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

the world tell me time and again that Gopher Prairie is the prettiest place in the Middlewest. Good enough for anybody. Certainly good enough for Mama and me. Besides! Mama and me are planning to go out to Pasadena and buy a bungalow and live there.” VII

She had met Miles Bjornstam on the street. For the second of welcome encounter this workman with the bandit mustache and the muddy overalls seemed nearer than anyone else to the credulous youth which she was seeking to fight beside her, and she told him, as a cheerful anecdote, a little of her story.

He grunted, “I never thought I’d be agreeing with Old Man Dawson, the penny-pinching old land-thief⁠—and a fine briber he is, too. But you got the wrong slant. You aren’t one of the people⁠—yet. You want to do something for the town. I don’t! I want the town to do something for itself. We don’t want old Dawson’s money⁠—not if it’s a gift, with a string. We’ll take it away from him, because it belongs to us. You got to get more iron and cussedness into you. Come join us cheerful bums, and some day⁠—when we educate ourselves and quit being bums⁠—we’ll take things and run ’em straight.”

He had changed from her friend to a cynical man in overalls. She could not relish the autocracy of “cheerful bums.”

She forgot him as she tramped the outskirts of town.

She had replaced the city hall project by an entirely new and highly exhilarating thought of how little was done for these unpicturesque poor.

VIII

The spring of the plains is not a reluctant virgin but brazen and soon away. The mud roads of a few days ago are powdery dust and the puddles beside them have hardened into lozenges of black sleek earth like cracked patent leather.

Carol was panting as she crept to the meeting of the Thanatopsis program committee which was to decide the subject for next fall and winter.

Madam Chairman (Miss Ella Stowbody in an oyster-colored blouse) asked if there was any new business.

Carol rose. She suggested that the Thanatopsis ought to help the poor of the town. She was ever so correct and modern. She did not, she said, want charity for them, but a chance of self-help; an employment bureau, direction in washing babies and making pleasing stews, possibly a municipal fund for home-building. “What do you think of my plans, Mrs. Warren?” she concluded.

Speaking judiciously, as one related to the church by marriage, Mrs. Warren gave verdict:

“I’m sure we’re all heartily in accord with Mrs. Kennicott in feeling that wherever genuine poverty is encountered, it is not only noblesse oblige but a joy to fulfil our duty to the less fortunate ones. But I must say it seems to me we should lose the whole point of the thing by not regarding it as charity. Why, that’s the chief adornment of the true Christian and the church! The Bible has laid it down for our guidance. ‘Faith, Hope, and Charity,’ it says, and, ‘The poor ye have with ye always,’ which indicates that there never can be anything to these so-called scientific schemes for abolishing charity, never! And isn’t it better so? I should hate to think of a world in which we were deprived of all the pleasure of giving. Besides, if these shiftless folks realize they’re getting charity, and not something to which they have a right, they’re so much more grateful.”

“Besides,” snorted Miss Ella Stowbody, “they’ve been fooling you, Mrs. Kennicott. There isn’t any real poverty here. Take that Mrs. Steinhof you speak of: I send her our washing whenever there’s too much for our hired girl⁠—I must have sent her ten dollars’ worth the past year alone! I’m sure Papa would never approve of a city home-building fund. Papa says these folks are fakers. Especially all these tenant farmers that pretend they have so much trouble getting seed and machinery. Papa says they simply won’t pay their debts. He says he’s sure he hates to foreclose mortgages, but it’s the only way to make them respect the law.”

“And then think of all the clothes we give these people!” said Mrs. Jackson Elder.

Carol intruded again. “Oh yes. The clothes. I was going to speak of that. Don’t you think that when we give clothes to the poor, if we do give them old ones, we ought to mend them first and make them as presentable as we can? Next Christmas when the Thanatopsis makes its distribution, wouldn’t it be jolly if we got together and sewed on the clothes, and trimmed hats, and made them⁠—”

“Heavens and earth, they have more time than we have! They ought to be mighty good and grateful to get anything, no matter what shape it’s in. I know I’m not going to sit and sew for that lazy Mrs. Vopni, with all I’ve got to do!” snapped Ella Stowbody.

They were glaring at Carol. She reflected that Mrs. Vopni, whose husband had been killed by a train, had ten children.

But Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks was smiling. Mrs. Wilks was the proprietor of Ye Art Shoppe and Magazine and Book Store, and the reader of the small Christian Science church. She made it all clear:

“If this class of people had an understanding of Science and that we are the children of God and nothing can harm us, they wouldn’t be in error and poverty.”

Mrs. Jackson Elder confirmed, “Besides, it strikes me the club is already doing enough, with tree-planting and the anti-fly campaign and the responsibility for the restroom⁠—to say nothing of the fact that we’ve talked of trying to get the railroad to put in a park at the station!”

“I think so too!” said Madam Chairman. She glanced uneasily at Miss Sherwin. “But what do you think, Vida?”

Vida smiled tactfully at each of the committee, and announced, “Well, I don’t believe we’d better start anything more right now. But it’s been a privilege to hear Carol’s dear generous ideas, hasn’t it! Oh! There is one thing we must