_ SHE had tripped into the meadow to teach the lambs a pretty
educational dance and found that the lambs were wolves.
There was no way out between their pressing gray shoulders.
She was surrounded by fangs and sneering eyes.
She could not go on enduring the hidden derision. She
wanted to flee. She wanted to hide in the generous indifference
of cities. She practised saying to Kennicott, "Think perhaps
I'll run down to St. Paul for a few days." But she could
not trust herself to say it carelessly; could not abide his
certain questioning.
Reform the town? All she wanted was to be tolerated!
She could not look directly at people. She flushed and
winced before citizens who a week ago had been amusing
objects of study, and in their good-mornings she heard a cruel
sniggering.
She encountered Juanita Haydock at Ole Jenson's grocery.
She besought, "Oh, how do you do! Heavens, what beautiful
celery that is!"
"Yes, doesn't it look fresh. Harry simply has to have his
celery on Sunday, drat the man!"
Carol hastened out of the shop exulting, "She didn't make
fun of me. . . . Did she?"
In a week she had recovered from consciousness of
insecurity, of shame and whispering notoriety, but she kept her
habit of avoiding people. She walked the streets with her head
down. When she spied Mrs. McGanum or Mrs. Dyer ahead
she crossed over with an elaborate pretense of looking at a
billboard. Always she was acting, for the benefit of every one
she saw--and for the benefit of the ambushed leering eyes
which she did not see.
She perceived that Vida Sherwin had told the truth. Whether
she entered a store, or swept the back porch, or stood at the
bay-window in the living-room, the village peeped at her.
Once she had swung along the street triumphant in making
a home. Now she glanced at each house, and felt, when she
was safely home, that she had won past a thousand enemies
armed with ridicule. She told herself that her sensitiveness
was preposterous, but daily she was thrown into panic. She
saw curtains slide back into innocent smoothness. Old women
who had been entering their houses slipped out again to stare
at her--in the wintry quiet she could hear them tiptoeing
on their porches. When she had for a blessed hour forgotten
the searchlight, when she was scampering through a chill dusk,
happy in yellow windows against gray night, her heart checked
as she realized that a head covered with a shawl was thrust
up over a snow-tipped bush to watch her.
She admitted that she was taking herself too seriously; that
villagers gape at every one. She became placid, and thought
well of her philosophy. But next morning she had a shock
of shame as she entered Ludelmeyer's The grocer, his clerk,
and neurotic Mrs. Dave Dyer had been giggling about something.
They halted, looked embarrassed, babbled about onions.
Carol felt guilty. That evening when Kennicott took her to
call on the crochety Lyman Casses, their hosts seemed flustered
at their arrival. Kennicott jovially hooted, "What makes you
so hang-dog, Lym?" The Casses tittered feebly.
Except Dave Dyer, Sam Clark, and Raymie Wutherspoon,
there were no merchants of whose welcome Carol was certain.
She knew that she read mockery into greetings but she could
not control her suspicion, could not rise from her psychic
collapse. She alternately raged and flinched at the superiority of
the merchants. They did not know that they were being rude,
but they meant to have it understood that they were prosperous
and "not scared of no doctor's wife." They often said, "One
man's as good as another--and a darn sight better." This
motto, however, they did not commend to farmer customers
who had had crop failures. The Yankee merchants were
crabbed; and Ole Jenson, Ludelmeyer, and Gus Dahl, from the
"Old Country," wished to be taken for Yankees. James
Madison Howland, born in New Hampshire, and Ole Jenson,
born in Sweden, both proved that they were free American
citizens by grunting, "I don't know whether I got any or not,"
or "Well, you can't expect me to get it delivered by noon."
It was good form for the customers to fight back. Juanita
Haydock cheerfully jabbered, "You have it there by twelve or
I'll snatch that fresh delivery-boy bald-headed." But Carol
had never been able to play the game of friendly rudeness;
and now she was certain that she never would learn it. She
formed the cowardly habit of going to Axel Egge's.
Axel was not respectable and rude. He was still a foreigner,
and he expected to remain one. His manner was heavy and
uninterrogative. His establishment was more fantastic than
any cross-roads store. No one save Axel himself could find
anything. A part of the assortment of children's stockings
was under a blanket on a shelf, a part in a tin ginger-snap box,
the rest heaped like a nest of black-cotton snakes upon a flour-
barrel which was surrounded by brooms, Norwegian Bibles,
dried cod for ludfisk, boxes of apricots, and a pair and a half
of lumbermen's rubber-footed boots. The place was crowded
with Scandinavian farmwives, standing aloof in shawls and
ancient fawn-colored leg o' mutton jackets, awaiting the return
of their lords. They spoke Norwegian or Swedish, and looked
at Carol uncomprehendingly. They were a relief to her--
they were not whispering that she was a poseur.
