Main Street

S >> Sinclair Lewis >> Main Street


The story was threshed out in Dave Dyer's drug store, with Sam Clark,
Kennicott, and Carol present.

"That's the way to treat those fellows--only they ought to have lynched
him!" declared Sam, and Kennicott and Dave Dyer joined in a proud "You
bet!"

Carol walked out hastily, Kennicott observing her.

Through supper-time she knew that he was bubbling and would soon boil
over. When the baby was abed, and they sat composedly in canvas chairs
on the porch, he experimented; "I had a hunch you thought Sam was kind
of hard on that fellow they kicked out of Wakamin."

"Wasn't Sam rather needlessly heroic?"

"All these organizers, yes, and a whole lot of the German and
Squarehead farmers themselves, they're seditious as the devil--disloyal,
non-patriotic, pro-German pacifists, that's what they are!"

"Did this organizer say anything pro-German?"

"Not on your life! They didn't give him a chance!" His laugh was stagey.

"So the whole thing was illegal--and led by the sheriff! Precisely how
do you expect these aliens to obey your law if the officer of the law
teaches them to break it? Is it a new kind of logic?"

"Maybe it wasn't exactly regular, but what's the odds? They knew this
fellow would try to stir up trouble. Whenever it comes right down to a
question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it's
justifiable to set aside ordinary procedure."

"What editorial did he get that from?" she wondered, as she protested,
"See here, my beloved, why can't you Tories declare war honestly? You
don't oppose this organizer because you think he's seditious but
because you're afraid that the farmers he is organizing will deprive you
townsmen of the money you make out of mortgages and wheat and shops.
Of course, since we're at war with Germany, anything that any one of us
doesn't like is 'pro-German,' whether it's business competition or
bad music. If we were fighting England, you'd call the radicals
'pro-English.' When this war is over, I suppose you'll be calling them
'red anarchists.' What an eternal art it is--such a glittery delightful
art--finding hard names for our opponents! How we do sanctify our
efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for
ourselves! The churches have always done it, and the political
orators--and I suppose I do it when I call Mrs. Bogart a 'Puritan' and
Mr. Stowbody a 'capitalist.' But you business men are going to beat all
the rest of us at it, with your simple-hearted, energetic, pompous----"

She got so far only because Kennicott was slow in shaking off respect
for her. Now he bayed:

"That'll be about all from you! I've stood for your sneering at this
town, and saying how ugly and dull it is. I've stood for your refusing
to appreciate good fellows like Sam. I've even stood for your ridiculing
our Watch Gopher Prairie Grow campaign. But one thing I'm not going
to stand: I'm not going to stand my own wife being seditious. You can
camouflage all you want to, but you know darn well that these radicals,
as you call 'em, are opposed to the war, and let me tell you right here
and now, and you and all these long-haired men and short-haired women
can beef all you want to, but we're going to take these fellows, and if
they ain't patriotic, we're going to make them be patriotic. And--Lord
knows I never thought I'd have to say this to my own wife--but if you go
defending these fellows, then the same thing applies to you! Next thing,
I suppose you'll be yapping about free speech. Free speech! There's too
much free speech and free gas and free beer and free love and all the
rest of your damned mouthy freedom, and if I had my way I'd make you
folks live up to the established rules of decency even if I had to take
you----"

"Will!" She was not timorous now. "Am I pro-German if I fail to throb to
Honest Jim Blausser, too? Let's have my whole duty as a wife!"

He was grumbling, "The whole thing's right in line with the criticism
you've always been making. Might have known you'd oppose any decent
constructive work for the town or for----"

"You're right. All I've done has been in line. I don't belong to Gopher
Prairie. That isn't meant as a condemnation of Gopher Prairie, and it
may be a condemnation of me. All right! I don't care! I don't belong
here, and I'm going. I'm not asking permission any more. I'm simply
going."

He grunted. "Do you mind telling me, if it isn't too much trouble, how
long you're going for?"

"I don't know. Perhaps for a year. Perhaps for a lifetime."

"I see. Well, of course, I'll be tickled to death to sell out my
practise and go anywhere you say. Would you like to have me go with you
to Paris and study art, maybe, and wear velveteen pants and a woman's
bonnet, and live on spaghetti?"

