Thus she triumphed through the class, which was a
typical Blodgett contest between a dreary teacher
and unwilling children of twenty, won by the teacher
because his opponents had to answer his questions,
while their treacherous queries he could counter by
demanding, “Have you looked that up in the library?
Well then, suppose you do!”
The history instructor was a retired minister.
He was sarcastic today. He begged of sporting
young Mr. Charley Holmberg, “Now Charles, would
it interrupt your undoubtedly fascinating pursuit
of that malevolent fly if I were to ask you to tell
us that you do not know anything about King John?”
He spent three delightful minutes in assuring himself
of the fact that no one exactly remembered the date
of Magna Charta.
Carol did not hear him. She was completing the
roof of a half-timbered town hall. She had found
one man in the prairie village who did not appreciate
her picture of winding streets and arcades, but she
had assembled the town council and dramatically defeated
him.
Though she was Minnesota-born Carol was not an intimate
of the prairie villages. Her father, the smiling
and shabby, the learned and teasingly kind, had come
from Massachusetts, and through all her childhood he
had been a judge in Mankato, which is not a prairie
town, but in its garden-sheltered streets and aisles
of elms is white and green New England reborn.
Mankato lies between cliffs and the Minnesota River,
hard by Traverse des Sioux, where the first settlers
made treaties with the Indians, and the cattle-rustlers
once came galloping before hell-for-leather posses.
As she climbed along the banks of the dark river Carol
listened to its fables about the wide land of yellow
waters and bleached buffalo bones to the West; the
Southern levees and singing darkies and palm trees
toward which it was forever mysteriously gliding; and
she heard again the startled bells and thick puffing
of high-stacked river steamers wrecked on sand-reefs
sixty years ago. Along the decks she saw missionaries,
gamblers in tall pot hats, and Dakota chiefs with scarlet
blankets. . . . Far off whistles at night, round
the river bend, plunking paddles reechoed by the pines,
and a glow on black sliding waters.
Carol’s family were self-sufficient in their
inventive life, with Christmas a rite full of surprises
and tenderness, and “dressing-up parties”
spontaneous and joyously absurd. The beasts in
the Milford hearth-mythology were not the obscene
Night Animals who jump out of closets and eat little
girls, but beneficent and bright-eyed creatures—the
tam htab, who is woolly and blue and lives in the
bathroom, and runs rapidly to warm small feet; the
ferruginous oil stove, who purrs and knows stories;
and the skitamarigg, who will play with children before
breakfast if they spring out of bed and close the
window at the very first line of the song about puellas
which father sings while shaving.
