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

“My dear! How?”

“I don’t know!”

He waited.

“I think I want you to help me find out what has made the darkness of the women. Gray darkness and shadowy trees. We’re all in it, ten million women, young married women with good prosperous husbands, and business women in linen collars, and grandmothers that gad out to teas, and wives of underpaid miners, and farmwives who really like to make butter and go to church. What is it we want⁠—and need? Will Kennicott there would say that we need lots of children and hard work. But it isn’t that. There’s the same discontent in women with eight children and one more coming⁠—always one more coming! And you find it in stenographers and wives who scrub, just as much as in girl college-graduates who wonder how they can escape their kind parents. What do we want?”

“Essentially, I think, you are like myself, Carol; you want to go back to an age of tranquillity and charming manners. You want to enthrone good taste again.”

“Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh⁠—no! I believe all of us want the same things⁠—we’re all together, the industrial workers and the women and the farmers and the negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and even a few of the Respectables. It’s all the same revolt, in all the classes that have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We’re tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We’re tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We’re tired of hearing the politicians and priests and cautious reformers (and the husbands!) coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just give us a bit more time and we’ll produce it; trust us; we’re wiser than you.’ For ten thousand years they’ve said that. We want our Utopia now⁠—and we’re going to try our hands at it. All we want is⁠—everything for all of us! For every housewife and every longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want everything. We shatn’t get it. So we shatn’t ever be content⁠—”

She wondered why he was wincing. He broke in:

“See here, my dear, I certainly hope you don’t class yourself with a lot of trouble-making labor-leaders! Democracy is all right theoretically, and I’ll admit there are industrial injustices, but I’d rather have them than see the world reduced to a dead level of mediocrity. I refuse to believe that you have anything in common with a lot of laboring men rowing for bigger wages so that they can buy wretched flivvers and hideous player-pianos and⁠—”

At this second, in Buenos Aires, a newspaper editor broke his routine of being bored by exchanges to assert, “Any injustice is better than seeing the world reduced to a gray level of scientific dullness.” At this second a clerk standing at the bar of a New York saloon stopped milling his secret fear of his nagging office-manager long enough to growl at the chauffeur beside him, “Aw, you socialists make me sick! I’m an individualist. I ain’t going to be nagged by no bureaus and take orders off labor-leaders. And mean to say a hobo’s as good as you and me?”

At this second Carol realized that for all Guy’s love of dead elegances his timidity was as depressing to her as the bulkiness of Sam Clark. She realized that he was not a mystery, as she had excitedly believed; not a romantic messenger from the World Outside on whom she could count for escape. He belonged to Gopher Prairie, absolutely. She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.

He was completing his protest, “You don’t want to be mixed up in all this orgy of meaningless discontent?”

She soothed him. “No, I don’t. I’m not heroic. I’m scared by all the fighting that’s going on in the world. I want nobility and adventure, but perhaps I want still more to curl on the hearth with someone I love.”

“Would you⁠—”

He did not finish it. He picked up a handful of popcorn, let it run through his fingers, looked at her wistfully.

With the loneliness of one who has put away a possible love Carol saw that he was a stranger. She saw that he had never been anything but a frame on which she had hung shining garments. If she had let him diffidently make love to her, it was not because she cared, but because she did not care, because it did not matter.

She smiled at him with the exasperating tactfulness of a woman checking a flirtation; a smile like an airy pat on the arm. She sighed, “You’re a dear to let me tell you my imaginary troubles.” She bounced up, and trilled, “Shall we take the popcorn in to them now?”

Guy looked after her desolately.

While she teased Vida and Kennicott she was repeating, “I must go on.”

Miles Bjornstam, the pariah “Red Swede,” had brought his circular saw and portable gasoline engine to the house, to cut the cords of poplar for the kitchen range. Kennicott had given the order; Carol knew nothing of it till she heard the ringing of the saw, and glanced out to see Bjornstam, in black leather jacket and enormous ragged purple mittens, pressing sticks against the whirling blade, and flinging the stove-lengths to one side. The red irritable motor kept up a red irritable tip-tip-tip-tip-tip-tip. The whine of the saw rose till it simulated the shriek of a fire-alarm whistle at night, but always at the end it gave a lively metallic clang, and in the stillness she heard the flump of the cut stick falling on the pile.

She threw a motor robe over her, ran out. Bjornstam welcomed her, “Well, well, well! Here’s old Miles, fresh as ever. Well say, that’s all right; he ain’t even begun to be cheeky yet; next