Main Street

S >> Sinclair Lewis >> Main Street


As she edged toward the stranger and murmured nothing in particular,
Carol remembered that Gopher Prairie was a Minnesota wheat-prairie town
of something over three thousand people.

"Pleased to meet you," stated Dr. Kennicott. His hand was strong; the
palm soft, but the back weathered, showing golden hairs against firm red
skin.

He looked at her as though she was an agreeable discovery. She tugged
her hand free and fluttered, "I must go out to the kitchen and help Mrs.
Marbury." She did not speak to him again till, after she had heated
the rolls and passed the paper napkins, Mr. Marbury captured her with
a loud, "Oh, quit fussing now. Come over here and sit down and tell
us how's tricks." He herded her to a sofa with Dr. Kennicott, who was
rather vague about the eyes, rather drooping of bulky shoulder, as
though he was wondering what he was expected to do next. As their host
left them, Kennicott awoke:

"Marbury tells me you're a high mogul in the public library. I was
surprised. Didn't hardly think you were old enough. I thought you were a
girl, still in college maybe."

"Oh, I'm dreadfully old. I expect to take to a lip-stick, and to find a
gray hair any morning now."

"Huh! You must be frightfully old--prob'ly too old to be my
granddaughter, I guess!"

Thus in the Vale of Arcady nymph and satyr beguiled the hours; precisely
thus, and not in honeyed pentameters, discoursed Elaine and the worn Sir
Launcelot in the pleached alley.

"How do you like your work?" asked the doctor.

"It's pleasant, but sometimes I feel shut off from things--the steel
stacks, and the everlasting cards smeared all over with red rubber
stamps."

"Don't you get sick of the city?"

"St. Paul? Why, don't you like it? I don't know of any lovelier view
than when you stand on Summit Avenue and look across Lower Town to the
Mississippi cliffs and the upland farms beyond."

"I know but----Of course I've spent nine years around the Twin
Cities--took my B.A. and M.D. over at the U., and had my internship in a
hospital in Minneapolis, but still, oh well, you don't get to know folks
here, way you do up home. I feel I've got something to say about running
Gopher Prairie, but you take it in a big city of two-three hundred
thousand, and I'm just one flea on the dog's back. And then I like
country driving, and the hunting in the fall. Do you know Gopher Prairie
at all?"

"No, but I hear it's a very nice town."

"Nice? Say honestly----Of course I may be prejudiced, but I've seen an
awful lot of towns--one time I went to Atlantic City for the American
Medical Association meeting, and I spent practically a week in New York!
But I never saw a town that had such up-and-coming people as Gopher
Prairie. Bresnahan--you know--the famous auto manufacturer--he comes
from Gopher Prairie. Born and brought up there! And it's a darn pretty
town. Lots of fine maples and box-elders, and there's two of the
dandiest lakes you ever saw, right near town! And we've got seven miles
of cement walks already, and building more every day! Course a lot of
these towns still put up with plank walks, but not for us, you bet!"

"Really?"

(Why was she thinking of Stewart Snyder?)

"Gopher Prairie is going to have a great future. Some of the best dairy
and wheat land in the state right near there--some of it selling right
now at one-fifty an acre, and I bet it will go up to two and a quarter
in ten years!"

"Is----Do you like your profession?"

"Nothing like it. Keeps you out, and yet you have a chance to loaf in
the office for a change."

"I don't mean that way. I mean--it's such an opportunity for sympathy."

Dr. Kennicott launched into a heavy, "Oh, these Dutch farmers don't want
sympathy. All they need is a bath and a good dose of salts."

Carol must have flinched, for instantly he was urging, "What I mean
is--I don't want you to think I'm one of these old salts-and-quinine
peddlers, but I mean: so many of my patients are husky farmers that I
suppose I get kind of case-hardened."

"It seems to me that a doctor could transform a whole community, if he
wanted to--if he saw it. He's usually the only man in the neighborhood
who has any scientific training, isn't he?"

"Yes, that's so, but I guess most of us get rusty. We land in a rut of
obstetrics and typhoid and busted legs. What we need is women like you
to jump on us. It'd be you that would transform the town."

"No, I couldn't. Too flighty. I did used to think about doing just that,
curiously enough, but I seem to have drifted away from the idea. Oh, I'm
a fine one to be lecturing you!"

