Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [93]
“I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it. From college I went to New York, to the Columbia Law School. And for four years I lived. Oh, I won’t rhapsodize about New York. It was dirty and noisy and breathless and ghastly expensive. But compared with the moldy academy in which I had been smothered—! I went to symphonies twice a week. I saw Irving and Terry and Duse and Bernhardt,bo from the top gallery. I walked in Gramercy Park. And I read, oh, everything.
“Through a cousin I learned that Julius Flickerbaugh was sick and needed a partner. I came here. Julius got well. He didn’t like my way of loafing five hours and then doing my work (really not so badly) in one. We parted.
“When I first came here I swore I’d ‘keep up my interests.’ Very lofty! I read Browning, and went to Minneapolis for the theaters. I thought I was ‘keeping up.’ But I guess the Village Virus had me already. I was reading four copies of cheap fiction-magazines to one poem. I’d put off the Minneapolis trips till I simply had to go there on a lot of legal matters.
“A few years ago I was talking to a patent lawyer from Chicago, and I realized that—I’d always felt so superior to people like Julius Flickerbaugh, but I saw that I was as provincial and behind-the-times as Julius. (Worse! Julius plows through the Literary Digest and the Outlookbp faithfully, while I’m turning over pages of a book by Charles Flandrau that I already know by heart.)
“I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the world. Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute! I didn’t want to face new streets and younger men—real competition. It was too easy to go on making out conveyances and arguing ditching cases. So—That’s all of the biography of a living dead man, except the diverting last chapter, the lies about my having been ‘a tower of strength and legal wisdom’ which some day a preacher will spin over my lean dry body.”
He looked down at his table-desk, fingering the starry enameled vase.
She could not comment. She pictured herself running across the room to pat his hair. She saw that his lips were firm, under his soft faded mustache. She sat still, and maundered, “I know. The Village Virus. Perhaps it will get me. Some day I’m going—Oh, no matter. At least, I am making you talk! Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness, but now I’m sitting at your feet.”
“It would be rather nice to have you literally sitting at my feet, by a fire.”
“Would you have a fireplace for me?”
“Naturally! Please don’t snub me now! Let the old man rave. How old are you, Carol?”
“Twenty-six, Guy.”
“Twenty-six! I was just leaving New York, at twenty-six. I heard Pattibq sing, at twenty-six. And now I’m forty-seven. I feel like a child, yet I’m old enough to be your father. So it’s decently paternal to imagine you curled at my feet.... Of course I hope it isn’t, but we’ll reflect the morals of Gopher Prairie by officially announcing that it is! ... These standards that you and I live up to! There’s one thing that’s the matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class (there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democracy). And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our subjects watch us every minute. We can’t get wholesomely drunk and relax. We have to be so correct about sex morals, and inconspicuous clothes, and doing our commercial trickery only in the traditional ways, that none of us can live up to it, and we become horribly hypocritical. Unavoidably. The widow-robbing deacon of fiction can’t help being hypocritical. The widows themselves demand it! They admire his unctuousness. And look at me. Suppose I did dare to make love to—some exquisite married woman. I wouldn’t admit it to myself. I giggle