_ CHAPTER XXVIII
IT WAS at a supper of the Jolly Seventeen in August that
Carol heard of "Elizabeth," from Mrs. Dave Dyer.
Carol was fond of Maud Dyer, because she had been particularly
agreeable lately; had obviously repented of the nervous
distaste which she had once shown. Maud patted her hand
when they met, and asked about Hugh.
Kennicott said that he was "kind of sorry for the girl,
some ways; she's too darn emotional, but still, Dave is sort
of mean to her." He was polite to poor Maud when they
all went down to the cottages for a swim. Carol was proud of
that sympathy in him, and now she took pains to sit with their
new friend.
Mrs. Dyer was bubbling, "Oh, have you folks heard about
this young fellow that's just come to town that the boys call
`Elizabeth'? He's working in Nat Hicks's tailor shop. I bet
he doesn't make eighteen a week, but my! isn't he the perfect
lady though! He talks so refined, and oh, the lugs he puts on
--belted coat, and pique collar with a gold pin, and socks
to match his necktie, and honest--you won't believe this, but
I got it straight--this fellow, you know he's staying at Mrs.
Gurrey's punk old boarding-house, and they say he asked Mrs.
Gurrey if he ought to put on a dress-suit for supper! Imagine!
Can you beat that? And him nothing but a Swede tailor--Erik
Valborg his name is. But he used to be in a tailor shop
in Minneapolis (they do say he's a smart needle-pusher, at
that) and he tries to let on that he's a regular city fellow.
They say he tries to make people think he's a poet--carries
books around and pretends to read 'em. Myrtle Cass says
she met him at a dance, and he was mooning around all
over the place, and he asked her did she like flowers and
poetry and music and everything; he spieled like he was a
regular United States Senator; and Myrtle--she's a devil, that
girl, ha! ha!--she kidded him along, and got him going, and
honest, what d'you think he said? He said he didn't find any
intellectual companionship in this town. Can you BEAT it?
Imagine! And him a Swede tailor! My! And they say he's
the most awful mollycoddle--looks just like a girl. The boys
call him `Elizabeth,' and they stop him and ask about the
books he lets on to have read, and he goes and tells them,
and they take it all in and jolly him terribly, and he never gets
onto the fact they're kidding him. Oh, I think it's just TOO funny!"
The Jolly Seventeen laughed, and Carol laughed with them.
Mrs. Jack Elder added that this Erik Valborg had confided
to Mrs. Gurrey that he would "love to design clothes for
women." Imagine! Mrs. Harvey Dillon had had a glimpse
of him, but honestly, she'd thought he was awfully handsome.
This was instantly controverted by Mrs. B. J. Gougerling,
wife of the banker. Mrs. Gougerling had had, she reported,
a good look at this Valborg fellow. She and B. J.
had been motoring, and passed "Elizabeth" out by McGruder's
Bridge. He was wearing the awfullest clothes, with the waist
pinched in like a girl's. He was sitting on a rock doing
nothing, but when he heard the Gougerling car coming he
snatched a book out of his pocket, and as they went by he
pretended to be reading it, to show off. And he wasn't really
good-looking--just kind of soft, as B. J. had pointed out.
When the husbands came they joined in the expose. "My
name is Elizabeth. I'm the celebrated musical tailor. The
skirts fall for me by the thou. Do I get some more veal
loaf?" merrily shrieked Dave Dyer. He had some admirable
stories about the tricks the town youngsters had played on
Valborg. They had dropped a decaying perch into his pocket.
They had pinned on his back a sign, "I'm the prize boob,
kick me."
Glad of any laughter, Carol joined the frolic, and surprised
them by crying, "Dave, I do think you're the dearest thing
since you got your hair cut!" That was an excellent sally.
Everybody applauded. Kennicott looked proud.
She decided that sometime she really must go out of her
way to pass Hicks's shop and see this freak.
II
She was at Sunday morning service at the Baptist Church,
in a solemn row with her husband, Hugh, Uncle Whittier,
Aunt Bessie.
