Simply absurd to wait. She poured her own cup
of tea. She sat and stared at it. What was
it she was going to do now? Oh yes; how idiotic;
take a lump of sugar.
She didn’t want the beastly tea.
She was springing up. She was on the couch, sobbing.
She was thinking more sharply than she had for weeks.
She reverted to her resolution to change the town—awaken
it, prod it, “reform” it. What if
they were wolves instead of lambs? They’d
eat her all the sooner if she was meek to them.
Fight or be eaten. It was easier to change the
town completely than to conciliate it! She could
not take their point of view; it was a negative thing;
an intellectual squalor; a swamp of prejudices and
fears. She would have to make them take hers.
She was not a Vincent de Paul, to govern and mold a
people. What of that? The tiniest change
in their distrust of beauty would be the beginning
of the end; a seed to sprout and some day with thickening
roots to crack their wall of mediocrity. If she
could not, as she desired, do a great thing nobly
and with laughter, yet she need not be content with
village nothingness. She would plant one seed
in the blank wall.
Was she just? Was it merely a blank wall, this
town which to three thousand and more people was the
center of the universe? Hadn’t she, returning
from Lac-qui-Meurt, felt the heartiness of their greetings?
No. The ten thousand Gopher Prairies had no monopoly
of greetings and friendly hands. Sam Clark was
no more loyal than girl librarians she knew in St.
Paul, the people she had met in Chicago. And those
others had so much that Gopher Prairie complacently
lacked—the world of gaiety and adventure,
of music and the integrity of bronze, of remembered
mists from tropic isles and Paris nights and the walls
of Bagdad, of industrial justice and a God who spake
not in doggerel hymns.
One seed. Which seed it was did not matter.
All knowledge and freedom were one. But she had
delayed so long in finding that seed. Could she
do something with this Thanatopsis Club? Or should
she make her house so charming that it would be an
influence? She’d make Kennicott like poetry.
That was it, for a beginning! She conceived so
clear a picture of their bending over large fair pages
by the fire (in a non-existent fireplace) that the
spectral presences slipped away. Doors no longer
moved; curtains were not creeping shadows but lovely
dark masses in the dusk; and when Bea came home Carol
was singing at the piano which she had not touched
for many days.
Their supper was the feast of two girls. Carol
was in the dining-room, in a frock of black satin
edged with gold, and Bea, in blue gingham and an apron,
dined in the kitchen; but the door was open between,
and Carol was inquiring, “Did you see any ducks
in Dahl’s window?” and Bea chanting, “No,
ma’am. Say, ve have a svell time, dis afternoon.
Tina she have coffee and knackebrod, and her fella
vos dere, and ve yoost laughed and laughed, and her
fella say he vos president and he going to make me
queen of Finland, and Ay stick a fedder in may hair
and say Ay bane going to go to var—oh,
ve vos so foolish and ve laugh so!”
