IV
The first week of March had given promise of spring and
stirred Carol with a thousand desires for lakes and fields and
roads. The snow was gone except for filthy woolly patches
under trees, the thermometer leaped in a day from wind-bitten
chill to itchy warmth. As soon as Carol was convinced that
even in this imprisoned North, spring could exist again, the
snow came down as abruptly as a paper storm in a theater;
the northwest gale flung it up in a half blizzard; and with
her hope of a glorified town went hope of summer meadows.
But a week later, though the snow was everywhere in slushy
heaps, the promise was unmistakable. By the invisible hints
in air and sky and earth which had aroused her every year
through ten thousand generations she knew that spring was
coming. It was not a scorching, hard, dusty day like the
treacherous intruder of a week before, but soaked with languor,
softened with a milky light. Rivulets were hurrying in each
alley; a calling robin appeared by magic on the crab-apple
tree in the Howlands' yard. Everybody chuckled, "Looks
like winter is going," and "This 'll bring the frost out of the
roads—have the autos out pretty soon now—wonder what kind
of bass-fishing we'll get this summer—ought to be good crops
this year."
Each evening Kennicott repeated, "We better not take off
our Heavy Underwear or the storm windows too soon—might
be 'nother spell of cold—got to be careful 'bout catching cold—
wonder if the coal will last through?"
The expanding forces of life within her choked the desire
for reforming. She trotted through the house, planning the
spring cleaning with Bea. When she attended her second
meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing about remaking
the town. She listened respectably to statistics on Dickens,
Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb,
De Quincey, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed,
constituted the writers of English Fiction and Essays.
Not till she inspected the rest-room did she again become
a fanatic. She had often glanced at the store-building which
had been turned into a refuge in which farmwives could wait
while their husbands transacted business. She had heard Vida
Sherwin and Mrs. Warren caress the virtue of the Thanatopsis
in establishing the rest-room and in sharing with the city
council the expense of maintaining it. But she had never
entered it till this March day.
She went in impulsively; nodded at the matron, a plump
worthy widow named Nodelquist, and at a couple of
farm-women who were meekly rocking. The rest-room resembled
a second-hand store. It was furnished with discarded patent
rockers, lopsided reed chairs, a scratched pine table, a gritty
straw mat, old steel engravings of milkmaids being morally
amorous under willow-trees, faded chromos of roses and fish,
and a kerosene stove for warming lunches. The front window
was darkened by torn net curtains and by a mound of geraniums
and rubber-plants.
While she was listening to Mrs. Nodelquist's account of how
many thousands of farmers' wives used the rest-room every
year, and how much they "appreciated the kindness of the
ladies in providing them with this lovely place, and all free,"
she thought, "Kindness nothing! The kind-ladies' husbands
get the farmers' trade. This is mere commercial accommodation.
And it's horrible. It ought to be the most charming
room in town, to comfort women sick of prairie kitchens.
Certainly it ought to have a clear window, so that they can
see the metropolitan life go by. Some day I'm going to make
a better rest-room—a club-room. Why! I've already planned
that as part of my Georgian town hall!"
So it chanced that she was plotting against the peace of the
Thanatopsis at her third meeting (which covered Scandinavian,
Russian, and Polish Literature, with remarks by Mrs. Leonard
Warren on the sinful paganism of the Russian so-called
church). Even before the entrance of the coffee and hot rolls
Carol seized on Mrs. Champ Perry, the kind and
ample-bosomed pioneer woman who gave historic dignity to the
modern matrons of the Thanatopsis. She poured out her
plans. Mrs. Perry nodded and stroked Carol's hand, but at
the end she sighed:
"I wish I could agree with you, dearie. I'm sure you're
one of the Lord's anointed (even if we don't see you at the
Baptist Church as often as we'd like to)! But I'm afraid
you're too tender-hearted. When Champ and I came here
we teamed-it with an ox-cart from Sauk Centre to Gopher
Prairie, and there was nothing here then but a stockade and
a few soldiers and some log cabins. When we wanted salt pork
and gunpowder, we sent out a man on horseback, and probably
he was shot dead by the Injuns before he got back. We
ladies—of course we were all farmers at first—we didn't expect
any rest-room in those days. My, we'd have thought the one
they have now was simply elegant! My house was roofed
with hay and it leaked something terrible when it rained—
only dry place was under a shelf.
