_ GRAY steel that seems unmoving because it spins so fast in the
balanced fly-wheel, gray snow in an avenue of elms, gray dawn
with the sun behind it--this was the gray of Vida Sherwin's
life at thirty-six.
She was small and active and sallow; her yellow hair was
faded, and looked dry; her blue silk blouses and modest
lace collars and high black shoes and sailor hats were as literal
and uncharming as a schoolroom desk; but her eyes determined
her appearance, revealed her as a personage and a force,
indicated her faith in the goodness and purpose of everything.
They were blue, and they were never still; they expressed
amusement, pity, enthusiasm. If she had been seen in sleep,
with the wrinkles beside her eyes stilled and the creased lids
hiding the radiant irises, she would have lost her potency.
She was born in a hill-smothered Wisconsin village where
her father was a prosy minister; she labored through a
sanctimonious college; she taught for two years in an iron-range
town of blurry-faced Tatars and Montenegrins, and wastes of
ore, and when she came to Gopher Prairie, its trees and the
shining spaciousness of the wheat prairie made her certain
that she was in paradise.
She admitted to her fellow-teachers that the schoolbuilding
was slightly damp, but she insisted that the rooms were
"arranged so conveniently--and then that bust of President
McKinley at the head of the stairs, it's a lovely art-work, and
isn't it an inspiration to have the brave, honest, martyr
president to think about!" She taught French, English, and
history, and the Sophomore Latin class, which dealt in matters
of a metaphysical nature called Indirect Discourse and the
Ablative Absolute. Each year she was reconvinced that the
pupils were beginning to learn more quickly. She spent four
winters in building up the Debating Society, and when the
debate really was lively one Friday afternoon, and the speakers
of pieces did not forget their lines, she felt rewarded.
She lived an engrossed useful life, and seemed as cool and
simple as an apple. But secretly she was creeping among fears,
longing, and guilt. She knew what it was, but she dared not
name it. She hated even the sound of the word "sex." When
she dreamed of being a woman of the harem, with great white
warm limbs, she awoke to shudder, defenseless in the dusk of
her room. She prayed to Jesus, always to the Son of God,
offering him the terrible power of her adoration, addressing him
as the eternal lover, growing passionate, exalted, large, as she
contemplated his splendor. Thus she mounted to endurance
and surcease.
By day, rattling about in many activities, she was able to
ridicule her blazing nights of darkness. With spurious
cheerfulness she announced everywhere, "I guess I'm a born
spinster," and "No one will ever marry a plain schoolma'am like
me," and "You men, great big noisy bothersome creatures,
we women wouldn't have you round the place, dirtying up nice
clean rooms, if it wasn't that you have to be petted and
guided. We just ought to say `Scat!' to all of you!"
But when a man held her close at a dance, even when
"Professor" George Edwin Mott patted her hand paternally
as they considered the naughtinesses of Cy Bogart, she quivered,
and reflected how superior she was to have kept her
virginity.
In the autumn of 1911, a year before Dr. Will Kennicott
was married, Vida was his partner at a five-hundred tournament.
She was thirty-four then; Kennicott about thirty-six.
To her he was a superb, boyish, diverting creature; all the
heroic qualities in a manly magnificent body. They had
been helping the hostess to serve the Waldorf salad and coffee
and gingerbread. They were in the kitchen, side by side on
a bench, while the others ponderously supped in the room
beyond.
Kennicott was masculine and experimental. He stroked
Vida's hand, he put his arm carelessly about her shoulder.
"Don't!" she said sharply.
"You're a cunning thing," he offered, patting the back of
her shoulder in an exploratory manner.
While she strained away, she longed to move nearer to him.
He bent over, looked at her knowingly. She glanced down at
his left hand as it touched her knee. She sprang up, started
noisily and needlessly to wash the dishes. He helped her. He
was too lazy to adventure further--and too used to women in
his profession. She was grateful for the impersonality of his
talk. It enabled her to gain control. She knew that she had
skirted wild thoughts.
A month after, on a sleighing-party, under the buffalo robes
in the bob-sled, he whispered, "You pretend to be a grown-up
schoolteacher, but you're nothing but a kiddie." His arm
was about her. She resisted.
"Don't you like the poor lonely bachelor?" he yammered in
a fatuous way.
"No, I don't! You don't care for me in the least. You're
just practising on me."
"You're so mean! I'm terribly fond of you."
"I'm not of you. And I'm not going to let myself be fond
of you, either."
