Chapter Chapter 16 · Chapter XVI
KENNICOTT was heavily pleased by her Christmas presents, and he gave her
a diamond bar-pin. But she could not persuade herself that he was much
interested in the rites of the morning, in the tree she had decorated,
the three stockings she had hung, the ribbons and gilt seals and hidden
messages. He said only:
“Nice way to fix things, all right. What do you say we go down to Jack
Elder's and have a game of five hundred this afternoon?”
She remembered her father's Christmas fantasies: the sacred old rag
doll at the top of the tree, the score of cheap presents, the punch and
carols, the roast chestnuts by the fire, and the gravity with which the
judge opened the children's scrawly notes and took cognizance of demands
for sled-rides, for opinions upon the existence of Santa Claus. She
remembered him reading out a long indictment of himself for being a
sentimentalist, against the peace and dignity of the State of Minnesota.
She remembered his thin legs twinkling before their sled----
She muttered unsteadily, “Must run up and put on my shoes--slippers so
cold.” In the not very romantic solitude of the locked bathroom she sat
on the slippery edge of the tub and wept.
II
Kennicott had five hobbies: medicine, land-investment, Carol, motoring,
and hunting. It is not certain in what order he preferred them. Solid
though his enthusiasms were in the matter of medicine--his admiration
of this city surgeon, his condemnation of that for tricky ways of
persuading country practitioners to bring in surgical patients,
his indignation about fee-splitting, his pride in a new X-ray
apparatus--none of these beatified him as did motoring.
He nursed his two-year-old Buick even in winter, when it was stored in
the stable-garage behind the house. He filled the grease-cups, varnished
a fender, removed from beneath the back seat the debris of gloves,
copper washers, crumpled maps, dust, and greasy rags. Winter noons he
wandered out and stared owlishly at the car. He became excited over a
fabulous “trip we might take next summer.” He galloped to the station,
brought home railway maps, and traced motor-routes from Gopher Prairie
to Winnipeg or Des Moines or Grand Marais, thinking aloud and expecting
her to be effusive about such academic questions as “Now I wonder if we
could stop at Baraboo and break the jump from La Crosse to Chicago?”
To him motoring was a faith not to be questioned, a high-church cult,
with electric sparks for candles, and piston-rings possessing the
sanctity of altar-vessels. His liturgy was composed of intoned and
metrical road-comments: “They say there's a pretty good hike from Duluth
to International Falls.”
Hunting was equally a devotion, full of metaphysical concepts veiled
from Carol. All winter he read sporting-catalogues, and thought about
remarkable past shots: “'Member that time when I got two ducks on a
long chance, just at sunset?” At least once a month he drew his favorite
repeating shotgun, his “pump gun,” from its wrapper of greased canton
flannel; he oiled the trigger, and spent silent ecstatic moments aiming
at the ceiling. Sunday mornings Carol heard him trudging up to the
attic and there, an hour later, she found him turning over boots, wooden
duck-decoys, lunch-boxes, or reflectively squinting at old shells,
rubbing their brass caps with his sleeve and shaking his head as he
thought about their uselessness.
He kept the loading-tools he had used as a boy: a capper for shot-gun
shells, a mold for lead bullets. When once, in a housewifely frenzy for
getting rid of things, she raged, “Why don't you give these away?” he
solemnly defended them, “Well, you can't tell; they might come in handy
some day.”
She flushed. She wondered if he was thinking of the child they would
have when, as he put it, they were “sure they could afford one.”
Mysteriously aching, nebulously sad, she slipped away, half-convinced
but only half-convinced that it was horrible and unnatural, this
postponement of release of mother-affection, this sacrifice to her
opinionation and to his cautious desire for prosperity.
“But it would be worse if he were like Sam Clark--insisted on having
children,” she considered; then, “If Will were the Prince, wouldn't I
DEMAND his child?”
Kennicott's land-deals were both financial advancement and favorite
game. Driving through the country, he noticed which farms had good
crops; he heard the news about the restless farmer who was “thinking
about selling out here and pulling his freight for Alberta.” He asked
the veterinarian about the value of different breeds of stock; he
inquired of Lyman Cass whether or not Einar Gyseldson really had had a
yield of forty bushels of wheat to the acre. He was always consulting
Julius Flickerbaugh, who handled more real estate than law, and more law
than justice. He studied township maps, and read notices of auctions.
Thus he was able to buy a quarter-section of land for one hundred and
fifty dollars an acre, and to sell it in a year or two, after installing
a cement floor in the barn and running water in the house, for one
hundred and eighty or even two hundred.
