I
GRAY steel that seems unmoving because it spins so fast in the
balanced fly-wheel, gray snow in an avenue of elms, gray dawn
with the sun behind it—this was the gray of Vida Sherwin's
life at thirty-six.
She was small and active and sallow; her yellow hair was
faded, and looked dry; her blue silk blouses and modest
lace collars and high black shoes and sailor hats were as literal
and uncharming as a schoolroom desk; but her eyes determined
her appearance, revealed her as a personage and a force,
indicated her faith in the goodness and purpose of everything.
They were blue, and they were never still; they expressed
amusement, pity, enthusiasm. If she had been seen in sleep,
with the wrinkles beside her eyes stilled and the creased lids
hiding the radiant irises, she would have lost her potency.
She was born in a hill-smothered Wisconsin village where
her father was a prosy minister; she labored through a
sanctimonious college; she taught for two years in an iron-range
town of blurry-faced Tatars and Montenegrins, and wastes of
ore, and when she came to Gopher Prairie, its trees and the
shining spaciousness of the wheat prairie made her certain
that she was in paradise.
She admitted to her fellow-teachers that the schoolbuilding
was slightly damp, but she insisted that the rooms were
"arranged so conveniently—and then that bust of President
McKinley at the head of the stairs, it's a lovely art-work, and
isn't it an inspiration to have the brave, honest, martyr
president to think about!" She taught French, English, and
history, and the Sophomore Latin class, which dealt in matters
of a metaphysical nature called Indirect Discourse and the
Ablative Absolute. Each year she was reconvinced that the
pupils were beginning to learn more quickly. She spent four
winters in building up the Debating Society, and when the
debate really was lively one Friday afternoon, and the speakers
of pieces did not forget their lines, she felt rewarded.
She lived an engrossed useful life, and seemed as cool and
simple as an apple. But secretly she was creeping among fears,
longing, and guilt. She knew what it was, but she dared not
name it. She hated even the sound of the word "sex." When
she dreamed of being a woman of the harem, with great white
warm limbs, she awoke to shudder, defenseless in the dusk of
her room. She prayed to Jesus, always to the Son of God,
offering him the terrible power of her adoration, addressing him
as the eternal lover, growing passionate, exalted, large, as she
contemplated his splendor. Thus she mounted to endurance
and surcease.
By day, rattling about in many activities, she was able to
ridicule her blazing nights of darkness. With spurious
cheerfulness she announced everywhere, "I guess I'm a born
spinster," and "No one will ever marry a plain schoolma'am like
me," and "You men, great big noisy bothersome creatures,
we women wouldn't have you round the place, dirtying up nice
clean rooms, if it wasn't that you have to be petted and
guided. We just ought to say `Scat!' to all of you!"
But when a man held her close at a dance, even when
"Professor" George Edwin Mott patted her hand paternally
as they considered the naughtinesses of Cy Bogart, she quivered,
and reflected how superior she was to have kept her
virginity.
In the autumn of 1911, a year before Dr. Will Kennicott
was married, Vida was his partner at a five-hundred tournament.
She was thirty-four then; Kennicott about thirty-six.
To her he was a superb, boyish, diverting creature; all the
heroic qualities in a manly magnificent body. They had
been helping the hostess to serve the Waldorf salad and coffee
and gingerbread. They were in the kitchen, side by side on
a bench, while the others ponderously supped in the room
beyond.
Kennicott was masculine and experimental. He stroked
Vida's hand, he put his arm carelessly about her shoulder.
"Don't!" she said sharply.
"You're a cunning thing," he offered, patting the back of
her shoulder in an exploratory manner.
While she strained away, she longed to move nearer to him.
He bent over, looked at her knowingly. She glanced down at
his left hand as it touched her knee. She sprang up, started
noisily and needlessly to wash the dishes. He helped her. He
was too lazy to adventure further—and too used to women in
his profession. She was grateful for the impersonality of his
talk. It enabled her to gain control. She knew that she had
skirted wild thoughts.
A month after, on a sleighing-party, under the buffalo robes
in the bob-sled, he whispered, "You pretend to be a grown-up
schoolteacher, but you're nothing but a kiddie." His arm
was about her. She resisted.
"Don't you like the poor lonely bachelor?" he yammered in
a fatuous way.
"No, I don't! You don't care for me in the least. You're
just practising on me."
"You're so mean! I'm terribly fond of you."
"I'm not of you. And I'm not going to let myself be fond
of you, either."
He persistently drew her toward him. She clutched his arm.
Then she threw off the robe, climbed out of the sled, raced after
it with Harry Haydock. At the dance which followed the
sleigh-ride Kennicott was devoted to the watery prettiness of
Maud Dyer, and Vida was noisily interested in getting up a
Virginia Reel. Without seeming to watch Kennicott, she knew
that he did not once look at her.
That was all of her first love-affair.
He gave no sign of remembering that he was "terribly fond."
She waited for him; she reveled in longing, and in a sense of
guilt because she longed. She told herself that she did not
want part of him; unless he gave her all his devotion she would
never let him touch her; and when she found that she was
probably lying, she burned with scorn. She fought it out in
prayer. She knelt in a pink flannel nightgown, her thin
hair down her back, her forehead as full of horror as a mask
of tragedy, while she identified her love for the Son of God
with her love for a mortal, and wondered if any other woman
had ever been so sacrilegious. She wanted to be a nun
and observe perpetual adoration. She bought a rosary, but
she had been so bitterly reared as a Protestant that she could
not bring herself to use it.
