charley and I can't make nothing of 'em.'
Either the master or the manner of this remark, which was made very
ruefully, delighted Charley Bates so much, that his consequent shout of
laughter roused the Jew from his reverie, and induced him to inquire
what was the matter.
'Matter, Fagin!' cried Charley. 'I wish you had watched the play.
Tommy Chitling hasn't won a point; and I went partners with him against
the Artfull and dumb.'
'Ay, ay!' said the Jew, with a grin, which sufficiently demonstrated
that he was at no loss to understand the reason. 'Try 'em again, Tom;
try 'em again.'
'No more of it for me, thank 'ee, Fagin,' replied Mr. Chitling; 'I've
had enough. That 'ere Dodger has such a run of luck that there's no
standing again' him.'
'Ha! ha! my dear,' replied the Jew, 'you must get up very early in the
morning, to win against the Dodger.'
'Morning!' said Charley Bates; 'you must put your boots on over-night,
and have a telescope at each eye, and a opera-glass between your
shoulders, if you want to come over him.'
Mr. Dawkins received these handsome compliments with much philosophy,
and offered to cut any gentleman in company, for the first
picture-card, at a shilling at a time. Nobody accepting the challenge,
and his pipe being by this time smoked out, he proceeded to amuse
himself by sketching a ground-plan of Newgate on the table with the
piece of chalk which had served him in lieu of counters; whistling,
meantime, with peculiar shrillness.
'How precious dull you are, Tommy!' said the Dodger, stopping short
when there had been a long silence; and addressing Mr. Chitling. 'What
do you think he's thinking of, Fagin?'
'How should I know, my dear?' replied the Jew, looking round as he
plied the bellows. 'About his losses, maybe; or the little retirement
in the country that he's just left, eh? Ha! ha! Is that it, my dear?'
'Not a bit of it,' replied the Dodger, stopping the subject of
discourse as Mr. Chitling was about to reply. 'What do _you_ say,
Charley?'
'_I_ should say,' replied Master Bates, with a grin, 'that he was
uncommon sweet upon Betsy. See how he's a-blushing! Oh, my eye!
here's a merry-go-rounder! Tommy Chitling's in love! Oh, Fagin,
Fagin! what a spree!'
Thoroughly overpowered with the notion of Mr. Chitling being the victim
of the tender passion, Master Bates threw himself back in his chair
with such violence, that he lost his balance, and pitched over upon the
floor; where (the accident abating nothing of his merriment) he lay at
full length until his laugh was over, when he resumed his former
position, and began another laugh.
'Never mind him, my dear,' said the Jew, winking at Mr. Dawkins, and
giving Master Bates a reproving tap with the nozzle of the bellows.
'Betsy's a fine girl. Stick up to her, Tom. Stick up to her.'
'What I mean to say, Fagin,' replied Mr. Chitling, very red in the
face, 'is, that that isn't anything to anybody here.'
'No more it is,' replied the Jew; 'Charley will talk. Don't mind him,
my dear; don't mind him. Betsy's a fine girl. Do as she bids you,
Tom, and you will make your fortune.'
'So I _do_ do as she bids me,' replied Mr. Chitling; 'I shouldn't have
been milled, if it hadn't been for her advice. But it turned out a
good job for you; didn't it, Fagin! And what's six weeks of it? It
must come, some time or another, and why not in the winter time when
you don't want to go out a-walking so much; eh, Fagin?'
'Ah, to be sure, my dear,' replied the Jew.
'You wouldn't mind it again, Tom, would you,' asked the Dodger, winking
upon Charley and the Jew, 'if Bet was all right?'
'I mean to say that I shouldn't,' replied Tom, angrily. 'There, now.
Ah! Who'll say as much as that, I should like to know; eh, Fagin?'
'Nobody, my dear,' replied the Jew; 'not a soul, Tom. I don't know one
of 'em that would do it besides you; not one of 'em, my dear.'
'I might have got clear off, if I'd split upon her; mightn't I, Fagin?'
angrily pursued the poor half-witted dupe. 'A word from me would have
done it; wouldn't it, Fagin?'
'To be sure it would, my dear,' replied the Jew.
'But I didn't blab it; did I, Fagin?' demanded Tom, pouring question
upon question with great volubility.
'No, no, to be sure,' replied the Jew; 'you were too stout-hearted for
that. A deal too stout, my dear!'
'Perhaps I was,' rejoined Tom, looking round; 'and if I was, what's to
laugh at, in that; eh, Fagin?'
The Jew, perceiving that Mr. Chitling was considerably roused, hastened
to assure him that nobody was laughing; and to prove the gravity of the
company, appealed to Master Bates, the principal offender. But,
unfortunately, Charley, in opening his mouth to reply that he was never
more serious in his life, was unable to prevent the escape of such a
violent roar, that the abused Mr. Chitling, without any preliminary
ceremonies, rushed across the room and aimed a blow at the offender;
who, being skilful in evading pursuit, ducked to avoid it, and chose
his time so well that it lighted on the chest of the merry old
gentleman, and caused him to stagger to the wall, where he stood
panting for breath, while Mr. Chitling looked on in intense dismay.
'Hark!' cried the Dodger at this moment, 'I heard the tinkler.'
Catching up the light, he crept softly upstairs.
The bell was rung again, with some impatience, while the party were in
darkness. After a short pause, the Dodger reappeared, and whispered
Fagin mysteriously.
'What!' cried the Jew, 'alone?'
The Dodger nodded in the affirmative, and, shading the flame of the
candle with his hand, gave Charley Bates a private intimation, in dumb
show, that he had better not be funny just then. Having performed this
friendly office, he fixed his eyes on the Jew's face, and awaited his
directions.
The old man bit his yellow fingers, and meditated for some seconds; his
face working with agitation the while, as if he dreaded something, and
feared to know the worst. At length he raised his head.
'Where is he?' he asked.
The Dodger pointed to the floor above, and made a gesture, as if to
leave the room.
'Yes,' said the Jew, answering the mute inquiry; 'bring him down. Hush!
Quiet, Charley! Gently, Tom! Scarce, scarce!'
This brief direction to Charley Bates, and his recent antagonist, was
softly and immediately obeyed. There was no sound of their whereabout,
when the Dodger descended the stairs, bearing the light in his hand,
and followed by a man in a coarse smock-frock; who, after casting a
hurried glance round the room, pulled off a large wrapper which had
concealed the lower portion of his face, and disclosed: all haggard,
unwashed, and unshorn: the features of flash Toby Crackit.
'How are you, Faguey?' said this worthy, nodding to the Jew. 'Pop that
shawl away in my castor, Dodger, so that I may know where to find it
when I cut; that's the time of day! You'll be a fine young cracksman
afore the old file now.'
With these words he pulled up the smock-frock; and, winding it round
his middle, drew a chair to the fire, and placed his feet upon the hob.
'See there, Faguey,' he said, pointing disconsolately to his top boots;
'not a drop of Day and Martin since you know when; not a bubble of
blacking, by Jove! But don't look at me in that way, man. All in
good time. I can't talk about business till I've eat and drank; so
produce the sustainance, and let's have a quiet fill-out for the first
time these three days!'
The Jew motioned to the Dodger to place what eatables there were, upon
the table; and, seating himself opposite the housebreaker, waited his
leisure.
To judge from appearances, Toby was by no means in a hurry to open the
conversation. At first, the Jew contented himself with patiently
watching his countenance, as if to gain from its expression some clue
to the intelligence he brought; but in vain.
He looked tired and worn, but there was the same complacent repose upon
his features that they always wore: and through dirt, and beard, and
whisker, there still shone, unimpaired, the self-satisfied smirk of
flash Toby Crackit. Then the Jew, in an agony of impatience, watched
every morsel he put into his mouth; pacing up and down the room,
meanwhile, in irrepressible excitement. It was all of no use. Toby
continued to eat with the utmost outward indifference, until he could
eat no more; then, ordering the Dodger out, he closed the door, mixed a
glass of spirits and water, and composed himself for talking.
'First and foremost, Faguey,' said Toby.
'Yes, yes!' interposed the Jew, drawing up his chair.
Mr. Crackit stopped to take a draught of spirits and water, and to
declare that the gin was excellent; then placing his feet against the
low mantelpiece, so as to bring his boots to about the level of his
eye, he quietly resumed.
'First and foremost, Faguey,' said the housebreaker, 'how's Bill?'
'What!' screamed the Jew, starting from his seat.
'Why, you don't mean to say--' began Toby, turning pale.
'Mean!' cried the Jew, stamping furiously on the ground. 'Where are
they? Sikes and the boy! Where are they? Where have they been?
Where are they hiding? Why have they not been here?'
'The crack failed,' said Toby faintly.
'I know it,' replied the Jew, tearing a newspaper from his pocket and
pointing to it. 'What more?'
'They fired and hit the boy. We cut over the fields at the back, with
him between us--straight as the crow flies--through hedge and ditch.
They gave chase. Damme! the whole country was awake, and the dogs upon
us.'
'The boy!'
'Bill had him on his back, and scudded like the wind. We stopped to
take him between us; his head hung down, and he was cold. They were
close upon our heels; every man for himself, and each from the gallows!
We parted company, and left the youngster lying in a ditch. Alive or
dead, that's all I know about him.'
The Jew stopped to hear no more; but uttering a loud yell, and twining
his hands in his hair, rushed from the room, and from the house.
| Fagin's back in the old den, thinking about something in front of the fire. The Artful Dodger, Charley, and Chitling are playing whist , and the Dodger is surreptitiously looking at Chitling's hand. Unsurprisingly, the Dodger wins every time. Chitling has finally had enough, and seems amazed at the Dodger's luck. Fagin is less amazed. After killing time for a while, the Dodger asks Chitling why he seems so down. Before Chitling can answer, the Dodger asks Fagin and Charley for their opinion. Fagin diplomatically declines to answer, but Charley thinks it's because Chitling's in love with Betsy, and starts laughing like crazy because Chitling is in looooooove. Fagin comforts Chitling, and says that Betsy's "a fine girl," and that if he does as she tells him to do, he'll be a successful thief and make his fortune. Of course, the reason Chitling went to jail was because he'd followed Betsy's advice, but he says he'd do it again if Betsy told him to. He's so angry with Charley , that he runs across the room to slug him. Charley dodges, and he hits Fagin in the chest, instead. Just then, the Dodger hears the bell downstairs, and grabs the candle to go see who it is. He comes back up and whispers to Fagin. Someone has come back "alone;" the news makes Fagin nervous. Charley and Chitling leave the room to make way for the --it's Toby Crackit, looking rather the worse for wear. He won't tell them what happened until he's eaten something. Finally, he asks how Bill Sikes is doing. Obviously, Fagin and the Dodger don't know, and were expecting that Toby would. Toby says that the job failed, but Fagin already knew that from the newspaper . Toby tells the story: in short, they ran away from the house, but there were dogs after them and the whole country seemed to be awake, and eventually Sikes had left Oliver alone in a ditch. Toby doesn't know what's happened to either of them since--it was each man for himself. Fagin yells, tears at his hair, and runs out of the house. | summary |
The old man had gained the street corner, before he began to recover
the effect of Toby Crackit's intelligence. He had relaxed nothing of
his unusual speed; but was still pressing onward, in the same wild and
disordered manner, when the sudden dashing past of a carriage: and a
boisterous cry from the foot passengers, who saw his danger: drove him
back upon the pavement. Avoiding, as much as was possible, all the
main streets, and skulking only through the by-ways and alleys, he at
length emerged on Snow Hill. Here he walked even faster than before;
nor did he linger until he had again turned into a court; when, as if
conscious that he was now in his proper element, he fell into his usual
shuffling pace, and seemed to breathe more freely.
Near to the spot on which Snow Hill and Holborn Hill meet, opens, upon
the right hand as you come out of the City, a narrow and dismal alley,
leading to Saffron Hill. In its filthy shops are exposed for sale huge
bunches of second-hand silk handkerchiefs, of all sizes and patterns;
for here reside the traders who purchase them from pick-pockets.
Hundreds of these handkerchiefs hang dangling from pegs outside the
windows or flaunting from the door-posts; and the shelves, within, are
piled with them. Confined as the limits of Field Lane are, it has its
barber, its coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its fried-fish warehouse.
It is a commercial colony of itself: the emporium of petty larceny:
visited at early morning, and setting-in of dusk, by silent merchants,
who traffic in dark back-parlours, and who go as strangely as they
come. Here, the clothesman, the shoe-vamper, and the rag-merchant,
display their goods, as sign-boards to the petty thief; here, stores of
old iron and bones, and heaps of mildewy fragments of woollen-stuff and
linen, rust and rot in the grimy cellars.
It was into this place that the Jew turned. He was well known to the
sallow denizens of the lane; for such of them as were on the look-out
to buy or sell, nodded, familiarly, as he passed along. He replied to
their salutations in the same way; but bestowed no closer recognition
until he reached the further end of the alley; when he stopped, to
address a salesman of small stature, who had squeezed as much of his
person into a child's chair as the chair would hold, and was smoking a
pipe at his warehouse door.
'Why, the sight of you, Mr. Fagin, would cure the hoptalmy!' said this
respectable trader, in acknowledgment of the Jew's inquiry after his
health.
'The neighbourhood was a little too hot, Lively,' said Fagin, elevating
his eyebrows, and crossing his hands upon his shoulders.
'Well, I've heerd that complaint of it, once or twice before,' replied
the trader; 'but it soon cools down again; don't you find it so?'
Fagin nodded in the affirmative. Pointing in the direction of Saffron
Hill, he inquired whether any one was up yonder to-night.
'At the Cripples?' inquired the man.
The Jew nodded.
'Let me see,' pursued the merchant, reflecting.
'Yes, there's some half-dozen of 'em gone in, that I knows. I don't
think your friend's there.'
'Sikes is not, I suppose?' inquired the Jew, with a disappointed
countenance.
'_Non istwentus_, as the lawyers say,' replied the little man, shaking
his head, and looking amazingly sly. 'Have you got anything in my line
to-night?'
'Nothing to-night,' said the Jew, turning away.
'Are you going up to the Cripples, Fagin?' cried the little man,
calling after him. 'Stop! I don't mind if I have a drop there with
you!'
But as the Jew, looking back, waved his hand to intimate that he
preferred being alone; and, moreover, as the little man could not very
easily disengage himself from the chair; the sign of the Cripples was,
for a time, bereft of the advantage of Mr. Lively's presence. By the
time he had got upon his legs, the Jew had disappeared; so Mr. Lively,
after ineffectually standing on tiptoe, in the hope of catching sight
of him, again forced himself into the little chair, and, exchanging a
shake of the head with a lady in the opposite shop, in which doubt and
mistrust were plainly mingled, resumed his pipe with a grave demeanour.
The Three Cripples, or rather the Cripples; which was the sign by which
the establishment was familiarly known to its patrons: was the
public-house in which Mr. Sikes and his dog have already figured.
Merely making a sign to a man at the bar, Fagin walked straight
upstairs, and opening the door of a room, and softly insinuating
himself into the chamber, looked anxiously about: shading his eyes with
his hand, as if in search of some particular person.
The room was illuminated by two gas-lights; the glare of which was
prevented by the barred shutters, and closely-drawn curtains of faded
red, from being visible outside. The ceiling was blackened, to prevent
its colour from being injured by the flaring of the lamps; and the
place was so full of dense tobacco smoke, that at first it was scarcely
possible to discern anything more. By degrees, however, as some of it
cleared away through the open door, an assemblage of heads, as confused
as the noises that greeted the ear, might be made out; and as the eye
grew more accustomed to the scene, the spectator gradually became aware
of the presence of a numerous company, male and female, crowded round a
long table: at the upper end of which, sat a chairman with a hammer of
office in his hand; while a professional gentleman with a bluish nose,
and his face tied up for the benefit of a toothache, presided at a
jingling piano in a remote corner.
As Fagin stepped softly in, the professional gentleman, running over
the keys by way of prelude, occasioned a general cry of order for a
song; which having subsided, a young lady proceeded to entertain the
company with a ballad in four verses, between each of which the
accompanyist played the melody all through, as loud as he could. When
this was over, the chairman gave a sentiment, after which, the
professional gentleman on the chairman's right and left volunteered a
duet, and sang it, with great applause.
It was curious to observe some faces which stood out prominently from
among the group. There was the chairman himself, (the landlord of the
house,) a coarse, rough, heavy built fellow, who, while the songs were
proceeding, rolled his eyes hither and thither, and, seeming to give
himself up to joviality, had an eye for everything that was done, and
an ear for everything that was said--and sharp ones, too. Near him
were the singers: receiving, with professional indifference, the
compliments of the company, and applying themselves, in turn, to a
dozen proffered glasses of spirits and water, tendered by their more
boisterous admirers; whose countenances, expressive of almost every
vice in almost every grade, irresistibly attracted the attention, by
their very repulsiveness. Cunning, ferocity, and drunkeness in all its
stages, were there, in their strongest aspect; and women: some with the
last lingering tinge of their early freshness almost fading as you
looked: others with every mark and stamp of their sex utterly beaten
out, and presenting but one loathsome blank of profligacy and crime;
some mere girls, others but young women, and none past the prime of
life; formed the darkest and saddest portion of this dreary picture.
Fagin, troubled by no grave emotions, looked eagerly from face to face
while these proceedings were in progress; but apparently without
meeting that of which he was in search. Succeeding, at length, in
catching the eye of the man who occupied the chair, he beckoned to him
slightly, and left the room, as quietly as he had entered it.
'What can I do for you, Mr. Fagin?' inquired the man, as he followed
him out to the landing. 'Won't you join us? They'll be delighted,
every one of 'em.'
The Jew shook his head impatiently, and said in a whisper, 'Is _he_
here?'
'No,' replied the man.
'And no news of Barney?' inquired Fagin.
'None,' replied the landlord of the Cripples; for it was he. 'He won't
stir till it's all safe. Depend on it, they're on the scent down
there; and that if he moved, he'd blow upon the thing at once. He's
all right enough, Barney is, else I should have heard of him. I'll
pound it, that Barney's managing properly. Let him alone for that.'
'Will _he_ be here to-night?' asked the Jew, laying the same emphasis
on the pronoun as before.
'Monks, do you mean?' inquired the landlord, hesitating.
'Hush!' said the Jew. 'Yes.'
'Certain,' replied the man, drawing a gold watch from his fob; 'I
expected him here before now. If you'll wait ten minutes, he'll be--'
'No, no,' said the Jew, hastily; as though, however desirous he might
be to see the person in question, he was nevertheless relieved by his
absence. 'Tell him I came here to see him; and that he must come to me
to-night. No, say to-morrow. As he is not here, to-morrow will be
time enough.'
'Good!' said the man. 'Nothing more?'
'Not a word now,' said the Jew, descending the stairs.
'I say,' said the other, looking over the rails, and speaking in a
hoarse whisper; 'what a time this would be for a sell! I've got Phil
Barker here: so drunk, that a boy might take him!'
'Ah! But it's not Phil Barker's time,' said the Jew, looking up.
'Phil has something more to do, before we can afford to part with him;
so go back to the company, my dear, and tell them to lead merry
lives--_while they last_. Ha! ha! ha!'
The landlord reciprocated the old man's laugh; and returned to his
guests. The Jew was no sooner alone, than his countenance resumed its
former expression of anxiety and thought. After a brief reflection, he
called a hack-cabriolet, and bade the man drive towards Bethnal Green.
He dismissed him within some quarter of a mile of Mr. Sikes's
residence, and performed the short remainder of the distance, on foot.
'Now,' muttered the Jew, as he knocked at the door, 'if there is any
deep play here, I shall have it out of you, my girl, cunning as you
are.'
She was in her room, the woman said. Fagin crept softly upstairs, and
entered it without any previous ceremony. The girl was alone; lying
with her head upon the table, and her hair straggling over it.
'She has been drinking,' thought the Jew, cooly, 'or perhaps she is
only miserable.'
The old man turned to close the door, as he made this reflection; the
noise thus occasioned, roused the girl. She eyed his crafty face
narrowly, as she inquired to his recital of Toby Crackit's story. When
it was concluded, she sank into her former attitude, but spoke not a
word. She pushed the candle impatiently away; and once or twice as she
feverishly changed her position, shuffled her feet upon the ground; but
this was all.
During the silence, the Jew looked restlessly about the room, as if to
assure himself that there were no appearances of Sikes having covertly
returned. Apparently satisfied with his inspection, he coughed twice
or thrice, and made as many efforts to open a conversation; but the
girl heeded him no more than if he had been made of stone. At length
he made another attempt; and rubbing his hands together, said, in his
most conciliatory tone,
'And where should you think Bill was now, my dear?'
The girl moaned out some half intelligible reply, that she could not
tell; and seemed, from the smothered noise that escaped her, to be
crying.
'And the boy, too,' said the Jew, straining his eyes to catch a glimpse
of her face. 'Poor leetle child! Left in a ditch, Nance; only think!'
'The child,' said the girl, suddenly looking up, 'is better where he
is, than among us; and if no harm comes to Bill from it, I hope he lies
dead in the ditch and that his young bones may rot there.'
'What!' cried the Jew, in amazement.
'Ay, I do,' returned the girl, meeting his gaze. 'I shall be glad to
have him away from my eyes, and to know that the worst is over. I
can't bear to have him about me. The sight of him turns me against
myself, and all of you.'
'Pooh!' said the Jew, scornfully. 'You're drunk.'
'Am I?' cried the girl bitterly. 'It's no fault of yours, if I am not!
You'd never have me anything else, if you had your will, except
now;--the humour doesn't suit you, doesn't it?'
'No!' rejoined the Jew, furiously. 'It does not.'
'Change it, then!' responded the girl, with a laugh.
'Change it!' exclaimed the Jew, exasperated beyond all bounds by his
companion's unexpected obstinacy, and the vexation of the night, 'I
_will_ change it! Listen to me, you drab. Listen to me, who with six
words, can strangle Sikes as surely as if I had his bull's throat
between my fingers now. If he comes back, and leaves the boy behind
him; if he gets off free, and dead or alive, fails to restore him to
me; murder him yourself if you would have him escape Jack Ketch. And
do it the moment he sets foot in this room, or mind me, it will be too
late!'
'What is all this?' cried the girl involuntarily.
'What is it?' pursued Fagin, mad with rage. 'When the boy's worth
hundreds of pounds to me, am I to lose what chance threw me in the way
of getting safely, through the whims of a drunken gang that I could
whistle away the lives of! And me bound, too, to a born devil that
only wants the will, and has the power to, to--'
Panting for breath, the old man stammered for a word; and in that
instant checked the torrent of his wrath, and changed his whole
demeanour. A moment before, his clenched hands had grasped the air;
his eyes had dilated; and his face grown livid with passion; but now,
he shrunk into a chair, and, cowering together, trembled with the
apprehension of having himself disclosed some hidden villainy. After a
short silence, he ventured to look round at his companion. He appeared
somewhat reassured, on beholding her in the same listless attitude from
which he had first roused her.
'Nancy, dear!' croaked the Jew, in his usual voice. 'Did you mind me,
dear?'
'Don't worry me now, Fagin!' replied the girl, raising her head
languidly. 'If Bill has not done it this time, he will another. He has
done many a good job for you, and will do many more when he can; and
when he can't he won't; so no more about that.'
'Regarding this boy, my dear?' said the Jew, rubbing the palms of his
hands nervously together.
'The boy must take his chance with the rest,' interrupted Nancy,
hastily; 'and I say again, I hope he is dead, and out of harm's way,
and out of yours,--that is, if Bill comes to no harm. And if Toby got
clear off, Bill's pretty sure to be safe; for Bill's worth two of Toby
any time.'
'And about what I was saying, my dear?' observed the Jew, keeping his
glistening eye steadily upon her.
'You must say it all over again, if it's anything you want me to do,'
rejoined Nancy; 'and if it is, you had better wait till to-morrow. You
put me up for a minute; but now I'm stupid again.'
Fagin put several other questions: all with the same drift of
ascertaining whether the girl had profited by his unguarded hints; but,
she answered them so readily, and was withal so utterly unmoved by his
searching looks, that his original impression of her being more than a
trifle in liquor, was confirmed. Nancy, indeed, was not exempt from a
failing which was very common among the Jew's female pupils; and in
which, in their tenderer years, they were rather encouraged than
checked. Her disordered appearance, and a wholesale perfume of Geneva
which pervaded the apartment, afforded strong confirmatory evidence of
the justice of the Jew's supposition; and when, after indulging in the
temporary display of violence above described, she subsided, first into
dullness, and afterwards into a compound of feelings: under the
influence of which she shed tears one minute, and in the next gave
utterance to various exclamations of 'Never say die!' and divers
calculations as to what might be the amount of the odds so long as a
lady or gentleman was happy, Mr. Fagin, who had had considerable
experience of such matters in his time, saw, with great satisfaction,
that she was very far gone indeed.
Having eased his mind by this discovery; and having accomplished his
twofold object of imparting to the girl what he had, that night, heard,
and of ascertaining, with his own eyes, that Sikes had not returned,
Mr. Fagin again turned his face homeward: leaving his young friend
asleep, with her head upon the table.
It was within an hour of midnight. The weather being dark, and
piercing cold, he had no great temptation to loiter. The sharp wind
that scoured the streets, seemed to have cleared them of passengers, as
of dust and mud, for few people were abroad, and they were to all
appearance hastening fast home. It blew from the right quarter for the
Jew, however, and straight before it he went: trembling, and shivering,
as every fresh gust drove him rudely on his way.
He had reached the corner of his own street, and was already fumbling
in his pocket for the door-key, when a dark figure emerged from a
projecting entrance which lay in deep shadow, and, crossing the road,
glided up to him unperceived.
'Fagin!' whispered a voice close to his ear.
'Ah!' said the Jew, turning quickly round, 'is that--'
'Yes!' interrupted the stranger. 'I have been lingering here these two
hours. Where the devil have you been?'
'On your business, my dear,' replied the Jew, glancing uneasily at his
companion, and slackening his pace as he spoke. 'On your business all
night.'
'Oh, of course!' said the stranger, with a sneer. 'Well; and what's
come of it?'
'Nothing good,' said the Jew.
'Nothing bad, I hope?' said the stranger, stopping short, and turning a
startled look on his companion.
The Jew shook his head, and was about to reply, when the stranger,
interrupting him, motioned to the house, before which they had by this
time arrived: remarking, that he had better say what he had got to
say, under cover: for his blood was chilled with standing about so
long, and the wind blew through him.
Fagin looked as if he could have willingly excused himself from taking
home a visitor at that unseasonable hour; and, indeed, muttered
something about having no fire; but his companion repeating his request
in a peremptory manner, he unlocked the door, and requested him to
close it softly, while he got a light.
'It's as dark as the grave,' said the man, groping forward a few steps.
'Make haste!'
'Shut the door,' whispered Fagin from the end of the passage. As he
spoke, it closed with a loud noise.
'That wasn't my doing,' said the other man, feeling his way. 'The wind
blew it to, or it shut of its own accord: one or the other. Look sharp
with the light, or I shall knock my brains out against something in
this confounded hole.'
Fagin stealthily descended the kitchen stairs. After a short absence,
he returned with a lighted candle, and the intelligence that Toby
Crackit was asleep in the back room below, and that the boys were in
the front one. Beckoning the man to follow him, he led the way
upstairs.
'We can say the few words we've got to say in here, my dear,' said the
Jew, throwing open a door on the first floor; 'and as there are holes
in the shutters, and we never show lights to our neighbours, we'll set
the candle on the stairs. There!'
With those words, the Jew, stooping down, placed the candle on an upper
flight of stairs, exactly opposite to the room door. This done, he led
the way into the apartment; which was destitute of all movables save a
broken arm-chair, and an old couch or sofa without covering, which
stood behind the door. Upon this piece of furniture, the stranger sat
himself with the air of a weary man; and the Jew, drawing up the
arm-chair opposite, they sat face to face. It was not quite dark; the
door was partially open; and the candle outside, threw a feeble
reflection on the opposite wall.
They conversed for some time in whispers. Though nothing of the
conversation was distinguishable beyond a few disjointed words here and
there, a listener might easily have perceived that Fagin appeared to be
defending himself against some remarks of the stranger; and that the
latter was in a state of considerable irritation. They might have been
talking, thus, for a quarter of an hour or more, when Monks--by which
name the Jew had designated the strange man several times in the course
of their colloquy--said, raising his voice a little,
'I tell you again, it was badly planned. Why not have kept him here
among the rest, and made a sneaking, snivelling pickpocket of him at
once?'
'Only hear him!' exclaimed the Jew, shrugging his shoulders.
'Why, do you mean to say you couldn't have done it, if you had chosen?'
demanded Monks, sternly. 'Haven't you done it, with other boys, scores
of times? If you had had patience for a twelvemonth, at most, couldn't
you have got him convicted, and sent safely out of the kingdom; perhaps
for life?'
'Whose turn would that have served, my dear?' inquired the Jew humbly.
'Mine,' replied Monks.
'But not mine,' said the Jew, submissively. 'He might have become of
use to me. When there are two parties to a bargain, it is only
reasonable that the interests of both should be consulted; is it, my
good friend?'
'What then?' demanded Monks.
'I saw it was not easy to train him to the business,' replied the Jew;
'he was not like other boys in the same circumstances.'
'Curse him, no!' muttered the man, 'or he would have been a thief, long
ago.'
'I had no hold upon him to make him worse,' pursued the Jew, anxiously
watching the countenance of his companion. 'His hand was not in. I
had nothing to frighten him with; which we always must have in the
beginning, or we labour in vain. What could I do? Send him out with
the Dodger and Charley? We had enough of that, at first, my dear; I
trembled for us all.'
'_That_ was not my doing,' observed Monks.
'No, no, my dear!' renewed the Jew. 'And I don't quarrel with it now;
because, if it had never happened, you might never have clapped eyes on
the boy to notice him, and so led to the discovery that it was him you
were looking for. Well! I got him back for you by means of the girl;
and then _she_ begins to favour him.'
'Throttle the girl!' said Monks, impatiently.
'Why, we can't afford to do that just now, my dear,' replied the Jew,
smiling; 'and, besides, that sort of thing is not in our way; or, one
of these days, I might be glad to have it done. I know what these
girls are, Monks, well. As soon as the boy begins to harden, she'll
care no more for him, than for a block of wood. You want him made a
thief. If he is alive, I can make him one from this time; and,
if--if--' said the Jew, drawing nearer to the other,--'it's not likely,
mind,--but if the worst comes to the worst, and he is dead--'
'It's no fault of mine if he is!' interposed the other man, with a look
of terror, and clasping the Jew's arm with trembling hands. 'Mind
that. Fagin! I had no hand in it. Anything but his death, I told you
from the first. I won't shed blood; it's always found out, and haunts
a man besides. If they shot him dead, I was not the cause; do you hear
me? Fire this infernal den! What's that?'
'What!' cried the Jew, grasping the coward round the body, with both
arms, as he sprung to his feet. 'Where?'
'Yonder! replied the man, glaring at the opposite wall. 'The shadow!
I saw the shadow of a woman, in a cloak and bonnet, pass along the
wainscot like a breath!'
The Jew released his hold, and they rushed tumultuously from the room.
The candle, wasted by the draught, was standing where it had been
placed. It showed them only the empty staircase, and their own white
faces. They listened intently: a profound silence reigned throughout
the house.
'It's your fancy,' said the Jew, taking up the light and turning to his
companion.
'I'll swear I saw it!' replied Monks, trembling. 'It was bending
forward when I saw it first; and when I spoke, it darted away.'
The Jew glanced contemptuously at the pale face of his associate, and,
telling him he could follow, if he pleased, ascended the stairs. They
looked into all the rooms; they were cold, bare, and empty. They
descended into the passage, and thence into the cellars below. The
green damp hung upon the low walls; the tracks of the snail and slug
glistened in the light of the candle; but all was still as death.
'What do you think now?' said the Jew, when they had regained the
passage. 'Besides ourselves, there's not a creature in the house
except Toby and the boys; and they're safe enough. See here!'
As a proof of the fact, the Jew drew forth two keys from his pocket;
and explained, that when he first went downstairs, he had locked them
in, to prevent any intrusion on the conference.
This accumulated testimony effectually staggered Mr. Monks. His
protestations had gradually become less and less vehement as they
proceeded in their search without making any discovery; and, now, he
gave vent to several very grim laughs, and confessed it could only have
been his excited imagination. He declined any renewal of the
conversation, however, for that night: suddenly remembering that it
was past one o'clock. And so the amiable couple parted.
| Fagin cools his pace after almost getting run over in the street, and turns and heads up to another neighborhood, where there are lots of second-hand shops where people buy and sell stolen goods. Fagin seems to know the place well. He sees a tradesman that he recognizes, and asks if anyone they know is up at the "Cripples." The tradesman doesn't think Sikes is there, but Fagin heads in that direction anyway. The Three Cripples is the bar from Chapter Fifteen, where Sikes went after his dog with the poker. Fagin knows it well and goes right upstairs, looking for a particular person. There's a guy playing the piano, and a woman singing in the upstairs room, which is full of some pretty dodgy-looking characters. Fagin steps back out onto the landing, followed by the landlord, who asks Fagin to join them. Fagin asks, in a whisper, "Is he here?" . The landlord says no, and then Fagin asks after Barney--he's not there, either. Fagin asks if he will be here later on. The landlord asks if he means Monks, and Fagin hushes him, but says yes. The landlord says that Monks will be coming there soon. Fagin seems relieved that he's not there now, and tells the landlord to send Monks to see him the next day. The landlord suggests that they "sell" Phil Barker, because he's good and drunk . Fagin says it's not Phil's time yet--he can still be useful before they sell him out. They both laugh. Fagin then takes a cab to Sikes's house to see what Nancy knows. He finds her with her head on the table--Fagin figures she's either drunk or miserable. Nancy asks if he has any news, and Fagin repeats Toby's story. Nancy doesn't respond. Fagin wants to know if she has any clue where Sikes might have gone. She doesn't answer, so he tries to get her to talk by reminding her about poor little Oliver. She says Oliver's better off dead, anyway. Fagin gets angry, and tells Nancy that if Sikes comes back without Oliver, Nancy had better kill him herself, or Fagin will have him hanged. Nancy's shocked, and asks what he means. Fagin's so worked up he lets out more than he means to: he says that Oliver is worth hundreds to him, and he doesn't want it all thrown away when he himself is bound "to a born devil that wants only the will, and has got the power to, to--" . But before finishing that sentence, Fagin realizes he's said too much, and falls back in a chair, and asks Nancy if she's understood him . Nancy just repeats that she thinks Oliver would be better off dead, so long as Bill Sikes is all right. Fagin asks if she minded what he'd just been saying, and she says that if it's something she's supposed to do, he'll have to repeat it. After asking a few more questions, Fagin is satisfied that she's too far gone to remember what he accidentally let slip about being in somebody's power and about Oliver being worth so much money. Fagin hurries home and, as he's about to open his door, someone comes out of a dark neighboring doorway and calls to him. The man asks where Fagin's been all this time, and Fagin says he's been out on the man's business, and that it's nothing good. The stranger asks to go inside, and Fagin reluctantly brings him in. Monks is complaining that the whole housebreaking scheme was a mistake, and that Fagin should have made "him" a pickpocket instead, as he had done to so many other boys, and so gotten "him" sent out of the country . Fagin defends himself by saying that "he" was hard to corrupt, so they needed to force him into something that they could use to frighten him later on. Anyway, he says, the worst case scenario is that he's dead, and-- But Monks breaks in and says that if the boy is dead, it's not his fault--his agreement was that they could do anything, but not bring about his death, because "it's always found out, and haunts a man besides!" . Just then, Monks thinks that he sees a shadow of a woman wearing a bonnet outside the door in the hallway. Fagin thinks Monks is nuts, but agrees to inspect the upper rooms--no one there. And besides, he'd locked the house, and the only other people in it are Charley, the Dodger, and Toby, who are all asleep. Monks is still nervous, but tries to shrug it offand goes home. | summary |
As it would be, by no means, seemly in a humble author to keep so
mighty a personage as a beadle waiting, with his back to the fire, and
the skirts of his coat gathered up under his arms, until such time as
it might suit his pleasure to relieve him; and as it would still less
become his station, or his gallantry to involve in the same neglect a
lady on whom that beadle had looked with an eye of tenderness and
affection, and in whose ear he had whispered sweet words, which, coming
from such a quarter, might well thrill the bosom of maid or matron of
whatsoever degree; the historian whose pen traces these words--trusting
that he knows his place, and that he entertains a becoming reverence
for those upon earth to whom high and important authority is
delegated--hastens to pay them that respect which their position
demands, and to treat them with all that duteous ceremony which their
exalted rank, and (by consequence) great virtues, imperatively claim at
his hands. Towards this end, indeed, he had purposed to introduce, in
this place, a dissertation touching the divine right of beadles, and
elucidative of the position, that a beadle can do no wrong: which
could not fail to have been both pleasurable and profitable to the
right-minded reader but which he is unfortunately compelled, by want of
time and space, to postpone to some more convenient and fitting
opportunity; on the arrival of which, he will be prepared to show, that
a beadle properly constituted: that is to say, a parochial beadle,
attached to a parochial workhouse, and attending in his official
capacity the parochial church: is, in right and virtue of his office,
possessed of all the excellences and best qualities of humanity; and
that to none of those excellences, can mere companies' beadles, or
court-of-law beadles, or even chapel-of-ease beadles (save the last,
and they in a very lowly and inferior degree), lay the remotest
sustainable claim.
Mr. Bumble had re-counted the teaspoons, re-weighed the sugar-tongs,
made a closer inspection of the milk-pot, and ascertained to a nicety
the exact condition of the furniture, down to the very horse-hair seats
of the chairs; and had repeated each process full half a dozen times;
before he began to think that it was time for Mrs. Corney to return.
Thinking begets thinking; as there were no sounds of Mrs. Corney's
approach, it occured to Mr. Bumble that it would be an innocent and
virtuous way of spending the time, if he were further to allay his
curiousity by a cursory glance at the interior of Mrs. Corney's chest
of drawers.
Having listened at the keyhole, to assure himself that nobody was
approaching the chamber, Mr. Bumble, beginning at the bottom, proceeded
to make himself acquainted with the contents of the three long drawers:
which, being filled with various garments of good fashion and texture,
carefully preserved between two layers of old newspapers, speckled with
dried lavender: seemed to yield him exceeding satisfaction. Arriving,
in course of time, at the right-hand corner drawer (in which was the
key), and beholding therein a small padlocked box, which, being shaken,
gave forth a pleasant sound, as of the chinking of coin, Mr. Bumble
returned with a stately walk to the fireplace; and, resuming his old
attitude, said, with a grave and determined air, 'I'll do it!' He
followed up this remarkable declaration, by shaking his head in a
waggish manner for ten minutes, as though he were remonstrating with
himself for being such a pleasant dog; and then, he took a view of his
legs in profile, with much seeming pleasure and interest.
He was still placidly engaged in this latter survey, when Mrs. Corney,
hurrying into the room, threw herself, in a breathless state, on a
chair by the fireside, and covering her eyes with one hand, placed the
other over her heart, and gasped for breath.
'Mrs. Corney,' said Mr. Bumble, stooping over the matron, 'what is
this, ma'am? Has anything happened, ma'am? Pray answer me: I'm
on--on--' Mr. Bumble, in his alarm, could not immediately think of the
word 'tenterhooks,' so he said 'broken bottles.'
'Oh, Mr. Bumble!' cried the lady, 'I have been so dreadfully put out!'
'Put out, ma'am!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble; 'who has dared to--? I know!'
said Mr. Bumble, checking himself, with native majesty, 'this is them
wicious paupers!'
'It's dreadful to think of!' said the lady, shuddering.
'Then _don't_ think of it, ma'am,' rejoined Mr. Bumble.
'I can't help it,' whimpered the lady.
'Then take something, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble soothingly. 'A little of
the wine?'
'Not for the world!' replied Mrs. Corney. 'I couldn't,--oh! The top
shelf in the right-hand corner--oh!' Uttering these words, the good
lady pointed, distractedly, to the cupboard, and underwent a convulsion
from internal spasms. Mr. Bumble rushed to the closet; and, snatching
a pint green-glass bottle from the shelf thus incoherently indicated,
filled a tea-cup with its contents, and held it to the lady's lips.
'I'm better now,' said Mrs. Corney, falling back, after drinking half
of it.
Mr. Bumble raised his eyes piously to the ceiling in thankfulness; and,
bringing them down again to the brim of the cup, lifted it to his nose.
'Peppermint,' exclaimed Mrs. Corney, in a faint voice, smiling gently
on the beadle as she spoke. 'Try it! There's a little--a little
something else in it.'
Mr. Bumble tasted the medicine with a doubtful look; smacked his lips;
took another taste; and put the cup down empty.
'It's very comforting,' said Mrs. Corney.
'Very much so indeed, ma'am,' said the beadle. As he spoke, he drew a
chair beside the matron, and tenderly inquired what had happened to
distress her.
'Nothing,' replied Mrs. Corney. 'I am a foolish, excitable, weak
creetur.'
'Not weak, ma'am,' retorted Mr. Bumble, drawing his chair a little
closer. 'Are you a weak creetur, Mrs. Corney?'
