CHAPTER XIX

by Sinclair Lewis

　　IIN three years of exile from herself Carol had certain experienceschronicled as important by the Dauntless, or discussed by the JollySeventeen, but the event unchronicled, undiscussed, and supremelycontrolling, was her slow admission of longing to find her own people.IIBea and Miles Bjornstam were married in June, a month after "The Girlfrom Kankakee." Miles had turned respectable. He had renounced hiscriticisms of state and society; he had given up roving as horse-trader,and wearing red mackinaws in lumber-camps; he had gone to work asengineer in Jackson Elder's planing-mill; he was to be seen upon thestreets endeavoring to be neighborly with suspicious men whom he hadtaunted for years.Carol was the patroness and manager of the wedding. Juanita Haydockmocked, "You're a chump to let a good hired girl like Bea go. Besides!How do you know it's a good thing, her marrying a sassy bum like thisawful Red Swede person? Get wise! Chase the man off with a mop, andhold onto your Svenska while the holding's good. Huh? Me go to theirScandahoofian wedding? Not a chance!"The other matrons echoed Juanita. Carol was dismayed by the casualnessof their cruelty, but she persisted. Miles had exclaimed to her, "JackElder says maybe he'll come to the wedding! Gee, it would be nice tohave Bea meet the Boss as a reg'lar married lady. Some day I'll be sowell off that Bea can play with Mrs. Elder--and you! Watch us!"There was an uneasy knot of only nine guests at the service in theunpainted Lutheran Church--Carol, Kennicott, Guy Pollock, and the ChampPerrys, all brought by Carol; Bea's frightened rustic parents, hercousin Tina, and Pete, Miles's ex-partner in horse-trading, a surly,hairy man who had bought a black suit and come twelve hundred miles fromSpokane for the event.Miles continuously glanced back at the church door. Jackson Elder didnot appear. The door did not once open after the awkward entrance of thefirst guests. Miles's hand closed on Bea's arm.He had, with Carol's help, made his shanty over into a cottage withwhite curtains and a canary and a chintz chair.Carol coaxed the powerful matrons to call on Bea. They half scoffed,half promised to go.Bea's successor was the oldish, broad, silent Oscarina, who wassuspicious of her frivolous mistress for a month, so that JuanitaHaydock was able to crow, "There, smarty, I told you you'd run into theDomestic Problem!" But Oscarina adopted Carol as a daughter, and withher as faithful to the kitchen as Bea had been, there was nothingchanged in Carol's life.IIIShe was unexpectedly appointed to the town library-board by Ole Jenson,the new mayor. The other members were Dr. Westlake, Lyman Cass, JuliusFlickerbaugh the attorney, Guy Pollock, and Martin Mahoney, formerlivery-stable keeper and now owner of a garage. She was delighted. Shewent to the first meeting rather condescendingly, regarding herselfas the only one besides Guy who knew anything about books or librarymethods. She was planning to revolutionize the whole system.Her condescension was ruined and her humility wholesomely increased whenshe found the board, in the shabby room on the second floor of the housewhich had been converted into the library, not discussing the weatherand longing to play checkers, but talking about books. She discoveredthat amiable old Dr. Westlake read everything in verse and "lightfiction"; that Lyman Cass, the veal-faced, bristly-bearded owner of themill, had tramped through Gibbon, Hume, Grote, Prescott, and the otherthick historians; that he could repeat pages from them--and did. WhenDr. Westlake whispered to her, "Yes, Lym is a very well-informed man,but he's modest about it," she felt uninformed and immodest, and scoldedat herself that she had missed the human potentialities in this vastGopher Prairie. When Dr. Westlake quoted the "Paradiso," "Don Quixote,""Wilhelm Meister," and the Koran, she reflected that no one she knew,not even her father, had read all four.She came diffidently to the second meeting of the board. She did notplan to revolutionize anything. She hoped that the wise elders might beso tolerant as to listen to her suggestions about changing the shelvingof the juveniles.Yet after four sessions of the library-board she was where she had beenbefore the first session. She had found that for all their pride inbeing reading men, Westlake and Cass and even Guy had no conception ofmaking the library familiar to the whole town. They used it, they passedresolutions about it, and they left it as dead as Moses. Only the Hentybooks and the Elsie books and the latest optimisms by moral femalenovelists and virile clergymen were in general demand, and the boardthemselves were interested only in old, stilted volumes. They had notenderness for the noisiness of youth discovering great literature.If she was egotistic about her tiny learning, they were at least as muchso regarding theirs. And for all their talk of the need of additionallibrary-tax none of them was willing to risk censure by battling for it,though they now had so small a fund that, after paying for rent, heat,light, and Miss Villets's salary, they had only a hundred dollars a yearfor the purchase of books.The Incident of the Seventeen Cents killed her none too enduringinterest.She had come to the board-meeting singing with a