"Please stop flying off at tangents, Carrie. This----"
"Tangents? TANGENTS! Let me tell you----"
"----isn't a theater-play; it's a serious effort to have us get together on fundamentals. We've both been cranky, and said a lot of things we didn't mean. I wish we were a couple o' bloomin' poets and just talked about roses and moonshine, but we're human. All right. Let's cut out jabbing at each other. Let's admit we both do fool things. See here: You KNOW you feel superior to folks. You're not as bad as I say, but you're not as good as you say--not by a long shot! What's the reason you're so superior? Why can't you take folks as they are?"
Her preparations for stalking out of the Doll's House were not yet visible. She mused:
"I think perhaps it's my childhood." She halted. When she went on her voice had an artificial sound, her words the bookish quality of emotional meditation. "My father was the tenderest man in the world, but he did feel superior to ordinary people. Well, he was! And the Minnesota Valley---- I used to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a time, my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to write poems. The shiny tilted roofs below me, and the river, and beyond it the level fields in the mist, and the rim of palisades across---- It held my thoughts in. I LIVED, in the valley. But the prairie--all my thoughts go flying off into the big space. Do you think it might be that?"
"Um, well, maybe, but---- Carrie, you always talk so much about getting all you can out of life, and not letting the years slip by, and here you deliberately go and deprive yourself of a lot of real good home pleasure by not enjoying people unless they wear frock coats and trot out----"
("Morning clothes. Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean t' interrupt you.")
"----to a lot of tea-parties. Take Jack Elder. You think Jack hasn't got any ideas about anything but manufacturing and the tariff on lumber. But do you know that Jack is nutty about music? He'll put a grand-opera record on the phonograph and sit and listen to it and close his eyes---- Or you take Lym Cass. Ever realize what a well-informed man he is?"
"But IS he? Gopher Prairie calls anybody `well-informed' who's been through the State Capitol and heard about Gladstone."
"Now I'm telling you! Lym reads a lot--solid stuff-- history. Or take Mart Mahoney, the garageman. He's got a lot of Perry prints of famous pictures in his office. Or old Bingham Playfair, that died here 'bout a year ago--lived seven miles out. He was a captain in the Civil War, and knew General Sherman, and they say he was a miner in Nevada right alongside of Mark Twain. You'll find these characters in all these small towns, and a pile of savvy in every single one of them, if you just dig for it."
"I know. And I do love them. Especially people like Champ Perry. But I can't be so very enthusiastic over the smug cits like Jack Elder."
"Then I'm a smug cit, too, whatever that is."
"No, you're a scientist. Oh, I will try and get the music out of Mr. Elder. Only, why can't he let it COME out, instead of being ashamed of it, and always talking about hunting dogs? But I will try. Is it all right now?"
"Sure. But there's one other thing. You might give me some attention, too!"
"That's unjust! You have everything I am!"
"No, I haven't. You think you respect me--you always hand out some spiel about my being so `useful.' But you never think of me as having ambitions, just as much as you haves----"
"Perhaps not. I think of you as being perfectly satisfied."
"Well, I'm not, not by a long shot! I don't want to be a plug general practitioner all my life, like Westlake, and die in harness because I can't get out of it, and have 'em say, `He was a good fellow, but he couldn't save a cent.' Not that I care a whoop what they say, after I've kicked in and can't hear 'em, but I want to put enough money away so you and I can be independent some day, and not have to work unless I feel like it, and I want to have a good house--by golly, I'll have as good a house as anybody in THIS town!--and if we want to travel and see your Tormina or whatever it is, why we can do it, with enough money in our jeans so we won't have to take anything off anybody, or fret about our old age. You never worry about what might happen if we got sick and didn't have a good fat wad salted away, do you!"
"I don't suppose I do."
"Well then, I have to do it for you. And if you think for one moment I want to be stuck in this burg all my life, and not have a chance to travel and see the different points of interest and all that, then you simply don't get me. I want to have a squint at the world, much's you do. Only, I'm practical about it. First place, I'm going to make the money-- I'm investing in good safe farmlands. Do you understand why now?"
"Yes."
"Will you try and see if you can't think of me as something more than just a dollar-chasing roughneck?"
"Oh, my dear, I haven't been just! I AM difficile. And I won't call on the Dillons! And if Dr. Dillon is working for Westlake and McGanum, I hate him!"
CHAPTER XV
THAT December she was in love with her husband.
She romanticized herself not as a great reformer but as the wife of a country physician. The realities of the doctor's household were colored by her pride.
Late at night, a step on the wooden porch, heard through her confusion of sleep; the storm-door opened; fumbling over the inner door-panels; the buzz of the electric bell. Kennicott muttering "Gol darn it," but patiently creeping out of bed, remembering to draw the covers up to keep her warm, feeling for slippers and bathrobe, clumping down-stairs.
From below, half-heard in her drowsiness, a colloquy in the pidgin-German of the farmers who have forgotten the Old Country language without learning the new:
"Hello, Barney, wass willst du?"
"Morgen, doctor. Die Frau ist ja awful sick. All night she been having an awful pain in de belly."
"How long she been this way? Wie lang, eh?"
"I dunno, maybe two days."
"Why didn't you come for me yesterday, instead of waking me up out of a sound sleep? Here it is two o'clock! So spat- warum, eh?"
"Nun aber, I know it, but she got soch a lot vorse last evening. I t'ought maybe all de time it go avay, but it got a lot vorse."
"Any fever?"
"Vell ja, I t'ink she got fever."
"Which side is the pain on?"
"Huh?"
"Das Schmertz--die Weh--which side is it on? Here?"
"So. Right here it is."
"Any rigidity there?"
"Huh?"
"Is it rigid--stiff--I mean, does the belly feel hard to the fingers?"
"I dunno. She ain't said yet."
"What she been eating?"
"Vell, I t'ink about vot ve alwis eat, maybe corn beef and cabbage and sausage, und so weiter. Doc, sie weint immer, all the time she holler like hell. I vish you come."
"Well, all right, but you call me earlier, next time. Look here, Barney, you better install a 'phone--telephone haben. Some of you Dutchmen will be dying one of these days before you can fetch the doctor."
The door closing. Barney's wagon--the wheels silent in the snow, but the wagon-body rattling. Kennicott clicking the receiver-hook to rouse the night telephone-operator, giving a number, waiting, cursing mildly, waiting again, and at last growling, "Hello, Gus, this is the doctor. Say, uh, send me up a team. Guess snow's too thick for a machine. Going eight miles south. All right. Huh? The hell I will! Don't you go back to sleep. Huh? Well, that's all right now, you didn't wait so very darn long. All right, Gus; shoot her along. By!"
His step on the stairs; his quiet moving about the frigid room while he dressed; his abstracted and meaningless cough. She was supposed to be asleep; she was too exquisitely drowsy to break the charm by speaking. On a slip of paper laid on the bureau--she could hear the pencil grinding against the marble slab--he wrote his destination. He went out, hungry, chilly, unprotesting; and she, before she fell asleep again, loved him for his sturdiness, and saw the drama of his riding by night to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured children standing at a window, waiting for him. He suddenly had in her eyes the heroism of a wireless operator on a ship in a collision; of an explorer, fever-clawed, deserted by his bearers, but going on--jungle--going----