'We are all weak creeturs,' said Mrs. Corney, laying down a general
principle.
'So we are,' said the beadle.
Nothing was said on either side, for a minute or two afterwards. By the
expiration of that time, Mr. Bumble had illustrated the position by
removing his left arm from the back of Mrs. Corney's chair, where it
had previously rested, to Mrs. Corney's apron-string, round which it
gradually became entwined.
'We are all weak creeturs,' said Mr. Bumble.
Mrs. Corney sighed.
'Don't sigh, Mrs. Corney,' said Mr. Bumble.
'I can't help it,' said Mrs. Corney. And she sighed again.
'This is a very comfortable room, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble looking
round. 'Another room, and this, ma'am, would be a complete thing.'
'It would be too much for one,' murmured the lady.
'But not for two, ma'am,' rejoined Mr. Bumble, in soft accents. 'Eh,
Mrs. Corney?'
Mrs. Corney drooped her head, when the beadle said this; the beadle
drooped his, to get a view of Mrs. Corney's face. Mrs. Corney, with
great propriety, turned her head away, and released her hand to get at
her pocket-handkerchief; but insensibly replaced it in that of Mr.
Bumble.
'The board allows you coals, don't they, Mrs. Corney?' inquired the
beadle, affectionately pressing her hand.
'And candles,' replied Mrs. Corney, slightly returning the pressure.
'Coals, candles, and house-rent free,' said Mr. Bumble. 'Oh, Mrs.
Corney, what an Angel you are!'
The lady was not proof against this burst of feeling. She sank into
Mr. Bumble's arms; and that gentleman in his agitation, imprinted a
passionate kiss upon her chaste nose.
'Such porochial perfection!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble, rapturously. 'You
know that Mr. Slout is worse to-night, my fascinator?'
'Yes,' replied Mrs. Corney, bashfully.
'He can't live a week, the doctor says,' pursued Mr. Bumble. 'He is the
master of this establishment; his death will cause a wacancy; that
wacancy must be filled up. Oh, Mrs. Corney, what a prospect this
opens! What a opportunity for a jining of hearts and housekeepings!'
Mrs. Corney sobbed.
'The little word?' said Mr. Bumble, bending over the bashful beauty.
'The one little, little, little word, my blessed Corney?'
'Ye--ye--yes!' sighed out the matron.
'One more,' pursued the beadle; 'compose your darling feelings for only
one more. When is it to come off?'
Mrs. Corney twice essayed to speak: and twice failed. At length
summoning up courage, she threw her arms around Mr. Bumble's neck, and
said, it might be as soon as ever he pleased, and that he was 'a
irresistible duck.'
Matters being thus amicably and satisfactorily arranged, the contract
was solemnly ratified in another teacupful of the peppermint mixture;
which was rendered the more necessary, by the flutter and agitation of
the lady's spirits. While it was being disposed of, she acquainted Mr.
Bumble with the old woman's decease.
'Very good,' said that gentleman, sipping his peppermint; 'I'll call at
Sowerberry's as I go home, and tell him to send to-morrow morning. Was
it that as frightened you, love?'
'It wasn't anything particular, dear,' said the lady evasively.
'It must have been something, love,' urged Mr. Bumble. 'Won't you tell
your own B.?'
'Not now,' rejoined the lady; 'one of these days. After we're married,
dear.'
'After we're married!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble. 'It wasn't any impudence
from any of them male paupers as--'
'No, no, love!' interposed the lady, hastily.
'If I thought it was,' continued Mr. Bumble; 'if I thought as any one
of 'em had dared to lift his wulgar eyes to that lovely countenance--'
'They wouldn't have dared to do it, love,' responded the lady.
'They had better not!' said Mr. Bumble, clenching his fist. 'Let me see
any man, porochial or extra-porochial, as would presume to do it; and I
can tell him that he wouldn't do it a second time!'
Unembellished by any violence of gesticulation, this might have seemed
no very high compliment to the lady's charms; but, as Mr. Bumble
accompanied the threat with many warlike gestures, she was much touched
with this proof of his devotion, and protested, with great admiration,
that he was indeed a dove.
The dove then turned up his coat-collar, and put on his cocked hat;
and, having exchanged a long and affectionate embrace with his future
partner, once again braved the cold wind of the night: merely pausing,
for a few minutes, in the male paupers' ward, to abuse them a little,
with the view of satisfying himself that he could fill the office of
workhouse-master with needful acerbity. Assured of his qualifications,
Mr. Bumble left the building with a light heart, and bright visions of
his future promotion: which served to occupy his mind until he reached
the shop of the undertaker.
Now, Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry having gone out to tea and supper: and
Noah Claypole not being at any time disposed to take upon himself a
greater amount of physical exertion than is necessary to a convenient
performance of the two functions of eating and drinking, the shop was
not closed, although it was past the usual hour of shutting-up. Mr.
Bumble tapped with his cane on the counter several times; but,
attracting no attention, and beholding a light shining through the
glass-window of the little parlour at the back of the shop, he made
bold to peep in and see what was going forward; and when he saw what
was going forward, he was not a little surprised.
The cloth was laid for supper; the table was covered with bread and
butter, plates and glasses; a porter-pot and a wine-bottle. At the
upper end of the table, Mr. Noah Claypole lolled negligently in an
easy-chair, with his legs thrown over one of the arms: an open
clasp-knife in one hand, and a mass of buttered bread in the other.
Close beside him stood Charlotte, opening oysters from a barrel: which
Mr. Claypole condescended to swallow, with remarkable avidity. A more
than ordinary redness in the region of the young gentleman's nose, and
a kind of fixed wink in his right eye, denoted that he was in a slight
degree intoxicated; these symptoms were confirmed by the intense relish
with which he took his oysters, for which nothing but a strong
appreciation of their cooling properties, in cases of internal fever,
could have sufficiently accounted.
'Here's a delicious fat one, Noah, dear!' said Charlotte; 'try him, do;
only this one.'
'What a delicious thing is a oyster!' remarked Mr. Claypole, after he
had swallowed it. 'What a pity it is, a number of 'em should ever make
you feel uncomfortable; isn't it, Charlotte?'
'It's quite a cruelty,' said Charlotte.
'So it is,' acquiesced Mr. Claypole. 'An't yer fond of oysters?'
'Not overmuch,' replied Charlotte. 'I like to see you eat 'em, Noah
dear, better than eating 'em myself.'
'Lor!' said Noah, reflectively; 'how queer!'
'Have another,' said Charlotte. 'Here's one with such a beautiful,
delicate beard!'
'I can't manage any more,' said Noah. 'I'm very sorry. Come here,
Charlotte, and I'll kiss yer.'
'What!' said Mr. Bumble, bursting into the room. 'Say that again, sir.'
Charlotte uttered a scream, and hid her face in her apron. Mr.
Claypole, without making any further change in his position than
suffering his legs to reach the ground, gazed at the beadle in drunken
terror.
'Say it again, you wile, owdacious fellow!' said Mr. Bumble. 'How dare
you mention such a thing, sir? And how dare you encourage him, you
insolent minx? Kiss her!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble, in strong indignation.
'Faugh!'
'I didn't mean to do it!' said Noah, blubbering. 'She's always
a-kissing of me, whether I like it, or not.'
'Oh, Noah,' cried Charlotte, reproachfully.
'Yer are; yer know yer are!' retorted Noah. 'She's always a-doin' of
it, Mr. Bumble, sir; she chucks me under the chin, please, sir; and
makes all manner of love!'
'Silence!' cried Mr. Bumble, sternly. 'Take yourself downstairs,
ma'am. Noah, you shut up the shop; say another word till your master
comes home, at your peril; and, when he does come home, tell him that
Mr. Bumble said he was to send a old woman's shell after breakfast
to-morrow morning. Do you hear sir? Kissing!' cried Mr. Bumble,
holding up his hands. 'The sin and wickedness of the lower orders in
this porochial district is frightful! If Parliament don't take their
abominable courses under consideration, this country's ruined, and the
character of the peasantry gone for ever!' With these words, the
beadle strode, with a lofty and gloomy air, from the undertaker's
premises.
And now that we have accompanied him so far on his road home, and have
made all necessary preparations for the old woman's funeral, let us set
on foot a few inquires after young Oliver Twist, and ascertain whether
he be still lying in the ditch where Toby Crackit left him.
| This chapter returns us to Mr. Bumble, who has been waiting patiently in Mrs. Corney's room all this time. He's counted all the silver several times, and decides it's time to go through the drawers of her dresser. He finds clothes tidily folded, and a locked box that jingles with coins when shaken. Mr. Bumble is very pleased, and declares, "I'll do it!" . Mrs. Corney comes back in all flustered, and Mr. Bumble blames the paupers, as usual. To calm her down, he gives her some peppermint something-or-other--she doesn't say what's in it, but we're guessing it's booze. He asks what upset her, and she says that she's "a weak creetur" . Mr. Bumble takes the opportunity to start hitting on her again, so he says he's weak, too, and starts fiddling with her apron string . Mr. Bumble's final come-on is, "The board allow you coals, don't they, Mrs Corney? Coals, candles, and house-rent free. Oh, Mrs. Corney, what an angel you are!" . Mrs. Corney can't resist such a charmer, and allows Mr. Bumble to kiss her on the nose. Mr. Bumble has it all planned out: Mr. Slout, the master of the workhouse, is dying, and Mr. Bumble will be able to take his place, marry Mrs. Corney, and live with her there in her comfy rooms. Mrs. Corney is totally smitten, and calls him "an irresistible duck" . Having arranged all that, Mr. Bumble asks what upset Mrs. Corney earlier. She says she'll tell him after they're married. After going on a jealous rant for a moment , Mr. Bumble is satisfied, and heads off to Mr. Sowerberry's house. He gets there to find Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry out to dinner, and Noah drunk in the parlor, eating oysters as fast as Charlotte can shell them for him. Noah offers to kiss Charlotte, and Mr. Bumble bursts in to break it up. Of course, Noah is terrified, and blames it all on Charlotte, saying she's always kissing him whether he wants to be smooched or not. Mr. Bumble gives them a lecture on the evils of kissing and what it leads to , and then leaves an order for old Sally's coffin and marches home. | summary |
'Wolves tear your throats!' muttered Sikes, grinding his teeth. 'I wish
I was among some of you; you'd howl the hoarser for it.'
As Sikes growled forth this imprecation, with the most desperate
ferocity that his desperate nature was capable of, he rested the body
of the wounded boy across his bended knee; and turned his head, for an
instant, to look back at his pursuers.
There was little to be made out, in the mist and darkness; but the loud
shouting of men vibrated through the air, and the barking of the
neighbouring dogs, roused by the sound of the alarm bell, resounded in
every direction.
'Stop, you white-livered hound!' cried the robber, shouting after Toby
Crackit, who, making the best use of his long legs, was already ahead.
'Stop!'
The repetition of the word, brought Toby to a dead stand-still. For he
was not quite satisfied that he was beyond the range of pistol-shot;
and Sikes was in no mood to be played with.
'Bear a hand with the boy,' cried Sikes, beckoning furiously to his
confederate. 'Come back!'
Toby made a show of returning; but ventured, in a low voice, broken for
want of breath, to intimate considerable reluctance as he came slowly
along.
'Quicker!' cried Sikes, laying the boy in a dry ditch at his feet, and
drawing a pistol from his pocket. 'Don't play booty with me.'
At this moment the noise grew louder. Sikes, again looking round,
could discern that the men who had given chase were already climbing
the gate of the field in which he stood; and that a couple of dogs were
some paces in advance of them.
'It's all up, Bill!' cried Toby; 'drop the kid, and show 'em your
heels.' With this parting advice, Mr. Crackit, preferring the chance
of being shot by his friend, to the certainty of being taken by his
enemies, fairly turned tail, and darted off at full speed. Sikes
clenched his teeth; took one look around; threw over the prostrate form
of Oliver, the cape in which he had been hurriedly muffled; ran along
the front of the hedge, as if to distract the attention of those
behind, from the spot where the boy lay; paused, for a second, before
another hedge which met it at right angles; and whirling his pistol
high into the air, cleared it at a bound, and was gone.
'Ho, ho, there!' cried a tremulous voice in the rear. 'Pincher!
Neptune! Come here, come here!'
The dogs, who, in common with their masters, seemed to have no
particular relish for the sport in which they were engaged, readily
answered to the command. Three men, who had by this time advanced some
distance into the field, stopped to take counsel together.
'My advice, or, leastways, I should say, my _orders_, is,' said the
fattest man of the party, 'that we 'mediately go home again.'
'I am agreeable to anything which is agreeable to Mr. Giles,' said a
shorter man; who was by no means of a slim figure, and who was very
pale in the face, and very polite: as frightened men frequently are.
'I shouldn't wish to appear ill-mannered, gentlemen,' said the third,
who had called the dogs back, 'Mr. Giles ought to know.'
'Certainly,' replied the shorter man; 'and whatever Mr. Giles says, it
isn't our place to contradict him. No, no, I know my sitiwation!
Thank my stars, I know my sitiwation.' To tell the truth, the little
man _did_ seem to know his situation, and to know perfectly well that
it was by no means a desirable one; for his teeth chattered in his head
as he spoke.
'You are afraid, Brittles,' said Mr. Giles.
'I an't,' said Brittles.
'You are,' said Giles.
'You're a falsehood, Mr. Giles,' said Brittles.
'You're a lie, Brittles,' said Mr. Giles.
Now, these four retorts arose from Mr. Giles's taunt; and Mr. Giles's
taunt had arisen from his indignation at having the responsibility of
going home again, imposed upon himself under cover of a compliment.
The third man brought the dispute to a close, most philosophically.
'I'll tell you what it is, gentlemen,' said he, 'we're all afraid.'
'Speak for yourself, sir,' said Mr. Giles, who was the palest of the
party.
'So I do,' replied the man. 'It's natural and proper to be afraid,
under such circumstances. I am.'
'So am I,' said Brittles; 'only there's no call to tell a man he is, so
bounceably.'
These frank admissions softened Mr. Giles, who at once owned that _he_
was afraid; upon which, they all three faced about, and ran back again
with the completest unanimity, until Mr. Giles (who had the shortest
wind of the party, as was encumbered with a pitchfork) most handsomely
insisted on stopping, to make an apology for his hastiness of speech.
'But it's wonderful,' said Mr. Giles, when he had explained, 'what a
man will do, when his blood is up. I should have committed murder--I
know I should--if we'd caught one of them rascals.'
As the other two were impressed with a similar presentiment; and as
their blood, like his, had all gone down again; some speculation ensued
upon the cause of this sudden change in their temperament.
'I know what it was,' said Mr. Giles; 'it was the gate.'
'I shouldn't wonder if it was,' exclaimed Brittles, catching at the
idea.
'You may depend upon it,' said Giles, 'that that gate stopped the flow
of the excitement. I felt all mine suddenly going away, as I was
climbing over it.'
By a remarkable coincidence, the other two had been visited with the
same unpleasant sensation at that precise moment. It was quite
obvious, therefore, that it was the gate; especially as there was no
doubt regarding the time at which the change had taken place, because
all three remembered that they had come in sight of the robbers at the
instant of its occurance.
This dialogue was held between the two men who had surprised the
burglars, and a travelling tinker who had been sleeping in an outhouse,
and who had been roused, together with his two mongrel curs, to join in
the pursuit. Mr. Giles acted in the double capacity of butler and
steward to the old lady of the mansion; Brittles was a lad of all-work:
who, having entered her service a mere child, was treated as a
promising young boy still, though he was something past thirty.
Encouraging each other with such converse as this; but, keeping very
close together, notwithstanding, and looking apprehensively round,
whenever a fresh gust rattled through the boughs; the three men hurried
back to a tree, behind which they had left their lantern, lest its
light should inform the thieves in what direction to fire. Catching up
the light, they made the best of their way home, at a good round trot;
and long after their dusky forms had ceased to be discernible, the
light might have been seen twinkling and dancing in the distance, like
some exhalation of the damp and gloomy atmosphere through which it was
swiftly borne.
The air grew colder, as day came slowly on; and the mist rolled along
the ground like a dense cloud of smoke. The grass was wet; the
pathways, and low places, were all mire and water; the damp breath of
an unwholesome wind went languidly by, with a hollow moaning. Still,
Oliver lay motionless and insensible on the spot where Sikes had left
him.
Morning drew on apace. The air become more sharp and piercing, as its
first dull hue--the death of night, rather than the birth of
day--glimmered faintly in the sky. The objects which had looked dim
and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually
resolved into their familiar shapes. The rain came down, thick and
fast, and pattered noisily among the leafless bushes. But, Oliver felt
it not, as it beat against him; for he still lay stretched, helpless
and unconscious, on his bed of clay.
At length, a low cry of pain broke the stillness that prevailed; and
uttering it, the boy awoke. His left arm, rudely bandaged in a shawl,
hung heavy and useless at his side; the bandage was saturated with
blood. He was so weak, that he could scarcely raise himself into a
sitting posture; when he had done so, he looked feebly round for help,
and groaned with pain. Trembling in every joint, from cold and
exhaustion, he made an effort to stand upright; but, shuddering from
head to foot, fell prostrate on the ground.
After a short return of the stupor in which he had been so long
plunged, Oliver: urged by a creeping sickness at his heart, which
seemed to warn him that if he lay there, he must surely die: got upon
his feet, and essayed to walk. His head was dizzy, and he staggered to
and fro like a drunken man. But he kept up, nevertheless, and, with
his head drooping languidly on his breast, went stumbling onward, he
knew not whither.
And now, hosts of bewildering and confused ideas came crowding on his
mind. He seemed to be still walking between Sikes and Crackit, who
were angrily disputing--for the very words they said, sounded in his
ears; and when he caught his own attention, as it were, by making some
violent effort to save himself from falling, he found that he was
talking to them. Then, he was alone with Sikes, plodding on as on the
previous day; and as shadowy people passed them, he felt the robber's
grasp upon his wrist. Suddenly, he started back at the report of
firearms; there rose into the air, loud cries and shouts; lights
gleamed before his eyes; all was noise and tumult, as some unseen hand
bore him hurriedly away. Through all these rapid visions, there ran an
undefined, uneasy consciousness of pain, which wearied and tormented
him incessantly.
Thus he staggered on, creeping, almost mechanically, between the bars
of gates, or through hedge-gaps as they came in his way, until he
reached a road. Here the rain began to fall so heavily, that it roused
him.
He looked about, and saw that at no great distance there was a house,
which perhaps he could reach. Pitying his condition, they might have
compassion on him; and if they did not, it would be better, he thought,
to die near human beings, than in the lonely open fields. He summoned
up all his strength for one last trial, and bent his faltering steps
towards it.
As he drew nearer to this house, a feeling come over him that he had
seen it before. He remembered nothing of its details; but the shape
and aspect of the building seemed familiar to him.
That garden wall! On the grass inside, he had fallen on his knees last
night, and prayed the two men's mercy. It was the very house they had
attempted to rob.
Oliver felt such fear come over him when he recognised the place, that,
for the instant, he forgot the agony of his wound, and thought only of
flight. Flight! He could scarcely stand: and if he were in full
possession of all the best powers of his slight and youthful frame,
whither could he fly? He pushed against the garden-gate; it was
unlocked, and swung open on its hinges. He tottered across the lawn;
climbed the steps; knocked faintly at the door; and, his whole strength
failing him, sunk down against one of the pillars of the little portico.
It happened that about this time, Mr. Giles, Brittles, and the tinker,
were recruiting themselves, after the fatigues and terrors of the
night, with tea and sundries, in the kitchen. Not that it was Mr.
Giles's habit to admit to too great familiarity the humbler servants:
towards whom it was rather his wont to deport himself with a lofty
affability, which, while it gratified, could not fail to remind them of
his superior position in society. But, death, fires, and burglary,
make all men equals; so Mr. Giles sat with his legs stretched out
before the kitchen fender, leaning his left arm on the table, while,
with his right, he illustrated a circumstantial and minute account of
the robbery, to which his bearers (but especially the cook and
housemaid, who were of the party) listened with breathless interest.
'It was about half-past two,' said Mr. Giles, 'or I wouldn't swear that
it mightn't have been a little nearer three, when I woke up, and,
turning round in my bed, as it might be so, (here Mr. Giles turned
round in his chair, and pulled the corner of the table-cloth over him
to imitate bed-clothes,) I fancied I heerd a noise.'
At this point of the narrative the cook turned pale, and asked the
housemaid to shut the door: who asked Brittles, who asked the tinker,
who pretended not to hear.
'--Heerd a noise,' continued Mr. Giles. 'I says, at first, "This is
illusion"; and was composing myself off to sleep, when I heerd the
noise again, distinct.'
'What sort of a noise?' asked the cook.
'A kind of a busting noise,' replied Mr. Giles, looking round him.
'More like the noise of powdering a iron bar on a nutmeg-grater,'
suggested Brittles.
'It was, when _you_ heerd it, sir,' rejoined Mr. Giles; 'but, at this
time, it had a busting sound. I turned down the clothes'; continued
Giles, rolling back the table-cloth, 'sat up in bed; and listened.'
The cook and housemaid simultaneously ejaculated 'Lor!' and drew their
chairs closer together.
'I heerd it now, quite apparent,' resumed Mr. Giles. '"Somebody," I
says, "is forcing of a door, or window; what's to be done? I'll call up
that poor lad, Brittles, and save him from being murdered in his bed;
or his throat," I says, "may be cut from his right ear to his left,
without his ever knowing it."'
Here, all eyes were turned upon Brittles, who fixed his upon the
speaker, and stared at him, with his mouth wide open, and his face
expressive of the most unmitigated horror.
'I tossed off the clothes,' said Giles, throwing away the table-cloth,
and looking very hard at the cook and housemaid, 'got softly out of
bed; drew on a pair of--'
'Ladies present, Mr. Giles,' murmured the tinker.
'--Of _shoes_, sir,' said Giles, turning upon him, and laying great
emphasis on the word; 'seized the loaded pistol that always goes
upstairs with the plate-basket; and walked on tiptoes to his room.
"Brittles," I says, when I had woke him, "don't be frightened!"'
'So you did,' observed Brittles, in a low voice.
'"We're dead men, I think, Brittles," I says,' continued Giles; '"but
don't be frightened."'
'_Was_ he frightened?' asked the cook.
'Not a bit of it,' replied Mr. Giles. 'He was as firm--ah! pretty near
as firm as I was.'
'I should have died at once, I'm sure, if it had been me,' observed the
housemaid.
'You're a woman,' retorted Brittles, plucking up a little.
'Brittles is right,' said Mr. Giles, nodding his head, approvingly;
'from a woman, nothing else was to be expected. We, being men, took a
dark lantern that was standing on Brittle's hob, and groped our way
downstairs in the pitch dark,--as it might be so.'
Mr. Giles had risen from his seat, and taken two steps with his eyes
shut, to accompany his description with appropriate action, when he
started violently, in common with the rest of the company, and hurried
back to his chair. The cook and housemaid screamed.
'It was a knock,' said Mr. Giles, assuming perfect serenity. 'Open the
door, somebody.'
Nobody moved.
'It seems a strange sort of a thing, a knock coming at such a time in
the morning,' said Mr. Giles, surveying the pale faces which surrounded
him, and looking very blank himself; 'but the door must be opened. Do
you hear, somebody?'
Mr. Giles, as he spoke, looked at Brittles; but that young man, being
naturally modest, probably considered himself nobody, and so held that
the inquiry could not have any application to him; at all events, he
tendered no reply. Mr. Giles directed an appealing glance at the
tinker; but he had suddenly fallen asleep. The women were out of the
question.
'If Brittles would rather open the door, in the presence of witnesses,'
said Mr. Giles, after a short silence, 'I am ready to make one.'
'So am I,' said the tinker, waking up, as suddenly as he had fallen
asleep.
Brittles capitulated on these terms; and the party being somewhat
re-assured by the discovery (made on throwing open the shutters) that
it was now broad day, took their way upstairs; with the dogs in front.
The two women, who were afraid to stay below, brought up the rear. By
the advice of Mr. Giles, they all talked very loud, to warn any
evil-disposed person outside, that they were strong in numbers; and by
a master-stoke of policy, originating in the brain of the same
ingenious gentleman, the dogs' tails were well pinched, in the hall, to
make them bark savagely.
These precautions having been taken, Mr. Giles held on fast by the
tinker's arm (to prevent his running away, as he pleasantly said), and
gave the word of command to open the door. Brittles obeyed; the group,
peeping timorously over each other's shoulders, beheld no more
formidable object than poor little Oliver Twist, speechless and
exhausted, who raised his heavy eyes, and mutely solicited their
compassion.
'A boy!' exclaimed Mr. Giles, valiantly, pushing the tinker into the
background. 'What's the matter with the--eh?--Why--Brittles--look
here--don't you know?'
Brittles, who had got behind the door to open it, no sooner saw Oliver,
than he uttered a loud cry. Mr. Giles, seizing the boy by one leg and
one arm (fortunately not the broken limb) lugged him straight into the
hall, and deposited him at full length on the floor thereof.
'Here he is!' bawled Giles, calling in a state of great excitement, up
the staircase; 'here's one of the thieves, ma'am! Here's a thief, miss!
Wounded, miss! I shot him, miss; and Brittles held the light.'
'--In a lantern, miss,' cried Brittles, applying one hand to the side
of his mouth, so that his voice might travel the better.
The two women-servants ran upstairs to carry the intelligence that Mr.
Giles had captured a robber; and the tinker busied himself in
endeavouring to restore Oliver, lest he should die before he could be
hanged. In the midst of all this noise and commotion, there was heard
a sweet female voice, which quelled it in an instant.
'Giles!' whispered the voice from the stair-head.
'I'm here, miss,' replied Mr. Giles. 'Don't be frightened, miss; I
ain't much injured. He didn't make a very desperate resistance, miss!
I was soon too many for him.'
'Hush!' replied the young lady; 'you frighten my aunt as much as the
thieves did. Is the poor creature much hurt?'
'Wounded desperate, miss,' replied Giles, with indescribable
complacency.
'He looks as if he was a-going, miss,' bawled Brittles, in the same
manner as before. 'Wouldn't you like to come and look at him, miss, in
case he should?'
'Hush, pray; there's a good man!' rejoined the lady. 'Wait quietly
only one instant, while I speak to aunt.'
With a footstep as soft and gentle as the voice, the speaker tripped
away. She soon returned, with the direction that the wounded person
was to be carried, carefully, upstairs to Mr. Giles's room; and that
Brittles was to saddle the pony and betake himself instantly to
Chertsey: from which place, he was to despatch, with all speed, a
constable and doctor.
'But won't you take one look at him, first, miss?' asked Mr. Giles,
with as much pride as if Oliver were some bird of rare plumage, that he
had skilfully brought down. 'Not one little peep, miss?'
'Not now, for the world,' replied the young lady. 'Poor fellow! Oh!
treat him kindly, Giles for my sake!'
The old servant looked up at the speaker, as she turned away, with a
glance as proud and admiring as if she had been his own child. Then,
bending over Oliver, he helped to carry him upstairs, with the care and
solicitude of a woman.
| And we're back with Oliver again, finally. Sikes is in the middle of the chase, pausing to rest while carrying the unconscious Oliver. He can hear them coming after him. He tries to get Toby to help carry the boy, but Toby's only interested in looking out for himself. Sikes reluctantly leaves Oliver in the ditch where he'd paused. He at least has the consideration to throw a cloak over him, and then runs off. Then we start overhearing the pursuers: they pause together to discuss their plan. Mr. Giles says he thinks they should go home, and has called back the dogs. They all want to go back, but no one wants to take the responsibility of making the decision, so they argue about it. They accuse each other of being frightened for a few minutes before admitting that they're all frightened--it's only sensible to be frightened. They discuss their good sense all the way back to the house. At this point we learn the names of the three men: Mr. Giles is the steward/butler at the house, and he's the one who shot the intruder. Brittles is another servant there, and the third guy is a tinker who happened to be staying in an outhouse on the property, and so was recruited to chase the robbers. Meanwhile, Oliver's still lying in a ditch. He wakes up in great pain, and after a few efforts , he manages to get up, and start staggering. He doesn't know where he's going, but figures if he lies on the cold ground much longer, he'll die. He reaches a road, follows it, and eventually reaches a house. Hmm, thinks Oliver. This house looks familiar. He realizes it's the house they attempted to rob the night before, and his first instinct is to run, but where's he going to go, especially in his condition? So he staggers to the front door, gives it a hard knock or two, and then collapses on the doorstep. Mr. Giles, meanwhile, is in the kitchen, telling the story of his exploits to the two female servants, who are listening with baited breath, while Brittles and the tinker just nod away to everything Giles says. When they hear the knock at the door, they're all too frightened to answer it . Giles persuades Brittles to do it, and they all go in a pack. They open the front door, and find a half-dead little boy. Giles realizes it must be the robber he shot, so he drags Oliver inside and starts calling for Mrs. Maylie, the mistress of the house, to come and see. He's obviously very proud of himself. A young lady calls for him to be quiet, because he'll frighten Mrs. Maylie. Without coming down herself, she asks Mr. Giles to treat the "poor fellow" kindly, if only for her sake. Mr. Giles immediately picks up Oliver and gently carries him to a bed. | summary |
In a handsome room: though its furniture had rather the air of
old-fashioned comfort, than of modern elegance: there sat two ladies
at a well-spread breakfast-table. Mr. Giles, dressed with scrupulous
care in a full suit of black, was in attendance upon them. He had
taken his station some half-way between the side-board and the
breakfast-table; and, with his body drawn up to its full height, his
head thrown back, and inclined the merest trifle on one side, his left
leg advanced, and his right hand thrust into his waist-coat, while his
left hung down by his side, grasping a waiter, looked like one who
laboured under a very agreeable sense of his own merits and importance.
Of the two ladies, one was well advanced in years; but the high-backed
oaken chair in which she sat, was not more upright than she. Dressed
with the utmost nicety and precision, in a quaint mixture of by-gone
costume, with some slight concessions to the prevailing taste, which
rather served to point the old style pleasantly than to impair its
effect, she sat, in a stately manner, with her hands folded on the
table before her. Her eyes (and age had dimmed but little of their
brightness) were attentively upon her young companion.
The younger lady was in the lovely bloom and spring-time of womanhood;
at that age, when, if ever angels be for God's good purposes enthroned
in mortal forms, they may be, without impiety, supposed to abide in
such as hers.
She was not past seventeen. Cast in so slight and exquisite a mould;
so mild and gentle; so pure and beautiful; that earth seemed not her
element, nor its rough creatures her fit companions. The very
intelligence that shone in her deep blue eye, and was stamped upon her
noble head, seemed scarcely of her age, or of the world; and yet the
changing expression of sweetness and good humour, the thousand lights
that played about the face, and left no shadow there; above all, the
smile, the cheerful, happy smile, were made for Home, and fireside
peace and happiness.
She was busily engaged in the little offices of the table. Chancing to
raise her eyes as the elder lady was regarding her, she playfully put
back her hair, which was simply braided on her forehead; and threw into
her beaming look, such an expression of affection and artless
loveliness, that blessed spirits might have smiled to look upon her.
'And Brittles has been gone upwards of an hour, has he?' asked the old
lady, after a pause.
'An hour and twelve minutes, ma'am,' replied Mr. Giles, referring to a
silver watch, which he drew forth by a black ribbon.
'He is always slow,' remarked the old lady.
'Brittles always was a slow boy, ma'am,' replied the attendant. And
seeing, by the bye, that Brittles had been a slow boy for upwards of
thirty years, there appeared no great probability of his ever being a
fast one.
'He gets worse instead of better, I think,' said the elder lady.
'It is very inexcusable in him if he stops to play with any other
boys,' said the young lady, smiling.
Mr. Giles was apparently considering the propriety of indulging in a
respectful smile himself, when a gig drove up to the garden-gate: out
of which there jumped a fat gentleman, who ran straight up to the door:
and who, getting quickly into the house by some mysterious process,
burst into the room, and nearly overturned Mr. Giles and the
breakfast-table together.
'I never heard of such a thing!' exclaimed the fat gentleman. 'My dear
Mrs. Maylie--bless my soul--in the silence of the night, too--I _never_
heard of such a thing!'
With these expressions of condolence, the fat gentleman shook hands
with both ladies, and drawing up a chair, inquired how they found
themselves.
'You ought to be dead; positively dead with the fright,' said the fat
gentleman. 'Why didn't you send? Bless me, my man should have come in
a minute; and so would I; and my assistant would have been delighted;
or anybody, I'm sure, under such circumstances. Dear, dear! So
unexpected! In the silence of the night, too!'
The doctor seemed expecially troubled by the fact of the robbery having
been unexpected, and attempted in the night-time; as if it were the
established custom of gentlemen in the housebreaking way to transact
business at noon, and to make an appointment, by post, a day or two
previous.
'And you, Miss Rose,' said the doctor, turning to the young lady, 'I--'
'Oh! very much so, indeed,' said Rose, interrupting him; 'but there is
a poor creature upstairs, whom aunt wishes you to see.'
'Ah! to be sure,' replied the doctor, 'so there is. That was your
handiwork, Giles, I understand.'
Mr. Giles, who had been feverishly putting the tea-cups to rights,
blushed very red, and said that he had had that honour.
'Honour, eh?' said the doctor; 'well, I don't know; perhaps it's as
honourable to hit a thief in a back kitchen, as to hit your man at
twelve paces. Fancy that he fired in the air, and you've fought a
duel, Giles.'
Mr. Giles, who thought this light treatment of the matter an unjust
attempt at diminishing his glory, answered respectfully, that it was
not for the like of him to judge about that; but he rather thought it
was no joke to the opposite party.
'Gad, that's true!' said the doctor. 'Where is he? Show me the way.
I'll look in again, as I come down, Mrs. Maylie. That's the little
window that he got in at, eh? Well, I couldn't have believed it!'
Talking all the way, he followed Mr. Giles upstairs; and while he is
going upstairs, the reader may be informed, that Mr. Losberne, a
surgeon in the neighbourhood, known through a circuit of ten miles
round as 'the doctor,' had grown fat, more from good-humour than from
good living: and was as kind and hearty, and withal as eccentric an
old bachelor, as will be found in five times that space, by any
explorer alive.
The doctor was absent, much longer than either he or the ladies had
anticipated. A large flat box was fetched out of the gig; and a
bedroom bell was rung very often; and the servants ran up and down
stairs perpetually; from which tokens it was justly concluded that
something important was going on above. At length he returned; and in
reply to an anxious inquiry after his patient; looked very mysterious,
and closed the door, carefully.
'This is a very extraordinary thing, Mrs. Maylie,' said the doctor,
standing with his back to the door, as if to keep it shut.
'He is not in danger, I hope?' said the old lady.
'Why, that would _not_ be an extraordinary thing, under the
circumstances,' replied the doctor; 'though I don't think he is. Have
you seen the thief?'
'No,' rejoined the old lady.
'Nor heard anything about him?'
'No.'
'I beg your pardon, ma'am, interposed Mr. Giles; 'but I was going to
tell you about him when Doctor Losberne came in.'
The fact was, that Mr. Giles had not, at first, been able to bring his
mind to the avowal, that he had only shot a boy. Such commendations
had been bestowed upon his bravery, that he could not, for the life of
him, help postponing the explanation for a few delicious minutes;
during which he had flourished, in the very zenith of a brief
reputation for undaunted courage.
'Rose wished to see the man,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'but I wouldn't hear of
it.'
'Humph!' rejoined the doctor. 'There is nothing very alarming in his
appearance. Have you any objection to see him in my presence?'
'If it be necessary,' replied the old lady, 'certainly not.'
'Then I think it is necessary,' said the doctor; 'at all events, I am
quite sure that you would deeply regret not having done so, if you
postponed it. He is perfectly quiet and comfortable now. Allow
me--Miss Rose, will you permit me? Not the slightest fear, I pledge
you my honour!'
| The chapter opens in the breakfast room of the house where Oliver ended up. The two ladies are sitting and eating their breakfast, and are described for the first time: the older lady is very upright and elegant, and the young lady is around sixteen or seventeen, and very lovely. They ask Giles how long Brittles has been gone, and Giles answers that he'd been gone for an hour or more. They joke about how Brittles "always was a slow boy" --it's a joke because Brittles started out working there when he was a boy. Now he's over 30, and they still call him a boy. Finally a coach pulls up, and a plump, friendly gentleman hops out and starts asking Mrs. Maylie and Rose how they're doing, after the fright of the night before. Rose says that they're fine, but that he should go and look after the "poor creature up stairs" . Mr. Losberne heads on upstairs. We don't get to see what goes on up there, but only see Mrs. Maylie and Rose downstairs, waiting for a long time, and looking anxious. Finally the doctor comes back and asks if they'd seen the thief. They say no, and Giles , says that he was going to tell them all about it, but that Mr. Losberne had arrived just then and interrupted. The doctor says that it is necessary that they see the thief. | summary |
With many loquacious assurances that they would be agreeably surprised
in the aspect of the criminal, the doctor drew the young lady's arm
through one of his; and offering his disengaged hand to Mrs. Maylie,
led them, with much ceremony and stateliness, upstairs.
'Now,' said the doctor, in a whisper, as he softly turned the handle of
a bedroom-door, 'let us hear what you think of him. He has not been
shaved very recently, but he don't look at all ferocious
notwithstanding. Stop, though! Let me first see that he is in
visiting order.'
Stepping before them, he looked into the room. Motioning them to
advance, he closed the door when they had entered; and gently drew back
the curtains of the bed. Upon it, in lieu of the dogged, black-visaged
ruffian they had expected to behold, there lay a mere child: worn with
pain and exhaustion, and sunk into a deep sleep. His wounded arm,
bound and splintered up, was crossed upon his breast; his head reclined
upon the other arm, which was half hidden by his long hair, as it
streamed over the pillow.
The honest gentleman held the curtain in his hand, and looked on, for a
minute or so, in silence. Whilst he was watching the patient thus, the
younger lady glided softly past, and seating herself in a chair by the
bedside, gathered Oliver's hair from his face. As she stooped over
him, her tears fell upon his forehead.
The boy stirred, and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity
and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection
he had never known. Thus, a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of
water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or the mention of a
familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes
that never were, in this life; which vanish like a breath; which some
brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have
awakened; which no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall.
'What can this mean?' exclaimed the elder lady. 'This poor child can
never have been the pupil of robbers!'
'Vice,' said the surgeon, replacing the curtain, 'takes up her abode in
many temples; and who can say that a fair outside shell not enshrine
her?'
'But at so early an age!' urged Rose.
'My dear young lady,' rejoined the surgeon, mournfully shaking his
head; 'crime, like death, is not confined to the old and withered
alone. The youngest and fairest are too often its chosen victims.'
'But, can you--oh! can you really believe that this delicate boy has
been the voluntary associate of the worst outcasts of society?' said
Rose.
The surgeon shook his head, in a manner which intimated that he feared
it was very possible; and observing that they might disturb the
patient, led the way into an adjoining apartment.
'But even if he has been wicked,' pursued Rose, 'think how young he is;
think that he may never have known a mother's love, or the comfort of a
home; that ill-usage and blows, or the want of bread, may have driven
him to herd with men who have forced him to guilt. Aunt, dear aunt,
for mercy's sake, think of this, before you let them drag this sick
child to a prison, which in any case must be the grave of all his
chances of amendment. Oh! as you love me, and know that I have never
felt the want of parents in your goodness and affection, but that I
might have done so, and might have been equally helpless and
unprotected with this poor child, have pity upon him before it is too
late!'
'My dear love,' said the elder lady, as she folded the weeping girl to
her bosom, 'do you think I would harm a hair of his head?'
'Oh, no!' replied Rose, eagerly.
'No, surely,' said the old lady; 'my days are drawing to their close:
and may mercy be shown to me as I show it to others! What can I do to
save him, sir?'
'Let me think, ma'am,' said the doctor; 'let me think.'
Mr. Losberne thrust his hands into his pockets, and took several turns
up and down the room; often stopping, and balancing himself on his
toes, and frowning frightfully. After various exclamations of 'I've
got it now' and 'no, I haven't,' and as many renewals of the walking
and frowning, he at length made a dead halt, and spoke as follows:
'I think if you give me a full and unlimited commission to bully Giles,
and that little boy, Brittles, I can manage it. Giles is a faithful
fellow and an old servant, I know; but you can make it up to him in a
thousand ways, and reward him for being such a good shot besides. You
don't object to that?'
'Unless there is some other way of preserving the child,' replied Mrs.
Maylie.
'There is no other,' said the doctor. 'No other, take my word for it.'
'Then my aunt invests you with full power,' said Rose, smiling through
her tears; 'but pray don't be harder upon the poor fellows than is
indispensably necessary.'
'You seem to think,' retorted the doctor, 'that everybody is disposed
to be hard-hearted to-day, except yourself, Miss Rose. I only hope, for
the sake of the rising male sex generally, that you may be found in as
vulnerable and soft-hearted a mood by the first eligible young fellow
who appeals to your compassion; and I wish I were a young fellow, that
I might avail myself, on the spot, of such a favourable opportunity for
doing so, as the present.'
'You are as great a boy as poor Brittles himself,' returned Rose,
blushing.
