Main Street, Sinclair Lewis [red white and royal blue hardcover txt] 📗

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