II
Through the first days of June she drove with Kennicott on
his calls. She identified him with the virile land; she admired
him as she saw with what respect the farmers obeyed him.
She was out in the early chill, after a hasty cup of coffee,
reaching open country as the fresh sun came up in that
unspoiled world. Meadow larks called from the tops of thin
split fence-posts. The wild roses smelled clean.
As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was a
solemnity of radial bands, like a heavenly fan of beaten gold;
the limitless circle of the grain was a green sea rimmed with
fog, and the willow wind-breaks were palmy isles.
Before July the close heat blanketed them. The tortured
earth cracked. Farmers panted through corn-fields behind
cultivators and the sweating flanks of horses. While she waited
for Kennicott in the car, before a farmhouse, the seat burned
her fingers and her head ached with the glare on fenders and
hood.
A black thunder-shower was followed by a dust storm which
turned the sky yellow with the hint of a coming tornado.
Impalpable black dust far-borne from Dakota covered the
inner sills of the closed windows.
The July heat was ever more stifling. They crawled along
Main Street by day; they found it hard to sleep at night. They
brought mattresses down to the living-room, and thrashed and
turned by the open window. Ten times a night they talked of
going out to soak themselves with the hose and wade through
the dew, but they were too listless to take the trouble. On
cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the gnats
appeared in swarms which peppered their faces and caught in
their throats.
She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but Kennicott
declared that it would be "kind of hard to get away, just
now." The Health and Improvement Committee of the
Thanatopsis asked her to take part in the anti-fly campaign,
and she toiled about town persuading householders to use the
fly-traps furnished by the club, or giving out money prizes to
fly-swatting children. She was loyal enough but not ardent,
and without ever quite intending to, she began to neglect the
task as heat sucked at her strength.
Kennicott and she motored North and spent a week with
his mother—that is, Carol spent it with his mother, while he
fished for bass.
The great event was their purchase of a summer cottage,
down on Lake Minniemashie.
Perhaps the most amiable feature of life in Gopher Prairie
was the summer cottages. They were merely two-room
shanties, with a seepage of broken-down chairs, peeling veneered
tables, chromos pasted on wooden walls, and inefficient kerosene
stoves. They were so thin-walled and so close together that
you could—and did—hear a baby being spanked in the fifth
cottage off. But they were set among elms and lindens on a
bluff which looked across the lake to fields of ripened wheat
sloping up to green woods.
Here the matrons forgot social jealousies, and sat gossiping
in gingham; or, in old bathing-suits, surrounded by hysterical
children, they paddled for hours. Carol joined them; she
ducked shrieking small boys, and helped babies construct
sand-basins for unfortunate minnows. She liked Juanita Haydock
and Maud Dyer when she helped them make picnic-supper
for the men, who came motoring out from town each evening.
She was easier and more natural with them. In the debate
as to whether there should be veal loaf or poached egg on hash,
she had no chance to be heretical and oversensitive.
They danced sometimes, in the evening; they had a minstrel
show, with Kennicott surprisingly good as end-man; always
they were encircled by children wise in the lore of woodchucks
and gophers and rafts and willow whistles.
If they could have continued this normal barbaric life Carol
would have been the most enthusiastic citizen of Gopher
Prairie. She was relieved to be assured that she did not want
bookish conversation alone; that she did not expect the town
to become a Bohemia. She was content now. She did not
criticize.
But in September, when the year was at its richest, custom
dictated that it was time to return to town; to remove the
children from the waste occupation of learning the earth, and
send them back to lessons about the number of potatoes which
(in a delightful world untroubled by commission-houses or
shortages in freight-cars) William sold to John. The women
who had cheerfully gone bathing all summer looked doubtful
when Carol begged, "Let's keep up an outdoor life this winter,
let's slide and skate." Their hearts shut again till spring, and
the nine months of cliques and radiators and dainty refreshments
began all over.
