Main Street

S >> Sinclair Lewis >> Main Street


Carol cried "Fine day!" to the boys; she came in a glow to Howland &
Gould's grocery, her collar white with frost from her breath; she bought
a can of tomatoes as though it were Orient fruit; and returned home
planning to surprise Kennicott with an omelet creole for dinner.

So brilliant was the snow-glare that when she entered the house she
saw the door-knobs, the newspaper on the table, every white surface as
dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy in the pyrotechnic dimness. When
her eyes had recovered she felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of
life. The world was so luminous that she sat down at her rickety little
desk in the living-room to make a poem. (She got no farther than "The
sky is bright, the sun is warm, there ne'er will be another storm.")

In the mid-afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called into the
country. It was Bea's evening out--her evening for the Lutheran Dance.
Carol was alone from three till midnight. She wearied of reading pure
love stories in the magazines and sat by a radiator, beginning to brood.

Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do.



II


She had, she meditated, passed through the novelty of seeing the
town and meeting people, of skating and sliding and hunting. Bea was
competent; there was no household labor except sewing and darning
and gossipy assistance to Bea in bed-making. She couldn't satisfy her
ingenuity in planning meals. At Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market you didn't
give orders--you wofully inquired whether there was anything today
besides steak and pork and ham. The cuts of beef were not cuts. They
were hacks. Lamb chops were as exotic as sharks' fins. The meat-dealers
shipped their best to the city, with its higher prices.

In all the shops there was the same lack of choice. She could not find
a glass-headed picture-nail in town; she did not hunt for the sort of
veiling she wanted--she took what she could get; and only at Howland &
Gould's was there such a luxury as canned asparagus. Routine care was
all she could devote to the house. Only by such fussing as the Widow
Bogart's could she make it fill her time.

She could not have outside employment. To the village doctor's wife it
was taboo.

She was a woman with a working brain and no work.

There were only three things which she could do: Have children; start
her career of reforming; or become so definitely a part of the town that
she would be fulfilled by the activities of church and study-club and
bridge-parties.

Children, yes, she wanted them, but----She was not quite ready. She had
been embarrassed by Kennicott's frankness, but she agreed with him
that in the insane condition of civilization, which made the rearing
of citizens more costly and perilous than any other crime, it was
inadvisable to have children till he had made more money. She was
sorry----Perhaps he had made all the mystery of love a mechanical
cautiousness but----She fled from the thought with a dubious, "Some
day."

Her "reforms," her impulses toward beauty in raw Main Street, they had
become indistinct. But she would set them going now. She would! She
swore it with soft fist beating the edges of the radiator. And at the
end of all her vows she had no notion as to when and where the crusade
was to begin.

Become an authentic part of the town? She began to think with unpleasant
lucidity. She reflected that she did not know whether the people liked
her. She had gone to the women at afternoon-coffees, to the merchants
in their stores, with so many outpouring comments and whimsies that
she hadn't given them a chance to betray their opinions of her. The men
smiled--but did they like her? She was lively among the women--but
was she one of them? She could not recall many times when she had been
admitted to the whispering of scandal which is the secret chamber of
Gopher Prairie conversation.

She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed.

Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and observed. Dave
Dyer and Sam Clark were as cordial as she had been fancying; but wasn't
there an impersonal abruptness in the "H' are yuh?" of Chet Dashaway?
Howland the grocer was curt. Was that merely his usual manner?

"It's infuriating to have to pay attention to what people think. In
St. Paul I didn't care. But here I'm spied on. They're watching
me. I mustn't let it make me self-conscious," she coaxed
herself--overstimulated by the drug of thought, and offensively on the
defensive.



III


A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a ringing iron night
when the lakes could be heard booming; a clear roistering morning. In
tam o'shanter and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior going
out to play hockey. She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run. On the
way home from shopping she yielded, as a pup would have yielded. She
galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of
slush, she gave a student "Yippee!"

She saw that in a window three old women were gasping. Their triple
glare was paralyzing. Across the street, at another window, the curtain
had secretively moved. She stopped, walked on sedately, changed from the
girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.

She never again felt quite young enough and defiant enough and free
enough to run and halloo in the public streets; and it was as a Nice
Married Woman that she attended the next weekly bridge of the Jolly
Seventeen.