Despite Aunt Bessie's nagging the Kennicotts rarely
attended church. The doctor asserted, "Sure, religion is a fine
influence--got to have it to keep the lower classes in order--
fact, it's the only thing that appeals to a lot of those fellows
and makes 'em respect the rights of property. And I guess this
theology is O.K.; lot of wise old coots figured it all out, and
they knew more about it than we do." He believed in the
Christian religion, and never thought about it, he believed
in the church, and seldom went near it; he was shocked by
Carol's lack of faith, and wasn't quite sure what was the
nature of the faith that she lacked.
Carol herself was an uneasy and dodging agnostic.
When she ventured to Sunday School and heard the teachers
droning that the genealogy of Shamsherai was a valuable
ethical problem for children to think about; when she
experimented with Wednesday prayer-meeting and listened to
store-keeping elders giving their unvarying weekly testimony
in primitive erotic symbols and such gory Chaldean phrases
as "washed in the blood of the lamb" and "a vengeful God";
when Mrs. Bogart boasted that through his boyhood she had
made Cy confess nightly upon the basis of the Ten
Commandments; then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian
religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as
Zoroastrianism--without the splendor. But when she went
to church suppers and felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with
which the sisters served cold ham and scalloped potatoes;
when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to her, on an afternoon call,
"My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes you to come
into abiding grace," then Carol found the humanness behind
the sanguinary and alien theology. Always she perceived that
the churches--Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Catholic,
all of them--which had seemed so unimportant to the judge's
home in her childhood, so isolated from the city struggle in
St. Paul, were still, in Gopher Prairie, the strongest of the
forces compelling respectability.
This August Sunday she had been tempted by the announcement
that the Reverend Edmund Zitterel would preach on the
topic "America, Face Your Problems!" With the great war,
workmen in every nation showing a desire to control industries,
Russia hinting a leftward revolution against Kerensky,
woman suffrage coming, there seemed to be plenty of problems
for the Reverend Mr. Zitterel to call on America to face.
Carol gathered her family and trotted off behind Uncle
Whittier.
The congregation faced the heat with informality. Men
with highly plastered hair, so painfully shaved that their faces
looked sore, removed their coats, sighed, and unbuttoned two
buttons of their uncreased Sunday vests. Large-bosomed,
white-bloused, hot-necked, spectacled matrons--the Mothers
in Israel, pioneers and friends of Mrs. Champ Perry--waved
their palm-leaf fans in a steady rhythm. Abashed boys slunk
into the rear pews and giggled, while milky little girls, up front
with their mothers, self-consciously kept from turning around.
The church was half barn and half Gopher Prairie parlor.
The streaky brown wallpaper was broken in its dismal sweep
only by framed texts, "Come unto Me" and "The Lord is
My Shepherd," by a list of hymns, and by a crimson and
green diagram, staggeringly drawn upon hemp-colored paper,
indicating the alarming ease with which a young man may
descend from Palaces of Pleasure and the House of Pride to
Eternal Damnation. But the varnished oak pews and the new
red carpet and the three large chairs on the platform, behind
the bare reading-stand, were all of a rocking-chair comfort.
Carol was civic and neighborly and commendable today.
She beamed and bowed. She trolled out with the others the
hymn:
How pleasant 'tis on Sabbath morn
To gather in the church
And there I'll have no carnal thoughts,
Nor sin shall me besmirch.
With a rustle of starched linen skirts and stiff shirt-fronts,
the congregation sat down, and gave heed to the Reverend
Mr. Zitterel. The priest was a thin, swart, intense young
man with a bang. He wore a black sack suit and a lilac tie.
He smote the enormous Bible on the reading-stand, vociferated,
"Come, let us reason together," delivered a prayer informing
Almighty God of the news of the past week, and began to
reason.
