Bab Bab 37 · Chapter XXXVII

I

SHE found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. Though the

armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks after her coming to

Washington, the work of the bureau continued. She filed correspondence

all day; then she dictated answers to letters of inquiry. It was an

endurance of monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found

“real work.”

Disillusions she did have. She discovered that in the afternoon, office

routine stretches to the grave. She discovered that an office is as full

of cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie. She discovered that most

of the women in the government bureaus lived unhealthfully, dining

on snatches in their crammed apartments. But she also discovered that

business women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men and

may revel in a bliss which no housewife attains--a free Sunday. It did

not appear that the Great World needed her inspiration, but she felt

that her letters, her contact with the anxieties of men and women all

over the country, were a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main

Street and a kitchen but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid.

She perceived that she could do office work without losing any of the

putative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cooking and cleaning, when

divested of the fussing of an Aunt Bessie, take but a tenth of the time

which, in a Gopher Prairie, it is but decent to devote to them.

Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly Seventeen, not to

have to report to Kennicott at the end of the day all that she had done

or might do, was a relief which made up for the office weariness. She

felt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of a

human being.

II

Washington gave her all the graciousness in which she had had faith:

white columns seen across leafy parks, spacious avenues, twisty alleys.

Daily she passed a dark square house with a hint of magnolias and a

courtyard behind it, and a tall curtained second-story window through

which a woman was always peering. The woman was mystery, romance, a

story which told itself differently every day; now she was a murderess,

now the neglected wife of an ambassador. It was mystery which Carol had

most lacked in Gopher Prairie, where every house was open to view, where

every person was but too easy to meet, where there were no secret gates

opening upon moors over which one might walk by moss-deadened paths to

strange high adventures in an ancient garden.

As she flitted up Sixteenth Street after a Kreisler recital, given late

in the afternoon for the government clerks, as the lamps kindled in

spheres of soft fire, as the breeze flowed into the street, fresh

as prairie winds and kindlier, as she glanced up the elm alley of

Massachusetts Avenue, as she was rested by the integrity of the Scottish

Rite Temple, she loved the city as she loved no one save Hugh. She

encountered negro shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains and

pots of mignonette; marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue, with

butlers and limousines; and men who looked like fictional explorers and

aviators. Her days were swift, and she knew that in her folly of running

away she had found the courage to be wise.

She had a dispiriting first month of hunting lodgings in the crowded

city. She had to roost in a hall-room in a moldy mansion conducted by an

indignant decayed gentlewoman, and leave Hugh to the care of a doubtful

nurse. But later she made a home.

III

Her first acquaintances were the members of the Tincomb Methodist

Church, a vast red-brick tabernacle. Vida Sherwin had given her a letter

to an earnest woman with eye-glasses, plaid silk waist, and a belief in

Bible Classes, who introduced her to the Pastor and the Nicer Members

of Tincomb. Carol recognized in Washington as she had in California a

transplanted and guarded Main Street. Two-thirds of the church-members

had come from Gopher Prairies. The church was their society and

their standard; they went to Sunday service, Sunday School, Christian

Endeavor, missionary lectures, church suppers, precisely as they had at

home; they agreed that ambassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidel

scientists of the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; and

by cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ideals from all

contamination.

They welcomed Carol, asked about her husband, gave her advice regarding

colic in babies, passed her the gingerbread and scalloped potatoes at

church suppers, and in general made her very unhappy and lonely, so

that she wondered if she might not enlist in the militant suffrage

organization and be allowed to go to jail.

Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she would have

perceived in New York or London) a thick streak of Main Street. The

cautious dullness of a Gopher Prairie appeared in boarding-houses where

ladylike bureau-clerks gossiped to polite young army officers about

the movies; a thousand Sam Clarks and a few Widow Bogarts were to be

identified in the Sunday motor procession, in theater parties, and

at the dinners of State Societies, to which the emigres from Texas or

Michigan surged that they might confirm themselves in the faith that

their several Gopher Prairies were notoriously “a whole lot peppier and

chummier than this stuck-up East.”

But she found a Washington which did not cleave to Main Street.

Guy Pollock wrote to a cousin, a temporary army captain, a confiding and

buoyant lad who took Carol to tea-dances, and laughed, as she had always

wanted some one to laugh, about nothing in particular. The captain

introduced her to the secretary of a congressman, a cynical young widow

with many acquaintances in the navy. Through her Carol met commanders

and majors, newspapermen, chemists and geographers and fiscal experts

from the bureaus, and a teacher who was a familiar of the militant

suffrage headquarters. The teacher took her to headquarters. Carol never

became a prominent suffragist. Indeed her only recognized position was

as an able addresser of envelopes. But she was casually adopted by

this family of friendly women who, when they were not being mobbed or

arrested, took dancing lessons or went picnicking up the Chesapeake

Canal or talked about the politics of the American Federation of Labor.