"No, I think we can save you that trouble. You don't quite understand.
I am going--I really am--and alone! I've got to find out what my work
is----"

"Work? Work? Sure! That's the whole trouble with you! You haven't got
enough work to do. If you had five kids and no hired girl, and had to
help with the chores and separate the cream, like these farmers' wives,
then you wouldn't be so discontented."

"I know. That's what most men--and women--like you WOULD say. That's how
they would explain all I am and all I want. And I shouldn't argue with
them. These business men, from their crushing labors of sitting in an
office seven hours a day, would calmly recommend that I have a dozen
children. As it happens, I've done that sort of thing. There've been a
good many times when we hadn't a maid, and I did all the housework, and
cared for Hugh, and went to Red Cross, and did it all very efficiently.
I'm a good cook and a good sweeper, and you don't dare say I'm not!"

"N-no, you're----"

"But was I more happy when I was drudging? I was not. I was just
bedraggled and unhappy. It's work--but not my work. I could run
an office or a library, or nurse and teach children. But solitary
dish-washing isn't enough to satisfy me--or many other women. We're
going to chuck it. We're going to wash 'em by machinery, and come out
and play with you men in the offices and clubs and politics you've
cleverly kept for yourselves! Oh, we're hopeless, we dissatisfied women!
Then why do you want to have us about the place, to fret you? So it's
for your sake that I'm going!"

"Of course a little thing like Hugh makes no difference!"

"Yes, all the difference. That's why I'm going to take him with me."

"Suppose I refuse?"

"You won't!"

Forlornly, "Uh----Carrie, what the devil is it you want, anyway?"

"Oh, conversation! No, it's much more than that. I think it's a
greatness of life--a refusal to be content with even the healthiest
mud."

"Don't you know that nobody ever solved a problem by running away from
it?"

"Perhaps. Only I choose to make my own definition of 'running away' I
don't call----Do you realize how big a world there is beyond this Gopher
Prairie where you'd keep me all my life? It may be that some day I'll
come back, but not till I can bring something more than I have now. And
even if I am cowardly and run away--all right, call it cowardly, call me
anything you want to! I've been ruled too long by fear of being called
things. I'm going away to be quiet and think. I'm--I'm going! I have a
right to my own life."

"So have I to mine!"

"Well?"

"I have a right to my life--and you're it, you're my life! You've made
yourself so. I'm damned if I'll agree to all your freak notions, but I
will say I've got to depend on you. Never thought of that complication,
did you, in this 'off to Bohemia, and express yourself, and free love,
and live your own life' stuff!"

"You have a right to me if you can keep me. Can you?"

He moved uneasily.


II


For a month they discussed it. They hurt each other very much, and
sometimes they were close to weeping, and invariably he used banal
phrases about her duties and she used phrases quite as banal about
freedom, and through it all, her discovery that she really could get
away from Main Street was as sweet as the discovery of love. Kennicott
never consented definitely. At most he agreed to a public theory that
she was "going to take a short trip and see what the East was like in
wartime."

She set out for Washington in October--just before the war ended.

She had determined on Washington because it was less intimidating than
the obvious New York, because she hoped to find streets in which Hugh
could play, and because in the stress of war-work, with its demand for
thousands of temporary clerks, she could be initiated into the world of
offices.

Hugh was to go with her, despite the wails and rather extensive comments
of Aunt Bessie.

She wondered if she might not encounter Erik in the East but it was a
chance thought, soon forgotten.


III


The last thing she saw on the station platform was Kennicott, faithfully
waving his hand, his face so full of uncomprehending loneliness that he
could not smile but only twitch up his lips. She waved to him as long
as she could, and when he was lost she wanted to leap from the vestibule
and run back to him. She thought of a hundred tendernesses she had
neglected.

She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was not the highest
of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether
excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb.

She sighed, "I couldn't do this if it weren't for Will's kindness, his
giving me money." But a second after: "I wonder how many women would
always stay home if they had the money?"

