CAROL’S liveliest interest was in her walks with the baby. Hugh wanted to know what the box-elder tree said, and what the Ford garage said, and what the big cloud said, and she told him, with a feeling that she was not in the least making up stories, but discovering the souls of things. They had an especial fondness for the hitching-post in front of the mill. It was a brown post, stout and agreeable; the smooth leg of it held the sunlight, while its neck, grooved by hitching- straps, tickled one’s fingers. Carol had never been awake to the earth except as a show of changing color and great satisfying masses; she had lived in people and in ideas about having ideas; but Hugh’s questions made her attentive to the comedies of sparrows, robins, blue jays, yellowhammers; she regained her pleasure in the arching flight of swallows, and added to it a solicitude about their nests and family squabbles.
She forgot her seasons of boredom. She said to Hugh, “We’re two fat disreputable old minstrels roaming round the world,” and he echoed her, “Roamin’ round — roamin’ round.”
The high adventure, the secret place to which they both fled joyously, was the house of Miles and Bea and Olaf Bjornstam.
Kennicott steadily disapproved of the Bjornstams. He protested, “What do you want to talk to that crank for?” He hinted that a former “Swede hired girl” was low company for the son of Dr. Will Kennicott. She did not explain. She did not quite understand it herself; did not know that in the Bjornstams she found her friends, her club, her sympathy and her ration of blessed cynicism. For a time the gossip of Juanita Haydock and the Jolly Seventeen had been a refuge from the droning of Aunt Bessie, but the relief had not continued. The young matrons made her nervous. They talked so loud, always so loud. They filled a room with clashing cackle; their jests and gags they repeated nine times over. Unconsciously, she had discarded the Jolly Seventeen, Guy Pollock, Vida, and every one save Mrs. Dr. Westlake and the friends whom she did not clearly know as friends — the Bjornstams.
To Hugh, the Red Swede was the most heroic and powerful person in the world. With unrestrained adoration he trotted after while Miles fed the cows, chased his one pig — an animal of lax and migratory instincts — or dramatically slaughtered a chicken. And to Hugh, Olaf was lord among mortal men, less stalwart than the old monarch, King Miles, but more understanding of the relations and values of things, of small sticks, lone playing-cards, and irretrievably injured hoops.
Carol saw, though she did not admit, that Olaf was not only more beautiful than her own dark child, but more gracious. Olaf was a Norse chieftain: straight, sunny-haired, large- limbed, resplendently amiable to his subjects. Hugh was a vulgarian; a bustling business man. It was Hugh that bounced and said “Let’s play”; Olaf that opened luminous blue eyes and agreed “All right,” in condescending gentleness. If Hugh batted him — and Hugh did bat him — Olaf was unafraid but shocked. In magnificent solitude he marched toward the house, while Hugh bewailed his sin and the overclouding of august favor.
The two friends played with an imperial chariot which Miles had made out of a starch-box and four red spools; together they stuck switches into a mouse-hole, with vast satisfaction though entirely without known results.
Bea, the chubby and humming Bea, impartially gave cookies and scoldings to both children, and if Carol refused a cup of coffee and a wafer of buttered knackebrod, she was desolated.
Miles had done well with his dairy. He had six cows, two hundred chickens, a cream separator, a Ford truck. In the spring he had built a two-room addition to his shack. That illustrious building was to Hugh a carnival. Uncle Miles did the most spectacular, unexpected things: ran up the ladder; stood on the ridge-pole, waving a hammer and singing something about “To arms, my citizens”; nailed shingles faster than Aunt Bessie could iron handkerchiefs; and lifted a two- by-six with Hugh riding on one end and Olaf on the other. Uncle Miles’s most ecstatic trick was to make figures not on paper but right on a new pine board, with the broadest softest pencil in the world. There was a thing worth seeing!
The tools! In his office Father had tools fascinating in their shininess and curious shapes, but they were sharp, they were something called sterized, and they distinctly were not for boys to touch. In fact it was a good dodge to volunteer “I must not touch,” when you looked at the tools on the glass shelves in Father’s office. But Uncle Miles, who was a person altogether superior to Father, let you handle all his kit except the saws. There was a hammer with a silver head; there was a metal thing like a big L; there was a magic instrument, very precious, made out of costly red wood and gold, with a tube which contained a drop — no, it wasn’t a drop, it was a nothing, which lived in the water, but the nothing LOOKED like a drop, and it ran in a frightened way up and down the tube, no matter how cautiously you tilted the magic instrument. And there were nails, very different and clever — big valiant spikes, middle-sized ones which were not very interesting, and shingle- nails much jollier than the fussed-up fairies in the yellow book.
II

While he had worked on the addition Miles had talked frankly to Carol. He admitted now that so long as he stayed in Gopher Prairie he would remain a pariah. Bea’s Lutheran friends were as much offended by his agnostic gibes as the merchants by his radicalism. “And I can’t seem to keep my mouth shut. I think I’m being a baa-lamb, and not springing any theories wilder than ‘c-a-t spells cat,’ but when folks have gone, I re’lize I’ve been stepping on their pet religious corns. Oh, the mill foreman keeps dropping in, and that Danish shoemaker, and one fellow from Elder’s factory, and a few Svenskas, but you know Bea: big good-hearted wench like her wants a lot of folks around — likes to fuss over ’em — never satisfied unless she tiring herself out making coffee for somebody.
“Once she kidnapped me and drug me to the Methodist Church. I goes in, pious as Widow Bogart, and sits still and never cracks a smile while the preacher is favoring us with his misinformation on evolution. But afterwards, when the old stalwarts were pumphandling everybody at the door and calling ’em ‘Brother’ and ‘Sister,’ they let me sail right by with nary a clinch. They figure I’m the town badman. Always will be, I guess. It’ll have to be Olaf who goes on. ‘And sometimes —— Blamed if I don’t feel like coming out and saying, ‘I’ve been conservative. Nothing to it. Now I’m going to start something in these rotten one-horse lumber- camps west of town.’ But Bea’s got me hypnotized. Lord, Mrs. Kennicott, do you re’lize what a jolly, square, faithful woman she is? And I love Olaf —— Oh well, I won’t go and get sentimental on you.
“Course I’ve had thoughts of pulling up stakes and going West. Maybe if they didn’t know it beforehand, they wouldn’t find out I’d ever been guilty of trying to think for myself. But — oh, I’ve worked hard, and built up this dairy business, and I hate to start all over again, and move Bea and the kid into another one-room shack. That’s how they get us! Encourage us to be thrifty and own our own houses, and then, by golly, they’ve got us; they know we won’t dare risk everything by committing lez — what is it? lez majesty? — I mean they know we won’t be hinting around that if we had a co-operative bank, we could get along without Stowbody. Well —— As long as I can sit and play pinochle with Bea, and tell whoppers to Olaf about his daddy’s adventures in the woods, an............