ALL that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott. She recalled a hundred grotesqueries: her comic dismay at his having chewed tobacco, the evening when she had tried to read poetry to him; matters which had seemed to vanish with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that he had been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She made much of her consoling affection for him in little things. She liked the homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his strength and handiness as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; his boyishness when he ran to her to be comforted because he had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun. But at the highest he was to her another Hugh, without the glamor of Hugh’s unknown future.
There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning.
Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other doctors the Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage but remained in town, dusty and irritable. In the afternoon, when she went to Oleson & McGuire’s (formerly Dahl & Oleson’s), Carol was vexed by the assumption of the youthful clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be neighborly and rude. He was no more brusquely familiar than a dozen other clerks of the town, but her nerves were heat- scorched.
When she asked for codfish, for supper, he grunted, “What d’you want that darned old dry stuff for?”
“I like it!”
“Punk! Guess the doc can afford something better than that. Try some of the new wienies we got in. Swell. The Haydocks use ’em.”
She exploded. “My dear young man, it is not your duty to instruct me in housekeeping, and it doesn’t particularly concern me what the Haydocks condescend to approve!”
He was hurt. He hastily wrapped up the leprous fragment of fish; he gaped as she trailed out. She lamented, “I shouldn’t have spoken so. He didn’t mean anything. He doesn’t know when he is being rude.”
Her repentance was not proof against Uncle Whittier when she stopped in at his grocery for salt and a package of safety matches. Uncle Whittier, in a shirt collarless and soaked with sweat in a brown streak down his back, was whining at a clerk, “Come on now, get a hustle on and lug that pound cake up to Mis’ Cass’s. Some folks in this town think a storekeeper ain’t got nothing to do but chase out ‘phone- orders. . . . Hello, Carrie. That dress you got on looks kind of low in the neck to me. May be decent and modest — I suppose I’m old-fashioned — but I never thought much of showing the whole town a woman’s bust! Hee, hee, hee! . . . . Afternoon, Mrs. Hicks. Sage? Just out of it. Lemme sell you some other spices. Heh?” Uncle Whittier was nasally indignant “CERTAINLY! Got PLENTY other spices jus’ good as sage for any purp’se whatever! What’s the matter with — well, with allspice?” When Mrs. Hicks had gone, he raged, “Some folks don’t know what they want!”
“Sweating sanctimonious bully — my husband’s uncle!” thought Carol.
She crept into Dave Dyer’s. Dave held up his arms with, “Don’t shoot! I surrender!” She smiled, but it occurred to her that for nearly five years Dave had kept up this game of pretending that she threatened his life.
As she went dragging through the prickly-hot street she reflected that a citizen of Gopher Prairie does not have jests — he has a jest. Every cold morning for five winters Lyman Cass had remarked, “Fair to middlin’ chilly — get worse before it gets better.” Fifty times had Ezra Stowbody informed the public that Carol had once asked, “Shall I indorse this check on the back?” Fifty times had Sam Clark called to her, “Where’d you steal that hat?” Fifty times had the mention of Barney Cahoon, the town drayman, like a nickel in a slot produced from Kennicott the apocryphal story of Barney’s directing a minister, “Come down to the depot and get your case of religious books — they’re leaking!”
She came home by the unvarying route. She knew every house-front, every street-crossing, every billboard, every tree, every dog. She knew every blackened banana-skin and empty cigarette-box in the gutters. She knew every greeting. When Jim Howland stopped and gaped at her there was no possibility that he was about to confide anything but his grudging, “Well, haryuh t’day?”
All her future life, this same red-labeled bread-crate in front of the bakery, this same thimble-shaped crack in the sidewalk a quarter of a block beyond Stowbody’s granite hitching- post ——
She silently handed her purchases to the silent Oscarina. She sat on the porch, rocking, fanning, twitchy with Hugh’s whining.
Kennicott came home, grumbled, “What the devil is the kid yapping about?”
“I guess you can stand it ten minutes if I can stand it all day!”
He came to supper in his shirt sleeves, his vest partly open, revealing discolored suspenders.
“Why don’t you put on your nice Palm Beach suit, and take off that hideous vest?” she complained.
“Too much trouble. Too hot to go up-stairs.”