Hugh complained, "Notice me, mummy!" He was beside her on the red plush
seat of the day-coach; a boy of three and a half. "I'm tired of playing
train. Let's play something else. Let's go see Auntie Bogart."

"Oh, NO! Do you really like Mrs. Bogart?"

"Yes. She gives me cookies and she tells me about the Dear Lord. You
never tell me about the Dear Lord. Why don't you tell me about the
Dear Lord? Auntie Bogart says I'm going to be a preacher. Can I be a
preacher? Can I preach about the Dear Lord?"

"Oh, please wait till my generation has stopped rebelling before yours
starts in!"

"What's a generation?"

"It's a ray in the illumination of the spirit."

"That's foolish." He was a serious and literal person, and rather
humorless. She kissed his frown, and marveled:

"I am running away from my husband, after liking a Swedish ne'er-do-well
and expressing immoral opinions, just as in a romantic story. And my own
son reproves me because I haven't given him religious instruction. But
the story doesn't go right. I'm neither groaning nor being dramatically
saved. I keep on running away, and I enjoy it. I'm mad with joy over it.
Gopher Prairie is lost back there in the dust and stubble, and I look
forward----"

She continued it to Hugh: "Darling, do you know what mother and you are
going to find beyond the blue horizon rim?"

"What?" flatly.

"We're going to find elephants with golden howdahs from which peep young
maharanees with necklaces of rubies, and a dawn sea colored like the
breast of a dove, and a white and green house filled with books and
silver tea-sets."

"And cookies?"

"Cookies? Oh, most decidedly cookies. We've had enough of bread and
porridge. We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on
no cookies at all."

"That's foolish."

"It is, O male Kennicott!"

"Huh!" said Kennicott II, and went to sleep on her shoulder.


IV

The theory of the Dauntless regarding Carol's absence:

Mrs. Will Kennicott and son Hugh left on No. 24 on Saturday last for
a stay of some months in Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Washington.
Mrs. Kennicott confided to _Ye Scribe_ that she will be connected with one
of the multifarious war activities now centering in the Nation's
Capital for a brief period before returning. Her countless friends who
appreciate her splendid labors with the local Red Cross realize how
valuable she will be to any war board with which she chooses to become
connected. Gopher Prairie thus adds another shining star to its service
flag and without wishing to knock any neighboring communities, we would
like to know any town of anywheres near our size in the state that has
such a sterling war record. Another reason why you'd better Watch Gopher
Prairie Grow.

* * *

Mr. and Mrs. David Dyer, Mrs. Dyer's sister, Mrs. Jennie Dayborn of
Jackrabbit, and Dr. Will Kennicott drove to Minniemashie on Tuesday for
a delightful picnic.



CHAPTER XXXVII

I

SHE found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. Though the
armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks after her coming to
Washington, the work of the bureau continued. She filed correspondence
all day; then she dictated answers to letters of inquiry. It was an
endurance of monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found
"real work."

Disillusions she did have. She discovered that in the afternoon, office
routine stretches to the grave. She discovered that an office is as full
of cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie She discovered that most
of the women in the government bureaus lived unhealthfully, dining
on snatches in their crammed apartments. But she also discovered that
business women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men and
may revel in a bliss which no housewife attains--a free Sunday. It did
not appear that the Great World needed her inspiration, but she felt
that her letters, her contact with the anxieties of men and women all
over the country, were a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main
Street and a kitchen but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid.

She perceived that she could do office work without losing any of the
putative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cooking and cleaning, when
divested of the fussing of an Aunt Bessie, take but a tenth of the time
which, in a Gopher Prairie, it is but decent to devote to them.

Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly Seventeen, not to
have to report to Kennicott at the end of the day all that she had done
or might do, was a relief which made up for the office weariness. She
felt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of a
human being.


II


Washington gave her all the graciousness in which she had had faith:
white columns seen across leafy parks, spacious avenues, twisty alleys.
Daily she passed a dark square house with a hint of magnolias and a
courtyard behind it, and a tall curtained second-story window through
which a woman was always peering. The woman was mystery, romance, a
story which told itself differently every day; now she was a murderess,
now the neglected wife of an ambassador. It was mystery which Carol had
most lacked in Gopher Prairie, where every house was open to view, where
every person was but too easy to meet, where there were no secret gates
opening upon moors over which one might walk by moss-deadened paths to
strange high adventures in an ancient garden.

