Main Street: Chapters 1–5

A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom.

Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a bulwark of sound religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin, and Robert Ingersoll.

Every cell of her body was alive—thin wrists, quince-blossom skin, ingenue eyes, black hair.

Yet so radioactive were her nerves, so adventurous her trust in rather vaguely conceived sweetness and light, that she was more energetic than any of the hulking young women who, with calves bulging in heavy-ribbed woolen stockings beneath decorous blue serge bloomers, thuddingly galloped across the floor of the “gym” in practise for the Blodgett Ladies' Basket-Ball Team.

When she was most ardently singing hymns or planning deviltry she yet seemed gently aloof and critical.

She was credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper; yet she did question and examine unceasingly.

The earnest virgins were, she fancied, as likely to do harm as to do good by their faith in the value of parsing Caesar.

“You're right! I apologize!” Carol's brows lifted in the astonishment of emotion, in a glory of abasement.

It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she regarded the treatise on village-improvement.

Judge Milford's pedagogical scheme was to let the children read whatever they pleased, and in his brown library Carol absorbed Balzac and Rabelais and Thoreau and Max Muller.

When she encountered an item about small-town women's clubs or a photograph of a straggling Main Street, she was homesick for it, she felt robbed of her work.

But so few of these stolid worlds wanted to be moved.

And by the chance of propinquity she read scores of books unnatural to her gay white littleness: volumes of anthropology with ditches of foot-notes filled with heaps of small dusty type, Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes for curry, voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American improvements, treatises upon success in the real-estate business.

Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her throat tense, as she slid down the room.

She noticed the healthy solidity of his chest. His nose, which had seemed irregular and large, was suddenly virile.

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.

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

The only habitable structures to be seen were the florid red-brick Catholic church and rectory at the end of Main Street.

Only this thin hedge shut them off from the plains-shorn wheat-lands of autumn, a hundred acres to a field, prickly and gray near-by but in the blurred distance like tawny velvet stretched over dipping hillocks.

She held his hand tightly and stared ahead as the car swung round a corner and stopped in the street before a prosaic frame house in a small parched lawn.

In hallway and front parlor she was conscious of dinginess and lugubriousness and airlessness, but she insisted, “I'll make it all jolly.”

But the advocate of freedom in marriage was as much disappointed as a drooping bride at the alacrity with which he took that freedom and escaped to the world of men's affairs.

The tottering brocade chair squeaked, “Choke her—choke her—smother her.”

It was a tall lean shabby structure, three stories of yellow-streaked wood, the corners covered with sanded pine slabs purporting to symbolize stone.

From them a stink of stale beer, and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out dirty songs—vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull—the delicacy of a mining-camp minus its vigor.

He had been called many things—loan-shark, skinflint, tightwad—but he had never before been called a flirt.

Ezra Stowbody was a troglodyte. He had come to Gopher Prairie in 1865.

While Mr. Stowbody gave a somatic and psychic study of them, Carol reflected, “Are they really so terribly interested in Ella's tonsils, or even in Ella's esophagus? I wonder if I could get them away from personalities? Let's risk damnation and try.”

Smiling as changelessly as an ivory figurine she sat quiescent, avoiding thought, glancing about the living-room and hall, noting their betrayal of unimaginative commercial prosperity.

Kennicott had borrowed Jackson Elder's red and white English setter, a complacent dog with a waving tail of silver hair which flickered in the sunshine.

As the sun warmed the world of stubble into a welter of yellow they turned from the highroad, through the bars of a farmer's gate, into a field, slowly bumping over the uneven earth.

A small spare woman with flaxen hair trotted from the house.

She was twanging a Swedish patois—not in monotone, like English, but singing it, with a lyrical whine...

Mrs. Elisha Gurrey, relict of Deacon Gurrey the dealer in hay and grain, was a pointed-nosed, simpering woman with iron-gray hair drawn so tight that it resembled a soiled handkerchief covering her head.

In the line of unsmiling, methodically chewing guests, like horses at a manger, Carol came to distinguish one countenance: the pale, long, spectacled face and sandy pompadour hair of Mr. Raymond P. Wutherspoon, known as “Raymie,” professional bachelor, manager and one half the sales-force in the shoe-department of the Bon Ton Store.

He passed the stewed apricots effusively.

When she entered Mr. Ludelmeyer's store and he wheezed, “Goot mornin', Mrs. Kennicott. Vell, dis iss a fine day,” she did not notice the dustiness of the shelves nor the stupidity of the girl clerk; and she did not remember the mute colloquy with him on her first view of Main Street.

She listened to the village noises common to all the world, jungle or prairie; sounds simple and charged with magic—dogs barking, chickens making a gurgling sound of content, children at play, a man beating a rug, wind in the cottonwood trees, a locust fiddling, a footstep on the walk, jaunty voices of Bea and a grocer's boy in the kitchen, a clinking anvil, a piano—not too near.

Pollock was a man of perhaps thirty-eight, slender, still, deferential.

He presented his idols diffidently, but he expanded in Carol's bookishness, in Miss Sherwin's voluminous praise, in Kennicott's tolerance of any one who amused his wife.