She realized that for perhaps a year she had not definitely looked at her husband. She regarded his table-manners. He violently chased fragments of fish about his plate with a knife and licked the knife after gobbling them. She was slightly sick. She asserted, “I’m ridiculous. What do these things matter! Don’t be so simple!” But she knew that to her they did matter, these solecisms and mixed tenses of the table.
She realized that they found little to say; that, incredibly, they were like the talked-out couples whom she had pitied at restaurants.
Bresnahan would have spouted in a lively, exciting, unreliable manner . . . .
She realized that Kennicott’s clothes were seldom pressed. His coat was wrinkled; his trousers would flap at the knees when he arose. His shoes were unblacked, and they were of an elderly shapelessness. He refused to wear soft hats; cleaved to a hard derby, as a symbol of virility and prosperity; and sometimes he forgot to take it off in the house. She peeped at his cuffs. They were frayed in prickles of starched linen. She had turned them once; she clipped them every week; but when she had begged him to throw the shirt away, last Sunday morning at the crisis of the weekly bath, he had uneasily protested, “Oh, it’ll wear quite a while yet.”
He was shaved (by himself or more socially by Del Snafflin) only three times a week. This morning had not been one of the three times.
Yet he was vain of his new turn-down collars and sleek ties; he often spoke of the “sloppy dressing” of Dr. McGanum; and he laughed at old men who wore detachable cuffs or Gladstone collars.
Carol did not care much for the creamed codfish that evening.
She noted that his nails were jagged and ill-shaped from his habit of cutting them with a pocket-knife and despising a nail-file as effeminate and urban. That they were invariably clean, that his were the scoured fingers of the surgeon, made his stubborn untidiness the more jarring. They were wise hands, kind hands, but they were not the hands of love.
She remembered him in the days of courtship. He had tried to please her, then, had touched her by sheepishly wearing a colored band on his straw hat. Was it possible that those days of fumbling for each other were gone so completely? He had read books, to impress her; had said (she recalled it ironically) that she was to point out his every fault; had insisted once, as they sat in the secret place beneath the walls of Fort Snelling ——
She shut the door on her thoughts. That was sacred ground. But it WAS a shame that ——
She nervously pushed away her cake and stewed apricots.
After supper, when they had been driven in from the porch by mosquitos, when Kennicott had for the two-hundredth time in five years commented, “We must have a new screen on the porch — lets all the bugs in,” they sat reading, and she noted, and detested herself for noting, and noted again his habitual awkwardness. He slumped down in one chair, his legs up on another, and he explored the recesses of his left ear with the end of his little finger — she could hear the faint smack — he kept it up — he kept it up ——
He blurted, “Oh. Forgot tell you. Some of the fellows coming in to play poker this evening. Suppose we could have some crackers and cheese and beer?”
She nodded.
“He might have mentioned it before. Oh well, it’s his house.”
The poker-party straggled in: Sam Clark, Jack Elder, Dave Dyer, Jim Howland. To her they mechanically said, “ ‘Devenin’,” but to Kennicott, in a heroic male manner, “Well, well, shall we start playing? Got a hunch I’m going to lick somebody real bad.” No one suggested that she join them. She told herself that it was her own fault, because she was not more friendly; but she remembered that they never asked Mrs. Sam Clark to play.
Bresnahan would have asked her.
She sat in the living-room, glancing across the hall at the men as they humped over the dining table.
They were in shirt sleeves; smoking, chewing, spitting incessantly; lowering their voices for a moment so that she did not hear what they said and afterward giggling hoarsely; using over and over the canonical phrases: “Three to dole,” “I raise you a finif,” “Come on now, ante up; what do you think this is, a pink tea?” The cigar-smoke was acrid and pervasive. The firmness with which the men mouthed their cigars made the lower part of their faces expressionless, heavy, unappealing. They were like politicians cynically dividing appointments.
How could they understand her world?
Did that faint and delicate world exist? Was she a fool? She doubted her world, doubted herself, and was sick in the acid, smoke-stained air.
She slipped back into brooding upon the habituality of the house.
Kennicott was as fixed in routine as an isolated old man. At first he had amorously deceived himself into liking her experiments with food — the one medium in which she could express imagination — but now he wanted only his round of favorite dishes: steak, roast beef, boiled pig’s-feet, oatmeal, baked apples. Because at some more flexible period he had advanced from oranges to grape-fruit he considered himself an epicure.
During their first autumn she had smiled over his affection for his hunting-coat, but now that the leather had come unstitched in dribbles of pale yellow thread, and tatters of canvas, smeared with dirt of the fields and grease from gun- cleaning, hung in a border of rags, she hated the thing.
Wasn’t her whole life like that hunting-coat?
She knew every nick and brown spot on each piece of the set of china purchased by Kennicott’s mother in 1895 — discreet china with a pattern of washed-out forget-me-nots, rimmed with blurred gold: the gravy-boat, in a saucer which did not match, the solemn and evangelical covered vegetable-dishes, the two platters.
Twenty times had Kennicott sighed over the fact that Bea had broken the other platter — the medium-sized one.
The kitchen.
Damp black iron sink, damp whitey-yellow drain-board with shreds of discolored wood which from long scrubbing were as soft as cotton thread, warped table, alarm clock, stove bravely blackened by Oscarina but an abomination in its loose doors and broken drafts and oven that never would keep an even heat.
Carol had done her best by the kitchen: painted it white, put up curtains, replaced a six-year-old calendar by a color print. She had hoped for tiling, and a kerosene range for summer cooking, but Kennicott always postponed these expenses.
She was better acquainted with the utensils in the kitchen than with Vida Sherwin or Guy Pollock. The can-opener, whose soft gray metal handle was twisted from some ancient effort to pry open a window, was more pertinent to her than all the cathedrals in Europe; and more significant than the future of Asia was the never-settled weekly question as to whether the small kitchen knife with the unpainted handle or the second-best buckhorn carving-knife was better for cutting up cold chicken for Sunday supper.
II

She was ignored by the males till midnight. Her husband called, “Suppose we could have some eats, Carrie?” As she passed through the dining-room the men smiled on her, belly- smiles. None of them noticed her while she was serving the crackers and cheese and sardines and beer. They were determining the exact psychology of Dave Dyer in standing pat, two hours before.
When they were gone she said to Kennicott, “Your friends have the manners of a barroom. They expect me to wait on them like a servant. They’re not so much interested in me as they would be in a waiter, because they don’t have to tip me. Unfortunately! Well, good night.”
So rarely did she nag in this petty, hot-weather fashion that he was astonished rather than angry. “Hey! Wait! What’s the idea? I must say I don’t get you. The boys —— Barroom? Why, Perce Bresnahan was saying there isn’t a finer bunch of royal good fellows anywhere than just the crowd that were here tonight!”
They stood in the lower hall. He was too shocked to go on with his duties of locking the front door and winding his watch and the clock.
“Bresnahan! I’m sick of him!” She meant nothing in particular.
“Why, Carrie, he’s one of the biggest men in the country! Boston just eats out of his hand!”
“I wonder if it does? How do we know but that in Boston, among well-bred people, he may be regarded as an absolute lout? The way he calls women ‘Sister,’ and the way ——”
“Now look here! That’ll do! Of course I know you don’t mean it — you’re simply hot and tired, and trying to work off your peeve on me. But just the same, I won’t stand your jumping on Perce. You —— It’s just like your attitude toward the war-so darn afraid that America will become militaristic ——”
“But you are the pure patriot!”
“By God, I am!”
“Yes, I heard you talking to Sam Clark tonight about ways of avoiding the income tax!”
He had recovered enough to lock the door; he clumped up-stairs ahead of her, growling, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m perfectly willing to pay my full tax — fact, I’m in favor of the income tax — even though I do think it’s a penalty on frugality and enterprise — fact, it’s an unjust, darn-fool tax. But just the same, I’ll pay it. Only, I’m not idiot enough to pay more than the government makes me pay, and Sam and I were just figuring out whether all automobile expenses oughn’t to be exemptions. I’ll take a lot off you, Carrie, but I don’t propose for one second to stand your saying I’m not patriotic. You know mighty well and good that I’ve tried to get away and join the army. And at the beginning of the whole fracas I said — I’ve said right along — that we ought to have entered the war the minute Germany invaded Belgium. You don’t get me at all. You can’t appreciate a man’s work. You’re abnormal. You’ve fussed so much with these fool novels and books and all this highbrow junk —— You like to argue!”
It ended, a quarter of an hour later, in his calling her a “neurotic” before he turned away and pretended to sleep.
For the first time they had failed to make peace.
“There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine ‘neurotic’; mine calls his ‘stupid.’ We’ll never understand each other, never; and it’s madness for us to debate — to lie together in a hot bed in a creepy room — enemies, yoked.”