It proved that the only problems which America had to
face were Mormonism and Prohibition:
"Don't let any of these self-conceited fellows that are
always trying to stir up trouble deceive you with the belief
that there's anything to all these smart-aleck movements to
let the unions and the Farmers' Nonpartisan League kill all
our initiative and enterprise by fixing wages and prices. There
isn't any movement that amounts to a whoop without it's got
a moral background. And let me tell you that while folks
are fussing about what they call `economics' and `socialism'
and `science' and a lot of things that are nothing in the world
but a disguise for atheism, the Old Satan is busy spreading
his secret net and tentacles out there in Utah, under his guise
of Joe Smith or Brigham Young or whoever their leaders
happen to be today, it doesn't make any difference, and they're
making game of the Old Bible that has led this American
people through its manifold trials and tribulations to its firm
position as the fulfilment of the prophecies and the recognized
leader of all nations. `Sit thou on my right hand till I make
thine enemies the footstool of my feet,' said the Lord of Hosts,
Acts II, the thirty-fourth verse--and let me tell you right now,
you got to get up a good deal earlier in the morning than you
get up even when you're going fishing, if you want to be
smarter than the Lord, who has shown us the straight and narrow
way, and he that passeth therefrom is in eternal peril and,
to return to this vital and terrible subject of Mormonism--and
as I say, it is terrible to realize how little attention is given
to this evil right here in our midst and on our very doorstep,
as it were--it's a shame and a disgrace that the Congress of
these United States spends all its time talking about
inconsequential financial matters that ought to be left to the Treasury
Department, as I understand it, instead of arising in their
might and passing a law that any one admitting he is a Mormon
shall simply be deported and as it were kicked out of this
free country in which we haven't got any room for polygamy
and the tyrannies of Satan.
"And, to digress for a moment, especially as there are more
of them in this state than there are Mormons, though you
never can tell what will happen with this vain generation of
young girls, that think more about wearing silk stockings than
about minding their mothers and learning to bake a good loaf
of bread, and many of them listening to these sneaking Mormon
missionaries--and I actually heard one of them talking right
out on a street-corner in Duluth, a few years ago, and the
officers of the law not protesting--but still, as they are a smaller
but more immediate problem, let me stop for just a moment
to pay my respects to these Seventh-Day Adventists. Not that
they are immoral, I don't mean, but when a body of men
go on insisting that Saturday is the Sabbath, after Christ himself
has clearly indicated the new dispensation, then I think
the legislature ought to step in----"
At this point Carol awoke.
She got through three more minutes by studying the face
of a girl in the pew across: a sensitive unhappy girl whose
longing poured out with intimidating self-revelation as she
worshiped Mr. Zitterel. Carol wondered who the girl was. She
had seen her at church suppers. She considered how many
of the three thousand people in the town she did not know;
to how many of them the Thanatopsis and the Jolly Seventeen
were icy social peaks; how many of them might be toiling
through boredom thicker than her own--with greater courage.
She examined her nails. She read two hymns. She got some
satisfaction out of rubbing an itching knuckle. She pillowed
on her shoulder the head of the baby who, after killing time
in the same manner as his mother, was so fortunate as to
fall asleep. She read the introduction, title-page, and
acknowledgment of copyrights, in the hymnal. She tried to evolve
a philosophy which would explain why Kennicott could never
tie his scarf so that it would reach the top of the gap in his
turn-down collar.
There were no other diversions to be found in the pew.
She glanced back at the congregation. She thought that it
would be amiable to bow to Mrs. Champ Perry.
Her slow turning head stopped, galvanized.
Across the aisle, two rows back, was a strange young man
who shone among the cud-chewing citizens like a visitant from
the sun-amber curls, low forehead, fine nose, chin smooth
but not raw from Sabbath shaving. His lips startled her. The
lips of men in Gopher Prairie are flat in the face, straight and
grudging. The stranger's mouth was arched, the upper lip
short. He wore a brown jersey coat, a delft-blue bow, a white
silk shirt, white flannel trousers. He suggested the ocean
beach, a tennis court, anything but the sun-blistered utility
of Main Street.
A visitor from Minneapolis, here for business? No. He
wasn't a business man. He was a poet. Keats was in his face,
and Shelley, and Arthur Upson, whom she had once seen in
Minneapolis. He was at once too sensitive and too sophisticated
to touch business as she knew it in Gopher Prairie.
With restrained amusement he was analyzing the noisy Mr.
Zitterel. Carol was ashamed to have this spy from the Great
World hear the pastor's maundering. She felt responsible for
the town. She resented his gaping at their private rites.
She flushed, turned away. But she continued to feel his
presence.
How could she meet him? She must! For an hour of talk.