But what she told herself was that Axel Egge's was "so
picturesque and romantic."
It was in the matter of clothes that she was most self-
conscious.
When she dared to go shopping in her new checked suit with
the black-embroidered sulphur collar, she had as good as
invited all of Gopher Prairie (which interested itself in nothing
so intimately as in new clothes and the cost thereof) to
investigate her. It was a smart suit with lines unfamiliar to the
dragging yellow and pink frocks of the town. The Widow
Bogart's stare, from her porch, indicated, "Well I never saw
anything like that before!" Mrs. McGanum stopped Carol
at the notions shop to hint, "My, that's a nice suit--wasn't
it terribly expensive?" The gang of boys in front of the
drug store commented, "Hey, Pudgie, play you a game of
checkers on that dress." Carol could not endure it. She
drew her fur coat over the suit and hastily fastened the buttons,
while the boys snickered.
II
No group angered her quite so much as these staring young
roues.
She had tried to convince herself that the village, with its
fresh air, its lakes for fishing and swimming, was healthier than
the artificial city. But she was sickened by glimpses of the
gang of boys from fourteen to twenty who loafed before Dyer's
Drug Store, smoking cigarettes, displaying "fancy" shoes and
purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped buttons, whistling
the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, "Oh, you baby-doll" at
every passing girl.
She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind Del
Snafflin's barber shop, and shaking dice in "The Smoke House,"
and gathered in a snickering knot to listen to the "juicy
stories" of Bert Tybee, the bartender of the Minniemashie
House. She heard them smacking moist lips over every love-
scene at the Rosebud Movie Palace. At the counter of the
Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful messes
of decayed bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream, and gelatinous
ice-cream, they screamed to one another, "Hey, lemme
'lone," "Quit dog-gone you, looka what you went and done,
you almost spilled my glass swater," "Like hell I did," "Hey,
gol darn your hide, don't you go sticking your coffin nail in
my i-scream," "Oh you Batty, how juh like dancing with Tillie
McGuire, last night? Some squeezing, heh, kid?"
By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered
that this was the only virile and amusing manner in which
boys could function; that boys who were not compounded of
the gutter and the mining-camp were mollycoddles and
unhappy. She had taken this for granted. She had studied the
boys pityingly, but impersonally. It had not occurred to her
that they might touch her.
Now she was aware that they knew all about her; that they
were waiting for some affectation over which they could guffaw.
No schoolgirl passed their observation-posts more flushingly
than did Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. In shame she knew that they
glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes, speculating about
her legs. Theirs were not young eyes there was no youth
in all the town, she agonized. They were born old, grim and
old and spying and censorious.
She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel on the
day when she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock.
Cyrus N. Bogart, son of the righteous widow who lived
across the alley, was at this time a boy of fourteen or fifteen.
Carol had already seen quite enough of Cy Bogart. On her
first evening in Gopher Prairie Cy had appeared at the head
of a "charivari," banging immensely upon a discarded
automobile fender. His companions were yelping in imitation of
coyotes. Kennicott had felt rather complimented; had gone
out and distributed a dollar. But Cy was a capitalist in
charivaris. He returned with an entirely new group, and this
time there were three automobile fenders and a carnival rattle.
When Kennicott again interrupted his shaving, Cy piped,
"Naw, you got to give us two dollars," and he got it. A week
later Cy rigged a tic-tac to a window of the living-room, and
the tattoo out of the darkness frightened Carol into screaming.
Since then, in four months, she had beheld Cy hanging a cat,
stealing melons, throwing tomatoes at the Kennicott house, and
making ski-tracks across the lawn, and had heard him
explaining the mysteries of generation, with great audibility and
dismaying knowledge. He was, in fact, a museum specimen
of what a small town, a well-disciplined public school, a
tradition of hearty humor, and a pious mother could produce from
the material of a courageous and ingenious mind.
Carol was afraid of him. Far from protesting when he set
his mongrel on a kitten, she worked hard at not seeing him.
The Kennicott garage was a shed littered with paint-cans,
tools, a lawn-mower, and ancient wisps of hay. Above it was
a loft which Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock, young brother of
Harry, used as a den, for smoking, hiding from whippings,
and planning secret societies. They climbed to it by a ladder
on the alley side of the shed.
This morning of late January, two or three weeks after
Vida's revelations, Carol had gone into the stable-garage to
find a hammer. Snow softened her step. She heard voices
in the loft above her:
"Ah gee, lez--oh, lez go down the lake and swipe some
mushrats out of somebody's traps," Cy was yawning.
"And get our ears beat off!" grumbled Earl Haydock.
