Main Street

"He's so darn afraid you'll be offended if he smokes. You scare him.

Every time he speaks of the weather you jump him because he ain't talking about poetry or Gertie--Goethe?--or some other highbrow junk.

You've got him so leery he scarcely dares to come here."

"Oh, I AM sorry. (Though I'm sure it's you who are exaggerating now.")

"Well now, I don't know as I am! And I can tell you one thing: if you keep on you'll manage to drive away every friend I've got."

"That would be horrible of me. You KNOW I don't mean to Will, what is it about me that frightens Sam--if I do frighten him."

"Oh, you do, all right! 'Stead of putting his legs up on another chair, and unb.u.t.toning his vest, and telling a good story or maybe kidding me about something, he sits on the edge of his chair and tries to make conversation about politics, and he doesn't even cuss, and Sam's never real comfortable unless he can cuss a little!"

"In other words, he isn't comfortable unless he can behave like a peasant in a mud hut!"

"Now that'll be about enough of that! You want to know how you scare him? First you deliberately fire some question at him that you know darn well he can't answer--any fool could see you were experimenting with him--and then you shock him by talking of mistresses or something, like you were doing just now----"

"Of course the pure Samuel never speaks of such erring ladies in his private conversations!"

"Not when there's ladies around! You can bet your life on that!"

"So the impurity lies in failing to pretend that----"

"Now we won't go into all that--eugenics or whatever d.a.m.n fad you choose to call it. As I say, first you shock him, and then you become so darn flighty that n.o.body can follow you. Either you want to dance, or you bang the piano, or else you get moody as the devil and don't want to talk or anything else. If you must be temperamental, why can't you be that way by yourself?"

"My dear man, there's nothing I'd like better than to be by myself occasionally! To have a room of my own! I suppose you expect me to sit here and dream delicately and satisfy my 'temperamentality' while you wander in from the bathroom with lather all over your face, and shout, 'Seen my brown pants?'"

"Huh!" He did not sound impressed. He made no answer. He turned out of bed, his feet making one solid thud on the floor. He marched from the room, a grotesque figure in baggy union-pajamas. She heard him drawing a drink of water at the bathroom tap. She was furious at the contemptuousness of his exit. She snuggled down in bed, and looked away from him as he returned. He ignored her. As he flumped into bed he yawned, and casually stated:

"Well, you'll have plenty of privacy when we build a new house.

"When?"

"Oh, I'll build it all right, don't you fret! But of course I don't expect any credit for it."

Now it was she who grunted "Huh!" and ignored him, and felt independent and masterful as she shot up out of bed, turned her back on him, fished a lone and petrified chocolate out of her glove-box in the top right-hand drawer of the bureau, gnawed at it, found that it had cocoanut filling, said "d.a.m.n!" wished that she had not said it, so that she might be superior to his colloquialism, and hurled the chocolate into the wastebasket, where it made an evil and mocking clatter among the debris of torn linen collars and toothpaste box. Then, in great dignity and self-dramatization, she returned to bed.

All this time he had been talking on, embroidering his a.s.sertion that he "didn't expect any credit." She was reflecting that he was a rustic, that she hated him, that she had been insane to marry him, that she had married him only because she was tired of

"I'm a fool to think about a new house. By the time I get it built you'll probably have succeeded in your plan to get me completely in Dutch with every friend and every patient I've got."

She sat up with a bounce. She said coldly, "Thank you very much for revealing your real opinion of me. If that's the way you feel, if I'm such a hindrance to you, I can't stay under this roof another minute.

And I am perfectly well able to earn my own living. I will go at once, and you may get a divorce at your pleasure! What you want is a nice sweet cow of a woman who will enjoy having your dear friends talk about the weather and spit on the floor!"

"Tut! Don't be a fool!"

"You will very soon find out whether I'm a fool or not! I mean it! Do you think I'd stay here one second after I found out that I was injuring you? At least I have enough sense of justice not to do that."

