Chapter Chapter 11 · 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?