CHAPTER XII

by Sinclair Lewis

　　ONE week of authentic spring, one rare sweet week of May, one tranquilmoment between the blast of winter and the charge of summer. Daily Carolwalked from town into flashing country hysteric with new life.One enchanted hour when she returned to youth and a belief in thepossibility of beauty.She had walked northward toward the upper shore of Plover Lake, takingto the railroad track, whose directness and dryness make it the naturalhighway for pedestrians on the plains. She stepped from tie to tie, inlong strides. At each road-crossing she had to crawl over a cattle-guardof sharpened timbers. She walked the rails, balancing with armsextended, cautious heel before toe. As she lost balance her body bentover, her arms revolved wildly, and when she toppled she laughed aloud.The thick grass beside the track, coarse and prickly with many burnings,hid canary-yellow buttercups and the mauve petals and woolly sage-greencoats of the pasque flowers. The branches of the kinnikinic brush werered and smooth as lacquer on a saki bowl.She ran down the gravelly embankment, smiled at children gatheringflowers in a little basket, thrust a handful of the soft pasque flowersinto the bosom of her white blouse. Fields of springing wheat drew herfrom the straight propriety of the railroad and she crawled through therusty barbed-wire fence. She followed a furrow between low wheat bladesand a field of rye which showed silver lights as it flowed before thewind. She found a pasture by the lake. So sprinkled was the pasture withrag-baby blossoms and the cottony herb of Indian tobacco that it spreadout like a rare old Persian carpet of cream and rose and delicate green.Under her feet the rough grass made a pleasant crunching. Sweet windsblew from the sunny lake beside her, and small waves sputtered on themeadowy shore. She leaped a tiny creek bowered in pussy-willow buds. Shewas nearing a frivolous grove of birch and poplar and wild plum trees.The poplar foliage had the downiness of a Corot arbor; the green andsilver trunks were as candid as the birches, as slender and lustrousas the limbs of a Pierrot. The cloudy white blossoms of the plum treesfilled the grove with a springtime mistiness which gave an illusion ofdistance.She ran into the wood, crying out for joy of freedom regained afterwinter. Choke-cherry blossoms lured her from the outer sun-warmed spacesto depths of green stillness, where a submarine light came through theyoung leaves. She walked pensively along an abandoned road. She found amoccasin-flower beside a lichen-covered log. At the end of the road shesaw the open acres--dipping rolling fields bright with wheat."I believe! The woodland gods still live! And out there, the great land.It's beautiful as the mountains. What do I care for Thanatopsises?"She came out on the prairie, spacious under an arch of boldly cutclouds. Small pools glittered. Above a marsh red-winged blackbirdschased a crow in a swift melodrama of the air. On a hill was silhouetteda man following a drag. His horse bent its neck and plodded, content.A path took her to the Corinth road, leading back to town. Dandelionsglowed in patches amidst the wild grass by the way. A stream gollopedthrough a concrete culvert beneath the road. She trudged in healthyweariness.A man in a bumping Ford rattled up beside her, hailed, "Give you a lift,Mrs. Kennicott?""Thank you. It's awfully good of you, but I'm enjoying the walk.""Great day, by golly. I seen some wheat that must of been five incheshigh. Well, so long."She hadn't the dimmest notion who he was, but his greeting warmed her.This countryman gave her a companionship which she had never (whetherby her fault or theirs or neither) been able to find in the matrons andcommercial lords of the town.Half a mile from town, in a hollow between hazelnut bushes and a brook,she discovered a gipsy encampment: a covered wagon, a tent, a bunch ofpegged-out horses. A broad-shouldered man was squatted on his heels,holding a frying-pan over a camp-fire. He looked toward her. He wasMiles Bjornstam."Well, well, what you doing out here?" he roared. "Come have a hunk o'bacon. Pete! Hey, Pete!"A tousled person came from behind the covered wagon."Pete, here's the one honest-to-God lady in my bum town. Come on, crawlin and set a couple minutes, Mrs. Kennicott. I'm hiking off for allsummer."The Red Swede staggered up, rubbed his cramped knees, lumbered to thewire fence, held the strands apart for her. She unconsciously smiled athim as she went through. Her skirt caught on a barb; he carefully freedit.Beside this man in blue