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

mind their being democrats, so much, but I won’t stand having socialists around. But thank God, we ain’t got the labor trouble they have in these cities. Even Jack Elder here gets along pretty well, in the planing-mill, don’t you, Jack?”

“Yep. Sure. Don’t need so many skilled workmen in my place, and it’s a lot of these cranky, wage-hogging, half-baked skilled mechanics that start trouble⁠—reading a lot of this anarchist literature and union papers and all.”

“Do you approve of union labor?” Carol inquired of Mr. Elder.

“Me? I should say not! It’s like this: I don’t mind dealing with my men if they think they’ve got any grievances⁠—though Lord knows what’s come over workmen, nowadays⁠—don’t appreciate a good job. But still, if they come to me honestly, as man to man, I’ll talk things over with them. But I’m not going to have any outsider, any of these walking delegates, or whatever fancy names they call themselves now⁠—bunch of rich grafters, living on the ignorant workmen! Not going to have any of those fellows butting in and telling me how to run my business!”

Mr. Elder was growing more excited, more belligerent and patriotic. “I stand for freedom and constitutional rights. If any man don’t like my shop, he can get up and git. Same way, if I don’t like him, he gits. And that’s all there is to it. I simply can’t understand all these complications and hoop-te-doodles and government reports and wage-scales and God knows what all that these fellows are balling up the labor situation with, when it’s all perfectly simple. They like what I pay ’em, or they get out. That’s all there is to it!”

“What do you think of profit-sharing?” Carol ventured.

Mr. Elder thundered his answer, while the others nodded, solemnly and in tune, like a shopwindow of flexible toys, comic mandarins and judges and ducks and clowns, set quivering by a breeze from the open door:

“All this profit-sharing and welfare work and insurance and old-age pension is simply poppycock. Enfeebles a workman’s independence⁠—and wastes a lot of honest profit. The half-baked thinker that isn’t dry behind the ears yet, and these suffragettes and God knows what all buttinskis there are that are trying to tell a business man how to run his business, and some of these college professors are just about as bad, the whole kit and bilin’ of ’em are nothing in God’s world but socialism in disguise! And it’s my bounden duty as a producer to resist every attack on the integrity of American industry to the last ditch. Yes⁠—sir!”

Mr. Elder wiped his brow.

Dave Dyer added, “Sure! You bet! What they ought to do is simply to hang every one of these agitators, and that would settle the whole thing right off. Don’t you think so, doc?”

“You bet,” agreed Kennicott.

The conversation was at last relieved of the plague of Carol’s intrusions and they settled down to the question of whether the justice of the peace had sent that hobo drunk to jail for ten days or twelve. It was a matter not readily determined. Then Dave Dyer communicated his carefree adventures on the gipsy trail:

“Yep. I get good time out of the flivver. ’Bout a week ago I motored down to New Wurttemberg. That’s forty-three⁠—No, let’s see: It’s seventeen miles to Belldale, and ’bout six and three-quarters, call it seven, to Torgenquist, and it’s a good nineteen miles from there to New Wurttemberg⁠—seventeen and seven and nineteen, that makes, uh, let me see: seventeen and seven’s twenty-four, plus nineteen, well say plus twenty, that makes forty-four, well anyway, say about forty-three or -four miles from here to New Wurttemberg. We got started about seven-fifteen, prob’ly seven-twenty, because I had to stop and fill the radiator, and we ran along, just keeping up a good steady gait⁠—”

Mr. Dyer did finally, for reasons and purposes admitted and justified, attain to New Wurttemberg.

Once⁠—only once⁠—the presence of the alien Carol was recognized. Chet Dashaway leaned over and said asthmatically, “Say, uh, have you been reading this serial ‘Two Out’ in Tingling Tales? Corking yarn! Gosh, the fellow that wrote it certainly can sling baseball slang!”

The others tried to look literary. Harry Haydock offered, “Juanita is a great hand for reading high-class stuff, like Mid the Magnolias by this Sara Hetwiggin Butts, and Riders of Ranch Reckless. Books. But me,” he glanced about importantly, as one convinced that no other hero had ever been in so strange a plight, “I’m so darn busy I don’t have much time to read.”

“I never read anything I can’t check against,” said Sam Clark.

Thus ended the literary portion of the conversation, and for seven minutes Jackson Elder outlined reasons for believing that the pike-fishing was better on the west shore of Lake Minniemashie than on the east⁠—though it was indeed quite true that on the east shore Nat Hicks had caught a pike altogether admirable.

The talk went on. It did go on! Their voices were monotonous, thick, emphatic. They were harshly pompous, like men in the smoking-compartments of Pullman cars. They did not bore Carol. They frightened her. She panted, “They will be cordial to me, because my man belongs to their tribe. God help me if I were an outsider!”

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 said, “Dandy interior, eh? My idea of how a place ought to be furnished. Modern.” She looked polite, and observed the oiled floors, hardwood staircase, unused fireplace with tiles which resembled brown linoleum, cut-glass vases standing upon doilies, and the barred, shut, forbidding unit bookcases that were half filled with swashbuckler novels and unread-looking sets of Dickens, Kipling, O. Henry, and Elbert Hubbard.

She perceived that even personalities were failing to hold the party. The room filled with hesitancy as with a fog. People cleared their throats, tried to choke down yawns. The men shot their cuffs and the women stuck their combs more firmly into their back