"No! You're just the one. You have ideas without having lost feminine
charm. Say! Don't you think there's a lot of these women that go out for
all these movements and so on that sacrifice----"

After his remarks upon suffrage he abruptly questioned her about
herself. His kindliness and the firmness of his personality enveloped
her and she accepted him as one who had a right to know what she
thought and wore and ate and read. He was positive. He had grown from a
sketched-in stranger to a friend, whose gossip was important news. She
noticed the healthy solidity of his chest. His nose, which had seemed
irregular and large, was suddenly virile.

She was jarred out of this serious sweetness when Marbury bounced over
to them and with horrible publicity yammered, "Say, what do you two
think you're doing? Telling fortunes or making love? Let me warn you
that the doc is a frisky bacheldore, Carol. Come on now, folks, shake a
leg. Let's have some stunts or a dance or something."

She did not have another word with Dr. Kennicott until their parting:

"Been a great pleasure to meet you, Miss Milford. May I see you some
time when I come down again? I'm here quite often--taking patients to
hospitals for majors, and so on."

"Why----"

"What's your address?"

"You can ask Mr. Marbury next time you come down--if you really want to
know!"

"Want to know? Say, you wait!"



II


Of the love-making of Carol and Will Kennicott there is nothing to be
told which may not be heard on every summer evening, on every shadowy
block.

They were biology and mystery; their speech was slang phrases and flares
of poetry; their silences were contentment, or shaky crises when his arm
took her shoulder. All the beauty of youth, first discovered when it
is passing--and all the commonplaceness of a well-to-do unmarried man
encountering a pretty girl at the time when she is slightly weary of her
employment and sees no glory ahead nor any man she is glad to serve.

They liked each other honestly--they were both honest. She was
disappointed by his devotion to making money, but she was sure that
he did not lie to patients, and that he did keep up with the medical
magazines. What aroused her to something more than liking was his
boyishness when they went tramping.

They walked from St. Paul down the river to Mendota, Kennicott more
elastic-seeming in a cap and a soft crepe shirt, Carol youthful in a
tam-o'-shanter of mole velvet, a blue serge suit with an absurdly and
agreeably broad turn-down linen collar, and frivolous ankles above
athletic shoes. The High Bridge crosses the Mississippi, mounting from
low banks to a palisade of cliffs. Far down beneath it on the St. Paul
side, upon mud flats, is a wild settlement of chicken-infested gardens
and shanties patched together from discarded sign-boards, sheets of
corrugated iron, and planks fished out of the river. Carol leaned
over the rail of the bridge to look down at this Yang-tse village;
in delicious imaginary fear she shrieked that she was dizzy with the
height; and it was an extremely human satisfaction to have a strong male
snatch her back to safety, instead of having a logical woman teacher or
librarian sniff, "Well, if you're scared, why don't you get away from
the rail, then?"

From the cliffs across the river Carol and Kennicott looked back at St.
Paul on its hills; an imperial sweep from the dome of the cathedral to
the dome of the state capitol.

The river road led past rocky field slopes, deep glens, woods flamboyant
now with September, to Mendota, white walls and a spire among trees
beneath a hill, old-world in its placid ease. And for this fresh land,
the place is ancient. Here is the bold stone house which General Sibley,
the king of fur-traders, built in 1835, with plaster of river mud, and
ropes of twisted grass for laths. It has an air of centuries. In its
solid rooms Carol and Kennicott found prints from other days which the
house had seen--tail-coats of robin's-egg blue, clumsy Red River carts
laden with luxurious furs, whiskered Union soldiers in slant forage caps
and rattling sabers.

It suggested to them a common American past, and it was memorable
because they had discovered it together. They talked more trustingly,
more personally, as they trudged on. They crossed the Minnesota River in
a rowboat ferry. They climbed the hill to the round stone tower of Fort
Snelling. They saw the junction of the Mississippi and the Minnesota,
and recalled the men who had come here eighty years ago--Maine
lumbermen, York traders, soldiers from the Maryland hills.

"It's a good country, and I'm proud of it. Let's make it all that those
old boys dreamed about," the unsentimental Kennicott was moved to vow.

"Let's!"

"Come on. Come to Gopher Prairie. Show us. Make the town--well--make
it artistic. It's mighty pretty, but I'll admit we aren't any too darn
artistic. Probably the lumber-yard isn't as scrumptious as all these
Greek temples. But go to it! Make us change!"

"I would like to. Some day!"

"Now! You'd love Gopher Prairie. We've been doing a lot with lawns
and gardening the past few years, and it's so homey--the big trees
and----And the best people on earth. And keen. I bet Luke Dawson----"

Carol but half listened to the names. She could not fancy their ever
becoming important to her.