IV


The Jolly Seventeen (the membership of which ranged from fourteen to
twenty-six) was the social cornice of Gopher Prairie. It was the country
club, the diplomatic set, the St. Cecilia, the Ritz oval room, the Club
de Vingt. To belong to it was to be "in." Though its membership partly
coincided with that of the Thanatopsis study club, the Jolly Seventeen
as a separate entity guffawed at the Thanatopsis, and considered it
middle-class and even "highbrow."

Most of the Jolly Seventeen were young married women, with their
husbands as associate members. Once a week they had a women's
afternoon-bridge; once a month the husbands joined them for supper and
evening-bridge; twice a year they had dances at I. O. O. F. Hall. Then
the town exploded. Only at the annual balls of the Firemen and of the
Eastern Star was there such prodigality of chiffon scarfs and tangoing
and heart-burnings, and these rival institutions were not select--hired
girls attended the Firemen's Ball, with section-hands and laborers. Ella
Stowbody had once gone to a Jolly Seventeen Soiree in the village hack,
hitherto confined to chief mourners at funerals; and Harry Haydock and
Dr. Terry Gould always appeared in the town's only specimens of evening
clothes.

The afternoon-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen which followed Carol's
lonely doubting was held at Juanita Haydock's new concrete bungalow,
with its door of polished oak and beveled plate-glass, jar of ferns in
the plastered hall, and in the living-room, a fumed oak Morris chair,
sixteen color-prints, and a square varnished table with a mat made of
cigar-ribbons on which was one Illustrated Gift Edition and one pack of
cards in a burnt-leather case.

Carol stepped into a sirocco of furnace heat. They were already playing.
Despite her flabby resolves she had not yet learned bridge. She was
winningly apologetic about it to Juanita, and ashamed that she should
have to go on being apologetic.

Mrs. Dave Dyer, a sallow woman with a thin prettiness devoted to
experiments in religious cults, illnesses, and scandal-bearing, shook
her finger at Carol and trilled, "You're a naughty one! I don't believe
you appreciate the honor, when you got into the Jolly Seventeen so
easy!"

Mrs. Chet Dashaway nudged her neighbor at the second table. But Carol
kept up the appealing bridal manner so far as possible. She twittered,
"You're perfectly right. I'm a lazy thing. I'll make Will start teaching
me this very evening." Her supplication had all the sound of birdies
in the nest, and Easter church-bells, and frosted Christmas cards.
Internally she snarled, "That ought to be saccharine enough." She sat in
the smallest rocking-chair, a model of Victorian modesty. But she saw or
she imagined that the women who had gurgled at her so welcomingly when
she had first come to Gopher Prairie were nodding at her brusquely.

During the pause after the first game she petitioned Mrs. Jackson Elder,
"Don't you think we ought to get up another bob-sled party soon?"

"It's so cold when you get dumped in the snow," said Mrs. Elder,
indifferently.

"I hate snow down my neck," volunteered Mrs. Dave Dyer, with an
unpleasant look at Carol and, turning her back, she bubbled at Rita
Simons, "Dearie, won't you run in this evening? I've got the loveliest
new Butterick pattern I want to show you."

Carol crept back to her chair. In the fervor of discussing the game they
ignored her. She was not used to being a wallflower. She struggled to
keep from oversensitiveness, from becoming unpopular by the sure method
of believing that she was unpopular; but she hadn't much reserve of
patience, and at the end of the second game, when Ella Stowbody sniffily
asked her, "Are you going to send to Minneapolis for your dress for
the next soiree--heard you were," Carol said "Don't know yet" with
unnecessary sharpness.

She was relieved by the admiration with which the jeune fille Rita
Simons looked at the steel buckles on her pumps; but she resented Mrs.
Howland's tart demand, "Don't you find that new couch of yours is too
broad to be practical?" She nodded, then shook her head, and touchily
left Mrs. Howland to get out of it any meaning she desired. Immediately
she wanted to make peace. She was close to simpering in the sweetness
with which she addressed Mrs Howland: "I think that is the prettiest
display of beef-tea your husband has in his store."

"Oh yes, Gopher Prairie isn't so much behind the times," gibed Mrs.
Howland. Some one giggled.

Their rebuffs made her haughty; her haughtiness irritated them to
franker rebuffs; they were working up to a state of painfully righteous
war when they were saved by the coming of food.

