III
A black February day. Clouds hewn of ponderous timber
weighing down on the earth; an irresolute dropping of snow
specks upon the trampled wastes. Gloom but no veiling of
angularity. The lines of roofs and sidewalks sharp and
inescapable.
The second day of Kennicott's absence.
She fled from the creepy house for a walk. It was thirty
below zero; too cold to exhilarate her. In the spaces between
houses the wind caught her. It stung, it gnawed at nose and
ears and aching cheeks, and she hastened from shelter to
shelter, catching her breath in the lee of a barn, grateful for
the protection of a billboard covered with ragged posters showing
layer under layer of paste-smeared green and streaky red.
The grove of oaks at the end of the street suggested Indians,
hunting, snow-shoes, and she struggled past the earth-banked
cottages to the open country, to a farm and a low hill
corrugated with hard snow. In her loose nutria coat, seal
toque, virginal cheeks unmarked by lines of village jealousies,
she was as out of place on this dreary hillside as a scarlet
tanager on an ice-floe. She looked down on Gopher Prairie.
The snow, stretching without break from streets to devouring
prairie beyond, wiped out the town's pretense of being a shelter.
The houses were black specks on a white sheet. Her heart
shivered with that still loneliness as her body shivered with
the wind.
She ran back into the huddle of streets, all the while
protesting that she wanted a city's yellow glare of shop-windows
and restaurants, or the primitive forest with hooded furs and
a rifle, or a barnyard warm and steamy, noisy with hens and
cattle, certainly not these dun houses, these yards choked with
winter ash-piles, these roads of dirty snow and clotted frozen
mud. The zest of winter was gone. Three months more, till
May, the cold might drag on, with the snow ever filthier, the
weakened body less resistent. She wondered why the good
citizens insisted on adding the chill of prejudice, why they
did not make the houses of their spirits more warm and frivolous,
like the wise chatterers of Stockholm and Moscow.
She circled the outskirts of the town and viewed the slum
of "Swede Hollow." Wherever as many as three houses are
gathered there will be a slum of at least one house. In
Gopher Prairie, the Sam Clarks boasted, "you don't get any of
this poverty that you find in cities—always plenty of work—
no need of charity—man got to be blame shiftless if he don't
get ahead." But now that the summer mask of leaves and
grass was gone, Carol discovered misery and dead hope. In
a shack of thin boards covered with tar-paper she saw the
washerwoman, Mrs. Steinhof, working in gray steam. Outside,
her six-year-old boy chopped wood. He had a torn jacket,
muffler of a blue like skimmed milk. His hands were covered
with red mittens through which protruded his chapped raw
knuckles. He halted to blow on them, to cry disinterestedly.
A family of recently arrived Finns were camped in an
abandoned stable. A man of eighty was picking up lumps of coal
along the railroad.
She did not know what to do about it. She felt that these
independent citizens, who had been taught that they belonged
to a democracy, would resent her trying to play Lady
Bountiful.
She lost her loneliness in the activity of the village
industries—the railroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the
wheat-elevator, oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks
on the snow, the creamery with the sleds of farmers and piles
of milk-cans, an unexplained stone hut labeled "Danger-.
Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard, where a
utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as he
hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's
small planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and
the burr of circular saws. Most important, the Gopher Prairie
Flour and Milling Company, Lyman, Cass president. Its windows
were blanketed with flour-dust, but it was the most
stirring spot in town. Workmen were wheeling barrels of flour
into a box-car; a farmer sitting on sacks of wheat in a bobsled
argued with the wheat-buyer; machinery within the mill
boomed and whined, water gurgled in the ice-freed mill-race.
The clatter was a relief to Carol after months of smug
houses. She wished that she could work in the mill; that
she did not belong to the caste of professional-man's-wife.
She started for home, through the small slum. Before a
tar-paper shack, at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown
dogskin coat and black plush cap with lappets was watching
her. His square face was confident, his foxy mustache was
picaresque. He stood erect, his hands in his side-pockets, his
pipe puffing slowly. He was forty-five or -six, perhaps.
