CHAPTER X

by Sinclair Lewis

　　THE house was haunted, long before evening. Shadows slipped down thewalls and waited behind every chair.Did that door move?No. She wouldn't go to the Jolly Seventeen. She hadn't energy enough tocaper before them, to smile blandly at Juanita's rudeness. Not today.But she did want a party. Now! If some one would come in this afternoon,some one who liked her--Vida or Mrs. Sam Clark or old Mrs. Champ Perryor gentle Mrs. Dr. Westlake. Or Guy Pollock! She'd telephone----No. That wouldn't be it. They must come of themselves.Perhaps they would.Why not?She'd have tea ready, anyway. If they came--splendid. If not--what didshe care? She wasn't going to yield to the village and let down; she wasgoing to keep up a belief in the rite of tea, to which she had alwayslooked forward as the symbol of a leisurely fine existence. And it wouldbe just as much fun, even if it was so babyish, to have tea by herselfand pretend that she was entertaining clever men. It would!She turned the shining thought into action. She bustled to the kitchen,stoked the wood-range, sang Schumann while she boiled the kettle, warmedup raisin cookies on a newspaper spread on the rack in the oven. Shescampered up-stairs to bring down her filmiest tea-cloth. She arrangeda silver tray. She proudly carried it into the living-room and set it onthe long cherrywood table, pushing aside a hoop of embroidery, a volumeof Conrad from the library, copies of the Saturday Evening Post, theLiterary Digest, and Kennicott's National Geographic Magazine.She moved the tray back and forth and regarded the effect. She shookher head. She busily unfolded the sewing-table set it in the bay-window,patted the tea-cloth to smoothness, moved the tray. "Some time I'll havea mahogany tea-table," she said happily.She had brought in two cups, two plates. For herself, a straight chair,but for the guest the big wing-chair, which she pantingly tugged to thetable.She had finished all the preparations she could think of. She sat andwaited. She listened for the door-bell, the telephone. Her eagerness wasstilled. Her hands drooped.Surely Vida Sherwin would hear the summons.She glanced through the bay-window. Snow was sifting over the ridgeof the Howland house like sprays of water from a hose. The wideyards across the street were gray with moving eddies. The black treesshivered. The roadway was gashed with ruts of ice.She looked at the extra cup and plate. She looked at the wing-chair. Itwas so empty.The tea was cold in the pot. With wearily dipping fingertip she testedit. Yes. Quite cold. She couldn't wait any longer.The cup across from her was icily clean, glisteningly empty.Simply absurd to wait. She poured her own cup of tea. She sat and staredat it. What was it she was going to do now? Oh yes; how idiotic; take alump of sugar.She didn't want the beastly tea.She was springing up. She was on the couch, sobbing.IIShe was thinking more sharply than she had for weeks.She reverted to her resolution to change the town--awaken it, prod it,"reform" it. What if they were wolves instead of lambs? They'd eat herall the sooner if she was meek to them. Fight or be eaten. It was easierto change the town completely than to conciliate it! She could not taketheir point of view; it was a negative thing; an intellectual squalor;a swamp of prejudices and fears. She would have to make them take hers.She was not a Vincent de Paul, to govern and mold a people. What ofthat? The tiniest change in their distrust of beauty would be thebeginning of the end; a seed to sprout and some day with thickeningroots to crack their wall of mediocrity. If she could not, as shedesired, do a great thing nobly and with laughter, yet she need not becontent with village nothingness. She would plant one seed in the blankwall.Was she just? Was it merely a blank wall, this town which to threethousand and more people was the center of the universe? Hadn't she,returning from Lac-qui-Meurt, felt the heartiness of their greetings?No. The ten thousand Gopher Prairies had no monopoly of greetings andfriendly hands. Sam Clark was no more loyal than girl librarians sheknew in St. Paul, the people she had met in Chicago. And those othershad so much that Gopher Prairie complacently lacked--the world of gaietyand adventure, of music and the integrity of bronze, of rememberedmists from tropic isles and Paris nights and the walls of Bagdad, ofindustrial justice and a God who spake not in doggerel hymns.One seed. Which seed it was did not matter. All knowledge and freedomwere one. But she had delayed so long in finding that seed. Could shedo something with this Thanatopsis Club? Or should she make her houseso charming that it would be an influence? She'd make Kennicott likepoetry. That was it, for a beginning! She conceived so clear a pictureof their bending over large fair pages by the fire (in a non-existentfireplace) that the spectral presences slipped away. Doors no longermoved; curtains were not creeping shadows but lovely dark masses in thedusk; and when Bea came home Carol was singing at the piano which shehad not touched for many days.Their supper was the feast of two girls. Carol was in the dining-room,in a frock of black satin edged with gold, and Bea, in blue gingham andan apron, dined in the kitchen; but the door was open between, andCarol was inquiring, "Did you see any ducks in Dahl's window?" and Beachanting, "No, ma'am. Say, ve