I
SHE had walked up the railroad track with Hugh, this Sunday
afternoon.
She saw Erik Valborg coming, in an ancient highwater suit,
tramping sullenly and alone, striking at the rails with a stick.
For a second she unreasoningly wanted to avoid him, but she
kept on, and she serenely talked about God, whose voice, Hugh
asserted, made the humming in the telegraph wires. Erik
stared, straightened. They greeted each other with "Hello."
"Hugh, say how-do-you-do to Mr. Valborg."
"Oh, dear me, he's got a button unbuttoned," worried Erik,
kneeling. Carol frowned, then noted the strength with which
he swung the baby in the air.
"May I walk along a piece with you?"
"I'm tired. Let's rest on those ties. Then I must be trotting
back."
They sat on a heap of discarded railroad ties, oak logs
spotted with cinnamon-colored dry-rot and marked with
metallic brown streaks where iron plates had rested. Hugh
learned that the pile was the hiding-place of Injuns; he went
gunning for them while the elders talked of uninteresting
things.
The telegraph wires thrummed, thrummed, thrummed above
them; the rails were glaring hard lines; the goldenrod smelled
dusty. Across the track was a pasture of dwarf clover and
sparse lawn cut by earthy cow-paths; beyond its placid narrow
green, the rough immensity of new stubble, jagged with
wheat-stacks like huge pineapples.
Erik talked of books; flamed like a recent convert to any
faith. He exhibited as many titles and authors as possible,
halting only to appeal, "Have you read his last book? Don't
you think he's a terribly strong writer?"
She was dizzy. But when he insisted, "You've been a
librarian; tell me; do I read too much fiction?" she advised
him loftily, rather discursively. He had, she indicated, never
studied. He had skipped from one emotion to another.
Especially—she hesitated, then flung it at him—he must not guess
at pronunciations; he must endure the nuisance of stopping to
reach for the dictionary.
"I'm talking like a cranky teacher," she sighed.
"No! And I will study! Read the damned dictionary right
through." He crossed his legs and bent over, clutching his
ankle with both hands. "I know what you mean. I've been
rushing from picture to picture, like a kid let loose in an art
gallery for the first time. You see, it's so awful recent that
I've found there was a world—well, a world where beautiful
things counted. I was on the farm till I was nineteen. Dad
is a good farmer, but nothing else. Do you know why he first
sent me off to learn tailoring? I wanted to study drawing,
and he had a cousin that'd made a lot of money tailoring out
in Dakota, and he said tailoring was a lot like drawing, so he
sent me down to a punk hole called Curlew, to work in a
tailor shop. Up to that time I'd only had three months' schooling
a year—walked to school two miles, through snow up to
my knees—and Dad never would stand for my having a single
book except schoolbooks.
"I never read a novel till I got `Dorothy Vernon of Haddon
Hall' out of the library at Curlew. I thought it was the
loveliest thing in the world! Next I read `Barriers Burned
Away' and then Pope's translation of Homer. Some
combination, all right! When I went to Minneapolis, just two
years ago, I guess I'd read pretty much everything in that
Curlew library, but I'd never heard of Rossetti or John Sargent
or Balzac or Brahms. But— Yump, I'll study. Look here!
Shall I get out of this tailoring, this pressing and repairing?"
"I don't see why a surgeon should spend very much time
cobbling shoes."
"But what if I find I can't really draw and design? After
fussing around in New York or Chicago, I'd feel like a fool
if I had to go back to work in a gents' furnishings store!"
"Please say `haberdashery.' "
"Haberdashery? All right. I'll remember." He shrugged
and spread his fingers wide.
She was humbled by his humility; she put away in her
mind, to take out and worry over later, a speculation as to
whether it was not she who was naive. She urged, "What
if you do have to go back? Most of us do! We can't all
be artists—myself, for instance. We have to darn socks, and
yet we're not content to think of nothing but socks and
darning-cotton. I'd demand all I could get—whether I finally settled
down to designing frocks or building temples or pressing pants.
What if you do drop back? You'll have had the adventure.
Don't be too meek toward life! Go! You're young, you're
unmarried. Try everything! Don't listen to Nat Hicks and
Sam Clark and be a `steady young man'—in order to help
them make money. You're still a blessed innocent. Go and
play till the Good People capture you!"