"Please stop flying off at tangents, Carrie. This----"

"Tangents? TANGENTS! Let me tell you----"

"----isn't a theater-play; it's a serious effort to have us get together on fundamentals. We've both been cranky, and said a lot of things we didn't mean. I wish we were a couple o' bloomin' poets and just talked about roses and moons.h.i.+ne, but we're human. All right. Let's cut out jabbing at each other. Let's admit we both do fool things. See here: You KNOW you feel superior to folks. You're not as bad as I say, but you're not as good as you say--not by a long shot! What's the reason you're so superior? Why can't you take folks as they are?"

Her preparations for stalking out of the Doll's House were not yet visible. She mused:

"I think perhaps it's my childhood." She halted. When she went on her voice had an artificial sound, her words the bookish quality of emotional meditation. "My father was the tenderest man in the world, but he did feel superior to ordinary people. Well, he was! And the Minnesota Valley----I used to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a time, my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to write poems. The s.h.i.+ny tilted roofs below me, and the river, and beyond it the level fields in the mist, and the rim of palisades across----It held my thoughts in. I LIVED, in the valley. But the prairie--all my thoughts go flying off into the big s.p.a.ce. Do you think it might be that?"

"Um, well, maybe, but----Carrie, you always talk so much about getting all you can out of life, and not letting the years slip by, and here you deliberately go and deprive yourself of a lot of real good home pleasure by not enjoying people unless they wear frock coats and trot out----"

("Morning clothes. Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean t' interrupt you.")

"----to a lot of tea-parties. Take Jack Elder. You think Jack hasn't got any ideas about anything but manufacturing and the tariff on lumber.

But do you know that Jack is nutty about music? He'll put a grand-opera record on the phonograph and sit and listen to it and close his eyes----Or you take Lym Ca.s.s. Ever realize what a well-informed man he is?"

"But IS he? Gopher Prairie calls anybody 'well-informed' who's been through the State Capitol and heard about Gladstone."

"Now I'm telling you! Lym reads a lot--solid stuff--history. Or take Mart Mahoney, the garageman. He's got a lot of Perry prints of famous pictures in his office. Or old Bingham Playfair, that died here 'bout a year ago--lived seven miles out. He was a captain in the Civil War, and knew General Sherman, and they say he was a miner in Nevada right alongside of Mark Twain. You'll find these characters in all these small towns, and a pile of savvy in every single one of them, if you just dig for it."

"I know. And I do love them. Especially people like Champ Perry. But I can't be so very enthusiastic over the smug cits like Jack Elder."

"Then I'm a smug cit, too, whatever that is."

"No, you're a scientist. Oh, I will try and get the music out of Mr.

Elder. Only, why can't he let it COME out, instead of being ashamed of it, and always talking about hunting dogs? But I will try. Is it all right now?"

"Sure. But there's one other thing. You might give me some attention, too!"

"That's unjust! You have everything I am!"

"No, I haven't. You think you respect me--you always hand out some spiel about my being so 'useful.' But you never think of me as having ambitions, just as much as you have----"

"Perhaps not. I think of you as being perfectly satisfied."

"Well, I'm not, not by a long shot! I don't want to be a plug general pract.i.tioner all my life, like Westlake, and die in harness because I can't get out of it, and have 'em say, 'He was a good fellow, but he couldn't save a cent.' Not that I care a whoop what they say, after I've kicked in and can't hear 'em, but I want to put enough money away so you and I can be independent some day, and not have to work unless I feel like it, and I want to have a good house--by golly, I'll have as good a house as anybody in THIS town!--and if we want to travel and see your Tormina or whatever it is, why we can do it, with enough money in our jeans so we won't have to take anything off anybody, or fret about our old age. You never worry about what might happen if we got sick and didn't have a good fat wad salted away, do you!"

"I don't suppose I do."

"Well then, I have to do it for you. And if you think for one moment I want to be stuck in this burg all my life, and not have a chance to travel and see the different points of interest and all that, then you simply don't get me. I want to have a squint at the world, much's you do. Only, I'm practical about it. First place, I'm going to make the money--I'm investing in good safe farmlands. Do you understand why now?"

"Yes."

"Will you try and see if you can't think of me as something more than just a dollar-chasing roughneck?"

"Oh, my dear, I haven't been just! I AM difficile. And I won't call on the Dillons! And if Dr. Dillon is working for Westlake and McGanum, I hate him!"

CHAPTER XV