CHAPTER XXXVII

by Sinclair Lewis

　　ISHE found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. Though thearmistice with Germany was signed a few weeks after her coming toWashington, the work of the bureau continued. She filed correspondenceall day; then she dictated answers to letters of inquiry. It was anendurance of monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found"real work."Disillusions she did have. She discovered that in the afternoon, officeroutine stretches to the grave. She discovered that an office is as fullof cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie She discovered that mostof the women in the government bureaus lived unhealthfully, diningon snatches in their crammed apartments. But she also discovered thatbusiness women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men andmay revel in a bliss which no housewife attains--a free Sunday. It didnot appear that the Great World needed her inspiration, but she feltthat her letters, her contact with the anxieties of men and women allover the country, were a part of vast affairs, not confined to MainStreet and a kitchen but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid.She perceived that she could do office work without losing any of theputative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cooking and cleaning, whendivested of the fussing of an Aunt Bessie, take but a tenth of the timewhich, 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 tohave to report to Kennicott at the end of the day all that she had doneor might do, was a relief which made up for the office weariness. Shefelt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of ahuman being.IIWashington 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 acourtyard behind it, and a tall curtained second-story window throughwhich a woman was always peering. The woman was mystery, romance, astory which told itself differently every day; now she was a murderess,now the neglected wife of an ambassador. It was mystery which Carol hadmost lacked in Gopher Prairie, where every house was open to view, whereevery person was but too easy to meet, where there were no secret gatesopening upon moors over which one might walk by moss-deadened paths tostrange high adventures in an ancient garden.As she flitted up Sixteenth Street after a Kreisler recital, given latein the afternoon for the government clerks, as the lamps kindled inspheres of soft fire, as the breeze flowed into the street, freshas prairie winds and kindlier, as she glanced up the elm alley ofMassachusetts Avenue, as she was rested by the integrity of the ScottishRite Temple, she loved the city as she loved no one save Hugh. Sheencountered negro shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains andpots of mignonette; marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue, withbutlers and limousines; and men who looked like fictional explorers andaviators. Her days were swift, and she knew that in her folly of runningaway she had found the courage to be wise.She had a dispiriting first month of hunting lodgings in the crowdedcity. She had to roost in a hall-room in a moldy mansion conducted by anindignant decayed gentlewoman, and leave Hugh to the care of a doubtfulnurse. But later she made a home.IIIHer first acquaintances were the members of the Tincomb MethodistChurch, a vast red-brick tabernacle. Vida Sherwin had given her a letterto an earnest woman with eye-glasses, plaid silk waist, and a belief inBible Classes, who introduced her to the Pastor and the Nicer Membersof Tincomb. Carol recognized in Washington as she had in California atransplanted and guarded Main Street. Two-thirds of the church-membershad come from Gopher Prairies. The church was their society andtheir standard; they went to Sunday service, Sunday School, ChristianEndeavor, missionary lectures, church suppers, precisely as they had athome; they agreed that ambassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidelscientists of the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; andby cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ideals from allcontamination.They welcomed Carol, asked about her husband, gave her advice regardingcolic in babies, passed her the gingerbread and scalloped potatoes atchurch suppers, and in general made her very unhappy and lonely, sothat she wondered if she might not enlist in the militant suffrageorganization and be allowed to go to jail.Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she would haveperceived in New York or London) a thick streak of Main Street. Thecautious dullness of a Gopher Prairie appeared in boarding-houses whereladylike bureau-clerks gossiped to polite young army officers aboutthe movies; a thousand Sam Clarks and a few Widow Bogarts were to beidentified in the Sunday motor procession, in theater parties, andat the dinners of State Societies, to which the emigres from Texas orMichigan surged that they might confirm themselves in the faith thattheir several Gopher Prairies were notoriously "a whole lot peppier andchummier 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 andbuoyant lad who took Carol to tea-dances, and laughed, as she had alwayswanted some one to laugh, about nothing in particular. The captainintroduced her to the secretary of a congressman, a cynical young widowwith many acquaintances in the navy. Through her Carol met commandersand majors, newspapermen, chemists and geographers and fiscal expertsfrom the bureaus, and a teacher who was a familiar of the militantsuffrage headquarters. The teacher took her to headquarters. Carol neverbecame a prominent suffragist. Indeed her only recognized position wasas an able addresser of envelopes. But she was casually adopted bythis family of friendly women who, when they were not being mobbed orarrested, took dancing lessons or went picnicking up the ChesapeakeCanal or talked about the politics of the American Federation of Labor.With the congressman's secretary and the teacher Carol leased a smallflat. 