_ ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two
generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower
blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-
mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis
and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages,
and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her.
She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux,
the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry
instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her
ears.
A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands
bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation
and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the
lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of
suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against
the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl
on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she
longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant
youth.
It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College.
The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears
killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot;
and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire
called the American Middlewest.
II
Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a
bulwark of sound religion. It is still combating the recent
heresies of Voltaire, Darwin, and Robert Ingersoll. Pious
families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas send their
children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the wickedness
of the universities. But it secretes friendly girls, young
men who sing, and one lady instructress who really likes
Milton and Carlyle. So the four years which Carol spent at
Blodgett were not altogether wasted. The smallness of the
school, the fewness of rivals, permitted her to experiment with
her perilous versatility. She played tennis, gave chafing-dish
parties, took a graduate seminar in the drama, went "twosing,"
and joined half a dozen societies for the practise of the arts
or the tense stalking of a thing called General Culture.
In her class there were two or three prettier girls, but none
more eager. She was noticeable equally in the classroom grind
and at dances, though out of the three hundred students of
Blodgett, scores recited more accurately and dozens Bostoned
more smoothly. Every cell of her body was alive--thin wrists,
quince-blossom skin, ingenue eyes, black hair.
The other girls in her dormitory marveled at the slightness
of her body when they saw her in sheer negligee, or darting out
wet from a shower-bath. She seemed then but half as large as
they had supposed; a fragile child who must be cloaked with
understanding kindness. "Psychic," the girls whispered, and
"spiritual." Yet so radioactive were her nerves, so adventurous
her trust in rather vaguely conceived sweetness and light,
that she was more energetic than any of the hulking young
women who, with calves bulging in heavy-ribbed woolen stockings
beneath decorous blue serge bloomers, thuddingly galloped
across the floor of the "gym" in practise for the Blodgett
Ladies' Basket-Ball Team.
Even when she was tired her dark eyes were observant. She
did not yet know the immense ability of the world to be
casually cruel and proudly dull, but if she should ever learn
those dismaying powers, her eyes would never become sullen
or heavy or rheumily amorous.
For all her enthusiasms, for all the fondness and the
"crushes" which she inspired, Carol's acquaintances were shy
of her. When she was most ardently singing hymns or planning
deviltry she yet seemed gently aloof and critical. She was
credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper; yet she did
question and examine unceasingly. Whatever she might become
she would never be static.
Her versatility ensnared her. By turns she hoped to discover
that she had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the
ability to act, to write, to manage organizations. Always she
was disappointed, but always she effervesced anew--over the
Student Volunteers, who intended to become missionaries, over
painting scenery for the dramatic club, over soliciting
advertisements for the college magazine.
She was on the peak that Sunday afternoon when she played
in chapel. Out of the dusk her violin took up the organ
theme, and the candle-light revealed her in a straight golden
frock, her arm arched to the bow, her lips serious. Every
man fell in love then with religion and Carol.
Throughout Senior year she anxiously related all her
experiments and partial successes to a career. Daily, on the
library steps or in the hall of the Main Building, the co-eds
talked of "What shall we do when we finish college?" Even
the girls who knew that they were going to be married
pretended to be considering important business positions; even
they who knew that they would have to work hinted about
fabulous suitors. As for Carol, she was an orphan; her only
near relative was a vanilla-flavored sister married to an
optician in St. Paul. She had used most of the money from
her father's estate. She was not in love--that is, not often,
nor ever long at a time. She would earn her living.
But how she was to earn it, how she was to conquer the
world--almost entirely for the world's own good--she did not
see. Most of the girls who were not betrothed meant to be
teachers. Of these there were two sorts: careless young
women who admitted that they intended to leave the "beastly
classroom and grubby children" the minute they had a chance
to marry; and studious, sometimes bulbous-browed and pop-
eyed maidens who at class prayer-meetings requested God to
"guide their feet along the paths of greatest usefulness."
Neither sort tempted Carol. The former seemed insincere (a
favorite word of hers at this era). The earnest virgins were,
she fancied, as likely to do harm as to do good by their
faith in the value of parsing Caesar.
At various times during Senior year Carol finally decided
upon studying law, writing motion-picture scenarios, professional
nursing, and marrying an unidentified hero.
Then she found a hobby in sociology.