Though Juanita Haydock was highly advanced in the matters of
finger-bowls, doilies, and bath-mats, her "refreshments" were typical
of all the afternoon-coffees. Juanita's best friends, Mrs. Dyer and Mrs.
Dashaway, passed large dinner plates, each with a spoon, a fork, and a
coffee cup without saucer. They apologized and discussed the afternoon's
game as they passed through the thicket of women's feet. Then they
distributed hot buttered rolls, coffee poured from an enamel-ware pot,
stuffed olives, potato salad, and angel's-food cake. There was, even in
the most strictly conforming Gopher Prairie circles, a certain option
as to collations. The olives need not be stuffed. Doughnuts were in some
houses well thought of as a substitute for the hot buttered rolls.
But there was in all the town no heretic save Carol who omitted
angel's-food.

They ate enormously. Carol had a suspicion that the thriftier housewives
made the afternoon treat do for evening supper.

She tried to get back into the current. She edged over to Mrs. McGanum.
Chunky, amiable, young Mrs. McGanum with her breast and arms of a
milkmaid, and her loud delayed laugh which burst startlingly from
a sober face, was the daughter of old Dr. Westlake, and the wife of
Westlake's partner, Dr. McGanum. Kennicott asserted that Westlake and
McGanum and their contaminated families were tricky, but Carol had found
them gracious. She asked for friendliness by crying to Mrs. McGanum,
"How is the baby's throat now?" and she was attentive while Mrs. McGanum
rocked and knitted and placidly described symptoms.

Vida Sherwin came in after school, with Miss Ethel Villets, the
town librarian. Miss Sherwin's optimistic presence gave Carol more
confidence. She talked. She informed the circle "I drove almost down to
Wahkeenyan with Will, a few days ago. Isn't the country lovely! And I do
admire the Scandinavian farmers down there so: their big red barns and
silos and milking-machines and everything. Do you all know that lonely
Lutheran church, with the tin-covered spire, that stands out alone on
a hill? It's so bleak; somehow it seems so brave. I do think the
Scandinavians are the hardiest and best people----"

"Oh, do you THINK so?" protested Mrs. Jackson Elder. "My husband says
the Svenskas that work in the planing-mill are perfectly terrible--so
silent and cranky, and so selfish, the way they keep demanding raises.
If they had their way they'd simply ruin the business."

"Yes, and they're simply GHASTLY hired girls!" wailed Mrs. Dave Dyer.
"I swear, I work myself to skin and bone trying to please my hired
girls--when I can get them! I do everything in the world for them. They
can have their gentleman friends call on them in the kitchen any time,
and they get just the same to eat as we do, if there's, any left over,
and I practically never jump on them."

Juanita Haydock rattled, "They're ungrateful, all that class of people.
I do think the domestic problem is simply becoming awful. I don't know
what the country's coming to, with these Scandahoofian clodhoppers
demanding every cent you can save, and so ignorant and impertinent,
and on my word, demanding bath-tubs and everything--as if they weren't
mighty good and lucky at home if they got a bath in the wash-tub."

They were off, riding hard. Carol thought of Bea and waylaid them:

"But isn't it possibly the fault of the mistresses if the maids are
ungrateful? For generations we've given them the leavings of food, and
holes to live in. I don't want to boast, but I must say I don't have
much trouble with Bea. She's so friendly. The Scandinavians are sturdy
and honest----"

Mrs. Dave Dyer snapped, "Honest? Do you call it honest to hold us up for
every cent of pay they can get? I can't say that I've had any of them
steal anything (though you might call it stealing to eat so much that a
roast of beef hardly lasts three days), but just the same I don't intend
to let them think they can put anything over on ME! I always make them
pack and unpack their trunks down-stairs, right under my eyes, and then
I know they aren't being tempted to dishonesty by any slackness on MY
part!"

"How much do the maids get here?" Carol ventured.

Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker, stated in a shocked manner,
"Any place from three-fifty to five-fifty a week! I know positively that
Mrs. Clark, after swearing that she wouldn't weaken and encourage them
in their outrageous demands, went and paid five-fifty--think of it!
practically a dollar a day for unskilled work and, of course, her food
and room and a chance to do her own washing right in with the rest of
the wash. HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY, Mrs. KENNICOTT?"

"Yes! How much do you pay?" insisted half a dozen.

"W-why, I pay six a week," she feebly confessed.

They gasped. Juanita protested, "Don't you think it's hard on the rest
of us when you pay so much?" Juanita's demand was reinforced by the
universal glower.