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. Sheherself put him to bed and played with him on holidays. There werewalks with him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chieflyWashington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting about theflat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but always excitedly.It was not at all the "artist's studio" of which, because of itspersistence in fiction, she had dreamed. Most of them were in officesall day, and thought more in card-catalogues or statistics than in massand color. But they played, very simply, and they saw no reason whyanything which exists cannot also be acknowledged.She was sometimes shocked quite as she had shocked Gopher Prairie bythese girls with their cigarettes and elfish knowledge. When they weremost eager about soviets or canoeing, she listened, longed to havesome special learning which would distinguish her, and sighed that heradventure had come so late. Kennicott and Main Street had drainedher self-reliance; the presence of Hugh made her feel temporary. Someday--oh, she'd have to take him back to open fields and the right toclimb about hay-lofts.But the fact that she could never be eminent among these scoffingenthusiasts did not keep her from being proud of them, from defendingthem in imaginary conversations with Kennicott, who grunted (she couldhear his voice), "They're simply a bunch of wild impractical theoristssittin' round chewing the rag," and "I haven't got the time to chaseafter a lot of these fool fads; I'm too busy putting aside a stake forour old age."Most of the men who came to the flat, whether they were army officers orradicals who hated the army, had the easy gentleness, the acceptanceof women without embarrassed banter, for which she had longed in GopherPrairie. Yet they seemed to be as efficient as the Sam Clarks. Sheconcluded that it was because they were of secure reputation, not hemmedin by the fire of provincial jealousies. Kennicott had asserted that thevillager's lack of courtesy is due to his poverty. "We're no millionairedudes," he boasted. Yet these army and navy men, these bureau experts,and organizers of multitudinous leagues, were cheerful on three or fourthousand 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 inthe poorhouse. That institution is reserved for men like Kennicott who,after devoting fifty years to "putting aside a stake," incontinentlyinvest the stake in spurious oil-stocks.IVShe was encouraged to believe that she had not been abnormal in viewingGopher Prairie as unduly tedious and slatternly. She found the samefaith not only in girls escaped from domesticity but also in demureold ladies who, tragically deprived of esteemed husbands and huge oldhouses, yet managed to make a very comfortable thing of it by living insmall flats and having time to read.But she also learned that by comparison Gopher Prairie was a model ofdaring color, clever planning, and frenzied intellectuality. From herteacher-housemate she had a sardonic description of a Middlewesternrailroad-division town, of the same size as Gopher Prairie but devoidof lawns and trees, a town where the tracks sprawled along thecinder-scabbed Main Street, and the railroad shops, dripping soot fromeaves and doorway, rolled out smoke in greasy coils.Other towns she came to know by anecdote: a prairie village where thewind blew all day long, and the mud was two feet thick in spring, and insummer the flying sand scarred new-painted houses and dust coveredthe few flowers set out in pots. New England mill-towns with the handsliving in rows of cottages like blocks of lava. A rich farming-centerin New Jersey, off the railroad, furiously pious, ruled by old men,unbelievably ignorant old men, sitting about the grocery talking ofJames G. Blaine. A Southern town, full of the magnolias and whitecolumns which Carol had accepted as proof of romance, but hating thenegroes, obsequious to the Old Families. A Western mining-settlementlike a tumor. A booming semi-city with parks and clever architects,visited by famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from astruggle between union labor and the manufacturers' association, sothat in even the gayest of the new houses there was a ceaseless andintimidating heresy-hunt.VThe chart which plots Carol's progress is not easy to read. The linesare broken and uncertain of direction; often instead of rising they sinkin wavering scrawls; and the colors are watery blue and pink and the dimgray of rubbed pencil marks. A few lines are traceable.Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynicalgossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or bya fog of vagueness. Carol had hidden in none of these refuges fromreality, but she, who was tender and merry, had been made timorous byGopher Prairie. Even her flight had been but the temporary courage ofpanic. The thing she gained in Washington was not information aboutoffice-systems and labor unions but renewed courage, that amiablecontempt called poise. Her glimpse of tasks involving millions of peopleand a score of nations reduced Main Street from bloated importance toits actual pettiness. She could never again be quite so awed by thepower with which she herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers andBogarts.From her work and from her association with women who had organizedsuffrage associations in hostile cities, or had defended politicalprisoners, she caught something of an impersonal attitude; saw that shehad been as touchily personal as Maud Dyer.And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals? Not individualsbut institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the discipleswho the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny undera hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family,the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior WhiteRace; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembitteredlaughter.