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

She found that it was not.

In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were prohibition, the place in Minneapolis where you could get whisky at thirteen dollars a quart, recipes for homemade beer, the “high cost of living,” the presidential election, Clark’s new car, and not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart. Their problems were exactly what they had been two years ago, what they had been twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years to come. With the world a possible volcano, the husbandmen were plowing at the base of the mountain. A volcano does occasionally drop a river of lava on even the best of agriculturists, to their astonishment and considerable injury, but their cousins inherit the farms and a year or two later go back to the plowing.

She was unable to rhapsodize much over the seven new bungalows and the two garages which Kennicott had made to seem so important. Her intensest thought about them was, “Oh yes, they’re all right I suppose.” The change which she did heed was the erection of the schoolbuilding, with its cheerful brick walls, broad windows, gymnasium, classrooms for agriculture and cooking. It indicated Vida’s triumph, and it stirred her to activity⁠—any activity. She went to Vida with a jaunty, “I think I shall work for you. And I’ll begin at the bottom.”

She did. She relieved the attendant at the restroom for an hour a day. Her only innovation was painting the pine table a black and orange rather shocking to the Thanatopsis. She talked to the farmwives and soothed their babies and was happy.

Thinking of them she did not think of the ugliness of Main Street as she hurried along it to the chatter of the Jolly Seventeen.

She wore her eyeglasses on the street now. She was beginning to ask Kennicott and Juanita if she didn’t look young, much younger than thirty-three. The eyeglasses pinched her nose. She considered spectacles. They would make her seem older, and hopelessly settled. No! She would not wear spectacles yet. But she tried on a pair at Kennicott’s office. They really were much more comfortable.

Dr. Westlake, Sam Clark, Nat Hicks, and Del Snafflin were talking in Del’s barber shop.

“Well, I see Kennicott’s wife is taking a whirl at the restroom, now,” said Dr. Westlake. He emphasized the “now.”

Del interrupted the shaving of Sam and, with his brush dripping lather, he observed jocularly:

“What’ll she be up to next? They say she used to claim this burg wasn’t swell enough for a city girl like her, and would we please tax ourselves about thirty-seven point nine and fix it all up pretty, with tidies on the hydrants and statoos on the lawns⁠—”

Sam irritably blew the lather from his lips, with milky small bubbles, and snorted, “Be a good thing for most of us roughnecks if we did have a smart woman to tell us how to fix up the town. Just as much to her kicking as there was to Jim Blausser’s gassing about factories. And you can bet Mrs. Kennicott is smart, even if she is skittish. Glad to see her back.”

Dr. Westlake hastened to play safe. “So was I! So was I! She’s got a nice way about her, and she knows a good deal about books, or fiction anyway. Of course she’s like all the rest of these women⁠—not solidly founded⁠—not scholarly⁠—doesn’t know anything about political economy⁠—falls for every new idea that some windjamming crank puts out. But she’s a nice woman. She’ll probably fix up the restroom, and the restroom is a fine thing, brings a lot of business to town. And now that Mrs. Kennicott’s been away, maybe she’s got over some of her fool ideas. Maybe she realizes that folks simply laugh at her when she tries to tell us how to run everything.”

“Sure. She’ll take a tumble to herself,” said Nat Hicks, sucking in his lips judicially. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ll say she’s as nice a looking skirt as there is in town. But yow!” His tone electrified them. “Guess she’ll miss that Swede Valborg that used to work for me! They was a pair! Talking poetry and moonshine! If they could of got away with it, they’d of been so darn lovey-dovey⁠—”

Sam Clark interrupted, “Rats, they never even thought about making love, Just talking books and all that junk. I tell you, Carrie Kennicott’s a smart woman, and these smart educated women all get funny ideas, but they get over ’em after they’ve had three or four kids. You’ll see her settled down one of these days, and teaching Sunday School and helping at sociables and behaving herself, and not trying to butt into business and politics. Sure!”

After only fifteen minutes of conference on her stockings, her son, her separate bedroom, her music, her ancient interest in Guy Pollock, her probable salary in Washington, and every remark which she was known to have made since her return, the supreme council decided that they would permit Carol Kennicott to live, and they passed on to a consideration of Nat Hicks’s New One about the traveling salesman and the old maid.

For some reason which was totally mysterious to Carol, Maud Dyer seemed to resent her return. At the Jolly Seventeen Maud giggled nervously, “Well, I suppose you found war-work a good excuse to stay away and have a swell time. Juanita! Don’t you think we ought to make Carrie tell us about the officers she met in Washington?”

They rustled and stared. Carol looked at them. Their curiosity seemed natural and unimportant.

“Oh yes, yes indeed, have to do that some day,” she yawned.

She no longer took Aunt Bessie Smail seriously enough to struggle for independence. She saw that Aunt Bessie did not mean to intrude; that she wanted to do things for all the Kennicotts. Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it