He persistently drew her toward him. She clutched his arm.
Then she threw off the robe, climbed out of the sled, raced after
it with Harry Haydock. At the dance which followed the
sleigh-ride Kennicott was devoted to the watery prettiness of
Maud Dyer, and Vida was noisily interested in getting up a
Virginia Reel. Without seeming to watch Kennicott, she knew
that he did not once look at her.
That was all of her first love-affair.
He gave no sign of remembering that he was "terribly fond."
She waited for him; she reveled in longing, and in a sense of
guilt because she longed. She told herself that she did not
want part of him; unless he gave her all his devotion she would
never let him touch her; and when she found that she was
probably lying, she burned with scorn. She fought it out in
prayer. She knelt in a pink flannel nightgown, her thin
hair down her back, her forehead as full of horror as a mask
of tragedy, while she identified her love for the Son of God
with her love for a mortal, and wondered if any other woman
had ever been so sacrilegious. She wanted to be a nun
and observe perpetual adoration. She bought a rosary, but
she had been so bitterly reared as a Protestant that she could
not bring herself to use it.
Yet none of her intimates in the school and in the boarding-
house knew of her abyss of passion. They said she was "so
optimistic."
When she heard that Kennicott was to marry a girl, pretty,
young, and imposingly from the Cities, Vida despaired. She
congratulated Kennicott; carelessly ascertained from him the
hour of marriage. At that hour, sitting in her room, Vida
pictured the wedding in St. Paul. Full of an ecstasy which
horrified her, she followed Kennicott and the girl who had stolen
her place, followed them to the train, through the evening,
the night.
She was relieved when she had worked out a belief that she
wasn't really shameful, that there was a mystical relation
between herself and Carol, so that she was vicariously yet
veritably with Kennicott, and had the right to be.
She saw Carol during the first five minutes in Gopher Prairie.
She stared at the passing motor, at Kennicott and the girl
beside him. In that fog world of transference of emotion Vida
had no normal jealousy but a conviction that, since through
Carol she had received Kennicott's love, then Carol was a part
of her, an astral self, a heightened and more beloved self.
She was glad of the girl's charm, of the smooth black hair,
the airy head and young shoulders. But she was suddenly
angry. Carol glanced at her for a quarter-second, but looked
past her, at an old roadside barn. If she had made the great
sacrifice, at least she expected gratitude and recognition, Vida
raged, while her conscious schoolroom mind fussily begged
her to control this insanity.
During her first call half of her wanted to welcome a fellow
reader of books; the other half itched to find out whether
Carol knew anything about Kennicott's former interest in
herself. She discovered that Carol was not aware that he had
ever touched another woman's hand. Carol was an amusing,
naive, curiously learned child. While Vida was most actively
describing the glories of the Thanatopsis, and complimenting
this librarian on her training as a worker, she was fancying
that this girl was the child born of herself and Kennicott; and
out of that symbolizing she had a comfort she had not known
for months.
When she came home, after supper with the Kennicotts and
Guy Pollock, she had a sudden and rather pleasant backsliding
from devotion. She bustled into her room, she slammed her
hat on the bed, and chattered, "I don't CARE! I'm a lot like
her--except a few years older. I'm light and quick, too, and
I can talk just as well as she can, and I'm sure---- Men are
such fools. I'd be ten times as sweet to make love to as that
dreamy baby. And I AM as good-looking!"
But as she sat on the bed and stared at her thin thighs,
defiance oozed away. She mourned:
"No. I'm not. Dear God, how we fool ourselves! I pretend
I'm `spiritual.' I pretend my legs are graceful. They
aren't. They're skinny. Old-maidish. I hate it! I hate that
impertinent young woman! A selfish cat, taking his love
for granted. . . . No, she's adorable. . . . I don't
think she ought to be so friendly with Guy Pollock."
For a year Vida loved Carol, longed to and did not pry into
the details of her relations with Kennicotts enjoyed her spirit
of play as expressed in childish tea-parties, and, with the
mystic bond between them forgotten, was healthily vexed by
Carol's assumption that she was a sociological messiah come
to save Gopher Prairie. This last facet of Vida's thought was
the one which, after a year, was most often turned to the
light. In a testy way she brooded, "These people that want
to change everything all of a sudden without doing any work,
make me tired! Here I have to go and work for four years,
picking out the pupils for debates, and drilling them, and
nagging at them to get them to look up references, and begging
them to choose their own subjects--four years, to get up a
couple of good debates! And she comes rushing in, and expects
in one year to change the whole town into a lollypop paradise
with everybody stopping everything else to grow tulips and
drink tea. And it's a comfy homey old town, too!"