As she flitted up Sixteenth Street after a Kreisler recital, given late
in the afternoon for the government clerks, as the lamps kindled in
spheres of soft fire, as the breeze flowed into the street, fresh
as prairie winds and kindlier, as she glanced up the elm alley of
Massachusetts Avenue, as she was rested by the integrity of the Scottish
Rite Temple, she loved the city as she loved no one save Hugh. She
encountered negro shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains and
pots of mignonette; marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue, with
butlers and limousines; and men who looked like fictional explorers and
aviators. Her days were swift, and she knew that in her folly of running
away she had found the courage to be wise.

She had a dispiriting first month of hunting lodgings in the crowded
city. She had to roost in a hall-room in a moldy mansion conducted by an
indignant decayed gentlewoman, and leave Hugh to the care of a doubtful
nurse. But later she made a home.


III


Her first acquaintances were the members of the Tincomb Methodist
Church, a vast red-brick tabernacle. Vida Sherwin had given her a letter
to an earnest woman with eye-glasses, plaid silk waist, and a belief in
Bible Classes, who introduced her to the Pastor and the Nicer Members
of Tincomb. Carol recognized in Washington as she had in California a
transplanted and guarded Main Street. Two-thirds of the church-members
had come from Gopher Prairies. The church was their society and
their standard; they went to Sunday service, Sunday School, Christian
Endeavor, missionary lectures, church suppers, precisely as they had at
home; they agreed that ambassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidel
scientists of the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; and
by cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ideals from all
contamination.

They welcomed Carol, asked about her husband, gave her advice regarding
colic in babies, passed her the gingerbread and scalloped potatoes at
church suppers, and in general made her very unhappy and lonely, so
that she wondered if she might not enlist in the militant suffrage
organization and be allowed to go to jail.

Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she would have
perceived in New York or London) a thick streak of Main Street. The
cautious dullness of a Gopher Prairie appeared in boarding-houses where
ladylike bureau-clerks gossiped to polite young army officers about
the movies; a thousand Sam Clarks and a few Widow Bogarts were to be
identified in the Sunday motor procession, in theater parties, and
at the dinners of State Societies, to which the emigres from Texas or
Michigan surged that they might confirm themselves in the faith that
their several Gopher Prairies were notoriously "a whole lot peppier and
chummier than this stuck-up East."

But she found a Washington which did not cleave to Main Street.

Guy Pollock wrote to a cousin, a temporary army captain, a confiding and
buoyant lad who took Carol to tea-dances, and laughed, as she had always
wanted some one to laugh, about nothing in particular. The captain
introduced her to the secretary of a congressman, a cynical young widow
with many acquaintances in the navy. Through her Carol met commanders
and majors, newspapermen, chemists and geographers and fiscal experts
from the bureaus, and a teacher who was a familiar of the militant
suffrage headquarters. The teacher took her to headquarters. Carol never
became a prominent suffragist. Indeed her only recognized position was
as an able addresser of envelopes. But she was casually adopted by
this family of friendly women who, when they were not being mobbed or
arrested, took dancing lessons or went picnicking up the Chesapeake
Canal or talked about the politics of the American Federation of Labor.

With the congressman's secretary and the teacher Carol leased a small
flat. Here she found home, her own place and her own people. She had,
though it absorbed most of her salary, an excellent nurse for Hugh. She
herself put him to bed and played with him on holidays. There were
walks with him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chiefly
Washington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting about the
flat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but always excitedly.
It was not at all the "artist's studio" of which, because of its
persistence in fiction, she had dreamed. Most of them were in offices
all day, and thought more in card-catalogues or statistics than in mass
and color. But they played, very simply, and they saw no reason why
anything which exists cannot also be acknowledged.