plan. She had madea list of thirty European novels of the past ten years, with twentyimportant books on psychology, education, and economics which thelibrary lacked. She had made Kennicott promise to give fifteen dollars.If each of the board would contribute the same, they could have thebooks.Lym Cass looked alarmed, scratched himself, and protested, "I thinkit would be a bad precedent for the board-members to contributemoney--uh--not that I mind, but it wouldn't be fair--establishprecedent. Gracious! They don't pay us a cent for our services!Certainly can't expect us to pay for the privilege of serving!"Only Guy looked sympathetic, and he stroked the pine table and saidnothing.The rest of the meeting they gave to a bellicose investigation of thefact that there was seventeen cents less than there should be in theFund. Miss Villets was summoned; she spent half an hour in explosivelydefending herself; the seventeen cents were gnawed over, penny by penny;and Carol, glancing at the carefully inscribed list which had beenso lovely and exciting an hour before, was silent, and sorry for MissVillets, and sorrier for herself.She was reasonably regular in attendance till her two years were up andVida Sherwin was appointed to the board in her place, but she did nottry to be revolutionary. In the plodding course of her life there wasnothing changed, and nothing new.IVKennicott made an excellent land-deal, but as he told her none of thedetails, she was not greatly exalted or agitated. What did agitate herwas his announcement, half whispered and half blurted, half tender andhalf coldly medical, that they "ought to have a baby, now they couldafford it." They had so long agreed that "perhaps it would be just aswell not to have any children for a while yet," that childlessness hadcome to be natural. Now, she feared and longed and did not know; shehesitatingly assented, and wished that she had not assented.As there appeared no change in their drowsy relations, she forgot allabout it, and life was planless.VIdling on the porch of their summer cottage at the lake, on afternoonswhen Kennicott was in town, when the water was glazed and the whole airlanguid, she pictured a hundred escapes: Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm,with limousines, golden shops, a cathedral spire. A reed hut onfantastic piles above the mud of a jungle river. A suite in Paris,immense high grave rooms, with lambrequins and a balcony. The EnchantedMesa. An ancient stone mill in Maryland, at the turn of the road,between rocky brook and abrupt hills. An upland moor of sheep andflitting cool sunlight. A clanging dock where steel cranes unloadedsteamers from Buenos Ayres and Tsing-tao. A Munich concert-hall, and afamous 'cellist playing--playing to her.One scene had a persistent witchery:She stood on a terrace overlooking a boulevard by the warm sea. She wascertain, though she had no reason for it, that the place was Mentone.Along the drive below her swept barouches, with a mechanical tlot-tlot,tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, and great cars with polished black hoods andengines quiet as the sigh of an old man. In them were women erect,slender, enameled, and expressionless as marionettes, their small handsupon parasols, their unchanging eyes always forward, ignoring the menbeside them, tall men with gray hair and distinguished faces. Beyond thedrive were painted sea and painted sands, and blue and yellow pavilions.Nothing moved except the gliding carriages, and the people were smalland wooden, spots in a picture drenched with gold and hard bright blues.There was no sound of sea or winds; no softness of whispers nor offalling petals; nothing but yellow and cobalt and staring light, and thenever-changing tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot----She startled. She whimpered. It was the rapid ticking of the clock whichhad hypnotized her into hearing the steady hoofs. No aching color of thesea and pride of supercilious people, but the reality of a round-belliednickel alarm-clock on a shelf against a fuzzy unplaned pine wall, witha stiff gray wash-rag hanging above it and a kerosene-stove standingbelow.A thousand dreams governed by the fiction she had read, drawn from thepictures she had envied, absorbed her drowsy lake afternoons, butalways in the midst of them Kennicott came out from town, drew on khakitrousers which were plastered with dry fish-scales, asked, "Enjoyingyourself?" and did not listen to her answer.And nothing was changed, and there was no reason to believe that thereever would be change.VITrains!At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She realizedthat in town she had depended upon them for assurance that thereremained a world beyond.The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie.It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel,and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that hemight keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevatedand served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories,colleges, army.The East remembered generations when there had been no railroad, and hadno awe of it; but here the railroads had been before time was. The townshad been staked out on barren prairie as convenient points for futuretrain-halts; and back in 1860 and 1870 