She had such an outburst after each of Carol's campaigns--
for better Thanatopsis programs, for Shavian plays, for more
human schools--but she never betrayed herself, and always she
was penitent.
Vida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal. She
believed that details could excitingly be altered, but that
things-in-general were comely and kind and immutable. Carol
was, without understanding or accepting it, a revolutionist, a
radical, and therefore possessed of "constructive ideas," which
only the destroyer can have, since the reformer believes that
all the essential constructing has already been done. After
years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more than
the fancied loss of Kennicott's love which held Vida irritably
fascinated.
But the birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion.
She was indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in
having borne Kennicott's child. She admitted that Carol
seemed to have affection and immaculate care for the baby,
but she began to identify herself now with Kennicott, and in
this phase to feel that she had endured quite too much from
Carol's instability.
She recalled certain other women who had come from
the Outside and had not appreciated Gopher Prairie. She
remembered the rector's wife who had been chilly to callers
and who was rumored throughout the town to have said,
"Re-ah-ly I cawn't endure this bucolic heartiness in the
responses." The woman was positively known to have worn
handkerchiefs in her bodice as padding--oh, the town had
simply roared at her. Of course the rector and she were
got rid of in a few months.
Then there was the mysterious woman with the dyed hair
and penciled eyebrows, who wore tight English dresses, like
basques, who smelled of stale musk, who flirted with the men
and got them to advance money for her expenses in a lawsuit,
who laughed at Vida's reading at a school-entertainment,
and went off owing a hotel-bill and the three hundred dollars
she had borrowed.
Vida insisted that she loved Carol, but with some satisfaction
she compared her to these traducers of the town.
II
Vida had enjoyed Raymie Wutherspoon's singing in the
Episcopal choir; she had thoroughly reviewed the weather with
him at Methodist sociables and in the Bon Ton. But she did
not really know him till she moved to Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-
house. It was five years after her affair with Kennicott. She
was thirty-nine, Raymie perhaps a year younger.
She said to him, and sincerely, "My! You can do anything,
with your brains and tact and that heavenly voice. You were
so good in `The Girl from Kankakee.' You made me feel
terribly stupid. If you'd gone on the stage, I believe you'd
be just as good as anybody in Minneapolis. But still, I'm not
sorry you stuck to business. It's such a constructive career."
"Do you really think so?" yearned Raymie, across the
apple-sauce.
It was the first time that either of them had found a
dependable intellectual companionship. They looked down on
Willis Woodford the bank-clerk, and his anxious babycentric
wife, the silent Lyman Casses, the slangy traveling man, and
the rest of Mrs. Gurrey's unenlightened guests. They sat
opposite, and they sat late. They were exhilarated to find that
they agreed in confession of faith:
"People like Sam Clark and Harry Haydock aren't earnest
about music and pictures and eloquent sermons and really
refined movies, but then, on the other hand, people like Carol
Kennicott put too much stress on all this art. Folks ought
to appreciate lovely things, but just the same, they got to be
practical and--they got to look at things in a practical way."
Smiling, passing each other the pressed-glass pickle-dish,
seeing Mrs. Gurrey's linty supper-cloth irradiated by the light
of intimacy, Vida and Raymie talked about Carol's rose-colored
turban, Carol's sweetness, Carol's new low shoes, Carol's erroneous
theory that there was no need of strict discipline in school,
Carol's amiability in the Bon Ton, Carol's flow of wild ideas,
which, honestly, just simply made you nervous trying to keep
track of them;
About the lovely display of gents' shirts in the Bon Ton
window as dressed by Raymie, about Raymie's offertory last
Sunday, the fact that there weren't any of these new solos as
nice as "Jerusalem the Golden," and the way Raymie stood
up to Juanita Haydock when she came into the store and
tried to run things and he as much as told her that she was
so anxious to have folks think she was smart and bright that
she said things she didn't mean, and anyway, Raymie was
running the shoe-department, and if Juanita, or Harry either,
didn't like the way he ran things, they could go get another
man;
About Vida's new jabot which made her look thirty-two
(Vida's estimate) or twenty-two (Raymie's estimate), Vida's
plan to have the high-school Debating Society give a playlet,
and the difficulty of keeping the younger boys well behaved
on the playground when a big lubber like Cy Bogart acted
up so;
About the picture post-card which Mrs. Dawson had sent to
Mrs. Cass from Pasadena, showing roses growing right outdoors
in February, the change in time on No. 4, the reckless
way Dr. Gould always drove his auto, the reckless way almost
all these people drove their autos, the fallacy of supposing
that these socialists could carry on a government for as much
as six months if they ever did have a chance to try out their
theories, and the crazy way in which Carol jumped from
subject to subject.