He was all that she was hungry for. She could not let
him get away without a word--and she would have to. She
pictured, and ridiculed, herself as walking up to him and
remarking, "I am sick with the Village Virus. Will you please
tell me what people are saying and playing in New York?"
She pictured, and groaned over, the expression of Kennicott
if she should say, "Why wouldn't it be reasonable for you, my
soul, to ask that complete stranger in the brown jersey coat to
come to supper tonight?"
She brooded, not looking back. She warned herself that
she was probably exaggerating; that no young man could have
all these exalted qualities. Wasn't he too obviously smart,
too glossy-new? Like a movie actor. Probably he was a
traveling salesman who sang tenor and fancied himself in
imitations of Newport clothes and spoke of "the swellest
business proposition that ever came down the pike." In a
panic she peered at him. No! This was no hustling salesman,
this boy with the curving Grecian lips and the serious eyes.
She rose after the service, carefully taking Kennicott's arm
and smiling at him in a mute assertion that she was devoted
to him no matter what happened. She followed the Mystery's
soft brown jersey shoulders out of the church.
Fatty Hicks, the shrill and puffy son of Nat, flapped his
hand at the beautiful stranger and jeered, "How's the kid?
All dolled up like a plush horse today, ain't we!"
Carol was exceeding sick. Her herald from the outside
was Erik Valborg, "Elizabeth." Apprentice tailor! Gasoline
and hot goose! Mending dirty jackets! Respectfully holding
a tape-measure about a paunch!
And yet, she insisted, this boy was also himself.
III
They had Sunday dinner with the Smails, in a dining-room
which centered about a fruit and flower piece and a crayon-
enlargement of Uncle Whittier. Carol did not heed Aunt
Bessie's fussing in regard to Mrs. Robert B. Schminke's bead
necklace and Whittier's error in putting on the striped pants,
day like this. She did not taste the shreds of roast pork. She
said vacuously:
"Uh--Will, I wonder if that young man in the white flannel
trousers, at church this morning, was this Valborg person that
they're all talking about?"
"Yump. That's him. Wasn't that the darudest get-up he
had on!" Kennicott scratched at a white smear on his hard
gray sleeve.
"It wasn't so bad. I wonder where he comes from? He
seems to have lived in cities a good deal. Is he from the
East?"
"The East? Him? Why, he comes from a farm right up
north here, just this side of Jefferson. I know his father
slightly--Adolph Valborg--typical cranky old Swede farmer."
"Oh, really?" blandly.
"Believe he has lived in Minneapolis for quite some time,
though. Learned his trade there. And I will say he's bright,
some ways. Reads a lot. Pollock says he takes more books
out of the library than anybody else in town. Huh! He's
kind of like you in that!"
The Smails and Kennicott laughed very much at this sly
jest. Uncle Whittier seized the conversation. "That fellow
that's working for Hicks? Milksop, that's what he is. Makes
me tired to see a young fellow that ought to be in the war,
or anyway out in the fields earning his living honest, like
I done when I was young, doing a woman's work and then
come out and dress up like a show-actor! Why, when I was
his age----"
Carol reflected that the carving-knife would make an
excellent dagger with which to kill Uncle Whittier. It would
slide in easily. The headlines would be terrible
Kennicott said judiciously, "Oh, I don't want to be unjust
to him. I believe he took his physical examination for military
service. Got varicose veins--not bad, but enough to disqualify
him. Though I will say he doesn't look like a fellow that
would be so awful darn crazy to poke his bayonet into a
Hun's guts."
"Will! PLEASE!"
"Well, he don't. Looks soft to me. And they say he told
Del Snafflin, when he was getting a hair-cut on Saturday, that
he wished he could play the piano."
"Isn't it wonderful how much we all know about one another
in a town like this," said Carol innocently.
Kennicott was suspicious, but Aunt Bessie, serving the floating
island pudding, agreed, "Yes, it is wonderful. Folks can
get away with all sorts of meannesses and sins in these
terrible cities, but they can't here. I was noticing this tailor
fellow this morning, and when Mrs. Riggs offered to share her
hymn-book with him, he shook his head, and all the while we
was singing he just stood there like a bump on a log and never
opened his mouth. Everybody says he's got an idea that he's got
so much better manners and all than what the rest of us have,
but if that's what he calls good manners, I want to know!"
