Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [72]
They grinned together. She demanded:
“You say that the Jolly Seventeen is stupid. What makes you think so?”
“Oh, trust us borers into the foundation to know about your leisure class. Fact, Mrs. Kennicott, I’ll say that far as I can make out, the only people in this man’s town that do have any brains—I don’t mean ledger-keeping brains or duck-hunting brains or baby-spanking brains, but real imaginative brains—are you and me and Guy Pollock and the foreman at the flour-mill. He’s a socialist, the foreman. (Don’t tell Lym Cass that! Lym would fire a socialist quicker than he would a horse-thief!)”
“Indeed no, I sha’n’t tell him.”
“This foreman and I have some great set-to’s. He’s a regular old-line party-member. Too dogmatic. Expects to reform everything from deforestation to nosebleed by saying phrases like ‘surplus value.’ Like reading the prayer-book. But same time, he’s a Plato J. Aristotle compared with people like Ezry Stowbody or Professor Mott or Julius Flickerbaugh.”
“It’s interesting to hear about him.”
He dug his toe into a drift, like a schoolboy. “Rats. You mean I talk too much. Well, I do, when I get hold of somebody like you. You probably want to run along and keep your nose from freezing.”
“Yes, I must go, I suppose. But tell me: Why did you leave Miss Sherwin, of the high school, out of your list of the town intelligentsia?”
“I guess maybe she does belong in it. From all I can hear she’s in everything and behind everything that looks like a reform—lot more than most folks realize. She lets Mrs. Reverend Warren, the president of this-here Thanatopsis Club, think she’s running the works, but Miss Sherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing something. But way I figure it out——You see, I’m not interested in these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin’s trying to repair the holes in this barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water. And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keel up.”
“Yes—that—that would be better. But I must run home. My poor nose is nearly frozen.”
“Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an old bach’s shack is like.”
She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard that was littered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless wash-tub. She was disquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her the opportunity to be delicate. He flung out his hand in a welcoming gesture which assumed that she was her own counselor, that she was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully a human being. With a shaky, “Well, just a moment, to warm my nose,” she glanced down the street to make sure that she was not spied on, and bolted toward the shanty.
She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more considerate host than the Red Swede.
He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the shelf behind the pot-bellied cannonball stove, backwoods chairs—one constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank—and a row of books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen,av and a spotty treatise on “The Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle.”
There was but one picture—a magazine color-plate of a steep-roofed village in the Harz Mountains which suggested koboldsaw and maidens with golden hair.
Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, “Might throw open your coat and put your feet up on the box in front of the stove.” He tossed his dogskin coat into the bunk, lowered himself into the barrel chair, and