Sinclair Lewis - The Collected Works of Sinclair Lewis

“Suppose you were right. Even so, don't you think you waste a lot of thundering on one poor scared little town? Kind of mean!”

“I tell you it's dull. DULL!”

“The folks don't find it dull. These couples like the Haydocks have a high old time; dances and cards —— ”

“They don't. They're bored. Almost every one here is. Vacuousness and bad manners and spiteful gossip — that's what I hate.”

“Those things — course they're here. So are they in Boston! And every place else! Why, the faults you find in this town are simply human nature, and never will be changed.”

“Perhaps. But in a Boston all the good Carols (I'll admit I have no faults) can find one another and play. But here — I'm alone, in a stale pool — except as it's stirred by the great Mr. Bresnahan!”

“My Lord, to hear you tell it, a fellow 'd think that all the denizens, as you impolitely call 'em, are so confoundedly unhappy that it's a wonder they don't all up and commit suicide. But they seem to struggle along somehow!”

“They don't know what they miss. And anybody can endure anything. Look at men in mines and in prisons.”

He drew up on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. He glanced across the reeds reflected on the water, the quiver of wavelets like crumpled tinfoil, the distant shores patched with dark woods, silvery oats and deep yellow wheat. He patted her hand. “Sis —— Carol, you're a darling girl, but you're difficult. Know what I think?”

“Yes.”

“Humph. Maybe you do, but —— My humble (not too humble!) opinion is that you like to be different. You like to think you're peculiar. Why, if you knew how many tens of thousands of women, especially in New York, say just what you do, you'd lose all the fun of thinking you're a lone genius and you'd be on the band-wagon whooping it up for Gopher Prairie and a good decent family life. There's always about a million young women just out of college who want to teach their grandmothers how to suck eggs.”

“How proud you are of that homely rustic metaphor! You use it at 'banquets' and directors' meetings, and boast of your climb from a humble homestead.”

“Huh! You may have my number. I'm not telling. But look here: You're so prejudiced against Gopher Prairie that you overshoot the mark; you antagonize those who might be inclined to agree with you in some particulars but —— Great guns, the town can't be all wrong!”

“No, it isn't. But it could be. Let me tell you a fable. Imagine a cavewoman complaining to her mate. She doesn't like one single thing; she hates the damp cave, the rats running over her bare legs, the stiff skin garments, the eating of half-raw meat, her husband's bushy face, the constant battles, and the worship of the spirits who will hoodoo her unless she gives the priests her best claw necklace. Her man protests, 'But it can't all be wrong!' and he thinks he has reduced her to absurdity. Now you assume that a world which produces a Percy Bresnahan and a Velvet Motor Company must be civilized. It is? Aren't we only about half-way along in barbarism? I suggest Mrs. Bogart as a test. And we'll continue in barbarism just as long as people as nearly intelligent as you continue to defend things as they are because they are.”

“You're a fair spieler, child. But, by golly, I'd like to see you try to design a new manifold, or run a factory and keep a lot of your fellow reds from Czech-slovenski-magyar-godknowswheria on the job! You'd drop your theories so darn quick! I'm not any defender of things as they are. Sure. They're rotten. Only I'm sensible.”

He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends. She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics.

He was so much the man, the worker, the friend, that she liked him when she most tried to stand out against him; he was so much the successful executive that she did not want him to despise her. His manner of sneering at what he called “parlor socialists” (though the phrase was not overwhelmingly new) had a power which made her wish to placate his company of well-fed, speed-loving administrators. When he demanded, “Would you like to associate with nothing but a lot of turkey-necked, horn-spectacled nuts that have adenoids and need a hair-cut, and that spend all their time kicking about 'conditions' and never do a lick of work?” she said, “No, but just the same —— ” When he asserted, “Even if your cavewoman was right in knocking the whole works, I bet some red-blooded Regular Fellow, some real He-man, found her a nice dry cave, and not any whining criticizing radical,” she wriggled her head feebly, between a nod and a shake.

His large hands, sensual lips, easy voice supported his self-confidence. He made her feel young and soft — as Kennicott had once made her feel. She had nothing to say when he bent his powerful head and experimented, “My dear, I'm sorry I'm going away from this town. You'd be a darling child to play with. You ARE pretty! Some day in Boston I'll show you how we buy a lunch. Well, hang it, got to be starting back.”

The only answer to his gospel of beef which she could find, when she was home, was a wail of “But just the same —— ”

She did not see him again before he departed for Washington.

His eyes remained. His glances at her lips and hair and shoulders had revealed to her that she was not a wife-and-mother alone, but a girl; that there still were men in the world, as there had been in college days.

That admiration led her to study Kennicott, to tear at the shroud of intimacy, to perceive the strangeness of the most familiar.

Table of Contents

I

All that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott. She recalled a hundred grotesqueries: her comic dismay at his having chewed tobacco, the evening when she had tried to read poetry to him; matters which had seemed to vanish with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that he had been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She made much of her consoling affection for him in little things. She liked the homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his strength and handiness as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; his boyishness when he ran to her to be comforted because he had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun. But at the highest he was to her another Hugh, without the glamor of Hugh's unknown future.

There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning.

Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other doctors the Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage but remained in town, dusty and irritable. In the afternoon, when she went to Oleson & McGuire's (formerly Dahl & Oleson's), Carol was vexed by the assumption of the youthful clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be neighborly and rude. He was no more brusquely familiar than a dozen other clerks of the town, but her nerves were heat-scorched.

When she asked for codfish, for supper, he grunted, “What d'you want that darned old dry stuff for?”

“I like it!”

“Punk! Guess the doc can afford something better than that. Try some of the new wienies we got in. Swell. The Haydocks use 'em.”

She exploded. “My dear young man, it is not your duty to instruct me in housekeeping, and it doesn't particularly concern me what the Haydocks condescend to approve!”

He was hurt. He hastily wrapped up the leprous fragment of fish; he gaped as she trailed out. She lamented, “I shouldn't have spoken so. He didn't mean anything. He doesn't know when he is being rude.”

Her repentance was not proof against Uncle Whittier when she stopped in at his grocery for salt and a package of safety matches. Uncle Whittier, in a shirt collarless and soaked with sweat in a brown streak down his back, was whining at a clerk, “Come on now, get a hustle on and lug that pound cake up to Mis' Cass's. Some folks in this town think a storekeeper ain't got nothing to do but chase out 'phone-orders. . . . Hello, Carrie. That dress you got on looks kind of low in the neck to me. May be decent and modest — I suppose I'm old-fashioned — but I never thought much of showing the whole town a woman's bust! Hee, hee, hee! . . . Afternoon, Mrs. Hicks. Sage? Just out of it. Lemme sell you some other spices. Heh?” Uncle Whittier was nasally indignant “CERTAINLY! Got PLENTY other spices jus' good as sage for any purp'se whatever! What's the matter with — well, with allspice?” When Mrs. Hicks had gone, he raged, “Some folks don't know what they want!”