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

used to love it in college.” She was awake now, and urgent. “I know you didn’t care so much for Yeats when I read him aloud to you, but you just see if you don’t adore him on the stage.”

Most of the cast were as unwieldy as oak chairs marching, and the setting was an arty arrangement of batik scarfs and heavy tables, but Maire Bruin was slim as Carol, and larger-eyed, and her voice was a morning bell. In her, Carol lived, and on her lifting voice was transported from this sleepy small-town husband and all the rows of polite parents to the stilly loft of a thatched cottage where in a green dimness, beside a window caressed by linden branches, she bent over a chronicle of twilight women and the ancient gods.

“Well⁠—gosh⁠—nice kid played that girl⁠—good-looker,” said Kennicott. “Want to stay for the last piece? Heh?”

She shivered. She did not answer.

The curtain was again drawn aside. On the stage they saw nothing but long green curtains and a leather chair. Two young men in brown robes like furniture-covers were gesturing vacuously and droning cryptic sentences full of repetitions.

It was Carol’s first hearing of Dunsany. She sympathized with the restless Kennicott as he felt in his pocket for a cigar and unhappily put it back.

Without understanding when or how, without a tangible change in the stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was conscious of another time and place.

Stately and aloof among vainglorious tiring-maids, a queen in robes that murmured on the marble floor, she trod the gallery of a crumbling palace. In the courtyard, elephants trumpeted, and swart men with beards dyed crimson stood with bloodstained hands folded upon their hilts, guarding the caravan from El Sharnak, the camels with Tyrian stuffs of topaz and cinnabar. Beyond the turrets of the outer wall the jungle glared and shrieked, and the sun was furious above drenched orchids. A youth came striding through the steel-bossed doors, the sword-bitten doors that were higher than ten tall men. He was in flexible mail, and under the rim of his planished morion were amorous curls. His hand was out to her; before she touched it she could feel its warmth⁠—

“Gosh all hemlock! What the dickens is all this stuff about, Carrie?”

She was no Syrian queen. She was Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. She fell with a jolt into a whitewashed hall and sat looking at two scared girls and a young man in wrinkled tights.

Kennicott fondly rambled as they left the hall:

“What the deuce did that last spiel mean? Couldn’t make head or tail of it. If that’s highbrow drama, give me a cowpuncher movie, every time! Thank God, that’s over, and we can get to bed. Wonder if we wouldn’t make time by walking over to Nicollet to take a car? One thing I will say for that dump: they had it warm enough. Must have a big hot-air furnace, I guess. Wonder how much coal it takes to run ’em through the winter?”

In the car he affectionately patted her knee, and he was for a second the striding youth in armor; then he was Doc Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, and she was recaptured by Main Street. Never, not all her life, would she behold jungles and the tombs of kings. There were strange things in the world, they really existed; but she would never see them.

She would recreate them in plays!

She would make the dramatic association understand her aspiration. They would, surely they would⁠—

She looked doubtfully at the impenetrable reality of yawning trolley conductor and sleepy passengers and placards advertising soap and underwear.

XVIII I

She hurried to the first meeting of the play-reading committee. Her jungle romance had faded, but she retained a religious fervor, a surge of half-formed thought about the creation of beauty by suggestion.

A Dunsany play would be too difficult for the Gopher Prairie association. She would let them compromise on Shaw⁠—on Androcles and the Lion, which had just been published.

The committee was composed of Carol, Vida Sherwin, Guy Pollock, Raymie Wutherspoon, and Juanita Haydock. They were exalted by the picture of themselves as being simultaneously businesslike and artistic. They were entertained by Vida in the parlor of Mrs. Elisha Gurrey’s boardinghouse, with its steel engraving of Grant at Appomattox, its basket of stereoscopic views, and its mysterious stains on the gritty carpet.

Vida was an advocate of culture-buying and efficiency-systems. She hinted that they ought to have (as at the committee-meetings of the Thanatopsis) a “regular order of business,” and “the reading of the minutes,” but as there were no minutes to read, and as no one knew exactly what was the regular order of the business of being literary, they had to give up efficiency.

Carol, as chairman, said politely, “Have you any ideas about what play we’d better give first?” She waited for them to look abashed and vacant, so that she might suggest Androcles.

Guy Pollock answered with disconcerting readiness, “I’ll tell you: since we’re going to try to do something artistic, and not simply fool around, I believe we ought to give something classic. How about The School for Scandal?”

“Why⁠—Don’t you think that has been done a good deal?”

“Yes, perhaps it has.”

Carol was ready to say, “How about Bernard Shaw?” when he treacherously went on, “How would it be then to give a Greek drama⁠—say Oedipus Tyrannus?”

“Why, I don’t believe⁠—”

Vida Sherwin intruded, “I’m sure that would be too hard for us. Now I’ve brought something that I think would be awfully jolly.”

She held out, and Carol incredulously took, a thin gray pamphlet entitled McGinerty’s Mother-in-Law. It was the sort of farce which is advertised in “school entertainment” catalogues as:

Riproaring knockout, 5 m. 3 f., time 2 hrs., interior set, popular with churches and all high-class occasions.

Carol glanced from the scabrous object to Vida, and realized that she was not joking.

“But this is⁠—this is⁠—why, it’s just a⁠—Why, Vida, I thought you appreciated⁠—well⁠—appreciated art.”

Vida snorted, “Oh. Art. Oh yes. I do like art. It’s