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

“Seems kind of slow though, after driving an auto.”

“Yump, it does, at that. Say, how’d you make out with that Sphinx tire you got?”

“Seems to hold out fine. Still, I don’t know’s I like it any better than the Roadeater Cord.”

“Yump, nothing better than a Roadeater. Especially the cord. The cord’s lots better than the fabric.”

“Yump, you said something⁠—Roadeater’s a good tire.”

“Say, how’d you come out with Pete Garsheim on his payments?”

“He’s paying up pretty good. That’s a nice piece of land he’s got.”

“Yump, that’s a dandy farm.”

“Yump, Pete’s got a good place there.”

They glided from these serious topics into the jocose insults which are the wit of Main Street. Sam Clark was particularly apt at them. “What’s this wild-eyed sale of summer caps you think you’re trying to pull off?” he clamored at Harry Haydock. “Did you steal ’em, or are you just overcharging us, as usual?⁠ ⁠… Oh say, speaking about caps, d’I ever tell you the good one I’ve got on Will? The doc thinks he’s a pretty good driver, fact, he thinks he’s almost got human intelligence, but one time he had his machine out in the rain, and the poor fish, he hadn’t put on chains, and thinks I⁠—”

Carol had heard the story rather often. She fled back to the dancers, and at Dave Dyer’s masterstroke of dropping an icicle down Mrs. McGanum’s back she applauded hysterically.

They sat on the floor, devouring the food. The men giggled amiably as they passed the whisky bottle, and laughed, “There’s a real sport!” when Juanita Haydock took a sip. Carol tried to follow; she believed that she desired to be drunk and riotous; but the whisky choked her and as she saw Kennicott frown she handed the bottle on repentantly. Somewhat too late she remembered that she had given up domesticity and repentance.

“Let’s play charades!” said Raymie Wutherspoon.

“Oh yes, do let us,” said Ella Stowbody.

“That’s the caper,” sanctioned Harry Haydock.

They interpreted the word “making” as May and King. The crown was a red flannel mitten cocked on Sam Clark’s broad pink bald head. They forgot they were respectable. They made-believe. Carol was stimulated to cry:

“Let’s form a dramatic club and give a play! Shall we? It’s been so much fun tonight!”

They looked affable.

“Sure,” observed Sam Clark loyally.

“Oh, do let us! I think it would be lovely to present Romeo and Juliet!” yearned Ella Stowbody.

“Be a whale of a lot of fun,” Dr. Terry Gould granted.

“But if we did,” Carol cautioned, “it would be awfully silly to have amateur theatricals. We ought to paint our own scenery and everything, and really do something fine. There’d be a lot of hard work. Would you⁠—would we all be punctual at rehearsals, do you suppose?”

“You bet!” “Sure.” “That’s the idea.” “Fellow ought to be prompt at rehearsals,” they all agreed.

“Then let’s meet next week and form the Gopher Prairie Dramatic Association!” Carol sang.

She drove home loving these friends who raced through moonlit snow, had Bohemian parties, and were about to create beauty in the theater. Everything was solved. She would be an authentic part of the town, yet escape the coma of the Village Virus.⁠ ⁠… She would be free of Kennicott again, without hurting him, without his knowing.

She had triumphed.

The moon was small and high now, and unheeding.

Though they had all been certain that they longed for the privilege of attending committee meetings and rehearsals, the dramatic association as definitely formed consisted only of Kennicott, Carol, Guy Pollock, Vida Sherwin, Ella Stowbody, the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, Raymie Wutherspoon, Dr. Terry Gould, and four new candidates: flirtatious Rita Simons, Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon and Myrtle Cass, an uncomely but intense girl of nineteen. Of these fifteen only seven came to the first meeting. The rest telephoned their unparalleled regrets and engagements and illnesses, and announced that they would be present at all other meetings through eternity.

Carol was made president and director.

She had added the Dillons. Despite Kennicott’s apprehension the dentist and his wife had not been taken up by the Westlakes but had remained as definitely outside really smart society as Willis Woodford, who was teller, bookkeeper, and janitor in Stowbody’s bank. Carol had noted Mrs. Dillon dragging past the house during a bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, looking in with pathetic lips at the splendor of the accepted. She impulsively invited the Dillons to the dramatic association meeting, and when Kennicott was brusque to them she was unusually cordial, and felt virtuous.

That self-approval balanced her disappointment at the smallness of the meeting, and her embarrassment during Raymie Wutherspoon’s repetitions of “The stage needs uplifting,” and “I believe that there are great lessons in some plays.”

Ella Stowbody, who was a professional, having studied elocution in Milwaukee, disapproved of Carol’s enthusiasm for recent plays. Miss Stowbody expressed the fundamental principle of the American drama: the only way to be artistic is to present Shakespeare. As no one listened to her she sat back and looked like Lady Macbeth.

The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to American drama three or four years later, were only in embryo. But of this fast coming revolt Carol had premonitions. She knew from some lost magazine article that in Dublin were innovators called The Irish Players. She knew confusedly that a man named Gordon Craig had painted scenery⁠—or had he written plays? She felt that in the turbulence of the drama she was discovering a history more important than the commonplace chronicles which dealt with senators and their pompous puerilities. She had a sensation of familiarity; a dream of sitting in a Brussels café and going afterward to a tiny gay theater under a cathedral wall.

The advertisement in the Minneapolis paper leaped from the page to her eyes:

The Cosmos School of Music, Oratory, and Dramatic Art announces a program of four one-act plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats, and Lord Dunsany.

She had to be there! She begged Kennicott to “run down to the Cities” with her.

“Well, I don’t know. Be fun to take in