Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [41]
A small spare woman with flaxen hair trotted from the house. She was twanging a Swedish patois—not in monotone, like English, but singing it, with a lyrical whine:
“Pete he say you kom pretty soon hunting, doctor. My, dot’s fine you kom. Is dis de bride? Ohhhh! Ve yoost say las’ night, ve hope maybe ve see her som day. My, soch a pretty lady!” Mrs. Rustad was shining with welcome. “Vell, veil! Ay hope you lak dis country! Von’t you stay for dinner, doctor?”
“No, but I wonder if you wouldn’t like to give us a glass of milk?” condescended Kennicott.
“Vell Ay should say Ay vill! You vait har a second and Ay run on de milk-house!” She nervously hastened to a tiny red building beside the windmill; she came back with a pitcher of milk from which Carol filled the thermos bottle.
As they drove off Carol admired, “She’s the dearest thing I ever saw. And she adores you. You are the Lord of the Manor.”
“Oh no,” much pleased, “but still they do ask my advice about things. Bully people, these Scandinavian farmers. And prosperous, too. Helga Rustad, she’s still scared of America, but her kids will be doctors and lawyers and governors of the state and any darn thing they want to.”
“I wonder———” Carol was plunged back into last night’s Weltschmerz.ag “I wonder if these farmers aren’t bigger than we are? So simple and hard-working. The town lives on them. We townies are parasites, and yet we feel superior to them. Last night I heard Mr. Haydock talking about ‘hicks.’ Apparently he despises the farmers because they haven’t reached the social heights of selling thread and buttons.”
“Parasites? Us? Where’d the farmers be without the town? Who lends them money? Who—why, we supply them with everything!”
“Don’t you find that some of the farmers think they pay too much for the services of the towns?”
“Oh, of course there’s a lot of cranks among the farmers same as there are among any class. Listen to some of these kickers, a fellow’d think that the farmers ought to run the state and the whole shooting-match—probably if they had their way they’d fill up the legislature with a lot of farmers in manure-covered boots—yes, and they’d come tell me I was hired on a salary now, and couldn’t fix my fees! That’d be fine for you, wouldn’t it!”
“But why shouldn’t they?”
“Why? That bunch of——Telling me—— Oh, for heaven’s sake, let’s quit arguing. All this discussing may be all right at a party but———Let’s forget it while we’re hunting.”
“I know. The Wonderlust—probably it’s a worse affliction than the Wanderlust. I just wonder———”
She told herself that she had everything in the world. And after each self-rebuke she stumbled again on “I just wonder——”
They ate their sandwiches by a prairie slew: long grass reaching up out of clear water, mossy bogs, red-winged blackbirds, the scum a splash of gold-green. Kennicott smoked a pipe while she leaned back in the buggy and let her tired spirit be absorbed in the Nirvana of the incomparable sky.
They lurched to the highroad and awoke from their sun-soaked drowse at the sound of the clopping hoofs. They paused to look for partridges in a rim of woods, little woods, very clean and shiny and gay, silver birches and poplars with immaculate green trunks, encircling a lake of sandy bottom, a splashing seclusion demure in the welter of hot prairie.
Kennicott brought down a fat red squirrel and at dusk he had a dramatic shot at a flight of ducks whirling down from the upper air, skimming the lake, instantly vanishing.
They drove home under the sunset. Mounds of straw, and wheat-stacks like bee-hives, stood out in startling rose and gold, and the green-tufted stubble glistened.