"I bet Luke Dawson has got more money than most of the swells on Summit
Avenue; and Miss Sherwin in the high school is a regular wonder--reads
Latin like I do English; and Sam Clark, the hardware man, he's a
corker--not a better man in the state to go hunting with; and if
you want culture, besides Vida Sherwin there's Reverend Warren, the
Congregational preacher, and Professor Mott, the superintendent of
schools, and Guy Pollock, the lawyer--they say he writes regular poetry
and--and Raymie Wutherspoon, he's not such an awful boob when you get to
KNOW him, and he sings swell. And----And there's plenty of others. Lym
Cass. Only of course none of them have your finesse, you might call it.
But they don't make 'em any more appreciative and so on. Come on! We're
ready for you to boss us!"

They sat on the bank below the parapet of the old fort, hidden from
observation. He circled her shoulder with his arm. Relaxed after the
walk, a chill nipping her throat, conscious of his warmth and power, she
leaned gratefully against him.

"You know I'm in love with you, Carol!"

She did not answer, but she touched the back of his hand with an
exploring finger.

"You say I'm so darn materialistic. How can I help it, unless I have you
to stir me up?"

She did not answer. She could not think.

"You say a doctor could cure a town the way he does a person. Well, you
cure the town of whatever ails it, if anything does, and I'll be your
surgical kit."

She did not follow his words, only the burring resoluteness of them.

She was shocked, thrilled, as he kissed her cheek and cried, "There's
no use saying things and saying things and saying things. Don't my arms
talk to you--now?"

"Oh, please, please!" She wondered if she ought to be angry, but it was
a drifting thought, and she discovered that she was crying.

Then they were sitting six inches apart, pretending that they had never
been nearer, while she tried to be impersonal:

"I would like to--would like to see Gopher Prairie."

"Trust me! Here she is! Brought some snapshots down to show you."

Her cheek near his sleeve, she studied a dozen village pictures. They
were streaky; she saw only trees, shrubbery, a porch indistinct in leafy
shadows. But she exclaimed over the lakes: dark water reflecting wooded
bluffs, a flight of ducks, a fisherman in shirt sleeves and a wide straw
hat, holding up a string of croppies. One winter picture of the edge of
Plover Lake had the air of an etching: lustrous slide of ice, snow in
the crevices of a boggy bank, the mound of a muskrat house, reeds in
thin black lines, arches of frosty grasses. It was an impression of cool
clear vigor.

"How'd it be to skate there for a couple of hours, or go zinging along
on a fast ice-boat, and skip back home for coffee and some hot wienies?"
he demanded.

"It might be--fun."

"But here's the picture. Here's where you come in."

A photograph of a forest clearing: pathetic new furrows straggling among
stumps, a clumsy log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with hay.
In front of it a sagging woman with tight-drawn hair, and a baby
bedraggled, smeary, glorious-eyed.

"Those are the kind of folks I practise among, good share of the time.
Nels Erdstrom, fine clean young Svenska. He'll have a corking farm in
ten years, but now----I operated his wife on a kitchen table, with my
driver giving the anesthetic. Look at that scared baby! Needs some woman
with hands like yours. Waiting for you! Just look at that baby's eyes,
look how he's begging----"

"Don't! They hurt me. Oh, it would be sweet to help him--so sweet."

As his arms moved toward her she answered all her doubts with "Sweet, so
sweet."



CHAPTER III

UNDER the rolling clouds of the prairie a moving mass of steel. An
irritable clank and rattle beneath a prolonged roar. The sharp scent of
oranges cutting the soggy smell of unbathed people and ancient baggage.

Towns as planless as a scattering of pasteboard boxes on an attic floor.
The stretch of faded gold stubble broken only by clumps of willows
encircling white houses and red barns.

No. 7, the way train, grumbling through Minnesota, imperceptibly
climbing the giant tableland that slopes in a thousand-mile rise from
hot Mississippi bottoms to the Rockies.

It is September, hot, very dusty.

There is no smug Pullman attached to the train, and the day coaches of
the East are replaced by free chair cars, with each seat cut into two
adjustable plush chairs, the head-rests covered with doubtful linen
towels. Halfway down the car is a semi-partition of carved oak columns,
but the aisle is of bare, splintery, grease-blackened wood. There is no
porter, no pillows, no provision for beds, but all today and all tonight
they will ride in this long steel box-farmers with perpetually tired
wives and children who seem all to be of the same age; workmen going to
new jobs; traveling salesmen with derbies and freshly shined shoes.