flannel shirt, baggy khaki trousers, unevensuspenders, and vile felt hat, she was small and exquisite.The surly Pete set out an upturned bucket for her. She lounged on it,her elbows on her knees. "Where are you going?" she asked."Just starting off for the summer, horse-trading." Bjornstam chuckled.His red mustache caught the sun. "Regular hoboes and public benefactorswe are. Take a hike like this every once in a while. Sharks on horses.Buy 'em from farmers and sell 'em to others. We're honest--frequently.Great time. Camp along the road. I was wishing I had a chance to saygood-by to you before I ducked out but----Say, you better come alongwith us.""I'd like to.""While you're playing mumblety-peg with Mrs. Lym Cass, Pete and mewill be rambling across Dakota, through the Bad Lands, into the buttecountry, and when fall comes, we'll be crossing over a pass of the BigHorn Mountains, maybe, and camp in a snow-storm, quarter of a mile rightstraight up above a lake. Then in the morning we'll lie snug in ourblankets and look up through the pines at an eagle. How'd it strike you?Heh? Eagle soaring and soaring all day--big wide sky----""Don't! Or I will go with you, and I'm afraid there might be some slightscandal. Perhaps some day I'll do it. Good-by."Her hand disappeared in his blackened leather glove. From the turn inthe road she waved at him. She walked on more soberly now, and she waslonely.But the wheat and grass were sleek velvet under the sunset; the prairieclouds were tawny gold; and she swung happily into Main Street.IIThrough the first days of June she drove with Kennicott on his calls.She identified him with the virile land; she admired him as she saw withwhat respect the farmers obeyed him. She was out in the early chill,after a hasty cup of coffee, reaching open country as the fresh sun cameup in that unspoiled world. Meadow larks called from the tops of thinsplit fence-posts. The wild roses smelled clean.As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was a solemnity of radialbands, like a heavenly fan of beaten gold; the limitless circle of thegrain was a green sea rimmed with fog, and the willow wind-breaks werepalmy isles.Before July the close heat blanketed them. The tortured earth cracked.Farmers panted through corn-fields behind cultivators and the sweatingflanks of horses. While she waited for Kennicott in the car, before afarmhouse, the seat burned her fingers and her head ached with the glareon fenders and hood.A black thunder-shower was followed by a dust storm which turned thesky yellow with the hint of a coming tornado. Impalpable black dustfar-borne from Dakota covered the inner sills of the closed windows.The July heat was ever more stifling. They crawled along Main Street byday; they found it hard to sleep at night. They brought mattresses downto the living-room, and thrashed and turned by the open window. Tentimes a night they talked of going out to soak themselves with thehose and wade through the dew, but they were too listless to take thetrouble. On cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the gnatsappeared in swarms which peppered their faces and caught in theirthroats.She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but Kennicott declaredthat it would be "kind of hard to get away, just NOW." The Health andImprovement Committee of the Thanatopsis asked her to take part in theanti-fly campaign, and she toiled about town persuading householders touse the fly-traps furnished by the club, or giving out money prizes tofly-swatting children. She was loyal enough but not ardent, and withoutever quite intending to, she began to neglect the task as heat sucked ather strength.Kennicott and she motored North and spent a week with his mother--thatis, Carol spent it with his mother, while he fished for bass.The great event was their purchase of a summer cottage, down on LakeMinniemashie.Perhaps the most amiable feature of life in Gopher Prairie was thesummer cottages. They were merely two-room shanties, with a seepage ofbroken-down chairs, peeling veneered tables, chromos pasted on woodenwalls, and inefficient kerosene stoves. They were so thin-walled and soclose together that you could--and did--hear a baby being spanked in thefifth cottage off. But they were set among elms and lindens on a bluffwhich looked across the lake to fields of ripened wheat sloping up togreen woods.Here the matrons forgot social jealousies, and sat gossiping in gingham;or, in old bathing-suits, surrounded by hysterical children, theypaddled for hours. Carol joined them; she ducked shrieking small boys,and