there had been much profit, muchopportunity to found aristocratic families, in the possession of advanceknowledge as to where the towns would arise.If a town was in disfavor, the railroad could ignore it, cut it off fromcommerce, slay it. To Gopher Prairie the tracks were eternal verities,and boards of railroad directors an omnipotence. The smallest boy or themost secluded grandam could tell you whether No. 32 had a hot-box lastTuesday, whether No. 7 was going to put on an extra day-coach; and thename of the president of the road was familiar to every breakfast table.Even in this new era of motors the citizens went down to the stationto see the trains go through. It was their romance; their only mysterybesides mass at the Catholic Church; and from the trains came lords ofthe outer world--traveling salesmen with piping on their waistcoats, andvisiting cousins from Milwaukee.Gopher Prairie had once been a "division-point." The roundhouse andrepair-shops were gone, but two conductors still retained residence,and they were persons of distinction, men who traveled and talked tostrangers, who wore uniforms with brass buttons, and knew all aboutthese crooked games of con-men. They were a special caste, neither abovenor below the Haydocks, but apart, artists and adventurers.The night telegraph-operator at the railroad station was the mostmelodramatic figure in town: awake at three in the morning, alone in aroom hectic with clatter of the telegraph key. All night he "talked"to operators twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away. It was always to beexpected that he would be held up by robbers. He never was, but roundhim was a suggestion of masked faces at the window, revolvers, cordsbinding him to a chair, his struggle to crawl to the key before hefainted.During blizzards everything about the railroad was melodramatic. Therewere days when the town was completely shut off, when they had no mail,no express, no fresh meat, no newspapers. At last the rotary snow-plowcame through, bucking the drifts, sending up a geyser, and the way tothe Outside was open again. The brakemen, in mufflers and fur caps,running along the tops of ice-coated freight-cars; the engineersscratching frost from the cab windows and looking out, inscrutable,self-contained, pilots of the prairie sea--they were heroism, they wereto Carol the daring of the quest in a world of groceries and sermons.To the small boys the railroad was a familiar playground. They climbedthe iron ladders on the sides of the box-cars; built fires behind pilesof old ties; waved to favorite brakemen. But to Carol it was magic.She was motoring with Kennicott, the car lumping through darkness, thelights showing mud-puddles and ragged weeds by the road. A train coming!A rapid chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck. It was hurlingpast--the Pacific Flyer, an arrow of golden flame. Light from thefire-box splashed the under side of the trailing smoke. Instantly thevision was gone; Carol was back in the long darkness; and Kennicott wasgiving his version of that fire and wonder: "No. 19. Must be 'bout tenminutes late."In town, she listened from bed to the express whistling in the cut amile north. Uuuuuuu!--faint, nervous, distrait, horn of the free nightriders journeying to the tall towns where were laughter andbanners and the sound of bells--Uuuuu! Uuuuu!--the world goingby--Uuuuuuu!--fainter, more wistful, gone.Down here there were no trains. The stillness was very great. Theprairie encircled the lake, lay round her, raw, dusty, thick. Only thetrain could cut it. Some day she would take a train; and that would be agreat taking.VIIShe turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the dramaticassociation, to the library-board.Besides the permanent Mother Chautauqua, in New York, there are, allover these States, commercial Chautauqua companies which send out toevery smallest town troupes of lecturers and "entertainers" to give aweek of culture under canvas. Living in Minneapolis, Carol had neverencountered the ambulant Chautauqua, and the announcement of its comingto Gopher Prairie gave her hope that others might be doing the vaguethings which she had attempted. She pictured a condensed universitycourse brought to the people. Mornings when she came in from the lakewith Kennicott she saw placards in every shop-window, and strung ona cord across Main Street, a line of pennants alternately worded"The Boland Chautauqua COMING!" and "A solid week of inspiration andenjoyment!" But she was disappointed when she saw the program. It didnot seem to be a tabloid university; it did not seem to be any kind ofa university; it seemed to be a combination of vaudeville performance Y.M. C. A. lecture, and the graduation exercises of an elocution class.She took her doubt to Kennicott. He insisted, "Well, maybe it won't beso awful darn intellectual, the way you and I might like it, but it'sa whole lot better than nothing." Vida Sherwin added, "They havesome splendid speakers. If the people don't carry off so much actualinformation, they do get a lot of new ideas, and that's what counts."During the Chautauqua Carol attended three evening meetings, twoafternoon meetings, and one in the morning. She was impressed by theaudience: the sallow women in skirts and blouses, eager to be made