Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [23]
The hordes of the way-train were not altogether new to Carol. She had seen them on trips from St. Paul to Chicago. But now that they had become her own people, to bathe and encourage and adorn, she had an acute and uncomfortable interest in them. They distressed her. They were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks. But the older people, Yankees as well as Norwegians, Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission to poverty. They were peasants, she groaned.
“Isn’t there any way of waking them up? What would happen if they understood scientific agriculture?” she begged of Kennicott, her hand groping for his.
It had been a transforming honeymoon. She had been frightened to discover how tumultuous a feeling could be roused in her. Will had been lordly—stalwart, jolly, impressively competent in making camp, tender and understanding through the hours when they had lain side by side in a tent pitched among pines high up a lonely mountain spur.
His hand swallowed hers as he started from thoughts of the practise to which he was returning. “These people? Wake ’em up? What for? They’re happy.”
“But they’re so provincial. No, that isn’t what I mean. They’re—oh, so sunk in the mud.”
“Look here, Carrie. You want to get over your city idea that because a man’s pants aren’t pressed, he’s a fool. These farmers are mighty keen and up-and-coming.”
“I know! That’s what hurts. Life seems so hard for them—these lonely farms and this gritty train.”
“Oh, they don’t mind it. Besides, things are changing. The auto, Dthe telephone, rural free delivery; they’re bringing the farmers in closer touch with the town. Takes time, you know, to change a wilderness like this was fifty years ago. But already, why, they can hop into the Ford or the Overland and get in to the movies on Saturday evening quicker than you could get down to ’em by trolley in St. Paul.”
“But if it’s these towns we’ve been passing that the farmers run to for relief from their bleakness———Can’t you understand? Just look at them!”
Kennicott was amazed. Ever since childhood he had seen these towns from trains on this same line. He grumbled, “Why, what’s the matter with ’em? Good hustling burgs. It would astonish you to know how much wheat and rye and corn and potatoes they ship in a year.”
“But they’re so ugly.”
“I’ll admit they aren’t comfy like Gopher Prairie. But give ’em time.”
“What’s the use of giving them time unless some one has desire and training enough to plan them? Hundreds of factories trying to make attractive motor cars, but these towns—left to chance. No! That can’t be true. It must have taken genius to make them so scrawny!”
“Oh, they’re not so bad,” was all he answered. He pretended that his hand was the cat and hers the mouse. For the first time she tolerated him rather than encouraged him. She was staring out at Schoenstrom,t a hamlet of perhaps a hundred and fifty inhabitants, at which the train was stopping.
A bearded German and his pucker-mouthed wife tugged their enormous imitation-leather satchel from under a seat and waddled out. The station agent hoisted a dead calf aboard the baggage-car. There were no other visible activities in Schoenstrom. In the quiet of the halt, Carol could hear a horse kicking his stall, a carpenter shingling a roof.
The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block, facing the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops covered with galvanized iron, or with clapboards painted red and bilious yel-low.The buildings were as ill-assorted, as temporary-looking, as a mining-camp street in the motion-pictures. The railroad station was a one-room frame box, a mirey cattle-pen on one side and a crimson wheat-elevator on the other. The elevator, with its cupola