"How do, Mrs. Kennicott," he drawled.
She recalled him—the town handyman, who had repaired
their furnace at the beginning of winter.
"Oh, how do you do," she fluttered.
"My name 's Bjornstam. `The Red Swede' they call me.
Remember? Always thought I'd kind of like to say howdy
to you again."
"Ye—yes— I've been exploring the outskirts of town."
"Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and
the Lutheran minister and the priest represent the arts and
sciences. Well, thunder, we submerged tenth down here in
Swede Hollow are no worse off than you folks. Thank God,
we don't have to go and purr at Juanity Haydock at the
Jolly Old Seventeen."
The Carol who regarded herself as completely adaptable
was uncomfortable at being chosen as comrade by a
pipe-reeking odd-job man. Probably he was one of her husband's
patients. But she must keep her dignity.
"Yes, even the Jolly Seventeen isn't always so exciting.
It's very cold again today, isn't it. Well—"
Bjornstam was not respectfully valedictory. He showed no
signs of pulling a forelock. His eyebrows moved as though
they had a life of their own. With a subgrin he went on:
"Maybe I hadn't ought to talk about Mrs. Haydock and
her Solemcholy Seventeen in that fresh way. I suppose I'd
be tickled to death if I was invited to sit in with that gang.
I'm what they call a pariah, I guess. I'm the town badman,
Mrs. Kennicott: town atheist, and I suppose I must be an
anarchist, too. Everybody who doesn't love the bankers and
the Grand Old Republican Party is an anarchist."
Carol had unconsciously slipped from her attitude of
departure into an attitude of listening, her face full toward him,
her muff lowered. She fumbled:
"Yes, I suppose so." Her own grudges came in a flood. "I
don't see why you shouldn't criticize the Jolly Seventeen if
you want to. They aren't sacred."
"Oh yes, they are! The dollar-sign has chased the crucifix
clean off the map. But then, I've got no kick. I do what
I please, and I suppose I ought to let them do the same."
"What do you mean by saying you're a pariah?"
"I'm poor, and yet I don't decently envy the rich. I'm an
old bach. I make enough money for a stake, and then I sit
around by myself, and shake hands with myself, and have a
smoke, and read history, and I don't contribute to the wealth
of Brother Elder or Daddy Cass."
"You— I fancy you read a good deal."
"Yep. In a hit-or-a-miss way. I'll tell you: I'm a lone
wolf. I trade horses, and saw wood, and work in lumber-camps
—I'm a first-rate swamper. Always wished I could go to
college. Though I s'pose I'd find it pretty slow, and they'd
probably kick me out."
"You really are a curious person, Mr.—"
"Bjornstam. Miles Bjornstam. Half Yank and half Swede.
Usually known as `that damn lazy big-mouthed calamity-howler
that ain't satisfied with the way we run things.' No, I ain't
curious—whatever you mean by that! I'm just a bookworm.
Probably too much reading for the amount of digestion I've
got. Probably half-baked. I'm going to get in `half-baked'
first, and beat you to it, because it's dead sure to be handed
to a radical that wears jeans!"
They grinned together. She demanded:
"You say that the Jolly Seventeen is stupid. What makes
you think so?"
"Oh, trust us borers into the foundation to know about
your leisure class. Fact, Mrs. Kennicott, I'll say that far as
I can make out, the only people in this man's town that do
have any brains—I don't mean ledger-keeping brains or
duck-hunting brains or baby-spanking brains, but real imaginative
brains—are you and me and Guy Pollock and the foreman at
the flour-mill. He's a socialist, the foreman. (Don't tell
Lym Cass that! Lym would fire a socialist quicker than he
would a horse-thief!)"
"Indeed no, I sha'n't tell him."
"This foreman and I have some great set-to's. He's a
regular old-line party-member. Too dogmatic. Expects to
reform everything from deforestration to nosebleed by saying
phrases like `surplus value.' Like reading the prayer-book.
But same time, he's a Plato J. Aristotle compared with people
like Ezry Stowbody or Professor Mott or Julius Flickerbaugh."
"It's interesting to hear about him."