"Gosh, these cigarettes are dandy. 'Member when we were
just kids, and used to smoke corn-silk and hayseed?"
"Yup. Gosh!"
Spit. Silence.
"Say Earl, ma says if you chew tobacco you get consumption."
"Aw rats, your old lady is a crank."
"Yuh, that's so." Pause. "But she says she knows a fella
that did."
"Aw, gee whiz, didn't Doc Kennicott used to chew tobacco
all the time before he married this-here girl from the Cities?
He used to spit--- Gee! Some shot! He could hit a tree
ten feet off."
This was news to the girl from the Cities.
"Say, how is she?" continued Earl.
"Huh? How's who?"
"You know who I mean, smarty."
A tussle, a thumping of loose boards, silence, weary
narration from Cy:
"Mrs. Kennicott? Oh, she's all right, I guess." Relief to
Carol, below. "She gimme a hunk o' cake, one time. But
Ma says she's stuck-up as hell. Ma's always talking about
her. Ma says if Mrs. Kennicott thought as much about the
doc as she does about her clothes, the doc wouldn't look so
peaked."
Spit. Silence.
"Yuh. Juanita's always talking about her, too," from Earl.
"She says Mrs. Kennicott thinks she knows it all. Juanita
says she has to laugh till she almost busts every time she
sees Mrs. Kennicott peerading along the street with that `take
a look--I'm a swell skirt' way she's got. But gosh, I don't
pay no attention to Juanita. She's meaner 'n a crab."
"Ma was telling somebody that she heard that Mrs.
Kennicott claimed she made forty dollars a week when she was
on some job in the Cities, and Ma says she knows
posolutely that she never made but eighteen a week--Ma says
that when she's lived here a while she won't go round making
a fool of herself, pulling that bighead stuff on folks that know
a whole lot more than she does. They're all laughing up their
sleeves at her."
"Say, jever notice how Mrs. Kennicott fusses around the
house? Other evening when I was coming over here, she'd
forgot to pull down the curtain, and I watched her for ten
minutes. Jeeze, you'd 'a' died laughing. She was there all
alone, and she must 'a' spent five minutes getting a picture
straight. It was funny as hell the way she'd stick out her finger
to straighten the picture--deedle-dee, see my tunnin' 'ittle
finger, oh my, ain't I cute, what a fine long tail my cat's got!"
"But say, Earl, she's some good-looker, just the same, and
O Ignatz! the glad rags she must of bought for her wedding.
Jever notice these low-cut dresses and these thin shimmy-shirts
she wears? I had a good squint at 'em when they were out
on the line with the wash. And some ankles she's got, heh?"
Then Carol fled.
In her innocence she had not known that the whole town
could discuss even her garments, her body. She felt that she
was being dragged naked down Main Street.
The moment it was dusk she pulled down the window-shades
all the shades, flush with the sill, but beyond them she felt
moist fleering eyes.
III
She remembered, and tried to forget, and remembered more
sharply the vulgar detail of her husband's having observed the
ancient customs of the land by chewing tobacco. She would
have preferred a prettier vice--gambling or a mistress. For
these she might have found a luxury of forgiveness. She could
not remember any fascinatingly wicked hero of fiction who
chewed tobacco. She asserted that it proved him to be a man
of the bold free West. She tried to align him with the hairy-
chested heroes of the motion-pictures. She curled on the couch
a pallid softness in the twilight, and fought herself, and lost the
battle. Spitting did not identify him with rangers riding the
buttes; it merely bound him to Gopher Prairie--to Nat Hicks
the tailor and Bert Tybee the bartender.
"But he gave it up for me. Oh, what does it matter! We're
all filthy in some things. I think of myself as so superior,
but I do eat and digest, I do wash my dirty paws and scratch.
I'm not a cool slim goddess on a column. There aren't any!
He gave it up for me. He stands by me, believing that every
one loves me. He's the Rock of Ages--in a storm of meanness
that's driving me mad. . .it will drive me mad."
All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when
she noticed that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled
maternally at his secret.
She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental
intonations which a thousand million women, dairy wenches
and mischief-making queens, had used before her, and which
a million million women will know hereafter), "Was it all
a horrible mistake, my marrying him?" She quieted the
doubt--without answering it.
IV
Kennicott had taken her north to Lac-qui-Meurt, in the Big
Woods. It was the entrance to a Chippewa Indian reservation,
a sandy settlement among Norway pines on the shore of a
huge snow-glaring lake. She had her first sight of his mother,
except the glimpse at the wedding. Mrs. Kennicott had a
hushed and delicate breeding which dignified her woodeny over-
scrubbed cottage with its worn hard cushions in heavy rockers.
She had never lost the child's miraculous power of wonder.
