II
She was thinking more sharply than she had for weeks.
She reverted to her resolution to change the town—awaken
it, prod it, "reform" it. What if they were wolves instead
of lambs? They'd eat her all the sooner if she was meek to
them. Fight or be eaten. It was easier to change the town
completely than to conciliate it! She could not take their point
of view; it was a negative thing; an intellectual squalor; a
swamp of prejudices and fears. She would have to make them
take hers. She was not a Vincent de Paul, to govern and
mold a people. What of that? The tiniest change in their
distrust of beauty would be the beginning of the end; a seed
to sprout and some day with thickening roots to crack their
wall of mediocrity. If she could not, as she desired, do a
great thing nobly and with laughter, yet she need not be content
with village nothingness. She would plant one seed in the
blank wall.
Was she just? Was it merely a blank wall, this town which
to three thousand and more people was the center of the
universe? Hadn't she, returning from Lac-qui-Meurt, felt the
heartiness of their greetings? No. The ten thousand Gopher
Prairies had no monopoly of greetings and friendly hands. Sam
Clark was no more loyal than girl librarians she knew in St.
Paul, the people she had met in Chicago. And those others
had so much that Gopher Prairie complacently lacked—the
world of gaiety and adventure, of music and the integrity of
bronze, of remembered mists from tropic isles and Paris nights
and the walls of Bagdad, of industrial justice and a God who
spake not in doggerel hymns.
One seed. Which seed it was did not matter. All knowledge
and freedom were one. But she had delayed so long in
finding that seed. Could she do something with this Thanatopsis
Club? Or should she make her house so charming that
it would be an influence? She'd make Kennicott like poetry.
That was it, for a beginning! She conceived so clear a picture
of their bending over large fair pages by the fire (in a
non-existent fireplace) that the spectral presences slipped away.
Doors no longer moved; curtains were not creeping shadows
but lovely dark masses in the dusk; and when Bea came home
Carol was singing at the piano which she had not touched for
many days.
Their supper was the feast of two girls. Carol was in the
dining-room, in a frock of black satin edged with gold, and Bea, in
blue gingham and an apron, dined in the kitchen; but the door was open
between, and Carol was inquiring, "Did you see any ducks in Dahl's
window?" and Bea chanting, "No, ma'am. Say, ve have a svell time, dis
afternoon. Tina she have coffee and knäckebröd, and
her fella vos dere, and ve yoost laughed and laughed, and her fella
say he vos president and he going to make me queen of Finland, and Ay
stick a fedder in may hair and say Ay bane going to go to var—oh, ve
vos so foolish and ve laugh so!"
When Carol sat at the piano again she did not think of
her husband but of the book-drugged hermit, Guy Pollock.
She wished that Pollock would come calling.
"If a girl really kissed him, he'd creep out of his den and
be human. If Will were as literate as Guy, or Guy were as
executive as Will, I think I could endure even Gopher Prairie. "It's
so hard to mother Will. I could be maternal with Guy. Is that what I
want, something to mother, a man or a baby or a town? I
will have a baby. Some day. But to have him
isolated here all his receptive years—
"And so to bed.
"Have I found my real level in Bea and kitchen-gossip?
"Oh, I do miss you, Will. But it will be pleasant to turn
over in bed as often as I want to, without worrying about
waking you up.
"Am I really this settled thing called a `married woman'?
I feel so unmarried tonight. So free. To think that there
was once a Mrs. Kennicott who let herself worry over a town
called Gopher Prairie when there was a whole world outside
it!
"Of course Will is going to like poetry."
