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

a barn-dance in the country, on a Saturday evening. Carol could not go. The next day, the storm crashed. XXXII I

Carol was on the back porch, tightening a bolt on the baby’s go-cart, this Sunday afternoon. Through an open window of the Bogart house she heard a screeching, heard Mrs. Bogart’s haggish voice:

“… did too, and there’s no use your denying it⁠ ⁠… no you don’t, you march yourself right straight out of the house⁠ ⁠… never in my life heard of such⁠ ⁠… never had nobody talk to me like⁠ ⁠… walk in the ways of sin and nastiness⁠ ⁠… leave your clothes here, and heaven knows that’s more than you deserve⁠ ⁠… any of your lip or I’ll call the policeman.”

The voice of the other interlocutor Carol did not catch, nor, though Mrs. Bogart was proclaiming that he was her confidant and present assistant, did she catch the voice of Mrs. Bogart’s God.

“Another row with Cy,” Carol inferred.

She trundled the go-cart down the back steps and tentatively wheeled it across the yard, proud of her repairs. She heard steps on the sidewalk. She saw not Cy Bogart but Fern Mullins, carrying a suitcase, hurrying up the street with her head low. The widow, standing on the porch with buttery arms akimbo, yammered after the fleeing girl:

“And don’t you dare show your face on this block again. You can send the drayman for your trunk. My house has been contaminated long enough. Why the Lord should afflict me⁠—”

Fern was gone. The righteous widow glared, banged into the house, came out poking at her bonnet, marched away. By this time Carol was staring in a manner not visibly to be distinguished from the window-peeping of the rest of Gopher Prairie. She saw Mrs. Bogart enter the Howland house, then the Casses’. Not till suppertime did she reach the Kennicotts. The doctor answered her ring, and greeted her, “Well, well? how’s the good neighbor?”

The good neighbor charged into the living-room, waving the most unctuous of black kid gloves and delightedly sputtering:

“You may well ask how I am! I really do wonder how I could go through the awful scenes of this day⁠—and the impudence I took from that woman’s tongue, that ought to be cut out⁠—”

“Whoa! Whoa! Hold up!” roared Kennicott. “Who’s the hussy, Sister Bogart? Sit down and take it cool and tell us about it.”

“I can’t sit down, I must hurry home, but I couldn’t devote myself to my own selfish cares till I’d warned you, and heaven knows I don’t expect any thanks for trying to warn the town against her, there’s always so much evil in the world that folks simply won’t see or appreciate your trying to safeguard them⁠—And forcing herself in here to get in with you and Carrie, many’s the time I’ve seen her doing it, and, thank heaven, she was found out in time before she could do any more harm, it simply breaks my heart and prostrates me to think what she may have done already, even if some of us that understand and know about things⁠—”

“Whoa-up! Who are you talking about?”

“She’s talking about Fern Mullins,” Carol put in, not pleasantly.

“Huh?”

Kennicott was incredulous.

“I certainly am!” flourished Mrs. Bogart, “and good and thankful you may be that I found her out in time, before she could get you into something, Carol, because even if you are my neighbor and Will’s wife and a cultured lady, let me tell you right now, Carol Kennicott, that you ain’t always as respectful to⁠—you ain’t as reverent⁠—you don’t stick by the good old ways like they was laid down for us by God in the Bible, and while of course there ain’t a bit of harm in having a good laugh, and I know there ain’t any real wickedness in you, yet just the same you don’t fear God and hate the transgressors of his commandments like you ought to, and you may be thankful I found out this serpent I nourished in my bosom⁠—and oh yes! oh yes indeed! my lady must have two eggs every morning for breakfast, and eggs sixty cents a dozen, and wa’n’t satisfied with one, like most folks⁠—what did she care how much they cost or if a person couldn’t make hardly nothing on her board and room, in fact I just took her in out of charity and I might have known from the kind of stockings and clothes that she sneaked into my house in her trunk⁠—”

Before they got her story she had five more minutes of obscene wallowing. The gutter comedy turned into high tragedy, with Nemesis in black kid gloves. The actual story was simple, depressing, and unimportant. As to details Mrs. Bogart was indefinite, and angry that she should be questioned.

Fern Mullins and Cy had, the evening before, driven alone to a barn-dance in the country. (Carol brought out the admission that Fern had tried to get a chaperon.) At the dance Cy had kissed Fern⁠—she confessed that. Cy had obtained a pint of whisky; he said that he didn’t remember where he had got it; Mrs. Bogart implied that Fern had given it to him; Fern herself insisted that he had stolen it from a farmer’s overcoat⁠—which, Mrs. Bogart raged, was obviously a lie. He had become soggily drunk. Fern had driven him home; deposited him, retching and wabbling, on the Bogart porch.

Never before had her boy been drunk, shrieked Mrs. Bogart. When Kennicott grunted, she owned, “Well, maybe once or twice I’ve smelled licker on his breath.” She also, with an air of being only too scrupulously exact, granted that sometimes he did not come home till morning. But he couldn’t ever have been drunk, for he always had the best excuses: the other boys had tempted him to go down the lake spearing pickerel by torchlight, or he had been out in a “machine that ran out of gas.” Anyway, never before had her boy fallen into the hands of a “designing woman.”

“What do you suppose Miss Mullins could design to