Vida had once beheld Raymie as a thin man with spectacles,
mournful drawn-out face, and colorless stiff hair. Now she
noted that his jaw was square, that his long hands moved
quickly and were bleached in a refined manner, and that his
trusting eyes indicated that he had "led a clean life." She
began to call him "Ray," and to bounce in defense of his
unselfishness and thoughtfulness every time Juanita Haydock
or Rita Gould giggled about him at the Jolly Seventeen.
On a Sunday afternoon of late autumn they walked down
to Lake Minniemashie. Ray said that he would like to see
the ocean; it must be a grand sight; it must be much grander
than a lake, even a great big lake. Vida had seen it, she
stated modestly; she had seen it on a summer trip to Cape
Cod.
"Have you been clear to Cape Cod? Massachusetts? I
knew you'd traveled, but I never realized you'd been that
far!"
Made taller and younger by his interest she poured out, "Oh
my yes. It was a wonderful trip. So many points of interest
through Massachusetts--historical. There's Lexington where
we turned back the redcoats, and Longfellow's home at
Cambridge, and Cape Cod--just everything--fishermen and whale-
ships and sand-dunes and everything."
She wished that she had a little cane to carry. He broke
off a willow branch.
"My, you're strong!" she said.
"No, not very. I wish there was a Y. M. C. A. here, so I
could take up regular exercise. I used to think I could do
pretty good acrobatics, if I had a chance."
"I'm sure you could. You're unusually lithe, for a large man."
"Oh no, not so very. But I wish we had a Y. M. It would
be dandy to have lectures and everything, and I'd like to take
a class in improving the memory--I believe a fellow ought
to go on educating himself and improving his mind even if he is
in business, don't you, Vida--I guess I'm kind of fresh to call
you `Vida'!"
"I've been calling you `Ray' for weeks!"
He wondered why she sounded tart.
He helped her down the bank to the edge of the lake but
dropped her hand abruptly, and as they sat on a willow log
and he brushed her sleeve, he delicately moved over and
murmured, "Oh, excuse me--accident."
She stared at the mud-browned chilly water, the floating
gray reeds.
"You look so thoughtful," he said.
She threw out her hands. "I am! Will you kindly tell
me what's the use of--anything! Oh, don't mind me. I'm
a moody old hen. Tell me about your plan for getting a
partnership in the Bon Ton. I do think you're right: Harry
Haydock and that mean old Simons ought to give you one."
He hymned the old unhappy wars in which he had been
Achilles and the mellifluous Nestor, yet gone his righteous ways
unheeded by the cruel kings. . . . "Why, if I've told
'em once, I've told 'em a dozen times to get in a side-line of
light-weight pants for gents' summer wear, and of course here
they go and let a cheap kike like Rifkin beat them to it
and grab the trade right off 'em, and then Harry said--
you know how Harry is, maybe he don't mean to be grouchy,
but he's such a sore-head----"
He gave her a hand to rise. "If you don't MIND. I think
a fellow is awful if a lady goes on a walk with him and she
can't trust him and he tries to flirt with her and all."
"I'm sure you're highly trustworthy!" she snapped, and
she sprang up without his aid. Then, smiling excessively,
"Uh--don't you think Carol sometimes fails to appreciate Dr.
Will's ability?"
III
Ray habitually asked her about his window-trimming, the
display of the new shoes, the best music for the entertainment
at the Eastern Star, and (though he was recognized as a
professional authority on what the town called "gents'
furnishings") about his own clothes. She persuaded him not to wear
the small bow ties which made him look like an elongated
Sunday School scholar. Once she burst out:
"Ray, I could shake you! Do you know you're too
apologetic? You always appreciate other people too much. You
fuss over Carol Kennicott when she has some crazy theory that
we all ought to turn anarchists or live on figs and nuts or
something. And you listen when Harry Haydock tries to show
off and talk about turnovers and credits and things you know
lots better than he does. Look folks in the eye! Glare at
'em! Talk deep! You're the smartest man in town, if you
only knew it. You ARE!"