They are parched and cramped, the lines of their hands filled with
grime; they go to sleep curled in distorted attitudes, heads against the
window-panes or propped on rolled coats on seat-arms, and legs thrust
into the aisle. They do not read; apparently they do not think. They
wait. An early-wrinkled, young-old mother, moving as though her joints
were dry, opens a suit-case in which are seen creased blouses, a pair
of slippers worn through at the toes, a bottle of patent medicine, a tin
cup, a paper-covered book about dreams which the news-butcher has coaxed
her into buying. She brings out a graham cracker which she feeds to a
baby lying flat on a seat and wailing hopelessly. Most of the crumbs
drop on the red plush of the seat, and the woman sighs and tries to
brush them away, but they leap up impishly and fall back on the plush.

A soiled man and woman munch sandwiches and throw the crusts on the
floor. A large brick-colored Norwegian takes off his shoes, grunts in
relief, and props his feet in their thick gray socks against the seat in
front of him.

An old woman whose toothless mouth shuts like a mud-turtle's, and whose
hair is not so much white as yellow like moldy linen, with bands of pink
skull apparent between the tresses, anxiously lifts her bag, opens it,
peers in, closes it, puts it under the seat, and hastily picks it up and
opens it and hides it all over again. The bag is full of treasures and
of memories: a leather buckle, an ancient band-concert program,
scraps of ribbon, lace, satin. In the aisle beside her is an extremely
indignant parrakeet in a cage.

Two facing seats, overflowing with a Slovene iron-miner's family,
are littered with shoes, dolls, whisky bottles, bundles wrapped in
newspapers, a sewing bag. The oldest boy takes a mouth-organ out of his
coat pocket, wipes the tobacco crumbs off, and plays "Marching through
Georgia" till every head in the car begins to ache.

The news-butcher comes through selling chocolate bars and lemon drops.
A girl-child ceaselessly trots down to the water-cooler and back to her
seat. The stiff paper envelope which she uses for cup drips in the aisle
as she goes, and on each trip she stumbles over the feet of a carpenter,
who grunts, "Ouch! Look out!"

The dust-caked doors are open, and from the smoking-car drifts back a
visible blue line of stinging tobacco smoke, and with it a crackle of
laughter over the story which the young man in the bright blue suit and
lavender tie and light yellow shoes has just told to the squat man in
garage overalls.

The smell grows constantly thicker, more stale.



II


To each of the passengers his seat was his temporary home, and most of
the passengers were slatternly housekeepers. But one seat looked clean
and deceptively cool. In it were an obviously prosperous man and a
black-haired, fine-skinned girl whose pumps rested on an immaculate
horsehide bag.

They were Dr. Will Kennicott and his bride, Carol.

They had been married at the end of a year of conversational courtship,
and they were on their way to Gopher Prairie after a wedding journey in
the Colorado mountains.

The hordes of the way-train were not altogether new to Carol. She had
seen them on trips from St. Paul to Chicago. But now that they had
become her own people, to bathe and encourage and adorn, she had an
acute and uncomfortable interest in them. They distressed her. They
were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American
peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination
and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man
working over his order-blanks. But the older people, Yankees as well
as Norwegians, Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission to
poverty. They were peasants, she groaned.

"Isn't there any way of waking them up? What would happen if they
understood scientific agriculture?" she begged of Kennicott, her hand
groping for his.

It had been a transforming honeymoon. She had been frightened to
discover how tumultuous a feeling could be roused in her. Will had been
lordly--stalwart, jolly, impressively competent in making camp, tender
and understanding through the hours when they had lain side by side in a
tent pitched among pines high up on a lonely mountain spur.

His hand swallowed hers as he started from thoughts of the practise to
which he was returning. "These people? Wake 'em up? What for? They're
happy."

"But they're so provincial. No, that isn't what I mean. They're--oh, so
sunk in the mud."

"Look here, Carrie. You want to get over your city idea that because a
man's pants aren't pressed, he's a fool. These farmers are mighty keen
and up-and-coming."

"I know! That's what hurts. Life seems so hard for them--these lonely
farms and this gritty train."

"Oh, they don't mind it. Besides, things are changing. The auto, the
telephone, rural free delivery; they're bringing the farmers in closer
touch with the town. Takes time, you know, to change a wilderness like
this was fifty years ago. But already, why, they can hop into the Ford
or the Overland and get in to the movies on Saturday evening quicker
than you could get down to 'em by trolley in St. Paul."

"But if it's these towns we've been passing that the farmers run to for
relief from their bleakness----Can't you understand? Just LOOK at them!"

