IV
The tragicomedy of the "domestic situation."
Oscarina went back home to help on the farm, and Carol had
a succession of maids, with gaps between. The lack of servants
was becoming one of the most cramping problems of the prairie
town. Increasingly the farmers' daughters rebelled against
village dullness, and against the unchanged attitude of the
Juanitas toward "hired girls." They went off to city kitchens,
or to city shops and factories, that they might be free and
even human after hours.
The Jolly Seventeen were delighted at Carol's desertion by
the loyal Oscarina. They reminded her that she had said, "I
don't have any trouble with maids; see how Oscarina stays on."
Between incumbencies of Finn maids from the North Woods,
Germans from the prairies, occasional Swedes and Norwegians
and Icelanders, Carol did her own work—and endured Aunt
Bessie's skittering in to tell her how to dampen a broom for
fluffy dust, how to sugar doughnuts, how to stuff a goose.
Carol was deft, and won shy praise from Kennicott, but as her
shoulder blades began to sting, she wondered how many
millions of women had lied to themselves during the
death-rimmed years through which they had pretended to enjoy the
puerile methods persisting in housework.
She doubted the convenience and, as a natural sequent, the
sanctity of the monogamous and separate home which she had
regarded as the basis of all decent life.
She considered her doubts vicious. She refused to remember
how many of the women of the Jolly Seventeen nagged their
husbands and were nagged by them.
She energetically did not whine to Kennicott. But her eyes
ached; she was not the girl in breeches and a flannel shirt who
had cooked over a camp-fire in the Colorado mountains five
years ago. Her ambition was to get to bed at nine; her
strongest emotion was resentment over rising at half-past six
to care for Hugh. The back of her neck ached as she got out
of bed. She was cynical about the joys of a simple laborious
life. She understood why workmen and workmen's wives are
not grateful to their kind employers.
At mid-morning, when she was momentarily free from the
ache in her neck and back, she was glad of the reality of
work. The hours were living and nimble. But she had no
desire to read the eloquent little newspaper essays in praise of
labor which are daily written by the white-browed journalistic
prophets. She felt independent and (though she hid it)
a bit surly.
In cleaning the house she pondered upon the maid's-room.
It was a slant-roofed, small-windowed hole above the kitchen,
oppressive in summer, frigid in winter. She saw that while
she had been considering herself an unusually good mistress,
she had been permitting her friends Bea and Oscarina to live
in a sty. She complained to Kennicott. "What's the matter
with it?" he growled, as they stood on the perilous stairs
dodging up from the kitchen. She commented upon the sloping
roof of unplastered boards stained in brown rings by the
rain, the uneven floor, the cot and its tumbled
discouraged-looking quilts, the broken rocker, the distorting mirror.
"Maybe it ain't any Hotel Radisson parlor, but still, it's
so much better than anything these hired girls are accustomed
to at home that they think it's fine. Seems foolish to spend
money when they wouldn't appreciate it."
But that night he drawled, with the casualness of a man who
wishes to be surprising and delightful, "Carrie, don't know
but what we might begin to think about building a new
house, one of these days. How'd you like that?"
"W-why—"
"I'm getting to the point now where I feel we can afford
one—and a corker! I'll show this burg something like a real
house! We'll put one over on Sam and Harry! Make folks
sit up an' take notice!"
"Yes," she said.
He did not go on.
Daily he returned to the subject of the new house, but as
to time and mode he was indefinite. At first she believed.
She babbled of a low stone house with lattice windows and
tulip-beds, of colonial brick, of a white frame cottage with
green shutters and dormer windows. To her enthusiasms he
answered, "Well, ye-es, might be worth thinking about.
Remember where I put my pipe?" When she pressed him he
fidgeted, "I don't know; seems to me those kind of houses you
speak of have been overdone."
It proved that what he wanted was a house exactly like
Sam Clark's, which was exactly like every third new house in
every town in the country: a square, yellow stolidity with immaculate
clapboards, a broad screened porch, tidy grass-plots,
and concrete walks; a house resembling the mind of a
merchant who votes the party ticket straight and goes to church
once a month and owns a good car.
He admitted, "Well, yes, maybe it isn't so darn artistic
but— Matter of fact, though, I don't want a place just like
Sam's. Maybe I would cut off that fool tower he's got, and
I think probably it would look better painted a nice cream
color. That yellow on Sam's house is too kind of flashy.
Then there's another kind of house that's mighty nice and
substantial-looking, with shingles, in a nice brown stain,
instead of clapboards—seen some in Minneapolis. You're way
off your base when you say I only like one kind of house!"
Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie came in one evening when
Carol was sleepily advocating a rose-garden cottage.
"You've had a lot of experience with housekeeping, aunty,
and don't you think," Kennicott appealed, "that it would be
sensible to have a nice square house, and pay more attention
to getting a crackajack furnace than to all this architecture
and doodads?"
Aunt Bessie worked her lips as though they were an elastic
band. "Why of course! I know how it is with young folks
like you, Carrie; you want towers and bay-windows and pianos
and heaven knows what all, but the thing to get is closets and
a good furnace and a handy place to hang out the washing, and
the rest don't matter."
Uncle Whittier dribbled a little, put his face near to Carol's,
and sputtered, "Course it don't! What d'you care what folks
think about the outside of your house? It's the inside you're
living in. None of my business, but I must say you young
folks that'd rather have cakes than potatoes get me riled."
She reached her room before she became savage. Below,
dreadfully near, she could hear the broom-swish of Aunt
Bessie's voice, and the mop-pounding of Uncle Whittier's
grumble. She had a reasonless dread that they would
intrude on her, then a fear that she would yield to Gopher
Prairie's conception of duty toward an Aunt Bessie and go
down-stairs to be "nice." She felt the demand for standardized
behavior coming in waves from all the citizens who sat
in their sitting-rooms watching her with respectable eyes,
waiting, demanding, unyielding. She snarled, "Oh, all right,
I'll go!" She powdered her nose, straightened her collar,
and coldly marched down-stairs. The three elders ignored
her. They had advanced from the new house to agreeable
general fussing. Aunt Bessie was saying, in a tone like the
munching of dry toast:
"I do think Mr. Stowbody ought to have had the rain-pipe
fixed at our store right away. I went to see him on Tuesday
morning before ten, no, it was couple minutes after ten, but
anyway, it was long before noon—I know because I went right
from the bank to the meat market to get some steak—my! I
think it's outrageous, the prices Oleson & McGuire charge for
their meat, and it isn't as if they gave you a good cut either
but just any old thing, and I had time to get it, and I
stopped in at Mrs. Bogart's to ask about her rheumatism—"
Carol was watching Uncle Whittier. She knew from his
taut expression that he was not listening to Aunt Bessie but
herding his own thoughts, and that he would interrupt her
bluntly. He did:
"Will, where c'n I get an extra pair of pants for this coat
and vest? D' want to pay too much."
"Well, guess Nat Hicks could make you up a pair. But
if I were you, I'd drop into Ike Rifkin's—his prices are lower
than the Bon Ton's."
"Humph. Got the new stove in your office yet?"
"No, been looking at some at Sam Clark's but—"
"Well, y' ought get 't in. Don't do to put off getting a
stove all summer, and then have it come cold on you in the
fall."
Carol smiled upon them ingratiatingly. "Do you dears
mind if I slip up to bed? I'm rather tired—cleaned the
upstairs today."
She retreated. She was certain that they were discussing
her, and foully forgiving her. She lay awake till she heard the
distant creak of a bed which indicated that Kennicott had
retired. Then she felt safe.
It was Kennicott who brought up the matter of the Smails
at breakfast. With no visible connection he said, "Uncle
Whit is kind of clumsy, but just the same, he's a pretty wise
old coot. He's certainly making good with the store."
Carol smiled, and Kennicott was pleased that she had come
to her senses. "As Whit says, after all the first thing is to
have the inside of a house right, and darn the people on the
outside looking in!"
It seemed settled that the house was to be a sound example
of the Sam Clark school.
Kennicott made much of erecting it entirely for her and the
baby. He spoke of closets for her frocks, and "a comfy
sewing-room." But when he drew on a leaf from an old
account-book (he was a paper-saver and a string-picker) the plans for
the garage, he gave much more attention to a cement floor
and a work-bench and a gasoline-tank than he had to
sewing-rooms.
She sat back and was afraid.
In the present rookery there were odd things—a step up
from the hall to the dining-room, a picturesqueness in the shed
and bedraggled lilac bush. But the new place would be smooth,
standardized, fixed. It was probable, now that Kennicott was
past forty, and settled, that this would be the last venture
he would ever make in building. So long as she stayed in this
ark, she would always have a possibility of change, but once
she was in the new house, there she would sit for all the rest
of her life—there she would die. Desperately she wanted to
put it off, against the chance of miracles. While Kennicott
was chattering about a patent swing-door for the garage she
saw the swing-doors of a prison.
She never voluntarily returned to the project. Aggrieved,
Kennicott stopped drawing plans, and in ten days the new
house was forgotten.
