Main Street | Page 9

please!" She wondered if she ought to be angry, but it was
a drifting thought, and she discovered that she was crying.

Then they were sitting six inches apart, pretending that they had never
been nearer, while she tried to be impersonal:
"I would like to--would like to see Gopher Prairie."
"Trust me! Here she is! Brought some snapshots down to show you."
Her cheek near his sleeve, she studied a dozen village pictures. They
were streaky; she saw only trees, shrubbery, a porch indistinct in leafy
shadows. But she exclaimed over the lakes: dark water reflecting
wooded bluffs, a flight of ducks, a fisherman in shirt sleeves and a wide
straw hat, holding up a string of croppies. One winter picture of the
edge of Plover Lake had the air of an etching: lustrous slide of ice,
snow in the crevices of a boggy bank, the mound of a muskrat house,
reeds in thin black lines, arches of frosty grasses. It was an impression
of cool clear vigor.
"How'd it be to skate there for a couple of hours, or go zinging along on
a fast ice-boat, and skip back home for coffee and some hot wienies?"
he demanded.
"It might be--fun."
"But here's the picture. Here's where you come in."
A photograph of a forest clearing: pathetic new furrows straggling
among stumps, a clumsy log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with
hay. In front of it a sagging woman with tight-drawn hair, and a baby
bedraggled, smeary, glorious-eyed.
"Those are the kind of folks I practise among, good share of the time.
Nels Erdstrom, fine clean young Svenska. He'll have a corking farm in
ten years, but now----I operated his wife on a kitchen table, with my
driver giving the anesthetic. Look at that scared baby! Needs some
woman with hands like yours. Waiting for you! Just look at that baby's
eyes, look how he's begging----"
"Don't! They hurt me. Oh, it would be sweet to help him--so sweet."

As his arms moved toward her she answered all her doubts with "Sweet,
so sweet."

CHAPTER III
UNDER the rolling clouds of the prairie a moving mass of steel. An
irritable clank and rattle beneath a prolonged roar. The sharp scent of
oranges cutting the soggy smell of unbathed people and ancient
baggage.
Towns as planless as a scattering of pasteboard boxes on an attic floor.
The stretch of faded gold stubble broken only by clumps of willows
encircling white houses and red barns.
No. 7, the way train, grumbling through Minnesota, imperceptibly
climbing the giant tableland that slopes in a thousand-mile rise from
hot Mississippi bottoms to the Rockies.
It is September, hot, very dusty.
There is no smug Pullman attached to the train, and the day coaches of
the East are replaced by free chair cars, with each seat cut into two
adjustable plush chairs, the head-rests covered with doubtful linen
towels. Halfway down the car is a semi-partition of carved oak columns,
but the aisle is of bare, splintery, grease-blackened wood. There is no
porter, no pillows, no provision for beds, but all today and all tonight
they will ride in this long steel box-farmers with perpetually tired wives
and children who seem all to be of the same age; workmen going to
new jobs; traveling salesmen with derbies and freshly shined shoes.
They are parched and cramped, the lines of their hands filled with
grime; they go to sleep curled in distorted attitudes, heads against the
window-panes or propped on rolled coats on seat-arms, and legs thrust
into the aisle. They do not read; apparently they do not think. They wait.
An early-wrinkled, young-old mother, moving as though her joints
were dry, opens a suit-case in which are seen creased blouses, a pair of

slippers worn through at the toes, a bottle of patent medicine, a tin cup,
a paper-covered book about dreams which the news-butcher has coaxed
her into buying. She brings out a graham cracker which she feeds to a
baby lying flat on a seat and wailing hopelessly. Most of the crumbs
drop on the red plush of the seat, and the woman sighs and tries to
brush them away, but they leap up impishly and fall back on the plush.
A soiled man and woman munch sandwiches and throw the crusts on
the floor. A large brick-colored Norwegian takes off his shoes, grunts
in relief, and props his feet in their thick gray socks against the seat in
front of him.
An old woman whose toothless mouth shuts like a mud-turtle's, and
whose hair is not so much white as yellow like moldy linen, with bands
of pink skull apparent between the tresses, anxiously lifts her bag,
opens it, peers in, closes it, puts it under the seat, and hastily picks it