Carol again studied the carving-knife. Blood on the whiteness
of a tablecloth might be gorgeous.
Then:
"Fool! Neurotic impossibilist! Telling yourself orchard
fairy-tales--at thirty. . . . Dear Lord, am I really THIRTY?
That boy can't be more than twenty-five."
IV
She went calling.
Boarding with the Widow Bogart was Fern Mullins, a girl
of twenty-two who was to be teacher of English, French, and
gymnastics in the high school this coming session. Fern
Mullins had come to town early, for the six-weeks normal
course for country teachers. Carol had noticed her on the
street, had heard almost as much about her as about Erik
Valborg. She was tall, weedy, pretty, and incurably rakish.
Whether she wore a low middy collar or dressed reticently
for school in a black suit with a high-necked blouse, she was
airy, flippant. "She looks like an absolute totty," said all
the Mrs. Sam Clarks, disapprovingly, and all the Juanita
Haydocks, enviously.
That Sunday evening, sitting in baggy canvas lawn-chairs
beside the house, the Kennicotts saw Fern laughing with Cy
Bogart who, though still a junior in high school, was now
a lump of a man, only two or three years younger than Fern.
Cy had to go downtown for weighty matters connected with the
pool-parlor. Fern drooped on the Bogart porch, her chin in
her hands.
"She looks lonely," said Kennicott.
"She does, poor soul. I believe I'll go over and speak to
her. I was introduced to her at Dave's but I haven't called."
Carol was slipping across the lawn, a white figure in the
dimness, faintly brushing the dewy grass. She was thinking of
Erik and of the fact that her feet were wet, and she was casual
in her greeting: "Hello! The doctor and I wondered if you
were lonely."
Resentfully, "I am!"
Carol concentrated on her. "My dear, you sound so! I
know how it is. I used to be tired when I was on the job--
I was a librarian. What was your college? I was Blodgett."
More interestedly, "I went to the U." Fern meant the
University of Minnesota.
"You must have had a splendid time. Blodgett was a bit
dull."
"Where were you a librarian?" challengingly.
"St. Paul--the main library."
"Honest? Oh dear, I wish I was back in the Cities! This
is my first year of teaching, and I'm scared stiff. I did have
the best time in college: dramatics and basket-ball and fussing
and dancing--I'm simply crazy about dancing. And here,
except when I have the kids in gymnasium class, or when I'm
chaperoning the basket-ball team on a trip out-of-town, I won't
dare to move above a whisper. I guess they don't care much
if you put any pep into teaching or not, as long as you look
like a Good Influence out of school-hours--and that means
never doing anything you want to. This normal course is
bad enough, but the regular school will be FIERCE! If it wasn't
too late to get a job in the Cities, I swear I'd resign here.
I bet I won't dare to go to a single dance all winter. If I cut
loose and danced the way I like to, they'd think I was a
perfect hellion--poor harmless me! Oh, I oughtn't to be
talking like this. Fern, you never could be cagey!"
"Don't be frightened, my dear! . . . Doesn't that
sound atrociously old and kind! I'm talking to you the way
Mrs. Westlake talks to me! That's having a husband and a
kitchen range, I suppose. But I feel young, and I want to
dance like a--like a hellion?--too. So I sympathize."
Fern made a sound of gratitude. Carol inquired, "What
experience did you have with college dramatics? I tried to
start a kind of Little Theater here. It was dreadful. I must
tell you about it----"
Two hours later, when Kennicott came over to greet Fern
and to yawn, "Look here, Carrie, don't you suppose you better
be thinking about turning in? I've got a hard day tomorrow,"
the two were talking so intimately that they constantly
interrupted each other.
As she went respectably home, convoyed by a husband, and
decorously holding up her skirts, Carol rejoiced, "Everything
has changed! I have two friends, Fern and---- But who's
the other? That's queer; I thought there was---- Oh, how
absurd!"
V
She often passed Erik Valborg on the street; the brown
jersey coat became unremarkable. When she was driving with
Kennicott, in early evening, she saw him on the lake shore,
reading a thin book which might easily have been poetry. She
noted that he was the only person in the motorized town who
still took long walks.