She asked questions about books and cities. She murmured:
"Will is a dear hard-working boy but he's inclined to be too
serious, and you've taught him how to play. Last night I
heard you both laughing about the old Indian basket-seller,
and I just lay in bed and enjoyed your happiness."
Carol forgot her misery-hunting in this solidarity of family
life. She could depend upon them; she was not battling alone.
Watching Mrs. Kennicott flit about the kitchen she was better
able to translate Kennicott himself. He was matter-of-fact,
yes, and incurably mature. He didn't really play; he let Carol
play with him. But he had his mother's genius for trusting,
her disdain for prying, her sure integrity.
From the two days at Lac-qui-Meurt Carol drew confidence
in herself, and she returned to Gopher Prairie in a throbbing
calm like those golden drugged seconds when, because he is
for an instant free from pain, a sick man revels in living.
A bright hard winter day, the wind shrill, black and silver
clouds booming across the sky, everything in panicky motion
during the brief light. They struggled against the surf of wind,
through deep snow. Kennicott was cheerful. He hailed Loren
Wheeler, "Behave yourself while I been away?" The editor
bellowed, "B' gosh you stayed so long that all your patients
have got well!" and importantly took notes for the Dauntless
about their journey. Jackson Elder cried, "Hey, folks! How's
tricks up North?" Mrs. McGanum waved to them from her
porch.
"They're glad to see us. We mean something here. These
people are satisfied. Why can't I be? But can I sit back
all my life and be satisfied with `Hey, folks'? They want
shouts on Main Street, and I want violins in a paneled room.
Why----?"
V
Vida Sherwin ran in after school a dozen times. She was tactful,
torrentially anecdotal. She had scuttled about town and plucked
compliments: Mrs. Dr. Westlake had pronounced Carol a "very sweet,
bright, cultured young woman," and Brad Bemis, the tinsmith at
Clark's Hardware Store, had declared that she was "easy to work for
and awful easy to look at."
But Carol could not yet take her in. She resented this
outsider's knowledge of her shame. Vida was not too long
tolerant. She hinted, "You're a great brooder, child. Buck up
now. The town's quit criticizing you, almost entirely. Come
with me to the Thanatopsis Club. They have some of the
BEST papers, and current-events discussions--SO interesting."
In Vida's demands Carol felt a compulsion, but she was too
listless to obey.
It was Bea Sorenson who was really her confidante.
However charitable toward the Lower Classes she may have
thought herself, Carol had been reared to assume that servants
belong to a distinct and inferior species. But she discovered
that Bea was extraordinarily like girls she had loved in college,
and as a companion altogether superior to the young matrons
of the Jolly Seventeen. Daily they became more frankly two
girls playing at housework. Bea artlessly considered Carol
the most beautiful and accomplished lady in the country; she
was always shrieking, "My, dot's a swell hat!" or, "Ay t'ink
all dese ladies yoost die when dey see how elegant you do
your hair!" But it was not the humbleness of a servant, nor
the hypocrisy of a slave; it was the admiration of Freshman
for Junior.
They made out the day's menus together. Though they
began with propriety, Carol sitting by the kitchen table and
Bea at the sink or blacking the stove, the conference was
likely to end with both of them by the table, while Bea gurgled
over the ice-man's attempt to kiss her, or Carol admitted,
"Everybody knows that the doctor is lots more clever than
Dr. McGanum." When Carol came in from marketing, Bea
plunged into the hall to take off her coat, rub her frostied
hands, and ask, "Vos dere lots of folks up-town today?"
This was the welcome upon which Carol depended.
VI
Through her weeks of cowering there was no change in
her surface life. No one save Vida was aware of her agonizing.
On her most despairing days she chatted to women on the
street, in stores. But without the protection of Kennicott's
presence she did not go to the Jolly Seventeen; she delivered
herself to the judgment of the town only when she went shopping
and on the ritualistic occasions of formal afternoon calls,
when Mrs. Lyman Cass or Mrs. George Edwin Mott, with
clean gloves and minute handkerchiefs and sealskin card-cases
and countenances of frozen approbation, sat on the edges of
chairs and inquired, "Do you find Gopher Prairie pleasing?"
When they spent evenings of social profit-and-loss at the
Haydocks' or the Dyers' she hid behind Kennicott, playing the
simple bride.
Now she was unprotected. Kennicott had taken a patient
to Rochester for an operation. He would be away for two
or three days. She had not minded; she would loosen the
matrimonial tension and be a fanciful girl for a time. But
now that he was gone the house was listeningly empty. Bea
was out this afternoon--presumably drinking coffee and talking
about "fellows" with her cousin Tina. It was the day
for the monthly supper and evening-bridge of the Jolly
Seventeen, but Carol dared not go.
She sat alone. _