He spoke of these details to Sam Clark . . . rather often.
In all his games, cars and guns and land, he expected Carol to take an
interest. But he did not give her the facts which might have created
interest. He talked only of the obvious and tedious aspects; never of
his aspirations in finance, nor of the mechanical principles of motors.
This month of romance she was eager to understand his hobbies. She
shivered in the garage while he spent half an hour in deciding whether
to put alcohol or patent non-freezing liquid into the radiator, or to
drain out the water entirely. “Or no, then I wouldn't want to take
her out if it turned warm--still, of course, I could fill the
radiator again--wouldn't take so awful long--just take a few pails
of water--still, if it turned cold on me again before I drained
it----Course there's some people that put in kerosene, but they say it
rots the hose-connections and----Where did I put that lug-wrench?”
It was at this point that she gave up being a motorist and retired to
the house.
In their new intimacy he was more communicative about his practise;
he informed her, with the invariable warning not to tell, that Mrs.
Sunderquist had another baby coming, that the “hired girl at Howland's
was in trouble.” But when she asked technical questions he did not know
how to answer; when she inquired, “Exactly what is the method of taking
out the tonsils?” he yawned, “Tonsilectomy? Why you just----If there's
pus, you operate. Just take 'em out. Seen the newspaper? What the devil
did Bea do with it?”
She did not try again.
III
They had gone to the “movies.” The movies were almost as vital
to Kennicott and the other solid citizens of Gopher Prairie as
land-speculation and guns and automobiles.
The feature film portrayed a brave young Yankee who conquered a South
American republic. He turned the natives from their barbarous habits of
singing and laughing to the vigorous sanity, the Pep and Punch and
Go, of the North; he taught them to work in factories, to wear Klassy
Kollege Klothes, and to shout, “Oh, you baby doll, watch me gather
in the mazuma.” He changed nature itself. A mountain which had borne
nothing but lilies and cedars and loafing clouds was by his Hustle so
inspirited that it broke out in long wooden sheds, and piles of iron
ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore to be converted into
steamers to carry iron ore.
The intellectual tension induced by the master film was relieved by a
livelier, more lyric and less philosophical drama: Mack Schnarken and
the Bathing Suit Babes in a comedy of manners entitled “Right on the
Coco.” Mr. Schnarken was at various high moments a cook, a life-guard,
a burlesque actor, and a sculptor. There was a hotel hallway up which
policemen charged, only to be stunned by plaster busts hurled upon them
from the innumerous doors. If the plot lacked lucidity, the dual motif
of legs and pie was clear and sure. Bathing and modeling were equally
sound occasions for legs; the wedding-scene was but an approach to the
thunderous climax when Mr. Schnarken slipped a piece of custard pie into
the clergyman's rear pocket.
The audience in the Rosebud Movie Palace squealed and wiped their eyes;
they scrambled under the seats for overshoes, mittens, and mufflers,
while the screen announced that next week Mr. Schnarken might be seen
in a new, riproaring, extra-special superfeature of the Clean Comedy
Corporation entitled, “Under Mollie's Bed.”
“I'm glad,” said Carol to Kennicott as they stooped before the northwest
gale which was torturing the barren street, “that this is a moral
country. We don't allow any of these beastly frank novels.”
“Yump. Vice Society and Postal Department won't stand for them. The
American people don't like filth.”
“Yes. It's fine. I'm glad we have such dainty romances as 'Right on the
Coco' instead.”
“Say what in heck do you think you're trying to do? Kid me?”
He was silent. She awaited his anger. She meditated upon his gutter
patois, the Boeotian dialect characteristic of Gopher Prairie. He
laughed puzzlingly. When they came into the glow of the house he laughed
again. He condescended:
“I've got to hand it to you. You're consistent, all right. I'd of
thought that after getting this look-in at a lot of good decent farmers,
you'd get over this high-art stuff, but you hang right on.”
“Well----” To herself: “He takes advantage of my trying to be good.”
“Tell you, Carrie: There's just three classes of people: folks that
haven't got any ideas at all; and cranks that kick about everything; and
Regular Guys, the fellows with sticktuitiveness, that boost and get the
world's work done.”
“Then I'm probably a crank.” She smiled negligently.
“No. I won't admit it. You do like to talk, but at a show-down you'd
prefer Sam Clark to any damn long-haired artist.”
“Oh--well----”
“Oh well!” mockingly. “My, we're just going to change everything, aren't
we! Going to tell fellows that have been making movies for ten years
how to direct 'em; and tell architects how to build towns; and make the
magazines publish nothing but a lot of highbrow stories about old maids,
and about wives that don't know what they want. Oh, we're a terror! . . .