helped babies construct sand-basins for unfortunate minnows.She liked Juanita Haydock and Maud Dyer when she helped them makepicnic-supper for the men, who came motoring out from town each evening.She was easier and more natural with them. In the debate as to whetherthere should be veal loaf or poached egg on hash, she had no chance tobe heretical and oversensitive.They danced sometimes, in the evening; they had a minstrel show, withKennicott surprisingly good as end-man; always they were encircled bychildren wise in the lore of woodchucks and gophers and rafts and willowwhistles.If they could have continued this normal barbaric life Carol would havebeen the most enthusiastic citizen of Gopher Prairie. She was relievedto be assured that she did not want bookish conversation alone; that shedid not expect the town to become a Bohemia. She was content now. Shedid not criticize.But in September, when the year was at its richest, custom dictated thatit was time to return to town; to remove the children from the wasteoccupation of learning the earth, and send them back to lessons aboutthe number of potatoes which (in a delightful world untroubled bycommission-houses or shortages in freight-cars) William sold to John.The women who had cheerfully gone bathing all summer looked doubtfulwhen Carol begged, "Let's keep up an outdoor life this winter, let'sslide and skate." Their hearts shut again till spring, and the ninemonths of cliques and radiators and dainty refreshments began all over.IIICarol had started a salon.Since Kennicott, Vida Sherwin, and Guy Pollock were her only lions,and since Kennicott would have preferred Sam Clark to all the poets andradicals in the entire world, her private and self-defensive clique didnot get beyond one evening dinner for Vida and Guy, on her first weddinganniversary; and that dinner did not get beyond a controversy regardingRaymie Wutherspoon's yearnings.Guy Pollock was the gentlest person she had found here. He spoke of hernew jade and cream frock naturally, not jocosely; he held her chairfor her as they sat down to dinner; and he did not, like Kennicott,interrupt her to shout, "Oh say, speaking of that, I heard a good storytoday." But Guy was incurably hermit. He sat late and talked hard, anddid not come again.Then she met Champ Perry in the post-office--and decided that in thehistory of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher Prairie, for allof America. We have lost their sturdiness, she told herself. We mustrestore the last of the veterans to power and follow them on thebackward path to the integrity of Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlersdancing in a saw-mill.She read in the records of the Minnesota Territorial Pioneers that onlysixty years ago, not so far back as the birth of her own father, fourcabins had composed Gopher Prairie. The log stockade which Mrs. ChampPerry was to find when she trekked in was built afterward by thesoldiers as a defense against the Sioux. The four cabins were inhabitedby Maine Yankees who had come up the Mississippi to St. Paul and drivennorth over virgin prairie into virgin woods. They ground their owncorn; the men-folks shot ducks and pigeons and prairie chickens; thenew breakings yielded the turnip-like rutabagas, which they ate rawand boiled and baked and raw again. For treat they had wild plums andcrab-apples and tiny wild strawberries.Grasshoppers came darkening the sky, and in an hour ate the farmwife'sgarden and the farmer's coat. Precious horses painfully brought fromIllinois, were drowned in bogs or stampeded by the fear of blizzards.Snow blew through the chinks of new-made cabins, and Eastern children,with flowery muslin dresses, shivered all winter and in summer were redand black with mosquito bites. Indians were everywhere; they camped indooryards, stalked into kitchens to demand doughnuts, came with riflesacross their backs into schoolhouses and begged to see the picturesin the geographies. Packs of timber-wolves treed the children; and thesettlers found dens of rattle-snakes, killed fifty, a hundred, in a day.Yet it was a buoyant life. Carol read enviously in the admirableMinnesota chronicles called "Old Rail Fence Corners" the reminiscence ofMrs. Mahlon Black, who settled in Stillwater in 1848:"There was nothing to parade over in those days. We took it as it cameand had happy lives. . . . We would all gather together and in about twominutes would be having a good time--playing cards or dancing. . . . Weused to waltz and dance contra dances. None of these new jigs and notwear any clothes to speak of. We