As she entered she heard Mrs. Dyer demanding, "Dave, I"ve got to have some money."
Carol saw that her husband was there, and two other men, all listening in amus.e.m.e.nt.
Dave Dyer snapped, "How much do you want? Dollar be enough?"
"No, it won"t! I"ve got to get some underclothes for the kids."
"Why, good Lord, they got enough now to fill the closet so I couldn"t find my hunting boots, last time I wanted them."
"I don"t care. They"re all in rags. You got to give me ten dollars----"
Carol perceived that Mrs. Dyer was accustomed to this indignity. She perceived that the men, particularly Dave, regarded it as an excellent jest. She waited--she knew what would come--it did. Dave yelped, "Where"s that ten dollars I gave you last year?" and he looked to the other men to laugh. They laughed.
Cold and still, Carol walked up to Kennicott and commanded, "I want to see you upstairs."
"Why--something the matter?"
"Yes!"
He clumped after her, up the stairs, into his barren office. Before he could get out a query she stated:
"Yesterday, in front of a saloon, I heard a German farm-wife beg her husband for a quarter, to get a toy for the baby--and he refused. Just now I"ve heard Mrs. Dyer going through the same humiliation. And I--I"m in the same position! I have to beg you for money. Daily! I have just been informed that I couldn"t have any sugar because I hadn"t the money to pay for it!"
"Who said that? By G.o.d, I"ll kill any----"
"Tut. It wasn"t his fault. It was yours. And mine. I now humbly beg you to give me the money with which to buy meals for you to eat. And hereafter to remember it. The next time, I sha"n"t beg. I shall simply starve. Do you understand? I can"t go on being a slave----"
Her defiance, her enjoyment of the role, ran out. She was sobbing against his overcoat, "How can you shame me so?" and he was blubbering, "Dog-gone it, I meant to give you some, and I forgot it. I swear I won"t again. By golly I won"t!"
He pressed fifty dollars upon her, and after that he remembered to give her money regularly ... sometimes.
Daily she determined, "But I must have a stated amount--be business-like. System. I must do something about it." And daily she didn"t do anything about it.
III
Mrs. Bogart had, by the simpering viciousness of her comments on the new furniture, stirred Carol to economy. She spoke judiciously to Bea about left-overs. She read the cookbook again and, like a child with a picture-book, she studied the diagram of the beef which gallantly continues to browse though it is divided into cuts.
But she was a deliberate and joyous spendthrift in her preparations for her first party, the housewarming. She made lists on every envelope and laundry-slip in her desk. She sent orders to Minneapolis "fancy grocers." She pinned patterns and sewed. She was irritated when Kennicott was jocular about "these frightful big doings that are going on." She regarded the affair as an attack on Gopher Prairie"s timidity in pleasure. "I"ll make "em lively, if nothing else. I"ll make "em stop regarding parties as committee-meetings."
Kennicott usually considered himself the master of the house. At his desire, she went hunting, which was his symbol of happiness, and she ordered porridge for breakfast, which was his symbol of morality. But when he came home on the afternoon before the housewarming he found himself a slave, an intruder, a blunderer. Carol wailed, "Fix the furnace so you won"t have to touch it after supper. And for heaven"s sake take that horrible old door-mat off the porch. And put on your nice brown and white shirt. Why did you come home so late? Would you mind hurrying? Here it is almost suppertime, and those fiends are just as likely as not to come at seven instead of eight. PLEASE hurry!"
She was as unreasonable as an amateur leading woman on a first night, and he was reduced to humility. When she came down to supper, when she stood in the doorway, he gasped. She was in a silver sheath, the calyx of a lily, her piled hair like black gla.s.s; she had the fragility and costliness of a Viennese goblet; and her eyes were intense. He was stirred to rise from the table and to hold the chair for her; and all through supper he ate his bread dry because he felt that she would think him common if he said "Will you hand me the b.u.t.ter?"
IV
She had reached the calmness of not caring whether her guests liked the party or not, and a state of satisfied suspense in regard to Bea"s technique in serving, before Kennicott cried from the bay-window in the living-room, "Here comes somebody!" and Mr. and Mrs. Luke Dawson faltered in, at a quarter to eight. Then in a shy avalanche arrived the entire aristocracy of Gopher Prairie: all persons engaged in a profession, or earning more than twenty-five hundred dollars a year, or possessed of grandparents born in America.
Even while they were removing their overshoes they were peeping at the new decorations. Carol saw Dave Dyer secretively turn over the gold pillows to find a price-tag, and heard Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh, the attorney, gasp, "Well, I"ll be switched," as he viewed the vermilion print hanging against the j.a.panese obi. She was amused. But her high spirits slackened as she beheld them form in dress parade, in a long, silent, uneasy circle clear round the living-room. She felt that she had been magically whisked back to her first party, at Sam Clark"s.
