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

Village Virus. Perhaps it will get me. Some day I’m going⁠—Oh, no matter. At least, I am making you talk! Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness, but now I’m sitting at your feet.”

“It would be rather nice to have you literally sitting at my feet, by a fire.”

“Would you have a fireplace for me?”

“Naturally! Please don’t snub me now! Let the old man rave. How old are you, Carol?”

“Twenty-six, Guy.”

“Twenty-six! I was just leaving New York, at twenty-six. I heard Patti sing, at twenty-six. And now I’m forty-seven. I feel like a child, yet I’m old enough to be your father. So it’s decently paternal to imagine you curled at my feet.⁠ ⁠… Of course I hope it isn’t, but we’ll reflect the morals of Gopher Prairie by officially announcing that it is!⁠ ⁠… These standards that you and I live up to! There’s one thing that’s the matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class (there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democracy). And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our subjects watch us every minute. We can’t get wholesomely drunk and relax. We have to be so correct about sex morals, and inconspicuous clothes, and doing our commercial trickery only in the traditional ways, that none of us can live up to it, and we become horribly hypocritical. Unavoidably. The widow-robbing deacon of fiction can’t help being hypocritical. The widows themselves demand it! They admire his unctuousness. And look at me. Suppose I did dare to make love to⁠—some exquisite married woman. I wouldn’t admit it to myself. I giggle with the most revolting salaciousness over La Vie Parisienne, when I get hold of one in Chicago, yet I shouldn’t even try to hold your hand. I’m broken. It’s the historical Anglo-Saxon way of making life miserable.⁠ ⁠… Oh, my dear, I haven’t talked to anybody about myself and all our selves for years.”

“Guy! Can’t we do something with the town? Really?”

“No, we can’t!” He disposed of it like a judge ruling out an improper objection; returned to matters less uncomfortably energetic: “Curious. Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure⁠—wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes. Here in Gopher Prairie we’ve cleared the fields, and become soft, so we make ourselves unhappy artificially, at great expense and exertion: Methodists disliking Episcopalians, the man with the Hudson laughing at the man with the flivver. The worst is the commercial hatred⁠—the grocer feeling that any man who doesn’t deal with him is robbing him. What hurts me is that it applies to lawyers and doctors (and decidedly to their wives!) as much as to grocers. The doctors⁠—you know about that⁠—how your husband and Westlake and Gould dislike one another.”

“No! I won’t admit it!”

He grinned.

“Oh, maybe once or twice, when Will has positively known of a case where Doctor⁠—where one of the others has continued to call on patients longer than necessary, he has laughed about it, but⁠—”

He still grinned.

“No, really! And when you say the wives of the doctors share these jealousies⁠—Mrs. McGanum and I haven’t any particular crush on each other; she’s so stolid. But her mother, Mrs. Westlake⁠—nobody could be sweeter.”

“Yes, I’m sure she’s very bland. But I wouldn’t tell her my heart’s secrets if I were you, my dear. I insist that there’s only one professional-man’s wife in this town who doesn’t plot, and that is you, you blessed, credulous outsider!”

“I won’t be cajoled! I won’t believe that medicine, the priesthood of healing, can be turned into a penny-picking business.”

“See here: Hasn’t Kennicott ever hinted to you that you’d better be nice to some old woman because she tells her friends which doctor to call in? But I oughtn’t to⁠—”

She remembered certain remarks which Kennicott had offered regarding the Widow Bogart. She flinched, looked at Guy beseechingly.

He sprang up, strode to her with a nervous step, smoothed her hand. She wondered if she ought to be offended by his caress. Then she wondered if he liked her hat, the new Oriental turban of rose and silver brocade.

He dropped her hand. His elbow brushed her shoulder. He flitted over to the desk-chair, his thin back stooped. He picked up the cloisonne vase. Across it he peered at her with such loneliness that she was startled. But his eyes faded into impersonality as he talked of the jealousies of Gopher Prairie. He stopped himself with a sharp, “Good Lord, Carol, you’re not a jury. You are within your legal rights in refusing to be subjected to this summing-up. I’m a tedious old fool analyzing the obvious, while you’re the spirit of rebellion. Tell me your side. What is Gopher Prairie to you?”

“A bore!”

“Can I help?”

“How could you?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps by listening. I haven’t done that tonight. But normally⁠—Can’t I be the confidant of the old French plays, the tiring-maid with the mirror and the loyal ears?”

“Oh, what is there to confide? The people are savorless and proud of it. And even if I liked you tremendously, I couldn’t talk to you without twenty old hexes watching, whispering.”

“But you will come talk to me, once in a while?”

“I’m not sure that I shall. I’m trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I’ve failed at every positive thing I’ve tried. I’d better ‘settle down,’ as they call it, and be satisfied to be⁠—nothing.”

“Don’t be cynical. It hurts me, in you. It’s like blood on the wing of a hummingbird.”

“I’m not a hummingbird. I’m a hawk; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens. But I am grateful to you for confirming me in the faith. And I’m going home!”

“Please stay and have some coffee with me.”

“I’d like to. But they’ve succeeded in terrorizing me. I’m afraid of what people might say.”

“I’m not afraid of that. I’m only afraid of what you might say!” He stalked to