VIII
She was in Washington; Kennicott was in Gopher Prairie,
writing as dryly as ever about water-pipes and goose-hunting
and Mrs. Fageros's mastoid.
She was talking at dinner to a generalissima of suffrage.
Should she return?
The leader spoke wearily:
"My dear, I'm perfectly selfish. I can't quite visualize the
needs of your husband, and it seems to me that your baby
will do quite as well in the schools here as in your barracks at
home."
"Then you think I'd better not go back?" Carol sounded
disappointed.
"It's more difficult than that. When I say that I'm selfish
I mean that the only thing I consider about women is whether
they're likely to prove useful in building up real political power
for women. And you? Shall I be frank? Remember when
I say `you' I don't mean you alone. I'm thinking of thousands
of women who come to Washington and New York and Chicago
every year, dissatisfied at home and seeking a sign in the
heavens—women of all sorts, from timid mothers of fifty in
cotton gloves, to girls just out of Vassar who organize strikes
in their own fathers' factories! All of you are more or less
useful to me, but only a few of you can take my place, because
I have one virtue (only one): I have given up father and
mother and children for the love of God.
"Here's the test for you: Do you come to `conquer the
East,' as people say, or do you come to conquer yourself?
"It's so much more complicated than any of you know—so
much more complicated than I knew when I put on Ground
Grippers and started out to reform the world. The final
complication in `conquering Washington' or `conquering New
York' is that the conquerors must beyond all things not
conquer! It must have been so easy in the good old days when
authors dreamed only of selling a hundred thousand volumes,
and sculptors of being fêted in big houses, and even the
Uplifters like me had a simple-hearted ambition to be elected to
important offices and invited to go round lecturing. But we
meddlers have upset everything. Now the one thing that is
disgraceful to any of us is obvious success. The Uplifter who
is very popular with wealthy patrons can be pretty sure that
he has softened his philosophy to please them, and the author
who is making lots of money—poor things, I've heard 'em
apologizing for it to the shabby bitter-enders; I've seen 'em
ashamed of the sleek luggage they got from movie rights.
"Do you want to sacrifice yourself in such a topsy-turvy
world, where popularity makes you unpopular with the people
you love, and the only failure is cheap success, and the only
individualist is the person who gives up all his individualism
to serve a jolly ungrateful proletariat which thumbs its nose at
him?"
Carol smiled ingratiatingly, to indicate that she was indeed
one who desired to sacrifice, but she sighed, "I don't know;
I'm afraid I'm not heroic. I certainly wasn't out home. Why
didn't I do big effective—"
"Not a matter of heroism. Matter of endurance. Your
Middlewest is double-Puritan—prairie Puritan on top of New
England Puritan; bluff frontiersman on the surface, but in its
heart it still has the ideal of Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm.
There's one attack you can make on it, perhaps the only kind
that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on looking
at one thing after another in your home and church and bank,
and ask why it is, and who first laid down the law that it had
to be that way. If enough of us do this impolitely enough,
then we'll become civilized in merely twenty thousand years
or so, instead of having to wait the two hundred thousand
years that my cynical anthropologist friends allow. . . .
Easy, pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives: asking people
to define their jobs. That's the most dangerous doctrine I
know!"
Carol was mediating, "I will go back! I will go on asking
questions. I've always done it, and always failed at it, and it's
all I can do. I'm going to ask Ezra Stowbody why he's
opposed to the nationalization of railroads, and ask Dave Dyer
why a druggist always is pleased when he's called `doctor,'
and maybe ask Mrs. Bogart why she wears a widow's veil that
looks like a dead crow."
The woman leader straightened. "And you have one thing.
You have a baby to hug. That's my temptation. I dream of
babies—of a baby—and I sneak around parks to see them
playing. (The children in Dupont Circle are like a
poppy-garden.) And the antis call me `unsexed'!"
Carol was thinking, in panic, "Oughtn't Hugh to have
country air? I won't let him become a yokel. I can guide
him away from street-corner loafing. . . . I think I can."
On her way home: "Now that I've made a precedent, joined
the union and gone out on one strike and learned personal
solidarity, I won't be so afraid. Will won't always be resisting
my running away. Some day I really will go to Europe with
him . . . or without him.
"I've lived with people who are not afraid to go to jail.
I could invite a Miles Bjornstam to dinner without being
afraid of the Haydocks . . . I think I could.
"I'll take back the sound of Yvette Guilbert's songs and
Elman's violin. They'll be only the lovelier against the thrumming
of crickets in the stubble on an autumn day.
"I can laugh now and be serene . . . I think I can."
Though she should return, she said, she would not be utterly
defeated. She was glad of her rebellion. The prairie was no
longer empty land in the sun-glare; it was the living tawny
beast which she had fought and made beautiful by fighting;
and in the village streets were shadows of her desires and the
sound of her marching and the seeds of mystery and greatness.