IV
She wanted to see Erik. She wanted some one to play with!
There wasn't even so dignified and sound an excuse as
having Kennicott's trousers pressed; when she inspected them,
all three pairs looked discouragingly neat. She probably
would not have ventured on it had she not spied Nat Hicks
in the pool-parlor, being witty over bottle-pool. Erik was
alone! She fluttered toward the tailor shop, dashed into its
slovenly heat with the comic fastidiousness of a humming bird
dipping into a dry tiger-lily. It was after she had entered
that she found an excuse.
Erik was in the back room, cross-legged on a long table,
sewing a vest. But he looked as though he were doing this
eccentric thing to amuse himself.
"Hello. I wonder if you couldn't plan a sports-suit for
me?" she said breathlessly.
He stared at her; he protested, "No, I won't! God! I'm
not going to be a tailor with you!"
"Why, Erik!" she said, like a mildly shocked mother.
It occurred to her that she did not need a suit, and that
the order might have been hard to explain to Kennicott.
He swung down from the table. "I want to show you
something." He rummaged in the roll-top desk on which Nat
Hicks kept bills, buttons, calendars, buckles, thread-channeled
wax, shotgun shells, samples of brocade for "fancy vests,"
fishing-reels, pornographic post-cards, shreds of buckram lining.
He pulled out a blurred sheet of Bristol board and
anxiously gave it to her. It was a sketch for a frock. It
was not well drawn; it was too finicking; the pillars in the
background were grotesquely squat. But the frock had an
original back, very low, with a central triangular section from
the waist to a string of jet beads at the neck.
"It's stunning. But how it would shock Mrs. Clark!"
"Yes, wouldn't it!"
"You must let yourself go more when you're drawing."
"Don't know if I can. I've started kind of late. But
listen! What do you think I've done this two weeks? I've
read almost clear through a Latin grammar, and about twenty
pages of Cæsar."
"Splendid! You are lucky. You haven't a teacher to make
you artificial."
"You're my teacher!"
There was a dangerous edge of personality to his voice.
She was offended and agitated. She turned her shoulder on
him, stared through the back window, studying this typical
center of a typical Main Street block, a vista hidden from
casual strollers. The backs of the chief establishments in town
surrounded a quadrangle neglected, dirty, and incomparably
dismal. From the front, Howland & Gould's grocery was
smug enough, but attached to the rear was a lean-to of storm
streaked pine lumber with a sanded tar roof—a staggering
doubtful shed behind which was a heap of ashes, splintered
packing-boxes, shreds of excelsior, crumpled straw-board,
broken olive-bottles, rotten fruit, and utterly disintegrated
vegetables: orange carrots turning black, and potatoes with
ulcers. The rear of the Bon Ton Store was grim with blistered
black-painted iron shutters, under them a pile of once glossy
red shirt-boxes, now a pulp from recent rain.
As seen from Main Street, Oleson & McGuire's Meat Market
had a sanitary and virtuous expression with its new tile
counter, fresh sawdust on the floor, and a hanging veal cut
in rosettes. But she now viewed a back room with a homemade
refrigerator of yellow smeared with black grease. A man
in an apron spotted with dry blood was hoisting out a hard
slab of meat.
Behind Billy's Lunch, the cook, in an apron which must
long ago have been white, smoked a pipe and spat at the
pest of sticky flies. In the center of the block, by itself, was
the stable for the three horses of the drayman, and beside it a
pile of manure.
The rear of Ezra Stowbody's bank was whitewashed, and
back of it was a concrete walk and a three-foot square of
grass, but the window was barred, and behind the bars she
saw Willis Woodford cramped over figures in pompous books.
He raised his head, jerkily rubbed his eyes, and went back
to the eternity of figures.
The backs of the other shops were an impressionistic picture
of dirty grays, drained browns, writhing heaps of refuse.
"Mine is a back-yard romance—with a journeyman tailor!"
She was saved from self-pity as she began to think through
Erik's mind. She turned to him with an indignant, "It's
disgusting that this is all you have to look at."
He considered it. "Outside there? I don't notice much.
I'm learning to look inside. Not awful easy!"
"Yes. . . . I must be hurrying."
As she walked home—without hurrying—she remembered
her father saying to a serious ten-year-old Carol, "Lady, only
a fool thinks he's superior to beautiful bindings, but only a
double-distilled fool reads nothing but bindings."
She was startled by the return of her father, startled by a
sudden conviction that in this flaxen boy she had found
the gray reticent judge who was divine love, perfect understanding.
She debated it, furiously denied it, reaffirmed it,
ridiculed it. Of one thing she was unhappily certain: there
was nothing of the beloved father image in Will Kennicott.
