"You're a fair spieler, child. But, by golly, I'd like to see you try to design a new manifold, or run a factory and keep a lot of your fellow reds from Czech-slovenski-magyar- godknowswheria on the job! You'd drop your theories so darn quick! I'm not any defender of things as they are. Sure. They're rotten. Only I'm sensible."
He preached his gospeclass="underline" love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends. She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics.
He was so much the man, the worker, the friend, that she liked him when she most tried to stand out against him; he was so much the successful executive that she did not want him to despise her. His manner of sneering at what he called "parlor socialists" (though the phrase was not overwhelmingly new) had a power which made her wish to placate his company of well-fed, speed-loving administrators. When he demanded, "Would you like to associate with nothing but a lot of turkey-necked, horn-spectacled nuts that have adenoids and need a hair-cut, and that spend all their time kicking about `conditions' and never do a lick of work?" she said, "No, but just the same----" When he asserted, "Even if your cavewoman was right in knocking the whole works, I bet some red-blooded Regular Fellow, some real He-man, found her a nice dry cave, and not any whining criticizing radical," she wriggled her head feebly, between a nod and a shake.
His large hands, sensual lips, easy voice supported his self- confidence. He made her feel young and soft--as Kennicott had once made her feel. She had nothing to say when he bent his powerful head and experimented, "My dear, I'm sorry I'm going away from this town. You'd be a darling child to play with. You ARE pretty! Some day in Boston I'll show you how we buy a lunch. Well, hang it, got to be starting back."
The only answer to his gospel of beef which she could find, when she was home, was a wail of "But just the same----"
She did not see him again before he departed for Washington.
His eyes remained. His glances at her lips and hair and shoulders had revealed to her that she was not a wife-and- mother alone, but a girl; that there still were men in the world, as there had been in college days.
That admiration led her to study Kennicott, to tear at the shroud of intimacy, to perceive the strangeness of the most familiar.
CHAPTER XXIV
I
ALL that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott. She recalled a hundred grotesqueries: her comic dismay at his having chewed tobacco, the evening when she had tried to read poetry to him; matters which had seemed to vanish with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that he had been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She made much of her consoling affection for him in little things. She liked the homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his strength and handiness as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; his boyishness when he ran to her to be comforted because he had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun. But at the highest he was to her another Hugh, without the glamor of Hugh's unknown future.
There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning.
Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other doctors the Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage but remained in town, dusty and irritable. In the afternoon, when she went to Oleson & McGuire's (formerly Dahl & Oleson's), Carol was vexed by the assumption of the youthful clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be neighborly and rude. He was no more brusquely familiar than a dozen other clerks of the town, but her nerves were heat- scorched.
When she asked for codfish, for supper, he grunted, "What d'you want that darned old dry stuff for?"
"I like it!"
"Punk! Guess the doc can afford something better than that. Try some of the new wienies we got in. Swell. The Haydocks use 'em."
She exploded. "My dear young man, it is not your duty to instruct me in housekeeping, and it doesn't particularly concern me what the Haydocks condescend to approve!"
He was hurt. He hastily wrapped up the leprous fragment of fish; he gaped as she trailed out. She lamented, "I shouldn't have spoken so. He didn't mean anything. He doesn't know when he is being rude."
Her repentance was not proof against Uncle Whittier when she stopped in at his grocery for salt and a package of safety matches. Uncle Whittier, in a shirt collarless and soaked with sweat in a brown streak down his back, was whining at a clerk, "Come on now, get a hustle on and lug that pound cake up to Mis' Cass's. Some folks in this town think a storekeeper ain't got nothing to do but chase out 'phone- orders. . . . Hello, Carrie. That dress you got on looks kind of low in the neck to me. May be decent and modest-- I suppose I'm old-fashioned--but I never thought much of showing the whole town a woman's bust! Hee, hee, hee! . . . . Afternoon, Mrs. Hicks. Sage? Just out of it. Lemme sell you some other spices. Heh?" Uncle Whittier was nasally indignant "CERTAINLY! Got PLENTY other spices jus' good as sage for any purp'se whatever! What's the matter with--well, with allspice?" When Mrs. Hicks had gone, he raged, "Some folks don't know what they want!"
"Sweating sanctimonious bully--my husband's uncle!" thought Carol.
She crept into Dave Dyer's. Dave held up his arms with, "Don't shoot! I surrender!" She smiled, but it occurred to her that for nearly five years Dave had kept up this game of pretending that she threatened his life.
As she went dragging through the prickly-hot street she reflected that a citizen of Gopher Prairie does not have jests-- he has a jest. Every cold morning for five winters Lyman Cass had remarked, "Fair to middlin' chilly--get worse before it gets better." Fifty times had Ezra Stowbody informed the public that Carol had once asked, "Shall I indorse this check on the back?" Fifty times had Sam Clark called to her, "Where'd you steal that hat?" Fifty times had the mention of Barney Cahoon, the town drayman, like a nickel in a slot produced from Kennicott the apocryphal story of Barney's directing a minister, "Come down to the depot and get your case of religious books--they're leaking!"
She came home by the unvarying route. She knew every house-front, every street-crossing, every billboard, every tree, every dog. She knew every blackened banana-skin and empty cigarette-box in the gutters. She knew every greeting. When Jim Howland stopped and gaped at her there was no possibility that he was about to confide anything but his grudging, "Well, haryuh t'day?"
All her future life, this same red-labeled bread-crate in front of the bakery, this same thimble-shaped crack in the sidewalk a quarter of a block beyond Stowbody's granite hitching- post----
She silently handed her purchases to the silent Oscarina. She sat on the porch, rocking, fanning, twitchy with Hugh's whining.
Kennicott came home, grumbled, "What the devil is the kid yapping about?"
"I guess you can stand it ten minutes if I can stand it all day!"
He came to supper in his shirt sleeves, his vest partly open, revealing discolored suspenders.
"Why don't you put on your nice Palm Beach suit, and take off that hideous vest?" she complained.
"Too much trouble. Too hot to go up-stairs."
She realized that for perhaps a year she had not definitely looked at her husband. She regarded his table-manners. He violently chased fragments of fish about his plate with a knife and licked the knife after gobbling them. She was slightly sick. She asserted, "I'm ridiculous. What do these things matter! Don't be so simple!" But she knew that to her they did matter, these solecisms and mixed tenses of the table.