When Carol sat at the piano again she did not think
of her husband but of the book-drugged hermit, Guy
Pollock. She wished that Pollock would come calling.
“If a girl really kissed him, he’d creep
out of his den and be human. If Will were as
literate as Guy, or Guy were as executive as Will,
I think I could endure even Gopher Prairie. It’s
so hard to mother Will. I could be maternal with
Guy. Is that what I want, something to mother,
a man or a baby or a town? I will have a
baby. Some day. But to have him isolated
here all his receptive years——
“And so to bed.
“Have I found my real level in Bea and kitchen-gossip?
“Oh, I do miss you, Will. But it will be
pleasant to turn over in bed as often as I want to,
without worrying about waking you up.
“Am I really this settled thing called a ‘married
woman’? I feel so unmarried tonight.
So free. To think that there was once a Mrs.
Kennicott who let herself worry over a town called
Gopher Prairie when there was a whole world outside
it!
“Of course Will is going to like poetry.”
A black February day. Clouds hewn of ponderous
timber weighing down on the earth; an irresolute dropping
of snow specks upon the trampled wastes. Gloom
but no veiling of angularity. The lines of roofs
and sidewalks sharp and inescapable.
The second day of Kennicott’s absence.
She fled from the creepy house for a walk. It
was thirty below zero; too cold to exhilarate her.
In the spaces between houses the wind caught her.
It stung, it gnawed at nose and ears and aching cheeks,
and she hastened from shelter to shelter, catching
her breath in the lee of a barn, grateful for the
protection of a billboard covered with ragged posters
showing layer under layer of paste-smeared green and
streaky red.
The grove of oaks at the end of the street suggested
Indians, hunting, snow-shoes, and she struggled past
the earth-banked cottages to the open country, to
a farm and a low hill corrugated with hard snow.
In her loose nutria coat, seal toque, virginal cheeks
unmarked by lines of village jealousies, she was as
out of place on this dreary hillside as a scarlet
tanager on an ice-floe. She looked down on Gopher
Prairie. The snow, stretching without break from
streets to devouring prairie beyond, wiped out the
town’s pretense of being a shelter. The
houses were black specks on a white sheet. Her
heart shivered with that still loneliness as her body
shivered with the wind.
She ran back into the huddle of streets, all the while
protesting that she wanted a city’s yellow glare
of shop-windows and restaurants, or the primitive
forest with hooded furs and a rifle, or a barnyard
warm and steamy, noisy with hens and cattle, certainly
not these dun houses, these yards choked with winter
ash-piles, these roads of dirty snow and clotted frozen
mud. The zest of winter was gone. Three months
more, till May, the cold might drag on, with the snow
ever filthier, the weakened body less resistent.
She wondered why the good citizens insisted on adding
the chill of prejudice, why they did not make the houses
of their spirits more warm and frivolous, like the
wise chatterers of Stockholm and Moscow.