'Well,' said the doctor, laughing heartily, 'that is no very difficult
matter. But to return to this boy. The great point of our agreement
is yet to come. He will wake in an hour or so, I dare say; and
although I have told that thick-headed constable-fellow downstairs that
he musn't be moved or spoken to, on peril of his life, I think we may
converse with him without danger. Now I make this stipulation--that I
shall examine him in your presence, and that, if, from what he says, we
judge, and I can show to the satisfaction of your cool reason, that he
is a real and thorough bad one (which is more than possible), he shall
be left to his fate, without any farther interference on my part, at
all events.'
'Oh no, aunt!' entreated Rose.
'Oh yes, aunt!' said the doctor. 'Is is a bargain?'
'He cannot be hardened in vice,' said Rose; 'It is impossible.'
'Very good,' retorted the doctor; 'then so much the more reason for
acceding to my proposition.'
Finally the treaty was entered into; and the parties thereunto sat down
to wait, with some impatience, until Oliver should awake.
The patience of the two ladies was destined to undergo a longer trial
than Mr. Losberne had led them to expect; for hour after hour passed
on, and still Oliver slumbered heavily. It was evening, indeed, before
the kind-hearted doctor brought them the intelligence, that he was at
length sufficiently restored to be spoken to. The boy was very ill, he
said, and weak from the loss of blood; but his mind was so troubled
with anxiety to disclose something, that he deemed it better to give
him the opportunity, than to insist upon his remaining quiet until next
morning: which he should otherwise have done.
The conference was a long one. Oliver told them all his simple
history, and was often compelled to stop, by pain and want of strength.
It was a solemn thing, to hear, in the darkened room, the feeble voice
of the sick child recounting a weary catalogue of evils and calamities
which hard men had brought upon him. Oh! if when we oppress and grind
our fellow-creatures, we bestowed but one thought on the dark evidences
of human error, which, like dense and heavy clouds, are rising, slowly
it is true, but not less surely, to Heaven, to pour their
after-vengeance on our heads; if we heard but one instant, in
imagination, the deep testimony of dead men's voices, which no power
can stifle, and no pride shut out; where would be the injury and
injustice, the suffering, misery, cruelty, and wrong, that each day's
life brings with it!
Oliver's pillow was smoothed by gentle hands that night; and loveliness
and virtue watched him as he slept. He felt calm and happy, and could
have died without a murmur.
The momentous interview was no sooner concluded, and Oliver composed to
rest again, than the doctor, after wiping his eyes, and condemning them
for being weak all at once, betook himself downstairs to open upon Mr.
Giles. And finding nobody about the parlours, it occurred to him, that
he could perhaps originate the proceedings with better effect in the
kitchen; so into the kitchen he went.
There were assembled, in that lower house of the domestic parliament,
the women-servants, Mr. Brittles, Mr. Giles, the tinker (who had
received a special invitation to regale himself for the remainder of
the day, in consideration of his services), and the constable. The
latter gentleman had a large staff, a large head, large features, and
large half-boots; and he looked as if he had been taking a
proportionate allowance of ale--as indeed he had.
The adventures of the previous night were still under discussion; for
Mr. Giles was expatiating upon his presence of mind, when the doctor
entered; Mr. Brittles, with a mug of ale in his hand, was corroborating
everything, before his superior said it.
'Sit still!' said the doctor, waving his hand.
'Thank you, sir, said Mr. Giles. 'Misses wished some ale to be given
out, sir; and as I felt no ways inclined for my own little room, sir,
and was disposed for company, I am taking mine among 'em here.'
Brittles headed a low murmur, by which the ladies and gentlemen
generally were understood to express the gratification they derived
from Mr. Giles's condescension. Mr. Giles looked round with a
patronising air, as much as to say that so long as they behaved
properly, he would never desert them.
'How is the patient to-night, sir?' asked Giles.
'So-so'; returned the doctor. 'I am afraid you have got yourself into
a scrape there, Mr. Giles.'
'I hope you don't mean to say, sir,' said Mr. Giles, trembling, 'that
he's going to die. If I thought it, I should never be happy again. I
wouldn't cut a boy off: no, not even Brittles here; not for all the
plate in the county, sir.'
'That's not the point,' said the doctor, mysteriously. 'Mr. Giles, are
you a Protestant?'
'Yes, sir, I hope so,' faltered Mr. Giles, who had turned very pale.
'And what are _you_, boy?' said the doctor, turning sharply upon
Brittles.
'Lord bless me, sir!' replied Brittles, starting violently; 'I'm the
same as Mr. Giles, sir.'
'Then tell me this,' said the doctor, 'both of you, both of you! Are
you going to take upon yourselves to swear, that that boy upstairs is
the boy that was put through the little window last night? Out with
it! Come! We are prepared for you!'
The doctor, who was universally considered one of the best-tempered
creatures on earth, made this demand in such a dreadful tone of anger,
that Giles and Brittles, who were considerably muddled by ale and
excitement, stared at each other in a state of stupefaction.
'Pay attention to the reply, constable, will you?' said the doctor,
shaking his forefinger with great solemnity of manner, and tapping the
bridge of his nose with it, to bespeak the exercise of that worthy's
utmost acuteness. 'Something may come of this before long.'
The constable looked as wise as he could, and took up his staff of
office: which had been reclining indolently in the chimney-corner.
'It's a simple question of identity, you will observe,' said the doctor.
'That's what it is, sir,' replied the constable, coughing with great
violence; for he had finished his ale in a hurry, and some of it had
gone the wrong way.
'Here's the house broken into,' said the doctor, 'and a couple of men
catch one moment's glimpse of a boy, in the midst of gunpowder smoke,
and in all the distraction of alarm and darkness. Here's a boy comes
to that very same house, next morning, and because he happens to have
his arm tied up, these men lay violent hands upon him--by doing which,
they place his life in great danger--and swear he is the thief. Now,
the question is, whether these men are justified by the fact; if not,
in what situation do they place themselves?'
The constable nodded profoundly. He said, if that wasn't law, he would
be glad to know what was.
'I ask you again,' thundered the doctor, 'are you, on your solemn
oaths, able to identify that boy?'
Brittles looked doubtfully at Mr. Giles; Mr. Giles looked doubtfully at
Brittles; the constable put his hand behind his ear, to catch the
reply; the two women and the tinker leaned forward to listen; the
doctor glanced keenly round; when a ring was heard at the gate, and at
the same moment, the sound of wheels.
'It's the runners!' cried Brittles, to all appearance much relieved.
'The what?' exclaimed the doctor, aghast in his turn.
'The Bow Street officers, sir,' replied Brittles, taking up a candle;
'me and Mr. Giles sent for 'em this morning.'
'What?' cried the doctor.
'Yes,' replied Brittles; 'I sent a message up by the coachman, and I
only wonder they weren't here before, sir.'
'You did, did you? Then confound your--slow coaches down here; that's
all,' said the doctor, walking away.
| Rose and Mrs. Maylie still don't know that the thief is just a boy, so the doctor decides to let them look for themselves at the kind of thief they're harboring--but only after assuring them that although the thief "hasn't shaved in a while," he's really not so scary. When they get to the room, Oliver's asleep on the bed and looking totally angelic as usual. Rose smoothes his hair on the pillow and cries over him a bit . Rose, Mrs. Maylie, and Mr. Losberne discuss whether or not Oliver can really be a criminal. Mr. Losberne thinks it's possible for crime and vice to take hold of a person from a very young age, and that even though Oliver looks innocent, he might really be a hardened criminal. Rose refuses to believe it, and begs her aunt to protect Oliver from the authorities, saying that she herself might have been an orphan all adrift in the world if Mrs. Maylie hadn't taken care of her, so could she please, please do the same for Oliver? Mrs. Maylie promises to, and the doctor thinks about what they can do--after all, the authorities have already been notified about the break-in, and the servants know all about it, so it will be difficult to keep Oliver from being arrested. Mr. Losberne decides what to do, and gets Mrs. Maylie's permission to do as he thinks proper--provided that, once they hear the boy's story, they still think that he's worth saving. Mrs. Maylie must really trust him, because she agrees to this, even though she doesn't know what his plan is. Later on in the day, Oliver wakes up and tells his story to Rose, Mrs. Maylie, and Mr. Losberne. They believe him, and put him to bed for the night. Mr. Losberne goes down to the kitchen, where Mr. Giles is once again telling the story of his heroism to the other servants. Mr. Losberne pretends to be very angry, and asks Giles and Losberne if they are Protestant--they are--and if they would be willing to swear up and down, on a stack of Bibles, that the boy they found on the doorstep that morning was the same as the boy they had shot the night before. Mr. Giles and Brittles are so rattled by his unexpected tone of voice that they say they aren't sure. Just then, they hear a coach in the driveway. Brittles says it must be the two Bow-street officers that he and Mr. Giles had sent for that morning. Mr. Losberne is annoyed that Giles and Brittles had sent for the officers without being asked, but he doesn't say so, and walks out of the kitchen. | summary |
'Who's that?' inquired Brittles, opening the door a little way, with
the chain up, and peeping out, shading the candle with his hand.
'Open the door,' replied a man outside; 'it's the officers from Bow
Street, as was sent to to-day.'
Much comforted by this assurance, Brittles opened the door to its full
width, and confronted a portly man in a great-coat; who walked in,
without saying anything more, and wiped his shoes on the mat, as coolly
as if he lived there.
'Just send somebody out to relieve my mate, will you, young man?' said
the officer; 'he's in the gig, a-minding the prad. Have you got a
coach 'us here, that you could put it up in, for five or ten minutes?'
Brittles replying in the affirmative, and pointing out the building,
the portly man stepped back to the garden-gate, and helped his
companion to put up the gig: while Brittles lighted them, in a state
of great admiration. This done, they returned to the house, and, being
shown into a parlour, took off their great-coats and hats, and showed
like what they were.
The man who had knocked at the door, was a stout personage of middle
height, aged about fifty: with shiny black hair, cropped pretty close;
half-whiskers, a round face, and sharp eyes. The other was a
red-headed, bony man, in top-boots; with a rather ill-favoured
countenance, and a turned-up sinister-looking nose.
'Tell your governor that Blathers and Duff is here, will you?' said the
stouter man, smoothing down his hair, and laying a pair of handcuffs on
the table. 'Oh! Good-evening, master. Can I have a word or two with
you in private, if you please?'
This was addressed to Mr. Losberne, who now made his appearance; that
gentleman, motioning Brittles to retire, brought in the two ladies, and
shut the door.
'This is the lady of the house,' said Mr. Losberne, motioning towards
Mrs. Maylie.
Mr. Blathers made a bow. Being desired to sit down, he put his hat on
the floor, and taking a chair, motioned to Duff to do the same. The
latter gentleman, who did not appear quite so much accustomed to good
society, or quite so much at his ease in it--one of the two--seated
himself, after undergoing several muscular affections of the limbs, and
the head of his stick into his mouth, with some embarrassment.
'Now, with regard to this here robbery, master,' said Blathers. 'What
are the circumstances?'
Mr. Losberne, who appeared desirous of gaining time, recounted them at
great length, and with much circumlocution. Messrs. Blathers and Duff
looked very knowing meanwhile, and occasionally exchanged a nod.
'I can't say, for certain, till I see the work, of course,' said
Blathers; 'but my opinion at once is,--I don't mind committing myself
to that extent,--that this wasn't done by a yokel; eh, Duff?'
'Certainly not,' replied Duff.
'And, translating the word yokel for the benefit of the ladies, I
apprehend your meaning to be, that this attempt was not made by a
countryman?' said Mr. Losberne, with a smile.
'That's it, master,' replied Blathers. 'This is all about the robbery,
is it?'
'All,' replied the doctor.
'Now, what is this, about this here boy that the servants are a-talking
on?' said Blathers.
'Nothing at all,' replied the doctor. 'One of the frightened servants
chose to take it into his head, that he had something to do with this
attempt to break into the house; but it's nonsense: sheer absurdity.'
'Wery easy disposed of, if it is,' remarked Duff.
'What he says is quite correct,' observed Blathers, nodding his head in
a confirmatory way, and playing carelessly with the handcuffs, as if
they were a pair of castanets. 'Who is the boy? What account does he
give of himself? Where did he come from? He didn't drop out of the
clouds, did he, master?'
'Of course not,' replied the doctor, with a nervous glance at the two
ladies. 'I know his whole history: but we can talk about that
presently. You would like, first, to see the place where the thieves
made their attempt, I suppose?'
'Certainly,' rejoined Mr. Blathers. 'We had better inspect the
premises first, and examine the servants afterwards. That's the usual
way of doing business.'
Lights were then procured; and Messrs. Blathers and Duff, attended by
the native constable, Brittles, Giles, and everybody else in short,
went into the little room at the end of the passage and looked out at
the window; and afterwards went round by way of the lawn, and looked in
at the window; and after that, had a candle handed out to inspect the
shutter with; and after that, a lantern to trace the footsteps with;
and after that, a pitchfork to poke the bushes with. This done, amidst
the breathless interest of all beholders, they came in again; and Mr.
Giles and Brittles were put through a melodramatic representation of
their share in the previous night's adventures: which they performed
some six times over: contradicting each other, in not more than one
important respect, the first time, and in not more than a dozen the
last. This consummation being arrived at, Blathers and Duff cleared
the room, and held a long council together, compared with which, for
secrecy and solemnity, a consultation of great doctors on the knottiest
point in medicine, would be mere child's play.
Meanwhile, the doctor walked up and down the next room in a very uneasy
state; and Mrs. Maylie and Rose looked on, with anxious faces.
'Upon my word,' he said, making a halt, after a great number of very
rapid turns, 'I hardly know what to do.'
'Surely,' said Rose, 'the poor child's story, faithfully repeated to
these men, will be sufficient to exonerate him.'
'I doubt it, my dear young lady,' said the doctor, shaking his head.
'I don't think it would exonerate him, either with them, or with legal
functionaries of a higher grade. What is he, after all, they would
say? A runaway. Judged by mere worldly considerations and
probabilities, his story is a very doubtful one.'
'You believe it, surely?' interrupted Rose.
'_I_ believe it, strange as it is; and perhaps I may be an old fool for
doing so,' rejoined the doctor; 'but I don't think it is exactly the
tale for a practical police-officer, nevertheless.'
'Why not?' demanded Rose.
'Because, my pretty cross-examiner,' replied the doctor: 'because,
viewed with their eyes, there are many ugly points about it; he can
only prove the parts that look ill, and none of those that look well.
Confound the fellows, they _will_ have the why and the wherefore, and
will take nothing for granted. On his own showing, you see, he has
been the companion of thieves for some time past; he has been carried
to a police-officer, on a charge of picking a gentleman's pocket; he
has been taken away, forcibly, from that gentleman's house, to a place
which he cannot describe or point out, and of the situation of which he
has not the remotest idea. He is brought down to Chertsey, by men who
seem to have taken a violent fancy to him, whether he will or no; and
is put through a window to rob a house; and then, just at the very
moment when he is going to alarm the inmates, and so do the very thing
that would set him all to rights, there rushes into the way, a
blundering dog of a half-bred butler, and shoots him! As if on purpose
to prevent his doing any good for himself! Don't you see all this?'
'I see it, of course,' replied Rose, smiling at the doctor's
impetuosity; 'but still I do not see anything in it, to criminate the
poor child.'
'No,' replied the doctor; 'of course not! Bless the bright eyes of
your sex! They never see, whether for good or bad, more than one side
of any question; and that is, always, the one which first presents
itself to them.'
Having given vent to this result of experience, the doctor put his
hands into his pockets, and walked up and down the room with even
greater rapidity than before.
'The more I think of it,' said the doctor, 'the more I see that it will
occasion endless trouble and difficulty if we put these men in
possession of the boy's real story. I am certain it will not be
believed; and even if they can do nothing to him in the end, still the
dragging it forward, and giving publicity to all the doubts that will
be cast upon it, must interfere, materially, with your benevolent plan
of rescuing him from misery.'
'Oh! what is to be done?' cried Rose. 'Dear, dear! why did they send
for these people?'
'Why, indeed!' exclaimed Mrs. Maylie. 'I would not have had them here,
for the world.'
'All I know is,' said Mr. Losberne, at last: sitting down with a kind
of desperate calmness, 'that we must try and carry it off with a bold
face. The object is a good one, and that must be our excuse. The boy
has strong symptoms of fever upon him, and is in no condition to be
talked to any more; that's one comfort. We must make the best of it;
and if bad be the best, it is no fault of ours. Come in!'
'Well, master,' said Blathers, entering the room followed by his
colleague, and making the door fast, before he said any more. 'This
warn't a put-up thing.'
'And what the devil's a put-up thing?' demanded the doctor, impatiently.
'We call it a put-up robbery, ladies,' said Blathers, turning to them,
as if he pitied their ignorance, but had a contempt for the doctor's,
'when the servants is in it.'
'Nobody suspected them, in this case,' said Mrs. Maylie.
'Wery likely not, ma'am,' replied Blathers; 'but they might have been
in it, for all that.'
'More likely on that wery account,' said Duff.
'We find it was a town hand,' said Blathers, continuing his report;
'for the style of work is first-rate.'
'Wery pretty indeed it is,' remarked Duff, in an undertone.
'There was two of 'em in it,' continued Blathers; 'and they had a boy
with 'em; that's plain from the size of the window. That's all to be
said at present. We'll see this lad that you've got upstairs at once,
if you please.'
'Perhaps they will take something to drink first, Mrs. Maylie?' said
the doctor: his face brightening, as if some new thought had occurred
to him.
'Oh! to be sure!' exclaimed Rose, eagerly. 'You shall have it
immediately, if you will.'
'Why, thank you, miss!' said Blathers, drawing his coat-sleeve across
his mouth; 'it's dry work, this sort of duty. Anythink that's handy,
miss; don't put yourself out of the way, on our accounts.'
'What shall it be?' asked the doctor, following the young lady to the
sideboard.
'A little drop of spirits, master, if it's all the same,' replied
Blathers. 'It's a cold ride from London, ma'am; and I always find that
spirits comes home warmer to the feelings.'
This interesting communication was addressed to Mrs. Maylie, who
received it very graciously. While it was being conveyed to her, the
doctor slipped out of the room.
'Ah!' said Mr. Blathers: not holding his wine-glass by the stem, but
grasping the bottom between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand:
and placing it in front of his chest; 'I have seen a good many pieces
of business like this, in my time, ladies.'
'That crack down in the back lane at Edmonton, Blathers,' said Mr.
Duff, assisting his colleague's memory.
'That was something in this way, warn't it?' rejoined Mr. Blathers;
'that was done by Conkey Chickweed, that was.'
'You always gave that to him' replied Duff. 'It was the Family Pet, I
tell you. Conkey hadn't any more to do with it than I had.'
'Get out!' retorted Mr. Blathers; 'I know better. Do you mind that
time when Conkey was robbed of his money, though? What a start that
was! Better than any novel-book _I_ ever see!'
'What was that?' inquired Rose: anxious to encourage any symptoms of
good-humour in the unwelcome visitors.
'It was a robbery, miss, that hardly anybody would have been down
upon,' said Blathers. 'This here Conkey Chickweed--'
'Conkey means Nosey, ma'am,' interposed Duff.
'Of course the lady knows that, don't she?' demanded Mr. Blathers.
'Always interrupting, you are, partner! This here Conkey Chickweed,
miss, kept a public-house over Battlebridge way, and he had a cellar,
where a good many young lords went to see cock-fighting, and
badger-drawing, and that; and a wery intellectual manner the sports was
conducted in, for I've seen 'em off'en. He warn't one of the family,
at that time; and one night he was robbed of three hundred and
twenty-seven guineas in a canvas bag, that was stole out of his bedroom
in the dead of night, by a tall man with a black patch over his eye,
who had concealed himself under the bed, and after committing the
robbery, jumped slap out of window: which was only a story high. He
was wery quick about it. But Conkey was quick, too; for he fired a
blunderbuss arter him, and roused the neighbourhood. They set up a
hue-and-cry, directly, and when they came to look about 'em, found that
Conkey had hit the robber; for there was traces of blood, all the way
to some palings a good distance off; and there they lost 'em. However,
he had made off with the blunt; and, consequently, the name of Mr.
Chickweed, licensed witler, appeared in the Gazette among the other
bankrupts; and all manner of benefits and subscriptions, and I don't
know what all, was got up for the poor man, who was in a wery low state
of mind about his loss, and went up and down the streets, for three or
four days, a pulling his hair off in such a desperate manner that many
people was afraid he might be going to make away with himself. One day
he came up to the office, all in a hurry, and had a private interview
with the magistrate, who, after a deal of talk, rings the bell, and
orders Jem Spyers in (Jem was a active officer), and tells him to go
and assist Mr. Chickweed in apprehending the man as robbed his house.
"I see him, Spyers," said Chickweed, "pass my house yesterday morning,"
"Why didn't you up, and collar him!" says Spyers. "I was so struck all
of a heap, that you might have fractured my skull with a toothpick,"
says the poor man; "but we're sure to have him; for between ten and
eleven o'clock at night he passed again." Spyers no sooner heard this,
than he put some clean linen and a comb, in his pocket, in case he
should have to stop a day or two; and away he goes, and sets himself
down at one of the public-house windows behind the little red curtain,
with his hat on, all ready to bolt out, at a moment's notice. He was
smoking his pipe here, late at night, when all of a sudden Chickweed
roars out, "Here he is! Stop thief! Murder!" Jem Spyers dashes out;
and there he sees Chickweed, a-tearing down the street full cry. Away
goes Spyers; on goes Chickweed; round turns the people; everybody roars
out, "Thieves!" and Chickweed himself keeps on shouting, all the time,
like mad. Spyers loses sight of him a minute as he turns a corner;
shoots round; sees a little crowd; dives in; "Which is the man?"
"D--me!" says Chickweed, "I've lost him again!" It was a remarkable
occurrence, but he warn't to be seen nowhere, so they went back to the
public-house. Next morning, Spyers took his old place, and looked out,
from behind the curtain, for a tall man with a black patch over his
eye, till his own two eyes ached again. At last, he couldn't help
shutting 'em, to ease 'em a minute; and the very moment he did so, he
hears Chickweed a-roaring out, "Here he is!" Off he starts once more,
with Chickweed half-way down the street ahead of him; and after twice
as long a run as the yesterday's one, the man's lost again! This was
done, once or twice more, till one-half the neighbours gave out that
Mr. Chickweed had been robbed by the devil, who was playing tricks with
him arterwards; and the other half, that poor Mr. Chickweed had gone
mad with grief.'
'What did Jem Spyers say?' inquired the doctor; who had returned to the
room shortly after the commencement of the story.
'Jem Spyers,' resumed the officer, 'for a long time said nothing at
all, and listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he
understood his business. But, one morning, he walked into the bar, and
taking out his snuffbox, says "Chickweed, I've found out who done this
here robbery." "Have you?" said Chickweed. "Oh, my dear Spyers, only
let me have wengeance, and I shall die contented! Oh, my dear Spyers,
where is the villain!" "Come!" said Spyers, offering him a pinch of
snuff, "none of that gammon! You did it yourself." So he had; and a
good bit of money he had made by it, too; and nobody would never have
found it out, if he hadn't been so precious anxious to keep up
appearances!' said Mr. Blathers, putting down his wine-glass, and
clinking the handcuffs together.
'Very curious, indeed,' observed the doctor. 'Now, if you please, you
can walk upstairs.'
'If _you_ please, sir,' returned Mr. Blathers. Closely following Mr.
Losberne, the two officers ascended to Oliver's bedroom; Mr. Giles
preceding the party, with a lighted candle.
Oliver had been dozing; but looked worse, and was more feverish than he
had appeared yet. Being assisted by the doctor, he managed to sit up
in bed for a minute or so; and looked at the strangers without at all
understanding what was going forward--in fact, without seeming to
recollect where he was, or what had been passing.
'This,' said Mr. Losberne, speaking softly, but with great vehemence
notwithstanding, 'this is the lad, who, being accidently wounded by a
spring-gun in some boyish trespass on Mr. What-d' ye-call-him's
grounds, at the back here, comes to the house for assistance this
morning, and is immediately laid hold of and maltreated, by that
ingenious gentleman with the candle in his hand: who has placed his
life in considerable danger, as I can professionally certify.'
Messrs. Blathers and Duff looked at Mr. Giles, as he was thus
recommended to their notice. The bewildered butler gazed from them
towards Oliver, and from Oliver towards Mr. Losberne, with a most
ludicrous mixture of fear and perplexity.
'You don't mean to deny that, I suppose?' said the doctor, laying
Oliver gently down again.
'It was all done for the--for the best, sir,' answered Giles. 'I am
sure I thought it was the boy, or I wouldn't have meddled with him. I
am not of an inhuman disposition, sir.'
'Thought it was what boy?' inquired the senior officer.
'The housebreaker's boy, sir!' replied Giles. 'They--they certainly
had a boy.'
'Well? Do you think so now?' inquired Blathers.
'Think what, now?' replied Giles, looking vacantly at his questioner.
'Think it's the same boy, Stupid-head?' rejoined Blathers, impatiently.
'I don't know; I really don't know,' said Giles, with a rueful
countenance. 'I couldn't swear to him.'
'What do you think?' asked Mr. Blathers.
'I don't know what to think,' replied poor Giles. 'I don't think it is
the boy; indeed, I'm almost certain that it isn't. You know it can't
be.'
'Has this man been a-drinking, sir?' inquired Blathers, turning to the
doctor.
'What a precious muddle-headed chap you are!' said Duff, addressing Mr.
Giles, with supreme contempt.
Mr. Losberne had been feeling the patient's pulse during this short
dialogue; but he now rose from the chair by the bedside, and remarked,
that if the officers had any doubts upon the subject, they would
perhaps like to step into the next room, and have Brittles before them.
Acting upon this suggestion, they adjourned to a neighbouring
apartment, where Mr. Brittles, being called in, involved himself and
his respected superior in such a wonderful maze of fresh contradictions
and impossibilities, as tended to throw no particular light on
anything, but the fact of his own strong mystification; except, indeed,
his declarations that he shouldn't know the real boy, if he were put
before him that instant; that he had only taken Oliver to be he,
because Mr. Giles had said he was; and that Mr. Giles had, five minutes
previously, admitted in the kitchen, that he began to be very much
afraid he had been a little too hasty.
Among other ingenious surmises, the question was then raised, whether
Mr. Giles had really hit anybody; and upon examination of the fellow
pistol to that which he had fired, it turned out to have no more
destructive loading than gunpowder and brown paper: a discovery which
made a considerable impression on everybody but the doctor, who had
drawn the ball about ten minutes before. Upon no one, however, did it
make a greater impression than on Mr. Giles himself; who, after
labouring, for some hours, under the fear of having mortally wounded a
fellow-creature, eagerly caught at this new idea, and favoured it to
the utmost. Finally, the officers, without troubling themselves very
much about Oliver, left the Chertsey constable in the house, and took
up their rest for that night in the town; promising to return the next
morning.
With the next morning, there came a rumour, that two men and a boy were
in the cage at Kingston, who had been apprehended over night under
suspicious circumstances; and to Kingston Messrs. Blathers and Duff
journeyed accordingly. The suspicious circumstances, however, resolving
themselves, on investigation, into the one fact, that they had been
discovered sleeping under a haystack; which, although a great crime, is
only punishable by imprisonment, and is, in the merciful eye of the
English law, and its comprehensive love of all the King's subjects,
held to be no satisfactory proof, in the absence of all other evidence,
that the sleeper, or sleepers, have committed burglary accompanied with
violence, and have therefore rendered themselves liable to the
punishment of death; Messrs. Blathers and Duff came back again, as wise
as they went.
In short, after some more examination, and a great deal more
conversation, a neighbouring magistrate was readily induced to take the
joint bail of Mrs. Maylie and Mr. Losberne for Oliver's appearance if
he should ever be called upon; and Blathers and Duff, being rewarded
with a couple of guineas, returned to town with divided opinions on the
subject of their expedition: the latter gentleman on a mature
consideration of all the circumstances, inclining to the belief that
the burglarious attempt had originated with the Family Pet; and the
former being equally disposed to concede the full merit of it to the
great Mr. Conkey Chickweed.
Meanwhile, Oliver gradually throve and prospered under the united care
of Mrs. Maylie, Rose, and the kind-hearted Mr. Losberne. If fervent
prayers, gushing from hearts overcharged with gratitude, be heard in
heaven--and if they be not, what prayers are!--the blessings which the
orphan child called down upon them, sunk into their souls, diffusing
peace and happiness.
| Brittles answers the door, and the two Bow-street officers, named Duff and Blathers, come right on in and make themselves at home. Well--Blathers makes himself at home. Duff doesn't seem to be all that comfortable in such fancy surroundings, so he's a little more awkward. They sit down with Mrs. Maylie, Rose, and Mr. Losberne, and Mr. Losberne tells them the whole story of the attempted robbery, and really draws it out because he's trying to buy time. Blathers and Duff believe that the robbery wasn't committed by a "yokel"--i.e., it must have been someone from the city. Then they ask about the boy, because the servants had mentioned him in connection with the robbery. Mr. Losberne says that the boy had had nothing to do with the robbery, but that "one of the frightened servants" started the rumor that he had. Mr. Blathers asks where the boy came from. Mr. Losberne tries not to look nervous, and offers to show the officers the place where the robbers had tried to break in. The officers agree that they had better check out the place first. Then they ask Mr. Giles and Brittles to go through the events of the night before about six times each, and they start contradicting each other more and more with each repetition. Blathers and Duff deliberate for a while by themselves. While they're alone, Rose, Mrs. Maylie, and Mr. Losberne discuss whether or not to repeat Oliver's story to the officers. Rose is certain that the truth of the story will get Oliver off, but Mr. Losberne isn't convinced--he thinks that they'd arrest him because there's no proof for any of it, except for the bad stuff. Blathers and Duff return from inspecting the premises, and announce that the robbers had done a good job, and obviously had had a boy with them based on the size of the window. So of course they want to see the boy upstairs. Mr. Losberne offers them a drink first, which they gladly accept. As they drink, they launch into a story about a burglary their friend, Jem Spyers, had investigated. So Blathers starts telling the story about Conkey Chickweed, and how he'd had his life savings stolen out from under his nose-- Meanwhile, Mr. Losberne steps out of the room briefly, and then returns. --and so Chickweed was so upset he ranted for days and then hired an investigator, just to keep up appearances, but in reality , he'd robbed himself. At the end of the story, Mr. Losberne invites them upstairs. Oliver is too feverish at this point to answer any questions, so Mr. Losberne just points him out to the officers, and says that he was a boy who was accidentally shot by a hunting gun while trespassing on some neighbor's property, and came to their house for help, only to be jumped on by Mr. Giles and the others because they mistook him for one of the robbers. Mr. Giles is very confused, and ends up saying that he couldn't swear it was the same boy, after all --in fact, he's almost certain it isn't. Duff and Blathers think Giles is an idiot, so they ask Brittles. Poor Brittles has no idea anymore. The question actually gets raised whether Mr. Giles shot anyone at all, and so they inspect his gun. They find that it's got powder and wadding in it, but no bullet. Finally Blathers and Duff leave, fully convinced that Oliver had nothing to do with the attempted burglary. The chapter ends with Oliver in the "united care of Mrs. Maylie, Rose, and the kind-hearted Mr. Losberne." | summary |
Oliver's ailings were neither slight nor few. In addition to the pain
and delay attendant on a broken limb, his exposure to the wet and cold
had brought on fever and ague: which hung about him for many weeks,
and reduced him sadly. But, at length, he began, by slow degrees, to
get better, and to be able to say sometimes, in a few tearful words,
how deeply he felt the goodness of the two sweet ladies, and how
ardently he hoped that when he grew strong and well again, he could do
something to show his gratitude; only something, which would let them
see the love and duty with which his breast was full; something,
however slight, which would prove to them that their gentle kindness
had not been cast away; but that the poor boy whom their charity had
rescued from misery, or death, was eager to serve them with his whole
heart and soul.
'Poor fellow!' said Rose, when Oliver had been one day feebly
endeavouring to utter the words of thankfulness that rose to his pale
lips; 'you shall have many opportunities of serving us, if you will.
We are going into the country, and my aunt intends that you shall
accompany us. The quiet place, the pure air, and all the pleasure and
beauties of spring, will restore you in a few days. We will employ you
in a hundred ways, when you can bear the trouble.'
'The trouble!' cried Oliver. 'Oh! dear lady, if I could but work for
you; if I could only give you pleasure by watering your flowers, or
watching your birds, or running up and down the whole day long, to make
you happy; what would I give to do it!'
'You shall give nothing at all,' said Miss Maylie, smiling; 'for, as I
told you before, we shall employ you in a hundred ways; and if you only
take half the trouble to please us, that you promise now, you will make
me very happy indeed.'
'Happy, ma'am!' cried Oliver; 'how kind of you to say so!'
'You will make me happier than I can tell you,' replied the young lady.
'To think that my dear good aunt should have been the means of rescuing
any one from such sad misery as you have described to us, would be an
unspeakable pleasure to me; but to know that the object of her goodness
and compassion was sincerely grateful and attached, in consequence,
would delight me, more than you can well imagine. Do you understand
me?' she inquired, watching Oliver's thoughtful face.
'Oh yes, ma'am, yes!' replied Oliver eagerly; 'but I was thinking that
I am ungrateful now.'
'To whom?' inquired the young lady.
'To the kind gentleman, and the dear old nurse, who took so much care
of me before,' rejoined Oliver. 'If they knew how happy I am, they
would be pleased, I am sure.'
'I am sure they would,' rejoined Oliver's benefactress; 'and Mr.
Losberne has already been kind enough to promise that when you are well
enough to bear the journey, he will carry you to see them.'
'Has he, ma'am?' cried Oliver, his face brightening with pleasure. 'I
don't know what I shall do for joy when I see their kind faces once
again!'
In a short time Oliver was sufficiently recovered to undergo the
fatigue of this expedition. One morning he and Mr. Losberne set out,
accordingly, in a little carriage which belonged to Mrs. Maylie. When
they came to Chertsey Bridge, Oliver turned very pale, and uttered a
loud exclamation.
'What's the matter with the boy?' cried the doctor, as usual, all in a
bustle. 'Do you see anything--hear anything--feel anything--eh?'
'That, sir,' cried Oliver, pointing out of the carriage window. 'That
house!'
'Yes; well, what of it? Stop coachman. Pull up here,' cried the
doctor. 'What of the house, my man; eh?'
'The thieves--the house they took me to!' whispered Oliver.
'The devil it is!' cried the doctor. 'Hallo, there! let me out!'
But, before the coachman could dismount from his box, he had tumbled
out of the coach, by some means or other; and, running down to the
deserted tenement, began kicking at the door like a madman.
'Halloa?' said a little ugly hump-backed man: opening the door so
suddenly, that the doctor, from the very impetus of his last kick,
nearly fell forward into the passage. 'What's the matter here?'
'Matter!' exclaimed the other, collaring him, without a moment's
reflection. 'A good deal. Robbery is the matter.'
'There'll be Murder the matter, too,' replied the hump-backed man,
coolly, 'if you don't take your hands off. Do you hear me?'
'I hear you,' said the doctor, giving his captive a hearty shake.
'Where's--confound the fellow, what's his rascally name--Sikes; that's
it. Where's Sikes, you thief?'
The hump-backed man stared, as if in excess of amazement and
indignation; then, twisting himself, dexterously, from the doctor's
grasp, growled forth a volley of horrid oaths, and retired into the
house. Before he could shut the door, however, the doctor had passed
into the parlour, without a word of parley.
He looked anxiously round; not an article of furniture; not a vestige
of anything, animate or inanimate; not even the position of the
cupboards; answered Oliver's description!
'Now!' said the hump-backed man, who had watched him keenly, 'what do
you mean by coming into my house, in this violent way? Do you want to
rob me, or to murder me? Which is it?'
'Did you ever know a man come out to do either, in a chariot and pair,
you ridiculous old vampire?' said the irritable doctor.
'What do you want, then?' demanded the hunchback. 'Will you take
yourself off, before I do you a mischief? Curse you!'
'As soon as I think proper,' said Mr. Losberne, looking into the other
parlour; which, like the first, bore no resemblance whatever to
Oliver's account of it. 'I shall find you out, some day, my friend.'
'Will you?' sneered the ill-favoured cripple. 'If you ever want me,
I'm here. I haven't lived here mad and all alone, for five-and-twenty
years, to be scared by you. You shall pay for this; you shall pay for
this.' And so saying, the mis-shapen little demon set up a yell, and
danced upon the ground, as if wild with rage.
'Stupid enough, this,' muttered the doctor to himself; 'the boy must
have made a mistake. Here! Put that in your pocket, and shut yourself
up again.' With these words he flung the hunchback a piece of money,
and returned to the carriage.
The man followed to the chariot door, uttering the wildest imprecations
and curses all the way; but as Mr. Losberne turned to speak to the
driver, he looked into the carriage, and eyed Oliver for an instant
with a glance so sharp and fierce and at the same time so furious and
vindictive, that, waking or sleeping, he could not forget it for months
afterwards. He continued to utter the most fearful imprecations, until
the driver had resumed his seat; and when they were once more on their
way, they could see him some distance behind: beating his feet upon the
ground, and tearing his hair, in transports of real or pretended rage.
'I am an ass!' said the doctor, after a long silence. 'Did you know
that before, Oliver?'
'No, sir.'
'Then don't forget it another time.'
'An ass,' said the doctor again, after a further silence of some
minutes. 'Even if it had been the right place, and the right fellows
had been there, what could I have done, single-handed? And if I had had
assistance, I see no good that I should have done, except leading to my
own exposure, and an unavoidable statement of the manner in which I
have hushed up this business. That would have served me right, though.
I am always involving myself in some scrape or other, by acting on
impulse. It might have done me good.'
Now, the fact was that the excellent doctor had never acted upon
anything but impulse all through his life, and it was no bad compliment
to the nature of the impulses which governed him, that so far from
being involved in any peculiar troubles or misfortunes, he had the
warmest respect and esteem of all who knew him. If the truth must be
told, he was a little out of temper, for a minute or two, at being
disappointed in procuring corroborative evidence of Oliver's story on
the very first occasion on which he had a chance of obtaining any. He
soon came round again, however; and finding that Oliver's replies to
his questions, were still as straightforward and consistent, and still
delivered with as much apparent sincerity and truth, as they had ever
been, he made up his mind to attach full credence to them, from that
time forth.
As Oliver knew the name of the street in which Mr. Brownlow resided,
they were enabled to drive straight thither. When the coach turned
into it, his heart beat so violently, that he could scarcely draw his
breath.
'Now, my boy, which house is it?' inquired Mr. Losberne.
'That! That!' replied Oliver, pointing eagerly out of the window.
'The white house. Oh! make haste! Pray make haste! I feel as if I
should die: it makes me tremble so.'
'Come, come!' said the good doctor, patting him on the shoulder. 'You
will see them directly, and they will be overjoyed to find you safe and
well.'
'Oh! I hope so!' cried Oliver. 'They were so good to me; so very,
very good to me.'
The coach rolled on. It stopped. No; that was the wrong house; the
next door. It went on a few paces, and stopped again. Oliver looked up
at the windows, with tears of happy expectation coursing down his face.
Alas! the white house was empty, and there was a bill in the window.
'To Let.'
'Knock at the next door,' cried Mr. Losberne, taking Oliver's arm in
his. 'What has become of Mr. Brownlow, who used to live in the
adjoining house, do you know?'
The servant did not know; but would go and inquire. She presently
returned, and said, that Mr. Brownlow had sold off his goods, and gone
to the West Indies, six weeks before. Oliver clasped his hands, and
sank feebly backward.
'Has his housekeeper gone too?' inquired Mr. Losberne, after a moment's
pause.
'Yes, sir'; replied the servant. 'The old gentleman, the housekeeper,
and a gentleman who was a friend of Mr. Brownlow's, all went together.'
'Then turn towards home again,' said Mr. Losberne to the driver; 'and
don't stop to bait the horses, till you get out of this confounded
London!'
'The book-stall keeper, sir?' said Oliver. 'I know the way there. See
him, pray, sir! Do see him!'
'My poor boy, this is disappointment enough for one day,' said the
doctor. 'Quite enough for both of us. If we go to the book-stall
keeper's, we shall certainly find that he is dead, or has set his house
on fire, or run away. No; home again straight!' And in obedience to
the doctor's impulse, home they went.
This bitter disappointment caused Oliver much sorrow and grief, even in
the midst of his happiness; for he had pleased himself, many times
during his illness, with thinking of all that Mr. Brownlow and Mrs.
Bedwin would say to him: and what delight it would be to tell them how
many long days and nights he had passed in reflecting on what they had
done for him, and in bewailing his cruel separation from them. The hope
of eventually clearing himself with them, too, and explaining how he
had been forced away, had buoyed him up, and sustained him, under many
of his recent trials; and now, the idea that they should have gone so
far, and carried with them the belief that he was an impostor and a
robber--a belief which might remain uncontradicted to his dying
day--was almost more than he could bear.
The circumstance occasioned no alteration, however, in the behaviour of
his benefactors. After another fortnight, when the fine warm weather
had fairly begun, and every tree and flower was putting forth its young
leaves and rich blossoms, they made preparations for quitting the house
at Chertsey, for some months.