"And when the town grew up we thought the new city
hall was real fine. And I don't see any need for dance-halls.
Dancing isn't what it was, anyway. We used to dance modest,
and we had just as much fun as all these young folks do
now with their terrible Turkey Trots and hugging and all.
But if they must neglect the Lord's injunction that young girls
ought to be modest, then I guess they manage pretty well at
the K. P. Hall and the Oddfellows', even if some of tie lodges
don't always welcome a lot of these foreigners and hired
help to all their dances. And I certainly don't see any
need of a farm-bureau or this domestic science demonstration
you talk about. In my day the boys learned to farm by honest
sweating, and every gal could cook, or her ma learned her
how across her knee! Besides, ain't there a county agent at
Wakamin? He comes here once a fortnight, maybe. That's
enough monkeying with this scientific farming—Champ says
there's nothing to it anyway.
"And as for a lecture hall—haven't we got the churches?
Good deal better to listen to a good old-fashioned sermon than
a lot of geography and books and things that nobody needs
to know—more 'n enough heathen learning right here in the
Thanatopsis. And as for trying to make a whole town in this
Colonial architecture you talk about— I do love nice things;
to this day I run ribbons into my petticoats, even if Champ
Perry does laugh at me, the old villain! But just the same
I don't believe any of us old-timers would like to see the town
that we worked so hard to build being tore down to make a
place that wouldn't look like nothing but some Dutch
story-book and not a bit like the place we loved. And don't you think
it's sweet now? All the trees and lawns? And such comfy
houses, and hot-water heat and electric lights and telephones
and cement walks and everything? Why, I thought everybody
from the Twin Cities always said it was such a beautiful
town!"
Carol forswore herself; declared that Gopher Prairie had
the color of Algiers and the gaiety of Mardi Gras.
Yet the next afternoon she was pouncing on Mrs. Lyman
Cass, the hook-nosed consort of the owner of the flour-mill.
Mrs. Cass's parlor belonged to the crammed-Victorian school,
as Mrs. Luke Dawson's belonged to the bare-Victorian. It was
furnished on two principles: First, everything must resemble
something else. A rocker had a back like a lyre, a near-leather
seat imitating tufted cloth, and arms like Scotch Presbyterian
lions; with knobs, scrolls, shields, and spear-points on
unexpected portions of the chair. The second principle of the
crammed-Victorian school was that every inch of the interior
must be filled with useless objects.
The walls of Mrs. Cass's parlor were plastered with
"hand-painted" pictures, "buckeye" pictures, of birch-trees,
news-boys, puppies, and church-steeples on Christmas Eve; with a
plaque depicting the Exposition Building in Minneapolis,
burnt-wood portraits of Indian chiefs of no tribe in particular, a
pansy-decked poetic motto, a Yard of Roses, and the banners of
the educational institutions attended by the Casses' two sons—
Chicopee Falls Business College and McGilllcuddy University.
One small square table contained a card-receiver of painted
china with a rim of wrought and gilded lead, a Family Bible,
Grant's Memoirs, the latest novel by Mrs. Gene Stratton
Porter, a wooden model of a Swiss chalet which was also a bank
for dimes, a polished abalone shell holding one black-headed
pin and one empty spool, a velvet pin-cushion in a gilded
metal slipper with "Souvenir of Troy, N. Y." stamped on the
toe, and an unexplained red glass dish which had warts.
Mrs. Cass's first remark was, "I must show you all my
pretty things and art objects."
She piped, after Carol's appeal:
"I see. You think the New England villages and Colonial
houses are so much more cunning than these Middlewestern
towns. I'm glad you feel that way. You'll be interested to
know I was born in Vermont."
"And don't you think we ought to try to make Gopher
Prai—"
"My gracious no! We can't afford it. Taxes are much too
high as it is. We ought to retrench, and not let the city council
spend another cent. Uh— Don't you think that was a grand
paper Mrs. Westlake read about Tolstoy? I was so glad
she pointed out how all his silly socialistic ideas failed."
What Mrs. Cass said was what Kennicott said, that evening.
Not in twenty years would the council propose or Gopher
Prairie vote the funds for a new city hall.