Carol was angry. "I don't care! A maid has one of the hardest jobs on
earth. She works from ten to eighteen hours a day. She has to wash slimy
dishes and dirty clothes. She tends the children and runs to the door
with wet chapped hands and----"

Mrs. Dave Dyer broke into Carol's peroration with a furious, "That's all
very well, but believe me, I do those things myself when I'm without
a maid--and that's a good share of the time for a person that isn't
willing to yield and pay exorbitant wages!"

Carol was retorting, "But a maid does it for strangers, and all she gets
out of it is the pay----"

Their eyes were hostile. Four of them were talking at once. Vida
Sherwin's dictatorial voice cut through, took control of the revolution:

"Tut, tut, tut, tut! What angry passions--and what an idiotic
discussion! All of you getting too serious. Stop it! Carol Kennicott,
you're probably right, but you're too much ahead of the times. Juanita,
quit looking so belligerent. What is this, a card party or a hen fight?
Carol, you stop admiring yourself as the Joan of Arc of the hired girls,
or I'll spank you. You come over here and talk libraries with Ethel
Villets. Boooooo! If there's any more pecking, I'll take charge of the
hen roost myself!"

They all laughed artificially, and Carol obediently "talked libraries."

A small-town bungalow, the wives of a village doctor and a village
dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial brawl over
paying a servant a dollar more a week. Yet this insignificance echoed
cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia
and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and the orators who deemed themselves
international leaders were but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas
denouncing a million Carols, with a hundred thousand Vida Sherwins
trying to shoo away the storm.

Carol felt guilty. She devoted herself to admiring the spinsterish Miss
Villets--and immediately committed another offense against the laws of
decency.

"We haven't seen you at the library yet," Miss Villets reproved.

"I've wanted to run in so much but I've been getting settled and----I'll
probably come in so often you'll get tired of me! I hear you have such a
nice library."

"There are many who like it. We have two thousand more books than
Wakamin."

"Isn't that fine. I'm sure you are largely responsible. I've had some
experience, in St. Paul."

"So I have been informed. Not that I entirely approve of library methods
in these large cities. So careless, letting tramps and all sorts of
dirty persons practically sleep in the reading-rooms."

"I know, but the poor souls----Well, I'm sure you will agree with me in
one thing: The chief task of a librarian is to get people to read."

"You feel so? My feeling, Mrs. Kennicott, and I am merely quoting
the librarian of a very large college, is that the first duty of the
CONSCIENTIOUS librarian is to preserve the books."

"Oh!" Carol repented her "Oh." Miss Villets stiffened, and attacked:

"It may be all very well in cities, where they have unlimited funds, to
let nasty children ruin books and just deliberately tear them up, and
fresh young men take more books out than they are entitled to by the
regulations, but I'm never going to permit it in this library!"

"What if some children are destructive? They learn to read. Books are
cheaper than minds."

"Nothing is cheaper than the minds of some of these children that come
in and bother me simply because their mothers don't keep them home where
they belong. Some librarians may choose to be so wishy-washy and turn
their libraries into nursing-homes and kindergartens, but as long as I'm
in charge, the Gopher Prairie library is going to be quiet and decent,
and the books well kept!"

Carol saw that the others were listening, waiting for her to be
objectionable. She flinched before their dislike. She hastened to smile
in agreement with Miss Villets, to glance publicly at her wrist-watch,
to warble that it was "so late--have to hurry home--husband--such nice
party--maybe you were right about maids, prejudiced because Bea so
nice--such perfectly divine angel's-food, Mrs. Haydock must give me the
recipe--good-by, such happy party----"

She walked home. She reflected, "It was my fault. I was touchy. And I
opposed them so much. Only----I can't! I can't be one of them if I must
damn all the maids toiling in filthy kitchens, all the ragged hungry
children. And these women are to be my arbiters, the rest of my life!"

She ignored Bea's call from the kitchen; she ran up-stairs to the
unfrequented guest-room; she wept in terror, her body a pale arc as
she knelt beside a cumbrous black-walnut bed, beside a puffy mattress
covered with a red quilt, in a shuttered and airless room.



CHAPTER VIII


"DON'T I, in looking for things to do, show that I'm not attentive
enough to Will? Am I impressed enough by his work? I will be. Oh, I will
be. If I can't be one of the town, if I must be an outcast----"

When Kennicott came home she bustled, "Dear, you must tell me a lot more
about your cases. I want to know. I want to understand."

"Sure. You bet." And he went down to fix the furnace.

At supper she asked, "For instance, what did you do today?"

"Do today? How do you mean?"