Sending the plate, which had so excited Fagin's cupidity, to the
banker's; and leaving Giles and another servant in care of the house,
they departed to a cottage at some distance in the country, and took
Oliver with them.
Who can describe the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft
tranquillity, the sickly boy felt in the balmy air, and among the green
hills and rich woods, of an inland village! Who can tell how scenes of
peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close
and noisy places, and carry their own freshness, deep into their jaded
hearts! Men who have lived in crowded, pent-up streets, through lives
of toil, and who have never wished for change; men, to whom custom has
indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick
and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks; even
they, with the hand of death upon them, have been known to yearn at
last for one short glimpse of Nature's face; and, carried far from the
scenes of their old pains and pleasures, have seemed to pass at once
into a new state of being. Crawling forth, from day to day, to some
green sunny spot, they have had such memories wakened up within them by
the sight of the sky, and hill and plain, and glistening water, that a
foretaste of heaven itself has soothed their quick decline, and they
have sunk into their tombs, as peacefully as the sun whose setting they
watched from their lonely chamber window but a few hours before, faded
from their dim and feeble sight! The memories which peaceful country
scenes call up, are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes.
Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands for the
graves of those we loved: may purify our thoughts, and bear down
before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this, there lingers,
in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of
having held such feelings long before, in some remote and distant time,
which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down
pride and worldliness beneath it.
It was a lovely spot to which they repaired. Oliver, whose days had
been spent among squalid crowds, and in the midst of noise and
brawling, seemed to enter on a new existence there. The rose and
honeysuckle clung to the cottage walls; the ivy crept round the trunks
of the trees; and the garden-flowers perfumed the air with delicious
odours. Hard by, was a little churchyard; not crowded with tall
unsightly gravestones, but full of humble mounds, covered with fresh
turf and moss: beneath which, the old people of the village lay at
rest. Oliver often wandered here; and, thinking of the wretched grave
in which his mother lay, would sometimes sit him down and sob unseen;
but, when he raised his eyes to the deep sky overhead, he would cease
to think of her as lying in the ground, and would weep for her, sadly,
but without pain.
It was a happy time. The days were peaceful and serene; the nights
brought with them neither fear nor care; no languishing in a wretched
prison, or associating with wretched men; nothing but pleasant and
happy thoughts. Every morning he went to a white-headed old gentleman,
who lived near the little church: who taught him to read better, and to
write: and who spoke so kindly, and took such pains, that Oliver could
never try enough to please him. Then, he would walk with Mrs. Maylie
and Rose, and hear them talk of books; or perhaps sit near them, in
some shady place, and listen whilst the young lady read: which he could
have done, until it grew too dark to see the letters. Then, he had his
own lesson for the next day to prepare; and at this, he would work
hard, in a little room which looked into the garden, till evening came
slowly on, when the ladies would walk out again, and he with them:
listening with such pleasure to all they said: and so happy if they
wanted a flower that he could climb to reach, or had forgotten anything
he could run to fetch: that he could never be quick enough about it.
When it became quite dark, and they returned home, the young lady would
sit down to the piano, and play some pleasant air, or sing, in a low
and gentle voice, some old song which it pleased her aunt to hear.
There would be no candles lighted at such times as these; and Oliver
would sit by one of the windows, listening to the sweet music, in a
perfect rapture.
And when Sunday came, how differently the day was spent, from any way
in which he had ever spent it yet! and how happily too; like all the
other days in that most happy time! There was the little church, in
the morning, with the green leaves fluttering at the windows: the
birds singing without: and the sweet-smelling air stealing in at the
low porch, and filling the homely building with its fragrance. The poor
people were so neat and clean, and knelt so reverently in prayer, that
it seemed a pleasure, not a tedious duty, their assembling there
together; and though the singing might be rude, it was real, and
sounded more musical (to Oliver's ears at least) than any he had ever
heard in church before. Then, there were the walks as usual, and many
calls at the clean houses of the labouring men; and at night, Oliver
read a chapter or two from the Bible, which he had been studying all
the week, and in the performance of which duty he felt more proud and
pleased, than if he had been the clergyman himself.
In the morning, Oliver would be a-foot by six o'clock, roaming the
fields, and plundering the hedges, far and wide, for nosegays of wild
flowers, with which he would return laden, home; and which it took
great care and consideration to arrange, to the best advantage, for the
embellishment of the breakfast-table. There was fresh groundsel, too,
for Miss Maylie's birds, with which Oliver, who had been studying the
subject under the able tuition of the village clerk, would decorate the
cages, in the most approved taste. When the birds were made all spruce
and smart for the day, there was usually some little commission of
charity to execute in the village; or, failing that, there was rare
cricket-playing, sometimes, on the green; or, failing that, there was
always something to do in the garden, or about the plants, to which
Oliver (who had studied this science also, under the same master, who
was a gardener by trade,) applied himself with hearty good-will, until
Miss Rose made her appearance: when there were a thousand
commendations to be bestowed on all he had done.
So three months glided away; three months which, in the life of the
most blessed and favoured of mortals, might have been unmingled
happiness, and which, in Oliver's were true felicity. With the purest
and most amiable generosity on one side; and the truest, warmest,
soul-felt gratitude on the other; it is no wonder that, by the end of
that short time, Oliver Twist had become completely domesticated with
the old lady and her niece, and that the fervent attachment of his
young and sensitive heart, was repaid by their pride in, and attachment
to, himself.
| Oliver really is sick--it isn't just the broken arm from being shot, he also caught a nasty fever from spending the night in a ditch. As he's first recovering, he spends a lot of energy trying to express his gratitude to Rose and Mrs. Maylie. He says that once he's well, he'll work for them night and day running errands to make them happy. She says that just getting well and being good will make her very happy. Aww. Oliver is sad that his old friends don't know how happy he is. Mr. Losberne says that he'll take Oliver to go see them as soon as he's up to the journey. So when Oliver's well, he and Mr. Losberne set out for Pentonville in Mrs. Maylie's carriage. On their way there, Oliver sees a house that he thinks is the one Sikes took him to back in Chapter 21. Mr. Losberne goes totally berserk: he jumps out of the carriage and starts banging on the door of the house. An ugly little man opens the door, and Mr. Losberne grabs him and asks for Sikes. The man doesn't answer about Sikes, but starts yelling at Mr. Losberne , and backs into the house--and Mr. Losberne follows. A quick look around the house, though, shows that it doesn't match up with Oliver's description of it, and the little man is insisting that he's been living there like a hermit for twenty-five years. Mr. Losberne figures Oliver made a mistake, and goes back to the carriage. The little man follows, stamping his feet and yelling curses after him. Mr. Losberne says that he's a fool--what could he have done by himself, anyway? Arrested the thieves? Taken on Bill Sikes single-handedly? When they get to Mr. Brownlow's house, they find that it's all boarded up, with a "to let" sign in the window. They ask a servant what's up, and find out that Mr. Brownlow, his housekeeper , and his friend had all set off for the West Indies together about six weeks before. Oliver is very disappointed. But a few weeks later, Mrs. Maylie and Rose close up the house outside of London and head to their country cottage. It's springtime in the country--flowers! Baby animals! Oliver loves it, and regains his health quickly. He spends a lot of time in the country churchyard, thinking about his mother, and although he's sad about her, it's not painful anymore. Everyday he goes walking with Rose and Mrs. Maylie, and likes to run errands for them, and pick flowers for them, and basically do anything he can think of for them to show how grateful he is. He's also learning to read and write from an old guy who lives nearby, and he's learning some stuff about gardening from the village clerk. He spends his evenings doing homework and listening to Rose sing and play the piano. Pretty much, Oliver is living Dickens's idea of heaven at this idyllic little cottage in the country. | summary |
Spring flew swiftly by, and summer came. If the village had been
beautiful at first it was now in the full glow and luxuriance of its
richness. The great trees, which had looked shrunken and bare in the
earlier months, had now burst into strong life and health; and
stretching forth their green arms over the thirsty ground, converted
open and naked spots into choice nooks, where was a deep and pleasant
shade from which to look upon the wide prospect, steeped in sunshine,
which lay stretched beyond. The earth had donned her mantle of
brightest green; and shed her richest perfumes abroad. It was the
prime and vigour of the year; all things were glad and flourishing.
Still, the same quiet life went on at the little cottage, and the same
cheerful serenity prevailed among its inmates. Oliver had long since
grown stout and healthy; but health or sickness made no difference in
his warm feelings of a great many people. He was still the same
gentle, attached, affectionate creature that he had been when pain and
suffering had wasted his strength, and when he was dependent for every
slight attention, and comfort on those who tended him.
One beautiful night, when they had taken a longer walk than was
customary with them: for the day had been unusually warm, and there
was a brilliant moon, and a light wind had sprung up, which was
unusually refreshing. Rose had been in high spirits, too, and they had
walked on, in merry conversation, until they had far exceeded their
ordinary bounds. Mrs. Maylie being fatigued, they returned more slowly
home. The young lady merely throwing off her simple bonnet, sat down
to the piano as usual. After running abstractedly over the keys for a
few minutes, she fell into a low and very solemn air; and as she played
it, they heard a sound as if she were weeping.
'Rose, my dear!' said the elder lady.
Rose made no reply, but played a little quicker, as though the words
had roused her from some painful thoughts.
'Rose, my love!' cried Mrs. Maylie, rising hastily, and bending over
her. 'What is this? In tears! My dear child, what distresses you?'
'Nothing, aunt; nothing,' replied the young lady. 'I don't know what
it is; I can't describe it; but I feel--'
'Not ill, my love?' interposed Mrs. Maylie.
'No, no! Oh, not ill!' replied Rose: shuddering as though some deadly
chillness were passing over her, while she spoke; 'I shall be better
presently. Close the window, pray!'
Oliver hastened to comply with her request. The young lady, making an
effort to recover her cheerfulness, strove to play some livelier tune;
but her fingers dropped powerless over the keys. Covering her face with
her hands, she sank upon a sofa, and gave vent to the tears which she
was now unable to repress.
'My child!' said the elderly lady, folding her arms about her, 'I never
saw you so before.'
'I would not alarm you if I could avoid it,' rejoined Rose; 'but indeed
I have tried very hard, and cannot help this. I fear I _am_ ill, aunt.'
She was, indeed; for, when candles were brought, they saw that in the
very short time which had elapsed since their return home, the hue of
her countenance had changed to a marble whiteness. Its expression had
lost nothing of its beauty; but it was changed; and there was an
anxious haggard look about the gentle face, which it had never worn
before. Another minute, and it was suffused with a crimson flush: and
a heavy wildness came over the soft blue eye. Again this disappeared,
like the shadow thrown by a passing cloud; and she was once more deadly
pale.
Oliver, who watched the old lady anxiously, observed that she was
alarmed by these appearances; and so in truth, was he; but seeing that
she affected to make light of them, he endeavoured to do the same, and
they so far succeeded, that when Rose was persuaded by her aunt to
retire for the night, she was in better spirits; and appeared even in
better health: assuring them that she felt certain she should rise in
the morning, quite well.
'I hope,' said Oliver, when Mrs. Maylie returned, 'that nothing is the
matter? She don't look well to-night, but--'
The old lady motioned to him not to speak; and sitting herself down in
a dark corner of the room, remained silent for some time. At length,
she said, in a trembling voice:
'I hope not, Oliver. I have been very happy with her for some years:
too happy, perhaps. It may be time that I should meet with some
misfortune; but I hope it is not this.'
'What?' inquired Oliver.
'The heavy blow,' said the old lady, 'of losing the dear girl who has
so long been my comfort and happiness.'
'Oh! God forbid!' exclaimed Oliver, hastily.
'Amen to that, my child!' said the old lady, wringing her hands.
'Surely there is no danger of anything so dreadful?' said Oliver. 'Two
hours ago, she was quite well.'
'She is very ill now,' rejoined Mrs. Maylies; 'and will be worse, I am
sure. My dear, dear Rose! Oh, what shall I do without her!'
She gave way to such great grief, that Oliver, suppressing his own
emotion, ventured to remonstrate with her; and to beg, earnestly, that,
for the sake of the dear young lady herself, she would be more calm.
'And consider, ma'am,' said Oliver, as the tears forced themselves into
his eyes, despite of his efforts to the contrary. 'Oh! consider how
young and good she is, and what pleasure and comfort she gives to all
about her. I am sure--certain--quite certain--that, for your sake, who
are so good yourself; and for her own; and for the sake of all she
makes so happy; she will not die. Heaven will never let her die so
young.'
'Hush!' said Mrs. Maylie, laying her hand on Oliver's head. 'You think
like a child, poor boy. But you teach me my duty, notwithstanding. I
had forgotten it for a moment, Oliver, but I hope I may be pardoned,
for I am old, and have seen enough of illness and death to know the
agony of separation from the objects of our love. I have seen enough,
too, to know that it is not always the youngest and best who are spared
to those that love them; but this should give us comfort in our sorrow;
for Heaven is just; and such things teach us, impressively, that there
is a brighter world than this; and that the passage to it is speedy.
God's will be done! I love her; and He knows how well!'
Oliver was surprised to see that as Mrs. Maylie said these words, she
checked her lamentations as though by one effort; and drawing herself
up as she spoke, became composed and firm. He was still more
astonished to find that this firmness lasted; and that, under all the
care and watching which ensued, Mrs. Maylie was ever ready and
collected: performing all the duties which had devolved upon her,
steadily, and, to all external appearances, even cheerfully. But he
was young, and did not know what strong minds are capable of, under
trying circumstances. How should he, when their possessors so seldom
know themselves?
An anxious night ensued. When morning came, Mrs. Maylie's predictions
were but too well verified. Rose was in the first stage of a high and
dangerous fever.
'We must be active, Oliver, and not give way to useless grief,' said
Mrs. Maylie, laying her finger on her lip, as she looked steadily into
his face; 'this letter must be sent, with all possible expedition, to
Mr. Losberne. It must be carried to the market-town: which is not more
than four miles off, by the footpath across the field: and thence
dispatched, by an express on horseback, straight to Chertsey. The
people at the inn will undertake to do this: and I can trust to you to
see it done, I know.'
Oliver could make no reply, but looked his anxiety to be gone at once.
'Here is another letter,' said Mrs. Maylie, pausing to reflect; 'but
whether to send it now, or wait until I see how Rose goes on, I
scarcely know. I would not forward it, unless I feared the worst.'
'Is it for Chertsey, too, ma'am?' inquired Oliver; impatient to execute
his commission, and holding out his trembling hand for the letter.
'No,' replied the old lady, giving it to him mechanically. Oliver
glanced at it, and saw that it was directed to Harry Maylie, Esquire,
at some great lord's house in the country; where, he could not make out.
'Shall it go, ma'am?' asked Oliver, looking up, impatiently.
'I think not,' replied Mrs. Maylie, taking it back. 'I will wait until
to-morrow.'
With these words, she gave Oliver her purse, and he started off,
without more delay, at the greatest speed he could muster.
Swiftly he ran across the fields, and down the little lanes which
sometimes divided them: now almost hidden by the high corn on either
side, and now emerging on an open field, where the mowers and haymakers
were busy at their work: nor did he stop once, save now and then, for
a few seconds, to recover breath, until he came, in a great heat, and
covered with dust, on the little market-place of the market-town.
Here he paused, and looked about for the inn. There were a white bank,
and a red brewery, and a yellow town-hall; and in one corner there was
a large house, with all the wood about it painted green: before which
was the sign of 'The George.' To this he hastened, as soon as it
caught his eye.
He spoke to a postboy who was dozing under the gateway; and who, after
hearing what he wanted, referred him to the ostler; who after hearing
all he had to say again, referred him to the landlord; who was a tall
gentleman in a blue neckcloth, a white hat, drab breeches, and boots
with tops to match, leaning against a pump by the stable-door, picking
his teeth with a silver toothpick.
This gentleman walked with much deliberation into the bar to make out
the bill: which took a long time making out: and after it was ready,
and paid, a horse had to be saddled, and a man to be dressed, which
took up ten good minutes more. Meanwhile Oliver was in such a
desperate state of impatience and anxiety, that he felt as if he could
have jumped upon the horse himself, and galloped away, full tear, to
the next stage. At length, all was ready; and the little parcel having
been handed up, with many injunctions and entreaties for its speedy
delivery, the man set spurs to his horse, and rattling over the uneven
paving of the market-place, was out of the town, and galloping along
the turnpike-road, in a couple of minutes.
As it was something to feel certain that assistance was sent for, and
that no time had been lost, Oliver hurried up the inn-yard, with a
somewhat lighter heart. He was turning out of the gateway when he
accidently stumbled against a tall man wrapped in a cloak, who was at
that moment coming out of the inn door.
'Hah!' cried the man, fixing his eyes on Oliver, and suddenly
recoiling. 'What the devil's this?'
'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Oliver; 'I was in a great hurry to get
home, and didn't see you were coming.'
'Death!' muttered the man to himself, glaring at the boy with his large
dark eyes. 'Who would have thought it! Grind him to ashes! He'd start
up from a stone coffin, to come in my way!'
'I am sorry,' stammered Oliver, confused by the strange man's wild
look. 'I hope I have not hurt you!'
'Rot you!' murmured the man, in a horrible passion; between his
clenched teeth; 'if I had only had the courage to say the word, I might
have been free of you in a night. Curses on your head, and black death
on your heart, you imp! What are you doing here?'
The man shook his fist, as he uttered these words incoherently. He
advanced towards Oliver, as if with the intention of aiming a blow at
him, but fell violently on the ground: writhing and foaming, in a fit.
Oliver gazed, for a moment, at the struggles of the madman (for such he
supposed him to be); and then darted into the house for help. Having
seen him safely carried into the hotel, he turned his face homewards,
running as fast as he could, to make up for lost time: and recalling
with a great deal of astonishment and some fear, the extraordinary
behaviour of the person from whom he had just parted.
The circumstance did not dwell in his recollection long, however: for
when he reached the cottage, there was enough to occupy his mind, and
to drive all considerations of self completely from his memory.
Rose Maylie had rapidly grown worse; before mid-night she was
delirious. A medical practitioner, who resided on the spot, was in
constant attendance upon her; and after first seeing the patient, he
had taken Mrs. Maylie aside, and pronounced her disorder to be one of a
most alarming nature. 'In fact,' he said, 'it would be little short of
a miracle, if she recovered.'
How often did Oliver start from his bed that night, and stealing out,
with noiseless footstep, to the staircase, listen for the slightest
sound from the sick chamber! How often did a tremble shake his frame,
and cold drops of terror start upon his brow, when a sudden trampling
of feet caused him to fear that something too dreadful to think of, had
even then occurred! And what had been the fervency of all the prayers
he had ever muttered, compared with those he poured forth, now, in the
agony and passion of his supplication for the life and health of the
gentle creature, who was tottering on the deep grave's verge!
Oh! the suspense, the fearful, acute suspense, of standing idly by
while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance! Oh!
the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat
violently, and the breath come thick, by the force of the images they
conjure up before it; the desperate anxiety _to be doing something_ to
relieve the pain, or lessen the danger, which we have no power to
alleviate; the sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remembrance of
our helplessness produces; what tortures can equal these; what
reflections or endeavours can, in the full tide and fever of the time,
allay them!
Morning came; and the little cottage was lonely and still. People spoke
in whispers; anxious faces appeared at the gate, from time to time;
women and children went away in tears. All the livelong day, and for
hours after it had grown dark, Oliver paced softly up and down the
garden, raising his eyes every instant to the sick chamber, and
shuddering to see the darkened window, looking as if death lay
stretched inside. Late that night, Mr. Losberne arrived. 'It is
hard,' said the good doctor, turning away as he spoke; 'so young; so
much beloved; but there is very little hope.'
Another morning. The sun shone brightly; as brightly as if it looked
upon no misery or care; and, with every leaf and flower in full bloom
about her; with life, and health, and sounds and sights of joy,
surrounding her on every side: the fair young creature lay, wasting
fast. Oliver crept away to the old churchyard, and sitting down on one
of the green mounds, wept and prayed for her, in silence.
There was such peace and beauty in the scene; so much of brightness and
mirth in the sunny landscape; such blithesome music in the songs of the
summer birds; such freedom in the rapid flight of the rook, careering
overhead; so much of life and joyousness in all; that, when the boy
raised his aching eyes, and looked about, the thought instinctively
occurred to him, that this was not a time for death; that Rose could
surely never die when humbler things were all so glad and gay; that
graves were for cold and cheerless winter: not for sunlight and
fragrance. He almost thought that shrouds were for the old and
shrunken; and that they never wrapped the young and graceful form in
their ghastly folds.
A knell from the church bell broke harshly on these youthful thoughts.
Another! Again! It was tolling for the funeral service. A group of
humble mourners entered the gate: wearing white favours; for the corpse
was young. They stood uncovered by a grave; and there was a mother--a
mother once--among the weeping train. But the sun shone brightly, and
the birds sang on.
Oliver turned homeward, thinking on the many kindnesses he had received
from the young lady, and wishing that the time could come again, that
he might never cease showing her how grateful and attached he was. He
had no cause for self-reproach on the score of neglect, or want of
thought, for he had been devoted to her service; and yet a hundred
little occasions rose up before him, on which he fancied he might have
been more zealous, and more earnest, and wished he had been. We need
be careful how we deal with those about us, when every death carries to
some small circle of survivors, thoughts of so much omitted, and so
little done--of so many things forgotten, and so many more which might
have been repaired! There is no remorse so deep as that which is
unavailing; if we would be spared its tortures, let us remember this,
in time.
When he reached home Mrs. Maylie was sitting in the little parlour.
Oliver's heart sank at sight of her; for she had never left the bedside
of her niece; and he trembled to think what change could have driven
her away. He learnt that she had fallen into a deep sleep, from which
she would waken, either to recovery and life, or to bid them farewell,
and die.
They sat, listening, and afraid to speak, for hours. The untasted meal
was removed, with looks which showed that their thoughts were
elsewhere, they watched the sun as he sank lower and lower, and, at
length, cast over sky and earth those brilliant hues which herald his
departure. Their quick ears caught the sound of an approaching
footstep. They both involuntarily darted to the door, as Mr. Losberne
entered.
'What of Rose?' cried the old lady. 'Tell me at once! I can bear it;
anything but suspense! Oh, tell me! in the name of Heaven!'
'You must compose yourself,' said the doctor supporting her. 'Be calm,
my dear ma'am, pray.'
'Let me go, in God's name! My dear child! She is dead! She is dying!'
'No!' cried the doctor, passionately. 'As He is good and merciful, she
will live to bless us all, for years to come.'
The lady fell upon her knees, and tried to fold her hands together; but
the energy which had supported her so long, fled up to Heaven with her
first thanksgiving; and she sank into the friendly arms which were
extended to receive her.
| Spring is over, and now it's summer. Ah, summer. One day, after a particularly long walk, Rose gets really emotional while playing the piano. She tries to hide her tears from Mrs. Maylie and from Oliver. Obviously she's not sad , and she denies that she's sick. But she is. She's very, very sick. She has some kind of a fever that causes wild fluctuations in temperature, and just in the few hours since they got back from her walk, her skin has gotten flushed and she's getting sicker by the minute. Mrs. Maylie realizes how serious it is , and, after putting Rose to bed, starts crying. Oliver comforts her as best he can, telling her that young and beloved people never die. Mrs. Maylie knows better, but decides that she needs to suck it up and do what she has to do. Which is to call a doctor, obviously. And since apparently there are no doctors in the entire village, they send for Mr. Losberne, their old friend from Chertsey. Oliver's the one chosen to go to the village to mail the letter summoning Mr. Losberne. He's eager to be off, but Mrs. Maylie is hesitating about whether to send a second letter, or not --it's addressed to "Harry Maylie Esquire" at some lord's house. We don't know who that is, and Oliver doesn't really care--he just wants to take off for the town as soon as possible because he's worried about Rose. Mrs. Maylie decides against sending the letter, and Oliver's off like a shot for town. They didn't have overnight mail like we have now, so what Oliver has to do is to hire some guy at the town inn to ride a horse to London and hand deliver the message. On his way out of the inn, Oliver stumbles into a tall man wearing a cloak. He apologizes automatically , but the man overreacts: "Death! Who'd have thought it! Grind him to ashes! he'd start up from a marble coffin to come in my way!" . Oliver backs away slowly, and assumes that the guy is totally crazy. The fact that the man then falls on the ground, foaming at the mouth and grinding his teeth, doesn't really help his case. Oliver runs to get help from the inn, and then heads home. There's too much going on at home for him to remember to tell Mrs. Maylie about the crazy guy. The local "medical practitioner" is there, and thinks that it's unlikely that Rose will recover. Mr. Losberne arrives the next morning, and goes straight in to take care of Rose. Two days go by, and the narrator reflects about how weird it is that it's summer, and everything is blossoming and in the fullness of life, and yet Rose is dying. Life is always juxtaposed with death, he tells us. Mrs. Maylie finally comes out of Rose's room, where she'd been sitting pretty constantly for the past couple of days. She says that Rose has fallen asleep, and will either wake up once before dying, or will wake up healthy. We're not sure how that works medically, but hey. Guess what? She wakes up healthy. They're all very relieved. | summary |
It was almost too much happiness to bear. Oliver felt stunned and
stupefied by the unexpected intelligence; he could not weep, or speak,
or rest. He had scarcely the power of understanding anything that had
passed, until, after a long ramble in the quiet evening air, a burst of
tears came to his relief, and he seemed to awaken, all at once, to a
full sense of the joyful change that had occurred, and the almost
insupportable load of anguish which had been taken from his breast.
The night was fast closing in, when he returned homeward: laden with
flowers which he had culled, with peculiar care, for the adornment of
the sick chamber. As he walked briskly along the road, he heard behind
him, the noise of some vehicle, approaching at a furious pace. Looking
round, he saw that it was a post-chaise, driven at great speed; and as
the horses were galloping, and the road was narrow, he stood leaning
against a gate until it should have passed him.
As it dashed on, Oliver caught a glimpse of a man in a white nightcap,
whose face seemed familiar to him, although his view was so brief that
he could not identify the person. In another second or two, the
nightcap was thrust out of the chaise-window, and a stentorian voice
bellowed to the driver to stop: which he did, as soon as he could pull
up his horses. Then, the nightcap once again appeared: and the same
voice called Oliver by his name.
'Here!' cried the voice. 'Oliver, what's the news? Miss Rose! Master
O-li-ver!'
'Is it you, Giles?' cried Oliver, running up to the chaise-door.
Giles popped out his nightcap again, preparatory to making some reply,
when he was suddenly pulled back by a young gentleman who occupied the
other corner of the chaise, and who eagerly demanded what was the news.
'In a word!' cried the gentleman, 'Better or worse?'
'Better--much better!' replied Oliver, hastily.
'Thank Heaven!' exclaimed the gentleman. 'You are sure?'
'Quite, sir,' replied Oliver. 'The change took place only a few hours
ago; and Mr. Losberne says, that all danger is at an end.'
The gentleman said not another word, but, opening the chaise-door,
leaped out, and taking Oliver hurriedly by the arm, led him aside.
'You are quite certain? There is no possibility of any mistake on your
part, my boy, is there?' demanded the gentleman in a tremulous voice.
'Do not deceive me, by awakening hopes that are not to be fulfilled.'
'I would not for the world, sir,' replied Oliver. 'Indeed you may
believe me. Mr. Losberne's words were, that she would live to bless us
all for many years to come. I heard him say so.'
The tears stood in Oliver's eyes as he recalled the scene which was the
beginning of so much happiness; and the gentleman turned his face away,
and remained silent, for some minutes. Oliver thought he heard him
sob, more than once; but he feared to interrupt him by any fresh
remark--for he could well guess what his feelings were--and so stood
apart, feigning to be occupied with his nosegay.
All this time, Mr. Giles, with the white nightcap on, had been sitting
on the steps of the chaise, supporting an elbow on each knee, and
wiping his eyes with a blue cotton pocket-handkerchief dotted with
white spots. That the honest fellow had not been feigning emotion, was
abundantly demonstrated by the very red eyes with which he regarded the
young gentleman, when he turned round and addressed him.
'I think you had better go on to my mother's in the chaise, Giles,'
said he. 'I would rather walk slowly on, so as to gain a little time
before I see her. You can say I am coming.'
'I beg your pardon, Mr. Harry,' said Giles: giving a final polish to
his ruffled countenance with the handkerchief; 'but if you would leave
the postboy to say that, I should be very much obliged to you. It
wouldn't be proper for the maids to see me in this state, sir; I should
never have any more authority with them if they did.'
'Well,' rejoined Harry Maylie, smiling, 'you can do as you like. Let
him go on with the luggage, if you wish it, and do you follow with us.
Only first exchange that nightcap for some more appropriate covering,
or we shall be taken for madmen.'
Mr. Giles, reminded of his unbecoming costume, snatched off and
pocketed his nightcap; and substituted a hat, of grave and sober shape,
which he took out of the chaise. This done, the postboy drove off;
Giles, Mr. Maylie, and Oliver, followed at their leisure.
As they walked along, Oliver glanced from time to time with much
interest and curiosity at the new comer. He seemed about
five-and-twenty years of age, and was of the middle height; his
countenance was frank and handsome; and his demeanor easy and
prepossessing. Notwithstanding the difference between youth and age,
he bore so strong a likeness to the old lady, that Oliver would have
had no great difficulty in imagining their relationship, if he had not
already spoken of her as his mother.
Mrs. Maylie was anxiously waiting to receive her son when he reached
the cottage. The meeting did not take place without great emotion on
both sides.
'Mother!' whispered the young man; 'why did you not write before?'
'I did,' replied Mrs. Maylie; 'but, on reflection, I determined to keep
back the letter until I had heard Mr. Losberne's opinion.'
'But why,' said the young man, 'why run the chance of that occurring
which so nearly happened? If Rose had--I cannot utter that word
now--if this illness had terminated differently, how could you ever
have forgiven yourself! How could I ever have know happiness again!'
'If that _had_ been the case, Harry,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'I fear your
happiness would have been effectually blighted, and that your arrival
here, a day sooner or a day later, would have been of very, very little
import.'
'And who can wonder if it be so, mother?' rejoined the young man; 'or
why should I say, _if_?--It is--it is--you know it, mother--you must
know it!'
'I know that she deserves the best and purest love the heart of man can
offer,' said Mrs. Maylie; 'I know that the devotion and affection of
her nature require no ordinary return, but one that shall be deep and
lasting. If I did not feel this, and know, besides, that a changed
behaviour in one she loved would break her heart, I should not feel my
task so difficult of performance, or have to encounter so many
struggles in my own bosom, when I take what seems to me to be the
strict line of duty.'
'This is unkind, mother,' said Harry. 'Do you still suppose that I am
a boy ignorant of my own mind, and mistaking the impulses of my own
soul?'
'I think, my dear son,' returned Mrs. Maylie, laying her hand upon his
shoulder, 'that youth has many generous impulses which do not last; and
that among them are some, which, being gratified, become only the more
fleeting. Above all, I think' said the lady, fixing her eyes on her
son's face, 'that if an enthusiastic, ardent, and ambitious man marry a
wife on whose name there is a stain, which, though it originate in no
fault of hers, may be visited by cold and sordid people upon her, and
upon his children also: and, in exact proportion to his success in the
world, be cast in his teeth, and made the subject of sneers against
him: he may, no matter how generous and good his nature, one day
repent of the connection he formed in early life. And she may have the
pain of knowing that he does so.'
'Mother,' said the young man, impatiently, 'he would be a selfish
brute, unworthy alike of the name of man and of the woman you describe,
who acted thus.'
'You think so now, Harry,' replied his mother.
'And ever will!' said the young man. 'The mental agony I have
suffered, during the last two days, wrings from me the avowal to you of
a passion which, as you well know, is not one of yesterday, nor one I
have lightly formed. On Rose, sweet, gentle girl! my heart is set, as
firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman. I have no thought, no
view, no hope in life, beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great
stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to
the wind. Mother, think better of this, and of me, and do not
disregard the happiness of which you seem to think so little.'
'Harry,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'it is because I think so much of warm and
sensitive hearts, that I would spare them from being wounded. But we
have said enough, and more than enough, on this matter, just now.'
'Let it rest with Rose, then,' interposed Harry. 'You will not press
these overstrained opinions of yours, so far, as to throw any obstacle
in my way?'
'I will not,' rejoined Mrs. Maylie; 'but I would have you consider--'
'I _have_ considered!' was the impatient reply; 'Mother, I have
considered, years and years. I have considered, ever since I have been
capable of serious reflection. My feelings remain unchanged, as they
ever will; and why should I suffer the pain of a delay in giving them
vent, which can be productive of no earthly good? No! Before I leave
this place, Rose shall hear me.'
'She shall,' said Mrs. Maylie.
'There is something in your manner, which would almost imply that she
will hear me coldly, mother,' said the young man.
'Not coldly,' rejoined the old lady; 'far from it.'
'How then?' urged the young man. 'She has formed no other attachment?'
'No, indeed,' replied his mother; 'you have, or I mistake, too strong a
hold on her affections already. What I would say,' resumed the old
lady, stopping her son as he was about to speak, 'is this. Before you
stake your all on this chance; before you suffer yourself to be carried
to the highest point of hope; reflect for a few moments, my dear child,
on Rose's history, and consider what effect the knowledge of her
doubtful birth may have on her decision: devoted as she is to us, with
all the intensity of her noble mind, and with that perfect sacrifice of
self which, in all matters, great or trifling, has always been her
characteristic.'
'What do you mean?'
'That I leave you to discover,' replied Mrs. Maylie. 'I must go back
to her. God bless you!'
'I shall see you again to-night?' said the young man, eagerly.
'By and by,' replied the lady; 'when I leave Rose.'
'You will tell her I am here?' said Harry.
'Of course,' replied Mrs. Maylie.
'And say how anxious I have been, and how much I have suffered, and how
I long to see her. You will not refuse to do this, mother?'
'No,' said the old lady; 'I will tell her all.' And pressing her son's
hand, affectionately, she hastened from the room.
Mr. Losberne and Oliver had remained at another end of the apartment
while this hurried conversation was proceeding. The former now held
out his hand to Harry Maylie; and hearty salutations were exchanged
between them. The doctor then communicated, in reply to multifarious
questions from his young friend, a precise account of his patient's
situation; which was quite as consolatory and full of promise, as
Oliver's statement had encouraged him to hope; and to the whole of
which, Mr. Giles, who affected to be busy about the luggage, listened
with greedy ears.
'Have you shot anything particular, lately, Giles?' inquired the
doctor, when he had concluded.
'Nothing particular, sir,' replied Mr. Giles, colouring up to the eyes.
'Nor catching any thieves, nor identifying any house-breakers?' said
the doctor.
'None at all, sir,' replied Mr. Giles, with much gravity.
'Well,' said the doctor, 'I am sorry to hear it, because you do that
sort of thing admirably. Pray, how is Brittles?'
'The boy is very well, sir,' said Mr. Giles, recovering his usual tone
of patronage; 'and sends his respectful duty, sir.'
'That's well,' said the doctor. 'Seeing you here, reminds me, Mr.
Giles, that on the day before that on which I was called away so
hurriedly, I executed, at the request of your good mistress, a small
commission in your favour. Just step into this corner a moment, will
you?'
Mr. Giles walked into the corner with much importance, and some wonder,
and was honoured with a short whispering conference with the doctor, on
the termination of which, he made a great many bows, and retired with
steps of unusual stateliness. The subject matter of this conference
was not disclosed in the parlour, but the kitchen was speedily
enlightened concerning it; for Mr. Giles walked straight thither, and
having called for a mug of ale, announced, with an air of majesty,
which was highly effective, that it had pleased his mistress, in
consideration of his gallant behaviour on the occasion of that
attempted robbery, to deposit, in the local savings-bank, the sum of
five-and-twenty pounds, for his sole use and benefit. At this, the two
women-servants lifted up their hands and eyes, and supposed that Mr.
Giles, pulling out his shirt-frill, replied, 'No, no'; and that if they
observed that he was at all haughty to his inferiors, he would thank
them to tell him so. And then he made a great many other remarks, no
less illustrative of his humility, which were received with equal
favour and applause, and were, withal, as original and as much to the
purpose, as the remarks of great men commonly are.
Above stairs, the remainder of the evening passed cheerfully away; for
the doctor was in high spirits; and however fatigued or thoughtful
Harry Maylie might have been at first, he was not proof against the
worthy gentleman's good humour, which displayed itself in a great
variety of sallies and professional recollections, and an abundance of
small jokes, which struck Oliver as being the drollest things he had
ever heard, and caused him to laugh proportionately; to the evident
satisfaction of the doctor, who laughed immoderately at himself, and
made Harry laugh almost as heartily, by the very force of sympathy.
So, they were as pleasant a party as, under the circumstances, they
could well have been; and it was late before they retired, with light
and thankful hearts, to take that rest of which, after the doubt and
suspense they had recently undergone, they stood much in need.
Oliver rose next morning, in better heart, and went about his usual
occupations, with more hope and pleasure than he had known for many
days. The birds were once more hung out, to sing, in their old places;
and the sweetest wild flowers that could be found, were once more
gathered to gladden Rose with their beauty. The melancholy which had
seemed to the sad eyes of the anxious boy to hang, for days past, over
every object, beautiful as all were, was dispelled by magic. The dew
seemed to sparkle more brightly on the green leaves; the air to rustle
among them with a sweeter music; and the sky itself to look more blue
and bright. Such is the influence which the condition of our own
thoughts, exercise, even over the appearance of external objects. Men
who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and
gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from
their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and
need a clearer vision.
It is worthy of remark, and Oliver did not fail to note it at the time,
that his morning expeditions were no longer made alone. Harry Maylie,
after the very first morning when he met Oliver coming laden home, was
seized with such a passion for flowers, and displayed such a taste in
their arrangement, as left his young companion far behind. If Oliver
were behindhand in these respects, he knew where the best were to be
found; and morning after morning they scoured the country together, and
brought home the fairest that blossomed. The window of the young
lady's chamber was opened now; for she loved to feel the rich summer
air stream in, and revive her with its freshness; but there always
stood in water, just inside the lattice, one particular little bunch,
which was made up with great care, every morning. Oliver could not
help noticing that the withered flowers were never thrown away,
although the little vase was regularly replenished; nor, could he help
observing, that whenever the doctor came into the garden, he invariably
cast his eyes up to that particular corner, and nodded his head most
expressively, as he set forth on his morning's walk. Pending these
observations, the days were flying by; and Rose was rapidly recovering.
Nor did Oliver's time hang heavy on his hands, although the young lady
had not yet left her chamber, and there were no evening walks, save now
and then, for a short distance, with Mrs. Maylie. He applied himself,
with redoubled assiduity, to the instructions of the white-headed old
gentleman, and laboured so hard that his quick progress surprised even
himself. It was while he was engaged in this pursuit, that he was
greatly startled and distressed by a most unexpected occurrence.
The little room in which he was accustomed to sit, when busy at his
books, was on the ground-floor, at the back of the house. It was quite
a cottage-room, with a lattice-window: around which were clusters of
jessamine and honeysuckle, that crept over the casement, and filled the
place with their delicious perfume. It looked into a garden, whence a
wicket-gate opened into a small paddock; all beyond, was fine
meadow-land and wood. There was no other dwelling near, in that
direction; and the prospect it commanded was very extensive.
One beautiful evening, when the first shades of twilight were beginning
to settle upon the earth, Oliver sat at this window, intent upon his
books. He had been poring over them for some time; and, as the day had
been uncommonly sultry, and he had exerted himself a great deal, it is
no disparagement to the authors, whoever they may have been, to say,
that gradually and by slow degrees, he fell asleep.
There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it
holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things
about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure. So far as an
overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter
inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called
sleep, this is it; and yet, we have a consciousness of all that is
going on about us, and, if we dream at such a time, words which are
really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate
themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and
imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost
matter of impossibility to separate the two. Nor is this, the most
striking phenomenon incidental to such a state. It is an undoubted
fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead,
yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before
us, will be influenced and materially influenced, by the _mere silent
presence_ of some external object; which may not have been near us when
we closed our eyes: and of whose vicinity we have had no waking
consciousness.
Oliver knew, perfectly well, that he was in his own little room; that
his books were lying on the table before him; that the sweet air was
stirring among the creeping plants outside. And yet he was asleep.
Suddenly, the scene changed; the air became close and confined; and he
thought, with a glow of terror, that he was in the Jew's house again.
There sat the hideous old man, in his accustomed corner, pointing at
him, and whispering to another man, with his face averted, who sat
beside him.
'Hush, my dear!' he thought he heard the Jew say; 'it is he, sure
enough. Come away.'
'He!' the other man seemed to answer; 'could I mistake him, think you?
If a crowd of ghosts were to put themselves into his exact shape, and
he stood amongst them, there is something that would tell me how to
point him out. If you buried him fifty feet deep, and took me across
his grave, I fancy I should know, if there wasn't a mark above it, that
he lay buried there?'
The man seemed to say this, with such dreadful hatred, that Oliver
awoke with the fear, and started up.
Good Heaven! what was that, which sent the blood tingling to his
heart, and deprived him of his voice, and of power to move!
There--there--at the window--close before him--so close, that he could
have almost touched him before he started back: with his eyes peering
into the room, and meeting his: there stood the Jew! And beside him,
white with rage or fear, or both, were the scowling features of the man
who had accosted him in the inn-yard.