She was sometimes shocked quite as she had shocked Gopher Prairie by
these girls with their cigarettes and elfish knowledge. When they were
most eager about soviets or canoeing, she listened, longed to have
some special learning which would distinguish her, and sighed that her
adventure had come so late. Kennicott and Main Street had drained
her self-reliance; the presence of Hugh made her feel temporary. Some
day--oh, she'd have to take him back to open fields and the right to
climb about hay-lofts.

But the fact that she could never be eminent among these scoffing
enthusiasts did not keep her from being proud of them, from defending
them in imaginary conversations with Kennicott, who grunted (she could
hear his voice), "They're simply a bunch of wild impractical theorists
sittin' round chewing the rag," and "I haven't got the time to chase
after a lot of these fool fads; I'm too busy putting aside a stake for
our old age."

Most of the men who came to the flat, whether they were army officers or
radicals who hated the army, had the easy gentleness, the acceptance
of women without embarrassed banter, for which she had longed in Gopher
Prairie. Yet they seemed to be as efficient as the Sam Clarks. She
concluded that it was because they were of secure reputation, not hemmed
in by the fire of provincial jealousies. Kennicott had asserted that the
villager's lack of courtesy is due to his poverty. "We're no millionaire
dudes," he boasted. Yet these army and navy men, these bureau experts,
and organizers of multitudinous leagues, were cheerful on three or four
thousand a year, while Kennicott had, outside of his land speculations,
six thousand or more, and Sam had eight.

Nor could she upon inquiry learn that many of this reckless race died in
the poorhouse. That institution is reserved for men like Kennicott who,
after devoting fifty years to "putting aside a stake," incontinently
invest the stake in spurious oil-stocks.


IV


She was encouraged to believe that she had not been abnormal in viewing
Gopher Prairie as unduly tedious and slatternly. She found the same
faith not only in girls escaped from domesticity but also in demure
old ladies who, tragically deprived of esteemed husbands and huge old
houses, yet managed to make a very comfortable thing of it by living in
small flats and having time to read.

But she also learned that by comparison Gopher Prairie was a model of
daring color, clever planning, and frenzied intellectuality. From her
teacher-housemate she had a sardonic description of a Middlewestern
railroad-division town, of the same size as Gopher Prairie but devoid
of lawns and trees, a town where the tracks sprawled along the
cinder-scabbed Main Street, and the railroad shops, dripping soot from
eaves and doorway, rolled out smoke in greasy coils.

Other towns she came to know by anecdote: a prairie village where the
wind blew all day long, and the mud was two feet thick in spring, and in
summer the flying sand scarred new-painted houses and dust covered
the few flowers set out in pots. New England mill-towns with the hands
living in rows of cottages like blocks of lava. A rich farming-center
in New Jersey, off the railroad, furiously pious, ruled by old men,
unbelievably ignorant old men, sitting about the grocery talking of
James G. Blaine. A Southern town, full of the magnolias and white
columns which Carol had accepted as proof of romance, but hating the
negroes, obsequious to the Old Families. A Western mining-settlement
like a tumor. A booming semi-city with parks and clever architects,
visited by famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from a
struggle between union labor and the manufacturers' association, so
that in even the gayest of the new houses there was a ceaseless and
intimidating heresy-hunt.


V


The chart which plots Carol's progress is not easy to read. The lines
are broken and uncertain of direction; often instead of rising they sink
in wavering scrawls; and the colors are watery blue and pink and the dim
gray of rubbed pencil marks. A few lines are traceable.

Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical
gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by
a fog of vagueness. Carol had hidden in none of these refuges from
reality, but she, who was tender and merry, had been made timorous by
Gopher Prairie. Even her flight had been but the temporary courage of
panic. The thing she gained in Washington was not information about
office-systems and labor unions but renewed courage, that amiable
contempt called poise. Her glimpse of tasks involving millions of people
and a score of nations reduced Main Street from bloated importance to
its actual pettiness. She could never again be quite so awed by the
power with which she herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers and
Bogarts.

From her work and from her association with women who had organized
suffrage associations in hostile cities, or had defended political
prisoners, she caught something of an impersonal attitude; saw that she
had been as touchily personal as Maud Dyer.

And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals? Not individuals
but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples
who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under
a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family,
the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White
Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembittered
laughter.