Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [112]
“I don’t get you. Look here now—”
She lay awake, while he rumbled with sleep.
“I must go on. My ‘crank ideas,’ he calls them. I thought that adoring him, watching him operate, would be enough. It isn’t. Not after the first thrill.
“I don’t want to hurt him. But I must go on.
“It isn’t enough to stand by while he fills an automobile radiator and chucks me bits of information.
“If I stood by and admired him long enough, I would be content. I would become a ‘nice little woman.’ The Village Virus. Already——I’m not reading anything. I haven’t touched the piano for a week. I’m letting the days drown in worship of ‘a good deal, ten plunks more per acre.’ I won’t! I won’t succumb!
“How? I’ve failed at everything: the Thanatopsis, parties, pioneers, city hall, Guy and Vida. But—It doesn’t matter! I’m not trying to ‘reform the town’ now. I’m not trying to organize Browning Clubs, and sit in clean white kids yearning up at lecturers with ribbony eye-glasses. I am trying to save my soul.
“Will Kennicott, asleep there, trusting me, thinking he holds me. And I’m leaving him. All of me left him when he laughed at me. It wasn’t enough for him that I admired him; I must change myself and grow like him. He takes advantage. No more. It’s finished. I will go on.”
IV
Her violin lay on top of the upright piano. She picked it up. Since she had last touched it the dried strings had snapped, and upon it lay a gold and crimson cigar-band.
V
She longed to see Guy Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in the faith. But Kennicott’s dominance was heavy upon her. She could not determine whether she was checked by fear of him, or by inertia—by dislike of the emotional labor of the “scenes” which would be involved in asserting independence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades.
The second evening after the movies she impulsively summoned Vida Sherwin and Guy to the house for pop-corn and cider. In the living-room Vida and Kennicott debated “the value of manual training in grades below the eighth,” while Carol sat beside Guy at the dining table, buttering pop-corn. She was quickened by the speculation in his eyes. She murmured:
“Guy, do you want to help me?”
“My dear! How?”
“I don’t know!”
He waited.
“I think I want you to help me find out what has made the darkness of the women. Gray darkness and shadowy trees. We’re all in it, ten million women, young married women with good prosperous husbands, and business women in linen collars, and grandmothers that gad out to teas, and wives of underpaid miners, and farmwives who really like to make butter and go to church. What is it we want—and need? Will Kennicott there would say that we need lots of children and hard work. But it isn’t that. There’s the same discontent in women with eight children and one more coming—always one more coming! And you find it in stenographers and wives who scrub, just as much as in girl college-graduates who wonder how they can escape their kind parents. What do we want?”
“Essentially, I think, you are like myself, Carol; you want to go back to an age of tranquillity and charming manners. You want to enthrone good taste again.”
“Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh—no! I believe all of us want the same things—we’re all together, the industrial workers and the women and the farmers and the Negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and even a few of the Respectables. It’s all the same revolt, in all the classes that have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We’re tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We’re tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We’re tired of hearing the politicians and priests and cautious reformers (and the husbands!) coax us,