She told herself that she was the daughter of a judge, the
wife of a doctor, and that she did not care to know a capering
tailor. She told herself that she was not responsive to men. . .
not even to Percy Bresnahan. She told herself that a woman
of thirty who heeded a boy of twenty-five was ridiculous.
And on Friday, when she had convinced herself that
the errand was necessary, she went to Nat Hicks's shop,
bearing the not very romantic burden of a pair of her husband's
trousers. Hicks was in the back room. She faced the Greek
god who, in a somewhat ungodlike way, was stitching a coat
on a scaley sewing-machine, in a room of smutted plaster walls.
She saw that his hands were not in keeping with a Hellenic
face. They were thick, roughened with needle and hot iron
and plow-handle. Even in the shop he persisted in his finery.
He wore a silk shirt, a topaz scarf, thin tan shoes.
This she absorbed while she was saying curtly, "Can I
get these pressed, please?"
Not rising from the sewing-machine he stuck out his hand,
mumbled, "When do you want them?"
"Oh, Monday."
The adventure was over. She was marching out.
"What name?" he called after her.
He had risen and, despite the farcicality of Dr. Will
Kennicott's bulgy trousers draped over his arm, he had the grace
of a cat.
"Kennicott."
"Kennicott. Oh! Oh say, you're Mrs. Dr. Kennicott then,
aren't you?"
"Yes." She stood at the door. Now that she had carried
out her preposterous impulse to see what he was like, she was
cold, she was as ready to detect familiarities as the virtuous
Miss Ella Stowbody.
"I've heard about you. Myrtle Cass was saying you got
up a dramatic club and gave a dandy play. I've always wished
I had a chance to belong to a Little Theater, and give some
European plays, or whimsical like Barrie, or a pageant."
He pronounced it "pagent"; he rhymed "pag" with "rag."
Carol nodded in the manner of a lady being kind to a tradesman,
and one of her selves sneered, "Our Erik is indeed a lost
John Keats."
He was appealing, "Do you suppose it would be possible
to get up another dramatic club this coming fall?"
"Well, it might be worth thinking of." She came out of
her several conflicting poses, and said sincerely, "There's a new
teacher, Miss Mullins, who might have some talent. That
would make three of us for a nucleus. If we could scrape up
half a dozen we might give a real play with a small cast. Have
you had any experience?"
"Just a bum club that some of us got up in Minneapolis
when I was working there. We had one good man, an interior
decorator--maybe he was kind of sis and effeminate, but he
really was an artist, and we gave one dandy play. But I----
Of course I've always had to work hard, and study by myself,
and I'm probably sloppy, and I'd love it if I had training in
rehearsing--I mean, the crankier the director was, the better
I'd like it. If you didn't want to use me as an actor, I'd love
to design the costumes. I'm crazy about fabrics--textures
and colors and designs."
She knew that he was trying to keep her from going, trying
to indicate that he was something more than a person to whom
one brought trousers for pressing. He besought:
"Some day I hope I can get away from this fool repairing,
when I have the money saved up. I want to go East and work
for some big dressmaker, and study art drawing, and become
a high-class designer. Or do you think that's a kind of fiddlin'
ambition for a fellow? I was brought up on a farm. And then
monkeyin' round with silks! I don't know. What do you
think? Myrtle Cass says you're awfully educated."
"I am. Awfully. Tell me: Have the boys made fun of
your ambition?"
She was seventy years old, and sexless, and more advisory
than Vida Sherwin.
"Well, they have, at that. They've jollied me a good deal,
here and Minneapolis both. They say dressmaking is ladies'
work. (But I was willing to get drafted for the war! I tried
to get in. But they rejected me. But I did try! ) I thought
some of working up in a gents' furnishings store, and I had
a chance to travel on the road for a clothing house, but somehow--
I hate this tailoring, but I can't seem to get enthusiastic
about salesmanship. I keep thinking about a room in gray
oatmeal paper with prints in very narrow gold frames--or
would it be better in white enamel paneling?--but anyway, it
looks out on Fifth Avenue, and I'm designing a sumptuous----"
He made it "sump-too-ous"--"robe of linden green chiffon
over cloth of gold! You know--tileul. It's elegant. . . .