It was but an instant, a glance, a flash, before his eyes; and they
were gone. But they had recognised him, and he them; and their look
was as firmly impressed upon his memory, as if it had been deeply
carved in stone, and set before him from his birth. He stood transfixed
for a moment; then, leaping from the window into the garden, called
loudly for help.
| Oliver can hardly believe that Rose will get better, so he goes for a walk and cries about it in private. He comes back with an armful of flowers for Rose's room just as night is falling. A post-chaise passes him on the road at full gallop. The passengers see him, and call for the driver to stop. One of the passengers is Mr. Giles, who immediately asks Oliver how Rose is doing. Oliver says that she's better, and the second man jumps out of the carriage and asks Oliver if he's quite sure about it. He seems to care an awful lot. Oliver's sure. The gentleman turns away and sobs with relief. Mr. Giles does the same. They all walk back to the house together . Oliver notices that the young gentleman is about twenty-five years old, and looks a lot like Mrs. Maylie, so Oliver assumes he's her son. When they arrive at the house, Harry asks his mother why she didn't write sooner, because if Rose had died and he hadn't been there, he would have been miserable forever. Then they get in a debate about whether or not he should marry Rose--he wants to, and says he's been in love with her since forever . But Mrs. Maylie says that Rose will say no, because she has a blight on her name and she would be afraid of dragging him down socially. Harry says he doesn't care; his heart is set on Rose. And he says he'll talk to Rose about it before he leaves again. Mrs. Maylie says fine, go ahead and talk to her, but she doesn't think Rose will say yes--Rose wouldn't want to keep Harry back professionally or socially, so even though she loves him, Mrs. Maylie predicts that she'll say no. Mrs. Maylie leaves to go check on Rose, and Mr. Losberne comes over to say hi to Harry and to Mr. Giles. Mr. Losberne tells Mr. Giles something in a whisper, which Mr. Giles goes down to the kitchen to repeat to all of the servants, with great importance. Because of his "gallantry" on the night of the attempted robbery, Mrs. Maylie has given him a gift of twenty-five pounds . The other servants are appropriately impressed. Meanwhile, Mr. Losberne, Harry, and Oliver are chatting away upstairs, and don't go to bed until late. Oliver wakes up in a better mood, and, because he can't go on long walks without Rose, he spends more time on his schoolwork. He's sitting in his little study at the back of the house with the window open, and he falls asleep over his work . He has a bad dream that he's back in Fagin's house, and shut up there again. He half wakes up because he feels like he's being watched. And sure enough, he is--by Fagin, and the man who had gotten all crazy at the inn. They're standing by the open window and staring at him. Oliver is understandably creeped out. Just as they realize that Oliver sees them, the second guy was saying that he'd recognize Oliver anywhere. Oliver sees all this in a flash, and then runs, calling for help from the rest of the house. | summary |
When the inmates of the house, attracted by Oliver's cries, hurried to
the spot from which they proceeded, they found him, pale and agitated,
pointing in the direction of the meadows behind the house, and scarcely
able to articulate the words, 'The Jew! the Jew!'
Mr. Giles was at a loss to comprehend what this outcry meant; but Harry
Maylie, whose perceptions were something quicker, and who had heard
Oliver's history from his mother, understood it at once.
'What direction did he take?' he asked, catching up a heavy stick which
was standing in a corner.
'That,' replied Oliver, pointing out the course the man had taken; 'I
missed them in an instant.'
'Then, they are in the ditch!' said Harry. 'Follow! And keep as near
me, as you can.' So saying, he sprang over the hedge, and darted off
with a speed which rendered it matter of exceeding difficulty for the
others to keep near him.
Giles followed as well as he could; and Oliver followed too; and in the
course of a minute or two, Mr. Losberne, who had been out walking, and
just then returned, tumbled over the hedge after them, and picking
himself up with more agility than he could have been supposed to
possess, struck into the same course at no contemptible speed, shouting
all the while, most prodigiously, to know what was the matter.
On they all went; nor stopped they once to breathe, until the leader,
striking off into an angle of the field indicated by Oliver, began to
search, narrowly, the ditch and hedge adjoining; which afforded time
for the remainder of the party to come up; and for Oliver to
communicate to Mr. Losberne the circumstances that had led to so
vigorous a pursuit.
The search was all in vain. There were not even the traces of recent
footsteps, to be seen. They stood now, on the summit of a little hill,
commanding the open fields in every direction for three or four miles.
There was the village in the hollow on the left; but, in order to gain
that, after pursuing the track Oliver had pointed out, the men must
have made a circuit of open ground, which it was impossible they could
have accomplished in so short a time. A thick wood skirted the
meadow-land in another direction; but they could not have gained that
covert for the same reason.
'It must have been a dream, Oliver,' said Harry Maylie.
'Oh no, indeed, sir,' replied Oliver, shuddering at the very
recollection of the old wretch's countenance; 'I saw him too plainly
for that. I saw them both, as plainly as I see you now.'
'Who was the other?' inquired Harry and Mr. Losberne, together.
'The very same man I told you of, who came so suddenly upon me at the
inn,' said Oliver. 'We had our eyes fixed full upon each other; and I
could swear to him.'
'They took this way?' demanded Harry: 'are you sure?'
'As I am that the men were at the window,' replied Oliver, pointing
down, as he spoke, to the hedge which divided the cottage-garden from
the meadow. 'The tall man leaped over, just there; and the Jew,
running a few paces to the right, crept through that gap.'
The two gentlemen watched Oliver's earnest face, as he spoke, and
looking from him to each other, seemed to feel satisfied of the
accuracy of what he said. Still, in no direction were there any
appearances of the trampling of men in hurried flight. The grass was
long; but it was trodden down nowhere, save where their own feet had
crushed it. The sides and brinks of the ditches were of damp clay; but
in no one place could they discern the print of men's shoes, or the
slightest mark which would indicate that any feet had pressed the
ground for hours before.
'This is strange!' said Harry.
'Strange?' echoed the doctor. 'Blathers and Duff, themselves, could
make nothing of it.'
Notwithstanding the evidently useless nature of their search, they did
not desist until the coming on of night rendered its further
prosecution hopeless; and even then, they gave it up with reluctance.
Giles was dispatched to the different ale-houses in the village,
furnished with the best description Oliver could give of the appearance
and dress of the strangers. Of these, the Jew was, at all events,
sufficiently remarkable to be remembered, supposing he had been seen
drinking, or loitering about; but Giles returned without any
intelligence, calculated to dispel or lessen the mystery.
On the next day, fresh search was made, and the inquiries renewed; but
with no better success. On the day following, Oliver and Mr. Maylie
repaired to the market-town, in the hope of seeing or hearing something
of the men there; but this effort was equally fruitless. After a few
days, the affair began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when
wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.
Meanwhile, Rose was rapidly recovering. She had left her room: was
able to go out; and mixing once more with the family, carried joy into
the hearts of all.
But, although this happy change had a visible effect on the little
circle; and although cheerful voices and merry laughter were once more
heard in the cottage; there was at times, an unwonted restraint upon
some there: even upon Rose herself: which Oliver could not fail to
remark. Mrs. Maylie and her son were often closeted together for a
long time; and more than once Rose appeared with traces of tears upon
her face. After Mr. Losberne had fixed a day for his departure to
Chertsey, these symptoms increased; and it became evident that
something was in progress which affected the peace of the young lady,
and of somebody else besides.
At length, one morning, when Rose was alone in the breakfast-parlour,
Harry Maylie entered; and, with some hesitation, begged permission to
speak with her for a few moments.
'A few--a very few--will suffice, Rose,' said the young man, drawing
his chair towards her. 'What I shall have to say, has already
presented itself to your mind; the most cherished hopes of my heart are
not unknown to you, though from my lips you have not heard them stated.'
Rose had been very pale from the moment of his entrance; but that might
have been the effect of her recent illness. She merely bowed; and
bending over some plants that stood near, waited in silence for him to
proceed.
'I--I--ought to have left here, before,' said Harry.
'You should, indeed,' replied Rose. 'Forgive me for saying so, but I
wish you had.'
'I was brought here, by the most dreadful and agonising of all
apprehensions,' said the young man; 'the fear of losing the one dear
being on whom my every wish and hope are fixed. You had been dying;
trembling between earth and heaven. We know that when the young, the
beautiful, and good, are visited with sickness, their pure spirits
insensibly turn towards their bright home of lasting rest; we know,
Heaven help us! that the best and fairest of our kind, too often fade
in blooming.'
There were tears in the eyes of the gentle girl, as these words were
spoken; and when one fell upon the flower over which she bent, and
glistened brightly in its cup, making it more beautiful, it seemed as
though the outpouring of her fresh young heart, claimed kindred
naturally, with the loveliest things in nature.
'A creature,' continued the young man, passionately, 'a creature as
fair and innocent of guile as one of God's own angels, fluttered
between life and death. Oh! who could hope, when the distant world to
which she was akin, half opened to her view, that she would return to
the sorrow and calamity of this! Rose, Rose, to know that you were
passing away like some soft shadow, which a light from above, casts
upon the earth; to have no hope that you would be spared to those who
linger here; hardly to know a reason why you should be; to feel that
you belonged to that bright sphere whither so many of the fairest and
the best have winged their early flight; and yet to pray, amid all
these consolations, that you might be restored to those who loved
you--these were distractions almost too great to bear. They were mine,
by day and night; and with them, came such a rushing torrent of fears,
and apprehensions, and selfish regrets, lest you should die, and never
know how devotedly I loved you, as almost bore down sense and reason in
its course. You recovered. Day by day, and almost hour by hour, some
drop of health came back, and mingling with the spent and feeble stream
of life which circulated languidly within you, swelled it again to a
high and rushing tide. I have watched you change almost from death, to
life, with eyes that turned blind with their eagerness and deep
affection. Do not tell me that you wish I had lost this; for it has
softened my heart to all mankind.'
'I did not mean that,' said Rose, weeping; 'I only wish you had left
here, that you might have turned to high and noble pursuits again; to
pursuits well worthy of you.'
'There is no pursuit more worthy of me: more worthy of the highest
nature that exists: than the struggle to win such a heart as yours,'
said the young man, taking her hand. 'Rose, my own dear Rose! For
years--for years--I have loved you; hoping to win my way to fame, and
then come proudly home and tell you it had been pursued only for you to
share; thinking, in my daydreams, how I would remind you, in that happy
moment, of the many silent tokens I had given of a boy's attachment,
and claim your hand, as in redemption of some old mute contract that
had been sealed between us! That time has not arrived; but here, with
not fame won, and no young vision realised, I offer you the heart so
long your own, and stake my all upon the words with which you greet the
offer.'
'Your behaviour has ever been kind and noble.' said Rose, mastering the
emotions by which she was agitated. 'As you believe that I am not
insensible or ungrateful, so hear my answer.'
'It is, that I may endeavour to deserve you; it is, dear Rose?'
'It is,' replied Rose, 'that you must endeavour to forget me; not as
your old and dearly-attached companion, for that would wound me deeply;
but, as the object of your love. Look into the world; think how many
hearts you would be proud to gain, are there. Confide some other
passion to me, if you will; I will be the truest, warmest, and most
faithful friend you have.'
There was a pause, during which, Rose, who had covered her face with
one hand, gave free vent to her tears. Harry still retained the other.
'And your reasons, Rose,' he said, at length, in a low voice; 'your
reasons for this decision?'
'You have a right to know them,' rejoined Rose. 'You can say nothing
to alter my resolution. It is a duty that I must perform. I owe it,
alike to others, and to myself.'
'To yourself?'
'Yes, Harry. I owe it to myself, that I, a friendless, portionless,
girl, with a blight upon my name, should not give your friends reason
to suspect that I had sordidly yielded to your first passion, and
fastened myself, a clog, on all your hopes and projects. I owe it to
you and yours, to prevent you from opposing, in the warmth of your
generous nature, this great obstacle to your progress in the world.'
'If your inclinations chime with your sense of duty--' Harry began.
'They do not,' replied Rose, colouring deeply.
'Then you return my love?' said Harry. 'Say but that, dear Rose; say
but that; and soften the bitterness of this hard disappointment!'
'If I could have done so, without doing heavy wrong to him I loved,'
rejoined Rose, 'I could have--'
'Have received this declaration very differently?' said Harry. 'Do not
conceal that from me, at least, Rose.'
'I could,' said Rose. 'Stay!' she added, disengaging her hand, 'why
should we prolong this painful interview? Most painful to me, and yet
productive of lasting happiness, notwithstanding; for it _will_ be
happiness to know that I once held the high place in your regard which
I now occupy, and every triumph you achieve in life will animate me
with new fortitude and firmness. Farewell, Harry! As we have met
to-day, we meet no more; but in other relations than those in which
this conversation have placed us, we may be long and happily entwined;
and may every blessing that the prayers of a true and earnest heart can
call down from the source of all truth and sincerity, cheer and prosper
you!'
'Another word, Rose,' said Harry. 'Your reason in your own words.
From your own lips, let me hear it!'
'The prospect before you,' answered Rose, firmly, 'is a brilliant one.
All the honours to which great talents and powerful connections can
help men in public life, are in store for you. But those connections
are proud; and I will neither mingle with such as may hold in scorn the
mother who gave me life; nor bring disgrace or failure on the son of
her who has so well supplied that mother's place. In a word,' said the
young lady, turning away, as her temporary firmness forsook her, 'there
is a stain upon my name, which the world visits on innocent heads. I
will carry it into no blood but my own; and the reproach shall rest
alone on me.'
'One word more, Rose. Dearest Rose! one more!' cried Harry, throwing
himself before her. 'If I had been less--less fortunate, the world
would call it--if some obscure and peaceful life had been my
destiny--if I had been poor, sick, helpless--would you have turned from
me then? Or has my probable advancement to riches and honour, given
this scruple birth?'
'Do not press me to reply,' answered Rose. 'The question does not
arise, and never will. It is unfair, almost unkind, to urge it.'
'If your answer be what I almost dare to hope it is,' retorted Harry,
'it will shed a gleam of happiness upon my lonely way, and light the
path before me. It is not an idle thing to do so much, by the
utterance of a few brief words, for one who loves you beyond all else.
Oh, Rose: in the name of my ardent and enduring attachment; in the name
of all I have suffered for you, and all you doom me to undergo; answer
me this one question!'
'Then, if your lot had been differently cast,' rejoined Rose; 'if you
had been even a little, but not so far, above me; if I could have been
a help and comfort to you in any humble scene of peace and retirement,
and not a blot and drawback in ambitious and distinguished crowds; I
should have been spared this trial. I have every reason to be happy,
very happy, now; but then, Harry, I own I should have been happier.'
Busy recollections of old hopes, cherished as a girl, long ago, crowded
into the mind of Rose, while making this avowal; but they brought tears
with them, as old hopes will when they come back withered; and they
relieved her.
'I cannot help this weakness, and it makes my purpose stronger,' said
Rose, extending her hand. 'I must leave you now, indeed.'
'I ask one promise,' said Harry. 'Once, and only once more,--say
within a year, but it may be much sooner,--I may speak to you again on
this subject, for the last time.'
'Not to press me to alter my right determination,' replied Rose, with a
melancholy smile; 'it will be useless.'
'No,' said Harry; 'to hear you repeat it, if you will--finally repeat
it! I will lay at your feet, whatever of station of fortune I may
possess; and if you still adhere to your present resolution, will not
seek, by word or act, to change it.'
'Then let it be so,' rejoined Rose; 'it is but one pang the more, and
by that time I may be enabled to bear it better.'
She extended her hand again. But the young man caught her to his
bosom; and imprinting one kiss on her beautiful forehead, hurried from
the room.
| Harry realizes immediately what must have happened , and grabs a heavy stick and runs out of the house to pursue the intruders. Oliver and Mr. Giles follow, and Mr. Losberne does as well once he realizes what's going down. They aren't able to find even the tracks of the two men, though. Oliver insists that he wasn't dreaming, and they believe him. They keep looking until it's dark outside, and the next day they look some more, and ask around town whether anyone's seen two men matching the description offered by Oliver. Still no luck. Meanwhile, Rose has been recovering nicely from her fever, but occasionally looks like she's been crying. Finally Harry manages to have a private conversation with her. Harry tells her she's an angel, and beautiful, and lots of other lovely things, and that he wants to marry her. She says he should forget all about her, because she doesn't want to be an "obstacle" to his "progress in the world." Harry manages to get her to admit that she loves him, and that it's just her sense of duty that keeps her from accepting him. He presses his point for a while, and finally gets her to agree that within the next year, he'll ask her again, and see whether or not her answer is still the same. | summary |
'And so you are resolved to be my travelling companion this morning;
eh?' said the doctor, as Harry Maylie joined him and Oliver at the
breakfast-table. 'Why, you are not in the same mind or intention two
half-hours together!'
'You will tell me a different tale one of these days,' said Harry,
colouring without any perceptible reason.
'I hope I may have good cause to do so,' replied Mr. Losberne; 'though
I confess I don't think I shall. But yesterday morning you had made up
your mind, in a great hurry, to stay here, and to accompany your
mother, like a dutiful son, to the sea-side. Before noon, you announce
that you are going to do me the honour of accompanying me as far as I
go, on your road to London. And at night, you urge me, with great
mystery, to start before the ladies are stirring; the consequence of
which is, that young Oliver here is pinned down to his breakfast when
he ought to be ranging the meadows after botanical phenomena of all
kinds. Too bad, isn't it, Oliver?'
'I should have been very sorry not to have been at home when you and
Mr. Maylie went away, sir,' rejoined Oliver.
'That's a fine fellow,' said the doctor; 'you shall come and see me
when you return. But, to speak seriously, Harry; has any communication
from the great nobs produced this sudden anxiety on your part to be
gone?'
'The great nobs,' replied Harry, 'under which designation, I presume,
you include my most stately uncle, have not communicated with me at
all, since I have been here; nor, at this time of the year, is it
likely that anything would occur to render necessary my immediate
attendance among them.'
'Well,' said the doctor, 'you are a queer fellow. But of course they
will get you into parliament at the election before Christmas, and
these sudden shiftings and changes are no bad preparation for political
life. There's something in that. Good training is always desirable,
whether the race be for place, cup, or sweepstakes.'
Harry Maylie looked as if he could have followed up this short dialogue
by one or two remarks that would have staggered the doctor not a
little; but he contented himself with saying, 'We shall see,' and
pursued the subject no farther. The post-chaise drove up to the door
shortly afterwards; and Giles coming in for the luggage, the good
doctor bustled out, to see it packed.
'Oliver,' said Harry Maylie, in a low voice, 'let me speak a word with
you.'
Oliver walked into the window-recess to which Mr. Maylie beckoned him;
much surprised at the mixture of sadness and boisterous spirits, which
his whole behaviour displayed.
'You can write well now?' said Harry, laying his hand upon his arm.
'I hope so, sir,' replied Oliver.
'I shall not be at home again, perhaps for some time; I wish you would
write to me--say once a fort-night: every alternate Monday: to the
General Post Office in London. Will you?'
'Oh! certainly, sir; I shall be proud to do it,' exclaimed Oliver,
greatly delighted with the commission.
'I should like to know how--how my mother and Miss Maylie are,' said
the young man; 'and you can fill up a sheet by telling me what walks
you take, and what you talk about, and whether she--they, I mean--seem
happy and quite well. You understand me?'
'Oh! quite, sir, quite,' replied Oliver.
'I would rather you did not mention it to them,' said Harry, hurrying
over his words; 'because it might make my mother anxious to write to me
oftener, and it is a trouble and worry to her. Let it be a secret
between you and me; and mind you tell me everything! I depend upon
you.'
Oliver, quite elated and honoured by a sense of his importance,
faithfully promised to be secret and explicit in his communications.
Mr. Maylie took leave of him, with many assurances of his regard and
protection.
The doctor was in the chaise; Giles (who, it had been arranged, should
be left behind) held the door open in his hand; and the women-servants
were in the garden, looking on. Harry cast one slight glance at the
latticed window, and jumped into the carriage.
'Drive on!' he cried, 'hard, fast, full gallop! Nothing short of
flying will keep pace with me, to-day.'
'Halloa!' cried the doctor, letting down the front glass in a great
hurry, and shouting to the postillion; 'something very short of flying
will keep pace with _me_. Do you hear?'
Jingling and clattering, till distance rendered its noise inaudible,
and its rapid progress only perceptible to the eye, the vehicle wound
its way along the road, almost hidden in a cloud of dust: now wholly
disappearing, and now becoming visible again, as intervening objects,
or the intricacies of the way, permitted. It was not until even the
dusty cloud was no longer to be seen, that the gazers dispersed.
And there was one looker-on, who remained with eyes fixed upon the spot
where the carriage had disappeared, long after it was many miles away;
for, behind the white curtain which had shrouded her from view when
Harry raised his eyes towards the window, sat Rose herself.
'He seems in high spirits and happy,' she said, at length. 'I feared
for a time he might be otherwise. I was mistaken. I am very, very
glad.'
Tears are signs of gladness as well as grief; but those which coursed
down Rose's face, as she sat pensively at the window, still gazing in
the same direction, seemed to tell more of sorrow than of joy.
| Harry leaves the cottage with Mr. Losberne, who comments on the fact that Harry's changed his mind about whether to stay or to go several times. Harry says that he's not hurrying away because any of the "great nobs" have written to him, but because he just has to. For some reason. He doesn't really give a definite reason. Harry asks Oliver to write to him regularly to give him all the updates on the family --and not to tell Mrs. Maylie or Rose that he's doing so. Oliver's happy to show off his newly acquired ability to write, so he agrees. Mr. Losberne and Harry leave . Rose watches them go from her window, and says that she's pleased that Harry seems to have left in a good mood, but sighs and looks sad anyway. | summary |
Mr. Bumble sat in the workhouse parlour, with his eyes moodily fixed on
the cheerless grate, whence, as it was summer time, no brighter gleam
proceeded, than the reflection of certain sickly rays of the sun, which
were sent back from its cold and shining surface. A paper fly-cage
dangled from the ceiling, to which he occasionally raised his eyes in
gloomy thought; and, as the heedless insects hovered round the gaudy
net-work, Mr. Bumble would heave a deep sigh, while a more gloomy
shadow overspread his countenance. Mr. Bumble was meditating; it might
be that the insects brought to mind, some painful passage in his own
past life.
Nor was Mr. Bumble's gloom the only thing calculated to awaken a
pleasing melancholy in the bosom of a spectator. There were not wanting
other appearances, and those closely connected with his own person,
which announced that a great change had taken place in the position of
his affairs. The laced coat, and the cocked hat; where were they? He
still wore knee-breeches, and dark cotton stockings on his nether
limbs; but they were not _the_ breeches. The coat was wide-skirted;
and in that respect like _the_ coat, but, oh how different! The mighty
cocked hat was replaced by a modest round one. Mr. Bumble was no
longer a beadle.
There are some promotions in life, which, independent of the more
substantial rewards they offer, require peculiar value and dignity from
the coats and waistcoats connected with them. A field-marshal has his
uniform; a bishop his silk apron; a counsellor his silk gown; a beadle
his cocked hat. Strip the bishop of his apron, or the beadle of his
hat and lace; what are they? Men. Mere men. Dignity, and even
holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than
some people imagine.
Mr. Bumble had married Mrs. Corney, and was master of the workhouse.
Another beadle had come into power. On him the cocked hat, gold-laced
coat, and staff, had all three descended.
'And to-morrow two months it was done!' said Mr. Bumble, with a sigh.
'It seems a age.'
Mr. Bumble might have meant that he had concentrated a whole existence
of happiness into the short space of eight weeks; but the sigh--there
was a vast deal of meaning in the sigh.
'I sold myself,' said Mr. Bumble, pursuing the same train of relection,
'for six teaspoons, a pair of sugar-tongs, and a milk-pot; with a small
quantity of second-hand furniture, and twenty pound in money. I went
very reasonable. Cheap, dirt cheap!'
'Cheap!' cried a shrill voice in Mr. Bumble's ear: 'you would have been
dear at any price; and dear enough I paid for you, Lord above knows
that!'
Mr. Bumble turned, and encountered the face of his interesting consort,
who, imperfectly comprehending the few words she had overheard of his
complaint, had hazarded the foregoing remark at a venture.
'Mrs. Bumble, ma'am!' said Mr. Bumble, with a sentimental sternness.
'Well!' cried the lady.
'Have the goodness to look at me,' said Mr. Bumble, fixing his eyes
upon her. (If she stands such a eye as that,' said Mr. Bumble to
himself, 'she can stand anything. It is a eye I never knew to fail
with paupers. If it fails with her, my power is gone.')
Whether an exceedingly small expansion of eye be sufficient to quell
paupers, who, being lightly fed, are in no very high condition; or
whether the late Mrs. Corney was particularly proof against eagle
glances; are matters of opinion. The matter of fact, is, that the
matron was in no way overpowered by Mr. Bumble's scowl, but, on the
contrary, treated it with great disdain, and even raised a laugh
thereat, which sounded as though it were genuine.
On hearing this most unexpected sound, Mr. Bumble looked, first
incredulous, and afterwards amazed. He then relapsed into his former
state; nor did he rouse himself until his attention was again awakened
by the voice of his partner.
'Are you going to sit snoring there, all day?' inquired Mrs. Bumble.
'I am going to sit here, as long as I think proper, ma'am,' rejoined
Mr. Bumble; 'and although I was _not_ snoring, I shall snore, gape,
sneeze, laugh, or cry, as the humour strikes me; such being my
prerogative.'
'_Your_ prerogative!' sneered Mrs. Bumble, with ineffable contempt.
'I said the word, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble. 'The prerogative of a man
is to command.'
'And what's the prerogative of a woman, in the name of Goodness?' cried
the relict of Mr. Corney deceased.
'To obey, ma'am,' thundered Mr. Bumble. 'Your late unfortunate husband
should have taught it you; and then, perhaps, he might have been alive
now. I wish he was, poor man!'
Mrs. Bumble, seeing at a glance, that the decisive moment had now
arrived, and that a blow struck for the mastership on one side or
other, must necessarily be final and conclusive, no sooner heard this
allusion to the dead and gone, than she dropped into a chair, and with
a loud scream that Mr. Bumble was a hard-hearted brute, fell into a
paroxysm of tears.
But, tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble's soul;
his heart was waterproof. Like washable beaver hats that improve with
rain, his nerves were rendered stouter and more vigorous, by showers of
tears, which, being tokens of weakness, and so far tacit admissions of
his own power, pleased and exalted him. He eyed his good lady with
looks of great satisfaction, and begged, in an encouraging manner, that
she should cry her hardest: the exercise being looked upon, by the
faculty, as strongly conducive to health.
'It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and
softens down the temper,' said Mr. Bumble. 'So cry away.'
As he discharged himself of this pleasantry, Mr. Bumble took his hat
from a peg, and putting it on, rather rakishly, on one side, as a man
might, who felt he had asserted his superiority in a becoming manner,
thrust his hands into his pockets, and sauntered towards the door, with
much ease and waggishness depicted in his whole appearance.
Now, Mrs. Corney that was, had tried the tears, because they were less
troublesome than a manual assault; but, she was quite prepared to make
trial of the latter mode of proceeding, as Mr. Bumble was not long in
discovering.
The first proof he experienced of the fact, was conveyed in a hollow
sound, immediately succeeded by the sudden flying off of his hat to the
opposite end of the room. This preliminary proceeding laying bare his
head, the expert lady, clasping him tightly round the throat with one
hand, inflicted a shower of blows (dealt with singular vigour and
dexterity) upon it with the other. This done, she created a little
variety by scratching his face, and tearing his hair; and, having, by
this time, inflicted as much punishment as she deemed necessary for the
offence, she pushed him over a chair, which was luckily well situated
for the purpose: and defied him to talk about his prerogative again,
if he dared.
'Get up!' said Mrs. Bumble, in a voice of command. 'And take yourself
away from here, unless you want me to do something desperate.'
Mr. Bumble rose with a very rueful countenance: wondering much what
something desperate might be. Picking up his hat, he looked towards
the door.
'Are you going?' demanded Mrs. Bumble.
'Certainly, my dear, certainly,' rejoined Mr. Bumble, making a quicker
motion towards the door. 'I didn't intend to--I'm going, my dear! You
are so very violent, that really I--'
At this instant, Mrs. Bumble stepped hastily forward to replace the
carpet, which had been kicked up in the scuffle. Mr. Bumble
immediately darted out of the room, without bestowing another thought
on his unfinished sentence: leaving the late Mrs. Corney in full
possession of the field.
Mr. Bumble was fairly taken by surprise, and fairly beaten. He had a
decided propensity for bullying: derived no inconsiderable pleasure
from the exercise of petty cruelty; and, consequently, was (it is
needless to say) a coward. This is by no means a disparagement to his
character; for many official personages, who are held in high respect
and admiration, are the victims of similar infirmities. The remark is
made, indeed, rather in his favour than otherwise, and with a view of
impressing the reader with a just sense of his qualifications for
office.
But, the measure of his degradation was not yet full. After making a
tour of the house, and thinking, for the first time, that the poor-laws
really were too hard on people; and that men who ran away from their
wives, leaving them chargeable to the parish, ought, in justice to be
visited with no punishment at all, but rather rewarded as meritorious
individuals who had suffered much; Mr. Bumble came to a room where some
of the female paupers were usually employed in washing the parish
linen: when the sound of voices in conversation, now proceeded.
'Hem!' said Mr. Bumble, summoning up all his native dignity. 'These
women at least shall continue to respect the prerogative. Hallo! hallo
there! What do you mean by this noise, you hussies?'
With these words, Mr. Bumble opened the door, and walked in with a very
fierce and angry manner: which was at once exchanged for a most
humiliated and cowering air, as his eyes unexpectedly rested on the
form of his lady wife.
'My dear,' said Mr. Bumble, 'I didn't know you were here.'
'Didn't know I was here!' repeated Mrs. Bumble. 'What do _you_ do
here?'
'I thought they were talking rather too much to be doing their work
properly, my dear,' replied Mr. Bumble: glancing distractedly at a
couple of old women at the wash-tub, who were comparing notes of
admiration at the workhouse-master's humility.
'_You_ thought they were talking too much?' said Mrs. Bumble. 'What
business is it of yours?'
'Why, my dear--' urged Mr. Bumble submissively.
'What business is it of yours?' demanded Mrs. Bumble, again.
'It's very true, you're matron here, my dear,' submitted Mr. Bumble;
'but I thought you mightn't be in the way just then.'
'I'll tell you what, Mr. Bumble,' returned his lady. 'We don't want
any of your interference. You're a great deal too fond of poking your
nose into things that don't concern you, making everybody in the house
laugh, the moment your back is turned, and making yourself look like a
fool every hour in the day. Be off; come!'
Mr. Bumble, seeing with excruciating feelings, the delight of the two
old paupers, who were tittering together most rapturously, hesitated
for an instant. Mrs. Bumble, whose patience brooked no delay, caught
up a bowl of soap-suds, and motioning him towards the door, ordered him
instantly to depart, on pain of receiving the contents upon his portly
person.
What could Mr. Bumble do? He looked dejectedly round, and slunk away;
and, as he reached the door, the titterings of the paupers broke into a
shrill chuckle of irrepressible delight. It wanted but this. He was
degraded in their eyes; he had lost caste and station before the very
paupers; he had fallen from all the height and pomp of beadleship, to
the lowest depth of the most snubbed hen-peckery.
'All in two months!' said Mr. Bumble, filled with dismal thoughts.
'Two months! No more than two months ago, I was not only my own
master, but everybody else's, so far as the porochial workhouse was
concerned, and now!--'
It was too much. Mr. Bumble boxed the ears of the boy who opened the
gate for him (for he had reached the portal in his reverie); and
walked, distractedly, into the street.
He walked up one street, and down another, until exercise had abated
the first passion of his grief; and then the revulsion of feeling made
him thirsty. He passed a great many public-houses; but, at length
paused before one in a by-way, whose parlour, as he gathered from a
hasty peep over the blinds, was deserted, save by one solitary
customer. It began to rain, heavily, at the moment. This determined
him. Mr. Bumble stepped in; and ordering something to drink, as he
passed the bar, entered the apartment into which he had looked from the
street.
The man who was seated there, was tall and dark, and wore a large
cloak. He had the air of a stranger; and seemed, by a certain
haggardness in his look, as well as by the dusty soils on his dress, to
have travelled some distance. He eyed Bumble askance, as he entered,
but scarcely deigned to nod his head in acknowledgment of his
salutation.
Mr. Bumble had quite dignity enough for two; supposing even that the
stranger had been more familiar: so he drank his gin-and-water in
silence, and read the paper with great show of pomp and circumstance.
It so happened, however: as it will happen very often, when men fall
into company under such circumstances: that Mr. Bumble felt, every now
and then, a powerful inducement, which he could not resist, to steal a
look at the stranger: and that whenever he did so, he withdrew his
eyes, in some confusion, to find that the stranger was at that moment
stealing a look at him. Mr. Bumble's awkwardness was enhanced by the
very remarkable expression of the stranger's eye, which was keen and
bright, but shadowed by a scowl of distrust and suspicion, unlike
anything he had ever observed before, and repulsive to behold.
When they had encountered each other's glance several times in this
way, the stranger, in a harsh, deep voice, broke silence.
'Were you looking for me,' he said, 'when you peered in at the window?'
'Not that I am aware of, unless you're Mr.--' Here Mr. Bumble stopped
short; for he was curious to know the stranger's name, and thought in
his impatience, he might supply the blank.
'I see you were not,' said the stranger; an expression of quiet sarcasm
playing about his mouth; 'or you have known my name. You don't know
it. I would recommend you not to ask for it.'
'I meant no harm, young man,' observed Mr. Bumble, majestically.
'And have done none,' said the stranger.
Another silence succeeded this short dialogue: which was again broken
by the stranger.
'I have seen you before, I think?' said he. 'You were differently
dressed at that time, and I only passed you in the street, but I should
know you again. You were beadle here, once; were you not?'
'I was,' said Mr. Bumble, in some surprise; 'porochial beadle.'
'Just so,' rejoined the other, nodding his head. 'It was in that
character I saw you. What are you now?'
'Master of the workhouse,' rejoined Mr. Bumble, slowly and
impressively, to check any undue familiarity the stranger might
otherwise assume. 'Master of the workhouse, young man!'
'You have the same eye to your own interest, that you always had, I
doubt not?' resumed the stranger, looking keenly into Mr. Bumble's
eyes, as he raised them in astonishment at the question.
'Don't scruple to answer freely, man. I know you pretty well, you see.'
'I suppose, a married man,' replied Mr. Bumble, shading his eyes with
his hand, and surveying the stranger, from head to foot, in evident
perplexity, 'is not more averse to turning an honest penny when he can,
than a single one. Porochial officers are not so well paid that they
can afford to refuse any little extra fee, when it comes to them in a
civil and proper manner.'
The stranger smiled, and nodded his head again: as much to say, he had
not mistaken his man; then rang the bell.
'Fill this glass again,' he said, handing Mr. Bumble's empty tumbler to
the landlord. 'Let it be strong and hot. You like it so, I suppose?'
'Not too strong,' replied Mr. Bumble, with a delicate cough.
'You understand what that means, landlord!' said the stranger, drily.
The host smiled, disappeared, and shortly afterwards returned with a
steaming jorum: of which, the first gulp brought the water into Mr.
Bumble's eyes.
'Now listen to me,' said the stranger, after closing the door and
window. 'I came down to this place, to-day, to find you out; and, by
one of those chances which the devil throws in the way of his friends
sometimes, you walked into the very room I was sitting in, while you
were uppermost in my mind. I want some information from you. I don't
ask you to give it for nothing, slight as it is. Put up that, to begin
with.'
As he spoke, he pushed a couple of sovereigns across the table to his
companion, carefully, as though unwilling that the chinking of money
should be heard without. When Mr. Bumble had scrupulously examined the
coins, to see that they were genuine, and had put them up, with much
satisfaction, in his waistcoat-pocket, he went on:
'Carry your memory back--let me see--twelve years, last winter.'
'It's a long time,' said Mr. Bumble. 'Very good. I've done it.'
'The scene, the workhouse.'
'Good!'
'And the time, night.'
'Yes.'
'And the place, the crazy hole, wherever it was, in which miserable
drabs brought forth the life and health so often denied to
themselves--gave birth to puling children for the parish to rear; and
hid their shame, rot 'em in the grave!'
'The lying-in room, I suppose?' said Mr. Bumble, not quite following
the stranger's excited description.
'Yes,' said the stranger. 'A boy was born there.'
'A many boys,' observed Mr. Bumble, shaking his head, despondingly.
'A murrain on the young devils!' cried the stranger; 'I speak of one; a
meek-looking, pale-faced boy, who was apprenticed down here, to a
coffin-maker--I wish he had made his coffin, and screwed his body in
it--and who afterwards ran away to London, as it was supposed.
'Why, you mean Oliver! Young Twist!' said Mr. Bumble; 'I remember him,
of course. There wasn't a obstinater young rascal--'
'It's not of him I want to hear; I've heard enough of him,' said the
stranger, stopping Mr. Bumble in the outset of a tirade on the subject
of poor Oliver's vices. 'It's of a woman; the hag that nursed his
mother. Where is she?'
'Where is she?' said Mr. Bumble, whom the gin-and-water had rendered
facetious. 'It would be hard to tell. There's no midwifery there,
whichever place she's gone to; so I suppose she's out of employment,
anyway.'
'What do you mean?' demanded the stranger, sternly.
'That she died last winter,' rejoined Mr. Bumble.
The man looked fixedly at him when he had given this information, and
although he did not withdraw his eyes for some time afterwards, his
gaze gradually became vacant and abstracted, and he seemed lost in
thought. For some time, he appeared doubtful whether he ought to be
relieved or disappointed by the intelligence; but at length he breathed
more freely; and withdrawing his eyes, observed that it was no great
matter. With that he rose, as if to depart.
But Mr. Bumble was cunning enough; and he at once saw that an
opportunity was opened, for the lucrative disposal of some secret in
the possession of his better half. He well remembered the night of old
Sally's death, which the occurrences of that day had given him good
reason to recollect, as the occasion on which he had proposed to Mrs.
Corney; and although that lady had never confided to him the disclosure
of which she had been the solitary witness, he had heard enough to know
that it related to something that had occurred in the old woman's
attendance, as workhouse nurse, upon the young mother of Oliver Twist.
Hastily calling this circumstance to mind, he informed the stranger,
with an air of mystery, that one woman had been closeted with the old
harridan shortly before she died; and that she could, as he had reason
to believe, throw some light on the subject of his inquiry.
'How can I find her?' said the stranger, thrown off his guard; and
plainly showing that all his fears (whatever they were) were aroused
afresh by the intelligence.
'Only through me,' rejoined Mr. Bumble.
'When?' cried the stranger, hastily.
'To-morrow,' rejoined Bumble.
'At nine in the evening,' said the stranger, producing a scrap of
paper, and writing down upon it, an obscure address by the water-side,
in characters that betrayed his agitation; 'at nine in the evening,
bring her to me there. I needn't tell you to be secret. It's your
interest.'
With these words, he led the way to the door, after stopping to pay for
the liquor that had been drunk. Shortly remarking that their roads
were different, he departed, without more ceremony than an emphatic
repetition of the hour of appointment for the following night.
On glancing at the address, the parochial functionary observed that it
contained no name. The stranger had not gone far, so he made after him
to ask it.
'What do you want?' cried the man, turning quickly round, as Bumble
touched him on the arm. 'Following me?'
'Only to ask a question,' said the other, pointing to the scrap of
paper. 'What name am I to ask for?'
'Monks!' rejoined the man; and strode hastily, away.
| Mr. Bumble is sitting in the workhouse parlor, being moody. He's no longer the beadle--he's now the master of the workhouse, because he married Mrs. Corney, who was the mistress of the workhouse. He sighs to himself about it--he's clearly unhappy--and Mrs. Corney walks in and hears him. Mr. Bumble gets in some trouble with the new Mrs. Bumble. They have a spat, and she tries crying to get him to back down. Tears don't work, since Mr. Bumble actually kind of likes making people cry , and so instead, she smacks him around and throws things at him. That has more the desired effect--Mr. Bumble is a big coward, and runs away in defeat. Shortly after their scuffle, Mr. Bumble is feeling the need to lord over someone, and the paupers of the workhouse are a convenient target. Unfortunately, he goes into the workhouse to yell at the paupers doing the laundry, and finds his wife there. She humiliates him in front of the paupers, and he runs away in shame to a nearby pub. While having his drink there, Mr. Bumble notices a stranger who seems to be staring at him. The stranger recognizes Mr. Bumble as the man who used to be the beadle, and asks if he remembers anything about a specific child who was born in the workhouse and ran away to London. Of course he means Oliver, and Mr. Bumble realizes it, too. The stranger wants to know about the old woman who nursed Oliver's mother and helped when Oliver was born. Mr. Bumble admits that that woman is dead, but that someone had been there when she died to hear a confession. The stranger is eager to meet with that person, and Mr. Bumble agrees to bring the person to meet him the next day at nine in the evening at a rather dodgy house by the river. At the very end of the chapter, as he is scurrying away, the stranger says that his name is "MONKS." | summary |
It was a dull, close, overcast summer evening. The clouds, which had
been threatening all day, spread out in a dense and sluggish mass of
vapour, already yielded large drops of rain, and seemed to presage a
violent thunder-storm, when Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, turning out of the
main street of the town, directed their course towards a scattered
little colony of ruinous houses, distant from it some mile and a-half,
or thereabouts, and erected on a low unwholesome swamp, bordering upon
the river.