have a svell time, dis afternoon. Tina shehave coffee and knackebrod, and her fella vos dere, and ve yoost laughedand laughed, and her fella say he vos president and he going to makeme queen of Finland, and Ay stick a fedder in may hair and say Ay banegoing to go to var--oh, ve vos so foolish and ve LAUGH so!"When Carol sat at the piano again she did not think of her husband butof the book-drugged hermit, Guy Pollock. She wished that Pollock wouldcome calling."If a girl really kissed him, he'd creep out of his den and be human. IfWill were as literate as Guy, or Guy were as executive as Will, I thinkI could endure even Gopher Prairie. It's so hard to mother Will. Icould be maternal with Guy. Is that what I want, something to mother, aman or a baby or a town? I WILL have a baby. Some day. But to have himisolated here all his receptive years----"And so to bed."Have I found my real level in Bea and kitchen-gossip?"Oh, I do miss you, Will. But it will be pleasant to turn over in bed asoften as I want to, without worrying about waking you up."Am I really this settled thing called a 'married woman'? I feelso unmarried tonight. So free. To think that there was once a Mrs.Kennicott who let herself worry over a town called Gopher Prairie whenthere was a whole world outside it!"Of course Will is going to like poetry."IIIA black February day. Clouds hewn of ponderous timber weighing downon the earth; an irresolute dropping of snow specks upon the trampledwastes. Gloom but no veiling of angularity. The lines of roofs andsidewalks sharp and inescapable.The second day of Kennicott's absence.She fled from the creepy house for a walk. It was thirty below zero;too cold to exhilarate her. In the spaces between houses the wind caughther. It stung, it gnawed at nose and ears and aching cheeks, and shehastened from shelter to shelter, catching her breath in the lee of abarn, grateful for the protection of a billboard covered with raggedposters showing layer under layer of paste-smeared green and streakyred.The grove of oaks at the end of the street suggested Indians, hunting,snow-shoes, and she struggled past the earth-banked cottages to theopen country, to a farm and a low hill corrugated with hard snow. Inher loose nutria coat, seal toque, virginal cheeks unmarked by lines ofvillage jealousies, she was as out of place on this dreary hillside asa scarlet tanager on an ice-floe. She looked down on Gopher Prairie. Thesnow, stretching without break from streets to devouring prairie beyond,wiped out the town's pretense of being a shelter. The houses were blackspecks on a white sheet. Her heart shivered with that still lonelinessas her body shivered with the wind.She ran back into the huddle of streets, all the while protesting thatshe wanted a city's yellow glare of shop-windows and restaurants, or theprimitive forest with hooded furs and a rifle, or a barnyard warm andsteamy, noisy with hens and cattle, certainly not these dun houses,these yards choked with winter ash-piles, these roads of dirty snow andclotted frozen mud. The zest of winter was gone. Three months more, tillMay, the cold might drag on, with the snow ever filthier, the weakenedbody less resistent. She wondered why the good citizens insisted onadding the chill of prejudice, why they did not make the houses of theirspirits more warm and frivolous, like the wise chatterers of Stockholmand Moscow.She circled the outskirts of the town and viewed the slum of "SwedeHollow." Wherever as many as three houses are gathered there will be aslum of at least one house. In Gopher Prairie, the Sam Clarks boasted,"you don't get any of this poverty that you find in cities--alwaysplenty of work--no need of charity--man got to be blame shiftless if hedon't get ahead." But now that the summer mask of leaves and grass wasgone, Carol discovered misery and dead hope. In a shack of thin boardscovered with tar-paper she saw the washerwoman, Mrs. Steinhof, workingin gray steam. Outside, her six-year-old boy chopped wood. He had a tornjacket, muffler of a blue like skimmed milk. His hands were covered withred mittens through which protruded his chapped raw knuckles. He haltedto blow on them, to cry disinterestedly.A family of recently arrived Finns were camped in an abandoned stable. Aman of eighty was picking up lumps of coal along the railroad.She did not know what to do about it. She felt that these independentcitizens, who had been taught that they belonged to a democracy, wouldresent her trying to play Lady Bountiful.She lost her loneliness in the activity of the village industries--therailroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the wheat-elevator,oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks on the snow, the creamerywith the sleds of farmers and piles of milk-cans, an unexplained stonehut labeled "Danger--Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard,where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled ashe hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's smallplaning-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and the burr ofcircular saws. Most important, the Gopher Prairie Flour and MillingCompany, Lyman Cass president. Its windows were blanketed withflour-dust, but it was the most stirring spot in town. Workmen werewheeling barrels of flour into a box-car; a farmer sitting on sacks ofwheat in a bobsled argued with the wheat-buyer; machinery within themill boomed and whined, water gurgled in the ice-freed mill-race.The clatter was a relief to Carol after months of smug houses. Shewished that she could work in the mill; that she did not belong to thecaste of professional-man's-wife.She started for home, through the small slum. Before a tar-paper shack,at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown dogskin coat and black plushcap with lappets was watching her. His square face was confident,his foxy mustache was picaresque. He stood erect, his hands in hisside-pockets, his pipe puffing slowly. He was forty-five or -six,perhaps."How do, Mrs. Kennicott," he drawled.She recalled him--the town handyman, who had repaired their furnace atthe beginning of winter."Oh, how do you do," she fluttered."My name 's Bjornstam. 