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

Vida would either laugh at her or snatch the idea and change it to suit herself. But there was no other hope. When Vida came in to tea Carol sketched her Utopia.

Vida was soothing but decisive:

“My dear, you’re all off. I would like to see it: a real gardeny place to shut out the gales. But it can’t be done. What could the clubwomen accomplish?”

“Their husbands are the most important men in town. They are the town!”

“But the town as a separate unit is not the husband of the Thanatopsis. If you knew the trouble we had in getting the city council to spend the money and cover the pumping-station with vines! Whatever you may think of Gopher Prairie women, they’re twice as progressive as the men.”

“But can’t the men see the ugliness?”

“They don’t think it’s ugly. And how can you prove it? Matter of taste. Why should they like what a Boston architect likes?”

“What they like is to sell prunes!”

“Well, why not? Anyway, the point is that you have to work from the inside, with what we have, rather than from the outside, with foreign ideas. The shell ought not to be forced on the spirit. It can’t be! The bright shell has to grow out of the spirit, and express it. That means waiting. If we keep after the city council for another ten years they may vote the bonds for a new school.”

“I refuse to believe that if they saw it the big men would be too tightfisted to spend a few dollars each for a building⁠—think!⁠—dancing and lectures and plays, all done cooperatively!”

“You mention the word ‘cooperative’ to the merchants and they’ll lynch you! The one thing they fear more than mail-order houses is that farmers’ cooperative movements may get started.”

“The secret trails that lead to scared pocketbooks! Always, in everything! And I don’t have any of the fine melodrama of fiction: the dictagraphs and speeches by torchlight. I’m merely blocked by stupidity. Oh, I know I’m a fool. I dream of Venice, and I live in Archangel and scold because the Northern seas aren’t tender-colored. But at least they shan’t keep me from loving Venice, and sometime I’ll run away⁠—All right. No more.”

She flung out her hands in a gesture of renunciation.

VI

Early May; wheat springing up in blades like grass; corn and potatoes being planted; the land humming. For two days there had been steady rain. Even in town the roads were a furrowed welter of mud, hideous to view and difficult to cross. Main Street was a black swamp from curb to curb; on residence streets the grass parking beside the walks oozed gray water. It was prickly hot, yet the town was barren under the bleak sky. Softened neither by snow nor by waving boughs the houses squatted and scowled, revealed in their unkempt harshness.

As she dragged homeward Carol looked with distaste at her clay-loaded rubbers, the smeared hem of her skirt. She passed Lyman Cass’s pinnacled, dark-red, hulking house. She waded a streaky yellow pool. This morass was not her home, she insisted. Her home, and her beautiful town, existed in her mind. They had already been created. The task was done. What she really had been questing was someone to share them with her. Vida would not; Kennicott could not.

Someone to share her refuge.

Suddenly she was thinking of Guy Pollock.

She dismissed him. He was too cautious. She needed a spirit as young and unreasonable as her own. And she would never find it. Youth would never come singing. She was beaten.

Yet that same evening she had an idea which solved the rebuilding of Gopher Prairie.

Within ten minutes she was jerking the old-fashioned bell-pull of Luke Dawson. Mrs. Dawson opened the door and peered doubtfully about the edge of it. Carol kissed her cheek, and frisked into the lugubrious sitting-room.

“Well, well, you’re a sight for sore eyes!” chuckled Mr. Dawson, dropping his newspaper, pushing his spectacles back on his forehead.

“You seem so excited,” sighed Mrs. Dawson.

“I am! Mr. Dawson, aren’t you a millionaire?”

He cocked his head, and purred, “Well, I guess if I cashed in on all my securities and farm-holdings and my interests in iron on the Mesaba and in Northern timber and cut-over lands, I could push two million dollars pretty close, and I’ve made every cent of it by hard work and having the sense to not go out and spend every⁠—”

“I think I want most of it from you!”

The Dawsons glanced at each other in appreciation of the jest; and he chirped, “You’re worse than Reverend Benlick! He don’t hardly ever strike me for more than ten dollars⁠—at a time!”

“I’m not joking. I mean it! Your children in the Cities are grown-up and well-to-do. You don’t want to die and leave your name unknown. Why not do a big, original thing? Why not rebuild the whole town? Get a great architect, and have him plan a town that would be suitable to the prairie. Perhaps he’d create some entirely new form of architecture. Then tear down all these shambling buildings⁠—”

Mr. Dawson had decided that she really did mean it. He wailed, “Why, that would cost at least three or four million dollars!”

“But you alone, just one man, have two of those millions!”

“Me? Spend all my hard-earned cash on building houses for a lot of shiftless beggars that never had the sense to save their money? Not that I’ve ever been mean. Mama could always have a hired girl to do the work⁠—when we could find one. But her and I have worked our fingers to the bone and⁠—spend it on a lot of these rascals⁠—?”

“Please! Don’t be angry! I just mean⁠—I mean⁠—Oh, not spend all of it, of course, but if you led off the list, and the others came in, and if they heard you talk about a more attractive town⁠—”

“Why now, child, you’ve got a lot of notions. Besides what’s the matter with the town? Looks good to me. I’ve had people that have traveled all over