II
Carol drove through an astonishing number of books from
the public library and from city shops. Kennicott was at
first uncomfortable over her disconcerting habit of buying
them. A book was a book, and if you had several thousand
of them right here in the library, free, why the dickens should
you spend your good money? After worrying about it for
two or three years, he decided that this was one of the Funny
Ideas which she had caught as a librarian and from which
she would never entirely recover.
The authors whom she read were most of them frightfully
annoyed by the Vida Sherwins. They were young American
sociologists, young English realists, Russian horrorists; Anatole
France, Rolland, Nexo, Wells, Shaw, Key, Edgar Lee Masters,
Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Mencken, and
all the other subversive philosophers and artists whom women
were consulting everywhere, in batik-curtained studios in
New York, in Kansas farmhouses, San Francisco
drawing-rooms, Alabama schools for negroes. From them she got
the same confused desire which the million other women
felt; the same determination to be class-conscious without
discovering the class of which she was to be conscious.
Certainly her reading precipitated her observations of Main
Street, of Gopher Prairie and of the several adjacent Gopher
Prairies which she had seen on drives with Kennicott. In
her fluid thought certain convictions appeared, jaggedly, a
fragment of an impression at a time, while she was going to
sleep, or manicuring her nails, or waiting for Kennicott.
These convictions she presented to Vida Sherwin—Vida
Wutherspoon—beside a radiator, over a bowl of not very good
walnuts and pecans from Uncle Whittier's grocery, on an
evening when both Kennicott and Raymie had gone out of
town with the other officers of the Ancient and Affiliated Order
of Spartans, to inaugurate a new chapter at Wakamin. Vida
had come to the house for the night. She helped in putting
Hugh to bed, sputtering the while about his soft skin. Then
they talked till midnight.
What Carol said that evening, what she was passionately
thinking, was also emerging in the minds of women in ten
thousand Gopher Prairies. Her formulations were not pat
solutions but visions of a tragic futility. She did not utter
them so compactly that they can be given in her words; they
were roughened with "Well, you see" and "if you get what
I mean" and "I don't know that I'm making myself clear."
But they were definite enough, and indignant enough.