He could not believe it. He kept coming back to her for
confirmation. He practised glaring and talking deep, but he
circuitously hinted to Vida that when he had tried to look
Harry Haydock in the eye, Harry had inquired, "What's the
matter with you, Raymie? Got a pain?" But afterward
Harry had asked about Kantbeatum socks in a manner which,
Ray felt, was somehow different from his former condescension.
They were sitting on the squat yellow satin settee in the
boarding-house parlor. As Ray reannounced that he simply
wouldn't stand it many more years if Harry didn't give him a
partnership, his gesticulating hand touched Vida's shoulders.
"Oh, excuse me!" he pleaded.
"It's all right. Well, I think I must be running up to my
room. Headache," she said briefly.
IV
Ray and she had stopped in at Dyer's for a hot chocolate
on their way home from the movies, that March evening. Vida
speculated, "Do you know that I may not be here next year?"
"What do you mean?"
With her fragile narrow nails she smoothed the glass slab
which formed the top of the round table at which they sat.
She peeped through the glass at the perfume-boxes of black and
gold and citron in the hollow table. She looked about at
shelves of red rubber water-bottles, pale yellow sponges, wash-
rags with blue borders, hair-brushes of polished cherry backs.
She shook her head like a nervous medium coming out of a
trance, stared at him unhappily, demanded:
"Why should I stay here? And I must make up my mind.
Now. Time to renew our teaching-contracts for next year.
I think I'll go teach in some other town. Everybody here is
tired of me. I might as well go. Before folks come out and
SAY they're tired of me. I have to decide tonight. I might as
well---- Oh, no matter. Come. Let's skip. It's late."
She sprang up, ignoring his wail of "Vida! Wait! Sit
down! Gosh! I'm flabbergasted! Gee! Vida!" She
marched out. While he was paying his check she got ahead.
He ran after her, blubbering, "Vida! Wait!" In the shade
of the lilacs in front of the Gougerling house he came up with
her, stayed her flight by a hand on her shoulder.
"Oh, don't! Don't! What does it matter?" she begged.
She was sobbing, her soft wrinkly lids soaked with tears.
"Who cares for my affection or help? I might as well drift
on, forgotten. O Ray, please don't hold me. Let me go.
I'll just decide not to renew my contract here, and--and
drift--way off----"
His hand was steady on her shoulder. She dropped her
head, rubbed the back of his hand with her cheek.
They were married in June.
V
They took the Ole Jenson house. "It's small," said Vida,
"but it's got the dearest vegetable garden, and I love having
time to get near to Nature for once."
Though she became Vida Wutherspoon technically, and
though she certainly had no ideals about the independence of
keeping her name, she continued to be known as Vida Sherwin.
She had resigned from the school, but she kept up one class
in English. She bustled about on every committee of the
Thanatopsis; she was always popping into the rest-room to
make Mrs. Nodelquist sweep the floor; she was appointed to
the library-board to succeed Carol; she taught the Senior
Girls' Class in the Episcopal Sunday School, and tried to revive
the King's Daughters. She exploded into self-confidence and
happiness; her draining thoughts were by marriage turned
into energy. She became daily and visibly more plump, and
though she chattered as eagerly, she was less obviously admiring
of marital bliss, less sentimental about babies, sharper in
demanding that the entire town share her reforms--the purchase
of a park, the compulsory cleaning of back-yards.
She penned Harry Haydock at his desk in the Bon Ton;
she interrupted his joking; she told him that it was Ray who
had built up the shoe-department and men's department; she
demanded that he be made a partner. Before Harry could
answer she threatened that Ray and she would start a rival
shop. "I'll clerk behind the counter myself, and a Certain
Party is all ready to put up the money."
She rather wondered who the Certain Party was.
Ray was made a one-sixth partner.
He became a glorified floor-walker, greeting the men with
new poise, no longer coyly subservient to pretty women.
When he was not affectionately coercing people into buying
things they did not need, he stood at the back of the store,
glowing, abstracted, feeling masculine as he recalled the
tempestuous surprises of love revealed by Vida.
The only remnant of Vida's identification of herself with
Carol was a jealousy when she saw Kennicott and Ray together,
and reflected that some people might suppose that
Kennicott was his superior. She was sure that Carol thought
so, and she wanted to shriek, "You needn't try to gloat! I
wouldn't have your pokey old husband. He hasn't one single
bit of Ray's spiritual nobility." _