They were both wrapped in old and shabby outer garments, which might,
perhaps, serve the double purpose of protecting their persons from the
rain, and sheltering them from observation. The husband carried a
lantern, from which, however, no light yet shone; and trudged on, a few
paces in front, as though--the way being dirty--to give his wife the
benefit of treading in his heavy footprints. They went on, in profound
silence; every now and then, Mr. Bumble relaxed his pace, and turned
his head as if to make sure that his helpmate was following; then,
discovering that she was close at his heels, he mended his rate of
walking, and proceeded, at a considerable increase of speed, towards
their place of destination.
This was far from being a place of doubtful character; for it had long
been known as the residence of none but low ruffians, who, under
various pretences of living by their labour, subsisted chiefly on
plunder and crime. It was a collection of mere hovels: some, hastily
built with loose bricks: others, of old worm-eaten ship-timber: jumbled
together without any attempt at order or arrangement, and planted, for
the most part, within a few feet of the river's bank. A few leaky
boats drawn up on the mud, and made fast to the dwarf wall which
skirted it: and here and there an oar or coil of rope: appeared, at
first, to indicate that the inhabitants of these miserable cottages
pursued some avocation on the river; but a glance at the shattered and
useless condition of the articles thus displayed, would have led a
passer-by, without much difficulty, to the conjecture that they were
disposed there, rather for the preservation of appearances, than with
any view to their being actually employed.
In the heart of this cluster of huts; and skirting the river, which its
upper stories overhung; stood a large building, formerly used as a
manufactory of some kind. It had, in its day, probably furnished
employment to the inhabitants of the surrounding tenements. But it had
long since gone to ruin. The rat, the worm, and the action of the
damp, had weakened and rotted the piles on which it stood; and a
considerable portion of the building had already sunk down into the
water; while the remainder, tottering and bending over the dark stream,
seemed to wait a favourable opportunity of following its old companion,
and involving itself in the same fate.
It was before this ruinous building that the worthy couple paused, as
the first peal of distant thunder reverberated in the air, and the rain
commenced pouring violently down.
'The place should be somewhere here,' said Bumble, consulting a scrap
of paper he held in his hand.
'Halloa there!' cried a voice from above.
Following the sound, Mr. Bumble raised his head and descried a man
looking out of a door, breast-high, on the second story.
'Stand still, a minute,' cried the voice; 'I'll be with you directly.'
With which the head disappeared, and the door closed.
'Is that the man?' asked Mr. Bumble's good lady.
Mr. Bumble nodded in the affirmative.
'Then, mind what I told you,' said the matron: 'and be careful to say
as little as you can, or you'll betray us at once.'
Mr. Bumble, who had eyed the building with very rueful looks, was
apparently about to express some doubts relative to the advisability of
proceeding any further with the enterprise just then, when he was
prevented by the appearance of Monks: who opened a small door, near
which they stood, and beckoned them inwards.
'Come in!' he cried impatiently, stamping his foot upon the ground.
'Don't keep me here!'
The woman, who had hesitated at first, walked boldly in, without any
other invitation. Mr. Bumble, who was ashamed or afraid to lag behind,
followed: obviously very ill at ease and with scarcely any of that
remarkable dignity which was usually his chief characteristic.
'What the devil made you stand lingering there, in the wet?' said
Monks, turning round, and addressing Bumble, after he had bolted the
door behind them.
'We--we were only cooling ourselves,' stammered Bumble, looking
apprehensively about him.
'Cooling yourselves!' retorted Monks. 'Not all the rain that ever
fell, or ever will fall, will put as much of hell's fire out, as a man
can carry about with him. You won't cool yourself so easily; don't
think it!'
With this agreeable speech, Monks turned short upon the matron, and
bent his gaze upon her, till even she, who was not easily cowed, was
fain to withdraw her eyes, and turn them towards the ground.
'This is the woman, is it?' demanded Monks.
'Hem! That is the woman,' replied Mr. Bumble, mindful of his wife's
caution.
'You think women never can keep secrets, I suppose?' said the matron,
interposing, and returning, as she spoke, the searching look of Monks.
'I know they will always keep _one_ till it's found out,' said Monks.
'And what may that be?' asked the matron.
'The loss of their own good name,' replied Monks. 'So, by the same
rule, if a woman's a party to a secret that might hang or transport
her, I'm not afraid of her telling it to anybody; not I! Do you
understand, mistress?'
'No,' rejoined the matron, slightly colouring as she spoke.
'Of course you don't!' said Monks. 'How should you?'
Bestowing something half-way between a smile and a frown upon his two
companions, and again beckoning them to follow him, the man hastened
across the apartment, which was of considerable extent, but low in the
roof. He was preparing to ascend a steep staircase, or rather ladder,
leading to another floor of warehouses above: when a bright flash of
lightning streamed down the aperture, and a peal of thunder followed,
which shook the crazy building to its centre.
'Hear it!' he cried, shrinking back. 'Hear it! Rolling and crashing
on as if it echoed through a thousand caverns where the devils were
hiding from it. I hate the sound!'
He remained silent for a few moments; and then, removing his hands
suddenly from his face, showed, to the unspeakable discomposure of Mr.
Bumble, that it was much distorted and discoloured.
'These fits come over me, now and then,' said Monks, observing his
alarm; 'and thunder sometimes brings them on. Don't mind me now; it's
all over for this once.'
Thus speaking, he led the way up the ladder; and hastily closing the
window-shutter of the room into which it led, lowered a lantern which
hung at the end of a rope and pulley passed through one of the heavy
beams in the ceiling: and which cast a dim light upon an old table and
three chairs that were placed beneath it.
'Now,' said Monks, when they had all three seated themselves, 'the
sooner we come to our business, the better for all. The woman know
what it is, does she?'
The question was addressed to Bumble; but his wife anticipated the
reply, by intimating that she was perfectly acquainted with it.
'He is right in saying that you were with this hag the night she died;
and that she told you something--'
'About the mother of the boy you named,' replied the matron
interrupting him. 'Yes.'
'The first question is, of what nature was her communication?' said
Monks.
'That's the second,' observed the woman with much deliberation. 'The
first is, what may the communication be worth?'
'Who the devil can tell that, without knowing of what kind it is?'
asked Monks.
'Nobody better than you, I am persuaded,' answered Mrs. Bumble: who did
not want for spirit, as her yoke-fellow could abundantly testify.
'Humph!' said Monks significantly, and with a look of eager inquiry;
'there may be money's worth to get, eh?'
'Perhaps there may,' was the composed reply.
'Something that was taken from her,' said Monks. 'Something that she
wore. Something that--'
'You had better bid,' interrupted Mrs. Bumble. 'I have heard enough,
already, to assure me that you are the man I ought to talk to.'
Mr. Bumble, who had not yet been admitted by his better half into any
greater share of the secret than he had originally possessed, listened
to this dialogue with outstretched neck and distended eyes: which he
directed towards his wife and Monks, by turns, in undisguised
astonishment; increased, if possible, when the latter sternly demanded,
what sum was required for the disclosure.
'What's it worth to you?' asked the woman, as collectedly as before.
'It may be nothing; it may be twenty pounds,' replied Monks. 'Speak
out, and let me know which.'
'Add five pounds to the sum you have named; give me five-and-twenty
pounds in gold,' said the woman; 'and I'll tell you all I know. Not
before.'
'Five-and-twenty pounds!' exclaimed Monks, drawing back.
'I spoke as plainly as I could,' replied Mrs. Bumble. 'It's not a
large sum, either.'
'Not a large sum for a paltry secret, that may be nothing when it's
told!' cried Monks impatiently; 'and which has been lying dead for
twelve years past or more!'
'Such matters keep well, and, like good wine, often double their value
in course of time,' answered the matron, still preserving the resolute
indifference she had assumed. 'As to lying dead, there are those who
will lie dead for twelve thousand years to come, or twelve million, for
anything you or I know, who will tell strange tales at last!'
'What if I pay it for nothing?' asked Monks, hesitating.
'You can easily take it away again,' replied the matron. 'I am but a
woman; alone here; and unprotected.'
'Not alone, my dear, nor unprotected, neither,' submitted Mr. Bumble,
in a voice tremulous with fear: '_I_ am here, my dear. And besides,'
said Mr. Bumble, his teeth chattering as he spoke, 'Mr. Monks is too
much of a gentleman to attempt any violence on porochial persons. Mr.
Monks is aware that I am not a young man, my dear, and also that I am a
little run to seed, as I may say; bu he has heerd: I say I have no
doubt Mr. Monks has heerd, my dear: that I am a very determined
officer, with very uncommon strength, if I'm once roused. I only want
a little rousing; that's all.'
As Mr. Bumble spoke, he made a melancholy feint of grasping his lantern
with fierce determination; and plainly showed, by the alarmed
expression of every feature, that he _did_ want a little rousing, and
not a little, prior to making any very warlike demonstration: unless,
indeed, against paupers, or other person or persons trained down for
the purpose.
'You are a fool,' said Mrs. Bumble, in reply; 'and had better hold your
tongue.'
'He had better have cut it out, before he came, if he can't speak in a
lower tone,' said Monks, grimly. 'So! He's your husband, eh?'
'He my husband!' tittered the matron, parrying the question.
'I thought as much, when you came in,' rejoined Monks, marking the
angry glance which the lady darted at her spouse as she spoke. 'So
much the better; I have less hesitation in dealing with two people,
when I find that there's only one will between them. I'm in earnest.
See here!'
He thrust his hand into a side-pocket; and producing a canvas bag, told
out twenty-five sovereigns on the table, and pushed them over to the
woman.
'Now,' he said, 'gather them up; and when this cursed peal of thunder,
which I feel is coming up to break over the house-top, is gone, let's
hear your story.'
The thunder, which seemed in fact much nearer, and to shiver and break
almost over their heads, having subsided, Monks, raising his face from
the table, bent forward to listen to what the woman should say. The
faces of the three nearly touched, as the two men leant over the small
table in their eagerness to hear, and the woman also leant forward to
render her whisper audible. The sickly rays of the suspended lantern
falling directly upon them, aggravated the paleness and anxiety of
their countenances: which, encircled by the deepest gloom and darkness,
looked ghastly in the extreme.
'When this woman, that we called old Sally, died,' the matron began,
'she and I were alone.'
'Was there no one by?' asked Monks, in the same hollow whisper; 'No
sick wretch or idiot in some other bed? No one who could hear, and
might, by possibility, understand?'
'Not a soul,' replied the woman; 'we were alone. _I_ stood alone
beside the body when death came over it.'
'Good,' said Monks, regarding her attentively. 'Go on.'
'She spoke of a young creature,' resumed the matron, 'who had brought a
child into the world some years before; not merely in the same room,
but in the same bed, in which she then lay dying.'
'Ay?' said Monks, with quivering lip, and glancing over his shoulder,
'Blood! How things come about!'
'The child was the one you named to him last night,' said the matron,
nodding carelessly towards her husband; 'the mother this nurse had
robbed.'
'In life?' asked Monks.
'In death,' replied the woman, with something like a shudder. 'She
stole from the corpse, when it had hardly turned to one, that which the
dead mother had prayed her, with her last breath, to keep for the
infant's sake.'
'She sold it,' cried Monks, with desperate eagerness; 'did she sell it?
Where? When? To whom? How long before?'
'As she told me, with great difficulty, that she had done this,' said
the matron, 'she fell back and died.'
'Without saying more?' cried Monks, in a voice which, from its very
suppression, seemed only the more furious. 'It's a lie! I'll not be
played with. She said more. I'll tear the life out of you both, but
I'll know what it was.'
'She didn't utter another word,' said the woman, to all appearance
unmoved (as Mr. Bumble was very far from being) by the strange man's
violence; 'but she clutched my gown, violently, with one hand, which
was partly closed; and when I saw that she was dead, and so removed the
hand by force, I found it clasped a scrap of dirty paper.'
'Which contained--' interposed Monks, stretching forward.
'Nothing,' replied the woman; 'it was a pawnbroker's duplicate.'
'For what?' demanded Monks.
'In good time I'll tell you.' said the woman. 'I judge that she had
kept the trinket, for some time, in the hope of turning it to better
account; and then had pawned it; and had saved or scraped together
money to pay the pawnbroker's interest year by year, and prevent its
running out; so that if anything came of it, it could still be
redeemed. Nothing had come of it; and, as I tell you, she died with
the scrap of paper, all worn and tattered, in her hand. The time was
out in two days; I thought something might one day come of it too; and
so redeemed the pledge.'
'Where is it now?' asked Monks quickly.
'_There_,' replied the woman. And, as if glad to be relieved of it,
she hastily threw upon the table a small kid bag scarcely large enough
for a French watch, which Monks pouncing upon, tore open with trembling
hands. It contained a little gold locket: in which were two locks of
hair, and a plain gold wedding-ring.
'It has the word "Agnes" engraved on the inside,' said the woman.
'There is a blank left for the surname; and then follows the date;
which is within a year before the child was born. I found out that.'
'And this is all?' said Monks, after a close and eager scrutiny of the
contents of the little packet.
'All,' replied the woman.
Mr. Bumble drew a long breath, as if he were glad to find that the
story was over, and no mention made of taking the five-and-twenty
pounds back again; and now he took courage to wipe the perspiration
which had been trickling over his nose, unchecked, during the whole of
the previous dialogue.
'I know nothing of the story, beyond what I can guess at,' said his
wife addressing Monks, after a short silence; 'and I want to know
nothing; for it's safer not. But I may ask you two questions, may I?'
'You may ask,' said Monks, with some show of surprise; 'but whether I
answer or not is another question.'
'--Which makes three,' observed Mr. Bumble, essaying a stroke of
facetiousness.
'Is that what you expected to get from me?' demanded the matron.
'It is,' replied Monks. 'The other question?'
'What do you propose to do with it? Can it be used against me?'
'Never,' rejoined Monks; 'nor against me either. See here! But don't
move a step forward, or your life is not worth a bulrush.'
With these words, he suddenly wheeled the table aside, and pulling an
iron ring in the boarding, threw back a large trap-door which opened
close at Mr. Bumble's feet, and caused that gentleman to retire several
paces backward, with great precipitation.
'Look down,' said Monks, lowering the lantern into the gulf. 'Don't
fear me. I could have let you down, quietly enough, when you were
seated over it, if that had been my game.'
Thus encouraged, the matron drew near to the brink; and even Mr. Bumble
himself, impelled by curiousity, ventured to do the same. The turbid
water, swollen by the heavy rain, was rushing rapidly on below; and all
other sounds were lost in the noise of its plashing and eddying against
the green and slimy piles. There had once been a water-mill beneath;
the tide foaming and chafing round the few rotten stakes, and fragments
of machinery that yet remained, seemed to dart onward, with a new
impulse, when freed from the obstacles which had unavailingly attempted
to stem its headlong course.
'If you flung a man's body down there, where would it be to-morrow
morning?' said Monks, swinging the lantern to and fro in the dark well.
'Twelve miles down the river, and cut to pieces besides,' replied
Bumble, recoiling at the thought.
Monks drew the little packet from his breast, where he had hurriedly
thrust it; and tying it to a leaden weight, which had formed a part of
some pulley, and was lying on the floor, dropped it into the stream.
It fell straight, and true as a die; clove the water with a scarcely
audible splash; and was gone.
The three looking into each other's faces, seemed to breathe more
freely.
'There!' said Monks, closing the trap-door, which fell heavily back
into its former position. 'If the sea ever gives up its dead, as books
say it will, it will keep its gold and silver to itself, and that trash
among it. We have nothing more to say, and may break up our pleasant
party.'
'By all means,' observed Mr. Bumble, with great alacrity.
'You'll keep a quiet tongue in your head, will you?' said Monks, with a
threatening look. 'I am not afraid of your wife.'
'You may depend upon me, young man,' answered Mr. Bumble, bowing
himself gradually towards the ladder, with excessive politeness. 'On
everybody's account, young man; on my own, you know, Mr. Monks.'
'I am glad, for your sake, to hear it,' remarked Monks. 'Light your
lantern! And get away from here as fast as you can.'
It was fortunate that the conversation terminated at this point, or Mr.
Bumble, who had bowed himself to within six inches of the ladder, would
infallibly have pitched headlong into the room below. He lighted his
lantern from that which Monks had detached from the rope, and now
carried in his hand; and making no effort to prolong the discourse,
descended in silence, followed by his wife. Monks brought up the rear,
after pausing on the steps to satisfy himself that there were no other
sounds to be heard than the beating of the rain without, and the
rushing of the water.
They traversed the lower room, slowly, and with caution; for Monks
started at every shadow; and Mr. Bumble, holding his lantern a foot
above the ground, walked not only with remarkable care, but with a
marvellously light step for a gentleman of his figure: looking
nervously about him for hidden trap-doors. The gate at which they had
entered, was softly unfastened and opened by Monks; merely exchanging a
nod with their mysterious acquaintance, the married couple emerged into
the wet and darkness outside.
They were no sooner gone, than Monks, who appeared to entertain an
invincible repugnance to being left alone, called to a boy who had been
hidden somewhere below. Bidding him go first, and bear the light, he
returned to the chamber he had just quitted.
| Mr. and Mrs. Bumble are walking along the river to get to a little "colony of ruinous houses" , scattered by the bank. They arrive at the agreed-upon house, and Mr. Bumble hesitates slightly. A man appears at an upper window, and calls to them that he'll come down to meet them. Mrs. Bumble warns Mr. Bumble not to say too much. Monks appears at the door and calls them inside. He asks Mr. Bumble if the lady with him is the woman who had spoken with old Sally, and Mr. Bumble replies that it is. They start to climb up a ladder to the second floor, when a sudden crack of thunder shakes the building. Monks's face distorts, and goes blank--he excuses it to Mr. Bumble by saying that it's a fit that the thunder sometimes brings on. They climb the ladder, and sit down at a table with three chairs. Monks asks what old Sally had to say to her the night she died, and Mrs. Bumble cuts him off, asking what the information was worth to him. After some back-and-forth , Monks agrees to pay twenty-five pounds in gold for the information, even though he doesn't yet know what it is. Mrs. Bumble leans across the table and tells Monks what old Sally had confessed to her: She was alone with old Sally when she died, and Sally told her that when Oliver's mother had died, she had robbed the corpse, and had sold the jewel, although Oliver's mother had begged her to keep it for the sake of the baby. And then old Sally had died, without telling Mrs. Bumble where, when, or to whom she had sold it. Or even what it was, other than gold. But old Sally had a slip of paper in her hand when she died: a note from a pawnbroker. Apparently Sally had sold the jewelry to the pawnbroker, but had scraped together the interest each year so that the pawnbroker would keep it for her, rather than sell it off. Mrs. Bumble had taken the note, and had redeemed the things from the pawnbroker, and puts them on the table in a little bag. The bag contains a gold locket, with two locks of hair inside, and a little gold wedding ring, with the name "Agnes" inscribed inside, along with the date , but no last name. Monks seems relieved. Mrs. Bumble wants to know whether what she's told him can be used against her. Monks says no, and then rapidly opens a trapdoor in the floor just in front of them. He says that if he had wanted to, he could have opened it while they were over it . But fortunately for them, he didn't want to. Then, with the Bumbles as his witnesses, Monks ties a weight to the bag with the jewelry and drops it into the stream below. After various threatening remarks to make sure they aren't planning to tell anyone about what they've seen or heard, Monks shows the Bumbles down the ladder and out of the house. As soon as they're gone, Monks calls a servant boy to go upstairs with him, since apparently he hates being alone. | summary |
On the evening following that upon which the three worthies mentioned
in the last chapter, disposed of their little matter of business as
therein narrated, Mr. William Sikes, awakening from a nap, drowsily
growled forth an inquiry what time of night it was.
The room in which Mr. Sikes propounded this question, was not one of
those he had tenanted, previous to the Chertsey expedition, although it
was in the same quarter of the town, and was situated at no great
distance from his former lodgings. It was not, in appearance, so
desirable a habitation as his old quarters: being a mean and
badly-furnished apartment, of very limited size; lighted only by one
small window in the shelving roof, and abutting on a close and dirty
lane. Nor were there wanting other indications of the good gentleman's
having gone down in the world of late: for a great scarcity of
furniture, and total absence of comfort, together with the
disappearance of all such small moveables as spare clothes and linen,
bespoke a state of extreme poverty; while the meagre and attenuated
condition of Mr. Sikes himself would have fully confirmed these
symptoms, if they had stood in any need of corroboration.
The housebreaker was lying on the bed, wrapped in his white great-coat,
by way of dressing-gown, and displaying a set of features in no degree
improved by the cadaverous hue of illness, and the addition of a soiled
nightcap, and a stiff, black beard of a week's growth. The dog sat at
the bedside: now eyeing his master with a wistful look, and now
pricking his ears, and uttering a low growl as some noise in the
street, or in the lower part of the house, attracted his attention.
Seated by the window, busily engaged in patching an old waistcoat which
formed a portion of the robber's ordinary dress, was a female: so pale
and reduced with watching and privation, that there would have been
considerable difficulty in recognising her as the same Nancy who has
already figured in this tale, but for the voice in which she replied to
Mr. Sikes's question.
'Not long gone seven,' said the girl. 'How do you feel to-night, Bill?'
'As weak as water,' replied Mr. Sikes, with an imprecation on his eyes
and limbs. 'Here; lend us a hand, and let me get off this thundering
bed anyhow.'
Illness had not improved Mr. Sikes's temper; for, as the girl raised
him up and led him to a chair, he muttered various curses on her
awkwardness, and struck her.
'Whining are you?' said Sikes. 'Come! Don't stand snivelling there.
If you can't do anything better than that, cut off altogether. D'ye
hear me?'
'I hear you,' replied the girl, turning her face aside, and forcing a
laugh. 'What fancy have you got in your head now?'
'Oh! you've thought better of it, have you?' growled Sikes, marking the
tear which trembled in her eye. 'All the better for you, you have.'
'Why, you don't mean to say, you'd be hard upon me to-night, Bill,'
said the girl, laying her hand upon his shoulder.
'No!' cried Mr. Sikes. 'Why not?'
'Such a number of nights,' said the girl, with a touch of woman's
tenderness, which communicated something like sweetness of tone, even
to her voice: 'such a number of nights as I've been patient with you,
nursing and caring for you, as if you had been a child: and this the
first that I've seen you like yourself; you wouldn't have served me as
you did just now, if you'd thought of that, would you? Come, come; say
you wouldn't.'
'Well, then,' rejoined Mr. Sikes, 'I wouldn't. Why, damme, now, the
girls's whining again!'
'It's nothing,' said the girl, throwing herself into a chair. 'Don't
you seem to mind me. It'll soon be over.'
'What'll be over?' demanded Mr. Sikes in a savage voice. 'What foolery
are you up to, now, again? Get up and bustle about, and don't come
over me with your woman's nonsense.'
At any other time, this remonstrance, and the tone in which it was
delivered, would have had the desired effect; but the girl being really
weak and exhausted, dropped her head over the back of the chair, and
fainted, before Mr. Sikes could get out a few of the appropriate oaths
with which, on similar occasions, he was accustomed to garnish his
threats. Not knowing, very well, what to do, in this uncommon
emergency; for Miss Nancy's hysterics were usually of that violent kind
which the patient fights and struggles out of, without much assistance;
Mr. Sikes tried a little blasphemy: and finding that mode of treatment
wholly ineffectual, called for assistance.
'What's the matter here, my dear?' said Fagin, looking in.
'Lend a hand to the girl, can't you?' replied Sikes impatiently. 'Don't
stand chattering and grinning at me!'
With an exclamation of surprise, Fagin hastened to the girl's
assistance, while Mr. John Dawkins (otherwise the Artful Dodger), who
had followed his venerable friend into the room, hastily deposited on
the floor a bundle with which he was laden; and snatching a bottle from
the grasp of Master Charles Bates who came close at his heels, uncorked
it in a twinkling with his teeth, and poured a portion of its contents
down the patient's throat: previously taking a taste, himself, to
prevent mistakes.
'Give her a whiff of fresh air with the bellows, Charley,' said Mr.
Dawkins; 'and you slap her hands, Fagin, while Bill undoes the
petticuts.'
These united restoratives, administered with great energy: especially
that department consigned to Master Bates, who appeared to consider his
share in the proceedings, a piece of unexampled pleasantry: were not
long in producing the desired effect. The girl gradually recovered her
senses; and, staggering to a chair by the bedside, hid her face upon
the pillow: leaving Mr. Sikes to confront the new comers, in some
astonishment at their unlooked-for appearance.
'Why, what evil wind has blowed you here?' he asked Fagin.
'No evil wind at all, my dear, for evil winds blow nobody any good; and
I've brought something good with me, that you'll be glad to see.
Dodger, my dear, open the bundle; and give Bill the little trifles that
we spent all our money on, this morning.'
In compliance with Mr. Fagin's request, the Artful untied this bundle,
which was of large size, and formed of an old table-cloth; and handed
the articles it contained, one by one, to Charley Bates: who placed
them on the table, with various encomiums on their rarity and
excellence.
'Sitch a rabbit pie, Bill,' exclaimed that young gentleman, disclosing
to view a huge pasty; 'sitch delicate creeturs, with sitch tender
limbs, Bill, that the wery bones melt in your mouth, and there's no
occasion to pick 'em; half a pound of seven and six-penny green, so
precious strong that if you mix it with biling water, it'll go nigh to
blow the lid of the tea-pot off; a pound and a half of moist sugar that
the niggers didn't work at all at, afore they got it up to sitch a
pitch of goodness,--oh no! Two half-quartern brans; pound of best
fresh; piece of double Glo'ster; and, to wind up all, some of the
richest sort you ever lushed!'
Uttering this last panegyric, Master Bates produced, from one of his
extensive pockets, a full-sized wine-bottle, carefully corked; while
Mr. Dawkins, at the same instant, poured out a wine-glassful of raw
spirits from the bottle he carried: which the invalid tossed down his
throat without a moment's hesitation.
'Ah!' said Fagin, rubbing his hands with great satisfaction. 'You'll
do, Bill; you'll do now.'
'Do!' exclaimed Mr. Sikes; 'I might have been done for, twenty times
over, afore you'd have done anything to help me. What do you mean by
leaving a man in this state, three weeks and more, you false-hearted
wagabond?'
'Only hear him, boys!' said Fagin, shrugging his shoulders. 'And us
come to bring him all these beau-ti-ful things.'
'The things is well enough in their way,' observed Mr. Sikes: a little
soothed as he glanced over the table; 'but what have you got to say for
yourself, why you should leave me here, down in the mouth, health,
blunt, and everything else; and take no more notice of me, all this
mortal time, than if I was that 'ere dog.--Drive him down, Charley!'
'I never see such a jolly dog as that,' cried Master Bates, doing as he
was desired. 'Smelling the grub like a old lady a going to market!
He'd make his fortun' on the stage that dog would, and rewive the
drayma besides.'
'Hold your din,' cried Sikes, as the dog retreated under the bed: still
growling angrily. 'What have you got to say for yourself, you withered
old fence, eh?'
'I was away from London, a week and more, my dear, on a plant,' replied
the Jew.
'And what about the other fortnight?' demanded Sikes. 'What about the
other fortnight that you've left me lying here, like a sick rat in his
hole?'
'I couldn't help it, Bill. I can't go into a long explanation before
company; but I couldn't help it, upon my honour.'
'Upon your what?' growled Sikes, with excessive disgust. 'Here! Cut me
off a piece of that pie, one of you boys, to take the taste of that out
of my mouth, or it'll choke me dead.'
'Don't be out of temper, my dear,' urged Fagin, submissively. 'I have
never forgot you, Bill; never once.'
'No! I'll pound it that you han't,' replied Sikes, with a bitter grin.
'You've been scheming and plotting away, every hour that I have laid
shivering and burning here; and Bill was to do this; and Bill was to do
that; and Bill was to do it all, dirt cheap, as soon as he got well:
and was quite poor enough for your work. If it hadn't been for the
girl, I might have died.'
'There now, Bill,' remonstrated Fagin, eagerly catching at the word.
'If it hadn't been for the girl! Who but poor ould Fagin was the means
of your having such a handy girl about you?'
'He says true enough there!' said Nancy, coming hastily forward. 'Let
him be; let him be.'
Nancy's appearance gave a new turn to the conversation; for the boys,
receiving a sly wink from the wary old Jew, began to ply her with
liquor: of which, however, she took very sparingly; while Fagin,
assuming an unusual flow of spirits, gradually brought Mr. Sikes into a
better temper, by affecting to regard his threats as a little pleasant
banter; and, moreover, by laughing very heartily at one or two rough
jokes, which, after repeated applications to the spirit-bottle, he
condescended to make.
'It's all very well,' said Mr. Sikes; 'but I must have some blunt from
you to-night.'
'I haven't a piece of coin about me,' replied the Jew.
'Then you've got lots at home,' retorted Sikes; 'and I must have some
from there.'
'Lots!' cried Fagin, holding up is hands. 'I haven't so much as
would--'
'I don't know how much you've got, and I dare say you hardly know
yourself, as it would take a pretty long time to count it,' said Sikes;
'but I must have some to-night; and that's flat.'
'Well, well,' said Fagin, with a sigh, 'I'll send the Artful round
presently.'
'You won't do nothing of the kind,' rejoined Mr. Sikes. 'The Artful's a
deal too artful, and would forget to come, or lose his way, or get
dodged by traps and so be perwented, or anything for an excuse, if you
put him up to it. Nancy shall go to the ken and fetch it, to make all
sure; and I'll lie down and have a snooze while she's gone.'
After a great deal of haggling and squabbling, Fagin beat down the
amount of the required advance from five pounds to three pounds four
and sixpence: protesting with many solemn asseverations that that would
only leave him eighteen-pence to keep house with; Mr. Sikes sullenly
remarking that if he couldn't get any more he must accompany him home;
with the Dodger and Master Bates put the eatables in the cupboard. The
Jew then, taking leave of his affectionate friend, returned homeward,
attended by Nancy and the boys: Mr. Sikes, meanwhile, flinging himself
on the bed, and composing himself to sleep away the time until the
young lady's return.
In due course, they arrived at Fagin's abode, where they found Toby
Crackit and Mr. Chitling intent upon their fifteenth game at cribbage,
which it is scarcely necessary to say the latter gentleman lost, and
with it, his fifteenth and last sixpence: much to the amusement of his
young friends. Mr. Crackit, apparently somewhat ashamed at being found
relaxing himself with a gentleman so much his inferior in station and
mental endowments, yawned, and inquiring after Sikes, took up his hat
to go.
'Has nobody been, Toby?' asked Fagin.
'Not a living leg,' answered Mr. Crackit, pulling up his collar; 'it's
been as dull as swipes. You ought to stand something handsome, Fagin,
to recompense me for keeping house so long. Damme, I'm as flat as a
juryman; and should have gone to sleep, as fast as Newgate, if I hadn't
had the good natur' to amuse this youngster. Horrid dull, I'm blessed
if I an't!'
With these and other ejaculations of the same kind, Mr. Toby Crackit
swept up his winnings, and crammed them into his waistcoat pocket with
a haughty air, as though such small pieces of silver were wholly
beneath the consideration of a man of his figure; this done, he
swaggered out of the room, with so much elegance and gentility, that
Mr. Chitling, bestowing numerous admiring glances on his legs and boots
till they were out of sight, assured the company that he considered his
acquaintance cheap at fifteen sixpences an interview, and that he
didn't value his losses the snap of his little finger.
'Wot a rum chap you are, Tom!' said Master Bates, highly amused by this
declaration.
'Not a bit of it,' replied Mr. Chitling. 'Am I, Fagin?'
'A very clever fellow, my dear,' said Fagin, patting him on the
shoulder, and winking to his other pupils.
'And Mr. Crackit is a heavy swell; an't he, Fagin?' asked Tom.
'No doubt at all of that, my dear.'
'And it is a creditable thing to have his acquaintance; an't it,
Fagin?' pursued Tom.
'Very much so, indeed, my dear. They're only jealous, Tom, because he
won't give it to them.'
'Ah!' cried Tom, triumphantly, 'that's where it is! He has cleaned me
out. But I can go and earn some more, when I like; can't I, Fagin?'
'To be sure you can, and the sooner you go the better, Tom; so make up
your loss at once, and don't lose any more time. Dodger! Charley!
It's time you were on the lay. Come! It's near ten, and nothing done
yet.'
In obedience to this hint, the boys, nodding to Nancy, took up their
hats, and left the room; the Dodger and his vivacious friend indulging,
as they went, in many witticisms at the expense of Mr. Chitling; in
whose conduct, it is but justice to say, there was nothing very
conspicuous or peculiar: inasmuch as there are a great number of
spirited young bloods upon town, who pay a much higher price than Mr.
Chitling for being seen in good society: and a great number of fine
gentlemen (composing the good society aforesaid) who established their
reputation upon very much the same footing as flash Toby Crackit.
'Now,' said Fagin, when they had left the room, 'I'll go and get you
that cash, Nancy. This is only the key of a little cupboard where I
keep a few odd things the boys get, my dear. I never lock up my money,
for I've got none to lock up, my dear--ha! ha! ha!--none to lock up.
It's a poor trade, Nancy, and no thanks; but I'm fond of seeing the
young people about me; and I bear it all, I bear it all. Hush!' he
said, hastily concealing the key in his breast; 'who's that? Listen!'
The girl, who was sitting at the table with her arms folded, appeared
in no way interested in the arrival: or to care whether the person,
whoever he was, came or went: until the murmur of a man's voice
reached her ears. The instant she caught the sound, she tore off her
bonnet and shawl, with the rapidity of lightning, and thrust them under
the table. The Jew, turning round immediately afterwards, she muttered
a complaint of the heat: in a tone of languor that contrasted, very
remarkably, with the extreme haste and violence of this action: which,
however, had been unobserved by Fagin, who had his back towards her at
the time.
'Bah!' he whispered, as though nettled by the interruption; 'it's the
man I expected before; he's coming downstairs. Not a word about the
money while he's here, Nance. He won't stop long. Not ten minutes, my
dear.'
Laying his skinny forefinger upon his lip, the Jew carried a candle to
the door, as a man's step was heard upon the stairs without. He
reached it, at the same moment as the visitor, who, coming hastily into
the room, was close upon the girl before he observed her.
It was Monks.
'Only one of my young people,' said Fagin, observing that Monks drew
back, on beholding a stranger. 'Don't move, Nancy.'
The girl drew closer to the table, and glancing at Monks with an air of
careless levity, withdrew her eyes; but as he turned towards Fagin, she
stole another look; so keen and searching, and full of purpose, that if
there had been any bystander to observe the change, he could hardly
have believed the two looks to have proceeded from the same person.
'Any news?' inquired Fagin.
'Great.'
'And--and--good?' asked Fagin, hesitating as though he feared to vex
the other man by being too sanguine.
'Not bad, any way,' replied Monks with a smile. 'I have been prompt
enough this time. Let me have a word with you.'
The girl drew closer to the table, and made no offer to leave the room,
although she could see that Monks was pointing to her. The Jew:
perhaps fearing she might say something aloud about the money, if he
endeavoured to get rid of her: pointed upward, and took Monks out of
the room.
'Not that infernal hole we were in before,' she could hear the man say
as they went upstairs. Fagin laughed; and making some reply which did
not reach her, seemed, by the creaking of the boards, to lead his
companion to the second story.
Before the sound of their footsteps had ceased to echo through the
house, the girl had slipped off her shoes; and drawing her gown loosely
over her head, and muffling her arms in it, stood at the door,
listening with breathless interest. The moment the noise ceased, she
glided from the room; ascended the stairs with incredible softness and
silence; and was lost in the gloom above.
The room remained deserted for a quarter of an hour or more; the girl
glided back with the same unearthly tread; and, immediately afterwards,
the two men were heard descending. Monks went at once into the street;
and the Jew crawled upstairs again for the money. When he returned,
the girl was adjusting her shawl and bonnet, as if preparing to be gone.
'Why, Nance!' exclaimed the Jew, starting back as he put down the
candle, 'how pale you are!'
'Pale!' echoed the girl, shading her eyes with her hands, as if to look
steadily at him.
'Quite horrible. What have you been doing to yourself?'
'Nothing that I know of, except sitting in this close place for I don't
know how long and all,' replied the girl carelessly. 'Come! Let me get
back; that's a dear.'
With a sigh for every piece of money, Fagin told the amount into her
hand. They parted without more conversation, merely interchanging a
'good-night.'
When the girl got into the open street, she sat down upon a doorstep;
and seemed, for a few moments, wholly bewildered and unable to pursue
her way. Suddenly she arose; and hurrying on, in a direction quite
opposite to that in which Sikes was awaiting her returned, quickened
her pace, until it gradually resolved into a violent run. After
completely exhausting herself, she stopped to take breath: and, as if
suddenly recollecting herself, and deploring her inability to do
something she was bent upon, wrung her hands, and burst into tears.
It might be that her tears relieved her, or that she felt the full
hopelessness of her condition; but she turned back; and hurrying with
nearly as great rapidity in the contrary direction; partly to recover
lost time, and partly to keep pace with the violent current of her own
thoughts: soon reached the dwelling where she had left the
housebreaker.
If she betrayed any agitation, when she presented herself to Mr. Sikes,
he did not observe it; for merely inquiring if she had brought the
money, and receiving a reply in the affirmative, he uttered a growl of
satisfaction, and replacing his head upon the pillow, resumed the
slumbers which her arrival had interrupted.
It was fortunate for her that the possession of money occasioned him so
much employment next day in the way of eating and drinking; and withal
had so beneficial an effect in smoothing down the asperities of his
temper; that he had neither time nor inclination to be very critical
upon her behaviour and deportment. That she had all the abstracted and
nervous manner of one who is on the eve of some bold and hazardous
step, which it has required no common struggle to resolve upon, would
have been obvious to the lynx-eyed Fagin, who would most probably have
taken the alarm at once; but Mr. Sikes lacking the niceties of
discrimination, and being troubled with no more subtle misgivings than
those which resolve themselves into a dogged roughness of behaviour
towards everybody; and being, furthermore, in an unusually amiable
condition, as has been already observed; saw nothing unusual in her
demeanor, and indeed, troubled himself so little about her, that, had
her agitation been far more perceptible than it was, it would have been
very unlikely to have awakened his suspicions.
As that day closed in, the girl's excitement increased; and, when night
came on, and she sat by, watching until the housebreaker should drink
himself asleep, there was an unusual paleness in her cheek, and a fire
in her eye, that even Sikes observed with astonishment.
Mr. Sikes being weak from the fever, was lying in bed, taking hot water
with his gin to render it less inflammatory; and had pushed his glass
towards Nancy to be replenished for the third or fourth time, when
these symptoms first struck him.
'Why, burn my body!' said the man, raising himself on his hands as he
stared the girl in the face. 'You look like a corpse come to life
again. What's the matter?'
'Matter!' replied the girl. 'Nothing. What do you look at me so hard
for?'
'What foolery is this?' demanded Sikes, grasping her by the arm, and
shaking her roughly. 'What is it? What do you mean? What are you
thinking of?'
'Of many things, Bill,' replied the girl, shivering, and as she did so,
pressing her hands upon her eyes. 'But, Lord! What odds in that?'
The tone of forced gaiety in which the last words were spoken, seemed
to produce a deeper impression on Sikes than the wild and rigid look
which had preceded them.
'I tell you wot it is,' said Sikes; 'if you haven't caught the fever,
and got it comin' on, now, there's something more than usual in the
wind, and something dangerous too. You're not a-going to--. No,
damme! you wouldn't do that!'
'Do what?' asked the girl.
'There ain't,' said Sikes, fixing his eyes upon her, and muttering the
words to himself; 'there ain't a stauncher-hearted gal going, or I'd
have cut her throat three months ago. She's got the fever coming on;
that's it.'
Fortifying himself with this assurance, Sikes drained the glass to the
bottom, and then, with many grumbling oaths, called for his physic.
The girl jumped up, with great alacrity; poured it quickly out, but
with her back towards him; and held the vessel to his lips, while he
drank off the contents.
'Now,' said the robber, 'come and sit aside of me, and put on your own
face; or I'll alter it so, that you won't know it agin when you do want
it.'
The girl obeyed. Sikes, locking her hand in his, fell back upon the
pillow: turning his eyes upon her face. They closed; opened again;
closed once more; again opened. He shifted his position restlessly;
and, after dozing again, and again, for two or three minutes, and as
often springing up with a look of terror, and gazing vacantly about
him, was suddenly stricken, as it were, while in the very attitude of
rising, into a deep and heavy sleep. The grasp of his hand relaxed;
the upraised arm fell languidly by his side; and he lay like one in a
profound trance.
'The laudanum has taken effect at last,' murmured the girl, as she rose
from the bedside. 'I may be too late, even now.'
