Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [89]
CHAPTER 13
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 wash-stand 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 cloisonné vase. On a swing shelf was a row of books unfamiliar to Gopher Prairie: Mosher editionsbl of the poets, black and red German novels, a Charles Lamb in crushed levant.bm
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 for it, as Kennicott would have done.
He made conversation: “I didn’t know you were a bosom friend of the Perrys. Champ is the salt of the earth but somehow I can’t imagine him joining you in symbolic dancing, or making improvements on the Diesel engine.”
“No. He’s a dear soul, bless him, but he belongs in the National Museum, along with General Grant’s sword, and I’m—Oh, I suppose I’m seeking for a gospel that will evangelize Gopher Prairie.”
“Really? Evangelize it to what?”
“To anything that’s definite. Seriousness or frivolousness or both. I wouldn’t care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it’s merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?”
“Is anything the matter with it? Isn’t there perhaps something the matter with you and me? (May I join you in the honor of having something the matter?)”
“(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it’s the town.”
“Because they enjoy skating more than biology?”
“But I’m not only more interested in biology than the Jolly Seventeen, but also in skating! I’ll skate with them, or slide, or throw snowballs, just as gladly as talk with you.”
(“Oh no!”)
(“Yes!) But they want to stay home and embroider.”
“Perhaps. I’m not defending the town. It’s merely—I’m a confirmed doubter of myself. (Probably I’m conceited about my lack of conceit!) Anyway, Gopher Prairie isn’t particularly bad. It’s like all villages in all countries. Most places that have lost the smell of earth but not yet acquired the smell of patchouli—or of factory-smoke—are just as suspicious and righteous. I wonder if the small town isn’t, with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix? Some day these dull market-towns may be as obsolete as monasteries. I can imagine the farmer and his local store-manager going by monorail, at the end of the day, into a city more charming than any William Morris Utopiabn—music, a university, clubs for loafers like me. (Lord, how I’d like to have a real club!)”
She asked impulsively, “You, why do you stay here?”
“I have the Village Virus.”
“It sounds dangerous.”
“It is. More dangerous than the cancer that will certainly get me at fifty unless I stop this smoking. The Village Virus is the germ which