The sociology instructor was new. He was married, and
therefore taboo, but he had come from Boston, he had lived
among poets and socialists and Jews and millionaire uplifters
at the University Settlement in New York, and he had a
beautiful white strong neck. He led a giggling class through the
prisons, the charity bureaus, the employment agencies of
Minneapolis and St. Paul. Trailing at the end of the line Carol
was indignant at the prodding curiosity of the others, their
manner of staring at the poor as at a Zoo. She felt herself a
great liberator. She put her hand to her mouth, her forefinger
and thumb quite painfully pinching her lower lip, and
frowned, and enjoyed being aloof.
A classmate named Stewart Snyder, a competent bulky
young man in a gray flannel shirt, a rusty black bow tie, and
the green-and-purple class cap, grumbled to her as they walked
behind the others in the muck of the South St. Paul stockyards,
"These college chumps make me tired. They're so
top-lofty. They ought to of worked on the farm, the way I
have. These workmen put it all over them."
"I just love common workmen," glowed Carol.
"Only you don't want to forget that common workmen don't
think they're common!"
"You're right! I apologize!" Carol's brows lifted in the
astonishment of emotion, in a glory of abasement. Her eyes
mothered the world. Stewart Snyder peered at her. He
rammed his large red fists into his pockets, he jerked them
out, he resolutely got rid of them by clenching his hands
behind him, and he stammered:
"I know. You get people. Most of these darn co-eds----
Say, Carol, you could do a lot for people."
"Oh--oh well--you know--sympathy and everything--if
you were--say you were a lawyer's wife. You'd understand
his clients. I'm going to be a lawyer. I admit I fall down
in sympathy sometimes. I get so dog-gone impatient with people
that can't stand the gaff. You'd be good for a fellow that was
too serious. Make him more--more--YOU know--sympathetic!"
His slightly pouting lips, his mastiff eyes, were begging her
to beg him to go on. She fled from the steam-roller of his
sentiment. She cried, "Oh, see those poor sheep--millions
and millions of them." She darted on.
Stewart was not interesting. He hadn't a shapely white
neck, and he had never lived among celebrated reformers.
She wanted, just now, to have a cell in a settlement-house, like
a nun without the bother of a black robe, and be kind, and
read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde of grateful poor.
The supplementary reading in sociology led her to a book
on village-improvement--tree-planting, town pageants, girls'
clubs. It had pictures of greens and garden-walls in France,
New England, Pennsylvania. She had picked it up carelessly,
with a slight yawn which she patted down with her finger-tips
as delicately as a cat.
She dipped into the book, lounging on her window-seat,
with her slim, lisle-stockinged legs crossed, and her knees up
under her chin. She stroked a satin pillow while she read.
About her was the clothy exuberance of a Blodgett College
room: cretonne-covered window-seat, photographs of girls, a
carbon print of the Coliseum, a chafing-dish, and a dozen
pillows embroidered or beaded or pyrographed. Shockingly
out of place was a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante. It
was the only trace of Carol in the room. She had inherited the
rest from generations of girl students.
It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she
regarded the treatise on village-improvement. But she suddenly
stopped fidgeting. She strode into the book. She had fled
half-way through it before the three o'clock bell called her
to the class in English history.
She sighed, "That's what I'll do after college! I'll get my
hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful.
Be an inspiration. I suppose I'd better become a teacher then,
but--I won't be that kind of a teacher. I won't drone. Why
should they have all the garden suburbs on Long Island?
Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in the
Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries to contain the
Elsie books. I'll make 'em put in a village green, and darling
cottages, and a quaint Main Street!"
Thus she triumphed through the class, which was a
typical Blodgett contest between a dreary teacher and unwilling
children of twenty, won by the teacher because his
opponents had to answer his questions, while their treacherous
queries he could counter by demanding, "Have you looked
that up in the library? Well then, suppose you do!"
The history instructor was a retired minister. He was
sarcastic today. He begged of sporting young Mr. Charley
Holmberg, "Now Charles, would it interrupt your undoubtedly
fascinating pursuit of that malevolent fly if I were to ask you
to tell us that you do not know anything about King John?"
He spent three delightful minutes in assuring himself of the
fact that no one exactly remembered the date of Magna Charta.
Carol did not hear him. She was completing the roof of a
half-timbered town hall. She had found one man in the
prairie village who did not appreciate her picture of winding
streets and arcades, but she had assembled the town council
and dramatically defeated him.
III
Though she was Minnesota-born Carol was not an intimate
of the prairie villages. Her father, the smiling and shabby,
the learned and teasingly kind, had come from Massachusetts,
and through all her childhood he had been a judge in Mankato,
which is not a prairie town, but in its garden-sheltered streets
and aisles of elms is white and green New England reborn.