She hastily dressed herself in her bonnet and shawl: looking fearfully
round, from time to time, as if, despite the sleeping draught, she
expected every moment to feel the pressure of Sikes's heavy hand upon
her shoulder; then, stooping softly over the bed, she kissed the
robber's lips; and then opening and closing the room-door with
noiseless touch, hurried from the house.
A watchman was crying half-past nine, down a dark passage through which
she had to pass, in gaining the main thoroughfare.
'Has it long gone the half-hour?' asked the girl.
'It'll strike the hour in another quarter,' said the man: raising his
lantern to her face.
'And I cannot get there in less than an hour or more,' muttered Nancy:
brushing swiftly past him, and gliding rapidly down the street.
Many of the shops were already closing in the back lanes and avenues
through which she tracked her way, in making from Spitalfields towards
the West-End of London. The clock struck ten, increasing her
impatience. She tore along the narrow pavement: elbowing the
passengers from side to side; and darting almost under the horses'
heads, crossed crowded streets, where clusters of persons were eagerly
watching their opportunity to do the like.
'The woman is mad!' said the people, turning to look after her as she
rushed away.
When she reached the more wealthy quarter of the town, the streets were
comparatively deserted; and here her headlong progress excited a still
greater curiosity in the stragglers whom she hurried past. Some
quickened their pace behind, as though to see whither she was hastening
at such an unusual rate; and a few made head upon her, and looked back,
surprised at her undiminished speed; but they fell off one by one; and
when she neared her place of destination, she was alone.
It was a family hotel in a quiet but handsome street near Hyde Park.
As the brilliant light of the lamp which burnt before its door, guided
her to the spot, the clock struck eleven. She had loitered for a few
paces as though irresolute, and making up her mind to advance; but the
sound determined her, and she stepped into the hall. The porter's seat
was vacant. She looked round with an air of incertitude, and advanced
towards the stairs.
'Now, young woman!' said a smartly-dressed female, looking out from a
door behind her, 'who do you want here?'
'A lady who is stopping in this house,' answered the girl.
'A lady!' was the reply, accompanied with a scornful look. 'What lady?'
'Miss Maylie,' said Nancy.
The young woman, who had by this time, noted her appearance, replied
only by a look of virtuous disdain; and summoned a man to answer her.
To him, Nancy repeated her request.
'What name am I to say?' asked the waiter.
'It's of no use saying any,' replied Nancy.
'Nor business?' said the man.
'No, nor that neither,' rejoined the girl. 'I must see the lady.'
'Come!' said the man, pushing her towards the door. 'None of this.
Take yourself off.'
'I shall be carried out if I go!' said the girl violently; 'and I can
make that a job that two of you won't like to do. Isn't there anybody
here,' she said, looking round, 'that will see a simple message carried
for a poor wretch like me?'
This appeal produced an effect on a good-tempered-faced man-cook, who
with some of the other servants was looking on, and who stepped forward
to interfere.
'Take it up for her, Joe; can't you?' said this person.
'What's the good?' replied the man. 'You don't suppose the young lady
will see such as her; do you?'
This allusion to Nancy's doubtful character, raised a vast quantity of
chaste wrath in the bosoms of four housemaids, who remarked, with great
fervour, that the creature was a disgrace to her sex; and strongly
advocated her being thrown, ruthlessly, into the kennel.
'Do what you like with me,' said the girl, turning to the men again;
'but do what I ask you first, and I ask you to give this message for
God Almighty's sake.'
The soft-hearted cook added his intercession, and the result was that
the man who had first appeared undertook its delivery.
'What's it to be?' said the man, with one foot on the stairs.
'That a young woman earnestly asks to speak to Miss Maylie alone,' said
Nancy; 'and that if the lady will only hear the first word she has to
say, she will know whether to hear her business, or to have her turned
out of doors as an impostor.'
'I say,' said the man, 'you're coming it strong!'
'You give the message,' said the girl firmly; 'and let me hear the
answer.'
The man ran upstairs. Nancy remained, pale and almost breathless,
listening with quivering lip to the very audible expressions of scorn,
of which the chaste housemaids were very prolific; and of which they
became still more so, when the man returned, and said the young woman
was to walk upstairs.
'It's no good being proper in this world,' said the first housemaid.
'Brass can do better than the gold what has stood the fire,' said the
second.
The third contented herself with wondering 'what ladies was made of';
and the fourth took the first in a quartette of 'Shameful!' with which
the Dianas concluded.
Regardless of all this: for she had weightier matters at heart: Nancy
followed the man, with trembling limbs, to a small ante-chamber,
lighted by a lamp from the ceiling. Here he left her, and retired.
| The chapter opens with Sikes grumpily asking what time it is. He's not in the same room he'd rented before the failed housebreaking attempt of a few months earlier, but it's in the same dodgy part of town. There's not a lot of furniture, or much in the way of spare clothes in the room--apparently Sikes is pretty strapped for cash. Sikes himself is lying in bed, wrapped in a big overcoat, and looking like a shadow of his former self. The dog is lying by the bed, occasionally growling at passing noises from the street. Nancy is sitting by the bed, looking thin and pale. She asks how he's feeling. He responds with growls and grouchiness, and asks for help getting out of bed. She helps, but he swears at her and smacks her. She tears up, and faints. Sikes isn't used to this--usually Nancy's hysterics are loud and violent, like we've seen before. So Sikes calls for help. Fagin looks in, and brings the Dodger and Charley Bates in to help bring Nancy around. Nancy recovers, staggers to the bed, and lies down. Sikes asks what Fagin is doing there, since he hasn't seen him for weeks. Fagin says that they've brought lots of goodies: rabbit pie , special green tea, sugar, bread, butter, and cheese. Sikes wants to know why they haven't been by before, and have left him sick and weak without coming to help him out. Fagin says he was out of town for part of the time, and unable to come for reasons he doesn't like to repeat for the rest. Sikes says he would have died, if it hadn't been for "the girl." Fagin reminds him that he wouldn't have such a handy girl as Nancy around if it weren't for him, and Nancy agrees. Sikes eats, and Nancy does too, a little. When he's finished, Sikes tells Fagin that he needs some money. Fagin insists that he doesn't have any, but Sikes knows better. He sends Nancy with Fagin to pick up the cash and bring it back. They arrive at Fagin's house, and Toby Crackit is there. He's just finished winning all of Tom Chitling's money at cribbage. Toby seems slightly embarrassed at being caught playing with someone as uncool as Tom Chitling . Toby takes off . Tom Chitling says that the money he lost to Toby is a small price to pay for the privilege of being seen in his company, because Toby's the coolest. Fagin says he agrees, and sends Tom, Charley, and the Dodger out to "work," leaving him alone with Nancy. He takes a key to get the money . Just then, they hear a voice from the street. Fagin's too busy hiding his key to notice Nancy's reaction--she tears off her bonnet and shawl, and sticks them under the table. Fagin says that the visitor won't be more than ten minutes, and goes down to let him in. Monks comes into the room, and notices Nancy sitting there. Rather than ask Nancy to leave, Fagin takes Monks to an upstairs room for their talk. As soon as they're gone, Nancy slips out of her shoes, pulls her skirt up so that it won't rustle, and sneaks upstairs after them. She listens for fifteen minutes, and slips back into the room just before Fagin comes back in . Fagin remarks that she looks pale, but she blows it off, saying that it's just because she's been sitting in a stuffy room too long. Fagin counts out the money for her, and she hurries out. She starts to run in a direction away from her home with Sikes, then stops, cries, and heads home. Sikes doesn't notice anything unusual about her--he barely wakes up enough to ask if she's gotten the money before going back to sleep. | summary |
The girl's life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most
noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was something of the
woman's original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light
step approaching the door opposite to that by which she had entered,
and thought of the wide contrast which the small room would in another
moment contain, she felt burdened with the sense of her own deep shame,
and shrunk as though she could scarcely bear the presence of her with
whom she had sought this interview.
But struggling with these better feelings was pride,--the vice of the
lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and
self-assured. The miserable companion of thieves and ruffians, the
fallen outcast of low haunts, the associate of the scourings of the
jails and hulks, living within the shadow of the gallows itself,--even
this degraded being felt too proud to betray a feeble gleam of the
womanly feeling which she thought a weakness, but which alone connected
her with that humanity, of which her wasting life had obliterated so
many, many traces when a very child.
She raised her eyes sufficiently to observe that the figure which
presented itself was that of a slight and beautiful girl; then, bending
them on the ground, she tossed her head with affected carelessness as
she said:
'It's a hard matter to get to see you, lady. If I had taken offence,
and gone away, as many would have done, you'd have been sorry for it
one day, and not without reason either.'
'I am very sorry if any one has behaved harshly to you,' replied Rose.
'Do not think of that. Tell me why you wished to see me. I am the
person you inquired for.'
The kind tone of this answer, the sweet voice, the gentle manner, the
absence of any accent of haughtiness or displeasure, took the girl
completely by surprise, and she burst into tears.
'Oh, lady, lady!' she said, clasping her hands passionately before her
face, 'if there was more like you, there would be fewer like me,--there
would--there would!'
'Sit down,' said Rose, earnestly. 'If you are in poverty or affliction
I shall be truly glad to relieve you if I can,--I shall indeed. Sit
down.'
'Let me stand, lady,' said the girl, still weeping, 'and do not speak
to me so kindly till you know me better. It is growing late.
Is--is--that door shut?'
'Yes,' said Rose, recoiling a few steps, as if to be nearer assistance
in case she should require it. 'Why?'
'Because,' said the girl, 'I am about to put my life and the lives of
others in your hands. I am the girl that dragged little Oliver back to
old Fagin's on the night he went out from the house in Pentonville.'
'You!' said Rose Maylie.
'I, lady!' replied the girl. 'I am the infamous creature you have
heard of, that lives among the thieves, and that never from the first
moment I can recollect my eyes and senses opening on London streets
have known any better life, or kinder words than they have given me, so
help me God! Do not mind shrinking openly from me, lady. I am younger
than you would think, to look at me, but I am well used to it. The
poorest women fall back, as I make my way along the crowded pavement.'
'What dreadful things are these!' said Rose, involuntarily falling from
her strange companion.
'Thank Heaven upon your knees, dear lady,' cried the girl, 'that you
had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood, and that you
were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness,
and--and--something worse than all--as I have been from my cradle. I
may use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will
be my deathbed.'
'I pity you!' said Rose, in a broken voice. 'It wrings my heart to
hear you!'
'Heaven bless you for your goodness!' rejoined the girl. 'If you knew
what I am sometimes, you would pity me, indeed. But I have stolen away
from those who would surely murder me, if they knew I had been here, to
tell you what I have overheard. Do you know a man named Monks?'
'No,' said Rose.
'He knows you,' replied the girl; 'and knew you were here, for it was
by hearing him tell the place that I found you out.'
'I never heard the name,' said Rose.
'Then he goes by some other amongst us,' rejoined the girl, 'which I
more than thought before. Some time ago, and soon after Oliver was put
into your house on the night of the robbery, I--suspecting this
man--listened to a conversation held between him and Fagin in the dark.
I found out, from what I heard, that Monks--the man I asked you about,
you know--'
'Yes,' said Rose, 'I understand.'
'--That Monks,' pursued the girl, 'had seen him accidently with two of
our boys on the day we first lost him, and had known him directly to be
the same child that he was watching for, though I couldn't make out
why. A bargain was struck with Fagin, that if Oliver was got back he
should have a certain sum; and he was to have more for making him a
thief, which this Monks wanted for some purpose of his own.'
'For what purpose?' asked Rose.
'He caught sight of my shadow on the wall as I listened, in the hope of
finding out,' said the girl; 'and there are not many people besides me
that could have got out of their way in time to escape discovery. But
I did; and I saw him no more till last night.'
'And what occurred then?'
'I'll tell you, lady. Last night he came again. Again they went
upstairs, and I, wrapping myself up so that my shadow would not betray
me, again listened at the door. The first words I heard Monks say were
these: "So the only proofs of the boy's identity lie at the bottom of
the river, and the old hag that received them from the mother is
rotting in her coffin." They laughed, and talked of his success in
doing this; and Monks, talking on about the boy, and getting very wild,
said that though he had got the young devil's money safely now, he'd
rather have had it the other way; for, what a game it would have been
to have brought down the boast of the father's will, by driving him
through every jail in town, and then hauling him up for some capital
felony which Fagin could easily manage, after having made a good profit
of him besides.'
'What is all this!' said Rose.
'The truth, lady, though it comes from my lips,' replied the girl.
'Then, he said, with oaths common enough in my ears, but strange to
yours, that if he could gratify his hatred by taking the boy's life
without bringing his own neck in danger, he would; but, as he couldn't,
he'd be upon the watch to meet him at every turn in life; and if he
took advantage of his birth and history, he might harm him yet. "In
short, Fagin," he says, "Jew as you are, you never laid such snares as
I'll contrive for my young brother, Oliver."'
'His brother!' exclaimed Rose.
'Those were his words,' said Nancy, glancing uneasily round, as she had
scarcely ceased to do, since she began to speak, for a vision of Sikes
haunted her perpetually. 'And more. When he spoke of you and the other
lady, and said it seemed contrived by Heaven, or the devil, against
him, that Oliver should come into your hands, he laughed, and said
there was some comfort in that too, for how many thousands and hundreds
of thousands of pounds would you not give, if you had them, to know who
your two-legged spaniel was.'
'You do not mean,' said Rose, turning very pale, 'to tell me that this
was said in earnest?'
'He spoke in hard and angry earnest, if a man ever did,' replied the
girl, shaking her head. 'He is an earnest man when his hatred is up.
I know many who do worse things; but I'd rather listen to them all a
dozen times, than to that Monks once. It is growing late, and I have
to reach home without suspicion of having been on such an errand as
this. I must get back quickly.'
'But what can I do?' said Rose. 'To what use can I turn this
communication without you? Back! Why do you wish to return to
companions you paint in such terrible colors? If you repeat this
information to a gentleman whom I can summon in an instant from the
next room, you can be consigned to some place of safety without half an
hour's delay.'
'I wish to go back,' said the girl. 'I must go back, because--how can
I tell such things to an innocent lady like you?--because among the men
I have told you of, there is one: the most desperate among them all;
that I can't leave: no, not even to be saved from the life I am
leading now.'
'Your having interfered in this dear boy's behalf before,' said Rose;
'your coming here, at so great a risk, to tell me what you have heard;
your manner, which convinces me of the truth of what you say; your
evident contrition, and sense of shame; all lead me to believe that you
might yet be reclaimed. Oh!' said the earnest girl, folding her hands
as the tears coursed down her face, 'do not turn a deaf ear to the
entreaties of one of your own sex; the first--the first, I do believe,
who ever appealed to you in the voice of pity and compassion. Do hear
my words, and let me save you yet, for better things.'
'Lady,' cried the girl, sinking on her knees, 'dear, sweet, angel lady,
you _are_ the first that ever blessed me with such words as these, and
if I had heard them years ago, they might have turned me from a life of
sin and sorrow; but it is too late, it is too late!'
'It is never too late,' said Rose, 'for penitence and atonement.'
'It is,' cried the girl, writhing in agony of her mind; 'I cannot leave
him now! I could not be his death.'
'Why should you be?' asked Rose.
'Nothing could save him,' cried the girl. 'If I told others what I
have told you, and led to their being taken, he would be sure to die.
He is the boldest, and has been so cruel!'
'Is it possible,' cried Rose, 'that for such a man as this, you can
resign every future hope, and the certainty of immediate rescue? It is
madness.'
'I don't know what it is,' answered the girl; 'I only know that it is
so, and not with me alone, but with hundreds of others as bad and
wretched as myself. I must go back. Whether it is God's wrath for the
wrong I have done, I do not know; but I am drawn back to him through
every suffering and ill usage; and I should be, I believe, if I knew
that I was to die by his hand at last.'
'What am I to do?' said Rose. 'I should not let you depart from me
thus.'
'You should, lady, and I know you will,' rejoined the girl, rising.
'You will not stop my going because I have trusted in your goodness,
and forced no promise from you, as I might have done.'
'Of what use, then, is the communication you have made?' said Rose.
'This mystery must be investigated, or how will its disclosure to me,
benefit Oliver, whom you are anxious to serve?'
'You must have some kind gentleman about you that will hear it as a
secret, and advise you what to do,' rejoined the girl.
'But where can I find you again when it is necessary?' asked Rose. 'I
do not seek to know where these dreadful people live, but where will
you be walking or passing at any settled period from this time?'
'Will you promise me that you will have my secret strictly kept, and
come alone, or with the only other person that knows it; and that I
shall not be watched or followed?' asked the girl.
'I promise you solemnly,' answered Rose.
'Every Sunday night, from eleven until the clock strikes twelve,' said
the girl without hesitation, 'I will walk on London Bridge if I am
alive.'
'Stay another moment,' interposed Rose, as the girl moved hurriedly
towards the door. 'Think once again on your own condition, and the
opportunity you have of escaping from it. You have a claim on me: not
only as the voluntary bearer of this intelligence, but as a woman lost
almost beyond redemption. Will you return to this gang of robbers, and
to this man, when a word can save you? What fascination is it that can
take you back, and make you cling to wickedness and misery? Oh! is
there no chord in your heart that I can touch! Is there nothing left,
to which I can appeal against this terrible infatuation!'
'When ladies as young, and good, and beautiful as you are,' replied the
girl steadily, 'give away your hearts, love will carry you all
lengths--even such as you, who have home, friends, other admirers,
everything, to fill them. When such as I, who have no certain roof but
the coffinlid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital
nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place
that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to
cure us? Pity us, lady--pity us for having only one feeling of the
woman left, and for having that turned, by a heavy judgment, from a
comfort and a pride, into a new means of violence and suffering.'
'You will,' said Rose, after a pause, 'take some money from me, which
may enable you to live without dishonesty--at all events until we meet
again?'
'Not a penny,' replied the girl, waving her hand.
'Do not close your heart against all my efforts to help you,' said
Rose, stepping gently forward. 'I wish to serve you indeed.'
'You would serve me best, lady,' replied the girl, wringing her hands,
'if you could take my life at once; for I have felt more grief to think
of what I am, to-night, than I ever did before, and it would be
something not to die in the hell in which I have lived. God bless you,
sweet lady, and send as much happiness on your head as I have brought
shame on mine!'
Thus speaking, and sobbing aloud, the unhappy creature turned away;
while Rose Maylie, overpowered by this extraordinary interview, which
had more the semblance of a rapid dream than an actual occurrence, sank
into a chair, and endeavoured to collect her wandering thoughts.
| The next day, Sikes is too busy eating and drinking with the money Fagin had sent to notice anything unusual about Nancy's behavior. Nancy is waiting for Sikes to drink himself asleep when he finally asks her what she's thinking to make her eyes all wild and her skin so flushed. He wants to know if she's caught his fever, or if she's agitated. Finally he falls into a heavy sleep, and Nancy is relieved--the laudanum has finally kicked in . She hurries out of the house, and books it across London in record time. She arrives at a family hotel in a street near Hyde Park , hesitates a bit, and then goes inside to ask to speak with Miss Maylie--alone. The servants are skeptical--what could this girl want with a sweet young lady like Miss Maylie? One of the servants feels sorry for her, and agrees to send the message to Miss Maylie. The other servants mumble and grumble self-righteously about it, loudly enough for Nancy to hear, but otherwise leave her alone. Miss Maylie comes down, and is so sweet that Nancy immediately bursts into tears. Of course Rose offers to help her in any way she can, even before knowing why Nancy's there. Nancy tells her to hold off on offering to help before knowing who and what she is. She admits, first off, that she's the one who helped to drag Oliver back to Fagin's house from Mr. Brownlow's. Rose is obviously surprised, and can't help being horrified. Nancy says she doesn't mind--she's used to good women being horrified by her, and tells Rose to thank Heaven that she had people to bring her up and keep her from the streets, and that she was raised in the gutter. Rose pities her. Of course. She pities everybody. Nancy asks if she knows a man named Monks. Rose doesn't. Nancy figures Monks must be a fake name, and goes on with her story. From what she overheard between Monks and Fagin, Monks had seen Oliver out with the Dodger and Charley on the day he was picked up by Brownlow. Monks offered Fagin a large sum of money if he could get Oliver back again, and make him a thief. That's all Nancy overheard the first time, because Monks saw her shadow on the wall and she had to go hide. Then, the night before, Nancy heard Monks telling Fagin about how the proof of Oliver's identity were at the bottom of the river. She also heard him mention Oliver's father's will, and how putting Oliver in jail would make a mockery of it, and finally, she heard Monks refer to his "young brother, Oliver." Rose is obviously surprised , and asks whether Monks could have been serious. Nancy is convinced that he was, but says that she has to get back. Rose tries to convince her to stay, and offers to protect her from the thieves, and give her a quiet home somewhere far away. Nancy says it's too late, and that she can't be the death of "him" . Rose tries again to persuade Nancy to stay, but Nancy won't. Nancy gets Rose to promise not to use the information she's given her to arrest any of Fagin's gang, and Rose agrees. Rose doesn't know what to do with the information, anyway--and Nancy suggests that she tell some "kind gentleman" and ask his advice . They make an arrangement that every Sunday, Nancy will walk on London Bridge between 11pm and midnight, and that if Rose needs to consult her about anything, she'll look for her there. Rose tries one more time to convince Nancy to stay--she appeals to her as one woman to another. Nancy says that it's love that makes her go, and asks for Rose's pity, but nothing else. Nancy leaves, and Rose feels like it's been all a bizarre dream. | summary |
Her situation was, indeed, one of no common trial and difficulty. While
she felt the most eager and burning desire to penetrate the mystery in
which Oliver's history was enveloped, she could not but hold sacred the
confidence which the miserable woman with whom she had just conversed,
had reposed in her, as a young and guileless girl. Her words and
manner had touched Rose Maylie's heart; and, mingled with her love for
her young charge, and scarcely less intense in its truth and fervour,
was her fond wish to win the outcast back to repentance and hope.
They purposed remaining in London only three days, prior to departing
for some weeks to a distant part of the coast. It was now midnight of
the first day. What course of action could she determine upon, which
could be adopted in eight-and-forty hours? Or how could she postpone
the journey without exciting suspicion?
Mr. Losberne was with them, and would be for the next two days; but
Rose was too well acquainted with the excellent gentleman's
impetuosity, and foresaw too clearly the wrath with which, in the first
explosion of his indignation, he would regard the instrument of
Oliver's recapture, to trust him with the secret, when her
representations in the girl's behalf could be seconded by no
experienced person. These were all reasons for the greatest caution
and most circumspect behaviour in communicating it to Mrs. Maylie,
whose first impulse would infallibly be to hold a conference with the
worthy doctor on the subject. As to resorting to any legal adviser,
even if she had known how to do so, it was scarcely to be thought of,
for the same reason. Once the thought occurred to her of seeking
assistance from Harry; but this awakened the recollection of their last
parting, and it seemed unworthy of her to call him back, when--the
tears rose to her eyes as she pursued this train of reflection--he
might have by this time learnt to forget her, and to be happier away.
Disturbed by these different reflections; inclining now to one course
and then to another, and again recoiling from all, as each successive
consideration presented itself to her mind; Rose passed a sleepless and
anxious night. After more communing with herself next day, she arrived
at the desperate conclusion of consulting Harry.
'If it be painful to him,' she thought, 'to come back here, how painful
it will be to me! But perhaps he will not come; he may write, or he
may come himself, and studiously abstain from meeting me--he did when
he went away. I hardly thought he would; but it was better for us
both.' And here Rose dropped the pen, and turned away, as though the
very paper which was to be her messenger should not see her weep.
She had taken up the same pen, and laid it down again fifty times, and
had considered and reconsidered the first line of her letter without
writing the first word, when Oliver, who had been walking in the
streets, with Mr. Giles for a body-guard, entered the room in such
breathless haste and violent agitation, as seemed to betoken some new
cause of alarm.
'What makes you look so flurried?' asked Rose, advancing to meet him.
'I hardly know how; I feel as if I should be choked,' replied the boy.
'Oh dear! To think that I should see him at last, and you should be
able to know that I have told you the truth!'
'I never thought you had told us anything but the truth,' said Rose,
soothing him. 'But what is this?--of whom do you speak?'
'I have seen the gentleman,' replied Oliver, scarcely able to
articulate, 'the gentleman who was so good to me--Mr. Brownlow, that we
have so often talked about.'
'Where?' asked Rose.
'Getting out of a coach,' replied Oliver, shedding tears of delight,
'and going into a house. I didn't speak to him--I couldn't speak to
him, for he didn't see me, and I trembled so, that I was not able to go
up to him. But Giles asked, for me, whether he lived there, and they
said he did. Look here,' said Oliver, opening a scrap of paper, 'here
it is; here's where he lives--I'm going there directly! Oh, dear me,
dear me! What shall I do when I come to see him and hear him speak
again!'
With her attention not a little distracted by these and a great many
other incoherent exclamations of joy, Rose read the address, which was
Craven Street, in the Strand. She very soon determined upon turning
the discovery to account.
'Quick!' she said. 'Tell them to fetch a hackney-coach, and be ready
to go with me. I will take you there directly, without a minute's loss
of time. I will only tell my aunt that we are going out for an hour,
and be ready as soon as you are.'
Oliver needed no prompting to despatch, and in little more than five
minutes they were on their way to Craven Street. When they arrived
there, Rose left Oliver in the coach, under pretence of preparing the
old gentleman to receive him; and sending up her card by the servant,
requested to see Mr. Brownlow on very pressing business. The servant
soon returned, to beg that she would walk upstairs; and following him
into an upper room, Miss Maylie was presented to an elderly gentleman
of benevolent appearance, in a bottle-green coat. At no great distance
from whom, was seated another old gentleman, in nankeen breeches and
gaiters; who did not look particularly benevolent, and who was sitting
with his hands clasped on the top of a thick stick, and his chin
propped thereupon.
'Dear me,' said the gentleman, in the bottle-green coat, hastily rising
with great politeness, 'I beg your pardon, young lady--I imagined it
was some importunate person who--I beg you will excuse me. Be seated,
pray.'
'Mr. Brownlow, I believe, sir?' said Rose, glancing from the other
gentleman to the one who had spoken.
'That is my name,' said the old gentleman. 'This is my friend, Mr.
Grimwig. Grimwig, will you leave us for a few minutes?'
'I believe,' interposed Miss Maylie, 'that at this period of our
interview, I need not give that gentleman the trouble of going away.
If I am correctly informed, he is cognizant of the business on which I
wish to speak to you.'
Mr. Brownlow inclined his head. Mr. Grimwig, who had made one very
stiff bow, and risen from his chair, made another very stiff bow, and
dropped into it again.
'I shall surprise you very much, I have no doubt,' said Rose, naturally
embarrassed; 'but you once showed great benevolence and goodness to a
very dear young friend of mine, and I am sure you will take an interest
in hearing of him again.'
'Indeed!' said Mr. Brownlow.
'Oliver Twist you knew him as,' replied Rose.
The words no sooner escaped her lips, than Mr. Grimwig, who had been
affecting to dip into a large book that lay on the table, upset it with
a great crash, and falling back in his chair, discharged from his
features every expression but one of unmitigated wonder, and indulged
in a prolonged and vacant stare; then, as if ashamed of having betrayed
so much emotion, he jerked himself, as it were, by a convulsion into
his former attitude, and looking out straight before him emitted a long
deep whistle, which seemed, at last, not to be discharged on empty air,
but to die away in the innermost recesses of his stomach.
Mr. Browlow was no less surprised, although his astonishment was not
expressed in the same eccentric manner. He drew his chair nearer to
Miss Maylie's, and said,
'Do me the favour, my dear young lady, to leave entirely out of the
question that goodness and benevolence of which you speak, and of which
nobody else knows anything; and if you have it in your power to produce
any evidence which will alter the unfavourable opinion I was once
induced to entertain of that poor child, in Heaven's name put me in
possession of it.'
'A bad one! I'll eat my head if he is not a bad one,' growled Mr.
Grimwig, speaking by some ventriloquial power, without moving a muscle
of his face.
'He is a child of a noble nature and a warm heart,' said Rose,
colouring; 'and that Power which has thought fit to try him beyond his
years, has planted in his breast affections and feelings which would do
honour to many who have numbered his days six times over.'
'I'm only sixty-one,' said Mr. Grimwig, with the same rigid face. 'And,
as the devil's in it if this Oliver is not twelve years old at least, I
don't see the application of that remark.'
'Do not heed my friend, Miss Maylie,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'he does not
mean what he says.'
'Yes, he does,' growled Mr. Grimwig.
'No, he does not,' said Mr. Brownlow, obviously rising in wrath as he
spoke.
'He'll eat his head, if he doesn't,' growled Mr. Grimwig.
'He would deserve to have it knocked off, if he does,' said Mr.
Brownlow.
'And he'd uncommonly like to see any man offer to do it,' responded Mr.
Grimwig, knocking his stick upon the floor.
Having gone thus far, the two old gentlemen severally took snuff, and
afterwards shook hands, according to their invariable custom.
'Now, Miss Maylie,' said Mr. Brownlow, 'to return to the subject in
which your humanity is so much interested. Will you let me know what
intelligence you have of this poor child: allowing me to promise that
I exhausted every means in my power of discovering him, and that since
I have been absent from this country, my first impression that he had
imposed upon me, and had been persuaded by his former associates to rob
me, has been considerably shaken.'
Rose, who had had time to collect her thoughts, at once related, in a
few natural words, all that had befallen Oliver since he left Mr.
Brownlow's house; reserving Nancy's information for that gentleman's
private ear, and concluding with the assurance that his only sorrow,
for some months past, had been not being able to meet with his former
benefactor and friend.
'Thank God!' said the old gentleman. 'This is great happiness to me,
great happiness. But you have not told me where he is now, Miss
Maylie. You must pardon my finding fault with you,--but why not have
brought him?'
'He is waiting in a coach at the door,' replied Rose.
'At this door!' cried the old gentleman. With which he hurried out of
the room, down the stairs, up the coachsteps, and into the coach,
without another word.
When the room-door closed behind him, Mr. Grimwig lifted up his head,
and converting one of the hind legs of his chair into a pivot,
described three distinct circles with the assistance of his stick and
the table; sitting in it all the time. After performing this
evolution, he rose and limped as fast as he could up and down the room
at least a dozen times, and then stopping suddenly before Rose, kissed
her without the slightest preface.
'Hush!' he said, as the young lady rose in some alarm at this unusual
proceeding. 'Don't be afraid. I'm old enough to be your grandfather.
You're a sweet girl. I like you. Here they are!'
In fact, as he threw himself at one dexterous dive into his former
seat, Mr. Brownlow returned, accompanied by Oliver, whom Mr. Grimwig
received very graciously; and if the gratification of that moment had
been the only reward for all her anxiety and care in Oliver's behalf,
Rose Maylie would have been well repaid.
'There is somebody else who should not be forgotten, by the bye,' said
Mr. Brownlow, ringing the bell. 'Send Mrs. Bedwin here, if you please.'
The old housekeeper answered the summons with all dispatch; and
dropping a curtsey at the door, waited for orders.
'Why, you get blinder every day, Bedwin,' said Mr. Brownlow, rather
testily.
'Well, that I do, sir,' replied the old lady. 'People's eyes, at my
time of life, don't improve with age, sir.'
'I could have told you that,' rejoined Mr. Brownlow; 'but put on your
glasses, and see if you can't find out what you were wanted for, will
you?'
The old lady began to rummage in her pocket for her spectacles. But
Oliver's patience was not proof against this new trial; and yielding to
his first impulse, he sprang into her arms.
'God be good to me!' cried the old lady, embracing him; 'it is my
innocent boy!'
'My dear old nurse!' cried Oliver.
'He would come back--I knew he would,' said the old lady, holding him
in her arms. 'How well he looks, and how like a gentleman's son he is
dressed again! Where have you been, this long, long while? Ah! the
same sweet face, but not so pale; the same soft eye, but not so sad. I
have never forgotten them or his quiet smile, but have seen them every
day, side by side with those of my own dear children, dead and gone
since I was a lightsome young creature.' Running on thus, and now
holding Oliver from her to mark how he had grown, now clasping him to
her and passing her fingers fondly through his hair, the good soul
laughed and wept upon his neck by turns.
Leaving her and Oliver to compare notes at leisure, Mr. Brownlow led
the way into another room; and there, heard from Rose a full narration
of her interview with Nancy, which occasioned him no little surprise
and perplexity. Rose also explained her reasons for not confiding in
her friend Mr. Losberne in the first instance. The old gentleman
considered that she had acted prudently, and readily undertook to hold
solemn conference with the worthy doctor himself. To afford him an
early opportunity for the execution of this design, it was arranged
that he should call at the hotel at eight o'clock that evening, and
that in the meantime Mrs. Maylie should be cautiously informed of all
that had occurred. These preliminaries adjusted, Rose and Oliver
returned home.
Rose had by no means overrated the measure of the good doctor's wrath.
Nancy's history was no sooner unfolded to him, than he poured forth a
shower of mingled threats and execrations; threatened to make her the
first victim of the combined ingenuity of Messrs. Blathers and Duff;
and actually put on his hat preparatory to sallying forth to obtain the
assistance of those worthies. And, doubtless, he would, in this first
outbreak, have carried the intention into effect without a moment's
consideration of the consequences, if he had not been restrained, in
part, by corresponding violence on the side of Mr. Brownlow, who was
himself of an irascible temperament, and party by such arguments and
representations as seemed best calculated to dissuade him from his
hotbrained purpose.
'Then what the devil is to be done?' said the impetuous doctor, when
they had rejoined the two ladies. 'Are we to pass a vote of thanks to
all these vagabonds, male and female, and beg them to accept a hundred
pounds, or so, apiece, as a trifling mark of our esteem, and some
slight acknowledgment of their kindness to Oliver?'
'Not exactly that,' rejoined Mr. Brownlow, laughing; 'but we must
proceed gently and with great care.'
'Gentleness and care,' exclaimed the doctor. 'I'd send them one and
all to--'
'Never mind where,' interposed Mr. Brownlow. 'But reflect whether
sending them anywhere is likely to attain the object we have in view.'
'What object?' asked the doctor.
'Simply, the discovery of Oliver's parentage, and regaining for him the
inheritance of which, if this story be true, he has been fraudulently
deprived.'
'Ah!' said Mr. Losberne, cooling himself with his pocket-handkerchief;
'I almost forgot that.'
'You see,' pursued Mr. Brownlow; 'placing this poor girl entirely out
of the question, and supposing it were possible to bring these
scoundrels to justice without compromising her safety, what good should
we bring about?'
'Hanging a few of them at least, in all probability,' suggested the
doctor, 'and transporting the rest.'
'Very good,' replied Mr. Brownlow, smiling; 'but no doubt they will
bring that about for themselves in the fulness of time, and if we step
in to forestall them, it seems to me that we shall be performing a very
Quixotic act, in direct opposition to our own interest--or at least to
Oliver's, which is the same thing.'
'How?' inquired the doctor.
'Thus. It is quite clear that we shall have extreme difficulty in
getting to the bottom of this mystery, unless we can bring this man,
Monks, upon his knees. That can only be done by stratagem, and by
catching him when he is not surrounded by these people. For, suppose
he were apprehended, we have no proof against him. He is not even (so
far as we know, or as the facts appear to us) concerned with the gang
in any of their robberies. If he were not discharged, it is very
unlikely that he could receive any further punishment than being
committed to prison as a rogue and vagabond; and of course ever
afterwards his mouth would be so obstinately closed that he might as
well, for our purposes, be deaf, dumb, blind, and an idiot.'
'Then,' said the doctor impetuously, 'I put it to you again, whether
you think it reasonable that this promise to the girl should be
considered binding; a promise made with the best and kindest
intentions, but really--'
'Do not discuss the point, my dear young lady, pray,' said Mr.
Brownlow, interrupting Rose as she was about to speak. 'The promise
shall be kept. I don't think it will, in the slightest degree,
interfere with our proceedings. But, before we can resolve upon any
precise course of action, it will be necessary to see the girl; to
ascertain from her whether she will point out this Monks, on the
understanding that he is to be dealt with by us, and not by the law;
or, if she will not, or cannot do that, to procure from her such an
account of his haunts and description of his person, as will enable us
to identify him. She cannot be seen until next Sunday night; this is
Tuesday. I would suggest that in the meantime, we remain perfectly
quiet, and keep these matters secret even from Oliver himself.'
Although Mr. Losberne received with many wry faces a proposal involving
a delay of five whole days, he was fain to admit that no better course
occurred to him just then; and as both Rose and Mrs. Maylie sided very
strongly with Mr. Brownlow, that gentleman's proposition was carried
unanimously.
'I should like,' he said, 'to call in the aid of my friend Grimwig. He
is a strange creature, but a shrewd one, and might prove of material
assistance to us; I should say that he was bred a lawyer, and quitted
the Bar in disgust because he had only one brief and a motion of
course, in twenty years, though whether that is recommendation or not,
you must determine for yourselves.'
'I have no objection to your calling in your friend if I may call in
mine,' said the doctor.
'We must put it to the vote,' replied Mr. Brownlow, 'who may he be?'
'That lady's son, and this young lady's--very old friend,' said the
doctor, motioning towards Mrs. Maylie, and concluding with an
expressive glance at her niece.
Rose blushed deeply, but she did not make any audible objection to this
motion (possibly she felt in a hopeless minority); and Harry Maylie and
Mr. Grimwig were accordingly added to the committee.
'We stay in town, of course,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'while there remains
the slightest prospect of prosecuting this inquiry with a chance of
success. I will spare neither trouble nor expense in behalf of the
object in which we are all so deeply interested, and I am content to
remain here, if it be for twelve months, so long as you assure me that
any hope remains.'
'Good!' rejoined Mr. Brownlow. 'And as I see on the faces about me, a
disposition to inquire how it happened that I was not in the way to
corroborate Oliver's tale, and had so suddenly left the kingdom, let me
stipulate that I shall be asked no questions until such time as I may
deem it expedient to forestall them by telling my own story. Believe
me, I make this request with good reason, for I might otherwise excite
hopes destined never to be realised, and only increase difficulties and
disappointments already quite numerous enough. Come! Supper has been
announced, and young Oliver, who is all alone in the next room, will
have begun to think, by this time, that we have wearied of his company,
and entered into some dark conspiracy to thrust him forth upon the
world.'
With these words, the old gentleman gave his hand to Mrs. Maylie, and
escorted her into the supper-room. Mr. Losberne followed, leading
Rose; and the council was, for the present, effectually broken up.
| Rose doesn't know what to do, but she really, really wants to save Nancy from her life in the streets. The Maylies are planning on staying in London for only three days on their way to the seashore, and Rose doesn't know how to deal with the information Nancy's given her in only that time. She doesn't want to tell Mr. Losberne, because he's too impetuous . And she doesn't want to tell Mrs. Maylie, because Mrs. Maylie would immediately tell Mr. Losberne. Rose thinks about asking Harry, but doesn't want to ask him for help when she's just rejected him. Seems like bad form. She finally decides that asking Harry is the best option, when Oliver comes in, all smiles, saying that Mr. Brownlow is back from the West Indies. Rose decides to tell Mr. Brownlow all about it, and offers to take Oliver to see him herself. They take off right away, and Rose goes in first to tell Mr. Brownlow that they'd found Oliver. Mr. Brownlow is sitting in his study with Mr. Grimwig, and Rose tells them that she has news about Oliver. Mr. Grimwig assumes that it's bad news, of course. Rose assures them that Oliver's a great kid--the best boy in the world--and that he's downstairs waiting. Mr. Brownlow is delighted, and immediately runs out to see the best boy in the world. Mr. Grimwig thinks Rose is just peachy, so he takes this moment to plant a big wet one on her cheek. He excuses himself by saying that he's old enough to be her grandpa, and that she's a good girl and he likes her. Rose thinks he's kind of odd, but doesn't say so. Mr. Brownlow comes back in with Oliver, and Mr. Grimwig is happy to see him, too. Mrs. Bedwin comes in, and they all cry over each other some more. After everyone's done crying, Rose takes Mr. Brownlow to the next room to tell him what Nancy had said. Mr. Brownlow says that he'll tell Mr. Losberne and Mrs. Maylie all of it, and keep Mr. Losberne from doing anything stupid or rash. Mr. Losberne, when finds out about it, does indeed want to go raid Fagin's house, but Mr. Brownlow persuades him to chill. Their main goal, Mr. Brownlow points out, is to figure out who Oliver's parents were, and to get his inheritance back from his evil brother. Mr. Losberne still thinks they should try to get the thieves all hanged or transported, but Mr. Brownlow points out that they can't do that without breaking Rose's promise to Nancy. And besides, they'll probably all get themselves hanged or transported soon enough, anyway. Harry Maylie and Mr. Grimwig get added to the committee, and filled in on what's going on. So now everyone knows about Monks and the big plot against Oliver except for Oliver. Mr. Brownlow says that he was out of the country on business that is still up in the air, so he won't tell them about it until it's all squared away. Then they go out to supper and rejoin Oliver, who probably thinks they're all conspiring against him or something. | summary |
Upon the night when Nancy, having lulled Mr. Sikes to sleep, hurried on
her self-imposed mission to Rose Maylie, there advanced towards London,
by the Great North Road, two persons, upon whom it is expedient that
this history should bestow some attention.