Kennicott was amazed. Ever since childhood he had seen these towns from
trains on this same line. He grumbled, "Why, what's the matter with 'em?
Good hustling burgs. It would astonish you to know how much wheat and
rye and corn and potatoes they ship in a year."

"But they're so ugly."

"I'll admit they aren't comfy like Gopher Prairie. But give 'em time."

"What's the use of giving them time unless some one has desire and
training enough to plan them? Hundreds of factories trying to make
attractive motor cars, but these towns--left to chance. No! That can't
be true. It must have taken genius to make them so scrawny!"

"Oh, they're not so bad," was all he answered. He pretended that his
hand was the cat and hers the mouse. For the first time she tolerated
him rather than encouraged him. She was staring out at Schoenstrom, a
hamlet of perhaps a hundred and fifty inhabitants, at which the train
was stopping.

A bearded German and his pucker-mouthed wife tugged their enormous
imitation-leather satchel from under a seat and waddled out. The station
agent hoisted a dead calf aboard the baggage-car. There were no other
visible activities in Schoenstrom. In the quiet of the halt, Carol could
hear a horse kicking his stall, a carpenter shingling a roof.

The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block, facing
the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops covered with galvanized
iron, or with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow. The buildings
were as ill-assorted, as temporary-looking, as a mining-camp street in
the motion-pictures. The railroad station was a one-room frame box, a
mirey cattle-pen on one side and a crimson wheat-elevator on the other.
The elevator, with its cupola on the ridge of a shingled roof, resembled
a broad-shouldered man with a small, vicious, pointed head. The only
habitable structures to be seen were the florid red-brick Catholic
church and rectory at the end of Main Street.

Carol picked at Kennicott's sleeve. "You wouldn't call this a not-so-bad
town, would you?"

"These Dutch burgs ARE kind of slow. Still, at that----See that fellow
coming out of the general store there, getting into the big car? I met
him once. He owns about half the town, besides the store. Rauskukle, his
name is. He owns a lot of mortgages, and he gambles in farm-lands. Good
nut on him, that fellow. Why, they say he's worth three or four hundred
thousand dollars! Got a dandy great big yellow brick house with tiled
walks and a garden and everything, other end of town--can't see it from
here--I've gone past it when I've driven through here. Yes sir!"

"Then, if he has all that, there's no excuse whatever for this place!
If his three hundred thousand went back into the town, where it belongs,
they could burn up these shacks, and build a dream-village, a jewel! Why
do the farmers and the town-people let the Baron keep it?"

"I must say I don't quite get you sometimes, Carrie. Let him? They can't
help themselves! He's a dumm old Dutchman, and probably the priest can
twist him around his finger, but when it comes to picking good farming
land, he's a regular wiz!"

"I see. He's their symbol of beauty. The town erects him, instead of
erecting buildings."

"Honestly, don't know what you're driving at. You're kind of played out,
after this long trip. You'll feel better when you get home and have a
good bath, and put on the blue negligee. That's some vampire costume,
you witch!"

He squeezed her arm, looked at her knowingly.

They moved on from the desert stillness of the Schoenstrom station. The
train creaked, banged, swayed. The air was nauseatingly thick. Kennicott
turned her face from the window, rested her head on his shoulder. She
was coaxed from her unhappy mood. But she came out of it unwillingly,
and when Kennicott was satisfied that he had corrected all her worries
and had opened a magazine of saffron detective stories, she sat upright.

Here--she meditated--is the newest empire of the world; the Northern
Middlewest; a land of dairy herds and exquisite lakes, of new
automobiles and tar-paper shanties and silos like red towers, of clumsy
speech and a hope that is boundless. An empire which feeds a quarter of
the world--yet its work is merely begun. They are pioneers, these sweaty
wayfarers, for all their telephones and bank-accounts and automatic
pianos and co-operative leagues. And for all its fat richness, theirs is
a pioneer land. What is its future? she wondered. A future of cities
and factory smut where now are loping empty fields? Homes universal and
secure? Or placid chateaux ringed with sullen huts? Youth free to find
knowledge and laughter? Willingness to sift the sanctified lies? Or
creamy-skinned fat women, smeared with grease and chalk, gorgeous in the
skins of beasts and the bloody feathers of slain birds, playing bridge
with puffy pink-nailed jeweled fingers, women who after much expenditure
of labor and bad temper still grotesquely resemble their own flatulent
lap-dogs? The ancient stale inequalities, or something different in
history, unlike the tedious maturity of other empires? What future and
what hope?