"Have I got to lift them, like so many pigs of iron? I don"t know that I can make them happy, but I"ll make them hectic."
A silver flame in the darkling circle, she whirled around, drew them with her smile, and sang, "I want my party to be noisy and undignified!
This is the christening of my house, and I want you to help me have a bad influence on it, so that it will be a giddy house. For me, won"t you all join in an old-fashioned square dance? And Mr. Dyer will call."
She had a record on the phonograph; Dave Dyer was capering in the center of the floor, loose-jointed, lean, small, rusty headed, pointed of nose, clapping his hands and shouting, "Swing y" pardners--alamun lef!"
Even the millionaire Dawsons and Ezra s...o...b..dy and "Professor" George Edwin Mott danced, looking only slightly foolish; and by rushing about the room and being coy and coaxing to all persons over forty-five, Carol got them into a waltz and a Virginia Reel. But when she left them to disenjoy themselves in their own way Harry Haydock put a one-step record on the phonograph, the younger people took the floor, and all the elders sneaked back to their chairs, with crystallized smiles which meant, "Don"t believe I"ll try this one myself, but I do enjoy watching the youngsters dance."
Half of them were silent; half resumed the discussions of that afternoon in the store. Ezra s...o...b..dy hunted for something to say, hid a yawn, and offered to Lyman Ca.s.s, the owner of the flour-mill, "How d" you folks like the new furnace, Lym? Huh? So."
"Oh, let them alone. Don"t pester them. They must like it, or they wouldn"t do it." Carol warned herself. But they gazed at her so expectantly when she flickered past that she was reconvinced that in their debauches of respectability they had lost the power of play as well as the power of impersonal thought. Even the dancers were gradually crushed by the invisible force of fifty perfectly pure and well-behaved and negative minds; and they sat down, two by two. In twenty minutes the party was again elevated to the decorum of a prayer-meeting.
"We"re going to do something exciting," Carol exclaimed to her new confidante, Vida Sherwin. She saw that in the growing quiet her voice had carried across the room. Nat Hicks, Ella s...o...b..dy, and Dave Dyer were abstracted, fingers and lips slightly moving. She knew with a cold certainty that Dave was rehearsing his "stunt" about the Norwegian catching the hen, Ella running over the first lines of "An Old Sweetheart of Mine," and Nat thinking of his popular parody on Mark Antony"s oration.
"But I will not have anybody use the word "stunt" in my house," she whispered to Miss Sherwin.
"That"s good. I tell you: why not have Raymond Wutherspoon sing?"
"Raymie? Why, my dear, he"s the most sentimental yearner in town!"
"See here, child! Your opinions on house-decorating are sound, but your opinions of people are rotten! Raymie does wag his tail. But the poor dear----Longing for what he calls "self-expression" and no training in anything except selling shoes. But he can sing. And some day when he gets away from Harry Haydock"s patronage and ridicule, he"ll do something fine."
Carol apologized for her superciliousness. She urged Raymie, and warned the planners of "stunts," "We all want you to sing, Mr. Wutherspoon.
You"re the only famous actor I"m going to let appear on the stage tonight."
While Raymie blushed and admitted, "Oh, they don"t want to hear me," he was clearing his throat, pulling his clean handkerchief farther out of his breast pocket, and thrusting his fingers between the b.u.t.tons of his vest.
In her affection for Raymie"s defender, in her desire to "discover artistic talent," Carol prepared to be delighted by the recital.
Raymie sang "Fly as a Bird," "Thou Art My Dove," and "When the Little Swallow Leaves Its Tiny Nest," all in a reasonably bad offertory tenor.
Carol was shuddering with the vicarious shame which sensitive people feel when they listen to an "elocutionist" being humorous, or to a precocious child publicly doing badly what no child should do at all.
She wanted to laugh at the gratified importance in Raymie"s half-shut eyes; she wanted to weep over the meek ambitiousness which clouded like an aura his pale face, flap ears, and sandy pompadour. She tried to look admiring, for the benefit of Miss Sherwin, that trusting admirer of all that was or conceivably could be the good, the true, and the beautiful.
At the end of the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from her att.i.tude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, "My! That was sweet! Of course Raymond hasn"t an unusually good voice, but don"t you think he puts such a lot of feeling into it?"
Carol lied blackly and magnificently, but without originality: "Oh yes, I do think he has so much FEELING!"
She saw that after the strain of listening in a cultured manner the audience had collapsed; had given up their last hope of being amused.
She cried, "Now we"re going to play an idiotic game which I learned in Chicago. You will have to take off your shoes, for a starter! After that you will probably break your knees and shoulder-blades."
Much attention and incredulity. A few eyebrows indicating a verdict that Doc Kennicott"s bride was noisy and improper.