"Medically. I want to understand----"

"Today? Oh, there wasn't much of anything: couple chumps with
bellyaches, and a sprained wrist, and a fool woman that thinks she wants
to kill herself because her husband doesn't like her and----Just routine
work."

"But the unhappy woman doesn't sound routine!"

"Her? Just case of nerves. You can't do much with these marriage
mix-ups."

"But dear, PLEASE, will you tell me about the next case that you do
think is interesting?"

"Sure. You bet. Tell you about anything that----Say that's pretty good
salmon. Get it at Howland's?"



II


Four days after the Jolly Seventeen debacle Vida Sherwin called and
casually blew Carol's world to pieces.

"May I come in and gossip a while?" she said, with such excess of bright
innocence that Carol was uneasy. Vida took off her furs with a bounce,
she sat down as though it were a gymnasium exercise, she flung out:

"Feel disgracefully good, this weather! Raymond Wutherspoon says if he
had my energy he'd be a grand opera singer. I always think this climate
is the finest in the world, and my friends are the dearest people in the
world, and my work is the most essential thing in the world. Probably
I fool myself. But I know one thing for certain: You're the pluckiest
little idiot in the world."

"And so you are about to flay me alive." Carol was cheerful about it.

"Am I? Perhaps. I've been wondering--I know that the third party to a
squabble is often the most to blame: the one who runs between A and B
having a beautiful time telling each of them what the other has said.
But I want you to take a big part in vitalizing Gopher Prairie and
so----Such a very unique opportunity and----Am I silly?"

"I know what you mean. I was too abrupt at the Jolly Seventeen."

"It isn't that. Matter of fact, I'm glad you told them some wholesome
truths about servants. (Though perhaps you were just a bit tactless.)
It's bigger than that. I wonder if you understand that in a secluded
community like this every newcomer is on test? People cordial to her
but watching her all the time. I remember when a Latin teacher came here
from Wellesley, they resented her broad A. Were sure it was affected. Of
course they have discussed you----"

"Have they talked about me much?"

"My dear!"

"I always feel as though I walked around in a cloud, looking out at
others but not being seen. I feel so inconspicuous and so normal--so
normal that there's nothing about me to discuss. I can't realize that
Mr. and Mrs. Haydock must gossip about me." Carol was working up a small
passion of distaste. "And I don't like it. It makes me crawly to think
of their daring to talk over all I do and say. Pawing me over! I resent
it. I hate----"

"Wait, child! Perhaps they resent some things in you. I want you to try
and be impersonal. They'd paw over anybody who came in new. Didn't you,
with newcomers in College?"

"Yes."

"Well then! Will you be impersonal? I'm paying you the compliment of
supposing that you can be. I want you to be big enough to help me make
this town worth while."

"I'll be as impersonal as cold boiled potatoes. (Not that I shall ever
be able to help you 'make the town worth while.') What do they say about
me? Really. I want to know."

"Of course the illiterate ones resent your references to anything
farther away than Minneapolis. They're so suspicious--that's it,
suspicious. And some think you dress too well."

"Oh, they do, do they! Shall I dress in gunny-sacking to suit them?"

"Please! Are you going to be a baby?"

"I'll be good," sulkily.

"You certainly will, or I won't tell you one single thing. You must
understand this: I'm not asking you to change yourself. Just want you
to know what they think. You must do that, no matter how absurd their
prejudices are, if you're going to handle them. Is it your ambition to
make this a better town, or isn't it?"

"I don't know whether it is or not!"

"Why--why----Tut, tut, now, of course it is! Why, I depend on you.
You're a born reformer."

"I am not--not any more!"

"Of course you are."

"Oh, if I really could help----So they think I'm affected?"

"My lamb, they do! Now don't say they're nervy. After all, Gopher
Prairie standards are as reasonable to Gopher Prairie as Lake Shore
Drive standards are to Chicago. And there's more Gopher Prairies than
there are Chicagos. Or Londons. And----I'll tell you the whole story:
They think you're showing off when you say 'American' instead of
'Ammurrican.' They think you're too frivolous. Life's so serious to them
that they can't imagine any kind of laughter except Juanita's snortling.
Ethel Villets was sure you were patronizing her when----"

"Oh, I was not!"

"----you talked about encouraging reading; and Mrs. Elder thought you
were patronizing when you said she had 'such a pretty little car.' She
thinks it's an enormous car! And some of the merchants say you're too
flip when you talk to them in the store and----"