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

the buyer at the grain-elevator. He weighed wagons of wheat on a rough platform-scale, in the cracks of which the kernels sprouted every spring. Between times he napped in the dusty peace of his office.

She called on the Perrys at their rooms above Howland & Gould’s grocery.

When they were already old they had lost the money, which they had invested in an elevator. They had given up their beloved yellow brick house and moved into these rooms over a store, which were the Gopher Prairie equivalent of a flat. A broad stairway led from the street to the upper hall, along which were the doors of a lawyer’s office, a dentist’s, a photographer’s “studio,” the lodge-rooms of the Affiliated Order of Spartans and, at the back, the Perrys’ apartment.

They received her (their first caller in a month) with aged fluttering tenderness. Mrs. Perry confided, “My, it’s a shame we got to entertain you in such a cramped place. And there ain’t any water except that ole iron sink outside in the hall, but still, as I say to Champ, beggars can’t be choosers. ’Sides, the brick house was too big for me to sweep, and it was way out, and it’s nice to be living down here among folks. Yes, we’re glad to be here. But⁠—Some day, maybe we can have a house of our own again. We’re saving up⁠—Oh, dear, if we could have our own home! But these rooms are real nice, ain’t they!”

As old people will, the world over, they had moved as much as possible of their familiar furniture into this small space. Carol had none of the superiority she felt toward Mrs. Lyman Cass’s plutocratic parlor. She was at home here. She noted with tenderness all the makeshifts: the darned chair-arms, the patent rocker covered with sleazy cretonne, the pasted strips of paper mending the birch-bark napkin-rings labeled “Papa” and “Mama.”

She hinted of her new enthusiasm. To find one of the “young folks” who took them seriously, heartened the Perrys, and she easily drew from them the principles by which Gopher Prairie should be born again⁠—should again become amusing to live in.

This was their philosophy complete⁠ ⁠… in the era of aeroplanes and syndicalism:

The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordained standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. “We don’t need all this newfangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that’s ruining our young men in colleges. What we need is to get back to the true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have it preached to us.”

The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs.

All socialists ought to be hanged.

“Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals in his novels, and folks say he’s made prett’ near a million dollars out of ’em.”

People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred are wicked.

Europeans are still wickeder.

It doesn’t hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody who touches wine is headed straight for hell.

Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be.

Nobody needs drugstore ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody.

The farmers want too much for their wheat.

The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the salaries they pay.

There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybody worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm.

IV

Carol’s hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the nodding dwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home with a headache.

Next day she saw Miles Bjornstam on the street.

“Just back from Montana. Great summer. Pumped my lungs chock-full of Rocky Mountain air. Now for another whirl at sassing the bosses of Gopher Prairie.” She smiled at him, and the Perrys faded, the pioneers faded, till they were but daguerreotypes in a black walnut cupboard.

XIII

She tried, more from loyalty than from desire, to call upon the Perrys on a November evening when Kennicott was away. They were not at home.

Like a child who has no one to play with she loitered through the dark hall. She saw a light under an office door. She knocked. To the person who opened she murmured, “Do you happen to know where the Perrys are?” She realized that it was Guy Pollock.

“I’m awfully sorry, Mrs. Kennicott, but I don’t know. Won’t you come in and wait for them?”

“W-why⁠—” she observed, as she reflected that in Gopher Prairie it is not decent to call on a man; as she decided that no, really, she wouldn’t go in; and as she went in.

“I didn’t know your office was up here.”

“Yes, office, town-house, and château in Picardy. But you can’t see the château and town-house (next to the Duke of Sutherland’s). They’re beyond that inner door. They are a cot and a washstand and my other suit and the blue crepe tie you said you liked.”

“You remember my saying that?”

“Of course. I always shall. Please try this chair.”

She glanced about the rusty office⁠—gaunt stove, shelves of tan law-books, desk-chair filled with newspapers so long sat upon that they were in holes and smudged to grayness. There were only two things which suggested Guy Pollock. On the green felt of the table-desk, between legal blanks and a clotted inkwell, was a cloissoné vase. On a swing shelf was a row of books unfamiliar to Gopher Prairie: Mosher editions of the poets, black and red German novels, a Charles Lamb in crushed levant.

Guy did not sit down. He quartered the office, a grayhound on the scent; a grayhound with glasses tilted forward on his thin nose, and a silky indecisive brown mustache. He had a golf jacket of jersey, worn through at the creases in the sleeves. She noted that he did not apologize