Mankato lies between cliffs and the Minnesota River, hard by
Traverse des Sioux, where the first settlers made treaties with
the Indians, and the cattle-rustlers once came galloping before
hell-for-leather posses.
As she climbed along the banks of the dark river Carol
listened to its fables about the wide land of yellow waters and
bleached buffalo bones to the West; the Southern levees and
singing darkies and palm trees toward which it was forever
mysteriously gliding; and she heard again the startled bells
and thick puffing of high-stacked river steamers wrecked on
sand-reefs sixty years ago. Along the decks she saw missionaries,
gamblers in tall pot hats, and Dakota chiefs with scarlet
blankets. . . . Far off whistles at night, round the river bend,
plunking paddles reechoed by the pines, and a glow on black
sliding waters.
Carol's family were self-sufficient in their inventive life,
with Christmas a rite full of surprises and tenderness, and
"dressing-up parties" spontaneous and joyously absurd. The
beasts in the Milford hearth-mythology were not the obscene
Night Animals who jump out of closets and eat little girls, but
beneficent and bright-eyed creatures--the tam htab, who is
woolly and blue and lives in the bathroom, and runs rapidly to
warm small feet; the ferruginous oil stove, who purrs and
knows stories; and the skitamarigg, who will play with children
before breakfast if they spring out of bed and close the
window at the very first line of the song about puellas which
father sings while shaving.
Judge Milford's pedagogical scheme was to let the children
read whatever they pleased, and in his brown library Carol
absorbed Balzac and Rabelais and Thoreau and Max Muller.
He gravely taught them the letters on the backs of the encyclopedias,
and when polite visitors asked about the mental progress
of the "little ones," they were horrified to hear the
children earnestly repeating A-And, And-Aus, Aus-Bis, Bis-Cal,
Cal-Cha.
Carol's mother died when she was nine. Her father retired
from the judiciary when she was eleven, and took the family
to Minneapolis. There he died, two years after. Her sister, a
busy proper advisory soul, older than herself, had become a
stranger to her even when they lived in the same house.
From those early brown and silver days and from her
independence of relatives Carol retained a willingness to be
different from brisk efficient book-ignoring people; an instinct
to observe and wonder at their bustle even when she was
taking part in it. But, she felt approvingly, as she discovered
her career of town-planning, she was now roused to being brisk
and efficient herself.
IV
In a month Carol's ambition had clouded. Her hesitancy
about becoming a teacher had returned. She was not, she
worried, strong enough to endure the routine, and she could
not picture herself standing before grinning children and
pretending to be wise and decisive. But the desire for the creation
of a beautiful town remained. When she encountered an item
about small-town women's clubs or a photograph of a straggling
Main Street, she was homesick for it, she felt robbed of
her work.
It was the advice of the professor of English which led her
to study professional library-work in a Chicago school. Her
imagination carved and colored the new plan. She saw herself
persuading children to read charming fairy tales, helping young
men to find books on mechanics, being ever so courteous to
old men who were hunting for newspapers--the light of the
library, an authority on books, invited to dinners with poets
and explorers, reading a paper to an association of distinguished
scholars.
V
The last faculty reception before commencement. In
five days they would be in the cyclone of final examinations.
The house of the president had been massed with palms
suggestive of polite undertaking parlors, and in the library, a
ten-foot room with a globe and the portraits of Whittier and
Martha Washington, the student orchestra was playing
"Carmen" and "Madame Butterfly." Carol was dizzy with
music and the emotions of parting. She saw the palms as a
jungle, the pink-shaded electric globes as an opaline haze, and
the eye-glassed faculty as Olympians. She was melancholy at
sight of the mousey girls with whom she had "always intended
to get acquainted," and the half dozen young men who were
ready to fall in love with her.
But it was Stewart Snyder whom she encouraged. He was
so much manlier than the others; he was an even warm brown,
like his new ready-made suit with its padded shoulders. She
sat with him, and with two cups of coffee and a chicken patty,
upon a pile of presidential overshoes in the coat-closet under
the stairs, and as the thin music seeped in, Stewart
whispered:
"I can't stand it, this breaking up after four years! The
happiest years of life."
She believed it. "Oh, I know! To think that in just a few
days we'll be parting, and we'll never see some of the bunch
again!"
"Carol, you got to listen to me! You always duck when I
try to talk seriously to you, but you got to listen to me.