Come on now, Carrie; come out of it; wake up! You've got a fine nerve,
kicking about a movie because it shows a few legs! Why, you're always
touting these Greek dancers, or whatever they are, that don't even wear
a shimmy!”
“But, dear, the trouble with that film--it wasn't that it got in so many
legs, but that it giggled coyly and promised to show more of them, and
then didn't keep the promise. It was Peeping Tom's idea of humor.”
“I don't get you. Look here now----”
She lay awake, while he rumbled with sleep
“I must go on. My 'crank ideas;' he calls them. I thought that adoring
him, watching him operate, would be enough. It isn't. Not after the
first thrill.
“I don't want to hurt him. But I must go on.
“It isn't enough, to stand by while he fills an automobile radiator and
chucks me bits of information.
“If I stood by and admired him long enough, I would be content. I would
become a 'nice little woman.' The Village Virus. Already----I'm not
reading anything. I haven't touched the piano for a week. I'm letting
the days drown in worship of 'a good deal, ten plunks more per acre.' I
won't! I won't succumb!
“How? I've failed at everything: the Thanatopsis, parties, pioneers,
city hall, Guy and Vida. But----It doesn't MATTER! I'm not trying to
'reform the town' now. I'm not trying to organize Browning Clubs,
and sit in clean white kids yearning up at lecturers with ribbony
eyeglasses. I am trying to save my soul.
“Will Kennicott, asleep there, trusting me, thinking he holds me. And
I'm leaving him. All of me left him when he laughed at me. It wasn't
enough for him that I admired him; I must change myself and grow like
him. He takes advantage. No more. It's finished. I will go on.”
IV
Her violin lay on top of the upright piano. She picked it up. Since she
had last touched it the dried strings had snapped, and upon it lay a
gold and crimson cigar-band.
V
She longed to see Guy Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in
the faith. But Kennicott's dominance was heavy upon her. She could not
determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia--by
dislike of the emotional labor of the “scenes” which would be involved
in asserting independence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty:
not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad
breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades.
The second evening after the movies she impulsively summoned Vida
Sherwin and Guy to the house for pop-corn and cider. In the living-room
Vida and Kennicott debated “the value of manual training in grades below
the eighth,” while Carol sat beside Guy at the dining table, buttering
pop-corn. She was quickened by the speculation in his eyes. She
murmured:
“Guy, do you want to help me?”
“My dear! How?”
“I don't know!”
He waited.
“I think I want you to help me find out what has made the darkness of
the women. Gray darkness and shadowy trees. We're all in it, ten million
women, young married women with good prosperous husbands, and business
women in linen collars, and grandmothers that gad out to teas, and wives
of under-paid miners, and farmwives who really like to make butter and
go to church. What is it we want--and need? Will Kennicott there would
say that we need lots of children and hard work. But it isn't that.
There's the same discontent in women with eight children and one more
coming--always one more coming! And you find it in stenographers and
wives who scrub, just as much as in girl college-graduates who wonder
how they can escape their kind parents. What do we want?”
“Essentially, I think, you are like myself, Carol; you want to go back
to an age of tranquillity and charming manners. You want to enthrone
good taste again.”
“Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh--no! I believe all of us want
the same things--we're all together, the industrial workers and the
women and the farmers and the negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and
even a few of the Respectables. It's all the same revolt, in all the
classes that have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a
more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying.
We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're
tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired
of hearing the politicians and priests and cautious reformers (and the
husbands!) coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a
Utopia already made; just give us a bit more time and we'll produce it;
trust us; we're wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said
that. We want our Utopia NOW--and we're going to try our hands at it.
All we want is--everything for all of us! For every housewife and every
longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want
everything. We shatn't get it. So we shatn't ever be content----”
She wondered why he was wincing. He broke in:
“See here, my dear, I certainly hope you don't class yourself with a lot
of trouble-making labor-leaders! Democracy is all right theoretically,
and I'll admit there are industrial injustices, but I'd rather have them
than see the world reduced to a dead level of mediocrity. I refuse to
believe that you have anything in common with a lot of laboring men
rowing for bigger wages so that they can buy wretched flivvers and
hideous player-pianos and----”
At this second, in Buenos Ayres, a newspaper editor broke his routine of
being bored by exchanges to assert, “Any injustice is better than seeing
the world reduced to a gray level of scientific dullness.” At this
second a clerk standing at the bar of a New York saloon stopped milling
his secret fear of his nagging office-manager long enough to growl
at the chauffeur beside him, “Aw, you socialists make me sick! I'm an
individualist. I ain't going to be nagged by no bureaus and take orders
off labor-leaders. And mean to say a hobo's as good as you and me?”