What do you think?"
"Why not? What do you care for the opinion of city
rowdies, or a lot of farm boys? But you mustn't, you really
mustn't, let casual strangers like me have a chance to judge
you."
"Well---- You aren't a stranger, one way. Myrtle Cass
--Miss Cass, should say--she's spoken about you so often. I
wanted to call on you--and the doctor--but I didn't quite
have the nerve. One evening I walked past your house, but
you and your husband were talking on the porch, and you
looked so chummy and happy I didn't dare butt in."
Maternally, "I think it's extremely nice of you to want
to be trained in--in enunciation by a stage-director. Perhaps
I could help you. I'm a thoroughly sound and uninspired
schoolma'am by instinct; quite hopelessly mature."
"Oh, you aren't EITHER!"
She was not very successful at accepting his fervor with the
air of amused woman of the world, but she sounded reasonably
impersonal: "Thank you. Shall we see if we really can get
up a new dramatic club? I'll tell you: Come to the house this
evening, about eight. I'll ask Miss Mullins to come over, and
we'll talk about it."
VI
"He has absolutely no sense of humor. Less than Will. But
hasn't he----- What is a `sense of humor'? Isn't the thing
he lacks the back-slapping jocosity that passes for humor here?
Anyway---- Poor lamb, coaxing me to stay and play with
him! Poor lonely lamb! If he could be free from Nat Hickses,
from people who say `dandy' and `bum,' would he develop?
"I wonder if Whitman didn't use Brooklyn back-street slang,
as a boy?
"No. Not Whitman. He's Keats--sensitive to silken
things. `Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes as are the
tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings.' Keats, here! A bewildered
spirit fallen on Main Street. And Main Street laughs till it
aches, giggles till the spirit doubts his own self and tries to give
up the use of wings for the correct uses of a `gents' furnishings
store.' Gopher Prairie with its celebrated eleven miles of
cement walk. . . . I wonder how much of the cement
is made out of the tombstones of John Keatses?"
VII
Kennicott was cordial to Fern Mullins, teased her, told her
he was a "great hand for running off with pretty school-
teachers," and promised that if the school-board should object
to her dancing, he would "bat 'em one over the head and tell
'em how lucky they were to get a girl with some go to her, for
once."
But to Erik Valborg he was not cordial. He shook hands
loosely, and said, "H' are yuh."
Nat Hicks was socially acceptable; he had been here for
years, and owned his shop; but this person was merely Nat's
workman, and the town's principle of perfect democracy was
not meant to be applied indiscriminately.
The conference on a dramatic club theoretically included
Kennicott, but he sat back, patting yawns, conscious of Fern's
ankles, smiling amiably on the children at their sport.
Fern wanted to tell her grievances; Carol was sulky every
time she thought of "The Girl from Kankakee"; it was Erik
who made suggestions. He had read with astounding breadth,
and astounding lack of judgment. His voice was sensitive to
liquids, but he overused the word "glorious." He mispronounced
a tenth of the words he had from books, but he knew
it. He was insistent, but he was shy.
When he demanded, "I'd like to stage `Suppressed Desires,'
by Cook and Miss Glaspell," Carol ceased to be patronizing.
He was not the yearner: he was the artist, sure of his vision.
"I'd make it simple. Use a big window at the back, with a
cyclorama of a blue that would simply hit you in the eye,
and just one tree-branch, to suggest a park below. Put the
breakfast table on a dais. Let the colors be kind of arty and
tea-roomy--orange chairs, and orange and blue table, and blue
Japanese breakfast set, and some place, one big flat smear of
black--bang! Oh. Another play I wish we could do is Tennyson
Jesse's `The Black Mask.' I've never seen it but----
Glorious ending, where this woman looks at the man with his
face all blown away, and she just gives one horrible scream."
"Good God, is that your idea of a glorious ending?" bayed
Kennicott.
"That sounds fierce! I do love artistic things, but not the
horrible ones," moaned Fern Mullins.
Erik was bewildered; glanced at Carol. She nodded loyally.
At the end of the conference they had decided nothing.
________
CHAPTER XXVIII [Novel: Main Street - Author: Sinclair Lewis] _