III
Her first acquaintances were the members of the Tincomb
Methodist Church, a vast red-brick tabernacle. Vida Sherwin
had given her a letter to an earnest woman with eye-glasses,
plaid silk waist, and a belief in Bible Classes, who introduced
her to the Pastor and the Nicer Members of Tincomb. Carol
recognized in Washington as she had in California a transplanted
and guarded Main Street. Two-thirds of the
church-members had come from Gopher Prairies. The church was
their society and their standard; they went to Sunday service,
Sunday School, Christian Endeavor, missionary lectures, church
suppers, precisely as they had at home; they agreed that
ambassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidel scientists of
the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; and by
cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ideals from all
contamination.
They welcomed Carol, asked about her husband, gave her
advice regarding colic in babies, passed her the gingerbread
and scalloped potatoes at church suppers, and in general made
her very unhappy and lonely, so that she wondered if she
might not enlist in the militant suffrage organization and be
allowed to go to jail.
Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she
would have perceived in New York or London) a thick streak
of Main Street. The cautious dullness of a Gopher Prairie
appeared in boarding-houses where ladylike bureau-clerks
gossiped to polite young army officers about the movies; a
thousand Sam Clarks and a few Widow Bogarts were to be
identified in the Sunday motor procession, in theater parties, and
at the dinners of State Societies, to which the emigrés from
Texas or Michigan surged that they might confirm themselves
in the faith that their several Gopher Prairies were notoriously
"a whole lot peppier and chummier than this stuck-up East."
But she found a Washington which did not cleave to Main
Street.
Guy Pollock wrote to a cousin, a temporary army captain, a
confiding and buoyant lad who took Carol to tea-dances, and
laughed, as she had always wanted some one to laugh, about
nothing in particular. The captain introduced her to the
secretary of a congressman, a cynical young widow with many
acquaintances in the navy. Through her Carol met commanders
and majors, newspapermen, chemists and geographers and fiscal
experts from the bureaus, and a teacher who was a familiar
of the militant suffrage headquarters. The teacher took her
to headquarters. Carol never became a prominent suffragist.
Indeed her only recognized position was as an able addresser
of envelopes. But she was casually adopted by this family
of friendly women who, when they were not being mobbed or
arrested, took dancing lessons or went picnicking up the
Chesapeake Canal or talked about the politics of the American
Federation of Labor.
With the congressman's secretary and the teacher Carol
leased a small flat. Here she found home, her own place and
her own people. She had, though it absorbed most of her
salary, an excellent nurse for Hugh. She herself put him to
bed and played with him on holidays. There were walks with
him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chiefly
Washington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting
about the flat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but
always excitedly. It was not at all the "artist's studio" of
which, because of its persistence in fiction, she had dreamed.
Most of them were in offices all day, and thought more in
card-catalogues or statistics than in mass and color. But they
played, very simply, and they saw no reason why anything
which exists cannot also be acknowledged.
She was sometimes shocked quite as she had shocked Gopher
Prairie by these girls with their cigarettes and elfish knowledge.
When they were most eager about soviets or canoeing, she
listened, longed to have some special learning which would
distinguish her, and sighed that her adventure had come so
late. Kennicott and Main Street had drained her self-reliance;
the presence of Hugh made her feel temporary. Some day—
oh, she'd have to take him back to open fields and the right
to climb about hay-lofts.
But the fact that she could never be eminent among these
scoffing enthusiasts did not keep her from being proud of
them, from defending them in imaginary conversations with
Kennicott, who grunted (she could hear his voice), "They're
simply a bunch of wild impractical theorists sittin' round
chewing the rag," and "I haven't got the time to chase after
a lot of these fool fads; I'm too busy putting aside a stake for
our old age."
Most of the men who came to the flat, whether they were
army officers or radicals who hated the army, had the easy
gentleness, the acceptance of women without embarrassed
banter, for which she had longed in Gopher Prairie. Yet they
seemed to be as efficient as the Sam Clarks. She concluded
that it was because they were of secure reputation, not hemmed
in by the fire of provincial jealousies. Kennicott had asserted
that the villager's lack of courtesy is due to his poverty.
"We're no millionaire dudes," he boasted. Yet these army
and navy men, these bureau experts, and organizers of
multitudinous leagues, were cheerful on three or four thousand a
year, while Kennicott had, outside of his land speculations,
six thousand or more, and Sam had eight.
Nor could she upon inquiry learn that many of this reckless
race died in the poorhouse. That institution is reserved for
men like Kennicott who, after devoting fifty years to "putting
aside a stake," incontinently invest the stake in spurious
oil-stocks.