Chapter Chapter 22 · Chapter XXII

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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?”