Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [63]
“By the way, Carrie, while we’re talking of this: Of course I like to keep independent, and I don’t believe in this business of binding yourself to trade with the man that trades with you unless you really want to, but same time: I’d be just as glad if you dealt with Jenson or Ludelmeyer as much as you can, instead of Howland & Gould, who go to Dr. Gould every last time, and the whole tribe of ’em the same way. I don’t see why I should be paying out my good money for groceries and having them pass it on to Terry Gould!”
“I’ve gone to Howland & Gould because they’re better, and cleaner.”
“I know. I don’t mean cut them out entirely. Course Jenson is tricky—give you short weight—and Ludelmeyer is a shiftless old Dutch hog. But same time, I mean let’s keep the trade in the family whenever it is convenient, see how I mean?”
“I see.”
“Well, guess it’s about time to turn in.”
He yawned, went out to look at the thermometer, slammed the door, patted her head, unbuttoned his waistcoat, yawned, wound the clock, went down to look at the furnace, yawned, and clumped up-stairs to bed, casually scratching his thick woolen undershirt.
Till he bawled, “Aren’t you ever coming up to bed?” she sat unmoving.
CHAPTER 9
She had tripped into the meadow to teach the lambs a pretty educational dance and found that the lambs were wolves. There was no way out between their pressing gray shoulders. She was surrounded by fangs and sneering eyes.
She could not go on enduring the hidden derision. She wanted to flee. She wanted to hide in the generous indifference of cities. She practised saying to Kennicott, “Think perhaps I’ll run down to St. Paul for a few days.” But she could not trust herself to say it carelessly; could not abide his certain questioning.
Reform the town? All she wanted was to be tolerated!
She could not look directly at people. She flushed and winced before citizens who a week ago had been amusing objects of study, and in their good-mornings she heard a cruel sniggering.
She encountered Juanita Haydock at Ole Jenson’s grocery. She besought, “Oh, how do you do! Heavens, what beautiful celery that is!”
“Yes, doesn’t it look fresh. Harry simply has to have his celery on Sunday, drat the man!”
Carol hastened out of the shop exulting, “She didn’t make fun of me.... Did she?”
In a week she had recovered from consciousness of insecurity, of shame and whispering notoriety, but she kept her habit of avoiding people. She walked the streets with her head down. When she spied Mrs. McGanum or Mrs. Dyer ahead she crossed over with an elaborate pretense of looking at a billboard. Always she was acting, for the benefit of every one she saw—and for the benefit of the am-bushed leering eyes which she did not see.
She perceived that Vida Sherwin had told the truth. Whether she entered a store, or swept the back porch, or stood at the bay-window in the living-room, the village peeped at her. Once she had swung along the street triumphant in making a home. Now she glanced at each house, and felt, when she was safely home, that she had won past a thousand enemies armed with ridicule. She told herself that her sensitiveness was preposterous, but daily she was thrown into panic. She saw curtains slide back into innocent smoothness. Old women who had been entering their houses slipped out again to stare at her—in the wintry quiet she could hear them tiptoeing on their porches. When she had for a blessed hour forgotten the searchlight, when she was scampering through a chill dusk, happy in yellow windows against gray night, her heart checked as she realized that a head covered with a shawl was thrust up over a snow-tipped bush to watch her.
She admitted that she was taking herself