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

Little and tender and merry and wise
With eyes that meet my eyes.

Do you get the idea the way I do?”

“Yes! I’m terribly grateful!” And she was grateful⁠—while she impersonally noted how bad a verse it was.

She was aware of the haggard beauty in the lowering night. Monstrous tattered clouds sprawled round a forlorn moon; puddles and rocks glistened with inner light. They were passing a grove of scrub poplars, feeble by day but looming now like a menacing wall. She stopped. They heard the branches dripping, the wet leaves sullenly plumping on the soggy earth.

“Waiting⁠—waiting⁠—everything is waiting,” she whispered. She drew her hand from his, pressed her clenched fingers against her lips. She was lost in the somberness. “I am happy⁠—so we must go home, before we have time to become unhappy. But can’t we sit on a log for a minute and just listen?”

“No. Too wet. But I wish we could build a fire, and you could sit on my overcoat beside it. I’m a grand fire-builder! My cousin Lars and me spent a week one time in a cabin way up in the Big Woods, snowed in. The fireplace was filled with a dome of ice when we got there, but we chopped it out, and jammed the thing full of pine-boughs. Couldn’t we build a fire back here in the woods and sit by it for a while?”

She pondered, halfway between yielding and refusal. Her head ached faintly. She was in abeyance. Everything, the night, his silhouette, the cautious-treading future, was as undistinguishable as though she were drifting bodiless in a Fourth Dimension. While her mind groped, the lights of a motor car swooped round a bend in the road, and they stood farther apart. “What ought I to do?” she mused. “I think⁠—Oh, I won’t be robbed! I am good! If I’m so enslaved that I can’t sit by the fire with a man and talk, then I’d better be dead!”

The lights of the thrumming car grew magically; were upon them; abruptly stopped. From behind the dimness of the windshield a voice, annoyed, sharp: “Hello there!”

She realized that it was Kennicott.

The irritation in his voice smoothed out. “Having a walk?”

They made schoolboyish sounds of assent.

“Pretty wet, isn’t it? Better ride back. Jump up in front here, Valborg.”

His manner of swinging open the door was a command. Carol was conscious that Erik was climbing in, that she was apparently to sit in the back, and that she had been left to open the rear door for herself. Instantly the wonder which had flamed to the gusty skies was quenched, and she was Mrs. W. P. Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, riding in a squeaking old car, and likely to be lectured by her husband.

She feared what Kennicott would say to Erik. She bent toward them. Kennicott was observing, “Going to have some rain before the night’s over, all right.”

“Yes,” said Erik.

“Been funny season this year, anyway. Never saw it with such a cold October and such a nice November. ’Member we had a snow way back on October ninth! But it certainly was nice up to the twenty-first, this month⁠—as I remember it, not a flake of snow in November so far, has there been? But I shouldn’t wonder if we’d be having some snow ’most any time now.”

“Yes, good chance of it,” said Erik.

“Wish I’d had more time to go after the ducks this fall. By golly, what do you think?” Kennicott sounded appealing. “Fellow wrote me from Man Trap Lake that he shot seven mallards and couple of canvasback in one hour!”

“That must have been fine,” said Erik.

Carol was ignored. But Kennicott was blustrously cheerful. He shouted to a farmer, as he slowed up to pass the frightened team, “There we are⁠—schon gut!” She sat back, neglected, frozen, unheroic heroine in a drama insanely undramatic. She made a decision resolute and enduring. She would tell Kennicott⁠—What would she tell him? She could not say that she loved Erik. Did she love him? But she would have it out. She was not sure whether it was pity for Kennicott’s blindness, or irritation at his assumption that he was enough to fill any woman’s life, which prompted her, but she knew that she was out of the trap, that she could be frank; and she was exhilarated with the adventure of it⁠ ⁠… while in front he was entertaining Erik:

“Nothing like an hour on a duck-pass to make you relish your victuals and⁠—Gosh, this machine hasn’t got the power of a fountain pen. Guess the cylinders are jam-cram-full of carbon again. Don’t know but what maybe I’ll have to put in another set of piston-rings.”

He stopped on Main Street and clucked hospitably, “There, that’ll give you just a block to walk. G’ night.”

Carol was in suspense. Would Erik sneak away?

He stolidly moved to the back of the car, thrust in his hand, muttered, “Good night⁠—Carol. I’m glad we had our walk.” She pressed his hand. The car was flapping on. He was hidden from her⁠—by a corner drug store on Main Street!

Kennicott did not recognize her till he drew up before the house. Then he condescended, “Better jump out here and I’ll take the boat around back. Say, see if the back door is unlocked, will you?” She unlatched the door for him. She realized that she still carried the damp glove she had stripped off for Erik. She drew it on. She stood in the center of the living-room, unmoving, in damp coat and muddy rubbers. Kennicott was as opaque as ever. Her task wouldn’t be anything so lively as having to endure a scolding, but only an exasperating effort to command his attention so that he would understand the nebulous things she had to tell him, instead of interrupting her by yawning, winding the clock, and going up to bed. She heard him shoveling coal into the furnace. He came through the kitchen energetically, but before he spoke to her he did stop in the