Yet none of her intimates in the school and in the
boarding-house knew of her abyss of passion. They said she was "so
optimistic."
When she heard that Kennicott was to marry a girl, pretty,
young, and imposingly from the Cities, Vida despaired. She
congratulated Kennicott; carelessly ascertained from him the
hour of marriage. At that hour, sitting in her room, Vida
pictured the wedding in St. Paul. Full of an ecstasy which
horrified her, she followed Kennicott and the girl who had stolen
her place, followed them to the train, through the evening,
the night.
She was relieved when she had worked out a belief that she
wasn't really shameful, that there was a mystical relation
between herself and Carol, so that she was vicariously yet
veritably with Kennicott, and had the right to be.
She saw Carol during the first five minutes in Gopher Prairie.
She stared at the passing motor, at Kennicott and the girl
beside him. In that fog world of transference of emotion Vida
had no normal jealousy but a conviction that, since through
Carol she had received Kennicott's love, then Carol was a part
of her, an astral self, a heightened and more beloved self.
She was glad of the girl's charm, of the smooth black hair,
the airy head and young shoulders. But she was suddenly
angry. Carol glanced at her for a quarter-second, but looked
past her, at an old roadside barn. If she had made the great
sacrifice, at least she expected gratitude and recognition, Vida
raged, while her conscious schoolroom mind fussily begged
her to control this insanity.
During her first call half of her wanted to welcome a fellow
reader of books; the other half itched to find out whether
Carol knew anything about Kennicott's former interest in
herself. She discovered that Carol was not aware that he had
ever touched another woman's hand. Carol was an amusing,
naive, curiously learned child. While Vida was most actively
describing the glories of the Thanatopsis, and complimenting
this librarian on her training as a worker, she was fancying
that this girl was the child born of herself and Kennicott; and
out of that symbolizing she had a comfort she had not known
for months.
When she came home, after supper with the Kennicotts and
Guy Pollock, she had a sudden and rather pleasant backsliding
from devotion. She bustled into her room, she slammed her
hat on the bed, and chattered, "I don't care! I'm
a lot like
her—except a few years older. I'm light and quick, too, and
I can talk just as well as she can, and I'm sure— Men are
such fools. I'd be ten times as sweet to make love to as that
dreamy baby. And I am as good-looking!"
But as she sat on the bed and stared at her thin thighs,
defiance oozed away. She mourned:
"No. I'm not. Dear God, how we fool ourselves! I pretend
I'm `spiritual.' I pretend my legs are graceful. They
aren't. They're skinny. Old-maidish. I hate it! I hate that
impertinent young woman! A selfish cat, taking his love
for granted. . . . No, she's adorable. . . . I don't
think she ought to be so friendly with Guy Pollock."
For a year Vida loved Carol, longed to and did not pry into
the details of her relations with Kennicotts enjoyed her spirit
of play as expressed in childish tea-parties, and, with the
mystic bond between them forgotten, was healthily vexed by
Carol's assumption that she was a sociological messiah come
to save Gopher Prairie. This last facet of Vida's thought was
the one which, after a year, was most often turned to the
light. In a testy way she brooded, "These people that want
to change everything all of a sudden without doing any work,
make me tired! Here I have to go and work for four years,
picking out the pupils for debates, and drilling them, and
nagging at them to get them to look up references, and begging
them to choose their own subjects—four years, to get up a
couple of good debates! And she comes rushing in, and expects
in one year to change the whole town into a lollypop paradise
with everybody stopping everything else to grow tulips and
drink tea. And it's a comfy homey old town, too!"
She had such an outburst after each of Carol's campaigns—
for better Thanatopsis programs, for Shavian plays, for more
human schools—but she never betrayed herself, and always she
was penitent.
Vida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal. She
believed that details could excitingly be altered, but that
things-in-general were comely and kind and immutable. Carol
was, without understanding or accepting it, a revolutionist, a
radical, and therefore possessed of "constructive ideas," which
only the destroyer can have, since the reformer believes that
all the essential constructing has already been done. After
years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more than
the fancied loss of Kennicott's love which held Vida irritably
fascinated.
But the birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion.
She was indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in
having borne Kennicott's child. She admitted that Carol
seemed to have affection and immaculate care for the baby,
but she began to identify herself now with Kennicott, and in
this phase to feel that she had endured quite too much from
Carol's instability.
She recalled certain other women who had come from
the Outside and had not appreciated Gopher Prairie. She
remembered the rector's wife who had been chilly to callers
and who was rumored throughout the town to have said,
"Re-ah-ly I cawn't endure this bucolic heartiness in the
responses." The woman was positively known to have worn
handkerchiefs in her bodice as padding—oh, the town had
simply roared at her. Of course the rector and she were
got rid of in a few months.
Then there was the mysterious woman with the dyed hair
and penciled eyebrows, who wore tight English dresses, like
basques, who smelled of stale musk, who flirted with the men
and got them to advance money for her expenses in a lawsuit,
who laughed at Vida's reading at a school-entertainment,
and went off owing a hotel-bill and the three hundred dollars
she had borrowed.
Vida insisted that she loved Carol, but with some satisfaction
she compared her to these traducers of the town.