I'm going to be a big lawyer, maybe a judge, and I need you,
and I'd protect you----"
His arm slid behind her shoulders. The insinuating music
drained her independence. She said mournfully, "Would you
take care of me?" She touched his hand. It was warm,
solid.
"You bet I would! We'd have, Lord, we'd have bully
times in Yankton, where I'm going to settle----"
"But I want to do something with life."
"What's better than making a comfy home and bringing up
some cute kids and knowing nice homey people?"
It was the immemorial male reply to the restless woman.
Thus to the young Sappho spake the melon-venders; thus the
captains to Zenobia; and in the damp cave over gnawed bones
the hairy suitor thus protested to the woman advocate of
matriarchy. In the dialect of Blodgett College but with the
voice of Sappho was Carol's answer:
"Of course. I know. I suppose that's so. Honestly, I do
love children. But there's lots of women that can do housework,
but I--well, if you HAVE got a college education, you
ought to use it for the world."
"I know, but you can use it just as well in the home. And
gee, Carol, just think of a bunch of us going out on an auto
picnic, some nice spring evening."
"Yes."
"And sleigh-riding in winter, and going fishing----"
Blarrrrrrr! The orchestra had crashed into the "Soldiers'
Chorus"; and she was protesting, "No! No! You're a dear,
but I want to do things. I don't understand myself but I want--
everything in the world! Maybe I can't sing or write, but I
know I can be an influence in library work. Just suppose I
encouraged some boy and he became a great artist! I will!
I will do it! Stewart dear, I can't settle down to nothing but
dish-washing!"
Two minutes later--two hectic minutes--they were disturbed
by an embarrassed couple also seeking the idyllic seclusion of
the overshoe-closet.
After graduation she never saw Stewart Snyder again. She
wrote to him once a week--for one month.
VI
A year Carol spent in Chicago. Her study of library-
cataloguing, recording, books of reference, was easy and not too
somniferous. She reveled in the Art Institute, in symphonies
and violin recitals and chamber music, in the theater and
classic dancing. She almost gave up library work to become one
of the young women who dance in cheese-cloth in the moonlight.
She was taken to a certified Studio Party, with beer, cigarettes.
bobbed hair, and a Russian Jewess who sang the Internationale.
It cannot be reported that Carol had anything significant
to say to the Bohemians. She was awkward with them, and
felt ignorant, and she was shocked by the free manners which
she had for years desired. But she heard and remembered
discussions of Freud, Romain Rolland, syndicalism, the
Confederation Generale du Travail, feminism vs. haremism,
Chinese lyrics, nationalization of mines, Christian Science, and
fishing in Ontario.
She went home, and that was the beginning and end of her
Bohemian life.
The second cousin of Carol's sister's husband lived in
Winnetka, and once invited her out to Sunday dinner. She walked
back through Wilmette and Evanston, discovered new forms of
suburban architecture, and remembered her desire to recreate
villages. She decided that she would give up library work and,
by a miracle whose nature was not very clearly revealed to
her, turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and Japanese
bungalows.
The next day in library class she had to read a theme on the
use of the Cumulative Index, and she was taken so seriously
in the discussion that she put off her career of town-planning--
and in the autumn she was in the public library of St. Paul.
VII
Carol was not unhappy and she was not exhilarated, in the
St. Paul Library. She slowly confessed that she was not visibly
affecting lives. She did, at first, put into her contact with the
patrons a willingness which should have moved worlds. But
so few of these stolid worlds wanted to be moved. When she
was in charge of the magazine room the readers did not ask
for suggestions about elevated essays. They grunted, "Wanta
find the Leather Goods Gazette for last February." When she
was giving out books the principal query was, "Can you tell me
of a good, light, exciting love story to read? My husband's
going away for a week."
She was fond of the other librarians; proud of their
aspirations. And by the chance of propinquity she read scores of
books unnatural to her gay white littleness: volumes of
anthropology with ditches of foot-notes filled with heaps of
small dusty type, Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes for curry,
voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American
improvements, treatises upon success in the real-estate business.
She took walks, and was sensible about shoes and diet. And
never did she feel that she was living.
She went to dances and suppers at the houses of college
acquaintances. Sometimes she one-stepped demurely;
sometimes, in dread of life's slipping past, she turned into a
bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her throat tense, as she slid
down the room.
During her three years of library work several men showed
diligent interest in her--the treasurer of a fur-manufacturing
firm, a teacher, a newspaper reporter, and a petty railroad
official. None of them made her more than pause in thought.
For months no male emerged from the mass. Then, at the
Marburys', she met Dr. Will Kennicott. _