"But I don't just want to play. I want to make something
beautiful. God! And I don't know enough. Do you get it?
Do you understand? Nobody else ever has! Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"And so— But here's what bothers me: I like fabrics;
dinky things like that; little drawings and elegant words. But
look over there at those fields. Big! New! Don't it seem
kind of a shame to leave this and go back to the East and
Europe, and do what all those people have been doing so long?
Being careful about words, when there's millions of bushels off
wheat here! Reading this fellow Pater, when I've helped Dad
to clear fields!"
"It's good to clear fields. But it's not for you. It's one
of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily
make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.
I thought that myself, when I first came to the prairie. `Big—
new.' Oh, I don't want to deny the prairie future. It will
be magnificent. But equally I'm hanged if I want to be bullied
by it, go to war on behalf of Main Street, be bullied and
bullied
by the faith that the future is already here in the present, and
that all of us must stay and worship wheat-stacks and insist
that this is `God's Country'—and never, of course, do
anything original or gay-colored that would help to make that
future! Anyway, you don't belong here. Sam Clark and Nat
Hicks, that's what our big newness has produced. Go! Before
it's too late, as it has been for—for some of us. Young man,
go East and grow up with the revolution! Then perhaps you
may come back and tell Sam and Nat and me what to do with
the land we've been clearing—if we'll listen—if we don't lynch
you first!"
He looked at her reverently. She could hear him saying,
"I've always wanted to know a woman who would talk to
me like that."
Her hearing was faulty. He was saying nothing of the sort.
He was saying:
"Why aren't you happy with your husband?"
"I—you—"
"He doesn't care for the `blessed innocent' part of you,
does he!"
"Erik, you mustn't—"
"First you tell me to go and be free, and then you say that
I `mustn't'!"
"I know. But you mustn't— You must be more
impersonal!"
He glowered at her like a downy young owl. She wasn't
sure but she thought that he muttered, "I'm damned if I will."
She considered with wholesome fear the perils of meddling with
other people's destinies, and she said timidly, "Hadn't we
better start back now?"
He mused, "You're younger than I am. Your lips are for
songs about rivers in the morning and lakes at twilight. I don't
see how anybody could ever hurt you. . . . Yes. We
better go."
He trudged beside her, his eyes averted. Hugh experimentally
took his thumb. He looked down at the baby seriously.
He burst out, "All right. I'll do it. I'll stay here
one year. Save. Not spend so much money on clothes. And
then I'll go East, to art-school. Work on the side-tailor shop,
dressmaker's. I'll learn what I'm good for: designing clothes,
stage-settings, illustrating, or selling collars to fat men. All
settled." He peered at her, unsmiling.
"Can you stand it here in town for a year?"
"With you to look at?"
"Please! I mean: Don't the people here think you're an
odd bird? (They do me, I assure you!)"
"I don't know. I never notice much. Oh, they do kid me
about not being in the army—especially the old warhorses, the
old men that aren't going themselves. And this Bogart boy.
And Mr. Hicks's son—he's a horrible brat. But probably he's
licensed to say what he thinks about his father's hired man!"
"He's beastly!"
They were in town. They passed Aunt Bessie's house. Aunt
Bessie and Mrs. Bogart were at the window, and Carol saw
that they were staring so intently that they answered her wave
only with the stiffly raised hands of automatons. In the next
block Mrs. Dr. Westlake was gaping from her porch. Carol
said with an embarrassed quaver:
"I want to run in and see Mrs. Westlake. I'll say good-by
here."
She avoided his eyes.
Mrs. Westlake was affable. Carol felt that she was expected
to explain; and while she was mentally asserting that she'd
be hanged if she'd explain, she was explaining:
"Hugh captured that Valborg boy up the track. They
became such good friends. And I talked to him for a while. I'd
heard he was eccentric, but really, I found him quite intelligent.
Crude, but he reads—reads almost the way Dr. Westlake does."
"That's fine. Why does he stick here in town? What's
this I hear about his being interested in Myrtle Cass?"
"I don't know. Is he? I'm sure he isn't! He said he was
quite lonely! Besides, Myrtle is a babe in arms!"
"Twenty-one if she's a day!"
"Well— Is the doctor going to do any hunting this
fall?"