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

the farmers who have forgotten the Old Country language without learning the new:

“Hello, Barney, wass willst du?”

“Morgen, doctor. Die Frau ist ja awful sick. All night she been having an awful pain in de belly.”

“How long she been this way? Wie lang, eh?”

“I dunno, maybe two days.”

“Why didn’t you come for me yesterday, instead of waking me up out of a sound sleep? Here it is two o’clock! So spät⁠—warum, eh?”

“Nun aber, I know it, but she got soch a lot vorse last evening. I t’ought maybe all de time it go avay, but it got a lot vorse.”

“Any fever?”

“Vell ja, I t’ink she got fever.”

“Which side is the pain on?”

“Huh?”

“Das Schmertz⁠—die Weh⁠—which side is it on? Here?”

“So. Right here it is.”

“Any rigidity there?”

“Huh?”

“Is it rigid⁠—stiff⁠—I mean, does the belly feel hard to the fingers?”

“I dunno. She ain’t said yet.”

“What she been eating?”

“Vell, I t’ink about vot ve alwis eat, maybe corn beef and cabbage and sausage, und so weiter. Doc, sie weint immer, all the time she holler like hell. I vish you come.”

“Well, all right, but you call me earlier, next time. Look here, Barney, you better install a phone⁠—telephone haben. Some of you Dutchmen will be dying one of these days before you can fetch the doctor.”

The door closing. Barney’s wagon⁠—the wheels silent in the snow, but the wagon-body rattling. Kennicott clicking the receiver-hook to rouse the night telephone-operator, giving a number, waiting, cursing mildly, waiting again, and at last growling, “Hello, Gus, this is the doctor. Say, uh, send me up a team. Guess snow’s too thick for a machine. Going eight miles south. All right. Huh? The hell I will! Don’t you go back to sleep. Huh? Well, that’s all right now, you didn’t wait so very darn long. All right, Gus; shoot her along. By!”

His step on the stairs; his quiet moving about the frigid room while he dressed; his abstracted and meaningless cough. She was supposed to be asleep; she was too exquisitely drowsy to break the charm by speaking. On a slip of paper laid on the bureau⁠—she could hear the pencil grinding against the marble slab⁠—he wrote his destination. He went out, hungry, chilly, unprotesting; and she, before she fell asleep again, loved him for his sturdiness, and saw the drama of his riding by night to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured children standing at a window, waiting for him. He suddenly had in her eyes the heroism of a wireless operator on a ship in a collision; of an explorer, fever-clawed, deserted by his bearers, but going on⁠—jungle⁠—going⁠—

At six, when the light faltered in as through ground glass and bleakly identified the chairs as gray rectangles, she heard his step on the porch; heard him at the furnace: the rattle of shaking the grate, the slow grinding removal of ashes, the shovel thrust into the coal-bin, the abrupt clatter of the coal as it flew into the firebox, the fussy regulation of drafts⁠—the daily sounds of a Gopher Prairie life, now first appealing to her as something brave and enduring, many-colored and free. She visioned the firebox: flames turned to lemon and metallic gold as the coal-dust sifted over them; thin twisty flutters of purple, ghost flames which gave no light, slipping up between the dark banked coals.

It was luxurious in bed, and the house would be warm for her when she rose, she reflected. What a worthless cat she was! What were her aspirations beside his capability?

She awoke again as he dropped into bed.

“Seems just a few minutes ago that you started out!”

“I’ve been away four hours. I’ve operated a woman for appendicitis, in a Dutch kitchen. Came awful close to losing her, too, but I pulled her through all right. Close squeak. Barney says he shot ten rabbits last Sunday.”

He was instantly asleep⁠—one hour of rest before he had to be up and ready for the farmers who came in early. She marveled that in what was to her but a night-blurred moment, he should have been in a distant place, have taken charge of a strange house, have slashed a woman, saved a life.

What wonder he detested the lazy Westlake and McGanum! How could the easy Guy Pollock understand this skill and endurance?

Then Kennicott was grumbling, “Seven-fifteen! Aren’t you ever going to get up for breakfast?” and he was not a hero-scientist but a rather irritable and commonplace man who needed a shave. They had coffee, griddlecakes, and sausages, and talked about Mrs. McGanum’s atrocious alligator-hide belt. Night witchery and morning disillusion were alike forgotten in the march of realities and days.

II

Familiar to the doctor’s wife was the man with an injured leg, driven in from the country on a Sunday afternoon and brought to the house. He sat in a rocker in the back of a lumber-wagon, his face pale from the anguish of the jolting. His leg was thrust out before him, resting on a starch-box and covered with a leather-bound horse-blanket. His drab courageous wife drove the wagon, and she helped Kennicott support him as he hobbled up the steps, into the house.

“Fellow cut his leg with an ax⁠—pretty bad gash⁠—Halvor Nelson, nine miles out,” Kennicott observed.

Carol fluttered at the back of the room, childishly excited when she was sent to fetch towels and a basin of water. Kennicott lifted the farmer into a chair and chuckled, “There we are, Halvor! We’ll have you out fixing fences and drinking aquavit in a month.” The farmwife sat on the couch, expressionless, bulky in a man’s dogskin coat and unplumbed layers of jackets. The flowery silk handkerchief which she had worn over her head now hung about her seamed neck. Her white wool gloves lay in her lap.

Kennicott drew from the injured leg the thick red “German sock,” the innumerous other socks of gray and white wool, then