Main Street - Sinclair Lewis (little red riding hood ebook .txt) 📗

burg on the whole bloomin’ expanse of God’s Green Footstool, and that goes, get me, that goes!”

Half an hour later Chairman Haydock moved a vote of thanks to Mr. Blausser.

The boosters’ campaign was on.

The town sought that efficient and modern variety of fame which is known as “publicity.” The band was reorganized, and provided by the Commercial Club with uniforms of purple and gold. The amateur baseball-team hired a semiprofessional pitcher from Des Moines, and made a schedule of games with every town for fifty miles about. The citizens accompanied it as “rooters,” in a special car, with banners lettered “Watch Gopher Prairie Grow,” and with the band playing “Smile, Smile, Smile.” Whether the team won or lost the Dauntless loyally shrieked, “Boost, Boys, and Boost Together⁠—Put Gopher Prairie on the Map⁠—Brilliant Record of Our Matchless Team.”

Then, glory of glories, the town put in a White Way. White Ways were in fashion in the Middlewest. They were composed of ornamented posts with clusters of high-powered electric lights along two or three blocks on Main Street. The Dauntless confessed: “White Way Is Installed⁠—Town Lit Up Like Broadway⁠—Speech by Hon. James Blausser⁠—Come On You Twin Cities⁠—Our Hat Is In the Ring.”

The Commercial Club issued a booklet prepared by a great and expensive literary person from a Minneapolis advertising agency, a redheaded young man who smoked cigarettes in a long amber holder. Carol read the booklet with a certain wonder. She learned that Plover and Minniemashie Lakes were world-famed for their beauteous wooded shores and gamey pike and bass not to be equalled elsewhere in the entire country; that the residences of Gopher Prairie were models of dignity, comfort, and culture, with lawns and gardens known far and wide; that the Gopher Prairie schools and public library, in its neat and commodious building, were celebrated throughout the state; that the Gopher Prairie mills made the best flour in the country; that the surrounding farm lands were renowned, where’er men ate bread and butter, for their incomparable No. 1 Hard Wheat and Holstein-Friesian cattle; and that the stores in Gopher Prairie compared favorably with Minneapolis and Chicago in their abundance of luxuries and necessities and the ever-courteous attention of the skilled clerks. She learned, in brief, that this was the one Logical Location for factories and wholesale houses.

“There’s where I want to go; to that model town Gopher Prairie,” said Carol.

Kennicott was triumphant when the Commercial Club did capture one small shy factory which planned to make wooden automobile-wheels, but when Carol saw the promoter she could not feel that his coming much mattered⁠—and a year after, when he failed, she could not be very sorrowful.

Retired farmers were moving into town. The price of lots had increased a third. But Carol could discover no more pictures nor interesting food nor gracious voices nor amusing conversation nor questing minds. She could, she asserted, endure a shabby but modest town; the town shabby and egomaniac she could not endure. She could nurse Champ Perry, and warm to the neighborliness of Sam Clark, but she could not sit applauding Honest Jim Blausser. Kennicott had begged her, in courtship days, to convert the town to beauty. If it was now as beautiful as Mr. Blausser and the Dauntless said, then her work was over, and she could go.

XXXVI I

Kennicott was not so inhumanly patient that he could continue to forgive Carol’s heresies, to woo her as he had on the venture to California. She tried to be inconspicuous, but she was betrayed by her failure to glow over the boosting. Kennicott believed in it; demanded that she say patriotic things about the White Way and the new factory. He snorted, “By golly, I’ve done all I could, and now I expect you to play the game. Here you been complaining for years about us being so poky, and now when Blausser comes along and does stir up excitement and beautify the town like you’ve always wanted somebody to, why, you say he’s a roughneck, and you won’t jump on the bandwagon.”

Once, when Kennicott announced at noon-dinner, “What do you know about this! They say there’s a chance we may get another factory⁠—cream-separator works!” he added, “You might try to look interested, even if you ain’t!” The baby was frightened by the Jovian roar; ran wailing to hide his face in Carol’s lap; and Kennicott had to make himself humble and court both mother and child. The dim injustice of not being understood even by his son left him irritable. He felt injured.

An event which did not directly touch them brought down his wrath.

In the early autumn, news came from Wakamin that the sheriff had forbidden an organizer for the National Nonpartisan League to speak anywhere in the county. The organizer had defied the sheriff, and announced that in a few days he would address a farmers’ political meeting. That night, the news ran, a mob of a hundred business men led by the sheriff⁠—the tame village street and the smug village faces ruddled by the light of bobbing lanterns, the mob flowing between the squatty rows of shops⁠—had taken the organizer from his hotel, ridden him on a fence-rail, put him on a freight train, and warned him not to return.

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 suppertime 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,