Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (ink book reader .TXT) 📕

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 shan’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 deforestration to nosebleed by saying phrases like ‘surplus value.’ Like reading the prayerbook. 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 easygoing 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 cordwood, moldy planks, a hoopless washtub. 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 workbench, wall bunk with amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffeepot on the shelf behind the potbellied 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, 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 kobolds 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 droned on:

“Yeh, I’m probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my independence by doing odd jobs, and that’s more ’n these polite cusses like the clerks in the banks do. When I’m rude to some slob, it may be partly because I don’t know better (and God knows I’m not no authority on trick forks and what pants you wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it’s because I mean something. I’m about the only man in Johnson County that remembers the joker in the Declaration of Independence about Americans being supposed to have the right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’

“I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at me like he wants me to remember he’s a highmuckamuck and worth two hundred thousand dollars, and he says, ‘Uh, Bjornquist⁠—’

“ ‘Bjornstam’s my name, Ezra,’ I says. He knows my name, all rightee.

“ ‘Well, whatever your name is,’ he says, ‘I understand you have a gasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw up four cords of maple for me,’ he says.

“ ‘So you like my looks, eh?’ I says, kind of innocent.

“ ‘What difference does that make? Want you to saw that wood before Saturday,’ he says, real sharp. Common workman going and getting fresh with a fifth of a million dollars all walking around in a hand-me-down fur coat!

“ ‘Here’s the difference it makes,’ I says, just to devil him. ‘How do you know I like your looks?’ Maybe he didn’t look sore! ‘Nope,’ I says, thinking it all over, ‘I don’t like your application for a loan. Take it to another bank, only there ain’t any,’ I says, and I walks off on him.

“Sure. Probably I was surly⁠—and foolish. But I figured there had to be one man in town independent enough to sass the banker!”

He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talked on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendliness and half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was a proletarian philosophy.

At the door, she hinted:

“Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought