Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [94]
“Guy! Can’t we do something with the town? Really?”
“No, we can’t!” He disposed of it like a judge ruling out an improper objection; returned to matters less uncomfortably energetic: “Curious. Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure—wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes. Here in Gopher Prairie we’ve cleared the fields, and become soft, so we make ourselves unhappy artificially, at great expense and exertion: Methodists disliking Episcopalians, the man with the Hudsonbs laughing at the man with the flivver. The worst is the commercial hatred—the grocer feeling that any man who doesn’t deal with him is robbing him. What hurts me is that it applies to lawyers and doctors (and decidedly to their wives!) as much as to grocers. The doctors—you know about that—how your husband and Westlake and Gould dislike one another.”
“No! I won’t admit it!”
He grinned.
“Oh, maybe once or twice, when Will has positively known of a case where Doctor—where one of the others has continued to call on patients longer than necessary, he has laughed about it, but—”
He still grinned.
“No, really! And when you say the wives of the doctors share these jealousies—Mrs. McGanum and I haven’t any particular crush on each other; she’s so stolid. But her mother, Mrs. Westlake—nobody could be sweeter.”
“Yes, I’m sure she’s very bland. But I wouldn’t tell her my heart’s secrets if I were you, my dear. I insist that there’s only one professional-man’s wife in this town who doesn’t plot, and that is you, you blessed, credulous outsider!”
“I won’t be cajoled! I won’t believe that medicine, the priesthood of healing, can be turned into a penny-picking business.”
“See here: Hasn’t Kennicott ever hinted to you that you’d better be nice to some old woman because she tells her friends which doctor to call in? But I oughtn’t to—”
She remembered certain remarks which Kennicott had offered regarding the Widow Bogart. She flinched, looked at Guy beseechingly.
He sprang up, strode to her with a nervous step, smoothed her hand. She wondered if she ought to be offended by his caress. Then she wondered if he liked her hat, the new Oriental turban of rose and silver brocade.
He dropped her hand. His elbow brushed her shoulder. He flitted over to the desk-chair, his thin back stooped. He picked up the cloisonné vase. Across it he peered at her with such loneliness that she was startled. But his eyes faded into impersonality as he talked of the jealousies of Gopher Prairie. He stopped himself with a sharp, “Good Lord, Carol, you’re not a jury. You are within your legal rights in refusing to be subjected to this summing-up. I’m a tedious old fool analyzing the obvious, while you’re the spirit of rebellion. Tell me your side. What is Gopher Prairie to you?”
“A bore!”
“Can I help?”
“How could you?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps by listening. I haven’t done that tonight. But normally—Can’t I be the confidant of the old French plays, the tiring-maid with the mirror and the loyal ears?”
“Oh, what is there to confide? The people are savorless and proud of it. And even if I liked you tremendously, I couldn’t talk to you without twenty old hexes watching, whispering.”
“But you will come talk to me, once in a while?”
“I’m not sure that I shall. I’m trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I’ve failed at every positive thing I’ve tried. I’d better ‘settle down,’ as they call it, and be satisfied to be—nothing.”
“Don’t be cynical. It hurts me, in you. It’s like blood on the wing of a humming-bird.”
“I’m not a humming-bird. I’m a hawk; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens. But