A concrete sidewalk with a “parking” of
grass and mud. A square smug brown house, rather
damp. A narrow concrete walk up to it. Sickly
yellow leaves in a windrow with dried wings of box-elder
seeds and snags of wool from the cotton-woods.
A screened porch with pillars of thin painted pine
surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed
wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze.
A lugubrious bay-window to the right of the porch.
Window curtains of starched cheap lace revealing a
pink marble table with a conch shell and a Family Bible.
“You’ll find it old-fashioned—what
do you call it?—Mid-Victorian. I left
it as is, so you could make any changes you felt were
necessary.” Kennicott sounded doubtful
for the first time since he had come back to his own.
“It’s a real home!” She was moved
by his humility. She gaily motioned good-by to
the Clarks. He unlocked the door—he
was leaving the choice of a maid to her, and there
was no one in the house. She jiggled while he
turned the key, and scampered in. . . . It was
next day before either of them remembered that in
their honeymoon camp they had planned that he should
carry her over the sill.
In hallway and front parlor she was conscious of dinginess
and lugubriousness and airlessness, but she insisted,
“I’ll make it all jolly.” As
she followed Kennicott and the bags up to their bedroom
she quavered to herself the song of the fat little-gods
of the hearth:
I have my own home,
To do what I please
with,
To do what I please
with,
My den for me and my
mate and my cubs,
My own!
She was close in her husband’s arms; she clung
to him; whatever of strangeness and slowness and insularity
she might find in him, none of that mattered so long
as she could slip her hands beneath his coat, run
her fingers over the warm smoothness of the satin back
of his waistcoat, seem almost to creep into his body,
find in him strength, find in the courage and kindness
of her man a shelter from the perplexing world.
“Sweet, so sweet,” she whispered.
“The Clarks have invited some folks to
their house to meet us, tonight,” said Kennicott,
as he unpacked his suit-case.
“Oh, that is nice of them!”
“You bet. I told you you’d like ’em.
Squarest people on earth. Uh, Carrie——Would
you mind if I sneaked down to the office for an hour,
just to see how things are?”
“Why, no. Of course not. I know you’re
keen to get back to work.”
“Sure you don’t mind?”
“Not a bit. Out of my way. Let me
unpack.”
But the advocate of freedom in marriage was as much
disappointed as a drooping bride at the alacrity with
which he took that freedom and escaped to the world
of men’s affairs. She gazed about their
bedroom, and its full dismalness crawled over her:
the awkward knuckly L-shape of it; the black walnut
bed with apples and spotty pears carved on the headboard;
the imitation maple bureau, with pink-daubed scent-bottles
and a petticoated pin-cushion on a marble slab uncomfortably
like a gravestone; the plain pine washstand and the
garlanded water-pitcher and bowl. The scent was
of horsehair and plush and Florida Water.
