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But the older people, Yankees as well as Norwegians, Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission to poverty. They were peasants, she groaned. "Isn't there any way of waking them up? What would happen if they understood scientific agriculture?" she begged of Kennicott, her hand groping for his. It had been a transforming honeymoon.
What are these unheard-of sins you condemn so much and like so well?" No one to say it. Not Kennicott nor Guy Pollock nor Champ Perry. Erik? Possibly. He would sputter uneasy protest. She suddenly wondered what subterranean connection her interest in Erik had with this affair. Wasn't it because they had been prevented by her caste from bounding on her own trail that they were howling at Fern?
He smiled at Kennicott, to imply that whatever he might say in the stress of being witty was not to count against him in the commercio-medical warfare.
But they followed the dog for a quarter of a mile, turning, doubling, crossing two low hills, kicking through a swale of weeds, crawling between the strands of a barbed-wire fence. The walking was hard on her pavement-trained feet. The earth was lumpy, the stubble prickly and lined with grass, thistles, abortive stumps of clover. She dragged and floundered. She heard Kennicott gasp, "Look!"
He stood erect, his hands in his side-pockets, his pipe puffing slowly. He was forty-five or -six, perhaps. "How do, Mrs. Kennicott," he drawled. She recalled him the town handyman, who had repaired their furnace at the beginning of winter. "Oh, how do you do," she fluttered. "My name 's Bjornstam. 'The Red Swede' they call me. Remember? Always thought I'd kind of like to say howdy to you again."
But It doesn't MATTER! I'm not trying to 'reform the town' now. I'm not trying to organize Browning Clubs, and sit in clean white kids yearning up at lecturers with ribbony eyeglasses. I am trying to save my soul. "Will Kennicott, asleep there, trusting me, thinking he holds me. And I'm leaving him. All of me left him when he laughed at me.
She was relieved when she had worked out a belief that she wasn't really shameful, that there was a mystical relation between herself and Carol, so that she was vicariously yet veritably with Kennicott, and had the right to be. She saw Carol during the first five minutes in Gopher Prairie. She stared at the passing motor, at Kennicott and the girl beside him.
She pillowed on her shoulder the head of the baby who, after killing time in the same manner as his mother, was so fortunate as to fall asleep. She read the introduction, title-page, and acknowledgment of copyrights, in the hymnal. She tried to evolve a philosophy which would explain why Kennicott could never tie his scarf so that it would reach the top of the gap in his turn-down collar.
She wondered if she might not encounter Erik in the East but it was a chance thought, soon forgotten. The last thing she saw on the station platform was Kennicott, faithfully waving his hand, his face so full of uncomprehending loneliness that he could not smile but only twitch up his lips.
She bought a rosary, but she had been so bitterly reared as a Protestant that she could not bring herself to use it. Yet none of her intimates in the school and in the boarding-house knew of her abyss of passion. They said she was "so optimistic." When she heard that Kennicott was to marry a girl, pretty, young, and imposingly from the Cities, Vida despaired.
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