They were a man and woman; or perhaps they would be better described as
a male and female: for the former was one of those long-limbed,
knock-kneed, shambling, bony people, to whom it is difficult to assign
any precise age,--looking as they do, when they are yet boys, like
undergrown men, and when they are almost men, like overgrown boys. The
woman was young, but of a robust and hardy make, as she need have been
to bear the weight of the heavy bundle which was strapped to her back.
Her companion was not encumbered with much luggage, as there merely
dangled from a stick which he carried over his shoulder, a small parcel
wrapped in a common handkerchief, and apparently light enough. This
circumstance, added to the length of his legs, which were of unusual
extent, enabled him with much ease to keep some half-dozen paces in
advance of his companion, to whom he occasionally turned with an
impatient jerk of the head: as if reproaching her tardiness, and
urging her to greater exertion.
Thus, they had toiled along the dusty road, taking little heed of any
object within sight, save when they stepped aside to allow a wider
passage for the mail-coaches which were whirling out of town, until
they passed through Highgate archway; when the foremost traveller
stopped and called impatiently to his companion,
'Come on, can't yer? What a lazybones yer are, Charlotte.'
'It's a heavy load, I can tell you,' said the female, coming up, almost
breathless with fatigue.
'Heavy! What are yer talking about? What are yer made for?' rejoined
the male traveller, changing his own little bundle as he spoke, to the
other shoulder. 'Oh, there yer are, resting again! Well, if yer ain't
enough to tire anybody's patience out, I don't know what is!'
'Is it much farther?' asked the woman, resting herself against a bank,
and looking up with the perspiration streaming from her face.
'Much farther! Yer as good as there,' said the long-legged tramper,
pointing out before him. 'Look there! Those are the lights of London.'
'They're a good two mile off, at least,' said the woman despondingly.
'Never mind whether they're two mile off, or twenty,' said Noah
Claypole; for he it was; 'but get up and come on, or I'll kick yer, and
so I give yer notice.'
As Noah's red nose grew redder with anger, and as he crossed the road
while speaking, as if fully prepared to put his threat into execution,
the woman rose without any further remark, and trudged onward by his
side.
'Where do you mean to stop for the night, Noah?' she asked, after they
had walked a few hundred yards.
'How should I know?' replied Noah, whose temper had been considerably
impaired by walking.
'Near, I hope,' said Charlotte.
'No, not near,' replied Mr. Claypole. 'There! Not near; so don't
think it.'
'Why not?'
'When I tell yer that I don't mean to do a thing, that's enough,
without any why or because either,' replied Mr. Claypole with dignity.
'Well, you needn't be so cross,' said his companion.
'A pretty thing it would be, wouldn't it to go and stop at the very
first public-house outside the town, so that Sowerberry, if he come up
after us, might poke in his old nose, and have us taken back in a cart
with handcuffs on,' said Mr. Claypole in a jeering tone. 'No! I shall
go and lose myself among the narrowest streets I can find, and not stop
till we come to the very out-of-the-wayest house I can set eyes on.
'Cod, yer may thanks yer stars I've got a head; for if we hadn't gone,
at first, the wrong road a purpose, and come back across country, yer'd
have been locked up hard and fast a week ago, my lady. And serve yer
right for being a fool.'
'I know I ain't as cunning as you are,' replied Charlotte; 'but don't
put all the blame on me, and say I should have been locked up. You
would have been if I had been, any way.'
'Yer took the money from the till, yer know yer did,' said Mr. Claypole.
'I took it for you, Noah, dear,' rejoined Charlotte.
'Did I keep it?' asked Mr. Claypole.
'No; you trusted in me, and let me carry it like a dear, and so you
are,' said the lady, chucking him under the chin, and drawing her arm
through his.
This was indeed the case; but as it was not Mr. Claypole's habit to
repose a blind and foolish confidence in anybody, it should be
observed, in justice to that gentleman, that he had trusted Charlotte
to this extent, in order that, if they were pursued, the money might be
found on her: which would leave him an opportunity of asserting his
innocence of any theft, and would greatly facilitate his chances of
escape. Of course, he entered at this juncture, into no explanation of
his motives, and they walked on very lovingly together.
In pursuance of this cautious plan, Mr. Claypole went on, without
halting, until he arrived at the Angel at Islington, where he wisely
judged, from the crowd of passengers and numbers of vehicles, that
London began in earnest. Just pausing to observe which appeared the
most crowded streets, and consequently the most to be avoided, he
crossed into Saint John's Road, and was soon deep in the obscurity of
the intricate and dirty ways, which, lying between Gray's Inn Lane and
Smithfield, render that part of the town one of the lowest and worst
that improvement has left in the midst of London.
Through these streets, Noah Claypole walked, dragging Charlotte after
him; now stepping into the kennel to embrace at a glance the whole
external character of some small public-house; now jogging on again, as
some fancied appearance induced him to believe it too public for his
purpose. At length, he stopped in front of one, more humble in
appearance and more dirty than any he had yet seen; and, having crossed
over and surveyed it from the opposite pavement, graciously announced
his intention of putting up there, for the night.
'So give us the bundle,' said Noah, unstrapping it from the woman's
shoulders, and slinging it over his own; 'and don't yer speak, except
when yer spoke to. What's the name of the house--t-h-r--three what?'
'Cripples,' said Charlotte.
'Three Cripples,' repeated Noah, 'and a very good sign too. Now, then!
Keep close at my heels, and come along.' With these injunctions, he
pushed the rattling door with his shoulder, and entered the house,
followed by his companion.
There was nobody in the bar but a young Jew, who, with his two elbows
on the counter, was reading a dirty newspaper. He stared very hard at
Noah, and Noah stared very hard at him.
If Noah had been attired in his charity-boy's dress, there might have
been some reason for the Jew opening his eyes so wide; but as he had
discarded the coat and badge, and wore a short smock-frock over his
leathers, there seemed no particular reason for his appearance exciting
so much attention in a public-house.
'Is this the Three Cripples?' asked Noah.
'That is the dabe of this 'ouse,' replied the Jew.
'A gentleman we met on the road, coming up from the country,
recommended us here,' said Noah, nudging Charlotte, perhaps to call her
attention to this most ingenious device for attracting respect, and
perhaps to warn her to betray no surprise. 'We want to sleep here
to-night.'
'I'b dot certaid you cad,' said Barney, who was the attendant sprite;
'but I'll idquire.'
'Show us the tap, and give us a bit of cold meat and a drop of beer
while yer inquiring, will yer?' said Noah.
Barney complied by ushering them into a small back-room, and setting
the required viands before them; having done which, he informed the
travellers that they could be lodged that night, and left the amiable
couple to their refreshment.
Now, this back-room was immediately behind the bar, and some steps
lower, so that any person connected with the house, undrawing a small
curtain which concealed a single pane of glass fixed in the wall of the
last-named apartment, about five feet from its flooring, could not only
look down upon any guests in the back-room without any great hazard of
being observed (the glass being in a dark angle of the wall, between
which and a large upright beam the observer had to thrust himself), but
could, by applying his ear to the partition, ascertain with tolerable
distinctness, their subject of conversation. The landlord of the house
had not withdrawn his eye from this place of espial for five minutes,
and Barney had only just returned from making the communication above
related, when Fagin, in the course of his evening's business, came into
the bar to inquire after some of his young pupils.
'Hush!' said Barney: 'stradegers id the next roob.'
'Strangers!' repeated the old man in a whisper.
'Ah! Ad rub uds too,' added Barney. 'Frob the cuttry, but subthig in
your way, or I'b bistaked.'
Fagin appeared to receive this communication with great interest.
Mounting a stool, he cautiously applied his eye to the pane of glass,
from which secret post he could see Mr. Claypole taking cold beef from
the dish, and porter from the pot, and administering homeopathic doses
of both to Charlotte, who sat patiently by, eating and drinking at his
pleasure.
'Aha!' he whispered, looking round to Barney, 'I like that fellow's
looks. He'd be of use to us; he knows how to train the girl already.
Don't make as much noise as a mouse, my dear, and let me hear 'em
talk--let me hear 'em.'
He again applied his eye to the glass, and turning his ear to the
partition, listened attentively: with a subtle and eager look upon his
face, that might have appertained to some old goblin.
'So I mean to be a gentleman,' said Mr. Claypole, kicking out his legs,
and continuing a conversation, the commencement of which Fagin had
arrived too late to hear. 'No more jolly old coffins, Charlotte, but a
gentleman's life for me: and, if yer like, yer shall be a lady.'
'I should like that well enough, dear,' replied Charlotte; 'but tills
ain't to be emptied every day, and people to get clear off after it.'
'Tills be blowed!' said Mr. Claypole; 'there's more things besides
tills to be emptied.'
'What do you mean?' asked his companion.
'Pockets, women's ridicules, houses, mail-coaches, banks!' said Mr.
Claypole, rising with the porter.
'But you can't do all that, dear,' said Charlotte.
'I shall look out to get into company with them as can,' replied Noah.
'They'll be able to make us useful some way or another. Why, you
yourself are worth fifty women; I never see such a precious sly and
deceitful creetur as yer can be when I let yer.'
'Lor, how nice it is to hear yer say so!' exclaimed Charlotte,
imprinting a kiss upon his ugly face.
'There, that'll do: don't yer be too affectionate, in case I'm cross
with yer,' said Noah, disengaging himself with great gravity. 'I
should like to be the captain of some band, and have the whopping of
'em, and follering 'em about, unbeknown to themselves. That would suit
me, if there was good profit; and if we could only get in with some
gentleman of this sort, I say it would be cheap at that twenty-pound
note you've got,--especially as we don't very well know how to get rid
of it ourselves.'
After expressing this opinion, Mr. Claypole looked into the porter-pot
with an aspect of deep wisdom; and having well shaken its contents,
nodded condescendingly to Charlotte, and took a draught, wherewith he
appeared greatly refreshed. He was meditating another, when the sudden
opening of the door, and the appearance of a stranger, interrupted him.
The stranger was Mr. Fagin. And very amiable he looked, and a very low
bow he made, as he advanced, and setting himself down at the nearest
table, ordered something to drink of the grinning Barney.
'A pleasant night, sir, but cool for the time of year,' said Fagin,
rubbing his hands. 'From the country, I see, sir?'
'How do yer see that?' asked Noah Claypole.
'We have not so much dust as that in London,' replied Fagin, pointing
from Noah's shoes to those of his companion, and from them to the two
bundles.
'Yer a sharp feller,' said Noah. 'Ha! ha! only hear that, Charlotte!'
'Why, one need be sharp in this town, my dear,' replied the Jew,
sinking his voice to a confidential whisper; 'and that's the truth.'
Fagin followed up this remark by striking the side of his nose with his
right forefinger,--a gesture which Noah attempted to imitate, though
not with complete success, in consequence of his own nose not being
large enough for the purpose. However, Mr. Fagin seemed to interpret
the endeavour as expressing a perfect coincidence with his opinion, and
put about the liquor which Barney reappeared with, in a very friendly
manner.
'Good stuff that,' observed Mr. Claypole, smacking his lips.
'Dear!' said Fagin. 'A man need be always emptying a till, or a
pocket, or a woman's reticule, or a house, or a mail-coach, or a bank,
if he drinks it regularly.'
Mr. Claypole no sooner heard this extract from his own remarks than he
fell back in his chair, and looked from the Jew to Charlotte with a
countenance of ashy paleness and excessive terror.
'Don't mind me, my dear,' said Fagin, drawing his chair closer. 'Ha!
ha! it was lucky it was only me that heard you by chance. It was very
lucky it was only me.'
'I didn't take it,' stammered Noah, no longer stretching out his legs
like an independent gentleman, but coiling them up as well as he could
under his chair; 'it was all her doing; yer've got it now, Charlotte,
yer know yer have.'
'No matter who's got it, or who did it, my dear,' replied Fagin,
glancing, nevertheless, with a hawk's eye at the girl and the two
bundles. 'I'm in that way myself, and I like you for it.'
'In what way?' asked Mr. Claypole, a little recovering.
'In that way of business,' rejoined Fagin; 'and so are the people of
the house. You've hit the right nail upon the head, and are as safe
here as you could be. There is not a safer place in all this town than
is the Cripples; that is, when I like to make it so. And I have taken
a fancy to you and the young woman; so I've said the word, and you may
make your minds easy.'
Noah Claypole's mind might have been at ease after this assurance, but
his body certainly was not; for he shuffled and writhed about, into
various uncouth positions: eyeing his new friend meanwhile with
mingled fear and suspicion.
'I'll tell you more,' said Fagin, after he had reassured the girl, by
dint of friendly nods and muttered encouragements. 'I have got a friend
that I think can gratify your darling wish, and put you in the right
way, where you can take whatever department of the business you think
will suit you best at first, and be taught all the others.'
'Yer speak as if yer were in earnest,' replied Noah.
'What advantage would it be to me to be anything else?' inquired Fagin,
shrugging his shoulders. 'Here! Let me have a word with you outside.'
'There's no occasion to trouble ourselves to move,' said Noah, getting
his legs by gradual degrees abroad again. 'She'll take the luggage
upstairs the while. Charlotte, see to them bundles.'
This mandate, which had been delivered with great majesty, was obeyed
without the slightest demur; and Charlotte made the best of her way off
with the packages while Noah held the door open and watched her out.
'She's kept tolerably well under, ain't she?' he asked as he resumed
his seat: in the tone of a keeper who had tamed some wild animal.
'Quite perfect,' rejoined Fagin, clapping him on the shoulder. 'You're
a genius, my dear.'
'Why, I suppose if I wasn't, I shouldn't be here,' replied Noah. 'But,
I say, she'll be back if yer lose time.'
'Now, what do you think?' said Fagin. 'If you was to like my friend,
could you do better than join him?'
'Is he in a good way of business; that's where it is!' responded Noah,
winking one of his little eyes.
'The top of the tree; employs a power of hands; has the very best
society in the profession.'
'Regular town-maders?' asked Mr. Claypole.
'Not a countryman among 'em; and I don't think he'd take you, even on
my recommendation, if he didn't run rather short of assistants just
now,' replied Fagin.
'Should I have to hand over?' said Noah, slapping his breeches-pocket.
'It couldn't possibly be done without,' replied Fagin, in a most
decided manner.
'Twenty pound, though--it's a lot of money!'
'Not when it's in a note you can't get rid of,' retorted Fagin. 'Number
and date taken, I suppose? Payment stopped at the Bank? Ah! It's not
worth much to him. It'll have to go abroad, and he couldn't sell it
for a great deal in the market.'
'When could I see him?' asked Noah doubtfully.
'To-morrow morning.'
'Where?'
'Here.'
'Um!' said Noah. 'What's the wages?'
'Live like a gentleman--board and lodging, pipes and spirits free--half
of all you earn, and half of all the young woman earns,' replied Mr.
Fagin.
Whether Noah Claypole, whose rapacity was none of the least
comprehensive, would have acceded even to these glowing terms, had he
been a perfectly free agent, is very doubtful; but as he recollected
that, in the event of his refusal, it was in the power of his new
acquaintance to give him up to justice immediately (and more unlikely
things had come to pass), he gradually relented, and said he thought
that would suit him.
'But, yer see,' observed Noah, 'as she will be able to do a good deal,
I should like to take something very light.'
'A little fancy work?' suggested Fagin.
'Ah! something of that sort,' replied Noah. 'What do you think would
suit me now? Something not too trying for the strength, and not very
dangerous, you know. That's the sort of thing!'
'I heard you talk of something in the spy way upon the others, my
dear,' said Fagin. 'My friend wants somebody who would do that well,
very much.'
'Why, I did mention that, and I shouldn't mind turning my hand to it
sometimes,' rejoined Mr. Claypole slowly; 'but it wouldn't pay by
itself, you know.'
'That's true!' observed the Jew, ruminating or pretending to ruminate.
'No, it might not.'
'What do you think, then?' asked Noah, anxiously regarding him.
'Something in the sneaking way, where it was pretty sure work, and not
much more risk than being at home.'
'What do you think of the old ladies?' asked Fagin. 'There's a good
deal of money made in snatching their bags and parcels, and running
round the corner.'
'Don't they holler out a good deal, and scratch sometimes?' asked Noah,
shaking his head. 'I don't think that would answer my purpose. Ain't
there any other line open?'
'Stop!' said Fagin, laying his hand on Noah's knee. 'The kinchin lay.'
'What's that?' demanded Mr. Claypole.
'The kinchins, my dear,' said Fagin, 'is the young children that's sent
on errands by their mothers, with sixpences and shillings; and the lay
is just to take their money away--they've always got it ready in their
hands,--then knock 'em into the kennel, and walk off very slow, as if
there were nothing else the matter but a child fallen down and hurt
itself. Ha! ha! ha!'
'Ha! ha!' roared Mr. Claypole, kicking up his legs in an ecstasy.
'Lord, that's the very thing!'
'To be sure it is,' replied Fagin; 'and you can have a few good beats
chalked out in Camden Town, and Battle Bridge, and neighborhoods like
that, where they're always going errands; and you can upset as many
kinchins as you want, any hour in the day. Ha! ha! ha!'
With this, Fagin poked Mr. Claypole in the side, and they joined in a
burst of laughter both long and loud.
'Well, that's all right!' said Noah, when he had recovered himself, and
Charlotte had returned. 'What time to-morrow shall we say?'
'Will ten do?' asked Fagin, adding, as Mr. Claypole nodded assent,
'What name shall I tell my good friend.'
'Mr. Bolter,' replied Noah, who had prepared himself for such
emergency. 'Mr. Morris Bolter. This is Mrs. Bolter.'
'Mrs. Bolter's humble servant,' said Fagin, bowing with grotesque
politeness. 'I hope I shall know her better very shortly.'
'Do you hear the gentleman, Charlotte?' thundered Mr. Claypole.
'Yes, Noah, dear!' replied Mrs. Bolter, extending her hand.
'She calls me Noah, as a sort of fond way of talking,' said Mr. Morris
Bolter, late Claypole, turning to Fagin. 'You understand?'
'Oh yes, I understand--perfectly,' replied Fagin, telling the truth for
once. 'Good-night! Good-night!'
With many adieus and good wishes, Mr. Fagin went his way. Noah
Claypole, bespeaking his good lady's attention, proceeded to enlighten
her relative to the arrangement he had made, with all that haughtiness
and air of superiority, becoming, not only a member of the sterner sex,
but a gentleman who appreciated the dignity of a special appointment on
the kinchin lay, in London and its vicinity.
| The same night Nancy drugs Sikes and goes to see Rose Maylie, a man and woman are walking towards London along the Great North Road. The man is tall and lanky, and the woman is sturdy, and carrying a huge bag. The man keeps urging her to hurry up, even though he's not carrying anything himself. It's our old friends, Noah Claypole and Charlotte, from the Sowerberry's house. Charlotte asks Noah how much further it is, and he tells her it's still plenty far, and to stop resting and hurry up. Charlotte wants to stop at the first inn or public house they can find, but Noah says that that won't do--they'll stop at an out-of-the-way place, and not somewhere on the main road into London, in case they're pursued. Charlotte says that if she's caught and locked up, he will be, too. He says that she's the one who took the money. But she took it for him, she says, and carries it for him because he trusts her. He doesn't argue with her--really, though, he made her take it, and carry it, so that if they were caught he'd be able to blame it all on her. They make their way into London, and don't stop until they see a very dirty public house called the "Three Cripples." They go on in, and the only person is a young Jewish man behind the bar. Noah asks if they can stay there the night, and Barney says he'll go and ask. Meanwhile, Noah asks for some dinner and ale, which they're given in a backroom a few steps down behind the bar. What Noah doesn't know is that there's a small opening behind the bar so that people can spy on the backroom from the bar. Fagin comes into the bar, and Barney has him listen in on their conversation. Fagin likes what he hears: they're discussing the stolen money, of course, and what they plan on doing with it, and how they plan on stealing more. They say that they'll need to find a good gang to get on the right track, especially since the money they stole is in a large banknote that they don't know how to dispose of. So without further ado, Fagin walks in on their conversation. He sits at the table next to theirs, and orders a drink. He makes chitchat with them for a moment about their arrival in the city from the country, and then repeats some of their conversation back to them. Noah's alarmed, and ready to blame everything on Charlotte. Fagin tells him to chill, since he's in the business himself, and can get them in with a "friend" who will put them on the right track. Noah sends Charlotte upstairs with the bundles, and has another word in private with Fagin. He asks Fagin if his "friend" is at the top of his business--of course, Fagin says yes. Fagin says that he'd have to "hand over"--i.e., give up the money he's already stolen. Noah's reluctant to do that, but asks what he'd be paid by Fagin's "friend." Fagin replies that the wages include room and board, tobacco, liquor, and half all he and Charlotte both earn. Of course, Noah realizes that if he says no, Fagin knows enough to have him arrested and hanged, so he says yes. The wages seem pretty good, anyway. Noah says that Charlotte will be able to work a lot for them both, so he'd like to do something easy, and not too dangerous. Fagin suggests stealing purses from old ladies, but that's too dangerous for Noah. Finally, Fagin suggests stealing from little kids who are sent out on errands. Noah gives Fagin fake names--Mr. and Mrs. Morris Bolter. Of course, Charlotte immediately blows their cover by calling him "Noah" in front of Fagin. Fagin doesn't really care, and tells them good night. | summary |
'And so it was you that was your own friend, was it?' asked Mr.
Claypole, otherwise Bolter, when, by virtue of the compact entered into
between them, he had removed next day to Fagin's house. ''Cod, I
thought as much last night!'
'Every man's his own friend, my dear,' replied Fagin, with his most
insinuating grin. 'He hasn't as good a one as himself anywhere.'
'Except sometimes,' replied Morris Bolter, assuming the air of a man of
the world. 'Some people are nobody's enemies but their own, yer know.'
'Don't believe that,' said Fagin. 'When a man's his own enemy, it's
only because he's too much his own friend; not because he's careful for
everybody but himself. Pooh! pooh! There ain't such a thing in
nature.'
'There oughn't to be, if there is,' replied Mr. Bolter.
'That stands to reason. Some conjurers say that number three is the
magic number, and some say number seven. It's neither, my friend,
neither. It's number one.
'Ha! ha!' cried Mr. Bolter. 'Number one for ever.'
'In a little community like ours, my dear,' said Fagin, who felt it
necessary to qualify this position, 'we have a general number one,
without considering me too as the same, and all the other young people.'
'Oh, the devil!' exclaimed Mr. Bolter.
'You see,' pursued Fagin, affecting to disregard this interruption, 'we
are so mixed up together, and identified in our interests, that it must
be so. For instance, it's your object to take care of number
one--meaning yourself.'
'Certainly,' replied Mr. Bolter. 'Yer about right there.'
'Well! You can't take care of yourself, number one, without taking
care of me, number one.'
'Number two, you mean,' said Mr. Bolter, who was largely endowed with
the quality of selfishness.
'No, I don't!' retorted Fagin. 'I'm of the same importance to you, as
you are to yourself.'
'I say,' interrupted Mr. Bolter, 'yer a very nice man, and I'm very
fond of yer; but we ain't quite so thick together, as all that comes
to.'
'Only think,' said Fagin, shrugging his shoulders, and stretching out
his hands; 'only consider. You've done what's a very pretty thing, and
what I love you for doing; but what at the same time would put the
cravat round your throat, that's so very easily tied and so very
difficult to unloose--in plain English, the halter!'
Mr. Bolter put his hand to his neckerchief, as if he felt it
inconveniently tight; and murmured an assent, qualified in tone but not
in substance.
'The gallows,' continued Fagin, 'the gallows, my dear, is an ugly
finger-post, which points out a very short and sharp turning that has
stopped many a bold fellow's career on the broad highway. To keep in
the easy road, and keep it at a distance, is object number one with
you.'
'Of course it is,' replied Mr. Bolter. 'What do yer talk about such
things for?'
'Only to show you my meaning clearly,' said the Jew, raising his
eyebrows. 'To be able to do that, you depend upon me. To keep my
little business all snug, I depend upon you. The first is your number
one, the second my number one. The more you value your number one, the
more careful you must be of mine; so we come at last to what I told you
at first--that a regard for number one holds us all together, and must
do so, unless we would all go to pieces in company.'
'That's true,' rejoined Mr. Bolter, thoughtfully. 'Oh! yer a cunning
old codger!'
Mr. Fagin saw, with delight, that this tribute to his powers was no
mere compliment, but that he had really impressed his recruit with a
sense of his wily genius, which it was most important that he should
entertain in the outset of their acquaintance. To strengthen an
impression so desirable and useful, he followed up the blow by
acquainting him, in some detail, with the magnitude and extent of his
operations; blending truth and fiction together, as best served his
purpose; and bringing both to bear, with so much art, that Mr. Bolter's
respect visibly increased, and became tempered, at the same time, with
a degree of wholesome fear, which it was highly desirable to awaken.
'It's this mutual trust we have in each other that consoles me under
heavy losses,' said Fagin. 'My best hand was taken from me, yesterday
morning.'
'You don't mean to say he died?' cried Mr. Bolter.
'No, no,' replied Fagin, 'not so bad as that. Not quite so bad.'
'What, I suppose he was--'
'Wanted,' interposed Fagin. 'Yes, he was wanted.'
'Very particular?' inquired Mr. Bolter.
'No,' replied Fagin, 'not very. He was charged with attempting to pick
a pocket, and they found a silver snuff-box on him,--his own, my dear,
his own, for he took snuff himself, and was very fond of it. They
remanded him till to-day, for they thought they knew the owner. Ah! he
was worth fifty boxes, and I'd give the price of as many to have him
back. You should have known the Dodger, my dear; you should have known
the Dodger.'
'Well, but I shall know him, I hope; don't yer think so?' said Mr.
Bolter.
'I'm doubtful about it,' replied Fagin, with a sigh. 'If they don't
get any fresh evidence, it'll only be a summary conviction, and we
shall have him back again after six weeks or so; but, if they do, it's
a case of lagging. They know what a clever lad he is; he'll be a
lifer. They'll make the Artful nothing less than a lifer.'
'What do you mean by lagging and a lifer?' demanded Mr. Bolter. 'What's
the good of talking in that way to me; why don't yer speak so as I can
understand yer?'
Fagin was about to translate these mysterious expressions into the
vulgar tongue; and, being interpreted, Mr. Bolter would have been
informed that they represented that combination of words,
'transportation for life,' when the dialogue was cut short by the entry
of Master Bates, with his hands in his breeches-pockets, and his face
twisted into a look of semi-comical woe.
'It's all up, Fagin,' said Charley, when he and his new companion had
been made known to each other.
'What do you mean?'
'They've found the gentleman as owns the box; two or three more's a
coming to 'dentify him; and the Artful's booked for a passage out,'
replied Master Bates. 'I must have a full suit of mourning, Fagin, and
a hatband, to wisit him in, afore he sets out upon his travels. To
think of Jack Dawkins--lummy Jack--the Dodger--the Artful Dodger--going
abroad for a common twopenny-halfpenny sneeze-box! I never thought
he'd a done it under a gold watch, chain, and seals, at the lowest.
Oh, why didn't he rob some rich old gentleman of all his walables, and
go out as a gentleman, and not like a common prig, without no honour
nor glory!'
With this expression of feeling for his unfortunate friend, Master
Bates sat himself on the nearest chair with an aspect of chagrin and
despondency.
'What do you talk about his having neither honour nor glory for!'
exclaimed Fagin, darting an angry look at his pupil. 'Wasn't he always
the top-sawyer among you all! Is there one of you that could touch him
or come near him on any scent! Eh?'
'Not one,' replied Master Bates, in a voice rendered husky by regret;
'not one.'
'Then what do you talk of?' replied Fagin angrily; 'what are you
blubbering for?'
''Cause it isn't on the rec-ord, is it?' said Charley, chafed into
perfect defiance of his venerable friend by the current of his regrets;
''cause it can't come out in the 'dictment; 'cause nobody will never
know half of what he was. How will he stand in the Newgate Calendar?
P'raps not be there at all. Oh, my eye, my eye, wot a blow it is!'
'Ha! ha!' cried Fagin, extending his right hand, and turning to Mr.
Bolter in a fit of chuckling which shook him as though he had the
palsy; 'see what a pride they take in their profession, my dear. Ain't
it beautiful?'
Mr. Bolter nodded assent, and Fagin, after contemplating the grief of
Charley Bates for some seconds with evident satisfaction, stepped up to
that young gentleman and patted him on the shoulder.
'Never mind, Charley,' said Fagin soothingly; 'it'll come out, it'll be
sure to come out. They'll all know what a clever fellow he was; he'll
show it himself, and not disgrace his old pals and teachers. Think how
young he is too! What a distinction, Charley, to be lagged at his time
of life!'
'Well, it is a honour that is!' said Charley, a little consoled.
'He shall have all he wants,' continued the Jew. 'He shall be kept in
the Stone Jug, Charley, like a gentleman. Like a gentleman! With his
beer every day, and money in his pocket to pitch and toss with, if he
can't spend it.'
'No, shall he though?' cried Charley Bates.
'Ay, that he shall,' replied Fagin, 'and we'll have a big-wig, Charley:
one that's got the greatest gift of the gab: to carry on his defence;
and he shall make a speech for himself too, if he likes; and we'll read
it all in the papers--"Artful Dodger--shrieks of laughter--here the
court was convulsed"--eh, Charley, eh?'
'Ha! ha!' laughed Master Bates, 'what a lark that would be, wouldn't
it, Fagin? I say, how the Artful would bother 'em wouldn't he?'
'Would!' cried Fagin. 'He shall--he will!'
'Ah, to be sure, so he will,' repeated Charley, rubbing his hands.
'I think I see him now,' cried the Jew, bending his eyes upon his pupil.
'So do I,' cried Charley Bates. 'Ha! ha! ha! so do I. I see it all
afore me, upon my soul I do, Fagin. What a game! What a regular game!
All the big-wigs trying to look solemn, and Jack Dawkins addressing of
'em as intimate and comfortable as if he was the judge's own son making
a speech arter dinner--ha! ha! ha!'
In fact, Mr. Fagin had so well humoured his young friend's eccentric
disposition, that Master Bates, who had at first been disposed to
consider the imprisoned Dodger rather in the light of a victim, now
looked upon him as the chief actor in a scene of most uncommon and
exquisite humour, and felt quite impatient for the arrival of the time
when his old companion should have so favourable an opportunity of
displaying his abilities.
'We must know how he gets on to-day, by some handy means or other,'
said Fagin. 'Let me think.'
'Shall I go?' asked Charley.
'Not for the world,' replied Fagin. 'Are you mad, my dear, stark mad,
that you'd walk into the very place where--No, Charley, no. One is
enough to lose at a time.'
'You don't mean to go yourself, I suppose?' said Charley with a
humorous leer.
'That wouldn't quite fit,' replied Fagin shaking his head.
'Then why don't you send this new cove?' asked Master Bates, laying his
hand on Noah's arm. 'Nobody knows him.'
'Why, if he didn't mind--' observed Fagin.
'Mind!' interposed Charley. 'What should he have to mind?'
'Really nothing, my dear,' said Fagin, turning to Mr. Bolter, 'really
nothing.'
'Oh, I dare say about that, yer know,' observed Noah, backing towards
the door, and shaking his head with a kind of sober alarm. 'No,
no--none of that. It's not in my department, that ain't.'
'Wot department has he got, Fagin?' inquired Master Bates, surveying
Noah's lank form with much disgust. 'The cutting away when there's
anything wrong, and the eating all the wittles when there's everything
right; is that his branch?'
'Never mind,' retorted Mr. Bolter; 'and don't yer take liberties with
yer superiors, little boy, or yer'll find yerself in the wrong shop.'
Master Bates laughed so vehemently at this magnificent threat, that it
was some time before Fagin could interpose, and represent to Mr. Bolter
that he incurred no possible danger in visiting the police-office;
that, inasmuch as no account of the little affair in which he had
engaged, nor any description of his person, had yet been forwarded to
the metropolis, it was very probable that he was not even suspected of
having resorted to it for shelter; and that, if he were properly
disguised, it would be as safe a spot for him to visit as any in
London, inasmuch as it would be, of all places, the very last, to which
he could be supposed likely to resort of his own free will.
Persuaded, in part, by these representations, but overborne in a much
greater degree by his fear of Fagin, Mr. Bolter at length consented,
with a very bad grace, to undertake the expedition. By Fagin's
directions, he immediately substituted for his own attire, a waggoner's
frock, velveteen breeches, and leather leggings: all of which articles
the Jew had at hand. He was likewise furnished with a felt hat well
garnished with turnpike tickets; and a carter's whip. Thus equipped,
he was to saunter into the office, as some country fellow from Covent
Garden market might be supposed to do for the gratification of his
curiousity; and as he was as awkward, ungainly, and raw-boned a fellow
as need be, Mr. Fagin had no fear but that he would look the part to
perfection.
These arrangements completed, he was informed of the necessary signs
and tokens by which to recognise the Artful Dodger, and was conveyed by
Master Bates through dark and winding ways to within a very short
distance of Bow Street. Having described the precise situation of the
office, and accompanied it with copious directions how he was to walk
straight up the passage, and when he got into the side, and pull off
his hat as he went into the room, Charley Bates bade him hurry on
alone, and promised to bide his return on the spot of their parting.
Noah Claypole, or Morris Bolter as the reader pleases, punctually
followed the directions he had received, which--Master Bates being
pretty well acquainted with the locality--were so exact that he was
enabled to gain the magisterial presence without asking any question,
or meeting with any interruption by the way.
He found himself jostled among a crowd of people, chiefly women, who
were huddled together in a dirty frowsy room, at the upper end of which
was a raised platform railed off from the rest, with a dock for the
prisoners on the left hand against the wall, a box for the witnesses in
the middle, and a desk for the magistrates on the right; the awful
locality last named, being screened off by a partition which concealed
the bench from the common gaze, and left the vulgar to imagine (if they
could) the full majesty of justice.
There were only a couple of women in the dock, who were nodding to
their admiring friends, while the clerk read some depositions to a
couple of policemen and a man in plain clothes who leant over the
table. A jailer stood reclining against the dock-rail, tapping his
nose listlessly with a large key, except when he repressed an undue
tendency to conversation among the idlers, by proclaiming silence; or
looked sternly up to bid some woman 'Take that baby out,' when the
gravity of justice was disturbed by feeble cries, half-smothered in the
mother's shawl, from some meagre infant. The room smelt close and
unwholesome; the walls were dirt-discoloured; and the ceiling
blackened. There was an old smoky bust over the mantel-shelf, and a
dusty clock above the dock--the only thing present, that seemed to go
on as it ought; for depravity, or poverty, or an habitual acquaintance
with both, had left a taint on all the animate matter, hardly less
unpleasant than the thick greasy scum on every inanimate object that
frowned upon it.
Noah looked eagerly about him for the Dodger; but although there were
several women who would have done very well for that distinguished
character's mother or sister, and more than one man who might be
supposed to bear a strong resemblance to his father, nobody at all
answering the description given him of Mr. Dawkins was to be seen. He
waited in a state of much suspense and uncertainty until the women,
being committed for trial, went flaunting out; and then was quickly
relieved by the appearance of another prisoner who he felt at once
could be no other than the object of his visit.
It was indeed Mr. Dawkins, who, shuffling into the office with the big
coat sleeves tucked up as usual, his left hand in his pocket, and his
hat in his right hand, preceded the jailer, with a rolling gait
altogether indescribable, and, taking his place in the dock, requested
in an audible voice to know what he was placed in that 'ere disgraceful
sitivation for.
'Hold your tongue, will you?' said the jailer.
'I'm an Englishman, ain't I?' rejoined the Dodger. 'Where are my
priwileges?'
'You'll get your privileges soon enough,' retorted the jailer, 'and
pepper with 'em.'
'We'll see wot the Secretary of State for the Home Affairs has got to
say to the beaks, if I don't,' replied Mr. Dawkins. 'Now then! Wot is
this here business? I shall thank the madg'strates to dispose of this
here little affair, and not to keep me while they read the paper, for
I've got an appointment with a genelman in the City, and as I am a man
of my word and wery punctual in business matters, he'll go away if I
ain't there to my time, and then pr'aps ther won't be an action for
damage against them as kep me away. Oh no, certainly not!'
At this point, the Dodger, with a show of being very particular with a
view to proceedings to be had thereafter, desired the jailer to
communicate 'the names of them two files as was on the bench.' Which
so tickled the spectators, that they laughed almost as heartily as
Master Bates could have done if he had heard the request.
'Silence there!' cried the jailer.
'What is this?' inquired one of the magistrates.
'A pick-pocketing case, your worship.'
'Has the boy ever been here before?'
'He ought to have been, a many times,' replied the jailer. 'He has been
pretty well everywhere else. _I_ know him well, your worship.'
'Oh! you know me, do you?' cried the Artful, making a note of the
statement. 'Wery good. That's a case of deformation of character, any
way.'
Here there was another laugh, and another cry of silence.
'Now then, where are the witnesses?' said the clerk.
'Ah! that's right,' added the Dodger. 'Where are they? I should like
to see 'em.'
This wish was immediately gratified, for a policeman stepped forward
who had seen the prisoner attempt the pocket of an unknown gentleman in
a crowd, and indeed take a handkerchief therefrom, which, being a very
old one, he deliberately put back again, after trying it on his own
countenance. For this reason, he took the Dodger into custody as soon
as he could get near him, and the said Dodger, being searched, had upon
his person a silver snuff-box, with the owner's name engraved upon the
lid. This gentleman had been discovered on reference to the Court
Guide, and being then and there present, swore that the snuff-box was
his, and that he had missed it on the previous day, the moment he had
disengaged himself from the crowd before referred to. He had also
remarked a young gentleman in the throng, particularly active in making
his way about, and that young gentleman was the prisoner before him.
'Have you anything to ask this witness, boy?' said the magistrate.
'I wouldn't abase myself by descending to hold no conversation with
him,' replied the Dodger.
'Have you anything to say at all?'
'Do you hear his worship ask if you've anything to say?' inquired the
jailer, nudging the silent Dodger with his elbow.
'I beg your pardon,' said the Dodger, looking up with an air of
abstraction. 'Did you redress yourself to me, my man?'
'I never see such an out-and-out young wagabond, your worship,'
observed the officer with a grin. 'Do you mean to say anything, you
young shaver?'
'No,' replied the Dodger, 'not here, for this ain't the shop for
justice: besides which, my attorney is a-breakfasting this morning
with the Wice President of the House of Commons; but I shall have
something to say elsewhere, and so will he, and so will a wery numerous
and 'spectable circle of acquaintance as'll make them beaks wish they'd
never been born, or that they'd got their footmen to hang 'em up to
their own hat-pegs, afore they let 'em come out this morning to try it
on upon me. I'll--'
'There! He's fully committed!' interposed the clerk. 'Take him away.'
'Come on,' said the jailer.
'Oh ah! I'll come on,' replied the Dodger, brushing his hat with the
palm of his hand. 'Ah! (to the Bench) it's no use your looking
frightened; I won't show you no mercy, not a ha'porth of it. _You'll_
pay for this, my fine fellers. I wouldn't be you for something! I
wouldn't go free, now, if you was to fall down on your knees and ask
me. Here, carry me off to prison! Take me away!'
With these last words, the Dodger suffered himself to be led off by the
collar; threatening, till he got into the yard, to make a parliamentary
business of it; and then grinning in the officer's face, with great
glee and self-approval.
Having seen him locked up by himself in a little cell, Noah made the
best of his way back to where he had left Master Bates. After waiting
here some time, he was joined by that young gentleman, who had
prudently abstained from showing himself until he had looked carefully
abroad from a snug retreat, and ascertained that his new friend had not
been followed by any impertinent person.
The two hastened back together, to bear to Mr. Fagin the animating news
that the Dodger was doing full justice to his bringing-up, and
establishing for himself a glorious reputation.
| The next morning, Noah realizes that Fagin was his own friend, as it were, and agrees to work for the gang. Fagin has to explain to him that they're all responsible for each other, and that if one of them gets caught, they all get caught. This is hard for Noah to understand, because he's remarkably selfish. Fagin illustrates his point by explaining that his "best hand" was taken the day before, and tells the story. The Dodger was caught attempting to pickpocket, and they found a silver snuff-box on him. Fagin thinks that they might let him off, but if not, he'll only get transported for life . Charley comes in just then, and is totally despondent about the Dodger's arrest. Not because he's sad that his friend will be transported for life, but because the Dodger was "only" arrested for a snuff-box. And that will mean that he won't get a big and dramatic entry in the Newgate Calendar. Back to the story: Fagin comforts Charley by reminding him what a show the Dodger is likely to make in the courtroom, and what a great "distinction" it is, to be transported so young. Charley is comforted pretty well. Fagin wants to send someone to the court to hear what the Dodger says, but he doesn't want to go himself, and doesn't want to send Charley, either. They decide to send Noah, since none of the authorities in London knows him, yet. Noah's reluctant to go, because he doesn't want anything dangerous, but they eventually bully him into agreeing. At the court, the Dodger gives as great a performance as Charley could wish for: he makes fun of all the magistrates and judges, demands his "priwileges" as an "Englishman," and makes all the spectators laugh. Noah waits until he sees the Dodger locked up by himself, and then rejoins Charley and Fagin with the report that the Dodger was "doing full justice to his bringing-up, and establishing for himself a glorious reputation." | summary |
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