tothink, the men in vests and shirt-sleeves, eager to be allowed to laugh,and the wriggling children, eager to sneak away. She liked the plainbenches, the portable stage under its red marquee, the great tent overall, shadowy above strings of incandescent bulbs at night and by daycasting an amber radiance on the patient crowd. The scent of dustand trampled grass and sun-baked wood gave her an illusion of Syriancaravans; she forgot the speakers while she listened to noises outsidethe tent: two farmers talking hoarsely, a wagon creaking down MainStreet, the crow of a rooster. She was content. But it was thecontentment of the lost hunter stopping to rest.For from the Chautauqua itself she got nothing but wind and chaff andheavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless andprimitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm.These were the several instructors in the condensed university'sseven-day course:Nine lecturers, four of them ex-ministers, and one an ex-congressman,all of them delivering "inspirational addresses." The only facts oropinions which Carol derived from them were: Lincoln was a celebratedpresident of the United States, but in his youth extremely poor. JamesJ. Hill was the best-known railroad-man of the West, and in his youthextremely poor. Honesty and courtesy in business are preferableto boorishness and exposed trickery, but this is not to be takenpersonally, since all persons in Gopher Prairie are known to be honestand courteous. London is a large city. A distinguished statesman oncetaught Sunday School.Four "entertainers" who told Jewish stories, Irish stories, Germanstories, Chinese stories, and Tennessee mountaineer stories, most ofwhich Carol had heard.A "lady elocutionist" who recited Kipling and imitated children.A lecturer with motion-pictures of an Andean exploration; excellentpictures and a halting narrative.Three brass-bands, a company of six opera-singers, a Hawaiian sextette,and four youths who played saxophones and guitars disguised aswash-boards. The most applauded pieces were those, such as the "Lucia"inevitability, which the audience had heard most often.The local superintendent, who remained through the week while the otherenlighteners went to other Chautauquas for their daily performances. Thesuperintendent was a bookish, underfed man who worked hard at rousingartificial enthusiasm, at trying to make the audience cheer by dividingthem into competitive squads and telling them that they were intelligentand made splendid communal noises. He gave most of the morning lectures,droning with equal unhappy facility about poetry, the Holy Land, and theinjustice to employers in any system of profit-sharing.The final item was a man who neither lectured, inspired, norentertained; a plain little man with his hands in his pockets. All theother speakers had confessed, "I cannot keep from telling the citizensof your beautiful city that none of the talent on this circuit havefound a more charming spot or more enterprising and hospitable people."But the little man suggested that the architecture of Gopher Prairie washaphazard, and that it was sottish to let the lake-front be monopolizedby the cinder-heaped wall of the railroad embankment. Afterward theaudience grumbled, "Maybe that guy's got the right dope, but what's theuse of looking on the dark side of things all the time? New ideas arefirst-rate, but not all this criticism. Enough trouble in life withoutlooking for it!"Thus the Chautauqua, as Carol saw it. After it, the town felt proud andeducated.VIIITwo weeks later the Great War smote Europe.For a month Gopher Prairie had the delight of shuddering, then, as thewar settled down to a business of trench-fighting, they forgot.When Carol talked about the Balkans, and the possibility of a Germanrevolution, Kennicott yawned, "Oh yes, it's a great old scrap, but it'snone of our business. Folks out here are too busy growing corn to monkeywith any fool war that those foreigners want to get themselves into."It was Miles Bjornstam who said, "I can't figure it out. I'm opposed towars, but still, seems like Germany has got to be licked because themJunkers stands in the way of progress."She was calling on Miles and Bea, early in autumn. They had receivedher with cries, with dusting of chairs, and a running to fetch water forcoffee. Miles stood and beamed at her. He fell often and joyously intohis old irreverence about the lords of Gopher Prairie, but always--witha certain difficulty--he added something decorous and appreciative."Lots of people have come to see you, haven't they?" Carol hinted."Why, Bea's cousin Tina comes in right along, and the foreman at themill, and----Oh, we have good times. Say, take a look at that Bea!Wouldn't you think she was a canary-bird, to listen to her, and to seethat Scandahoofian tow-head of hers? But say, know what she is? She'sa mother hen! Way she fusses over me--way she makes old Miles wear anecktie! Hate to spoil her by letting her hear it, but she's one prettydarn nice--nice----Hell! What do we care if none of the dirty snobs comeand call? We've got each other."Carol worried about their struggle, but she forgot it in the stress ofsickness and fear. For that autumn she knew that a baby was coming,that at last life promised to be interesting in the peril of the greatchange.