At this second Carol realized that for all Guy's love of dead elegances
his timidity was as depressing to her as the bulkiness of Sam Clark. She
realized that he was not a mystery, as she had excitedly believed; not
a romantic messenger from the World Outside on whom she could count for
escape. He belonged to Gopher Prairie, absolutely. She was snatched back
from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.
He was completing his protest, “You don't want to be mixed up in all
this orgy of meaningless discontent?”
She soothed him. “No, I don't. I'm not heroic. I'm scared by all the
fighting that's going on in the world. I want nobility and adventure,
but perhaps I want still more to curl on the hearth with some one I
love.”
“Would you----”
He did not finish it. He picked up a handful of pop-corn, let it run
through his fingers, looked at her wistfully.
With the loneliness of one who has put away a possible love Carol saw
that he was a stranger. She saw that he had never been anything but
a frame on which she had hung shining garments. If she had let him
diffidently make love to her, it was not because she cared, but because
she did not care, because it did not matter.
She smiled at him with the exasperating tactfulness of a woman checking
a flirtation; a smile like an airy pat on the arm. She sighed, “You're
a dear to let me tell you my imaginary troubles.” She bounced up, and
trilled, “Shall we take the pop-corn in to them now?”
Guy looked after her desolately.
While she teased Vida and Kennicott she was repeating, “I must go on.”
VI
Miles Bjornstam, the pariah “Red Swede,” had brought his circular saw
and portable gasoline engine to the house, to cut the cords of poplar
for the kitchen range. Kennicott had given the order; Carol knew nothing
of it till she heard the ringing of the saw, and glanced out to see
Bjornstam, in black leather jacket and enormous ragged purple
mittens, pressing sticks against the whirling blade, and flinging
the stove-lengths to one side. The red irritable motor kept up a red
irritable “tip-tip-tip-tip-tip-tip.” The whine of the saw rose till it
simulated the shriek of a fire-alarm whistle at night, but always at the
end it gave a lively metallic clang, and in the stillness she heard the
flump of the cut stick falling on the pile.
She threw a motor robe over her, ran out. Bjornstam welcomed her, “Well,
well, well! Here's old Miles, fresh as ever. Well say, that's all right;
he ain't even begun to be cheeky yet; next summer he's going to take you
out on his horse-trading trip, clear into Idaho.”
“Yes, and I may go!”
“How's tricks? Crazy about the town yet?”
“No, but I probably shall be, some day.”
“Don't let 'em get you. Kick 'em in the face!”
He shouted at her while he worked. The pile of stove-wood grew
astonishingly. The pale bark of the poplar sticks was mottled with
lichens of sage-green and dusty gray; the newly sawed ends were
fresh-colored, with the agreeable roughness of a woolen muffler. To the
sterile winter air the wood gave a scent of March sap.
Kennicott telephoned that he was going into the country. Bjornstam had
not finished his work at noon, and she invited him to have dinner with
Bea in the kitchen. She wished that she were independent enough to dine
with these her guests. She considered their friendliness, she sneered at
“social distinctions,” she raged at her own taboos--and she continued
to regard them as retainers and herself as a lady. She sat in the
dining-room and listened through the door to Bjornstam's booming and
Bea's giggles. She was the more absurd to herself in that, after the
rite of dining alone, she could go out to the kitchen, lean against the
sink, and talk to them.
They were attracted to each other; a Swedish Othello and Desdemona, more
useful and amiable than their prototypes. Bjornstam told his scapes:
selling horses in a Montana mining-camp, breaking a log-jam, being
impertinent to a “two-fisted” millionaire lumberman. Bea gurgled “Oh
my!” and kept his coffee cup filled.
He took a long time to finish the wood. He had frequently to go into the
kitchen to get warm. Carol heard him confiding to Bea, “You're a darn
nice Swede girl. I guess if I had a woman like you I wouldn't be such
a sorehead. Gosh, your kitchen is clean; makes an old bach feel sloppy.
Say, that's nice hair you got. Huh? Me fresh? Saaaay, girl, if I ever do
get fresh, you'll know it. Why, I could pick you up with one finger,
and hold you in the air long enough to read Robert J. Ingersoll clean
through. Ingersoll? Oh, he's a religious writer. Sure. You'd like him
fine.”
When he drove off he waved to Bea; and Carol, lonely at the window
above, was envious of their pastoral.
“And I----But I will go on.”