With the congressman's secretary and the teacher Carol leased a small

flat. Here she found home, her own place and her own people. She had,

though it absorbed most of her salary, an excellent nurse for Hugh. She

herself put him to bed and played with him on holidays. There were

walks with him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chiefly

Washington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting about the

flat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but always excitedly.

It was not at all the “artist's studio” of which, because of its

persistence in fiction, she had dreamed. Most of them were in offices

all day, and thought more in card-catalogues or statistics than in mass

and color. But they played, very simply, and they saw no reason why

anything which exists cannot also be acknowledged.

She was sometimes shocked quite as she had shocked Gopher Prairie by

these girls with their cigarettes and elfish knowledge. When they were

most eager about soviets or canoeing, she listened, longed to have

some special learning which would distinguish her, and sighed that her

adventure had come so late. Kennicott and Main Street had drained

her self-reliance; the presence of Hugh made her feel temporary. Some

day--oh, she'd have to take him back to open fields and the right to

climb about hay-lofts.

But the fact that she could never be eminent among these scoffing

enthusiasts did not keep her from being proud of them, from defending

them in imaginary conversations with Kennicott, who grunted (she could

hear his voice), “They're simply a bunch of wild impractical theorists

sittin' round chewing the rag,” and “I haven't got the time to chase

after a lot of these fool fads; I'm too busy putting aside a stake for

our old age.”

Most of the men who came to the flat, whether they were army officers or

radicals who hated the army, had the easy gentleness, the acceptance

of women without embarrassed banter, for which she had longed in Gopher

Prairie. Yet they seemed to be as efficient as the Sam Clarks. She

concluded that it was because they were of secure reputation, not hemmed

in by the fire of provincial jealousies. Kennicott had asserted that the

villager's lack of courtesy is due to his poverty. “We're no millionaire

dudes,” he boasted. Yet these army and navy men, these bureau experts,

and organizers of multitudinous leagues, were cheerful on three or four

thousand a year, while Kennicott had, outside of his land speculations,

six thousand or more, and Sam had eight.

Nor could she upon inquiry learn that many of this reckless race died in

the poorhouse. That institution is reserved for men like Kennicott who,

after devoting fifty years to “putting aside a stake,” incontinently

invest the stake in spurious oil-stocks.

IV

She was encouraged to believe that she had not been abnormal in viewing

Gopher Prairie as unduly tedious and slatternly. She found the same

faith not only in girls escaped from domesticity but also in demure

old ladies who, tragically deprived of esteemed husbands and huge old

houses, yet managed to make a very comfortable thing of it by living in

small flats and having time to read.

But she also learned that by comparison Gopher Prairie was a model of

daring color, clever planning, and frenzied intellectuality. From her

teacher-housemate she had a sardonic description of a Middlewestern

railroad-division town, of the same size as Gopher Prairie but devoid

of lawns and trees, a town where the tracks sprawled along the

cinder-scabbed Main Street, and the railroad shops, dripping soot from

eaves and doorway, rolled out smoke in greasy coils.

Other towns she came to know by anecdote: a prairie village where the

wind blew all day long, and the mud was two feet thick in spring, and in

summer the flying sand scarred new-painted houses and dust covered

the few flowers set out in pots. New England mill-towns with the hands

living in rows of cottages like blocks of lava. A rich farming-center

in New Jersey, off the railroad, furiously pious, ruled by old men,

unbelievably ignorant old men, sitting about the grocery talking of

James G. Blaine. A Southern town, full of the magnolias and white

columns which Carol had accepted as proof of romance, but hating the

negroes, obsequious to the Old Families. A Western mining-settlement

like a tumor. A booming semi-city with parks and clever architects,

visited by famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from a

struggle between union labor and the manufacturers' association, so

that in even the gayest of the new houses there was a ceaseless and

intimidating heresy-hunt.

V

The chart which plots Carol's progress is not easy to read. The lines

are broken and uncertain of direction; often instead of rising they sink

in wavering scrawls; and the colors are watery blue and pink and the dim

gray of rubbed pencil marks. A few lines are traceable.

Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical

gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by

a fog of vagueness. Carol had hidden in none of these refuges from

reality, but she, who was tender and merry, had been made timorous by

Gopher Prairie. Even her flight had been but the temporary courage of

panic. The thing she gained in Washington was not information about

office-systems and labor unions but renewed courage, that amiable

contempt called poise. Her glimpse of tasks involving millions of people

and a score of nations reduced Main Street from bloated importance to

its actual pettiness. She could never again be quite so awed by the

power with which she herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers and

Bogarts.

From her work and from her association with women who had organized

suffrage associations in hostile cities, or had defended political

prisoners, she caught something of an impersonal attitude; saw that she

had been as touchily personal as Maud Dyer.

And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals? Not individuals

but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples

who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under

a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family,

the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White

Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembittered

laughter.