He dug his toe into a drift, like a schoolboy. "Rats. You
mean I talk too much. Well, I do, when I get hold of somebody
like you. You probably want to run along and keep
your nose from freezing."
"Yes, I must go, I suppose. But tell me: Why did you
leave Miss Sherwin, of the high school, out of your list of the
town intelligentsia?"
"I guess maybe she does belong in it. From all I can hear
she's in everything and behind everything that looks like a
reform—lot more than most folks realize. She lets Mrs.
Reverend Warren, the president of this-here Thanatopsis Club,
think she's running the works, but Miss Sherwin is the secret
boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing something.
But way I figure it out— You see, I'm not interested in these
dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in
this barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing
out the water. And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry
to the crew! Me, I want to yank it up on the ways, and fire
the poor bum of a shoemaker that built it so it sails crooked,
and have it rebuilt right, from the keel up."
"Yes—that—that would be better. But I must run home.
My poor nose is nearly frozen."
"Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an
old bach's shack is like."
She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard
that was littered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless
wash-tub. She was disquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her
the opportunity to be delicate. He flung out his hand in a
welcoming gesture which assumed that she was her own
counselor, that she was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully
a human being. With a shaky, "Well, just a moment, to
warm my nose," she glanced down the street to make sure
that she was not spied on, and bolted toward the shanty.
She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more
considerate host than the Red Swede.
He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench,
wall bunk with amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and
ash-stippled coffee-pot on the shelf behind the pot-bellied
cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs—one constructed from half a
barrel, one from a tilted plank-and a row of books incredibly
assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of
gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise
on "The Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry
and Cattle."
There was but one picture—a magazine color-plate of a
steep-roofed village in the Harz Mountains which suggested
kobolds and maidens with golden hair.
Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, "Might
throw open your coat and put your feet up on the box in front
of the stove." He tossed his dogskin coat into the bunk,
lowered himself into the barrel chair, and droned on:
"Yeh, I'm probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my
independence by doing odd jobs, and that's more 'n these polite
cusses like the clerks in the banks do. When I'm rude to some
slob, it may be partly because I don't know better (and God
knows I'm not no authority on trick forks and what pants you
wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it's because I mean
something. I'm about the only man in Johnson County that
remembers the joker in the Declaration of Independence about
Americans being supposed to have the right to `life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.'
"I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at
me like he wants me to remember he's a highmuckamuck and
worth two hundred thousand dollars, and he says, `Uh, Bjornquist—'
" `Bjornstam's my name, Ezra,' I says. He
knows my name,
all rightee.
" `Well, whatever your name is,' he says, `I understand you
have a gasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw
up four cords of maple for me,' he says.
" `So you like my looks, eh?' I says, kind of innocent.
" `What difference does that make? Want you to saw that
wood before Saturday,' he says, real sharp. Common workman
going and getting fresh with a fifth of a million dollars
all walking around in a hand-me-down fur coat!
" `Here's the difference it makes,' I says, just to devil him.
`How do you know I like your looks?' Maybe he
didn't look
sore! Nope,' I says, `thinking it all over, I don't like your
application for a loan. Take it to another bank, only there
ain't any,' I says, and I walks off on him.
"Sure. Probably I was surly—and foolish. But I figured
there had to be one man in town independent enough
to sass
the banker!"
He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a
cup, and talked on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful
for friendliness and half amused by her surprise at the
discovery that there was a proletarian philosophy.
At the door, she hinted:
"Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when
people thought you were affected?"
"Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull,
and all over silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals
thought about my flying?"
It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of
Bjornstam's scorn which carried her through town. She faced
Juanita Haydock, cocked her head at Maud Dyer's brief nod,
and came home to Bea radiant. She telephoned Vida Sherwin
to "run over this evening." She lustily played Tschaikowsky—
the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopher of
the tar-paper shack.
(When she hinted to Vida, "Isn't there a man here who
amuses himself by being irreverent to the village gods—Bjornstam,
some such a name?" the reform-leader said "Bjornstam?
Oh yes. Fixes things. He's awfully impertinent.")