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

decide on at once. We must get together and oppose any move on the part of the Minneapolis clubs to elect another State Federation president from the Twin Cities. And this Mrs. Edgar Potbury they’re putting forward⁠—I know there are people who think she’s a bright interesting speaker, but I regard her as very shallow. What do you say to my writing to the Lake Ojibawasha Club, telling them that if their district will support Mrs. Warren for second vice-president, we’ll support their Mrs. Hagelton (and such a dear, lovely, cultivated woman, too) for president.”

“Yes! We ought to show up those Minneapolis folks!” Ella Stowbody said acidly. “And oh, by the way, we must oppose this movement of Mrs. Potbury’s to have the state clubs come out definitely in favor of woman suffrage. Women haven’t any place in politics. They would lose all their daintiness and charm if they became involved in these horried plots and logrolling and all this awful political stuff about scandal and personalities and so on.”

All⁠—save one⁠—nodded. They interrupted the formal business-meeting to discuss Mrs. Edgar Potbury’s husband, Mrs. Potbury’s income, Mrs. Potbury’s sedan, Mrs. Potbury’s residence, Mrs. Potbury’s oratorical style, Mrs. Potbury’s mandarin evening coat, Mrs. Potbury’s coiffure, and Mrs. Potbury’s altogether reprehensible influence on the State Federation of Women’s Clubs.

Before the program committee adjourned they took three minutes to decide which of the subjects suggested by the magazine Culture Hints, Furnishings and China or The Bible as Literature, would be better for the coming year. There was one annoying incident. Mrs. Dr. Kennicott interfered and showed off again. She commented, “Don’t you think that we already get enough of the Bible in our churches and Sunday Schools?”

Mrs. Leonard Warren, somewhat out of order but much more out of temper, cried, “Well upon my word! I didn’t suppose there was anyone who felt that we could get enough of the Bible! I guess if the Grand Old Book has withstood the attacks of infidels for these two thousand years it is worth our slight consideration!”

“Oh, I didn’t mean⁠—” Carol begged. Inasmuch as she did mean, it was hard to be extremely lucid. “But I wish, instead of limiting ourselves either to the Bible, or to anecdotes about the Brothers Adam’s wigs, which Culture Hints seems to regard as the significant point about furniture, we could study some of the really stirring ideas that are springing up today⁠—whether it’s chemistry or anthropology or labor problems⁠—the things that are going to mean so terribly much.”

Everybody cleared her polite throat.

Madam Chairman inquired, “Is there any other discussion? Will someone make a motion to adopt the suggestion of Vida Sherwin⁠—to take up Furnishings and China?”

It was adopted, unanimously.

“Checkmate!” murmured Carol, as she held up her hand.

Had she actually believed that she could plant a seed of liberalism in the blank wall of mediocrity? How had she fallen into the folly of trying to plant anything whatever in a wall so smooth and sun-glazed, and so satisfying to the happy sleepers within?

XII I

One week of authentic spring, one rare sweet week of May, one tranquil moment between the blast of winter and the charge of summer. Daily Carol walked from town into flashing country hysteric with new life.

One enchanted hour when she returned to youth and a belief in the possibility of beauty.

She had walked northward toward the upper shore of Plover Lake, taking to the railroad track, whose directness and dryness make it the natural highway for pedestrians on the plains. She stepped from tie to tie, in long strides. At each road-crossing she had to crawl over a cattle-guard of sharpened timbers. She walked the rails, balancing with arms extended, cautious heel before toe. As she lost balance her body bent over, her arms revolved wildly, and when she toppled she laughed aloud.

The thick grass beside the track, coarse and prickly with many burnings, hid canary-yellow buttercups and the mauve petals and woolly sage-green coats of the pasque flowers. The branches of the kinnikinic brush were red and smooth as lacquer on a saki bowl.

She ran down the gravelly embankment, smiled at children gathering flowers in a little basket, thrust a handful of the soft pasque flowers into the bosom of her white blouse. Fields of springing wheat drew her from the straight propriety of the railroad and she crawled through the rusty barbed-wire fence. She followed a furrow between low wheat blades and a field of rye which showed silver lights as it flowed before the wind. She found a pasture by the lake. So sprinkled was the pasture with rag-baby blossoms and the cottony herb of Indian tobacco that it spread out like a rare old Persian carpet of cream and rose and delicate green. Under her feet the rough grass made a pleasant crunching. Sweet winds blew from the sunny lake beside her, and small waves sputtered on the meadowy shore. She leaped a tiny creek bowered in pussy-willow buds. She was nearing a frivolous grove of birch and poplar and wild plum trees.

The poplar foliage had the downiness of a Corot arbor; the green and silver trunks were as candid as the birches, as slender and lustrous as the limbs of a Pierrot. The cloudy white blossoms of the plum trees filled the grove with a springtime mistiness which gave an illusion of distance.

She ran into the wood, crying out for joy of freedom regained after winter. Chokecherry blossoms lured her from the outer sun-warmed spaces to depths of green stillness, where a submarine light came through the young leaves. She walked pensively along an abandoned road. She found a moccasin-flower beside a lichen-covered log. At the end of the road she saw the open acres⁠—dipping rolling fields bright with wheat.

“I believe! The woodland gods still live! And out there, the great land. It’s beautiful as the mountains. What do I care for Thanatopsises?”

She came out on the prairie, spacious under an arch of boldly cut clouds. Small pools glittered. Above a marsh red-winged blackbirds chased a crow