'The Red Swede' they call me. Remember? Alwaysthought I'd kind of like to say howdy to you again.""Ye--yes----I've been exploring the outskirts of town.""Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and the Lutheranminister and the priest represent the arts and sciences. Well, thunder,we submerged tenth down here in Swede Hollow are no worse off than youfolks. Thank God, we don't have to go and purr at Juanity Haydock at theJolly Old Seventeen."The Carol who regarded herself as completely adaptable was uncomfortableat being chosen as comrade by a pipe-reeking odd-job man. Probably hewas one of her husband's patients. But she must keep her dignity."Yes, even the Jolly Seventeen isn't always so exciting. It's very coldagain today, isn't it. Well----"Bjornstam was not respectfully valedictory. He showed no signs ofpulling a forelock. His eyebrows moved as though they had a life oftheir own. With a subgrin he went on:"Maybe I hadn't ought to talk about Mrs. Haydock and her SolemcholySeventeen in that fresh way. I suppose I'd be tickled to death if I wasinvited to sit in with that gang. I'm what they call a pariah, I guess.I'm the town badman, Mrs. Kennicott: town atheist, and I suppose I mustbe an anarchist, too. Everybody who doesn't love the bankers and theGrand Old Republican Party is an anarchist."Carol had unconsciously slipped from her attitude of departure into anattitude of listening, her face full toward him, her muff lowered. Shefumbled:"Yes, I suppose so." Her own grudges came in a flood. "I don't see whyyou shouldn't criticize the Jolly Seventeen if you want to. They aren'tsacred.""Oh yes, they are! The dollar-sign has chased the crucifix clean offthe map. But then, I've got no kick. I do what I please, and I suppose Iought to let them do the same.""What do you mean by saying you're a pariah?""I'm poor, and yet I don't decently envy the rich. I'm an old bach.I make enough money for a stake, and then I sit around by myself, andshake hands with myself, and have a smoke, and read history, and I don'tcontribute to the wealth of Brother Elder or Daddy Cass.""You----I fancy you read a good deal.""Yep. In a hit-or-a-miss way. I'll tell you: I'm a lone wolf. I tradehorses, and saw wood, and work in lumber-camps--I'm a first-rateswamper. Always wished I could go to college. Though I s'pose I'd findit pretty slow, and they'd probably kick me out.""You really are a curious person, Mr.----""Bjornstam. Miles Bjornstam. Half Yank and half Swede. Usually known as'that damn lazy big-mouthed calamity-howler that ain't satisfied withthe way we run things.' No, I ain't curious--whatever you mean bythat! I'm just a bookworm. Probably too much reading for the amountof digestion I've got. Probably half-baked. I'm going to get in'half-baked' first, and beat you to it, because it's dead sure to behanded to a radical that wears jeans!"They grinned together. She demanded:"You say that the Jolly Seventeen is stupid. What makes you think so?""Oh, trust us borers into the foundation to know about your leisureclass. Fact, Mrs. Kennicott, I'll say that far as I can make out, theonly people in this man's town that do have any brains--I don't meanledger-keeping brains or duck-hunting brains or baby-spanking brains,but real imaginative brains--are you and me and Guy Pollock and theforeman at the flour-mill. He's a socialist, the foreman. (Don't tellLym Cass that! Lym would fire a socialist quicker than he would ahorse-thief!)""Indeed no, I sha'n't tell him.""This foreman and I have some great set-to's. He's a regular old-lineparty-member. Too dogmatic. Expects to reform everything fromdeforestration to nosebleed by saying phrases like 'surplus value.'Like reading the prayer-book. But same time, he's a Plato J. Aristotlecompared with people like Ezry Stowbody or Professor Mott or JuliusFlickerbaugh.""It's interesting to hear about him."He dug his toe into a drift, like a schoolboy. "Rats. You mean I talktoo much. Well, I do, when I get hold of somebody like you. You probablywant to run along and keep your nose from freezing.""Yes, I must go, I suppose. But tell me: Why did you leave Miss Sherwin,of the high school, out of your list of the town intelligentsia?""I guess maybe she does belong in it. From all I can hear she's ineverything and behind everything that looks like a reform--lot morethan most folks realize. She lets Mrs. Reverend Warren, the presidentof this-here Thanatopsis Club, think she's running the works, but MissSherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doingsomething. But way I figure it out----You see, I'm not interested inthese dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in thisbarnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water.And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I wantto yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker thatbuilt it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keelup.""Yes--that--that would be better. But I must run home. My poor nose isnearly frozen.""Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an old bach's shackis like."She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard that waslittered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless wash-tub. She wasdisquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her the opportunity to bedelicate. He flung out his hand in a welcoming gesture which assumedthat she was her own counselor, that she was not a Respectable MarriedWoman but fully a human being. With a shaky, "Well, just a moment, towarm my nose," she glanced down the street to make sure that she was notspied on, and bolted toward the shanty.She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more consideratehost than the Red Swede.He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk withamazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on theshelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs--oneconstructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank--and a row ofbooks incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual ofgas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on "TheCare, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle."There was but one picture--a magazine color-plate of a steep-roofedvillage in the Harz Mountains which suggested kobolds and maidens withgolden hair.Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, "Might throw open yourcoat and put your feet up on the box in front of the stove." He tossedhis dogskin coat into the bunk, lowered himself into the barrel chair,and droned on:"Yeh, I'm probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my independence bydoing odd jobs, and that's more 'n these polite cusses like the clerksin the banks do. When I'm rude to some slob, it may be partly because Idon't know better (and God knows I'm not no authority on trick forksand what pants you wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it's because Imean something. I'm about the only man in Johnson County that remembersthe joker in the Declaration of Independence about Americans beingsupposed to have the right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit ofhappiness.'"I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at me like he wants meto remember he's a highmuckamuck and worth two hundred thousand dollars,and he says, 'Uh, Bjornquist----'"'Bjornstam's my name, Ezra,' I says. HE knows my name, all rightee."'Well, whatever your name is,' he says, 'I understand you have agasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw up four cords of maplefor me,' he says."'So you like my looks, eh?' I says, kind of innocent."'What difference does that make? Want you to saw that wood beforeSaturday,' he says, real sharp. Common workman going and getting freshwith a fifth of a million dollars all walking around in a hand-me-downfur coat!"'Here's the difference it makes,' I says, just to devil him. 'How doyou know I like YOUR looks?' Maybe he didn't look sore! 'Nope,' I says,thinking it all over, 'I don't like your application for a loan. Take itto another bank, only there ain't any,' I says, and I walks off on him."Sure. Probably I was surly--and foolish. But I figured there had to beONE man in town independent enough to sass the banker!"He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talkedon, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendlinessand half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was aproletarian philosophy.At the door, she hinted:"Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought youwere affected?""Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all oversilver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals thought about myflying?"It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of Bjornstam's scornwhich carried her through town. She faced Juanita Haydock, cockedher head at Maud Dyer's brief nod, and came home to Bea radiant. Shetelephoned Vida Sherwin to "run over this evening." She lustily playedTschaikowsky--the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopherof the tar-paper shack.(When she hinted to Vida, "Isn't there a man here who amuses himself bybeing irreverent to the village gods--Bjornstam, some such a name?"the reform-leader said "Bjornstam? Oh yes. Fixes things. He's awfullyimpertinent.")IVKennicott had returned at midnight. At breakfast he said four severaltimes that he had missed her every moment.On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, "The top o' the mornin'to yez! Going to stop and pass the time of day mit Sam'l? Warmer, eh?What'd the doc's thermometer say it was? Say, you folks better comeround and visit with us, one of these evenings. Don't be so dog-goneproud, staying by yourselves."Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator, stopped her inthe post-office, held her hand in his withered paws, peered at herwith faded eyes, and chuckled, "You are so fresh and blooming, my dear.Mother was saying t'other day that a sight of you was better 'n a doseof medicine."In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively buying a modestgray scarf. "We haven't seen you for so long," she said. "Wouldn't youlike to come in and play cribbage, some evening?" As though he meant it,Pollock begged, "May I, really?"While she was purchasing two yards of malines the vocal RaymieWutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long sallow face bobbing, and hebesought, "You've just got to come back to my department and see a pairof patent leather slippers I set aside for you."In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced her boots,tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid on the slippers. She took them."You're a good salesman," she said."I'm not a salesman at all! I just like elegant things. All this is soinartistic." He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves ofshoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in rosettes, the display ofshoe-trees and tin boxes of blacking, the lithograph of a smirkingyoung woman with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry ofadvertising, "My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection wastill I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes.""But sometimes," Raymie sighed, "there is a pair of dainty little shoeslike these, and I set them aside for some one who will appreciate. WhenI saw these I said right away, 'Wouldn't it be nice if they fitted Mrs.Kennicott,' and I meant to speak to you first chance I had. I haven'tforgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey's!"That evening Guy Pollock came in and, though Kennicott instantlyimpressed him into a cribbage game, Carol was happy again.VShe did not, in recovering something of her buoyancy, forget herdetermination to begin the liberalizing of Gopher Prairie by the easyand agreeable propaganda of teaching Kennicott to enjoy reading poetryin the lamplight. The campaign was delayed. Twice he suggested that theycall on neighbors; once he was in the country. The fourth eveninghe yawned pleasantly, stretched, and inquired, "Well, what'll we dotonight? Shall we go to the movies?""I know exactly what we're going to do. Now don't ask questions! Comeand sit down by the table. There, are you comfy? Lean back and forgetyou're a practical man, and listen to me."It may be that she had been influenced by the managerial Vida Sherwin;certainly she sounded as though she was selling culture. But she droppedit when she sat on the couch, her chin in her hands, a volume of Yeatson her knees, and read aloud.Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town.She was in the world of lonely things--the flutter of twilight linnets,the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam creptout of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternalglories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold,the woful incessant chanting and the----"Heh-cha-cha!" coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She remembered thathe was the sort of person who chewed tobacco. She glared, while heuneasily petitioned, "That's great stuff. Study it in college? Ilike poetry fine--James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow--this'Hiawatha.' Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. ButI guess I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks."With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to giggle, sheconsoled him, "Then let's try some Tennyson. You've read him?""Tennyson? You bet. Read him in school. There's that: And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell When I put out to sea, But let the---- Well, I don't remember all of it but----Oh, sure! And there's that 'Imet a little country boy who----' I don't remember exactly how it goes,but the chorus ends up, 'We are seven.'""Yes. Well----Shall we try 'The Idylls of the King?' They're so full ofcolor.""Go to it. Shoot." But he hastened to shelter himself behind a cigar.She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an eye cocked on him,and when she saw how much he was suffering she ran to him, kissed hisforehead, cried, "You poor forced tube-rose that wants to be a decentturnip!""Look here now, that ain't----""Anyway, I sha'n't torture you any longer."She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great deal ofemphasis:There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the GRAND Trunk ROAD.He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. Butwhen he complimented her, "That was fine. I don't know but what youcan elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody," she banged the book andsuggested that they were not too late for the nine o'clock show at themovies.That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divineunhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon andthe sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at Ole Jenson's Grocery.But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered herselflaughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an actor who stuffedspaghetti down a woman's evening frock. For a second she loathed herlaughter; mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippishe had walked the battlements with queens. But the celebrated cinemajester's conceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her intounwilling tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fledthrough darkness.