III

It clarified in her the longing for a place of her own.
“While it’s so hot, I think I’ll sleep in the spare room,” she said next day.
“Not a bad idea.” He was cheerful and kindly.
The room was filled with a lumbering double bed and a cheap pine bureau. She stored the bed in the attic; replaced it by a cot which, with a denim cover, made a couch by day; put in a dressing-table, a rocker transformed by a cretonne cover; had Miles Bjornstam build book-shelves.
Kennicott slowly understood that she meant to keep up her seclusion. In his queries, “Changing the whole room?” “Putting your books in there?” she caught his dismay. But it was so easy, once her door was closed, to shut out his worry. That hurt her — the ease of forgetting him.
Aunt Bessie Smail sleuthed out this anarchy. She yammered, “Why, Carrie, you ain’t going to sleep all alone by yourself? I don’t believe in that. Married folks should have the same room, of course! Don’t go getting silly notions. No telling what a thing like that might lead to. Suppose I up and told your Uncle Whit that I wanted a room of my own!”
Carol spoke of recipes for corn-pudding.
But from Mrs. Dr. Westlake she drew encouragement. She had made an afternoon call on Mrs. Westlake. She was for the first time invited up-stairs, and found the suave old woman sewing in a white and mahogany room with a small bed.
“Oh, do you have your own royal apartments, and the doctor his?” Carol hinted.
“Indeed I do! The doctor says it’s bad enough to have to stand my temper at meals. Do ——” Mrs. Westlake looked at her sharply. “Why, don’t you do the same thing?”
“I’ve been thinking about it.” Carol laughed in an embarrassed way. “Then you wouldn’t regard me as a complete hussy if I wanted to be by myself now and then?”
“Why, child, every woman ought to get off by herself and turn over her thoughts — about children, and God, and how bad her complexion is, and the way men don’t really understand her, and how much work she finds to do in the house, and how much patience it takes to endure some things in a man’s love.”
“Yes!” Carol said it in a gasp, her hands twisted together. She wanted to confess not only her hatred for the Aunt Bessies but her covert irritation toward those she best loved: her alienation from Kennicott, her disappointment in Guy Pollock, her uneasiness in the presence of Vida. She had enough self-control to confine herself to, “Yes. Men! The dear blundering souls, we do have to get off and laugh at them.”
“Of course we do. Not that you have to laugh at Dr. Kennicott so much, but MY man, heavens, now there’s a rare old bird! Reading story-books when he ought to be tending to business! ‘Marcus Westlake,’ I say to him, ‘you’re a romantic old fool.’ And does he get angry? He does not! He chuckles and says, ‘Yes, my beloved, folks do say that married people grow to resemble each other!’ Drat him!” Mrs. Westlake laughed comfortably.
After such a disclosure what could Carol do but return the courtesy by remarking that as for Kennicott, he wasn’t romantic enough — the darling. Before she left she had babbled to Mrs. Westlake her dislike for Aunt Bessie, the fact that Kennicott’s income was now more than five thousand a year, her view of the reason why Vida had married Raymie (which included some thoroughly insincere praise of Raymie’s “kind heart”), her opinion of the library-board, just what Kennicott had said about Mrs. Carthal’s diabetes, and what Kennicott thought of the several surgeons in the Cities.
She went home soothed by confession, inspirited by finding a new friend.
IV

The tragicomedy of the “domestic situation.”
Oscarina went back home to help on the farm, and Carol had a succession of maids, with gaps between. The lack of servants was becoming one of the most cramping problems of the prairie town. Increasingly the farmers’ daughters rebelled against village dullness, and against the unchanged attitude of the Juanitas toward “hired girls.” They went off to city kitchens, or to city shops and factories, that they might be free and even human after hours.
The Jolly Seventeen were delighted at Carol’s desertion by the loyal Oscarina. They reminded her that she had said, “I don’t have any trouble with maids; see how Oscarina stays on.”
Between incumbencies of Finn maids from the North Woods, Germans from the prairies, occasional Swedes and Norwegians and Icelanders, Carol did her own work — and endured Aunt Bessie’s skittering in to tell her how to dampen a broom for fluffy dust, how to sugar doughnuts, how to stuff a goose. Carol was deft, and won shy praise from Kennicott, but as her shoulder blades began to sting, she wondered how many millions of women had lied to themselves during............