II
She examined the city hall, next morning. She had
remembered it only as a bleak inconspicuousness. She found it
a liver-colored frame coop half a block from Main Street. The
front was an unrelieved wall of clapboards and dirty windows.
It had an unobstructed view of a vacant lot and Nat Hicks's
tailor shop. It was larger than the carpenter shop beside it,
but not so well built.
No one was about. She walked into the corridor. On one
side was the municipal court, like a country school; on the
other, the room of the volunteer fire company, with a Ford
hose-cart and the ornamental helmets used in parades, at
the end of the hall, a filthy two-cell jail, now empty but smelling
of ammonia and ancient sweat. The whole second story
was a large unfinished room littered with piles of folding
chairs, a lime-crusted mortar-mixing box, and the skeletons of
Fourth of July floats covered with decomposing plaster shields
and faded red, white, and blue bunting. At the end was an
abortive stage. The room was large enough for the community
dances which Mrs. Nat Hicks advocated. But Carol was after
something bigger than dances.
In the afternoon she scampered to the public library.
The library was open three afternoons and four evenings a
week. It was housed in an old dwelling, sufficient but
unattractive. Carol caught herself picturing pleasanter
reading-rooms, chairs for children, an art collection, a librarian young
enough to experiment.
She berated herself, "Stop this fever of reforming
everything! I will be satisfied with the library!
The city hall is
enough for a beginning. And it's really an excellent library.
It's—it isn't so bad. . . . Is it possible that I am to
find dishonesties and stupidity in every human activity I
encounter? In schools and business and government and everything?
Is there never any contentment, never any rest?"
She shook her head as though she were shaking off water,
and hastened into the library, a young, light, amiable presence,
modest in unbuttoned fur coat, blue suit, fresh organdy collar,
and tan boots roughened from scuffling snow. Miss Villets
stared at her, and Carol purred, "I was so sorry not to see
you at the Thanatopsis yesterday. Vida said you might come."
"Oh. You went to the Thanatopsis. Did you enjoy it?"
"So much. Such good papers on the poets." Carol lied
resolutely. "But I did think they should have had you give
one of the papers on poetry!"
"Well— Of course I'm not one of the bunch that seem to
have the time to take and run the club, and if they prefer
to have papers on literature by other ladies who have no
literary training—after all, why should I complain? What
am I but a city employee!"
"You're not! You're the one person that does—that does—
oh, you do so much. Tell me, is there, uh— Who are the
people who control the club?"
Miss Villets emphatically stamped a date in the front of
"Frank on the Lower Mississippi" for a small flaxen boy,
glowered at him as though she were stamping a warning on
his brain, and sighed:
"I wouldn't put myself forward or criticize any one for the
world, and Vida is one of my best friends, and such a splendid
teacher, and there is no one in town more advanced and
interested in all movements, but I must say that no matter
who the president or the committees are, Vida Sherwin seems
to be behind them all the time, and though she is always
telling me about what she is pleased to call my `fine work
in the library,' I notice that I'm not often called on for papers,
though Mrs. Lyman Cass once volunteered and told me that
she thought my paper on `The Cathedrals of England' was
the most interesting paper we had, the year we took up English
and French travel and architecture. But— And of course
Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Warren are very important in the club,
as you might expect of the wives of the superintendent of
schools and the Congregational pastor, and indeed they are
both very cultured, but— No, you may regard me as entirely
unimportant. I'm sure what I say doesn't matter a bit!"
"You're much too modest, and I'm going to tell Vida so,
and, uh, I wonder if you can give me just a teeny bit of your
time and show me where the magazine files are kept?"
She had won. She was profusely escorted to a room like a
grandmother's attic, where she discovered periodicals devoted
to house-decoration and town-planning, with a six-year file of
the National Geographic. Miss Villets blessedly left her alone.
Humming, fluttering pages with delighted fingers, Carol sat
cross-legged on the floor, the magazines in heaps about her.
She found pictures of New England streets: the dignity of
Falmouth, the charm of Concord, Stockbridge and Farmington
and Hillhouse Avenue. The fairy-book suburb of Forest Hills
on Long Island. Devonshire cottages and Essex manors and
a Yorkshire High Street and Port Sunlight. The Arab village
of Djeddah—an intricately chased jewel-box. A town in California
which had changed itself from the barren brick fronts
and slatternly frame sheds of a Main Street to a way which
led the eye down a vista of arcades and gardens.
Assured that she was not quite mad in her belief that a
small American town might be lovely, as well as useful in
buying wheat and selling plows, she sat brooding, her thin
fingers playing a tattoo on her cheeks. She saw in Gopher
Prairie a Georgian city hall: warm brick walls with white
shutters, a fanlight, a wide hall and curving stair. She saw it
the common home and inspiration not only of the town but
of the country about. It should contain the court-room (she
couldn't get herself to put in a jail), public library, a collection
of excellent prints, rest-room and model kitchen for farmwives,
theater, lecture room, free community ballroom, farm-bureau,
gymnasium. Forming about it and influenced by it, as
mediæval villages gathered about the castle, she saw a new
Georgian town as graceful and beloved as Annapolis or that
bowery Alexandria to which Washington rode.
All this the Thanatopsis Club was to accomplish with no
difficulty whatever, since its several husbands were the
controllers of business and politics. She was proud of herself for
this practical view.
She had taken only half an hour to change a wire-fenced
potato-plot into a walled rose-garden. She hurried out to
apprize Mrs. Leonard Warren, as president of the Thanatopsis,
of the miracle which had been worked.