covered our hides in those days; notight skirts like now. You could take three or four steps inside ourskirts and then not reach the edge. One of the boys would fiddle a whileand then some one would spell him and he could get a dance. Sometimesthey would dance and fiddle too."She reflected that if she could not have ballrooms of gray and roseand crystal, she wanted to be swinging across a puncheon-floor with adancing fiddler. This smug in-between town, which had exchanged "MoneyMusk" for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroicold nor the sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet unimaginedhow, turn it back to simplicity?She herself knew two of the pioneers: the Perrys. Champ Perry was thebuyer at the grain-elevator. He weighed wagons of wheat on a roughplatform-scale, in the cracks of which the kernels sprouted everyspring. Between times he napped in the dusty peace of his office.She called on the Perrys at their rooms above Howland & Gould's grocery.When they were already old they had lost the money, which they hadinvested in an elevator. They had given up their beloved yellow brickhouse and moved into these rooms over a store, which were the GopherPrairie equivalent of a flat. A broad stairway led from the streetto the upper hall, along which were the doors of a lawyer's office, adentist's, a photographer's "studio," the lodge-rooms of the AffiliatedOrder of Spartans and, at the back, the Perrys' apartment.They received her (their first caller in a month) with aged flutteringtenderness. Mrs. Perry confided, "My, it's a shame we got to entertainyou in such a cramped place. And there ain't any water except that oleiron sink outside in the hall, but still, as I say to Champ, beggarscan't be choosers. 'Sides, the brick house was too big for me to sweep,and it was way out, and it's nice to be living down here among folks.Yes, we're glad to be here. But----Some day, maybe we can have a houseof our own again. We're saving up----Oh, dear, if we could have our ownhome! But these rooms are real nice, ain't they!"As old people will, the world over, they had moved as much as possibleof their familiar furniture into this small space. Carol had none of thesuperiority she felt toward Mrs. Lyman Cass's plutocratic parlor. Shewas at home here. She noted with tenderness all the makeshifts: thedarned chair-arms, the patent rocker covered with sleazy cretonne, thepasted strips of paper mending the birch-bark napkin-rings labeled "Papa"and "Mama."She hinted of her new enthusiasm. To find one of the "young folks" whotook them seriously, heartened the Perrys, and she easily drew fromthem the principles by which Gopher Prairie should be born again--shouldagain become amusing to live in.This was their philosophy complete . . . in the era of aeroplanes andsyndicalism:The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational,and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordainedstandard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. "We don't needall this new-fangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that'sruining our young men in colleges. What we need is to get back to thetrue Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to haveit preached to us."The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is theagent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs.All socialists ought to be hanged."Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good moralsin his novels, and folks say he's made prett' near a million dollars outof 'em."People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundredare wicked.Europeans are still wickeder.It doesn't hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybodywho touches wine is headed straight for hell.Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be.Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody.The farmers want too much for their wheat.The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the salaries theypay.There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybodyworked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm.IVCarol's hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the noddingdwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home with a headache.Next day she saw Miles Bjornstam on the street."Just back from Montana. Great summer. Pumped my lungs chuck-full ofRocky Mountain air. Now for another whirl at sassing the bosses ofGopher Prairie." She smiled at him, and the Perrys faded, the pioneersfaded, till they were but daguerreotypes in a black walnut cupboard.