II
Kennicott had five hobbies: medicine, land-investment, Carol,
motoring, and hunting. It is not certain in what order he
preferred them. Solid though his enthusiasms were in the matter
of medicine—his admiration of this city surgeon, his
condemnation of that for tricky ways of persuading country
practitioners to bring in surgical patients, his indignation about
fee-splitting, his pride in a new X-ray apparatus—none of
these beatified him as did motoring.
He nursed his two-year-old Buick even in winter, when it
was stored in the stable-garage behind the house. He filled
the grease-cups, varnished a fender, removed from beneath the
back seat the débris of gloves, copper washers, crumpled maps,
dust, and greasy rags. Winter noons he wandered out and
stared owlishly at the car. He became excited over a fabulous
"trip we might take next summer." He galloped to the station,
brought home railway maps, and traced motor-routes from
Gopher Prairie to Winnipeg or Des Moines or Grand Marais,
thinking aloud and expecting her to be effusive about such
academic questions as "Now I wonder if we could stop at
Baraboo and break the jump from La Crosse to Chicago?"
To him motoring was a faith not to be questioned, a
high-church cult, with electric sparks for candles, and piston-rings
possessing the sanctity of altar-vessels. His liturgy was
composed of intoned and metrical road-comments: "They say
there's a pretty good hike from Duluth to International Falls."
Hunting was equally a devotion, full of metaphysical
concepts veiled from Carol. All winter he read
sporting-catalogues, and thought about remarkable past shots: " 'Member
that time when I got two ducks on a long chance, just at
sunset?" At least once a month he drew his favorite repeating
shotgun, his "pump gun," from its wrapper of greased
canton flannel; he oiled the trigger, and spent silent ecstatic
moments aiming at the ceiling. Sunday mornings Carol heard
him trudging up to the attic and there, an hour later, she
found him turning over boots, wooden duck-decoys,
lunch-boxes, or reflectively squinting at old shells, rubbing their
brass caps with his sleeve and shaking his head as he thought
about their uselessness.
He kept the loading-tools he had used as a boy: a capper
for shot-gun shells, a mold for lead bullets. When once, in a
housewifely frenzy for getting rid of things, she raged, "Why
don't you give these away?" he solemnly defended them,
"Well, you can't tell; they might come in handy some day."
She flushed. She wondered if he was thinking of the child
they would have when, as he put it, they were "sure they
could afford one."
Mysteriously aching, nebulously sad, she slipped away,
half-convinced but only half-convinced that it was horrible and
unnatural, this postponement of release of mother-affection, this
sacrifice to her opinionation and to his cautious desire for
prosperity.
"But it would be worse if he were like Sam Clark—
insisted on having children," she considered; then, "If Will
were the Prince, wouldn't I demand his child?"
Kennicott's land-deals were both financial advancement and
favorite game. Driving through the country, he noticed which
farms had good crops; he heard the news about the restless
farmer who was "thinking about selling out here and pulling
his freight for Alberta." He asked the veterinarian about the
value of different breeds of stock; he inquired of Lyman Cass
whether or not Einar Gyseldson really had had a yield of forty
bushels of wheat to the acre. He was always consulting Julius
Flickerbaugh, who handled more real estate than law, and more
law than justice. He studied township maps, and read notices
of auctions.
Thus he was able to buy a quarter-section of land for one
hundred and fifty dollars an acre, and to sell it in a year or
two, after installing a cement floor in the barn and running
water in the house, for one hundred and eighty or even two
hundred.
He spoke of these details to Sam Clark. . . . rather
often.
In all his games, cars and guns and land, he expected Carol
to take an interest. But he did not give her the facts which
might have created interest. He talked only of the obvious and
tedious aspects; never of his aspirations in finance, nor of the
mechanical principles of motors.
This month of romance she was eager to understand his
hobbies. She shivered in the garage while he spent half an hour
in deciding whether to put alcohol or patent non-freezing liquid
into the radiator, or to drain out the water entirely. "Or no,
then I wouldn't want to take her out if it turned warm—
still, of course, I could fill the radiator again—wouldn't take
so awful long—just take a few pails of water—still, if it turned
cold on me again before I drained it— Course there's some
people that put in kerosene, but they say it rots the
hose-connections and— Where did I put that lug-wrench?"
It was at this point that she gave up being a motorist and
retired to the house.
In their new intimacy he was more communicative about his
practise; he informed her, with the invariable warning not to
tell, that Mrs. Sunderquist had another baby coming, that the
"hired girl at Howland's was in trouble." But when she asked
technical questions he did not know how to answer; when she
inquired, "Exactly what is the method of taking out the
tonsils?" he yawned, "Tonsilectomy? Why you just— If
there's pus, you operate. Just take 'em out. Seen the
newspaper? What the devil did Bea do with it?"
She did not try again.
